Insights

Sales Structure

People oftentimes ask me “what does it take to be a top salesperson for a company” and I’ll ask the question back to see what answers I get. Here are some of the answers I get:

  • “You have to be fearless, courageous, and a hunter.”
  • “You have to understand your product or service better than anyone else.”
  • “You have to control the conversations with your prospects.”
  • “You have to be a good influencer (i.e. bullshit artist).”
  • “You have to put your nose to the grindstone.”
  • “You have to know how to talk to people.”

I wouldn’t say that any of these above answers are incorrect, but they are flawed. They are flawed because they don’t really answer the question of “how to become a top salesperson for your company?”

To become a top salesperson you need to acquire certain sales skills that can be developed. I was not born with advanced questioning skills. I wasn’t naturally good at understanding tone and inflection. These were skills that I developed over time and through experience…and through practice.

There are lots of different educational platforms out there that will “promise” you that they can turn you into a top salesperson. Some are most likely legit, while others will dangle a lot of promises, but rarely deliver.

I’ll start by saying that it does NOT matter what industry you are in. One of the scariest things I can hear when I interview ‘salespeople’ is when they tell me “I’m a great salesperson, I’ve sold everything under the sun – solar, insurance products, high-ticket tech items, cars, etc.” But WHY does this scare me?

Because great salespeople usually only sell 1-3 products/services their entire career (because if they are great – they stick with a good product or service and they sell the crap out of it).

What do all these top salespeople have in common? The first is they follow a structure – this is the most important thing when it comes to sales – making sure that you have a structure in place that can be repeated, tested, and improved.

Sales Structure

Sales structure is simply a process for turning leads or prospects into buying customers/clients. I’ll break this down into 3 areas:

Pre-Sales Activities

Your pre-sales activities are all the things you do before you engage your prospect (meaning, before you actually speak with them). This includes research on your target consumer base, gathering marketing materials, compiling prospect lists, etc.

Sales Activities

These are all the things done when speaking or engaging with the consumer (prospect, buyer, customer, etc). Activities like discovery phone calls or meetings, proposal presentations, etc.

Post-Sales Activities

All the things done after you sign on a new client or make the sale. These will be activities like client advocacy, customer check-ins (temperature gauges), getting referrals, etc.

But….what’s fascinating about the above structure is that each one of these buckets (Pre-sales, Sales, Post-sales activities) can be broken down further into more structure or processes.

Focusing on Sales Activities

For me, this is the most fun part of any sales position. Actually engaging with the prospect and attempting to influence their buyer behavior is enjoyable. However, depending on what type of industry or company you’re in, those activities can look wildly different. I’ll give an example:

Let’s say I’m working for a web agency that redesigns marketing websites. Well, the sales activities might include a screener questionnaire, a discovery session, then a written proposal, presenting that proposal to the prospect, then moving into a round of negotiations, and getting the final contract signed by the new client. This could take several months to a year.

BUT – if I work in the insurance field selling home warranties, then my sales activities might only be ONE phone call where I give the prospect all the information they need and they sign up on that one phone call. This could realistically be a 20 minute call.

It doesn’t matter what you are selling, whether that’s products or services, but you always need to follow structure – without that you have nothing. Structure should be baked into your sales process.

Take the above examples:

Web Agency Sales Person: they have to go through a structure or process to close their prospect. First, they make sure the prospect seems like the right fit by doing a screener and having a discovery (a.k.a qualifying) session. Then the propose the solution and go in for negotiations.

Insurance Sales Person: they have to do the same thing only in a shorter period of time. In a 20 minute phone call the first thing that would happen is the sales person would “qualify” the prospect by asking questions like “what is the value of your home?” or “how much protection were you looking to get?” Afterwords, the sales person is going to have to present an insurance program to the prospect and possibly negotiate and go in for a money-ask.

In Closing

In order to CLOSE your prospect, you will need to ask questions that get them to illuminate their own problems. Problem-find in your openings/qualifying/discovery sessions and then problem-solve in your closes. Closing a prospect, no matter the industry, will require a relentless (don’t make it seem desperate) approach. You do this by empathizing with your consumer, then isolating objections the consumer is giving you, then negotiating a “better deal” – all of that will make the “buying” part simple and easy. Although closing is NOT easy, I will go into that structure in an upcoming blog post.

A History of Sales

Before I begin I would like to say that I believe sales to be a noble profession. There is such a stigma associated with sales and I’m pretty sure being a car salesman classifies you as the least trusted professional out there, Congressmen rank a close second! But sales is the 2nd oldest profession in the world, next to the oldest profession in the world as the adage goes. Go ahead – google “the oldest profession”, but I would argue that there is an element of sales to “the oldest profession”, so sales is technically the oldest profession!

As time has progressed, the industry that changes the most is sales. Sales needs to adapt not only to the market, but the buyer as well. It’s a delicate feat to sell things. I don’t care what it is – cars, commodities, services, solutions, warranties, carbon fiber, umbrellas, whatever – it takes skill to continually do it well. There are so many moving parts to sales. There’s the market, this fluctuates quite regularly depending on what industry you’re in. There are the buyers, consumers, prospects – and they all have different personalities, different thresholds, different emotional triggers. Then there’s the company you work for – this fluctuates – new people come aboard, new features get added to your product or service. And then there’s you – the salesperson – who holds all that together, and still manages to close business month after month. Kudos!

So let’s look at the history of sales:

The Beginning of Time

At the beginning of time, there was the bartering system. You give me three cows and I’ll let you harvest an acre of my corn field – fair deal? Maybe. Maybe not. There has been some form of selling since the birth of mankind because the human instincts of wanting and needing have always been around. I doubt whoever made that first transaction of the acre of corn and those three cows knew they were making the first sales deal, but it created a system for improvement.

Before the Common Era:

We fast forward all these years later to right around BC(E) and money was born. Now money was really born well before this, I think somewhere around Mesopotamia and coinage had been introduced by the Greeks. But the Roman Empire and Roman currency, which consisted of gold, silver, bronze, and copper had their own system and it was quite sophisticated. They started minting coins and used it as a way to keep track of debts and sell items worth value. I don’t want to take any credit away from the Aztecs, the Egyptians, the Celts, the Chinese, and so on. The point that I want to make is that the invention and implementation of money developed the bartering system into markets and helped initialize sales.

The Industrial Revolution

Centuries later we move into the 1700’s and 1800’s, the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. This ushered in what we know today as the “modern day salesman” – the traveling salesmen (a.k.a. the snake-oil salesmen). Now for those of you who do not know what snake oil is, well, it’s the cure-all potion that turned you into a new person. Snake-oil started being used by the railroad workers who would lay track all across the country. Their bodies would hurt, their muscles were sore, and their bones would ache – so, they needed something to cure that pain. In comes snake-oil and the traveling or exaggerated salesmen. They were showmen, they made big, exaggerated claims, sold the snake-oil elixir, then would high-tail it outta town and move on to the next one.

To give you a little background on snake-oil, originally it had rattlesnake venom in it that would numb a worker’s body when he rubbed it on himself and claim to calm their pain. At that time, snake-oil soon became synonymous with miraculous healing powers, even though, often times the ingredients weren’t made public. Due to rival salesmen in the medicine profession there was a huge push to uncover the ingredients and a century later snake-oil became synonymous with hoaxes. And the snake-oil salesman was the equivalent to a charlatan, a hack, a fraud, etc.

But there were other salesman of this time period and they sold everything. The Industrial Revolution was a time of growth. Products were mass produced and manufactured – textiles, clothing, etc., and all these things didn’t sell themselves.

Time for tactics and techniques

How to Win Friends and Influence People – this book written in 1936 by Dale Carnegie was the first of its kind. It’s a self help book but naturally, salespeople gravitated towards it. It really started the techniques of selling – how to connect with people, how to persuade people, how to influence people. It talked about how to get people excited about things and have a winning attitude towards life and your job. And… it was all in lists – 12 ways for this, or 6 ways to do that. A great, easy read and most of what Carnegie writes is still quite relevant today.

But this sparked a movement in sales, you could actively use and improve your techniques to get people to buy your products or services. You, as a salesperson, could control the outcome of a consumer transaction by implementing psychological tactics. It wasn’t rocket science, but it was still pretty genius!

The Fast-Talking Salesman:

(hello, Kirby vacuum cleaners)
Also known as the Kirby Vacuum cleaner salesman, they were introduced in the 1940’s and 1950’s. These were the gentleman salesmen who would go door-to-door and invite themselves into the homes of housewives and put on a presentation of the benefits of their product. This really is the dawn of the retail age. And at this point in the sales industry, the seller held all the information. The consumer was only told what the seller wanted them to know. So, the seller could say whatever they wanted. If a consumer asked a question, the salesmen could lie or not tell the entire truth. It made for a one way street where salespeople held power over their customers and if a consumer was remotely interested in a product (such as a Kirby vacuum) the only information they could get on it was right from the salesman’s mouth.

This didn’t last very long because consumers got wise to the information exchange and their reactions to “The Fast-Talking Salesmen” changed (yet again) the face of the selling world.

The 1960’s

This was a time of cultural divide, opposition was growing for the war in Vietnam, racial tensions were stirring, class issues were starting to get noticed, and great music was born! But, selling was also taking a drastic turn. Instead of the salesman having all the information, we started to see this shift from “ask me a question and I’ll give you the answer” to “here’s some information, let’s figure out what you need” – and in comes Strategy Selling in the 1970’s – a salesman was trained to do an effective analysis of their consumers’ business or company and would make the consumer more a part of the process of selling, so the consumer would feel like they were making a sound decision with the help of their salesperson who knew about their business.

We see SPIN Selling – Situation, Problem, Implication, Need, then payoff! Or Consultative Selling in the 1980’s which was really about asking as many questions as you could (being a salesman), this would build rapport and uncover the true meaning of the consumer’s inquiry into your business (be it product or service). SPIN selling is an interesting methodology. Situation – understand the facts about the customer’s situation. Problem – focus the buyer on his actual, current problem. What is it now that we need to solve? Implication – discuss the implications of a). what happens if the customer stays with their current service or product, and b). what happens when they switch to your product or service. Then finally, Need – you want the customer to tell you about their needs, having them articulate their need is better than you articulating it for them! Remember that – people buy when you ask questions that get them to uncover their own needs, people resist when you tell them what they need. The 1980’s was when Glengarry Glen Ross (the play) came out and Always Be Closing started gaining popularity moving into the 1990’s. This is when we see a shift from uncovering the problems of the customer to being a well-liked salesman by building trust through connection, relationships, and your willingness to provide the right solution.

The 1990’s

In comes Solution Selling – the salesperson focuses on the consumer’s pain and addresses that particular pain point. But there is a huge element of connection with salespeople. They want to know about their consumers’ lives, they ask about their kids’ little league games, they ask about the extended family. Solution selling was about the solution, but it was also about the relationship. People do business with people they like – bottom line – still holds true to this very day! But the 1990’s brought with it the confident salesman, the detail-oriented salesman, the salesman that would build strong relationships with the buyers to encourage them to commit to buying, but also working with them side by side to understand all facets of the solutions and which one would be the most appropriate fit. The economy grew in the 90’s and it was a good decade for salesmen!!

Gordon Gekko – the ultimate solution seller (not really!)

The information age totally rocked the selling world:

And then the internet came and took with it the old school salesmen of the last 3 decades and a new breed of seller was born. This new breed of salesmen had their own way of doing things, it was all about acknowledgement and understanding that the buyer already had the information. Salesmen had to adapt literally overnight. I mean, if you think about, you can walk into a dealership tomorrow and say “Hey, that Hyundai Accent on the lot, well, I want for $12,000 because it says right here (holding up your smartphone) that I can get it for this price.” – Rock the boat a little more why don’t you. This is when I got into sales, we were right on that cusp of “old way” tactics to developing pitches and strategies that would let our customers see we were all about diagnosing the problem and working with them before any contracts were signed. Salesmen had to give up more of their commission because they spent more time in the life cycle of the sale.

Now, a great deal of effort goes into selling complex, big-dollar, high-stakes sales. That’s just the way it goes. In order for companies to compete in this landscape, they have to forfeit more time in the beginning to nurturing the relationship, diagnosing the problem (and essentially bringing more employees to the table) with their buyers, and having some type of deliverable before any contracts are signed.

But that’s how people win these days. They give something for nothing. Salesmen are generous and authentic. There’s a stigma because we still see cold calling, knocking on people’s doors, email blasts, Linkedin inmail messages piling up, solution after solution coming out, cloud-based SaaS products that people need (or don’t). But the bottom line is, in order to be a salesman in this game, you actually have to want to help people. The sales guys who are super slick are laughed out of the room these days. No one buys anymore from a pushy car salesmen, I wouldn’t. But I would buy from someone like me. I’m invested in getting people the right solution, even if that means it’s not from my company.

The face of the selling world has taken on many different looks over the years, and I guarantee that it will continue to evolve and change. I see the sales industry going in one of two directions. 1). Sales people will become more commoditized, and they’ll be ranked by number. The great sales people will be getting offered large salaries to come to work for the buyers of the industries to help vet other salesmen trying to sell them something. Or 2). The effort salespeople put in will continue to increase, the demands of the buyers will increase, and the information out there will increase, therefore turning the decision-making process into a lengthier lifecycle. Because either way, the market and the buyers now own the selling world. Information is there, people just need to take the time to sift through it. But great salesmen are like chameleons, they improvise and overcome, and trust me when I say – the last man standing on this earth will be a salesman!!

Create Your Own Digital Products

Ok, this goes out to all the Affiliate Marketers out there.

I fully believe that Affiliate Marketing in the MMO niche is probably the worst thing to get into online if you are just starting out or an intermediate. Again, especially, if someone is trying to sell you in the MMO (Make Money Online) niche – all they are selling is a pipe-dream, and people who “buy-in” to the phishing funnel will make little to no money because they don’t understand how it works.

You have to consider things like recurring commission, cookie durations, social presence, transparency in the affiliate marketing company, reputation, the list goes on and on and on….

On every affiliate link that you click on in someone’s bio – please scroll down to the very bottom of the page where the DISCLAIMER is. It’ll have this line in it somewhere:

Anyone who buys “HOW-TO” information should expect to get little-to-no results. We can in NO way guarantee you will get similar results.

Anyone who buys ‘HOW-TO’ information should expect to get little-to-no results.

Yup – that ^^

Master Resell Rights is a bit different yet I have never done MRR. The more I look into the less I think it’s the way to go. They will tell you that you can learn the courses and resell them at 100% profit. But here’s the question I would ask?

Where are the courses housed online? No one can seem to answer this? And this is WHY it’s important to fully understand before you SPEND MONEY.

So, if MRR lets you download the courses to your local computer and store them there, and also allows you to change the content (which I doubt) – then it would be worth it to me.

But here’s the thing most people don’t know. Those MRR courses are on a website that has hosting services and the cost of that is dependent on how much traffic you get.

So – learn how to build your own website so you own your own content. It’s NOT AS HARD AS YOU THINK IT IS!! We can show you how!

Why creating your own (actually your products/services) is better?

Creating and building your own content (that is valuable for a small niche audience) and then putting that content on your own website to share and sell is really the smart way to go about building a digital business.

By doing this, it also protects your content – you can put up alerts on your website to know if people are using it in the way that you said they can. This means, YOU are fully in control!

If you do AM or MRR – at the end of the day, the company/brand/creator who originally made that content, can pull the plug.

Or

Let’s say the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) cracks down on Affiliate Marketers (this could absolutely happen, a lot of AMs are making outrageous claims to get you in their phishing funnels). If the FTC cracks down on the practice – well, what are you (as an Affiliate Marketer) left with?

NOTHING!

CREATE YOUR OWN CONTENT THAT YOU ENJOY CREATING AND HAS A NICHE MARKET – THEN BUILD A WEBSITE AROUND THAT AND WE CAN SET UP ALL THE EMAIL MARKETING AND OTHER INTEGRATIONS THAT CAN AUTOMATE THE PROCESS!

The Hard Truth About Making Money Online

The hard truth – is MMO something I’m willing to invest my time, money, and knowledge in?

If the answer to that is YES and I’m not telling you it should be (only you can decide that), then you’ll need to decide what avenue of MMO is right for you?

We are going to get into the different ways you can make money online (in a different post) and what you’ll need to learn to accomplish those things. But many of my connections ask me this question:

Is this something that’s truly worth doing?

My answer for them is IT DEPENDS – I always tell people who ask to follow your passions/dreams to the extent that you can afford them (in time, money, and knowledge). Ok?

Do NOT go into debt to make money online because you can spend more time (and less money) to learn the skill.

The answer for myself is YES – because I know the only way to scale what I do is to put it online. And if you’ve ever read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, then you’ve heard of the Cashflow Quadrant.

Cashflow Quadrant broken down for beginners

There are 4 ways to create cashflow (generate money):

  1. Being an Employee: where you trade time for money (I still have a regular job!)
  2. Being Self Employed: where you still trade time for money and then maybe create a lifestyle business where you’re making the money you want to.
  3. Creating Systems: where you create a product, service, or process that can be replicated and sold to others, by others and yourself. This is where you start to get back more of your time. Once you create a system (like an eCourse) – you can sell this in your sleep.
  4. Being an Investor: where you take the money that you have and invest it into real estate, stocks, commodities, etc. Again, this can be done with very little to no time once things are set up.

But you will ALWAYS have to spend time if you want to make money online – again, this is UNAVOIDABLE. The initial set up will take the most time, but once things are set, the time factor becomes less and you gain a form of freedom that you would not otherwise have. How much time depends on YOU!

The Goal?

The goal of making money online is to create a system that can be replicated and scaled so you aren’t continuing to trade time for money. And that’s as simple as I can explain it. So, if you want that for you – then keep reading.

So what is the HARD TRUTH?

The hard truth is this: If you are a beginner in the Making Money Online space then it will take you AT LEAST 1 full year to build and grow a successful digital business where you own the products/services you sell and you stand behind them as an ethical digital creator.

Anyone telling you that you can spend 1-2 hours a day and making 4 or 5 figure per month income is LYING TO YOU!

For beginners – you’re going to have to treat this like a FULLTIME job. That’s the only way to actually become successful, unless you go viral.

BUT – only 1% of people doing this actually go viral – don’t believe that you are going to be in that 1% because the probability of that happening is slim (1% chance!).

The other hard truth is that YOU DON’T HAVE TO SPEND MONEY ON A COURSE (especially if that course says “we have strategies and templates that are ‘DONE FOR YOU’). What that really means is the strategies and templates THEY created worked for THEM (therefore, DONE FOR THEM – NOT YOU!)

There is NO single course out there will ACTUALLY show you how to build a successful digital business. This is true – they might show you successful marketing strategies that work today (or worked last month) but these things are always changing in the digital world. Nothing stays the same!

What should I do if I’m a complete beginner?

Ok, so here are the high-level steps you will need to focus on:

  1. Find a niche (category, topic, industry, market) that you are interested in and have some valuable knowledge in.
    • Please note that THIS is what beginners have trouble with and WHY they choose to go into the MMO (making money online) niche. But that just sells a pipe-dream. Use valuable info that gives a small audience something valuable.
    • You need to list out all the interests, passions, hobbies, jobs that you ever done or had in your life (make it a long list!). Then write down all the things you want to learn (i.e. digital marketing, TikTok strategies, etc.)
    • We will find ‘confluence’ and ‘voyages’ here (they are insight channels!)
      • Use YOUR own knowledge to build eBooks, eCourses, PDF downloads and more to give away, share, and sell. Also take the things you want to learn and document them while you’re learning. You can share this stuff too! The best way to learn something is by learning it and then trying to teach someone else the same thing.
  2. Create products and services using completely FREE digital tools like:
    • G-Suite: Many of the $7, $8, $9 or even $500 courses are using G-Suite anyways. They are creating courses in a slide deck in Google Slides, they are transcribing these to Google Docs and then storing them in the Google Drive to share and disseminate to their customers. It’s easier than you think!
    • Trello: this is a FREE management and organizational tool that can help organize and manage your digital business.
    • Canva: free to use (with paid upgrades) where you can create an eBook, logo, business cards, etc. all for FREE! It’s got a drag and drop builder and free templates.
    • MailChimp: free to use (but LIMITED) and you can set up one audience list and send emails to them to get more repeat business and send out good valuable information.
    • WordPress: Instead of using sales funnel builders, use WordPress – create your own website where you can house YOUR content! That way it is YOURS. And don’t just “bridge” and “phish” people to another persons’s product or service.
  3. Payment Gateways – you have to use a Payment Platform like PayPal or Stripe when you first start off. These are sort of FREE tools meaning that you can sign up for them for free, but every transaction you get – they will take a transaction fee. So, sign up for Paypal (personal) and you can upgrade from there if you start seeing success.
    • Learn how to connect these Payment Platforms to your bank accounts.
  4. Once you learn all the above, and start making some money, you can then look into setting up an LLC and Corporate Bank Account to protect your product / service even more.
  5. But this is the key here – YOU HAVE TO CREATE YOUR OWN DIGITAL PRODUCTS / SERVICES.
VALUABLE CONTENT IS STILL KING AND ALWAYS WILL BE!

The Cost Triangle of MMO

Have you ever seen the videos on TT and other social media platforms that tell you “this is for the broke and lazy” or “side hustles you can do in your sleep” – if you have, then this post is for you.

MMO (Making Money Online) IS for the ‘broke and lazy’ – IF by ‘broke and lazy’ they mean industrious and hard-working? Doing MMO is like having a full-time job, especially for beginners.

If you have absolutely no experience with digital platforms (i.e. social media creation, website building, email marketing template creation, copywriting / content creation, etc.) then MMO will be a journey for you! And I promise you – it will be one of the hardest things you’ve ever done in your life….but it can also be the most fulfilling.

There is a way to retire from your 9-5 job, but it won’t be in a month, or 2 months, or even 3. Realistically, if you treat MMO like a full-time job (or close to), you will get there within 1-2 years!

The Real Cost to MMO?

This is simple yet complex. The REAL cost is TIME, MONEY, and KNOWLEDGE – and that’s it! But within those 3 areas, there is a lot of room for error and mistake and listening to the wrong gurus or influencers out there. I’ll break each down for you.

Time

MMO will cost you in TIME. This is unavoidable. You will need to make time for this journey or endeavor. There are no get-rich-quick strategies for MMO. And ANYONE who tells you that there is – they are lying to you! Or trying to get you to sign up for something.

How much time will you spend? Well, let’s look at all the things that require time.

  1. Building an audience on social media
  2. Building a website for your content
    1. Ideating, creating, and producing that content
  3. Using Email Marketing platforms like MailChimp or AWeber to capture emails.
  4. Creating an online store with a Content Management System by uploading all the products and services and creating content around them (product listings pages, product details pages, images of products, etc.)
  5. Trying to find good products to sell to your audience from companies or brands that compliment your product or service (but this IS Affiliate Marketing – you can still do it ethically)
  6. Managing all the aspects of your content (products and services) including customer issues, reviews & online reputation, taxes, changing regulations, etc. – the list goes on and on.
A TRUE DIGITAL BUSINESS IS NEVER PASSIVE!

Money

MMO will also cost you money (not much to start). ANYONE that tells you you don’t need to spend a dime to make money online – again, they are LYING to you! BUT – ANYONE who tells you YOU need to spend THOUSANDS – is, without a doubt, unequivocally, LYING TO YOU !

How much money will you need to spend? Well, it really depends on what you are looking to do. Let’s look at things that cost money:

  1. Websites:
    1. There are open source (free to use and contribute to) website platforms like WordPress and Drupal. but in order to put them online and have them seen by internet users, you’ll have to buy hosting services and domain names.
    2. There are paid (proprietary) website builders that make it easier to create websites but they cost money (usually a monthly subscription) like: Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, GoDaddy, etc.
  2. Email Marketing platforms:
    1. Some of these are free to use like Mailchimp. BUT, if you use the free versions they are limited in how many lists you can create and what functionality you can use. So, you’ll start thinking about buying these things without knowing what they can really do for your business.
  3. Funnel Builders:
    1. You CAN make money online WITHOUT a website – BUT this assumes that you have an audience built on social media and are directing them to a product or service with an affiliate link. Getting an affiliate link is NOT easy, especially from a brand or company that is established and reputable.
  4. LLC’s:
    1. Creating an LLC in your state or another state like Wyoming (hard to pierce the corporate veil) then this will ABSOLUTELY cost you money. Where this will help you is in your tax filing proceedings to start but also in liability considerations. DISCLAIMER: I’m not a lawyer nor business advisor!

Knowledge

MMO will cost you knowledge. Now, knowledge can be seen as just another form of time/experience/expertise. But the cool thing about knowledge is that most of us already have some! If you have any life experience that you think is worth sharing – that’s where you should start your journey into MMO.

What knowledge do you possess that is worth sharing with the world? And the great thing about this is that YOUR KNOWLEDGE does NOT have to cater (and should NOT) cater to EVERYONE.

There are 5 billion people on the internet today (June 17, 2023) and we only need our knowledge (which will be turned to some form of content) to reach a very small percentage of that huge user base.

Think about this:

1% of 5 Billion is: 50 Million (there are only maybe 100 celebrities that have 50 million followers of more).

0.01% of 5 Billion is: 500,000

0.001% of 5 Billion is: 50,000

0.0001% of 5 Billion is: 5,000

0.00001% of 5 Billion is: 500 – you can even start making money online if this is the following you have, but you WILL NOT become rich off of it.

What Will Require Your Knowledge?

The answer could be anything and everything (almost like a catch-all):

  • What job have you worked for a while and what do people need to know about it? What secrets can you share?
  • What interests or hobbies do you have that others also want to know or learn?
  • What topics make you jazzed to think about or talk about?
  • What is uniquely you? What is authentically you?
  • How did you acquire certain things like products, material goods, knowledge, processes, thoughts, ideas, etc. that you believe others would benefit from?

Getting Started?

How should you get started if you don’t know what to do first? You should get started by doing 2 things first: Figuring out your KNOWLEDGE to know what’s worth sharing, giving away, and selling. USE YOUR KNOWLEDGE to learn FREE digital management, design, creation, and marketing tools. We can learn about payment gateways and hosting services a bit later. But start there – free digital tools can be found here (all they cost is your email):

Free Tools for MMO

Skills Development During a Pandemic

Hey everyone – things are a bit uneasy right now. Maybe you or someone you know has been affected by COVID-19 (directly or indirectly). Many Americans are out of work due to businesses and companies shutting down. And there are millions of people out there that are dealing with the fear of uncertainty about what will happen tomorrow or the next day.

In the midst of this ambiguous future, I wanted to share some resources for my upcoming podcast episode about skilling up during a pandemic.

First, now is a great time to ramp up, skill up, or learn something new in the digital space. Depending on what you’re passionate about, you can find many available resources and courses online — many of which are free and I’ll list here.

Second, if you find yourself out of work due to COVID-19, then make sure to check with your state about offering unemployment benefits even if you’re a gig worker or a freelancer or self-employed. Many states are offering pandemic relief insurance and I found a good website at Career One Stop here: https://www.careeronestop.org/LocalHelp/UnemploymentBenefits/unemployment-benefits.aspx – which will drill down to individual state unemployment insurance.

Free Skills Development

While we are all social distancing and locked (sort of) in our homes away from other people, it’s really a good time to start learning more stuff. They say that learning a new skill slows cognitive aging, so go learn something!

Khan Academy: https://www.khanacademy.org/ – we’ll start with Khan – this is a great site that is geared toward math, science, and history. It also has free classes on economics and finances (very important during a crisis), and computer science. This site is ideal for general studies and then some.

Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/courses?query=free – Coursera has a wide variety of free courses with topics that include arts & humanities, business, data science, information technology, personal development and more. If you’re interested in things like machine learning, human psychology, social media marketing, and more – check out Coursera.

Udemy: https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?q=free – Udemy is another well-known site that offers plenty of learning classes including how to earn money blogging, cloud computing, growth hacking, leadership, copywriting, and other stuff like nutrition, fitness, etc.

If you’re unsure of where to start with your skills development training, I’d recommend checking out the 3 aforementioned websites and look at the free available classes. See what peaks your interest and go from there.

Skilling up in Marketing Tools & SEO

If you are looking to get better at leveraging marketing tools, then I’d suggest trying out these different courses:

If you are looking to get better in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) then check out these following sites that have opened up much of their training right now:

Career Development

If you’re in the tech field and find yourself out of work due to the Coronavirus or just want to explore opportunities in the digital space, there are a few different sites that I use:

There are lots of resources out there that include career advice, professional development, career coaching, networking strategy and more. If you are out of work, then try to use this time wisely. For those of you who are curious about what tech trends are shaping the business world (and may be worth developing skills in to potentially get a job doing), then head over to Future Today Institute and download their 2020 Tech Trends Report.

How to work through skills development?

After you have all your resources and things you want to learn more about, how do you accomplish them? Well, that’s a really good question and one I’m not sure I’ve mastered yet. I have definitely done my share of skipping around from tutorial to class to course to article. 

I try to employ a goal setting technique to developing skills or skills learning. I learned this from Tony Robbins when I listened to his goal setting strategies. They were on cassette tapes in the early 2000’s. Basically, you’re supposed to write down all the goals you want to accomplish. So, in this instance you would write down all the skills you want to ramp up on. For example – maybe you want to become a Google Sheet expert, or learn the basics of content marketing, or maybe you want to learn more about on-page SEO. Write all these things down. I use Trello (you guys know it’s my favorite organizational tool), but you could do this in a Word Doc, Evernote, or even on a piece of paper. 

Then you can start numbering which ones are most important to you and bang them out in that order, that’s probably the simplest way. Or you can write out the details of why learning that particular skill is so important. And then from there you can categorize them into buckets and tell a story with the new learning material. The path that makes for the best story for you in terms of the opportunity or job you may be seeking is the one you’ll want to take. But whatever that story is – it needs to fit you, and the main goal of the overall knowledge gain. Meaning that you are at point A now (which is your current skillset), you want to get to point B (your ideal skillset) – which path will best lead you there? And that’s something that only you can determine. 

Wrapping up with skills development

If you are trying to get a certain role, look up job descriptions from top companies or companies that you are interested in working for. Read up on the skills that job description requires, then work backward from that description and incorporate your learning material.

It’s always good to work on your professional (and personal) development during uncertain times (well…all times, really). But it’s especially important now because we don’t really know how things will land when the dust settles. There’s an old saying “live as if you were to die tomorrow, but learn as if you were to live forever.” I don’t practice the first part of that saying, but I’ve always believed in continual learning. Stay safe, stay healthy, and learn something new!

Better Strategic Planning in a Crisis

Pondering the Theory of Strategy Entanglement amidst the novel COVID-19 uproar and the potential of a global economic failure directly below our feet, it’s time to redefine strategic planning for business. What can a business do without clients buying their services or products? What about paying clients that can’t get full support because company workforces have been shaved in half due to cost-cutting?

Virus strain

The general principle of entangled strategies is that there are no strategies that operate independently of themselves. Simply put, nothing can perform well in a silo. But that can change quickly when markets, companies, and consumers start to silo off out of fear, government orders, or social distancing.

Suddenly, companies are no longer bringing in revenue, which has a drastically larger impact than just on employees and customers. It can mean that commerce slows to a halt, maybe quicker than expected, and that ripple effect can and will cripple markets.

Taking Stock in Uncertain Times

It might be too late to mention this, but the best plan for dealing with a crisis is to have that plan already in place well before the crisis hits. For many, this might not be possible, so the first thing you’ll need to consider is taking an inventory of your current situation.

If your company has a cash reserve or funds put aside for rainy days, then you’ll be able to weather this storm much better than others. If your company doesn’t have that, then it’s time to get granular and make some hard decisions.

  1. What is the current financial position? If we were to receive no more revenue from today onward, how long could we sustain?
  2. What expenses do we need and what can we cut? Salaries, technology, tools, equipment, marketing, advertising, etc. – all of this could be on the chopping block depending on how dire the financial position is.
  3. How many customers are still paying us; how many have halted their invoices?
  4. Where can we generate more revenue? Or where can we add more value to revenue generating customers?

As a business owner or leader, you’ll need to reassure your troops. That needs to be backed by real numbers, so take a look at the above questions and get them answered. An honest conversation with your employees about the company’s situation (or plight) may be the only way to get everyone pushing in the same direction.

Surviving Lockdowns

The governor of New York called for a state-wide shutdown of non-essential businesses on Friday. If you don’t run a grocery store or pharmacy, then your business may be in for hardship the likes of which we’ve never seen.

As everyone looks to make the most of their situation and survive, here are some suggestions if your business doesn’t have the reserves it needs to make it through this crisis:

  • You’ll need to triage your finances right away, just like if you lost your job. What are your fixed expenses, non-fixed expenses, what can you do without, what can you not do without?
  • You’ll need to figure out if there’s a way to run the business remotely. Can you send employees home with a laptop and needed software? Agencies, digital product companies, and sales organizations would be the most likely candidates for this.
  • Can you sell your products solely online for the time-being? If you don’t have an online presence (then you’re seriously behind the time), but now would be a great time to start your e-commerce storefront.
  • Are there complimentary services that you can use to keep your “non-essential” business operational? Like delivery services for restaurants.
  • Can your company get assistance from the government or state-funded programs? You’ll have to do some digging on what your state is offering.

If remote work is not an option for your business or employees, then you’ll have to consider temporary lay-offs or more flexibility until the world gets through this pandemic.

Communication with Existing Customers / Clients

If your business is still able to operate, then one of your core strategies should be good communication with your existing clients or customers. Obviously, those customers are facing uncertainty as well, so try to put that uncertainty in front of both parties—the business and the customer—not between the two.

Transparency is key while communicating your situation. We are all human and clients will most likely empathize with your position because they’re going through it too. Give them information on what your business is facing right now in terms of challenges and give them insight into the actions you’re taking to mitigate risk.

These really are unprecedented times, and they call for unprecedented measures:

  • Chat with your longest and most valued clients first
  • Be honest about how many employees you’ve had to let go
  • Let them know if you’ll still be able to perform the same level of service for them
  • Let them know if production will suffer
  • Reassure them that you are doing everything you can to minimize the risk to your business and their business

Strategy in times of crisis

Since the coronavirus doesn’t seem to be slowing down (except for a few countries), you’ll need to start thinking long-term. Depending on what you uncover during your situation inventory (i.e. financial triage, must-haves), you should be looking about six months to a year out before things get back to normal. But let’s start short-term as there are many things that could change (for the worse) in the weeks to come.

Create a short-term internal plan that maps out the following things:

  1. Steps being taken to minimize the spread of coronavirus (this would be good to share with your employees and customers)
  2. Financial forecasting in one to three months time
  3. Opportunities to serve clients/customers through digital mediums including mobile
  4. Worst-case scenario – exit strategy (it may come to this)

If you can make it through the next 3 months and you’re still operational, then focus on six to twelve months.

The sad news is that some businesses will survive and others will not, which may just be out of your control. Don’t put your health at risk just to keep your business afloat. Times will change, and times will get better. There are plenty of resources out their for small businesses right now – just check out your local chamber of commerce. Or the US Chamber.  If you’re interested in starting an online business, check out the Ecommerce Business Blueprint on Shopify.

For a final note—let your human side show—we will all need to hunker down, do our best, show compassion, and keep ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities safe during these next few months.

Sifting Thru the Information Age

The woeful art of data collection is tedious, time-consuming, and not necessarily fruitful. For every strategist out there, data really is the name of the game. It comes in all shapes and sizes, different formats and forms, analytics, reports, whitepapers, press releases, and on it goes till there’s too many to name. Compiling data is a hard pursuit for information analysts and data specialists, so what’s the average agency team member to do when they find themselves drowning in a sea of data? Paddle back to shore…as quickly as possible.

I’ve always felt like strategists are a rare breed. They have to think about their clients, their client’s’ users, the competition, the market trends, social trends, industry influencers, disruptors, shifts and more. Then, hopefully, get in front of it all and find that one tidbit of information that will lead to a successful client interaction. Hard, yes? YES!!

To find the insight that leads to an opportunity to capitalize on objectives before the next wave or trend hits is really hard to do. Then the cycle starts all over again.

Capturing the data landscape

From a strategy standpoint, there are 3 questions you’ll need to answer:

  1. What data will be useful to both the short and long-term objective?
  2. What data can actually be collected?
  3. What categorization will make the data more manageable?

Or you can look at it like this:

  1. Identify and establish
  2. Collect and aggregate
  3. Sift and categorize

The collection process has become a huge problem, hence the recent shift into machine learning, artificial intelligence, and algorithms to help categorize or cluster lumps of information. Businesses, organizations, and (specifically) strategists are suffocating beneath it all. And if you have the money to invest in AI – by all means – do! But many of us do not, and don’t even really know how it could help (don’t worry – I’ll write a post on that too!).

If you go even deeper into the data collection world, there are a multitude of techniques and tactics including exploratory data analysis, descriptive statistics, lambda architecture, data cleansing, data transforming, data modeling, and mining. WOAH!!! Hold up – here’s the reality: there’s a simpler way to identify, collect, and sift the data that won’t leave you submerged in a pool of data delirium.

Identify…

The first step in the data collection process is to identify what’s important. Obviously, this is going to be dependent on the problem you’re trying to solve, but there are usually some universal things that we need to know and I’ll list them out here.

The usual stuff…

  • Users – Who are they? What do they need? Where are they? How do they normally interact with your client? Why are they continuing to interact with your client? What’s the value your client provides them with?
  • Competition – What are they doing that’s different than your client? Who are their users? How have they positioned themselves? What can we learn from them?
  • Market – I always find this to be a tricky one. This is mostly about industry trends and what’s happening in the market. Is there something going on in the political landscape that may disrupt what we’re trying to do? Economically, how sound is the product/tool/resource your client is trying to offer? Are others offering it at a lower price? Is demand being driven up by an exclusive offer? You get the point.

These are the big three! Other information you may want to know about could be emerging technology or the best in business for that particular industry. Think about the problem before you go looking for the data. If you don’t, then you will, literally, be drowning in it.

Collect…

The next step is actually getting your hands on the data. But what is the easiest way to collect the data that we need? Great question….and I’ll just be honest – I don’t have any great answers for you! If you aren’t a developer and don’t know how to write algorithms or scripts that will easily aggregate or pull in data for you…then you’re at the mercy of the tools that are out there.

  • Google Analytics: This is a phenomenal tool. It really can get you a lot of the data you require, especially when it comes to the users of a particular website. It’ll give you insight into who your users are (or who your client’s users are), where they hangout online, etc. However, it won’t give you answers to questions like “what’s the value they get from your client?” You can take guesses at this, but you’ll never actually know unless you ask the user.
  • RSS Feed Readers: There are a number of Feed Readers out there that will aggregate blogs and other feeds for you all in one place. Just google “Best RSS feed readers” and you’ll find something. I pull in a lot of competitor and best in biz blogs so I can keep a pulse on what others in the same industry are doing.
  • Social Media: This one’s pretty obvious, no? I have several Twitter accounts because I’m following different verticals in each one and staying up-to-date on what’s going on in the social (and real) world. You’d be surprised at how many things hit social first before anything else.
  • Client Databases: This could be their CRM, Marketing Automation Platform, or Membership Portal, where they have information on their users already. Which could be helpful in understanding their audiences demographically as well as their behavior.
  • Watson Analytics: Now, I’ve just started to play around with this interface (see below) and it’s pretty intense. What I’ve sussed out so far is that this platform allows you to import pretty much any type of data (weather patterns, Twitter hashtags, CRM contacts, OneDrive, etc.) or information that’s readily available. It mixes in what Watson already knows (which, apparently is a lot) and lets you ask it questions. For example: Which content should we use to target a specific customer segment for the month of May? It spits you out an answer. I haven’t fully understood it yet, and make no mistake when I do, a blog post is coming!

Collecting data is kind of the easy part, there are systems in place for aggregating the data. The hard part is making sense of it all and we do that by categorizing it appropriately.

Sift…and sift….and sift some more…

Ok, you have all the information, but there’s just sooooo much of it! What’s the easiest way to sift through the information and categorize it to make it more manageable? Well…there are a few ways to do this. Before I get into it, I want to quickly talk about tools for categorization. I tend to gravitate towards using Trello Boards to separate certain information and link off to different platforms. You can use Google Docs, an Excel spreadsheet, whatever works for you!

  1. Categorize around your problem or initiative:
    • If you’re trying to get information and use it for a certain workshop, then look at your agenda for that workshop. What are talking points? If you want to talk about users, make sure you’ve categorized all the information you have on the users appropriately. I would start a Google doc and put in all relevant links to users in one place. That way you can link off in your workshop to check the data quickly. Maybe it’s to a certain Twitter account where you can review all recent tweets in an industry.
    • If you have information on the market, put all relevant links (or content/data/info) in the same doc so you can pull it up in your workshop. I find this way to be efficient, especially working with clients who have no idea what information they need or where to find it. You can also share Google docs to collaborate with them, or at least give them insight into what you’ve been compiling.
  2. Categorize around your client or account:
    • You can also categorize your information around a specific client. Let’s say you work with the GizmoSoftware company and they build software for design/development teams. What data would be useful to them (and you) so that they’re kept up-to-date with what’s going on in their industry, with their users, and their competitors?

I built a website called TheWebward where I pull in over 150 RSS feeds, 100 different social channels including Twitter feeds, FB feeds, and FB groups. And I also have an Article Library where I’ve categorized important posts, articles, and whitepapers so I can gain access to them at any point I need. The website is housed with information that’s important to me and helps me do my everyday job. I also push information to certain content types (“buyers”) that help me accommodate my clients in a much easier way. If you can do something like this, great! Read my post, it’s kind of like a how-to in using WordPress to help you manage the information you need.

Remember a few years ago when everyone was saying “content is king” – well, now data is king. And data is content, analytics, information on anything and everything. And there’s so much of it out there. So, identify what’s important to you (or the problem), collect the data that can be collected, and categorize it according to your initiative or client.

In the meantime, collect the data that’s important to you as a human being. Pull in things you find interesting and learn about them. You can never have enough data, but you can most certainly have too much of the wrong data.