Ron Sukenick approached me several weeks ago and described a new networking event he was putting together called “At the Top“.

As he was describing At the Top, it had a familiar sound to it.  It sounded a lot like the old Entrepreneurs Alliance of indiana.  I thought, “man I miss the old Entrepreneur’s Alliance.”  I miss seeing everyone on the 3rd Thursday of every month to have drinks and learn about how business started, failed and succeeded.  See, I used to be President of EAI.  We had too much competition and everyone just kind of pulled out.

So, Ron asked if Professional Blog Service would like to be a co-sponsor of the event.  I said, “Absolutely”.

Here is why, I would not have co-started Professional Blog Service, if not for the Entrepreneurs Alliance.  It was there that I heard many stories from many different Indianapolis business people who were just like me.  My  all-time favorites were:

• Ray Compton – “You don’t need a lot of money to market, you need to be creative.”
• Harley Davidson – “There are three things needed to be a successful manager – knowledge, experience, and emotional competency.”  With the emphasis on emotional competency.
• Jeff Smulyan – Great story about how he got started

And the other companies:

• Ritters Ice Cream
• JD Byrider
• Scott Jones
• Ontario Systems

The list really goes on and on.  There were a lot of great companies and speakers that participated at the Entrepreneurs Alliance of Indiana.

So, Ron has resurrected this idea with his “At the Top” program.  The venue is the excellent Skyline Club downtown.  (See the metaphor here, “At the Top”  on top of Indianapolis?)  The format is going to be similar to what we did at EAI.  There will be cocktails and appetizers with a guest speaker for each meeting.

So, if you are an Entrepreneur seeking inspiration from other Entrepreneurs that have gone through what you are experiencing, go to the “At the Top” meeting November 18, 2009.

What:  At the Top

When:  November 18, 2009

Time:  5:30p

Where:  Skyline Club – Downtown Indianapolis

Professional Blog Service is very happy to be a co-sponser of this important series of meetings.  Without Entrepreneurs, there is no economy.

You can learn more about At The Top here.

Is Cold Calling Dead? Can Social Media Fill the Void?

Yes and No.

I know this is a hot topic right now.

Traditional cold calling seems to be a thing in the past. How many of us like an interruption in our day of someone trying to sell us something? I particularly like the ones that do not even ask, “Is this a good time to talk?” Or, I had one recently where the guy made it sound like he was representing the firm that put on a trade show I participated in. After I realized I was being sold, it kind of pissed me off. I decided not to do business with him anyway, because he had been deceitful.

I hired an expert in cold calling several years ago. She had built a successful IT Staffing business before cold calling had become so widespread. She got frustrated because it had become much harder to get people to even want to talk. Cold calling in her mind was dead.

Those are my anecdotes.

What are the statistic?

Proponents of cold calls will tell you, it depends on the industry. But the fact of the matter is it is about numbers. On one site I found, the sales manager did the math to figure out how his people could make the $100k the owner says they could. He found his folks would need to make 510 calls a day. He already knew that he needed to “speak” to 100 people in order to get three buying customers (a .0058 percent close rate from calls to closes). He presented the numbers to the owner and suggested the following:

1. Purchase a bigger list to support the increased numbers needed.
2. Or, increase commissions so reps can earn the 100k
3. Or, find new ways to work smarter.

The owner’s response: “The reps might do better than those statistics.”

I am not suggesting that the phone is dead. It just needs to be used differently. Prospects need to be warmed up before calls are made. And at a .0058% close rate, there has got to be a better way.

How can social media help?

In B2B, social media can play an important role. It is a list building exercise, only it’s a list you build. The ROI in social media is building the list of possible customers, and industry contacts. An organic list is more valuable to you than a rented or purchased list. If you are generating conversation through social with your marketplace, they are more likely to do business with you.

With social media, it won’t take 100 conversations to get three clients. You can start getting one client in about eight phone conversations — which happens after you’ve laid the groundwork through a social network. Your sales pipeline becomes more predictable.

Cold calling in the traditional sense is dead. But, warm calling is alive and well. Social Media can help warm those folks up.

I found this great Pandora Software for the Mac.  It’s called PandoraJam.

You can get it here.

In a nutshell, it allows you to stream Pandora through your Airport Express.  It costs only $15.  It’s for Mac OSX.

I love Pandora for several reasons:

1. It introduces me to music I would otherwise not hear.
2. It allows me to be lazy and let someone else pick my music based on my tastes.
3. It still gives me music based on my moods.

Yesterday, I was feeling a bit like Liszt, Ferenc.  I was introduced to a whole new genre of music I would otherwise never had heard.

It is yet another example of how the Internet allows users to customize their experience to suite their individual personality or explore new things.

I love it!

These lyrics were written in the late 80s by Neil Peart.  It was the beginning of the political discourse in which we live today.  The beginning of Rush Limbaugh.  The era of Lee Atwater.  Our national discourse has gotten progressively worse since that time.  We are becoming more European in our skepticism and mistrust of each other.  These lyrics really speak to our times.

Second Nature lyrics

A memo to a higher office
Open letter to the powers that be
To a god, a king, a head of state
A captain of industry
To the movers and the shakers…
Can’t everybody see?

It ought to be second nature
I mean, the places where we live
Let’s talk about this sensibly
We’re not insensitive
I know progress has no patience
But something’s got to give

I know you’re different
You know I’m the same
We’re both too busy
To be taking the blame
I’d like some changes
But you don’t have the time
We can’t go on thinking
It’s a victimless crime
No one is blameless
But we’re all without shame
We fight the fire while we’re feeding the flames

Folks have got to make choices
And choices got to have voices
Folks are basically decent
Conventional wisdom would say
But we read about the exceptions
In the papers every day

It ought to be second nature
At least, that’s what I feel
Now I lay me down in Dreamland
I know perfect’s not for real
I thought we might get closer
But I’m ready to make a deal

Today is different, and tomorrow the same
It’s hard to take the world the way that it came
Too many rapids keep us sweeping along
Too many captains keep on steering us wrong
It’s hard to take the heat
It’s hard to lay blame
To fight the fire while we’re feeding the flames

It is quite simple.  It is networking online.  It allows you to build networks outside of your city limits with connections all over the world, if you like.  I always associate it to the old Fabrege commercial we used to see back in the 80s:

What is important to understand is that you have to be real.  You are not a faceless corporation.  It is people doing business with people.

Simplistic?  Yes.  We are taking what used to be and still is off-line behavior and opening it up to online behavior.

Today’s outrage brought to you by the NY Times’ Maureen Dowd.

I am not challenging what she is saying here.  There is some tragic comedy unfolding here.  What I would challenge you on is your reaction.  What emotions are you experiencing as you read it?

For you guys who claim you do not understand feelings, you have 4 main feelings that drive a male.  There is one more too, they are:

1.  Anger

2.  Fear

3.  Sadness

4.  Joy

Bonus feeling for males:  Shame.

So, it is pretty simple, your body communicates when these feeling are going through your body.  With that in mind, what is the feeling that comes out of reading the following:

http://kl20.com/outrageatbankers/

I know how it made me feel.  Test it for yourself.

It is a powerful marketing tool.

Hi Everyone,

Yes, this is a shameless promotion of my new business.

My company Indy Associates is winding down its operations to focus on a new business we started several months ago. Some of you may have received an email about “Professional Blog Service.”

In a nutshell, www.ProBlogService.com is a new service that provides ghost writing, promotion, and social networking management for companies that want to blog, but don’t have the time or resources to do it properly or effectively.

Why blog?

Traditional Search Engine Optimization has been going through changes over the past several years. In Internet Marketing, “shoppers use keywords, buyers use phrases.” Corporate blogging helps companies connect with the buyers in their market because GOOGLE wants “FRESH, HOT CONTENT”.

The challenge is, it takes a lot of work to keep up a corporate blog. Most companies don’t have the resources to do it. Nor, do they know how to do it right and make sure the activity is measured properly for an ROI. This is where we help.

Lloyds of Indiana is a local retailer that sells printing equipment, supplies, and binding machines through their webstore. We have been blogging for them and manage their social media profiles. We continue to grow their list of marketable prospects and have even converted sales off their MySpace page.

These guys were a local print shop for years. How many print shops have you seen go under in your local market? They changed their business to sell the supplies people need in their office, including high-end printers and corporate displays.

Blogging is helping them do this.

The cost is simple:

$135.00 per post – written, promoted, and managed through social network
$75.00 per post – written only.

So, if you have any friends or family that are complaining about their traditional marketing being expensive and unmeasurable, send them my way.

My office number is: 317-644-3034

####

(I am Paul Lorinczi and I approve this message)

We live in a buzzword world.

Everything that even smells of something new gets a buzzword. I have visions of smartly dressed people with stylish glasses and fancy haircuts going, “let’s give a name.” Then we come up with a sample like this:

3-6-3 Rule
A Ton Of Money
Accounting Noise
Acquisition Indigestion
Across The Board
Active Box
Activity Based Budgeting – ABB
Affluenza
After The Bell
Agency Cross
Agflation
Air Pocket Stock
Alligator Property
Alligator Spread
Alternative Energy ETF
Alternative Investment
And Interest
Angel Bond
Angelina Jolie Stock Index
Ankle Biter
Anonymous Trading
Antitrust
Arbitrageur
Aspirin Count Theory
Sourced from www.investopedia.com/categories/buzzwords.asp

What usually happens is a small segment of the population actually understands what it means. People in the know sound really smart because they can repeat the buzzword and sound really intelligent. The Internet has spawned all kinds of them. Example: “It is important that your GUI design captures the eyeballs. Make sure that you employ search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), and Web Analytics. ” The genius ones use a lot of them in many sentences. (Wow, he’s smart, he is buzzword compliant). And people buy it all the time. (I guess that why they work).

I will be the first to admit that I loved buzzwords too. I used to sit around with my collegues who dressed nicely and play the buzzword game too. I was a buzzword expert too. I would do it in front of clients and feel really good about myself.

There is one constant in human evolution. Human interactions have not really changed. Despite all this technology introduced into our lives, we as a species still function pretty much the same way. While we may not feed each other to lions, we find new ways to be cruel just the same. And our fears and desires are pretty simple too. We can still be made to fear and sex will always sell.

So, what is all this social media hype about anyways? What’s all this Internet stuff with My Space, Facebook, Linkedin, and Plaxo about? Well, the reality is human evolution in buying has gone from the bazaar to the store, to the electronic store. Buying and selling is still done on emotions. Doing it on the Internet is no different. Now we have to either visually or through words impact people’s emotional reaction to buying from us. Just like we did when people stood in front of our table at the bazaar. There is no buzzword to describe this. Businesses just need to learn how to sell in this new market. It is old fashion buying and selling that is going on today.

Cold calling is dead. People no longer pick up the phone and talk because caller ID says I don’t have time for people I do not know. So, they are changing from having the world come to them to opting into the world of their choosing. People are quorom sensing beings. They will naturally gravitate towards those people that have similar interest and become part of a community. Instead of going down to the Church Hall, they may now choose to join the forum on under water basket weaving because there are not many people at church who are into under water basket weaving.

Business professionals globally are also trying to connect with potential colleagues with like interests. They no longer pick up the phone and listen to sales people. Instead they pick and choose what information interests them or could help them. The challenge today is learning how to generate the information they would be interested in reading. Or, creating an environments that gives them the option to participate. Again, it is old fashion buying and selling.

In the end, humans have not changed. We are still creatures of habit. We still gravitate towards shared interest. The only difference is that we do it in a different environment today. So, if you peal off all the buzzwords and narrow down the basic human behavior we see today, success is simply watching how humans behave in their new environments. If you observe the Internet from this perspective, you will see that nothing has really changed, only the location where people congregate has.