Four True Ways To Be A Published Authority

by Henry DeVries

One of my heroes, Guy Kawasaki, is out to democratize the spread of information with a new venture called Truemors. If anyone can change the world without firing a shot, it is Guy.

Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

I say I first met Guy through my friend Lisa Nirell (Chief Energy Officer of EnergizeGrowth.com) when he was writing the book The Art of the Start. In truth, I met him a decade earlier through the pages of a book I read over and over, his take on business evangelism called Selling the Dream. These are two business books I can’t say enough good things about.
According to his latest venture, www.truemors.com, you are invited to become a “citizen journalist/editor” and “tell the world”—within the bounds of good taste and the law anyway.
Second, from a reader perspective, it puts you “in the know” about the latest news, rumors, and happenings, so that “you know better” without having to spend hours every day searching for information.

Simply stated Truemors is not interested in crap. Some crap, says the Web site, is easy to recognize: profanity, pornography, bullying, libel, slander, and advertising.

The content that Guy and his cofounders want are true rumors that are relevant, informative, and interesting. Reading them would make them a person more interesting. Gossip, by contrast, is less urgent, less useful, and almost always deals with people’s private lives.

In other words, says the Web site, if we wanted gossip, we would have called our site “Truessip” or some such drivel.

The Web site covers the evolution of information. A long time ago royalty and religious leaders had scribes. Around 600 the Chinese printed using negative reliefs. Around 1450 Johann Gutenberg combined hundreds of years of progress into the screw printing press.

Fast forward to 1985 when Apple (Macintosh), Aldus (PageMaker), and Adobe (PostScript) produced “desktop publishing.” A few years later people could create Web sites. Then blogging appeared on the scene. Still, people needed a computer and a blogging tool like WordPress or TypePad to disseminate information. Kawasaki believes he has created a better way.

You can post your information on Truemors in four ways:
Call 1-650-329-2020 and leave a voicemail. SpinVox will translate your voicemail to text and send it to our server. Incidentally, you can speak in English, German, Spanish, and French. Your message, however, will remain in the language you spoke.
Text “2020 ” to 55022.
Enter your message in an online form on the Web site
Send an email to post@truemors.com. FYI, this is a SpamArrest-protected email address, so you’ll have to confirm your address.
How much does it cost to change the world?

“In total, I spent $12,107.09 to launch Truemors,” Kawasaki said in his Change the World blog. ”During the dotcom days, entrepreneurs had to raise $5 million to try stupid ideas. Now I’ve proven that you can do it for $12,107.09.”
By the way, Guy has an honorary doctorate from Babson College, an MBA from UCLA and a BA from Stanford. To say thanks for writing the foreword to my new book with Chris Stiehl called Pain Killer Marketing, we invited Guy to be our guest at last fall’s sold out USC-Stanford football game. But he declined and chose instead to stay home to spend time with his four kids. He missed Stanford’s last second shocking upset of number one ranked USC, but as always he has his priorities straight. And that is the truth.

Are we speaking the same language??

One of the keys to eliminating customer 'pain' is to understand what they are saying, and to respond in a way that makes sense to them. Speak the same language!! When you are working out of a call center, customers want things fixed by the first person they talk to, and they want it fixed fast! Be responsive to their "hierarchy of needs"! (PKM, CH.22)

Upcoming Events!

3/8-3/9: Networking with other authors and speakers asking to cross-promote books at the Odd Couple Seminar in San Francisco.

3/13: "Pain Killer Marketing for Consultants" for Institute of Management Consultants Orange County Chapter breakfast meeting

3/13: Blue Velocity Partners hosted event and video taping of Pain Killer Marketing workshop (coming soon to YouTube), 9:30 to 11 am at Sandler Sales Institute, 2091 Business Center Drive, Suite 230, Irvine, CA 92612

4/8: "Science of Clients" by Henry only to the American Association of Senior Executives, Irvine.

4/15: "Pain Killer Marketing for Direct Marketers" for San Diego Direct Marketing Association lunch meeting, Sheraton Hotel, La Jolla Village Drive and I-5. www.sddma.org

4/17: Book launch networking night in Silicon Valley at El Torito, 2950 Lakeside Drive, Santa Clara, CA from 5 to 7 pm. 408-727-4426. Free books to first 50 people who agree to read and review the book

4/22: Book launch networking night in San Diego at El Torito across from UC San Diego, 8910 Villa La Jolla Drive, La Jolla, CA from 5 to 7 pm. Free books for first 50 people who agree to read and review the books on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com.

5/8: Book launch networking night with other W Business Book authors in Orange County at the El Toritos across from John Wayne Airport, 18512 Macarthur Blvd., Irvine CA 92612 5 to 7 pm 949-833-8230

5/16: Henry to present at Columbia University Consultants and Coaches Conference, New York City.

5/30: Signing books at the Book Expo in Los Angeles and attending author event sponsored by W Business Books.

7/18: Henry to present an all day workshop for the San Diego chapter of the Public Relations Society of America

Managing Key Accounts

Manage Key Accounts as if They Were Key!

By Chris Stiehl, StiehlWorks, co-author of Pain Killer Marketing

The idea of singling out key accounts is to treat them special, to give them the recognition and treatment that they deserve. If the age old “80/20 rule” applies, there are 20% of your customers, or less, who generate 80% of the profits, or more. These customers should be made to feel as though they are really special. Most companies recognize this strategy as being important and create sales plans and organizations to reflect this idea. In my experience, many lose sight of the objective of this strategy when they implement tactics to support it.

As an example, in one of our clients too many customers were considered “key accounts.” The objective was to treat them all as “special.” What happened internally was that each region of the company wanted to define their own key account criteria. None of them wanted to be left out of this program. The result was that the number of customers who were put into this group far exceeded the number of customers that the sales staff could reasonably accommodate. The key account sales reps did not have time to treat each customer with the special attention that they deserved. The hope was that each special account would be visited at least once a month, or once a quarter at worst. In fact, many were only visited twice a year or less often.

What does a key account want from sales staff? Some do not want frequent contact, but most of them do. If their partnership with your company means that they are a key account, they have a number of wants and needs that have been expressed frequently in market research:

Understand their business – they don’t want to have to explain their needs over and over because you have changed sales assignments or don’t remember from last time.
Know how they make money and how your product or service helps them accomplish that.
Ask about their plans. Are they expanding? Are they moving? What are their major problems? In what direction do they see their business or industry going in the future? You need to know in case you can help, even if they don’t think the problems apply to your product or service. Find out what their problems are, all of them, and find ways to help.

Make sure that you know not only their order history with you, but any problems in the relationship, even if they did not involve the sales activity (e.g., missing delivery dates or service delays).

Many companies do not treat these types of customers as truly special. Designating them as a “key account” should be meaningful to them as well. If they don’t feel as though they are being treated as important to you, such a designation will be a negative, not a positive, in their mind. I have heard several times in my consulting practice, “I don’t feel as though I am being given the attention that my purchases would indicate I deserve; I’m not being treated as a special customer should be treated.”

Make sure that your best customers don’t feel that way. You may want to ask them what being a key account means to them and how they would want to be treated. Some of the answers may surprise you. This type of research is invaluable. It may be done fairly easily if your C-level sales executive is sincere about making these customers feel like the select few. Find out their thoughts on how to grow the partnership so both companies profit.

The bottom line: Don’t lose sight of your overall objective to make the key account feel special as you implement the tactics of that strategy.