Are you a maven? Perhaps you know one?

This or That?

1. Stay in or go out on New Year’s Eve? Probably staying in
2. If you stay home, do you stay up to ring in the new year, or fall asleep earlier? I plan on falling asleep early
3. If you go out, do you prefer to attend a party at someone’s home, or go to a bar/nightclub/restaurant? If I were going out, I’d rather spend time with friends at their house
4. Make resolutions, or do you not bother? Never bother
5. Ever been to Times Square (New York City) on New Year’s Eve, or just watched the ball drop on TV? Television. Too many people in Time Square.
6. Toast the New Year with champagne or a soft drink? Don’t like the taste of champagne
7. Do you have a special New Year’s dinner or not? Pork and Saurkraut for good luck
8. Do you already have your 2003 calendar, or do you wait to buy one until the stores mark them down? Never need to buy calenders. I get them as gifts.
9. Take down Christmas decorations: before or after New Year’s? You don’t need to take them down if you don’t put them up!
10. Funny hats and noisemakers, or a quieter celebration? Quiet

If you’re ever in the throws of insomnia and The Prime Gig is on, check it out.

I pretty much figured out that I’m going to have to actually get the Tom Peter’s books that the CD is based on. There’s way too much info to absorb by just listening!

Guerrilla Publicity Articles

Here’s a great article for you Students of Management. It combines Sales and Marketing with Deming’s principles of Process Management. An excerpt:

Assuming you�d like to improve your overall revenue generation process, you need to know where to start. The following approach has worked for service firms, and can work for you.

1. Change the premise. Enter this process with the premise that both marketing and sales have one purpose: generate maximum revenue for the firm. If defensiveness and bickering are allowed to continue between marketing and selling, your process improvement progress will be greatly hindered.

2. Add up the costs. Add up everything you are spending on sales and marketing now. Don�t forget to include everything like management time, salaries, and overhead.

3. Categorize. Assign each dollar you are spending to specific tasks designed to produce specific outputs. Force yourself to categorize the costs and place them into buckets.

4. Challenge each cost. Find out what is really working (not just what everyone thinks is working) and what is not. Find out what you can do for less cost and time while achieving the same results. Be diligent about supporting every assertion and assumption with clearly measurable and defensible facts.

5. Plug leaks. Stop spending money on what is not working. If you don�t take active and decisive action to stop spending on unproductive or unnecessary activities, useless dollars will perpetually leak out of your profits.

6. Focus on goals. Establish clear, integrated goals and targets for each sales and marketing task and activity. No dollars should be spent frivolously on tactics that don�t work. No new dollars and new strategies should be engaged without success measures. Everything must have a measurable goal.

7. Communicate. Make sure that everyone involved understand those goals, why they are important, and how each person is connected to the tasks, goals, and firm�s success.

8. Implement. Service companies have a tendency to let bold projects, plans, and goals fade away like old soldiers. Implement with commitment. Of course, this is easier said than done, but implementation assurance is a topic for another article.

9. Measure. Measure your results.

10. Repeat. Start the process again (hopefully at step 2 this time), and don�t stop repeating the process. Make measurable continuous improvement in marketing and sales a part of your culture.

It�s hard work, yes. What worth doing isn�t? But once you engage the process, you will be surprised at how much time, cash, and sanity you gain.

Great service companies have a continuously improving, integrated marketing and sales engine designed to generate maximum revenue for the company.

From Three Resolutions to Make 2003 More Profitable

‘A successful small business marketer is a cross between an eternal optimist and a hard-nosed realist. If you don’t cultivate optimism, your efforts will be sporadic, half-hearted, and uncreative. On the other hand, if you look at the world only through “rose-colored glasses”, you may develop a false sense of confidence and plunge blindly into an expensive media blitz, bypassing the necessary planning and evaluation. While optimism is an essential state of mind for pursuing any goal, it needs to be tempered with a dose of realism.’

‘Sometimes a company’s worst enemy can be self-defeating attitudes. You know it’s time to regroup and re-examine attitudes and your creative process when you hear yourself or one of your associates saying, “I didn’t think that ad would work, anyway!” Does that sound familiar? If you ever have serious reservations about an ad, a marketing campaign, or a sales presentation, then it’s time to step back, re-evaluate it, and get some outside feedback before launching it.’

You know, I don’t understand why people in the area still complain about the winters here in Northeast Ohio. The last few winters have been incredibly mild! I was looking at the forecast and it’s going to rain until Thursday, with temps in the 40s. I know it’s not that warm, but growing up, I remember being buried in snow by now.