Choose who to lose.

Pick your niche because “There’s riches in niches.”

Cardiac surgeons make more money than family practitioners for a reason. And they don’t advertise! The local family doctor knows the best cardiac surgeon in town and sends his patients suffering from chest pains to that surgeon all day long.

If you’re known as a “pretty good guy…but a little scatter-brained at times” your business is in for a slow, painful death.

For the longest time I wanted to do all I could to help the small business owner. I created lower pricing models, extended payment terms, I’d let them stay past their allotted time until I realized I was being bled dry and worked to death because I cared more about the growth of my clients’ business than they did.

So I created group training for the cash-strapped business owners and sales people of the world and I raised my prices as much as 250% while cutting back the allowable consulting time by 25% for my private consulting and low and behold I could come up for air.

Today, right now, get crystal clear on who you can help, who you want to help and why. Then tell everyone else to either take a hike or tell them it’s not your specialty but you’ll help them as best you can for a higher price and let them decide.

Then the stress will be off of you and you can focus on what you love, you’ll do a better job at it, your clients will be better served, they’ll provide more testimonials and referrals and your business will grow with less stress and more fun, guaranteed.

If you’d like narrowing down your top niche I recommend giving my Inner Circle Silver program a try. You have a 30-day money back guarantee so you have only upside potential by joining.

Good selling.

Verizon FIOS has some smoking hot fiber to the home service and has been my ISP and TV provider for over 5 years. However, last week I moved into my new home in SoCal and I had to make this video and post.

To their credit the technician was right on time, which is very cool. However, after pulling some cables and drilling a couple of holes the technician left a mess behind him. What you see is insulation pulled out of the wall and left all over my home office floor.

What you don’t see are the JACKED UP cables behind my TV that I had to untangle just for ease of upgrading in the future.

In today’s competitive environment it’s not enough to just do enough. You need to under-promise and over-deliver.

Verizon FIOS did not do that here.

Any fans of “The Cure” out there?

I’m writing my next issue of  “The Weekly Whisper©” and the band The Cure is creeping into my writings. Being the highly trained researcher I am (translated, “easily distracted”) I peeked into my iTunes library to see what classic tunes of theirs I own.

Thinking back 21 years (AHHH!) I remember getting their 1989 album “Disintegration” for Christmas from my friends and sponsor family at the Air Force Academy and digging that album.

So I hopped on over to the iTunes store and augmented my collection from The Cure with Just Like Heaven, Friday I’m in Love, Why Can’t I Be You, Hot Hot Hot!!!

Rest assured I put myself in timeout for not owning these classics already.

You just gotta love Apple and iTunes. While I sit here in my fuzzy pink slippers with my 3rd cup of Joe I can find 25 year old songs and only buy the ones I really wanted, own them immediately, and crank them on my JBL system off my MacBook Pro and form a mosh pit with my 6 kids, wife and English lab all before 9:30 in the morning.

(Who says Apple has lost its mojo?)

As soon as you figure out how to build that kind of loyalty and create that type of buying experience your recession will be over forever.

If you’d like a little help check out my Pre-Paid Sales Advisor program. It’s just what The Sales Whisperer ordered.

Every one of my past clients are past clients because they were looking for that “silver bullet” to make their businesses grow.

They are past clients because they thought they could just cut a (small) check, flip a switch and watch the money come in over their iPhone banking app while they kicked back in a hammock on some sunny beach and barked an occasional order from time to time via text or email.

(You don’t go to the gym January 1st and you’re suddenly and consistently in shape for the entire year. So why do business owners think Sales and Marketing training and programs are any different?)

What they didn’t (and most probably still don’t) realize is that people don’t do business with you for one of two reasons: 1) your market either doesn’t know about you; 2) or they do.

Here’s the double-edged sword: I can help you make the phone ring but if you have:

• A systemic inability to answer the phone in less than 5 rings, and/or,
• Rude, obnoxious, ignorant boobs answering your phones, and/or,
• A habit of greeting new prospects with kids macking down on tuna casseroles while their feet are propped up on the front desk, and/or
• Staff that can’t fill out standard forms and do basic data entry, and/or,
• A dirty, stinky, crowded, under-stocked, under-staffed facility, and/or,
• Staff that won’t follow your instructions, and/or,
• The social and people and communication skills of Attila the Hun fighting dysentery and laryngitis, which causes your people to run for the hills when they see you pull up into the parking lot…

…then what you need is not a silver bullet but a box of silver bullets…and a house-cleaning…and an attitude adjustment.

But if you really want to know what the biggest silver bullet on the planet is for growing your business beyond your wildest dreams it’s a coach/friend/mentor/advisor/strategist/no-bullshitter that will tell you:

• “how the cow eats the cabbage,”
• where your business needs improvement,
• where your blind spots are,
• how to create realistic goals and action plans, and
• hold you accountable to completing them.

Once you have your house in order I’ll help you tell the world.

But paying to market a crappy business is like taking a limousine from your private jet to a climate change summit to ponder the non-occurring changes erroneously predicted by your peers that manipulated data to fit their agenda. It just doesn’t add up.

I’m ready to help you grow. Are you?

On December 4th, 2009 a lady delivered a baby boy on a Southwest Airlines flight.

Even though the captain decided to divert to Denver the baby still joined the mile high club!
A doctor and two nurses on board helped deliver the baby at the back of the plane with the help of flight attendants and an in-flight medical radio service. Both are fine.
How would you handle this:

1. Charge her for a second ticket?

2. Refund her ticket?

3. Do nothing?

Overheard conversation between prospective clients:

“You know how you can tell when a salesman is lying? His lips are moving.”

Overheard conversation between salespeople:

“You know how you can tell when a prospect is lying? His lips are moving.”

Who is right? How did we get to this point?

When is it right to lie in a sales situation?

Are there “forgivable lies” and “unforgivable lies” in a sales situation?

Kanye West is an idiot, a buffoon, a pitiful, conceited, rude, self-centered MEANY…but my momma always told me “you can learn something from everyone.”

So let’s look at what we can learn from this punk ass fool’s lack of class and apply it to our own efforts to connect, persuade and earn a sale:

1. Sober Up Before Your Presentation. Unless you’re on a golf course, a fishing trip, Hooter’s or your client’s bachelor party, leave the flask in your rental car. I can’t think of any sale (of any significance) I’ve closed while drunk.
   
2. Let Your Client Have the Spotlight. Selling is all about cashing checks, not stroking your ego. (Salespeople get their ego stroked BY cashing checks!) If you are stealing the spotlight from your client your chances of earning their business diminish exponentially.
3. Bring Your Own Microphone. You will come across more polished and prepared if you don’t have to rip the mic from your co-presenter and then slobber all over it because you forgot Rule #1.
4. Timing, Timing, Timing. Real estate is all about location. Selling, persuasion and negotiation is all about timing. I love Beyonce – and she eventually won Video of the Year – so “Cocktail Kanye” seems that much more insane because he was fighting a fight that didn’t need to be fought.
5. Know When To Speak and When to Shut the Hell Up! I learned early on that it’s better to keep quiet and have people think I’m a fool, than to open my mouth and remove all doubt. You can talk yourself right past the sale. Learn to be interested in your client instead of interesting to them.
6. Remember Your Manners. Southern Hospitality goes a long way, even if you’re not from the South. Learn and remember the manners your momma taught you growing up and use them in every selling situation.
7. Get Over It. If you think you’re desperate, you are. We all have skeletons in our closets; family members we hope don’t come to the reunion; mistakes we’ve made in business and should have known better. Suck it up. We don’t want to hear your weak ass excuses. We want results. Shake it off and make things happen.

Kanye West is a narcissistic nincompoop and Taylor Swift and Beyonce are classy individuals. Learn from them all and learn to learn from all of life’s situations at all times. It’ll be your secret weapon on the journey…

As a CMAC for over a year I like Infusionsoft and the people.

While I have had some frustration with some features (or lack thereof) the staff has treated me like gold and, no, I don’t think it’s because I’m a CMAC. (I’m not some world-renowned super marketer. Just a former Air Force football player with 6 kids building my own sales and marketing consulting gig in the bowels of SoCal with a passion for sales and marketing training/consulting.)

I am also certified as a trainer with Salesforce.com and I used SFDC since 2004 with various high tech companies.

With that experience I have no qualms recommending Infusionsoft to small business owners over SFDC. SFDC was meant for large enterprises. SFDC sucks when it comes to helping small businesses market and sell and grow.

I will stipulate that I approach using Infusionsoft from a sales and marketing standpoint vs. a programmer, which I am not.

Infusionsoft has been great for my small business clients that are looking to:
- embed web forms.
- build a database.
- tag that database for future, relevant correspondence.
- communicate with that database regularly with good, relevant content.
- codify and quantify their unique selling propositions to ensure their messaging is delivered to 100% of prospects 100% of the time.
- track open rates with HTML emails and trackable links embedded in the emails.
- process credit cards (ecommerce) for both one time orders and subscriptions via order forms and/or a shopping cart.
- offer an upsell at the time of checkout.
- store and share notes and files/documents with small teams.
- grow.

I’m glad Infusionsoft dropped the $5,000 setup fee. I was not a fan of that at all.

Infusionsoft, when installed and used properly like Gregg LaPore described above, is PERFECT for the one-office dentist, Realtor®, mortgage broker, promotional items company, IT VAR, restaurant owner, etc with 1 – 25 employees and thinks marketing is putting a wrap on their car and their picture on their business card and expect the phone to ring.

I’ve been selling and/or training since 1995 and I can tell you that Infusionsoft and Dan Kennedy made me stretch to fully comprehend and begin to master the art of marketing through persuasive copywriting, consistent follow up and upsells.

Did Infusionsoft sell a little more than they could handle? Probably. (How many small businesses [or former small businesses] wished they had that problem?)
Did it cause some pain for some users? Obviously.
Are some of their sales people a little pushy and cheesy? Yes (but none of them have been through my sales training courses!)
Do any of the sales people possess the power of telekinesis or Jedi Mind Tricks that forced people to buy? Not that I know of.
Do the support staff blow people off? Apparently but they’ve never done it to me nor any of my clients and I don’t have ESP, telekinesis or Obi Wan’s powers.
Are the support staff inexperienced? I noticed an influx of rookies 6-8 months ago but that seems to have tapered off and the folks I’ve spoken with since then have been fine if not superb.
Is it a better solution for the small businesses I listed above compared to hobbling together Outlook, Excel, 1ShoppingCart, aWeber and ConstantContact and Salesforce.com? Without a doubt.

If you’re a 90 person company with 65 SKUs and you’re growing 50% a year and you’re adding 5 products a month…Infusionsoft may not be right for you…but they admit it.

If you don’t have a list, you’re just starting out online, you’ve never created a webform and you’ve never even used the “Categories” feature in Outlook to segment your contacts, might you be better off with a ConstantContact account for $19 or $29/mo? Probably. But how big do you want to be and how quickly? If the answer is “BIG” and “fast” then it may be worth it for you to start out with Infusionsoft.

If you’re a 10 person company with two sales people and you, the owner, are involved in sales and and you’re doing manual, duplicate entry and sales and leads are falling off the table then Infusionsoft can be a life-saver.

But if you’ve never written a follow-up sequence or exported contacts as CSV files or tagged/categorized contacts, and you can’t explain your own company’s USP and you can’t rattle off in your sleep 3 COMPELLING reasons why I should buy from YOU then you’d be well-advised to take the $4,000 you just saved on the Infusionsoft setup fee and retain someone to help you set all of this up for you FROM DAY ONE!

Why?

Because sales and marketing are:
A) Not the same.
B) Not as easy as it looks.
C) Friggin’ IMPOSSIBLE to master in a timely fashion for the typical “E-Myth” technician that thinks “I can shimmy a door better than my jerk of a boss” and goes out on his own to open his own contracting business only to have his ass, kidneys, liver, lungs, nostrils, knee caps and esophagus handed to him a mere 6 months later after he’s run out of fancy business cards and relatives he can beg business off of.

If you try to duct tape your marketing and bootstrap any platform, in 4 months you’ll be out $800 in fees, $8,000 in lost opportunity costs, and 60 hours of software-induced frustration and you’ll be posting on here how much you dislike Infusionsoft.

Remember, Life’s too short for follow up calls.

“We’re not open. You have to leave the building and come back at 8!” said the government security rent-a-cop with bi-focal Coke bottle glasses and a three-color patch on his arm that gave him a license to be a complete $?:;-”@^*} €><\@*^%}{].

I'm at the Riverside County Board of Equalization to get a reseller permit so the Socialist Republic of California can take their hands just a little bit out of my pocket and this is how I'm treated.

How do your people treat and greet your prospects and clients?

Your competitors hope you treat them like a government monopoly dictatorship. With mobile technology and Web 2.0 social media platforms the world will know if you do before you even open for business.

If you can't afford to lose even one client because your staff is not trained and supervised and incentivized to treat all customers like fragile ferns in a monastery's contemplation garden give me a call while you can still afford my services.

Now please excuse me while I go sign in with Earl.