chris voss

Being Relentless – a Marketing discipline

Affirmative action, Marketing, persistence, Sales

Relentless is an adjective.

Synonyms – Persistent, Non-Stop, Continuous…

An adjective qualifies the noun – grade 5 English grammar course. In this case, the noun is going to be a person. A relentless person a persistent person is how this will be used.

So what is the significance of this English grammar lesson for today’s post.

The other day in one of the posts I mentioned about the I love marketing podcast episode with Chris Voss and I explained why I admired him because of his usage of of words.

With a background in hostage negotiation you have to be careful with your words and the words should have the the exact Nuance of what is being thought by the speaker. That is one of the reasons why his vocabulary is so good.

During the podcast, one of the questions asked to him was on the launch of his book, in 2017 I think, and how he went about promoting it.

One word that he mentioned which immediately stuck in my head was the fact that he was RELENTLESS in ensuring that he was on two interviews a week at the minimum, to promote his book which he is doing to this day.

While the book – Never Split the Difference – is very good, but if people don’t come to know about the book they will not go and buy it. It’s a terrific lesson in marketing from a hostage negotiator. If you keep yourself aware you can get marketing lessons even from the small kiosk on the kerb.

We may have a terrific product or a terrific service but if people do not come to know about it then people will not buy it.

In one word Chris had put out such a big strategy for marketing

Everyone knows about Coke. But they relentlessly advertise about their product so that when you visit the shop or restaurant and you are thirsty the first word which comes out of your mouth is a Coke.

Everyday in marketing and I include sales as part of marketing, if you are not somehow reaching more and more customers everyday , by some mechanism , you will not be able to build a sustainable pipeline and a predictable business.

You need not be brilliant, you need not be teriffic , but if you want to succeed you have to be relentless, persistent et al.

Till next time

Carpe Diem!!!

Relentless – Part II

Habits, Marketing, Sales

Since yesterday when I first wrote the blog post about being relentless this thought has been going on in my mind continuously all through the night that all marketing success at one point comes down to being relentless in your pursuit. You can read the post.

That does not mean there are no other attributes  – like if you are running in the wrong direction then obviously you will reach the wrong place but assuming you have the right direction then if you have to reach your destination you need to be e consistently relentlessly going after your target destination to be able to reach there

After the post I looked around to see which other authors had sold more than a million books and try to identify what all they were doing to achieve those numbers. One author who comes to mind is Russell Brunson. He’s written 3 books and has this relentless effort to ensure he’s in front of the right influencers who read his books, interviewed him and their audiences bought his books.

If I  look at sales,  one of the greatest sales guys I have had the chance to read about was the late Chet Holmes. He had a methodology which he used to call the Dream 100. His idea was very simple. He would first identify the Top 100 (notional number) that he wanted to do business with.

Then he would  relentlessly every alternate day send a bulky packet with information and next day give a call.  In one case as per him , where he had listed 167 companies in his list of dream companies , he was able to get all of them as customers within about an year.

At the end of the day,  the consistent focus of daily activities is what helps these companies execute.

Again as I said earlier this does not mean that you don’t need a good product or service.  It does not mean that you don’t need to differentiate your offerings.  It does not mean that you have a faulty strategy.  These are table stakes.

If you have all the above and then you execute relentlessly that’s when you succeed.  If you have all the above and do things in an episodic way then you will fail.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Relentless

Marketing, Sales

It’s an adjective.

Synonyms – Persistent, Non-Stop, Continuous…

An adjective qualifies the noun – grade 5 English grammar course. In this case, the noun is going to be a person. A relentless person a persistent person is how this will be used.

So what is the significance of this English grammar lesson for today’s post.

The other day in one of the posts I mentioned about the I love marketing podcast episode with Chris Voss and I explained why I admired him because of his usage of of words.

With a background in hostage negotiation you have to be careful with your words and the words should have the the exact Nuance of what is being thought by the speaker. That is one of the reasons why his vocabulary is so good.

During the podcast, one of the questions asked to him was on the launch of his book, in 2017 I think, and how he went about promoting it.

One word that he mentioned which immediately stuck in my head was the fact that he was relentless in ensuring that he was on two interviews a week at the minimum, to promote his book which he is doing to this day.

While the book – Never Split the Difference – is very good, but if people don’t hear about it they will not go and buy it. So it’s a terrific lesson in marketing.

We may have a terrific product or a terrific service but if people do not come to know about it then people will not buy it.

In one word he had put out such a big strategy for marketing

Everyone knows about Coke. But they relentlessly advertise about their product so that when you visit the shop or restaurant and you are thirsty the first word which comes out of your mouth is a Coke.

Everyday in marketing and I am including sales as part of marketing only for the purpose of this blog, if you are not somehow reaching more and more customers everyday , by some mechanism , you will not be able to build a sustainable pipeline and a predictable business.

You need not be brilliant, you need not be teriffic , but if you want to succeed you have to be relentless, persistent et al.

Till next time

Carpe Diem!!!

Serendipity

Serendipity

Everyone has heard the cliché “all that glitters is not gold” but we still end up taking a lot of decisions based on the way something is shown.

Today however I have to tell you how accidentally decided to hear a podcast episode and it turned out to be such a revelation. Pure serendipity.

I have mentioned multiple times to you about the podcast ilovemarketing by Joe Polish and Dean Jackson. If you have any thing to do with marketing, you should listen to this podcast.

Anyway….to today’s story….I was actually intending to hear the episode where Joe Polish talks about his sabbatical. While going through the episodes list I accidentally pressed the episode with Chris Voss.

If you haven’t heard of Chris Voss, he was the chief hostage negotiator of FBI and has written the amazing book Never Split the Difference.

Coming back,  when I heard the first few words at the start of the podcast talking about the difference between assertive and aggressive and collaboration and cooperation I got captivated.

I love people who can give the nuances between words and know how to use the right word…. true wordsmiths

But as I heard the podcast further it had so much wisdom, that I was enthralled. I had no intention of listening to this episode when I had started Google podcast. but I got so much value listening to it.

Sometimes you are looking for something and you accidentally come across something so amazing. I would strongly recommend , that if you’re in any way involved in doing negotiations or love how human interaction can be improved,  you should watch this episode on YouTube.

Till next time….

Carpe Diem!!!