Everyone knows and apparently hates Powerpoint.

Yet we all use it, could it be a case of double standards?

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, brothers Chip and Dan Heath make the case for ditching Powerpoint.

Chip Heath is a professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and for the last 5 years has been running an MBA class called "Making Ideas Stick". His brother Dan is a consultant at Duke Corporate Education.

And if you've heard me talk about the power of a core story Chip and Dan advocate it and give examples in an interview they did with US News.

Having just talked to Rob who mentioned CRM it took me back to a time when I'd developed CRM solutions and implemented CRM packages. It was whilst working as an external consultant. Believe me I've seen many different ways the systems are used, or abused. 

No one can argue that Customer Relationship Management, more commonly known as CRM, is a vital part of marketing and sales.

Cheap and cheerful contact management systems like ACT! have grown into pretty good CRM solutions. You can even use Microsoft Outlook as a CRM solution.

If you've more than 50 people you can go to Microsoft's or Sage's CRM offerings.

And if you're big you'll probably plump for Siebel or SAP.

But it doesn't matter what package you use if your company can't agree on answers to the following questions:

1. How do we want our customers to feel after doing business with us?
2. Which parts of the organisation "touch" the customer - directly or indirectly that need access to the CRM system?
3. What information must we hold that helps our customers - both in services and sales
4. How are prospects found and used?
5. What information must we hold to allow prospects and quotes to easily convert to customers and orders?
6. What further information do we need to make the customer experience with us seamless?
7. Are there any customers we should make redundant?
8. Can we articulate our strategy to see if we need a CRM solution?

So if you're thinking of making your customer experience with your company better think about the 8 questions and look at how you do business with them first before investing in a computerised system.

I've been looking further into Zazzle and I'm beginning to think that although the idea is great the execution seems to be flawed.

Check out these opinions on their service.

This is not the only site with pretty consistent negative thoughts on Zazzle.

So beware if you try them out.

For the last few months I've been selling the updated 2nd edition of my book "How To Leap Ahead Of Your Competitors". 

Yes, yes of course it's full of great stuff that helps your business and I'm not asking you to click on the link and pay for it - even if it makes you tons of money.

Instead I want to ask you my subscriber and faithful reader, you who keep coming back to this blog to help me with a project.

The project is to write a book to really help people like you to grow your business substantially without major investments in time or money.

To help me decide the book I need to write I'm looking for you to send me your top burning question that you just know the answer would kick your business into overdrive.

Maybe I've touched on a subject in a previous post that hit a nerve with you but I didn't go into step by step detail to let you use it properly. If so email about that too, with the offending post title if you remember it. 

If I get no significant feedback I've a few thoughts of my own that I'll address in the new book. Although I really would prefer to write stuff that you'll find most useful.

So don't delay, fill in the form above and send it to me and I'll get on to it right away.  As a bribe to encourage you to put your thinking cap on I'll send you a copy of the tool I created which helps you prepare for and make the most of exhibiting at shows.

Whilst reviewing the book "Lightning in a Bottle" I discovered that the  authors had reasons "Why 9 Out of 10 New Products Fail".

The authors David Minter and Michael Reid have over 25 years
working in the innovation arena, particularly Blockbuster Video.
Dole and Einstein Bagles and run their own innovation company.

Their book is an easy one to read and explains in detail about
how companies can innovate to order.

The only slight irritation I found was they sometimes repeated
what they'd already said in a previous chapter. Get over that and
you'll find some true gold in this book.

"Lightning in a Bottle" demolishes the central plank of belief
that so many companies have in any or all of:

• Focus groups
• Brainstorming
• Ivory tower R&D or Gee Whiz
• Rip Off
• Incoming

The Failures Of Focus Groups

They explain why focus groups return the wrong results or results
you want them to return. Unless you're lucky putting out a new
product based on the focus groups feedback is destined to fail.

Badly Let Down By Brainstorming

Brainstorming is given short shrift too as it is compared to
giving a group of scientists in different disciplines random
unlabeled chemicals and instruments and asking them to come up
with lots and lots of compounds. Rhetorically they ask, "Does
this sound like a way to cure polio or develop the next
breakthrough in interstellar space exploration?"

Gee Whiz, Incoming and Rip Off are similarly examined and found
wanting.

Maybe you think Quantative Research and Market Segmentation are
important? Minter and Reid suggest that whilst these are good
tools they're inevitably used wrongly for innovation.

10 Points Why New Ideas Fail

To help you understand why new ideas fail they list and consider
10 points that are not usually addressed during the idea creation
approach.

They give excellent examples of why businessmen like Ted Turner
and Rupert Murdoch are creative geniuses who innovated and kept
true to the vision they believed in but nobody else did.

The 7 Step Idea Engineering Method

So having effectively demolished the "normal approach" to
generating new products or services the book puts forward the
authors own 7 Step Idea Engineering approach.

I should probably declare that this book fits right in with my
own thoughts on focus groups and the way innovation is usually
handled. And the interesting thing about it is the examples they
give and the logical way they construct a better way to innovate.

Believe me by the end of this book I was hooked. And the most
interesting thing I found from their book was that rather than
focus groups they use one on one interviews to seek feedback.

I'd not realised before but it suddenly hit me. I'd started to
use one on one interviews to create new processes and systems in
companies because I found that group dynamics meant a process
would be skewed according to the most vocal in the group.

If you're in market research or you're a business owner you need
to read, understand and use Idea Engineering because Minter and
Reid have produced a short easily read  book that has the potential to change your whole world, for the better.

I can't help but keep getting bombarded by Day Job Killer emails.

If I do a search on Day Job Killer I now get 12,400,000 search results on Google! On the first page that includes

• Titus Hoskins with Bizwaremagic.com
• Gary Ruplinger with Dayjobkillerresults.com
• Netpreneurnow.com
• Brad Issac at Persistenceunlimited.com

Of them all Brad Issac is doing an interesting exercise...

He's going to try out each technique in Day Job Killer and see whether he can make money with them.

The underlying message in all the reviews I've read and in my own look at the book is that unless you understand Adwords or you're prepared to go slowly and consider what you're doing carefully don't buy Day Job Killer.

The reason?

You could lose your shirt. Yes, yes you might make a mint, but be prepared to experiment to get your own shot at these campaigns.

You can bet there's a lot of competition out there now using Day Job Killer techniques.

The Valentine's Day Poem competition has now ended. If you've not heard from me please bear with me as I've been a bit immersed in floods of rehearsals and the performances for the Bollywood Mikado.

If you've missed the performance you can still catch us when we go to the Pavilion Gardens in Buxton on the 3rd March.

Anyway, like I said the poem competition is finished and the winner comes from Matthew Sproston, an ex-coaching client.   I've chosen this one because I like the way Matthew has done it as a testimonial for me - thanks Matthew, I may well add this to my business card!

So without further ado, the winning entry .... 

A testimonial poem.

I was hungry for sales and profit

But lacked a strategic plan

I needed a master

To get results faster

So I called Jim, the marketing man

He coached me by phone and in person

About training, systems and goals

He gave sound advice

About raising our price

And all of the marketing role

Truth be told, it took time to make changes

I was always ‘too busy’ you know

But a tweak here and there

When I had an hour spare

Gradually the firm started to grow

Two years on and our turnover’s doubled

Well not quite but it’s increased a lot

Our customer’s say

That we brighten their day

At this rate I’ll be buying a yacht!

Now I visit Jim’s business blog daily

To keep up with his marketing news

I’ll make it quite plain –

If you’re seeking sales gain

There’s only one coach you should choose.

(Written by: Matthew Sproston, CJS Engineering Ltd)

So well done Matthew ring me on 0161 278 1919 so we can discuss how you get your coaching prize.

Day Job Killer is spreading across the Internet Marketing space like a ton of black paint dropped from height onto a 1 foot square white sheet.

I've been most amused by the adverts I've seen on Google for it ...

They've titles like:

• "Day Job Killer Real Deal"
• "Day Job Killer Project X"
• "Get Day Job Killer Now"
• "I hate Day Job Killer"
• Day Job Killer Launched"
• "Don't Buy Day Job Killer"
• Bonus + Day Job Killer

And the interesting thing about all these adverts is that all of them are using the methods recommended in Day Job Killer to reach their market place.

Personally I think the Internet Marketing sector has too much competition in for Day Job Killer and I'd do as recommended in Day Job Killer itself and actually find some niches to serve with ebooks and other products and hit those instead.

For a start it's less competition, need I say more?

That said Project X which Chris wrote before Day Job Killer is still selling well in the Internet Marketing area.

The first night went well. In fact our President, who's not given to making gushing remarks said,

"Absolutely brilliant. I’ve seen Saturday night performances – at the end of the run – that were not as good as last night. Keep it up. The recordings sounded good too" (Mike Harris)

There was a big audience for our first night and they seemed very appreciative.

The picture to the right shows Iain Field dressed as The Mikado.

The 7 foot high golden elephant is just right for him to make his entrance.

The show continues until Saturday 17th February at the Royal Northern College of Music's large theatre. Come along or miss out!

That's it the technical rehearsal where we work out where lights and lumps of sets interact with us, the people is finished.

We finished the dress rehearsal late last night and I got home at midnight.

After getting changed into the costume we all felt excited and ready to go. Plus we had some people who'd paid to watch the dress rehearsal!

Anyway, the first dance was a bit of a disaster because I'd not tied my trousers tightly enough and every time I leapt or hopped or jumped my trousers fell down. Good for a laugh but nil points for dancing.

I dashed off at a convenient point and did the draw string up more tightly and went back on. Almost unnoticed...

After that every dance went wrong for different people. 

Then whilst waiting in the wings I was nearly run over by a massive gold elephant. I got prodded by a tusk and at least had the good sense to dive out of the way.

At the end of the night the notes we got from the director weren't too bad. Although the men and the women have to go through one of the routines again to make sure we're all doing the same things.

This is the second post in the series on "What is Marketing And Why Should We Use It?"

Remember without a marketing strategy customer prospecting is prone to failure.

Where Do Firms Go Wrong?

New firms begin with a big idea they believe people will buy.

More mature firms develop a product that they think addresses a market problem.

Desperate, cash hungry firms throw up anything to attract customers and get money rolling in.

Why Do Research?

Research into whether people want the product or service the company intends offering may be minimal or even non-existent.

Beware because without a properly defined market to aim at the business is tempted to go after all prospects they can think of.

Going after everyone leads the owner and/or sales staff wasting their time following up with leads that either never convert or are wrong for the product they offer.

How You Can Research Your Customers

 Make a list of every business you want to do business with or you already like doing business with. You're listing what is effectively your ideal customer.

Then either ring them up or go meet them. Then ask them if they can help you because you want to see whether your new product or service is something they want.

Forget Focus Groups

I'm not particularly impressed by focus groups and believe a one on one talk with your current ideal prospects and customers is much more informative and useable.

Oh, by the way and I'm reviewing a book shortly that covers focus groups and why they're a complete waste of space by two people who've done decades of market research. So sign-up to get on my email list so you know when it comes out.

Anyway, onwards...

What To Do When You're Ready To Sell

Make sure your marketing strategy, oh wait you mean you don't have one?

OK. For now lets assume you do...

So, make sure your marketing strategy defines exactly how you'll get leads for your sales staff and then further defines how sales staff deal with each prospect.

The 12 Ways To Prospect for Customers

Obviously there are more than 12 ways to prospect for customers I'm just giving the basics:

1. Get referrals
2. From press releases
3. Using cold calling by sales staff
4. Using cold calling by external call centre
5. Sending direct mail
6. Creating an email campaign
7. Advertising in yell.com and Yellow Pages
8. Replying to Invitation To Tenders
9. Joint Ventures
10. Web sites and autoresponder follow-up
11. Blogs
12. Seminars

Your strategy which is based on your analysis of your customers/prospects and the product or service you sell defines exactly which of these tactics you use.

In the next in this series I'll look into Product or Service development.

Peter Drucker famously described marketing in the context of the firm with:

"Marketing and innovation are the two chief functions of business. You get paid for creating a customer, which is marketing. And you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost center."

He further defined marketing by saying:

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

Many SME firms approach to marketing is often one of “we can’t afford to spend money on marketing we need sales!”

And of course they’re right. And they’re also wrong.

They’re right because without the lifeblood of sales a company drops dead.

And they’re wrong because without the ability to get to the right customers that marketing can provide there is a lot of wasted effort in all areas of the business, not just sales.

Wasted Effort Without Marketing

These are examples of the many areas of a firm at risk or fail through the lack of a suitable marketing strategy:

• Customer prospecting
• Product or service development
• Sales
• Accounting
• Advertising
• After sales service
• Ad hoc marketing

Over the next few days I'll be elaborating on exactly how SMEs waste their efforts. And more importantly how they can eliminate or minimise the waste.

The coolest guy on the planet  fun competition remains a one horse race.

That horse is not called Jim Symcox at the moment. Although I'm currently at position 24 out of 1,040,000 results so I'm hanging in there.

Still I've just arrived back from visiting my Mum and Dad before Dad goes into hospital for another operation. They're both in good spirits and my prayers are with them for a great result.

Funny how writing a blog becomes almost cathartic at times isn't it?

Anyway, I'm still thinking about Day Job Killer and how it's anti-guru in stance. I'm going to have a good go at the techniques that are recommended in it. After all Project X flew off the shelves and I'm still seeing people use those techniques.

Then I'm going to check how it's doing in clickbank standing on Monday.

And we'll see how much cooler I can get!

I bought DJK pretty much on release to check out the hype.

As I said before I don't often leap on the band wagon but with all the hype from a fellow Brit. I thought I ought to check it out.

Well I'm getting down into the bowels of the ebook and I'm actually pretty impressed.

Chris (the author) has obviously spent a lot of time thinking about and analysing the strategies used by the gurus and super affiliates.

What's more he gives you step by step instructions on how to write affiliate Adwords campaigns that work.

And he shares a number of resources that I've not seen in other ebooks. A good example is an effective free affiliate link cloaker which saves you $59 on the cost of a good link cloaker!

Want another? How about one of Chris's own easy to set-up sales page (squeeze page) that he encourages you to take and copy and use. What's that worth in terms of time spent coding and testing?

Why Stay Away From DJK?

Day Job Killer is written so that anyone can take the necessary steps to get money making campaigns.

That said there are some downsides to this ebook:

• You need to invest at least $9 for a domain name and then some for an adwords campaign
• The steps aren't rocket science to follow, you could see immediate success but it takes research and testing
• If you don't want to compete hard with other Adwords publishers you'll feel uncomfortable

Obviously if you're ok with those downsides go and get The Day Job Killer and start off the process to say goodbye to your day job.

Finally, here's a direct quote from the Day Job Killer at almost the end of the book: "What seperates those whose jobs die a brutal death and those who are back in at work a year from now is going to be the effort you put into it." 

"Day Job Killer!", sounds like everyone and his dog is shouting about it.

You've heard the hype on the Internet

Even The Rich Jerk recommends the Day Job Killer. Amazing. If you just want to get it go get Day Job Killer Now!

DJK launched yesterday.

It's been written by Chris a fellow Brit. He also wrote the best seller Affiliate Project X. That broke Clickbank sales record when it swung into action in October 2006.

The reason it did so well was...

At Last! An Internet Product That Delivers!

Yes, an Internet product that did the business.

I've done a much fuller review on my Rich Jerks Blog

As always the people who take action will get the money and those who buy out of interest simply add something else to their virtual bookshelf to gather virtual dust.

Ok I tried it and I'm hooked!

Zazzle is a fun way of producing your own unique products. Sure you can run a web site yourself, do the admin and order fulfillment but wouldn't you rather put up a few photos or scanned images and design your own T-shirt, mug or base cap and in 5 minutes get a product for sale?

I've seen these sites before but I've kept from trying them out because I knew they'd be addictive. Sure enough I tried Zazzle and I spent 2 hours finding photos to use and worse spent time designing a T-shirt!

As I suspected it does take a lot longer than 5 minutes...

Do these sort of sites make money?

To be honest I don't know. I just thought it would be fun to have a go. If it does make money I'll let you know.

I've been on both sides of the fence when it comes to writing business proposals.

Do you think your proposal would suddenly be more acceptable if you could offer the prospect the allure of a peerage?

Let me take you through a little about proposals before answering that question.

On Writing Business Proposals

I've produced massive documents in reply to an "invitation to tender", "expression of interest" and also to the OJEC (also known as European Journal) based tenders. I've also produced short reports for the same purpose.

Does this weight of material, references, appendices and presentations make any difference to who is eventually chosen?

On Sifting Through Business Proposals

I've read enormous numbers of turgid documents that are difficult to read and which sometimes go so far away from answering an invitation to tender question that you begin to think the authors have never read the invitation document. In fact I've seen examples where they obviously didn't.

Do Business Proposals Get Sales?

 Looking back at the tenders I wrote, usually as part of a team, latterly as the bid manager, and also at the tenders I had to evaluate I would say that documents don't make the sale.

Obviously you can kill the sale stone dead if you miss the deadline! As there's always a deadline. Although sometimes prospects will extend the deadline it is unusual.

You also need to tick the expected boxes by completing the appropriate answers to questions raised. It's important that your answers are not "boiler plate" but each answer is made in light of the tender.

Presentations that invariably go with the proposal don't make the sale either.

What Makes A Sale?

Simple!

It's whether the prospect wants to do business with you or not. Whether they've implemented a fair weighting system for evaluating bids or not. Whether they check all references or not. Whether they evaluate a pilot or not...

In the end it comes down to whether they want to do business with you and ultimately your company.

So What About The Peerages Then?

So to come back to my question about offering peerages.

If you look at the current furore going on in the UK media about "cash for peerages" you can see that such sweeteners are not allowed by politicians either.

In actual fact the concern is that a political party may be using the honours system to reward people who give large amounts of cash to their party cause without the party declaring it because it's a loan.

In the end people can have their favourite supplier.  And invitation to tenders can be so slanted towards that vendor no on else can possibly win.  

How vendor companies may get into this "favourite supplier" situation varies. For example the prospect may like their salespeople the most, or the way the presentation was done, or their geographic closeness. The proposal may not even enter in to it.

However, while I've heard of dinner, nights at the casino and all expenses paid visits to sites around the World it's always seemed unlikely that a supplier would offer such a huge sweetener along the lines of the commercial equivalent of a "peerage" for the order.

Otherwise it becomes completely blatant bribery and would attract the attention of several government departments.

Yes, we're galloping towards the dress rehearsal for the Bollywood Mikado at the Royal Northern College of Music.

My previous post about the Bollywood Mikado explains all about it, what it is, where it is and why you should go. And no it's not just because of the attractive girls. Or even the dashing men. It's going to be FUN with a capital F!

Thanks to Mark at Simply Networking for putting  a mention in his newsletter.

Also thanks to Rob for his post at his Artisan Marketing Communications blog where Rob suggests we forget Big Brother winner Shilpa and think of me as the star. Nice thought Rob - thanks! No pressure there then, even if I'm only in the chorus.

The only slight hiccup in rehearsal was finding that our set had grown so enormous that we had to act in a very small space, like a keyhole.

Cue one despairing director.  Fortunately with the goodwill and hard work of our vast army of talented crew we got the set back to normal (for Bollywood) proportions.

I've decided that we need to do something to celebrate Valentine's day here on Marketing For Power Packed Growth.

So I'm going to run a short poem contest (no epics please)  where the words blog, marketing and customer must be used.

You've got until 14th February to get your entry in.

I'm doing a press release for the competition and another for the winner. So if free publicity intrigues and excites you pitch in now and get writing that poem.

The rules are short and  sweet:

1) No offensive language or subjects

2) My decision as to the winner and runner-up is final

3) The poem should be no shorter than 20 words and no longer than 150

4) The words blog, marketing and customer must be used in the poem and not just in the title.

5) Entry means you'll let me publish the poem (with your name) on this blog and elsewhere.

6) The prize is 3 hours of business coaching worth £750.

7) The poem (not as an attachment) should be emailed to me at poem (AT) acornservice.com by 23:55 on 13th February 2007 London time.

So get writing and good luck.

If you've know me more than 5 minutes you know that I talk a lot about the greats in marketing.

People such as Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert, Joe Vitale and many others.

Why do I do that?

Remember Sir Issac Newton said "If I have seen further than you, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

That's exactly why any marketer or content provider should continually educate themselves. Just so they can build on the tested psychological and business principals discovered by the greats.

Jay Abraham credits Claude Hopkins and Napoleon Hill from a previous generation with books that helped him get to where he is now. Books that he's read a lot more than once.

Marketers of today have lots of people they can learn from. A new site called Guru Knowledge has a list of the top 10 most influential Internet marketing gurus. I stress this is the authors personal opinion and my own top 10 list would contain some of them and not others.

Update: I misread Dale's original post and thought me meant greatest all round marketers . He actually mean on the Internet. So my apologies to Dale. I've changed the wording in the previous paragraph to reflect that.

Even so I would still like to have the top 10 Marketing gurus of all time listed.

I would include Gary Halbert, Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy in my own top 10.

There are other UK based marketing gurus but I'm not sure they're as well known worldwide.

What about you? Do you have a favourite all-round marketing guru? 

It's nice when a plan comes together. Particularly in Search Engine Optimization.

I've been in control of a clients web site and also writing his blog for him.

And it's taken until now for the results to really start happening.

He's now at number 1 in the UK, where he deserves to be and at number 5 world wide on Google. Well done Iain.

He's so pleased that he wrote me an email which I've cut and paste here:

"And to think that when I went on the Web academy course a few months back (after the work was done) I got criticized so badly that I simply shut down and stopped listening to what was being said! And now its number 1! But I wish I knew specifically what had done it.
You obviously did the right things with it didn’t you?"

Check the Google search here you're taken directly to the Google search we used. Which by the way is the term his customers use to search for information on "infrared saunas"

So What?

I wanted to make two points here... 

1) The Web Academy course he went on didn't understand the tactics being used to bring his site to the top.  So simply putting on a course doesn't mean you're an expert. So be warned. Often it can be better for a business to try out search engine optimisation themselves first.

2) Iain didn't understand exactly what tactics I used to catapult him from nowhere to the top. And the reason?  It can take time to get results you're looking for when you optimize a site and also do off-site work to improve placement. Things that an average business owner is frankly not interested in.

Does It Increase Sales

Very good question. Will a higher placement in Google lead to more sales?

The answer is it depends ...

It depends on whether the item you're selling is one that someone will impulse buy off the web. Iain's in my opinion is too valuable for people to do that. Which is why we ask people to sign up to get a helpful report on detoxification. Then we can continue to send them useful information until they're ready to buy.

Simply having people visit the site is not enough.

It needs to be part of a step by step integrated sales and marketing plan.