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Contact Shannon English with She Knows Marketing for all your marketing needs!

Shannon A English
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com
785-383-8139

Become a FACEBOOK fan: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Topeka-KS/She-Knows-Marketing/300085784961?ref=nf

“Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

Check out my website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more. (My facebook fan page has product sales and items uploaded all the time.) Do you need help with your Social Media & Marketing, ask me to set up a one on one or group meeting to help grow your business.

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards
are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat.
We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we
have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your
marketing needs!

Jeffrey Gitomer's Sales Caffeine Issue 433

Value First Selling
you can bank on!

I got a call from a bank who wanted me to present a seminar. I love getting incoming leads! My company is blessed with lots of them, but this one was different.

My seminars are usually conducted in front of a live audience at some gathering place: hotel, meeting room, or theater. I see the audience. They see me. I hear the audience. They hear me. I feel the audience. They feel me (emotionally). It’s part of the magic of a live performance.

This particular inquiry was about doing a webinar. It was, as they say in the talk-show business, a “first time caller.” But more interestingly, they did not want this webinar for themselves or internal purposes; they wanted an online video webinar for their customers. Cool.

As I got deeper into the conversation, I found out their business philosophy behind wanting to do this seminar, and it is for that reason I am sharing this information with you.

The customer, the bank, is the Nevada State Bank, with primary offices in Las Vegas and branch offices throughout the region. Their prime objective was to help, and strengthen their customer’s business in these economic times. In short they have poured all of their marketing resources, and most of their advertising budget, into providing value to their customers.

Why? Their strategy is help customers first and they will remain loyal. And because of their online banking capability, they are not limited to local customers. Favorable corporate laws and their Las Vegas location has attracted customers from all over the US.

Incredible, unheard of, unprecedented - and I jumped at the chance.

I will admit to you that it’s awkward giving a presentation to a camera. I will use slides and impromptu dialogue so it will be very similar to what I would normally do if I was face to face with the audience. But as you can imagine, a first time with anything has its learning curve, and the associated risks that go along with it.

To help me prepare and witness a run through, their two chief marketers, Tom Sweet and Robert Richardson, flew to Charlotte.

On a side note, I have spent double the amount of time preparing for this event to make sure that it will go off without a hitch, and that the information is transferable to each online participant.

But let me go back to my original WOW! Think for a moment what you are doing for YOUR customers. Think for a moment about how much money you are spending on advertising and sales promotion, rather than trying to help your present customers build their business.

My bet is you’re spending 100 cents out of a dollar on yourselves, and not a penny on the people who are providing you with 100% of your revenue. What Nevada State Bank is doing is a remarkable, precedent-setting process that every one of you should be employing. They are providing a seminar for their customers, not for their salespeople -- but their salespeople and the bank will benefit from it.

Now is the time for you to come to the aid of your customers. Now is the time when you can enact a value-based marketing strategy that will lead to a profit-based selling strategy as the economy (slowly) recovers.

The webinar will be broadcast this Thursday, February 25th, from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. PST. It will be loaded with information that will help you build your business. It is offered at no charge, with no catch. Just register and reap the rewards. To reserve your “seat,” go to: www.nsbank.com/webevent/

If you are interested in learning more about this marketing/sales strategy, go to www.gitomer.com and enter the words CUSTOMER WELLNESS in the GitBit box.

Shared by:
Shannon A English
Cell 785-383-8139
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com

Check out my personal website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more.

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

What to Expect: 2010 to 2023

Moses was 40 years old when he tried to lead Israel out of Egypt by the strength of his own arm. He failed, then ran from the anger of Pharaoh like a little girl. But who can blame him for trying? He was, after all, the only Israelite who lived in the palace under the protection of Pharaoh’s daughter: “I’m unique. I’m special. I was born for this.”

Moses at 40 was brash, confident, full of himself; the kind of leader who would stand on the deck of an aircraft carrier, look into the lens of a TV camera and say, “Mission accomplished.”

But Moses at 80 was a completely different man. In the book of Numbers we read, “Now the man Moses was very meek, the most humble man on the face of the whole earth.” Having lived 40 years as a shepherd on the backside of the desert, Moses had lost his hubris and developed a speech impediment.

Remember how many years the unbelieving Israelites had to wander in the desert before they became a completely different people? Bingo. 40 years.

That phrase - “40 years” - appears 25 times in the Bible and in virtually every instance it refers to a window of transformative change. Do we in fact become a different people every 40 years?

William Strauss and Neil Howe wrote a book about this 40-year phenomenon in 1991. Those authors never mention the Bible but focus instead on the historical record of Western society from 1584 to the present. That book, Generations, asserts that we go through a series of 4, approximately 20-year cycles or "generations" in a predictable order. (Think of a generation not as birth cohorts but as life cohorts. Everyone alive in a society is part of the same generation in that moment.)

Here’s how those 20-year cycles look when overlaid onto the story of Moses.

1. Idealist, marked by infatuation,
ending with full-of-himself Moses at 40,
“I’m special.” 1963-1983

2. Reactive, marked by disillusionment,
ending with Moses at 60 after 20 years in the desert,
“I’m searching for something better.” 1983-2003

3. Civic, marked by a power struggle,
ending with burning-bush/10 Plagues Moses at 80,
“I’m just a regular person trying to make it through the day.” 2003-2023 (and 1923-1943)

4. Adaptive, marked by reluctant acceptance,
ending with Israel-in-the-wilderness Moses at 100,
“I’m part of a team on a journey.” 2023-2043 (and 1943 to 1963) (In the middle of the last Adaptive cycle (1943-1963) a friend of Jack Kerouac, the poet John Clellon Holmes wrote, “You know, everyone I know is kind of furtive, kind of beat...” - Go, (1952) And from that Beat generation came the beatniks who inspired the idealist hippies of the 1960’s.)

When the cycle has gone full circle it returns to where it began:

1. Idealist
ending with Moses at 120, full of himself again, striking the rock to bring water instead of speaking to it as God had instructed. 2043-2063

Please note that each of these 20-year cycles is attended by sparkle and darkness. None of them is inherently better than the others.

Society hungers for individuality and freedom during the upswing of an Idealist cycle. Nothing wrong with that. But we always take a good thing too far. What begins as a beautiful dream of self-discovery (1963) ends as hollow, phony posing (1983.) And from that shining disco of lights and glitter our hunger falls back, feather-like, toward what we left behind: working together for the common good.

But this beautiful dream of working together to build a better tomorrow slowly hardens into duty, obligation and sacrifice. We become bound by rules and the expectations of others.

And we grow weary.

Finally, we begin to move toward what we left behind: individuality and freedom of expression.

“If you look at the history of youth cultural movements, they tend to go one of two ways. One is in the direction of individual expression and creativity; the best example is the '60s. The other way is to lose themselves in the collective, binding themselves into a gang…” – Jaron Lanier


The declining Idealist pendulum reached the bottom of its arc in 2003, right on schedule. We’re now in our 7th year of a new Civic cycle, “losing ourselves in the collective, binding ourselves into a gang,” as the pendulum swings toward another Civic zenith in 2023.

On the sunny side of a Civic upswing are transparency, volunteerism and authenticity. But in the dark you’ll find smug self-righteousness, legalism and bureaucracy.

If history can be trusted as a guide, we’re now entering the time of a power struggle. Everywhere it will be “us” versus “them.” And both sides will believe they work purely for the common good. "God is clearly on OUR side."

“You don’t care enough about global warming,
or free enterprise,
or civil liberties,
or the rights of the unborn,
or the downtrodden in Tibet.
You’re not committed to family values
and you don’t recycle.
You don’t support our troops.
Frankly, we’re disappointed in you.
You’re not doing your part.
Shape up.”


The coming zealot will want to make sure you’re doing your part for the team. You’ll be interrogated, evaluated and castigated. When you have capitulated, you’ll be authenticated, approximated and appropriated. In the end you’ll be assimilated.

Or you can hide out at Wizard Academy. As society becomes more sharply divided, we’ll remain committed to the insanity of open-mindedness. We'll listen and hear and understand what both sides are trying to say. We'll see things no one else notices.

And we will use this knowledge to make a difference in our businesses and our communities.

Come to Wizard Academy.
You’re going to like it here.

We know how to make money
and we remember how to have fun.

Roy H. Williams

PS – If you were wondering where I got my info about Moses...
file:///C:/DOCUME~1/EZ-PCC~1/LOCALS~1/Temp/fcctemp/Attach0%203.html

Shared by Shannon A English
She Knows Marketing
785-383-8139
Shannon@SheKnowsMarketing.com
www.SheKnowsMarketing.com

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

The Power of Labels
Even When They're Wrong

Christian Jürgensen Thomsen was a young man interested in archaeology so when the Danish government of 1816 needed someone to climb into the attic of Copenhagen’s Trinitatis Church and sort through the rubble that had collected there, Thomsen was their man.

Upon entering the attic, Thomsen reported random items in “dust and disorganized disarray, hidden away in chests and baskets, among bits of material and paper. It was total chaos.”

Sounds like my attic. Yours too, I’ll bet.

The first thing young Christian Jürgensen Thomsen did was to organize the antiquities according to their material: stone in one pile, bronze in another, iron in a third. When the public was invited to an exhibition in that same church loft in 1819, this was the first time the false division of the past into three “ages” was ever used.

“So familiar has Thomsen’s tripartite division of the past into a Stone, a Bronze and an Iron age become, so complete the authority it has acquired, that we easily forget its comparatively recent vintage and attribute to it a degree of reality that it scarcely has a right to.” – Historian Robert Ferguson

Ferguson says “Stone Age,” “Bronze Age” and “Iron Age” are false labels adopted by people looking for categories where none exist. Likewise, I believe “Baby Boomer,” “Gen-Xer” and “Millennial” to be false labels.

People are not imprinted at birth with values systems they carry throughout their lives.

Search the phrase “Attributes of Baby Boomers” and you’ll read some truly idiotic assertions that have come to be widely believed, such as, “People born between 1946 and 1955 are experimental, value individualism and are free spirited. People born between 1956 and 1964 are less optimistic, distrust the government and are generally cynical.”- Wikipedia

Stone, bronze and iron refer not to time periods but to materials. Likewise, Baby Boomer, Gen-X and Millennial refer not to people born during a certain window of years but to values systems that were popular for a while in our society.

New systems of values are first adopted by the youth. Later, when those values become mainstream and are embraced by the rest of society, the values continue to be associated with the birth cohorts that first embraced them.

In truth, the pendulum of Western society swings in a very predictable 40-year arc and all of us are carried along with it. When our societal pendulum is moving toward individuality and self-expression we live in a “Me generation.” When we’re swinging away from these virtues and begin working together for the common good, we live in a “We generation.” The move from one extreme to the other takes 40 years.

We’ve recently seen our pendulum reach the bottom of its arc (2003) as we shifted from “Me” back to “We.”

Next Monday I’ll tell you exactly what you can expect from the coming decade.

Roy H. Williams

Monday Morning Memo with Roy Williams

How I Win the Ad Wars
Frankly, I Cheat. You Can, Too.

I became an advertising salesman so I could buy groceries. A college dropout with no financial safety net, I installed aluminum guttering on houses during the day and changed reel-to-reel tapes in an automated radio station at night. Our format was radio preachers who needed your money to pay for the airtime we sold them.

We were the number 23 station in a city of 23 stations. Our best ratings book showed us with a cumulative weekly audience of 18,000 people in a city of 1.3 million. We had between 400 and 800 people listening at any given moment. That sounded like a lot of people to me. One day I asked the manager why our station played no ads.

“You think you could sell some ads?” he asked.

I nodded like a bobblehead doll.

“Do it,” he said as he walked away.

I asked the back of his head how much I should charge.

“Whatever you can get,” he answered, without ever looking back.

When you sell ads on the tiniest station in town, you don’t compete with the other stations, you sell only those businesses with too little money to afford anyone else. In fact, the money my clients gave me every month was usually all the cash they had. If my ads didn’t work, I’d have groceries in my pantry but my clients wouldn’t. A man learns fast in that environment.

The first thing I learned is that people are bored by advertising for the same reason they’re bored by anything else: lack of relevance.

"If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot."- Emil Cioran

When ads are relevant, customers respond. Are your ads relevant, or are they answering questions no one is asking?

My job at the radio station paid $3.50 an hour plus 15 percent commission. Within 3 years I was making about $6,000 a month. That was doctor/lawyer money 30 years ago.

Strangely, I never made that many sales calls. Most of my clients called the station to ask if they could buy ads from me. Usually, a friend had told them how much money they were making as a result of the ads I was writing and they wanted in on the action.

"What does it cost?" they'd ask. These people didn't care about the radio station or its format. They just wanted to grow their businesses.

When the owners of my radio station sold it for 11 times what they paid for it, I decided I’d rather become a self-employed ad consultant than move to Los Angeles and become a station manager for them.

The second thing I had learned, you see, is that good ads work no matter how they’re delivered. I saw my ads work on virtually every radio and TV station in the city and with tiny variations these same ads performed as direct mail letters and fax machine blasts.

The secret wasn’t in reaching the right people. The secret was in crafting a message that would be relevant to the public.

My ads worked because I cheated: I insisted my clients let me deliver a message guaranteed to move the needle on the “Who Cares?” meter.

Ads fail when no one cares.

An extremely common mistake is to believe that discounting the price of a product is guaranteed to win the interest of the public. But I've seen that strategy fail dozens of times. A half-price turd is still a turd.

When a client belligerently demanded that I write some magic words to help him sell a load of crap that no one in their right mind would ever want to buy, I looked down at the ground, dropped a wad of spit on the toe of his shoe, then looked up into his face and said, “No.”

Yes, it was a rude and vulgar thing to do but I can assure you it shortened the argument. Word of my little stunt spread. Some saw it as the action of an egotistical lunatic. It’s possible these people were right. But others saw it as the mark of a young man who had the courage of his convictions. These people may have been right, too.

Every business owner is on the inside, looking out, and what they see is entirely different from what their customers see. Customers are on the outside, looking in.

Great ad writers remain on the outside, looking in. They are advocates, not of the business owner, but of the business owner’s customer. This gives them their great advantage.

Do you have the courage to learn what your company looks like from the outside, looking in? Would you like to know what your customer is thinking?

Twice a year I gather my Wizard of Ads partners from around the world for 2 days of continuing education in Austin, Texas. This year we’re looking for 7 business owners willing to be guinea pigs for us on February 25, the second day of class. These selected business owners will be responsible for their own airfare and accommodations. Since this is not a Wizard Academy event, we can’t offer you a room in Engelbrecht House. Sorry.

In return for your investment of time, travel costs and courage, you’ll receive 1 hour of focused attention from the brightest ad consultants on earth.

If you own a business and are interested, email PaulBoomer@WizardOfAds.com or call Paul Boomer at (573) 268-4109. Please, no advertising professionals.

I hope to see 7 owners of interesting businesses in Austin on February 25.

It is good to be a guinea pig.

Roy H. Williams

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Shannon A English
Account Manager, FASTSIGNS
Owner, She Knows Marketing
Always ask for Shannon English when placing an order!
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Check out my personal website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more.

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
A cause that is dear to me: http://saveourshelteranimals.org/
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/

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We'll help solve your challenges and make you look great! Call, click or visit us today.

Sincerely,
Shannon A English
Account Manager
Cell 785-383-8139
Fax 785-271-2324
shannon.english@fastsigns.com

Check out my personal website: http://www.sheknowsmarketing.com/ Under the New Age Marketing tab you can connect with me on twitter, facebook, myspace, linked, plaxo and many more.

Did you know we have the best business cards on the market? Our cards are thick and have a nice gloss finish for a price that can't be beat. We also have promotional items, ask an associate for the sales that we have going on right now. We are your one stop shop for all your marketing needs!

www.fastsigns.com/304

CLICK ON THE LINK BELOW TO VIEW MY SIGN SLIDE SHOW:
http://s273.photobucket.com/albums/jj209/Shannonhappy1/Fastsigns/?action=view¤t=d651bac8.pbw
A cause that is dear to me: http://saveourshelteranimals.org/
My Blog: http://shannonenglish.blogspot.com/