Stick out while fitting in.

People don’t want to deviate from their normal routine.

So how do you get them to notice you? Interrupt their day? Force them to pay attention to you?

Don’t be intrusive. Don’t make them change their workflow to make time for a sales pitch.

Two examples of sticking out while fitting in:

• You have a new product and want to spread the word. Modify your business card for a while. On one side of the card include an elevator pitch for your new product.  Later, when they’re going through their cards, they’ll remember the conversation they had with you.

• You need to connect with a prospect that is difficult to reach. Send a personal video introduction via email. Your prospect goes through his emails just like the rest of us. And if you are lucky, he just might watch what you sent him.

Follow these steps when brainstorming for an idea like this:

• What do you want to communicate to this person?

• What are his common habits?

• Where’s the spot for creativity

This is not an easy task. Madison Avenue was built on this problem.

Please, (don't) act your age.

When you were a child you absorbed information like a sponge. You laughed more. You explored the world in daring and unselfconscious ways. Remember playing in the creek?

There are many reasons why you may have lost those child-like traits. You went through difficult relationships. You had crappy jobs. Responsibilities piled up. You got a mortgage. You had kids.

This all leads to risk aversion.

But what would your life look like if you carried some of those child-like traits into adulthood?

• Learning would be easier.

• You would laugh more.

• Exploring the world like a child, you would find business opportunities, personal interests, and relationships that you might have missed.

As adults, we see the world through the narrative of our past. And we let it bind us.

Do something today that scares you. 

Your Tribe is Shrinking, You Have Three Options, Choose Wisely

You share 99.99% of your genes with people who lived 10,000 years ago. These people were hunter-gatherers. They banded into tribes of thirty to fifty, and could support no more. Everyone sought food, every day. They stayed lean and mobile to go where the food was.

Today, 99.99% of your genes are still in a tribe looking for food. But things have changed. There is abundance. People can remain in one place now. There is time to organize and specialize. And tribes have grown much larger. Your company is a tribe, accumulating wealth by meeting a market demand.

But over the past few years the food has been drying up in your area. Your tribe was built on the assumption of abundance, so they are unable to move. To survive they kick people out of the tribe. You are faced with three choices.

• You can live in fear of being sacked and continue with your tasks of seeking ever scarcer food.
• You can make a dash for another tribe.
• You can strike out on your own, seeking food without a tribe.

Tough decision. There are a couple of things to keep in mind. Your tribe does not act in your best interest. Many other tribes are also shrinking. And the data says that a first time entrepreneur has a 20% chance at success.

Who knows which option will work. But there’s only one where you are the master of your own destiny.

Recruit Timid Employees for Sales, Ignorance is Bliss

Sometimes, ignorance is bliss and profitable.

It would be nice to get more of your people into the sales effort, but the problem is that a lot of them are timid.

Why are they timid? The fear of rejection? The fear of failure? We all have these fears. If you’re in sales, you’ve learned how to deal with them in your own way. The others need more practice. But you don’t have years to train them. You need help now.

So do two things to minimize the amount of fear they have to face. One is optional.

• Liquid courage (optional)
• Lower the cost of failure - Do not burden your newly minted salesmen with the knowledge that Bob Young is a prospect you’ve been chasing for years. Simply tell them Bob Young is a prospect. 

That’s right. Withhold information. This is one case where a level of ignorance will help your cause. If your new salesmen know how important Bob Young is, they’re going to get nervous when they meet him. So don’t make Bob scary.

Later, when they tell you about their conversation with Bob, tell them how you’ve been chasing him for years. That is a wonderful, empowering moment.

Which Kind of Entrepreneur are You? - A Visual Exercise

Do you consider yourself an entrepreneur? If you do, are you an analyzer or a doer? Probably both, yes? There are two extremes in the entrepreneur world. There are the people who have great ideas, but research and plan until the idea is rationalized into the “this won’t work” trash bin. These are the “aim, aim, aim,” people. Then there are the extreme doers, who dive into initiatives without proper due diligence. This second group is the “ fire, fire, fire,” group.

Confirmation bias allows an aggressive entrepreneur to rationalize greater expected returns and lower costs of failure. Therefore, they are more likely to pull the trigger sooner in the research process. At the same time, an over-analyzing entrepreneur will rationalize themselves into lower expected returns and greater costs of failure. They will spend much more money on research before going to market.  Let’s look at three graphs showing the decision process of three market actors; the “fire, fire, fire,” the “fire, aim, fire,” and the “aim, aim, aim.” The purple square is the point of indifference.

In large fixed and variable costs industries, the car business for example, somewhere between “Fire! Aim! Fire!” and “Aim. Aim. Aim.” is clearly the way to go. Mistakes are extremely costly. But with the low fixed and variable costs of much of the social technology industry, “fire, aim, fire,” is the way to go. Here are two reasons;

• Low barriers to entry allow anyone and their dog to put business models to the test. Thus speed to market is critical.

• The costs of failure are low enough to allow an entrepreneur to quickly recover and try something else.  This means that you have tons of competing initiatives any any given point.

At the end of the day, the power lies in knowing yourself.

Which type of entrepreneur are you? And is that the winning strategy?

Never Lose an Idea, Google App Tackles Bad Memory

Ideas come at inconvenient times. You’ll get ideas in the shower, at the doctor, or while running. What’s worse is that sometimes you’ll get two or three ideas in a row. So then just remembering them is a challenge. On days when you have a lot on your mind, you can forget an idea seconds after its conception. That’s bad.

Record your ideas immediately! You don’t need to be at your desk, ready to write an article. Do you have your phone nearby? Chances are you do.

Use your phone to get your ideas down. It seems obvious. On most phones there are notepad apps. But notepads are just notepads. Your ideas deserve more than that. Try Google Docs. It’s a great way to record your ideas.

• Google’s documents do not default to a page view. An empty page can be intimidating.

• Google saves your document automatically every few seconds, so just write, then turn your phone off.

• You’ll see the progress you’re making when you can scroll up and look at the other entries you’ve made. Recording your ideas will feel productive. You may even gain momentum.

Try fleshing out the promising ideas on the same document. Eliminate the bad ones. The result will be a mass of ideas at different levels of maturity. It’s pretty neat to see. When ideas are fully developed and ready to go, you may want to take them off your idea doc. Make room for the youngsters.

          Make room for the idea.

Say Goodbye to Standalone Contact Databases

Almost. Here’s the thing. 

• The current worker in the US stays with their employer for on an average of 4.4 years. 1 
• As of January 7, 2011, the unemployment rate was 9.4%. 2

• Add to this all of the people who are working under contract, and what you have is a lot of people doing a lot of moving around. And this means your contact information quickly becomes outdated.

So, if you want to stay with a standalone database, you’re going to have to find a balance between the costs of keeping it up to date, and the number of times you hear, “He no longer works here.”

But it’s much worse than that. Outdated information can be very damaging.

• Mass communication problems - you won’t know who is not receiving information you feel important enough to broadcast.

• Missed opportunities - for instance, you have a client that you speak with on average four times a year. Let’s say that contact moves to a new company. You won’t know that until the next time you call him. By then your contact may be using the company’s default supplier. And you’ve lost a growth opportunity.

• You become reactionary - This is a world of information. If you’re constantly the last one to find things out, you won’t be around long. It is unacceptable to discover that a key contact has moved to another company from an industry periodical.

Here’s the answer to this conundrum. Outsource your contact management to the contacts themselves! Who knows the most about your distribution partner, Edward Knickerbocker? Edward Knickerbocker, that’s who. He’s the one that is going to update his profile on Linkedin when he moves to a new company, because it’s in his best interest.

Admittedly, I haven’t seen the right software for this yet. Linkedin is the best self-updating database for professionals there is at the moment. But there’s a snag. People are hesitant, and rightly so, to put their phone numbers on their profile. Other than that, you can download your contacts’ information and plug it into any program you want. Go to the “Contacts” tab, then click on the export connections link at the bottom right-hand side of the page. This will allow you to turn your contact information into a .csv file. You can import your contacts into a cloud program, say Salesforce or Google Contacts. From there, everyone in your organization can see the same contacts, and it’s constantly updating. Sensitive information, like phone numbers and notes will not be effected by incoming, non-conflicting fields.  It’s not a perfect solution, but one will come soon. Perhaps a permission level system built into Linkedin. We’ll see.

In the meantime, keep cutting costs where you can. And win the information race.