Before I call them back – I spend 2-3 minutes rapidly vetting them.  It happens at speed, and it’s something I do instantly, before I call.

I also do it when a new person joins a project to see what I can know.  This is a matter of course, and a baseline responsibility.  A lot of marketing people can’t be found online, others can.

The vetting process generally includes:

• Following their links
• Googling their name/region + the word “blog” (hits sometimes)
• I look 2-3 levels deep at social connections (Linked In, Twitter)
• If it’s tech, hit up CrunchBase.
• Looking for their past companies on Linkedin.
• Looking for mutual connections.

When I have someone that I know, I generally email a “how well do you know _______” post.  Again, I’m looking for individuals, not interactions.  I also see how they got to our site via Clicky.Com, and that gives me even more insight.

I find myself, before I call them, determining if I want to work with them or not. IF I don’t, I take an aggressive line, and give them a million reasons to think about.  If I do, I present us in a way that makes that most likely.

I would think that depending on how I felt about you, you might think I’m an amazing or terrible salesperson.   I guess I’m both.  I don’t believe that every sale is good, what I want is every quarter to be better than the last one.  Sometimes you have to say no to the unhinged, and you have to make them think it’s their idea.

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As if I blew a sale. As if I’m stupid.

More to the point – as if, had I said something a little bit different, or been a little more deferential I might have won the sale, and that I screwed up.

“Gee, if you’d have done it this way, I’d be your customer instead of your something.”

Please.

I know how I come across. I always have. I know that sending a strong signal of indifference or disdain will scare people away. This is on purpose. I’m reacting to something that I’m reading.

I know that putting a bunch of hoops to jump through allows us to screen our customers. Some customers get them, some don’t. This isn’t fair at all. This is my business. (These days about everyone pays the same price).

When someone sends me a signal that they are insane, or insist on meetings….I make them jump through fairly arbitrary hoops, or I pick a fight with their legal department.

Obviously, we need business, but we really don’t need business from anyone in particular. When a client believes that they are our boss, they act poorly.

They get a worse project because our objective necessarily shifts from “doing the very best that has ever been done” to “being done with these jerks as quickly as possible so that we can do the best work on another project.”

I guess it’s OK to have false positives. To have a filter that kicks out more crazy/problems. And, as we become more skilled at our process, we’ll be able to “client proof” ourselves, and as our brand becomes stronger, people will put up with more to work with us on our terms.

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It occurred to me that I pursue loads interests without achieving much depth in any one thing.  Being interested in lots of things is nice, and reading a lot of books has paid serious dividends in my own life.

None of it changes you very much.

There’s some sort of limiting factor with all of it. Spending 3 hours reading about economics, and 5 hours reading about iOS development seems inefficient.  It seems that it’s unlikely that there will be any real gains in any area.  You don’t accrue a benefit because you’re spending time dabbling.

Or, maybe you benefit but not nearly as much as if you’d focus on one skill, one thing that you were able to do.
If you spent 100 hours of fairly serious study, let’s say in Spanish or German or even PHP or Guitar, you’d walk away with a real, measurable improvement.  You’d become competent, and your brain would be tougher.

More to the point – it seems that you would be more capable of learning different things.
So, I figured that it would be possible to carve out about 100 hours each quarter to improve myself.  Recently, my Rescue Time numbers have been terrible…I know I have the time to put into something.

The idea is to gain skill by pouring big chunks of time at something as opposed to dabbling.

Over the next year I’ll try and document this here, for my purposes.

I intend to pick from the following ‘things that I’ve always wanted to know’

• Ukelele
• PHP
• Jquery
• CSS/HTML
• ISO Development
• Photoshop/basic design
• Mandarin Chinese

I haven’t decided exactly how I want to handle things, but it seems that we can train with an alternating system of 2-3 hour “planning” sessions alongside 20-25 hour “practice” sessions.  It seems likely that you can cover a LOT of ground tis way.  It might also take 5-10 hours upfront to figure out the best way to learn something.

It seems to me that the project could be organized as follows:

1-2 hours: picking how you’ll be pursuing the first 20 hours.
22-24 hours: basic skill building.
Next 1-2: check in for the next 20 and confirm you’re on course.
22-24+ hours: more skill building and hard practice.
Next 2 or so: review and plan the following/remaining

etc.

This gives us a chance to map out the territory and lay out what we want to do.

I’ll give it a shot, and I’ll see what I can do here.  It seems to me that the first one of these things should be either PHP or Photoshop type stuff.

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1. Are you profoundly ridiculous?
2. Is it possible that the advice is going to make you look dumb?
3. Is it likely that the recipient has thought of the advice before?
4. Is it welcome and not a problem?

There’s more to it than that, but when I was flailing and failing I was more likely to dispense advice than I am these days.

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I was getting recognition and had built a following.  I kept knocking it down because it was built on fantasy.  Since then, I took my web presence down about 15 notches.

I canned my e-mail list.

I deleted 2500 Facebook “pseudo friends.”

I deleted thousands of Twitterers.

I all but stopped blogging regularly, stopped guest posting all together.  Traffic here went from 15k visitors/month to 1500.

There are those that will tell you “you are enough.”  This is code for “any old half ass shit you put out on the web is enough.  It’s not, you have to be great.  Really, really great.  Bragging about a fantasy doesn’t cut it.

The difference between what a dude like Ramit does and some other schmuck is profound.  I’ll be damned if I’ll be that other schmuck.

I will, of course, keep blogging, and I will of course, keep putting stuff out there.  But I don’t know how it’s going to look, not exactly.

In the mean time, I’ll just be reminded by all of this as GoDaddy tells me repeatedly that the domains I had such high hopes for are expiring.

I have done things, good and bad.  My kids love me. They both adore me. For whatever reason, I am their hero.Ruby  - my almost 4 year old -sat in my lap yesterday morning, and watched The Incredibles with me.  She made it about 50 times better.  Sure, sure, it’s a great movie, a reverent parody and homage to the comics.

But watching it with HER, laughing and discovering the jokes, smiling and looking up at me to see if it was funny.  Grinning and curling in my lap.

I did nothing in my life to deserve this.  But I get it anyway, and I am full up with love and happiness.

Now, off to the zoo.

Anyway, the gist is this: keep your needs well, well, well beneath your means. Sales has volatility.  The optimism required to sell means that you think that every month is your best month.  That you can swing something that you did once.

Then you become dependent on big months, just to survive, and you start to fray around the edges.

Better to drive an old, paid off corsica than it is to try and chase someone else’s leased Beamer.  Better to have a ton of runway then to need a comp plan to stay the same.

It’s not “sales advice” per se, but despair undoes a salesperson faster than anything else.

 And then you get yourself a couple spots on your hat, and you’re finished.

“Having To” sell to survive makes selling damn near impossible.  I’ve been there, and lived that.

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But focusing on them is wrong.

The tactics:

• Objection Handling
• Cold Calling Opens
• Scripts
• DiSC typing.

All have a purpose. To some degree they help, and they can make a difference.  But it’s frosting.  You can probably put bakery frosting on garbage and make it look like a delicious birthday cake.  The frosting will look OK, but it’s covering up stuff.

Tactics are frosting.  They help.  But before we study tactics, we want to dig a little deeper. I spent ten years studying tactics.  I read books like “Question Based Selling,” or “Selling to Vito“.  Countless others  All are fine, adequate books.  All are helpful, and have things that you can use.

But none of them inspire passion, none of them teach you to tell the truth and to be fully grounded, human and real.  None of them teach leadership.  Respect.  Kindness.  Helpfulness.  Being good.  Being concerned about someone else’s well being.

That stuff makes you good.  That stuff means you get real, long term sales.

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The story for today is an observation I made there.

I was the most productive member of an unproductive office.  I was making something around $80-90k a year or so (it was a bad year, I’m sorry).  Many months–even many quarters my buddy Jeremiah would print off absurd pie charts showing that my paltry production was 2/3 of what was being made in the office.  (As another aside- there probably more DUIs than employees in that office).  Instead of wondering how the hell people were eating, I crowed like a rooster, and medicated with $2 dollar beers during the afternoons.

I wasn’t a genius.  I was delusional.  You’ve been in sales, you’ve been there.

But one of the things that I noticed was that everyone was reliving every blow by blow in real time.

A variant of yesterdays lesson, this behavior was indulgent.  People would have a sales event.  A call with a client.  A possible referral.  A check in with an underwriter.

The next action would be to repeat the story throughout the office, and contribute to the hazy and delusional cognitive dissonance that was the Bush administration.

“Another referral from Brian, mmm- buddy, things are looking up.”

First they’d tell our broken down mortgage processor, then each other.  A routine event, one of 30 or 40 things that had to happen for a loan to close would be repeated to the office 5,6 times.  Something that took 3 minutes to complete would bloat into a 45 minute ordeal.

Each time it was repeated, it seems that the event became less likely to happen, but only the skill of the loan officer stood in the gap and made it work.

I imagine their wives heard the details it as well, hoping to find reassurance that their husband may actually get paid this month.

I know that they’d even tell the other loan officers at Happy Hour.

Jeremiah caught this happening and made an itinerant snarky remark about someone getting 5-6 phone calls a day and then doing 30 minutes worth of debriefing per call to fill the time.  I observed my own behavior, and yes, I did this.  Nobody cared.  Certainly not me.

The lesson here is shut up about the routine.  It doesn’t need to be said.  None of it. Do your job, shut up, and do it again.  You don’t need congratulations because some housewife in the burbs returned your call after you stayed with it 15 times.  It’s what it takes.  It’s hard for everyone.

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