Dave Lakhani - Secrets of Persuasion

Tell stories.
Persona -- build a powerful, effective persona
- What is people's initial reaction when they first perceive you
- Act the same way every time, people will expect it from you
Transfer of Credibility - whatever we see people do, we do too. Testimonials are good
When you learn to persuade -- your story is too powerful, too different, you can't be compared to anyone else.

When enter, stand in doorframe -- frame yourself -- for 3-5 seconds. People will pay more attention to you.

Shake hands with both hands, make eye contact, and say name.

People want to buy from experts rather than generalists.

Referrals

This was an ExecTech meeting on referability.

Why people are referred:

I have to believe in business model, product, or person. To believe in it, it must be not too complicated, honest, and relevant.

Is the person trustworthy?

If not sure if it's trustworthy, then refer with caveat.

Strong sense of values: Integrity, honesty, responsibility, competence

According to article
Be likeable, be reliable, customer should trust you, have good track record

Gets to know someone well before they refer them. See if you can work together.

Little things that indicate trust.

Referral sometimes confirms what you already feel about someone.

Take-home message: I may need to read about about building trust.

I looked up trust: Trust, then, can be defined as confidence, the absence of suspicion, confirmed by track record and our ability to correct.

The track record is only a confirmation of well-placed trust. If we define trust solely in terms of past events, we often consign ourselves to long periods of testing and sometimes stubborn unforgiveness. It is much more productive to correct mistakes and miscommunications to re-build trust starting now.

http://www.learningcenter.net/library/trust.shtml

Melanie Benson-Strick

Another conference call featuring Melanie Benson-Strick on running your own business and working less.

3 major mistakes:
Bright, shiny object syndrome – wanna do that, say yes because you can, instead of knowing it’ll pay off
Superhero syndrome – Flurry of activity without any plan for it, all over the place
Job syndrome – We create a biz to make more money, but with no idea how to run a biz, so we run it like an employee instead of taking responsibility for running a successful biz.

No shortage of ideas, just a shortage of results
clear ideas + focused action = massive results

Your beliefs dictate your habits which dictate your results
Your inner game dictates your outer game
If you don’t like your results, you have to change inner game first… all the advertisement and web pages won’t pay off otherwise

Formula for doing stuff
Don’t say yes to everything, have a clear plan and all that
When you can say yes to something and know how it pays off, then you have formula for success:
How is this gonna make money for my business? Then you are playing the 6-7 figure game.

Process for a certain woman: What are values, priorities, skills, what gets her excited?
What would pay off for her would be doing her own live events.
1. You’ve got to be clear on what’s important to you.
2. Have a plan to achieve it. Work on your plan every day.
3. Block time for working on the business. Be in your big-picture thinking.
4. Integrating specific action steps into your calendar. Move from idea stage into calendar…
5. Leveraging your resources… don’t try to do it all by yourself

Why don’t you do #2? Is it frustrating, boring, don’t know how, don’t get it’s high payoff? We get so sucked into working in biz, we don’t work *on* biz aspect. It’s high payoff
If you don’t know how, learn skill
You cannot eat an elephant in one bite – cannot make goals that big, ie “Write a book”
Keep a plan visible – biz plan, action plan, marketing plan… action plan moves to calendar.. otherwise nothing gets done
Making planning a habit = high payoff

Get clear on life struggles – Most ppl chase their own tail.
Get clear about lifestyle goals – was frustrated by how hard she worked… put her lifestyle goals first – traveling, go to Europe … milestone goals, etc.
Get in habits – even if it’s stuff you don’t like
Clear desk of distractions – when you allow toxic experiences, surrounded by ppl who don’t support you, then it’ll be hard for you to focus on high payoff activities

If you’re not focused, your teams are not focused.

If you’re not planning, making habits, then you can’t do it on your own.

Magnetizing your goal – attracts you to it

Sounds good, doesn't it?

Online marketing

Yesterday I was on a conference call with Alex Mandossian and David Riklan. This is what stood out to me:

How to get big names – give them things of value. If you give, they’ll eventually give back. Give first.
Give for a year or two before becoming comfortable asking them for help.
Make yourself more valuable to them – get more search optimization skills, etc.

Identify important keywords for your industry, and then kick ass on them online.

More people you’re linked to, the better. The higher the quality of links and content on them, the better.

Free article submitting tools out there
Ezinecheck.com
Alexa.com – If you're looking for business partners, this site ranks sites based on popularity

Of course it seems like you'd have to be popular already to be popular, but there you go...