The power of Silence for Focusing on your business

Focus, Marketing, peak Performance, Productivity, single target market, Uncategorized

For a lot of people who follow Buddhism , today is an auspicious occasion since it Lord Buddha’s birthday. One of the things linked to Buddhism and the overall philosophy of religions that originated in the Indian Sub-Continent is the practice of “Dhyan” and Yoga. While there are a lot of people who follow and practice Yoga across the world “Dhyan” is something that is missing in our lives. “Dhyan” involves sitting in pin drop silence and just focusing all your energy to think.

We all (me included) are so busy running after deadlines all day that we don’t give our brains the bandwidth to actually do what it can do best – which is THINK. When you get into the “Dhyan” stage you are able to connect a lot of the dots which otherwise seem impossible to connect.

I have many times earlier, mentioned a practice by Dean Jackson called the focus finder. Its a very practical way to do a brain dump and then get on to the activity of Thinking.

Today I was a little frustrated that I was not being able to figure out a solution for identifying a Single Target Market. I keep giving you folks a lot of inputs on why you should go about identifying the Single Target Market and the incredible benefits it can have in your marketing.

But today I had a mind block and I was not able to think through on what would be my STM. After lazing around mindlessly and watching un-necessary web series for about an hour, I decided to just sit down with my notebook and pencil and started jotting down thoughts as they came to me about my “bullseye ” (the STM)

While doing this my brain also kept throwing up additional items that I could include. But I had to make my STM as sharply defined as possible. So I kept listing down, all the people whom I would not be able to help.

Automatically I ended up putting a lot of AND statements to ensure that there were as little possibilities as possible for some additional markets creeping in.

Once this was done I went two steps further, I even identified the the markets, one variable away and two variables away. This would help me, in case, the STM I have defined is not viable economically and I have to expand it a little bit.

While I spent close to 2 hours dilly – dalling, I was able to achieve all this in a matter of about 45 minutes, when there was pin drop silence and I was only focusing on this activity. These 45 minutes were more precious because of the immense productivity I got.

If feasible I would suggest everyone to regularly do these focus exercises, they can increase productivity levels dramatically and because you take out everything from your brain and put it on paper, there’s no chance of missing things.

Till next then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Testing for your lead generation engine -3

campaign, lead generation, Marketing, media, Testing

In this sequence of blog posts, I am actually taking you step by step through a real life campaign showing the testing I am doing, the failures and successes , as they happen.

In life in general and in marketing in particular “one” is a dangerous term. Some of you who follow my blog regularly will point at the contradiction. I am also the one who says focus. So to all those people who got this thought in your mind, I will still say FOCUS on one thing at a time, but never be too dependent on any one thing.

Having only one sales person, only one medium, only one partner are all situations which can lead to disaster.

So today I started working on creating the lead magnet using a different medium. Since I focus on B2B, my typical mediums are Google, LinkedIn and YouTube for posting advertisements. I have not yet understood the Facebook mechanism, so I don’t experiment with it when I am advising someone.

So today I have helped create the advertisement to be put on YouTube. We will test it against the revised ads we had put on Google yesterday to see which medium is performing better. Will keep you posted on this as well.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The ability of your brain to give you the niggling feeling

Fear, Focus, Human Brain, Thinking, Worry

I am writing after a long time related to the brain functioning. This comes from he fact that I get to hear a lot of times and I am also a culprit sometimes, that I end up saying – “I did not have the time”. Or even if you don’t say it in the open, you are overwhelmed and always under pressure because you have so many things on your plate.

A lot of this whole situation arises because we are being reactive to our circumstances. Whether its the email which comes in – complaining about a problem or a phone call giving us a new requirement or even just a person interrupting us, asking if we have a minute. Suddenly you get pulled one after another into tasks that were not planned for the day. I have had the habit of keeping a To-Do list for many years, but by reacting to all these interruptions, the To-Dos only kept growing longer.

Now to top that when I try to switch off my phone or switch off my email, I have this constant fear, a niggling feeling, that there’s a disaster waiting to happen on the other side . Now my brain is designed to ensure my survival, so it will always keep warning me about impending danger. So what happens, its even more difficult to concentrate on a task. This happens because of the Zeigarnik effect and the lizard brain which still resides inside us.

One thing which I learnt from Dean Jackson is to do a brain dump for a concentrated 50 minutes, from time to time. I have mentioned this earlier also – please watch his YouTube video on the Fifty minute focus finder. Its an amazing detailing on how you can become more productive. I keep going back to that video from time to time and each time I watch it, I learn something new to make me less reactive.

This brain dump does help the brain become a little more restive, because it realises that I have put out the things on paper so I will execute on it. Its a very relieving exercise. But you need to do it without any kind of distraction.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Focus on Single Market & Media

B2B, Focus, lead generation, Marketing, single target market

Today I was watching a video on YouTube about productising a service offering, to make it scalable. This video is an interaction between Chris Do and Greg Hickman.

I keep talking about a Single Target Market for your offering and how you need to focus all your attention to being able to dominate that market before moving into a different market. Getting all your learning whether its about the social media platform you want to use or the message you want to convey for this one focused market.

At the beginning of the video Greg talks about focusing for one year, with one offering using one media if you want to scale up. He talks about a couple of other “ones” also.

But these stuck to me, because while I only emphasize the idea of one market, this gentleman is going a step further, to also ensure your focus on the media.

I fully agree to the idea of focus to achieve your objectives. Once you have tested the media which is getting you the most traction in the Single Target Market of your choice , then you should only keep using that medium and see how you can reduce the cost, increase the traffic and increase the conversions.

If you do this with focused attention for a year, you would have created a huge “top of the funnel” to keep you busy for a long time. In case of B2B this focus from your marketing team will ensure that your sales teams have leads coming their way.

I am going to explore this idea and will keep you posted.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!