Welcome to the Official Master Plumbers of Australia

Welcome to the Official Master Plumbers of Australia
Hi Everyone,

I hope you have all had a nice weekend and that the 'right' football team won :-)) I've had an interesting weekend too catching up and learning all about the new phenonemum to hit the Internet called "Tag & Ping" but I'll let you know more about that in later blogs after I've had more time to test it out.

Below is an Email I received from one of my favourite people this morning:

Dear Jan,

A few days ago you finished reading my "Nine Great Lies of Sales & Marketing" course.

I should add a tenth lie to the list.

Lie #10 is:

"Build a superior product, offer a superior service, and provide elegant solution to difficult problems, and you will be successful."

NOT true.

Below is an email from a guy named Mitch Carr, which was forwarded to me:

"It is a shame that the best talent, the groundbreaking work, the technical superiority is in the field that is suffering the most with the highest cutbacks, the slimmest of margins and lowest of salaries.

"Perhaps it is because (technology) is not a glamorous industry.
We don't make the Internet faster, or the sub-woofer louder.
We make machines work. We make turkey bags from 11 layers of plastic film so people don't get sick from spoiled food. We make bolts stronger so airplane engines don't fall off. We make drugs that cure diseases. We make the cheapest gasoline in the world.
And yet we earn some of the lowest salaries.

"Consumers drive prices down, which drives costs down, which drive overhead down, which drive salaries and benefits down.
To me, joblessness means that some of our smartest and most talented people are sitting at home watching soap operas.
I know talented project managers who are now selling real estate.
My neighbor used to build sophisticated head-end servers - and he is now selling custom doors at Home Depot."

This guy hit the nail on the head. There are all kinds of highly educated, talented people who are selling custom doors at Home Depot. It's not what they want to do, it's not what they should be doing - so why are so many talented people having such a hard time?

Here's why:

What you can do and how good you are does not matter.

What matters is how well you COMMUNICATE what you do and how good you are.

That is the difference.

Every year, tens of thousands of people invent, innovate and create brilliant products, terrific solutions to truly perplexing problems - only to find out that it's darn hard to raise money for their new ventures, and even harder to get customers to listen.

Most of the time those new products and services die on the slag heap of great ideas that never saw the light of day.

You don't want that to happen to your great idea.

So here's how to make sure it doesn't:

Make sure that marketing, sales, advertising and PR is the foremost priority in your new venture.

Even if you don't like Microsoft (they're not my favorite company either), you MUST learn this lesson from them: They don't have the best software by any stretch of the imagination, but they do have the best sales strategy. And in business, it's the sales strategy that wins, not the superior technology.

So if you're waking up every morning thinking about the minute details of your cool product or service, please stop and re-calibrate. Understand this:

1) Having a superior product is not necessarily an advantage, and can even be a DISadvantage - because it can distract you from the real objective, which is to GET and KEEP customers.

2) The product you develop is rarely the product your customers want to buy. That's OK as long as you're listening and flexible. But if you've already spent all your money perfecting the product, then you won't have any left to respond to customer feedback.

3) The product or service itself is, at most, maybe 25% of the equation. Advertising, PR strategies, and real-world market testing (as opposed to "market research", which is usually just "opinion research") --- all of these things are MORE important than the product.

4) Innovate, Don't Invent -- It's much easier to go into an existing market and solve an existing problem with a slightly improved, more interesting product (innovation) than to create a product from scratch that solves a problem people don't realize they have. That's goes along with my principle of "enter the conversation inside the customer's head."

Back to selling custom doors at Home Depot -- nobody needs to suffer this fate. But don't underestimate the
challenge: If you have superior talent, then the best investment you can make is in communicating that talent to the world -- clearly, effectively, and without fail.

Perry Marshall
www.perrymarshall.com/inabox.htm

Why have I posted this to you all?

Because he's right.

Take care everyone and don't forget to come back and visit often because I try to update this blog 3 times a week, depending on what I find that could be of benefit to you all.

Warmly,
Jan-ConstructingProfits
www.constructingprofits.com