Tag Archives: goals

GPS Marketing Strategy

I have a GPS in my car and I use it all the time. Even if I pretty much know where I am going, I still set the destination in the GPS. And the reason is if something happens along the way like a tree is in the middle of the road or there is a lot of traffic, I want my GPS on point to find me a new route to get to the same destination. That’s what business strategy is, that’s what strategy is, that’s what I do for my clients – we set the strategy. We determine the brand, we set the strategy and we’re always headed in that direction.

I’m your GPS; you look down at me and you say, “Dan, I want to go that way.” And I’m going to respond with, “Let’s make sure it’s in the strategy, let’s make sure it’s on point, let’s make sure that we’re definitely headed in the direction that you want to go and find out black iron club that we’re definitely headed towards the direction that you want.”

In your day-to-day minutiae of your business it’s so easy to forget what the strategy is; where you’re headed, what your orchid maids service business really is and how to transmit that to the world so there’s always a funnel of potential customers headed to your door.

Without strategy you’re flying blind, you don’t have a GPS, you’re using the sun as navigation, kind of, sort of thinking about the best way to get to where you want to get but you don’t really know because you don’t have that destination plugged in, locked in, so that at every moment you know that you’re headed towards where you want to be. Check out  best solar panels. That’s strategy, that’s marketing, that’s branding, that’s what I do.

The Give and Take of Marketing

As Americans we are takers. And that’s not a statement of condemnation, it just is. And it’s not really our fault because we got started on a taking trajectory. It’s actually simple physics. Objects in rest and motion will continue in that direction until enacted upon by an outside force. So when this country started, we came here and saw Indians, and we took their land and we built. And then when the railroad came through and we realized that we needed to go through where there were communities, we took those communities. And when we needed more people to help us build the country, we took people from other countries and used them. Even when we went to the moon, we did not declare it a victory for our planet, we called it ours. So we took the moon. We haven’t really done anything with it or don’t know if we will do anything with it, but just so everybody knows, it’s ours.

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We’ve built an entire society on taking and we are incentivized to take because the largest takers get the highest levels of status in our culture, so we are incentivized to take. Now, that’s not to say that we don’t give; we have. In fact, in the last hundred years, we figured out that giving is an important part of taking, and there are a lot of givers. It’s just that our giving hasn’t quite caught up with our taking yet. If we were to graph out taking and giving, clearly taking would still be way, way higher than the amount of giving that we do. And it’s ironic because endemic in our language is the term “give and take,” how come it’s not “take and give?” That seems to be our path, because most of the time we don’t give back until we take.

Andrew Carnegie did not build Carnegie Hall until he had taken quite a bit. The Gates Foundation is a giver because of all the taking that they did. Well, of course, naturally you have to take first because if you don’t take something then you have nothing to give, right? Maybe not. It’s sort of like the guy who keeps dating the same type of girl over and over and over again and complains why he can’t find love. Perhaps we’ve gotten so used to taking and then giving that that’s the way that we only see it.

In my process in working with companies and branding them, the first thing that I do is help them unlock the way that they have looked at their company. In other words, I don’t ask what you do for a living; I ask, what is your company all about?  –  which is a  much more complicated question. For instance, if I would ask a flower shop owner, “What is your company all about?” his first answer is, “We sell flowers.” “But, no, no, no, that’s what your company does. What is your company all about?” And after working with him, we might uncover something like the death of a friend’s mother when he was a little boy and watching the flowers being delivered to the home and bringing some level of joy and color to a very, very dark place, and perhaps it got inside of him that, “Oh, flowers have this magical property to bring color to someone’s world.”

And so his brand isn’t really about selling flowers, his brand is about bringing color to the world – which is very, very different than selling flowers. And it helps him on his business trajectory, because if his best client is somebody who wants to bring color to the world, then that really changes the way that he thinks about his company. In other words, he stops going after the type of customer like the guy who forgot his wife’s anniversary and in the last second buys a dozen roses. That’s not really bringing color to someone’s world, that’s covering your ass.

So, with that brand model, he has put himself on a trajectory of giving before taking. In other words, when a potential customer comes in, say, a wedding, he would have a program of figuring out the best flowers for them to use, create a list and create the systems for how the flowers would be set up. He would then give that customer that piece of paper that they could go online, they could go to another flower shop or they could work with him. But it’s a tremendous amount of faith to give before he takes, to offer value way before the sale.

And that’s my style of marketing, and that’s what I want to bring to the world – giving before taking. When I sit down with a potential client, I tell them that, “You will walk away with at least five new ideas about how to promote your company, so even if we never work together you’ve had value from our interaction.” I give before I take.

And I’m not the only one doing this. There’s a company called The Panera Bread Corporation, a sandwich and bakery shop that started in St. Louis, Missouri that came up with a great idea: pay what you feel the meal is worth. Now, they haven’t quite worked it out where you can eat the food first and then pay before you leave, but they’re getting close to giving before taking, because it’s the same mindset. It’s a level of faith. It’s a belief that we will be okay by releasing the control of our taking. What we haven’t learned in over 200 years is faith; faith that if we give first we will be given back to, that we don’t have to take, that giving comes naturally after someone is given to.

So I’m pushing a new model. Instead of give and take, it’s give and give back, a give-and-give-back model. Now, how would a give-and-give-back model work? Certainly, if you pulled up to an Exxon Mobil station, what are they going to say? “Go ahead and fill up your tank, drive around for a while, then come back and let us know what you feel the value of our tankful of gas was.” A pretty good idea from my perspective, but how much luck do you think I’m going to have selling that to the oil companies? In fact, the entire oil business is founded on the principle of taking. Certainly, there’s not a lot they can give back once they pull all the fossil fuel out of the ground. In fact, there’s probably nothing left to give back.

So again, I don’t blame them. I don’t think it’s their fault. It’s trajectory. It’s physics. It’s a company; it’s an industry that was based on the concept of taking, so they’re probably going to be one of the last ones to the party. Instead, I focus my efforts on companies who can weave in the giving-before-taking model into their business system a lot easier.

Now, let me tell you how I know this works. For 15 years, I’ve been in the personal development world, and for a number of years I flew around the country teaching personal growth courses, these very intense weekends of helping people recognize the things they do in their lives that keep them from the things that they want. In other words, we all have wants and hopes and dreams, and the reason that we don’t pursue that is largely based on the blocks that we create, the belief systems that we create. And most of those belief systems could be boiled down to taking before giving.

 

There are a lot of people that came through that course who were struggling in their relationships, and overall what I found the struggles were about where they didn’t feel fulfilled. Their partner in essence wasn’t giving them what they wanted. And it’s what we all want, love on our own terms. But what they didn’t recognize was it was okay to give their partner what they wanted, and the immediate response was, “What about me?”

For instance, let’s say you are married and your husband says that he wants dinner on the table the moment he comes home from work your first reaction may be “What about my feelings? What about my needs? What about the things I’m doing?” And my response to you would be, “Well, have you tried giving him what he wants?” And your reaction may be, “No, of course not, because if I give him dinner the moment he comes home, what’s the next thing he’s going to want and the next thing he’s going to want and the next thing he’s going to want? And I’ll never get my needs filled.” I’d say, “Wait, all he asked for was dinner. Have you tried that?” And the response I  usually get is, “No, no, no, Dan, you don’t understand. This guy’s a taker. He’ll just keep taking.”

So after working with them,  we get them to begrudgingly agree to doing the thing that their partner wants just as an experiment, just to see what happens, and 9 times out of 10 I’d hear back from them, “Things are so great. All he wanted was dinner on the table when he got home from work. Our relationship is a lot better now. I’m getting so much of what I wanted. Wow! Giving gets you what you want.”

So it’s true at the bottom, base, foundation of our culture, our relationships, when we give, we get. When we give things that other people want, they give us back something. So if it’s true with the foundation of our culture, then it’s got to be true as we go up the ladder, as those relationships turn into businesses, and then companies and corporations. If it works at the foundation level, then it’s got to work at the upper levels too.

So when I work with companies, I work on the principle of giving. What can you give that will create that positive psychic energy that will make your customers want to give back? And there’s a lot of pushback with this because just like the people in the relationships, “Wait, wait, wait, if I give to my customers, they’re just going to take and take and take and I’ll never have something for me.” Have you tried? “No, you don’t understand. We’re operating on a razor-thin budget. If I don’t do it this way, I’ll never have anything.” “Have you tried?” “Well, no, but…” “Would you try?” “Okay.”

You see, when I start working with a new client, I have what I call my branding session, which is basically my personal development technology applied to business. It’s a very powerful session, usually three or four hours, where 9 times out of 10,  the person I’m working with ends up bursting into tears, because I help them find something inside of them, that spark, that thing that got them into business in the first place.

And at the base of it all, at the bottom, when I ask them what their business is really all about, the answer always boils down to the same thing. “I want to help people.” Whether it’s CPAs or flower shops or tire stores or e-commerce companies, they want to help people. For more info contact MaidThis here. They got into the business because they found that it would be the easiest conduit to being in service to others.

And I think that’s endemic in our DNA, because we are a social species, we have to be connected to others. We have to or we die. We have to have connections, and it is endemic in that to be in service to others. We just get lost along the way.

See, I believe that business is the best place for us to learn about ourselves, because the things that we won’t do for ourselves we will do in business. Why? Because there’s a paycheck at the end of it. I would fly into cities and teach this course and come back a year later, and the people I had talked with would still be struggling with the same things. However, I do the same work with people in their business and they’re much more willing to take risks, to try things, to do things differently, because there’s a paycheck at the end of it. I have no qualms about that. It’s the ultimate piece of cheese in the rat maze.

So, to wrap this all up, if we are a species that wants to give, and if we find greater happiness in relationships through giving, then certainly we can find greater profits in our business by giving before we take and the model of giving can be so easy; just understand what you do and give part of that away. The easiest, the best way, the first way is by giving away knowledge, the thing that you know, because the thing that you know that’s so obvious to you is complete new technology to the people who first start doing business with your company. So by giving away a part of your knowledge, you’re creating a tremendous amount of positive click this site.

And yes, some people are going to take that knowledge and find the lowest price in which to apply that knowledge, but you will find, more and more, the more giving that you do, the more goodwill you create, that creates a vortex of compassion and a certain sense about your business that will draw your customers to you, that in giving, the giveback will be monumental.

Play Ball!

If baseball players played baseball the way that most business owners do their marketing they would be running out onto the field swinging a couple of bats, kicking a ball, jumping up and down on the bases, and trying to put their gloves on their head. They would have a rough idea about how the game is played but they would be going about it all wrong. What they would be missing would be rules and strategy.

Your marketing approach must have a strategy behind it or you will be haphazardly using the tools of marketing in completely the wrong way. When I begin working with client I learn specifically what they’re struggling with in their business and what they want to achieve so I can design a marketing strategy specifically for them. So, you can be laser focused on winning the game while all the other teams are just playing with their balls.

How we STOP ourselves from success.

Most everything that we struggle with in business and in life is a story that we tell ourselves. It’s a story of what we think might happen and unfortunately, it’s usually a pretty bad story.

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There are very few things that we struggle with that are actually taking place in the moment. Our struggles mostly live in the future or the past. Sure, it might seem like the struggle is happening in the moment when your boss comes in telling you that a report needs to be on his desk in an hour and you’re sure then it will take two hours to complete. Isn’t that happening in the moment? Actually, no. It isn’t.

What is actually happening in the moment is that you are running a little movie in your head. This movie is set in the future, one hour from now. In it, the main character, you, walks into your boss’s office and tells him that the report is not done. Then the boss flies off the handle, fires you and you end up living under a bridge or something like that.  But none of that is really happening at all. All that is really happening in the moment is that there is a task to complete. Nothing more. So why do we get so effected? It is because the emotional part of our brain takes all of its cues from the intellectual part of our brain. The emotional part doesn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. When you run the little movie about you getting fired your emotional brain thinks that it’s actually happening.

The other movie that often gets run is one that takes place in the past. In that movie, your boss, a high school football coach, your mother or father or any other number of people jibe and harangue you for making a mistake. That movie has him imprinted a powerful emotion we call shame. It feels bad and we want to avoid repeating it at all costs. Therefore, we run the movie of the past as a cautionary tale for what we might encounter in the near future.

Regardless of which or both movies get screened, the result is the same. A series of biological triggers occur in your body like an emotional avalanche. You go into fight or flight mode. Your heart rate increases, your eyes dilate, you are flooded with adrenaline. All of this shuts down the creative pipeline that feeds ideas to your consciousness. The movies overwhelm and short circuit all of your other thoughts. Now, your ability to invent creative solutions to your problems is squeezed off like kinking a garden hose.

So, why does this have to happen at all? What is the point? Why do we do this to ourselves? This whole process is actually the body and mind attempting to predict dangerous situations so it can prepare you for the proper response. The problem is that the human software running this program was written about 3 million years ago. It was originally designed to anticipate things like avoiding saber tooth tigers. Back then those were really big problems for people. Today, we rarely encounter situations today that put our life in immediate danger but the software doesn’t know that. So when it signals a danger response, it is literally placing you in what feels like a life or death situation.The irony in all of this is that, when you think back on all of those stories you have told yourself, you will discover that no more than 10% of them come true. Things most often times work out. Not all the time, but they do most of the time. So freaking yourself out is like betting the farm on a longshot that time and again has never come through. It’s a bad bet and you really need to stop placing it.

By bringing your self back into the conscious moment, you recognize that nothing is actually happening right then. This allows you to calm yourself down and re-open the creative centers of your mind. In doing so you will suddenly find new and unrealized solutions for the problems at hand. It is entirely likely that one hour is all you need to complete that report hughesairco.com. Perhaps someone else in the office has knowledge that could reduce the time it takes or, maybe a few of your friends can pitch in and help you completed in time. Yet, none of these solutions would ever occur to you when your body is in fight or flight mode.

The hbcontrols business people choose a meditation practice or take a walk outside during lunch. This seemingly wasteful use of time actually propels they’re thinking forward allowing them 360° views of the problems they face in their business.

Remember these two truths:

  • The scary stories we tell ourselves about our past is shame.
  • The scary stories we tell ourselves about our future is stress.

Neither are real. All that is real is what is happening in your present moment. Do your best to keep yourself there. You will find that it is a much more tangible place where are only real things exist. For example, in this present moment you have just read the last word of this article.