A Note From The President

Avil Beckford, President

Happy New Year! We've all heard that it's important to repeat positive affirmations to help us realize our goals. We keep on saying our affirmations every day and nothing happens. So, what now? Recently, I attended a workshop and learned that you have to repeat your affirmations 108 times to raise them to the level where manifestation takes place. The following week, while reading "The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity," I learned that the number 15 is a significant number. The author further added that each day you need to say your affirmations for at least 15 minutes, and write them out at least 15 times. We now have an interesting situation. Is it 15 or is it 108? Looking at the information at hand, does it mean that on average, it takes 15 minutes to say an affirmation 108 times? Or, is writing an affirmation 15 times equivalent to saying it 108 times. How would you define an average length affirmation? The reality is that we do not have enough information to make a decision.

So, what do you do when you are confronted with this exact situation? What do you do when you have an important decision to make and you are faced with contrasting information, incomplete information, or information that simply raises more questions than answers? Do you throw your hands up in frustration, toss a coin, or just simply give up? Say for example that your company plans to launch a new product or service and you've done some test marketing, and the results are very favourable. However, a trusted employee brings you some information on a similar product or service that was launched two years ago, which failed miserably. The product or service that failed had fifty percent of the characteristics of your company's product or service. What do you? Fire the bearer of bad news, ask the employee to keep his/her mouth shut, or investigate further? When your personal credibility is on the line, the correct thing to do is to seek additional information. You could hire someone like myself to help you find the information that you need. Also, The Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP) has many consultants who you could choose from.

By the way, I couldn't resist, occupational hazard, here is what I've found out so far (I am not providing you with the answers, just raising your level of awareness). The number 108 has spiritual significance. I also selected an affirmation from The Dynamic Laws of Prosperity - "All financial doors are open, all financial channels are free and endless bounty comes to me," and it takes 10 minutes to say it 108 times. So, where does that leave us? Was I racing through the affirmation? Are your affirmations longer or shorter than this one? To complicate matters further, in Creative Visualization, the author, Shakti Gawain writes that you should "Take any affirmation you want to work with and write it ten or twenty times in succession on a piece of paper… Use your name and try to write it in the first, second and third persons." She also mentions in the book that writing your affirmation is very powerful because "The written word has so much power over our minds. We are both writing and reading them at the same time, so it's like a double hit of energy." So, is it 10, 15, 20 or 108? Now we have a conundrum. More questions than answers.

Book Review

What's Keeping Your Customers Up At Night? Close More Deals by Selling to Your Client's Pain by Steven Cody & Richard Harte

What's Keeping Your Customers Up At Night? Close More Deals by Selling to Your Client's Pain is not just for salespeople but also for anyone who has to sell their ideas and budgets, or influence people. I found this book to be very useful and I completed all the exercises. The book describes a four-step process - (1) uncover the pain using audits and assessment strategies, (2) enhance the pain using case studies and published articles, (3) sell against the pain through pain-based questioning and (4) get the commitment or heal the wound by empowering the prospect to move forward with you - you do this by asking "If I can provide you with a solution to your problem, would you be willing to move forward with me?"

Cody and Harte recommend that before you attempt to uncover your customer's pain, that is, embark on step one, you should find out what's keeping you up at nights, both in your personal and professional lives. They further add that your thoughts, feelings and actions are fundamental to understanding your own pain. To uncover your thoughts, feelings and actions, ask yourself: What am I thinking? What am I feeling, and what and am I doing about it? The authors propose that whatever your state of mind, you can improve it. They go as far as to include three scripts - diet and exercise, "show me the money" and my sales script for you to affirm at least three times daily for 30 days. They encourage you to customize the scripts for your individual situation.

I like this book because it is loaded with many examples and tools that you can customize for your unique situation. I found the section on reading the prospect to be very useful. For example, if you are meeting with a prospect and he/she unfolds the arm or moves an object such as a pen toward himself/herself, that means that the prospect is reacting positively to what you are saying. However, if the prospect clears his/her throat or dust something away from the surface of the desk, that's an indication that you need to change gears and re-establish rapport.

The book ends with a 30-day process to become a pain doctor. The chapter has great ideas and information on how to do that, but unfortunately, it's not structured. It doesn't tell you what to do each of the thirty days, so you are on your own to figure it out. Despite this, What's Keeping Your Customers Up at Night? is still worth reading.

January's Book List

What's Keeping Your Customers Up At Night? Close More Deals by Selling to Your Client's Pain, Steven Cody & Richard Harte
Creative Visualization, Shakti Gawain

Gauging the Cost of What's Lost

• While 66.4% of respondents said customer acquisition was "very important" to the growth of their business, 43.6% said they were dissatisfied with the way their company generates new business
• While 53% of respondents believe the sales and marketing functions have a close and collaborative relationship, only 7% feel the two groups work together very effectively to harvest business prospects.
• 56% of the respondents don't have a formal process for generating, qualifying, certifying and validating new business opportunities
• 73% of respondents report that their company has no process for re-qualifying and revisiting business leads
• 56% of respondents convert less than 10% of their business prospects into deals; approximately 30% covert less than 5%.
• Most respondents are not satisfied with their conversion rates; only 5% are very satisfied.
• Nearly half of the respondents say it takes at least six months to close a deal
• Many of the corporate officers polled believe revenues at their companies could increase by more than 20 percent through the adoption of improved prospect harvesting practices
• Forty-seven percent of the respondents had the title of CEO, CFO, COO or group executive
  

Note: This is a joint study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council and the Business Performance Management Forum. Responses are based on online survey responses from 722 decision-makers at U.S. companies

Source: Business Performance Management Forum Press Release, November 22, 2004 & BtoB, December 13, 2004

How Did They Do That?

William J. Morin, Founder & CEO, WJM Associates, Inc. http://www.wmjassoc.com

Challenge: The business was flat, yet considered successful. When that happens you have a tendency to think that all you need is more salespeople to build the business faster, when in fact the real problem was that you did not have the appropriate infrastructure in place to support sales growth.

Solution: Trained the account managers to represent the business in a more encompassing way, and, be knowledgeable about customer needs instead of being transactional. Helped the account managers to understand the importance of building long-term relationships with customers. Had to train and retrain the account managers to continuously build the business. Sales were not an event, but the beginning of a relationship.

Lessons Learned:

• Never assume a sale is final even after you've received the cheque. You have to constantly nurture the relationship.
• Realized that learning is continuous and not an event, and has to be a guiding principle in the organization.
• Adapting to your customers' needs and truly understanding the needs of their company is a paramount skill needed in any business.

What Can Ambeck Do For You:

Ambeck Enterprise provides diverse business research and analysis services to senior level executives, through the relevant distillation of diverse facts and data.

Formula For Success

Bill Morin

Determine what success means to you personally and professionally, have a vision of what it looks like, celebrate it and maintain the energy to achieve it.

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