Urgency will Close the Deal

Many entrepreneurs mistakenly think that making the sale has to do with using the consultative selling approach, special listening skills, likeability or any number of popular questioning or closing programs. Sure, they’re all important aspects of selling. But the granddaddy of them all--the one factor that guarantees your sales success more than any other and the one method top producers have in common--is a sense of urgency.

Originally Posted On Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

Urgency is what gets top sellers up in the morning and keeps them fired up all day. Their attitude is, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me, and I determine my own success or failure.” They’re constantly asking themselves, “What do I need to do next to move this sale forward? What actions do I have to take to get it done?” It’s about putting your ideas and strategies in motion. 

Top sellers don’t waste time when there’s no opportunity. They’re so intensely focused on each of their accounts that they know exactly what each customer wants and what it will take to help them grow their business. When they don’t see the benefit to that customer, they move on and eliminate wasted energy for both sides. But when there’s real opportunity, they’re relentless. A voice inside them keeps saying, “Don’t let customers miss the many ways they can truly benefit from you and your service.”

Recently I spoke to someone that I knew needed to get involved with a particular opportunity.  I truly believed that he needed to purchase from me, and to partner with me.  I told him that he would see a return on his investment, and would be sold out within just a few weeks, and that if he wasn’t, that I would cover the difference.  I realized he never would have bought on the spot like that if he didn’t like me, feel comfortable with me or have a successful relationship with me on previous programs. But the real reason was that I wasn’t leaving him until he bought from me. I knew he would have success, and even before walking in, I based my endgame on that sense of urgency.

To close the deal well, we need to prioritize specific goals for all of our activities and then act on them with confidence, conviction and a desire to move things forward.

Originally Posted On Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

Building Success: Where are you headed – Dream Building

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You have probably heard this time and time again.  You need to set your dreams to be successful.  Even if think that your goals do not pertain to what you are currently working on, you need to set your dreams.  Here are a couple of approaches.

Originally posted on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

Dream Board
Create a dream board.  A dream board is a physical location for you to post your dreams.  Many people struggle to remember why it is that they are working so hard.  For some a dream board is the best way to be reminded of what they are working for.  For others, simply placing a picture of their spouse or kids on their desk is enough.  All successful people utilize some form of dream building and some fashion of reminding themselves of what those dreams are.  You need clearly find and define your why.  Your why, will provide you the energy to drive through your challenges and provide the determination to finish.

Managing Your Thoughts
Focus on those dreams and the steps to achieve them.  If you continue to focus on the positive goals that you want to reach and push to complete each step of the way, you will make it.  Not only will you be able to reach those goals, but you will reach them faster.  Most people focus on the things that they don’t want to happen, and as a result those things happen faster, or they run in to more challenges as they push to finish their projects.

Where Am I
Before you can determine where you are headed, or how you can get there, you need to first realize where you are.  Where are you financially, emotionally, physically.  All of these things affect the way you will map out your plan, and how you will get there.

Constantly Learning
We need to keep in mind that we are constantly learning.  When talking to other people, listen to learn.  When working on a project, look for ways to push yourself.  When faced with a challenge, look for the opportunity to learn.  When you crash, or something doesn’t go the way that you had expected… take responsibility for the crash, get up, and learn so that you can avoid that crash in the future.

Set and Achieve Goals
The purpose of setting and then reaching your goals is about becoming the person that it takes to achieve the goals.  As we work through our projects, we build off of the previous step.  The same is true for becoming successful.  You need to build yourself with each step, and each day in order to prepare yourself to make it to your next goal.

Big Goals are Important
Setting big goals is important to becoming a better you.  The larger the goal, the better you will become.  Make sure that all of your goals are written, specific, and measureable.  Only a measurable goal can be achieved.

Originally posted on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

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National Day of Prayer – Reflecting on answered prayers

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Originally Posted on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

Opportunity to Share
I recently had an opportunity to share about a few answered prayers.  My life is full of answered prayers, so my first challenges was to limit the number I spoke about.  I wanted to share those same stories with the online community.  Yesterday was the National Day of Prayer.

Complications
A few years ago I receive a call from my brother that his wife and he were at the hospital, getting ready for the birth of their first child.  This was extremely exciting, but just the beginning of the night, so my wife and I went to bed.  I told him to call me when things got closer.  We all know how long it can take for the arrival of someone’s first child.

A couple hours later, I received another phone call, with a trembling voice on the other end.  I could tell something was wrong, but could barely hear it what it was.  I was told that there was blood, and that some complications had risen.  All I could do was let them know that I was on my way for support.

Relief in Prayer
At the end of that brief call, I fell to my knees in prayer.  I then continued to pray while I got dress, and continued to pray in the car on the way to the hospital.  This was one of my most intense prayers, with tears running down my face.  About half way to the hospital, my tears dried up, and I was felt this wave of calmness come over me.  I knew that everything was ok.

My Niece is Born
Upon my arrival at the hospital I was greeted by my mom, and told that they had just finished an emergency c-section, and that mom and baby were healthy.  The nurses were just cleaning up and doing their first rounds of vitals.  My niece was born (pictured right) and sister-in-law were both doing well.

Instant Prayer
This prayer was answered instantly, and I was comforted by the answered prayer, but not all prayers get answered this quickly, or even the way that you want them to be.

Job Interviews
Every job interview that I have ever gone to has been a prayer drive before and after.  Often I pray in the car.  It is a great time to give praise and to talk with God.  So on my way to every job interview I pray.  And on the way home from every job interview, I pray.  After praying on my way home, I forget it about and trust that the opportunity is in God’s hands.  If he wants me to work there, he will open the door.

I have been blessed with many fantastic opportunities, all of which of toned by skills and provided new ones, but not all jobs have been great.  I have worked for companies that have bounced paychecks, missed payroll, been evicted from their buildings and one that went through a hostile take over while the owner was in Hawaii.  God has always put me where he wants me and provided amazing opportunities.

These job prayers were often answered in unexpected ways.  I could see many people asking God why they would be in a situation where they were working hard and not getting rewarded.  Or worse, working hard and going into debt.  Add a family and kids into the mix and the stress can be overwhelming.  God will never give you too much to handle.  You need to just pray about the situation, and ask him to help guide you and to open the doors for you.  He wants the best for you, and those prayers will be answered.  Cast all of your cares on him, and relax.  He is in control.

Partial Prayers
Sometimes answered prayers may look like partially answered prayers, and sometimes we feel like giving up.  I spent my 10 birthday receiving my first chemotherapy treatment.  When I was 9 years old, I was diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma, a bone cancer.  The doctors told me and my family that I was going to have to go through 3 years of treatment and that the best way to make sure that the cancer is gone, is to have surgery to remove the bone.

The cancer was on the back of my right shoulder blade and the size of a softball.  At 10 years old, that is about the size of the entire shoulder blade.  Removing that bone with the cancer would render my right arm useless.  I was right handed and not ready to lose my arm.  The doctors said that since my arm would just hang, and that it would be useless, that it would be best to remove the arm so that it wouldn’t get caught on things and wouldn’t get in the way.

Pray Without Ceasing
My entire family began to pray.  This was the start of tremendous prayer warfare.  Day after day, week after week, we prayed.  We prayed alone, we prayed with others, we prayed at home, on the road, at church, at other people’s homes.  Everywhere we went, we prayed.

One particular evening, we went to a prayer concert.  I remember being excited and nervous.  I was excited to pray as I felt myself getting closer to God, and nervous as there were hundreds of people there and I didn’t know what to expect.

Cancer Shrinking
The following week, I had another doctors appointment, and the doctors were completely surprised.  That softball sized tumor was now the size of a golf ball.  God had shrunk that tumor.  He could have just as easily healed me, but instead he just shrunk it.  The doctors changed the 3 year plan to 1, and I had radiation therapy instead of surgery.  A year later I went into remission and still had my arm.  My right arm is about 4 inches shorter than my left, but I’m still right handed and can still play sports with the best of them.

God used that year to bring me closer to him.  I was able to share and encourage many other children at the hospital and at Oncology Camp, a camp dedicated to kids with cancer and their families.  This was one of the most amazing experiences in my life, and looking back, I don’t regret it.  I don’t wish that it hadn’t happened.

Cast ALL of Your Cares
Sometimes prayers are answered immediately, other times we need to pray without ceasing, entering into a prayer battle.  Sometimes we need to pray and forget, trusting in God, and other times we need to continue to pray.  Answered prayers are not always what we want, but God’s plan for us is far better than what we would want for ourselves.  It is important to trust in him, and that when you pray… ask that his will be done, and that you are able to see where he wants you, and remember, he will not give you more than you can handle.

 Originally Posted on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

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Twitter Tips: How And Why To Use Hashtags (#)

I would like to thank CG Lynch with CIO for this posting
Guest Blog By C.G. Lynch
Posted on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

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While you can use Twitter's search tool to find specific people, companies, and their messages ("tweets") on the service, Hashtags allow users to sort topics into useful categories to revisit later.

If you've spent any time on Twitter, you've probably seen a hashtag before. A "#" symbol sets off a hashtag. For instance, if you wrote a tweet about Google, it might look like this:

Here's a look at how to utilize Hashtags to organize information that you contribute and consume on Twitter. As the tweets pile up, the extra time you take to thoughtfully categorize your tweets with a hashtag will help the greater Twitter community (and you individually) make the most of the service.

The story behind Hashtags

Twitter (the company) didn't create hashtags. The Twitter community's early adopters came up with the idea to put a "#" in front of topics to add context to tweets. The tag would also help filter and sort them out for future readers.

According to a Twitter fan website, the hashtags achieved significant notoriety with Twitter users in 2007 during the San Diego fires, when users designated their tweets with "#sandiegofires."

The trend to use hashtags led to the community-driven site hashtags.org, where a semi-official index of Twitter's hashtags now resides. To access the site, Twitter users merely need to opt-in (for free) by following @hashtags on Twitter.

If you're writing a tweet about a topic you think might have a unique hashtag assigned to it, you can visit hashtags.org to find it.

When you arrive at the site, choose "Tags" on the right-side menu. After the menu drops down, choose "directory."

Hashtags are listed alphabetically, but the directory won't be helpful unless you have a lot of time. It's jammed with obscure-looking hashtags (many are acronyms). As a result, you might have better luck searching the site for your hashtag of choice.

Say, for instance, that you want to assign a tag to a new product that Google released. To find the official hashtag, type "Google" into Hashtag.org's search bar. It will return results with a list of Google-related hashtags.

The site also keeps analytics for popular tags, showing recent messages in which people used the tag, the people who tweeted it, and related tags.

How Hashtags Are Born

The Twitter community organically and collectively decides what a hashtag should be as it pertains to a certain topic. Third-party sites, such as tagalus and HashDictionary allow Twitter users to define hashtags. HashtagNation facilitates discussions around how certain hashtags should be defined and formed.

All of these user-generated sites have drawbacks. For one, they often fail to return definitions for common hashtags on Twitter. This could be due to the fact that some are really obvious — if you type #facebook into tagulus, for instance, no results appear, as no one bothered to take the time to note that it would be used for a tweet about the social network.

Secondly, because multiple dictionaries chronicle Twitter hashtags, definitions for the same hashtag can vary.

Use Twitter Search to Find Hashtags

As Twitter hashtags became more popular, Twitter integrated them into its search tool. You can search for a hashtag in two ways.

The first: If you perform an advanced search, under the "Words" section, you can search for a hashtag.

Or, you can simply use Twitter's main search bar (which they recently made available on people's home pages), and put a "#" symbol in front of your hashtag.

Whichever method you decide, Twitter will return back results with tweets where users employed the hashtag. The upside to an advanced search is that you can define dates, so you don't return hashtags since the beginning of Twitter time (unless, of course, that's what you want).

Use Hashtags Judiciously

Hashtags can be overused. Chris Messina, a San Francisco-bases social media consultant (who was credited as first formulating the hashtag idea in his blog), noted some of the drawbacks in a post about how to make the most of hashtags.

"Already it's been made clear to me that the use of hashtags can be annoying, adding more noise than value," Messina wrote. "Some people just don't like how they look. Others feel that they encumber a simple communication system that should do one thing and one thing well."

As a result, he said users should make use of hashtags sparingly and only when they bring additional context to a tweet that would otherwise be absent. For instance, take these examples:

"@google gave a nice presentation. #CIOconference."

That tweet, with the hashtag, would provide better context than:

"@google gave a nice presentation."

In this case, the writer of the tweet informs people that his message is meant within the context of a conference he is attending. The benefit: his followers do not need to read past tweets in his Twitter stream to find out where he is or what he means.

My Two Cents

Twitter's hashtagging system remains a nascent form of organizing the Twitter world. Messina's contention that they should be used sparingly is well-taken. Hashtags have largely been employed by Twitter's first adopters, and their overuse has two unfortunate consequences.

First, hashtags can give Twitter an insular feel that will detract people from staying on the service, as evidenced by Twitter's poor retention rate of new users (60 percent bail not long after joining, according to recent Nielsen research). Second, it's presumptuous (and ironic, considering Twitter power users' championing of social technologies) for these folks to assume they know the best way to organize the service before more average Joe Web-Users have their say.

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.

 

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Twitter Tips: How to Write Better Tweets

Guest Blog by C.G. Lynch, CIO, CXO Media Inc
Original Post on CIO, Guest post on Successful Thinkers Meetup by Josh Shackelford

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Twitter's growing popularity has yielded one unusual result: It has exposed the frailty of writing skills in the business world. You can fudge bad writing in a 20-slide presentation, but not in a 140-character tweet. From abbreviation-laden tweets with no discernible value, to tweets that fail to compel followers to click through on a link, examples abound. The process of constructing a good Twitter message takes careful thought, time and analysis.

More Twitter Tips on CIO.com

Twitter Etiquette: Five Dos and Don'ts

Twitter Tips: How to Safely Blend the Personal and the Professional

How and Why to Launch a Business Presence on Twitter

Clearly, the 140-character limit adds a degree of difficulty for people who already struggle with writing for less restrictive, more long-form friendly mediums, such as e-mail or blogs.

While we failed to find a panacea for constructing the perfect tweet — since the "perfect tweet" largely depends on your audience, your profession, and how you use Twitter — we compiled some guidelines from industry analysts and people who tweet uncommonly well.

Avoid Abrevs

Every day, we all receive work e-mails that are littered with improper grammar, spelling and all-lowercase letters. Given how many e-mails most of us receive in a day, such messages become, at best, an unwelcome sight, and, at worst, disrespectful of our time.

Twitter is no different. Some people follow thousands of other people on Twitter, populating their streams (home pages) with, in some cases, hundreds of tweets a minute. Obviously, people will skip over sloppy tweets, or trivial tweets, because they simply don't have the time.

"If you sound like a 13-year-old in an instant message conversation, that's not going to make people want to read your [Twitter] messages," says Susan Daffron (@susandaffron), president of Logical Expressions, a company that helps people self-publish books.

As your user-base diversifies to include people from different backgrounds, you should avoid abbreviations unless it's absolutely necessary, says Laura Fitton (@pistachio), who runs Pistachio Consulting, a firm that helps companies utilize Twitter.

"I generally go out of my way to avoid abbreviations," she says. "There are so many abbreviations you really can't always assume people will know what they are."

Twitter power users can be particular offenders with regards to that rule. Despite the fact that Twitter's user base has broadened substantially during the past six months, the majority of its users descend from a technical background. Depending on how your follower list has diversified, people might not know a lot of the Twitter lingo.

"I had people asking me what are these "#" signs," Daffron says, referring to Hashtags, which Twitter users employ to categorize topics, such as #sanfrancisco. "By writing things that are more obscure to new users, you essentially block them out."

Take Your Time

Twitter allows you to publish information instantly. The open field to tweet a message sits in your web-browser or in an app on your desktop. Since it's such a short message, the natural inclination is to post away without much thought. Much like you'd proofread an important e-mail message, you should consider sitting on a Tweet, Fitton says.

"Don't feel shy that, even though they're short, they [tweets] can be a lot work," Fitton says. "If you take your time, you will most likely put more thought into it. Thoughtful tweets are more likely to be appreciated."

Due to the fact a tweet must measure 140 characters, a quick writing job combined with lack of context can create misunderstandings. If you take time to not only construct the tweet, but also analyze your audience to see how it might be received, you can avoid upsetting people, Fitton says.

Tweeting Links: Headlines Matter

On Twitter, people often tweet links to their own published work, or articles that they have found relevant. In fact, so many people tweet links now that it requires a lot of work to get people to click on them. As a result, you must have a headline that sets your Tweet apart for the other stories of the day, says Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), a social media analyst who writes the /message blog

"It could be humorous or topical," he says. "But you also must pare down to the absolute minimum."

One key differentiator can be pulling a quote from a piece that might entice people to read it. For instance, if everyone knows the general news of the day on a certain topic, tweeting an article with a general headline on the topic ("Democrats Reach 60 Seats in Senate") might not be as compelling as a new quote from President Obama or a Senator. In other words, assume people already read the nuts-and-bolts news story that first hit the wire, and show them why you read something that has greater depth or value. This approach also shows what about the article stuck out the most for you.

On Pistachio's website, a guest blogger, Marshall Thompson, published a helpful guide, seven steps to writing a successful Twitter headline. In the piece, he includes the following guidelines: keep it short, no puns, use keywords, use hashtags, don't consolidate stories (one tweet per story), link directly to story (not home page — don't be a page-view monger), and don't use subheads.

Learn from Past Tweets

Twitter's web-based version, and its ecosystem of apps such as TweetDeck, track every time your Twitter handle appears in a tweet. After you tweet a link or make a statement, watch how your followers receive it and whether they retweet it.

In addition to following your retweets on Twitter's search tool, other tools help you track the pervasiveness of the links you share. TweetDeck users utilize bit.ly to shorten URLs they tweet. If you visit bit.ly's website, you can track the performance of links you tweet.

Over time, you should notice patterns for what material your followers receive well. In many cases, it will depend on the audience, which can be quite diverse. Figuring out what makes your Twitter followers click and retweet is a process Boyd calls "micro-psychographics."

In his blog post explaining the phenomenon, Boyd observed that, based on anecdotal evidence, Twitter users respond to tweets differently. Some engage more heavily with questions or declarative sentences, while others prefer emotional prompts evincing anger or happiness. "I have noticed very different responses to different styles of URL-ed tweets," Boyd wrote. "And I think it has to do with the psychological makeup of the recipients of the messages, just as much as the text in the message."

Staff Writer C.G. Lynch covers consumer and social technologies for CIO. You can follow him at @cglynch.

© 2008 CXO Media Inc.

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