First Task for the Day: BUYING

I turned 30 a few months ago in November and while I won’t pretend to be the ‘grey haired’  Oracle of all things business (although I do have more grey hair then I should have), I have learned quite a bit over my almost 364 months of being alive.

A lot of that knowledge has been through reading what great minds think about sales and philosophy and business motivation.  Playing on the battlefield of business has taught me even more.  Most promising, are the friendships I have developed with fellow sales-gurus like Shamus Brown, of Industrial Ego Sales, Frank Rumbauskas, of Never Cold Call Again, and John Holland, of Customer Centric Selling fame.

By studying, living, and learning about the best in generating explosive revenue growth, I have added a million lessons to my mental library about sales, marketing, and “branding”.  Here is one of the most powerful lessons I have learned: You can sell almost ANYTHING to ANYONE  basically ANYWHERE!

It’s true!  No matter what you are selling, you can sell it to almost anyone.  From porn to avocado shampoo to priority placements in a waiting line to iPhone apps that make farting sounds — people buy things that other people are selling!  I buy, you buy, we all buy stuff AND we buy it all the time.

We buy in a bad economy and we buy in a good economy.   It’s basically what we as people are doing when we are NOT sleeping, eating, or working.  And even then, (against all odds) we multi-task by finding time to buy while working or eating or sleeping (thanks to Ebay).  We can’t help but buy stuff.

That’s why I can help companies all over the world explosively sell almost ANYTHING to ANYONE .

• It’s NOT about slick pitches and archaic marketing plans….
• It’s NOT about how much venture funding you have….
• It’s NOT even about the strength of your existing sales team….

It’s ALL about the strategy!

In heavily contemplating sale strategy, I reread a quick report that I put together when I was CEO of ACCESS.  Here are my opening thoughts on the reasons for a proper sales strategy:

“It is an axiom amongst military planners and commanders that no plan survives beyond the first contact with the enemy. Plans are made and executed SIMPLY in the service of strategy.  Strategy is more than a plan; it takes into account, objectives, resources, strengths, weaknesses, competitors and targets… “

STRATEGY is everything….  It is what keeps you sane when external circumstances make your task seem impossible.  It is what allows you to change direction quickly when your tactics are not as productive as you would like…  It is the glue that holds together your activities into logical customer interactions.

• Without a strategy, hard work turns into wasted effort and passion quickly fizzles into “burn out”…
• Without strategy, chaos fuels resentment rather than possibilities for improvement…
• Without strategy, your “impossible task”, really is IMPOSSIBLE…

So how to build a sales strategy in 5 easily reproducible steps :

1. Think about the biggest dream you want to achieve — and double it in size…
2. List the 5 obstacles that will stop your dream from happening…
3. Outline in no more than 5  steps how to get to your dream…
4. Plan how to use your personal relationships to accelerate each of the 5 steps you wrote down…
5. Calculate carefully how to mitigate the risks of each obstacle by planning for the worse case scenario…

Here is another way to thing about strategy and how it plays into success as the ultimate goal.  Successful strategy is the end result of personal dreams multiplied by the scope of our personal relationships in removing obstacles completely negated by the number of details that are overlooked.  Put into pictures, here is the DEW formula: