How you define success?

One of the hardest things to define. Here is how Edward de Bono tries to define it:

At no point in this book am I going to define ‘success’. We all have an idea of what the term means but a precise definition is impossible. (There is exactly the same trouble with the world ‘creativity’)

Is it success in the eyes of the world: winning an Olympic gold medal or at Wimbledon; making a great deal of money; running a large organization; making things happen; being awarded the Nobel Price?
Or, is it personal success: the person who toward the end of his or her life feels that it has been a happy, fulfilled, and enjoyed life?

Which is the more successful, a man who has made millions but is unhappy and unsatisfied or an unnoticed person who has led a happy life?
There are clearly many different ways of looking at success and it is only the poverty of the English language which provides us with but a single word for them.

Perhaps the simplest definition is ‘to set out to do something and to succeed in doing it‘.

(Tactics, The Art & Science of Success, Page 9)

How to sell anything to any body

A summary of Joe Girard’s classic book on selling “How to Sell Anything to Anybody”, written by me, is available. Download your free copy.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Update: Added title image.

The HR Project

The HR Project

hr@lists.mavsol.com is a new mailing list containing email addresses of people associated with human resource development. This includes HR managers, professionals and trainers. For the last few months I am compiling database of people like you are who associated with HR in one way or another. So chances are you are already on this list.

Aims

The general aim is to help the development of human resources ("people" if you prefer a simpler word) by pooling, organizing and communicating the efforts of people who are already doing this kind of development work.

We need to fill the gaps left by the traditional education. Higher education has become extremely expensive and return on investment is quite poor.

There is lot of emphasis on knowing (literacy) but very little on doing (operacy). Majority of young people who are enrolled in master level studies and are still financially dependent on their parents is an ample proof of this.

Internet

Using Internet tools and technologies effectively is a great way to do something useful with very little or no cost. This is an area where I have experience and can help. This includes, but not limited to, e-commerce.

Joining the mailing list

Chances are you are already on this list. If you think I have missed you, please join using any of following two ways:

1. Visit mailing list website: http://lists.mavsol.com/mailman/listinfo/hr
2. Send a blank email to hr-request@lists.mavsol.com with ‘subscribe’ in the subject.

Notes

1. To join you do not need to provide any personal information. Your email is enough.
2. If, for any reason, you do not want to be part of this mailing, you will be able to remove yourself. Instructions will be included in every email. (Gmail also provides a direct way to remove yourself from any mailman mailing list.)

Mailing lists – the ignored social media

I have 946 friends on facebook. A large number of them (about 300-400) are marketers, salespersons, social media "gurus", web site developers or search engine optimization experts. But only 3 of them have some sort of mailing list. And only one of them, a social media expert, has a correctly setup, permission based, mailing list.

There are few reasons why, compared to social media, there is very little or no emphasis on mailing lists:

1. It takes more effort to setup a mailing list system than creating a facebook account or page. You either need to have technical knowledge yourself, hire someone to setup it up for you or buy an online subscription.
2. Populating and maintaining a relevant and targeted mailing list requires time and effort investment.
3. People will not signup your mailing list as easily as they can become your friend (or follower) on social media. So the instant satisfaction element is missing.
4. An incorrectly setup mailing list or one without a genuine / single click un-subscription link can send all your email newsletters in spam folder or get marked as spam by users. This is another discouraging factor.
5. Unlike the ‘like’ button (pun not intended) count, judging the effectiveness of your newsletter is not quite straight forward.
6. The inbox noise demands special care to write a minimalist and value driven news letter which is actually read. Who has the time to do this?

Why take the trouble to setup a mailing list? Take the case of facebook, the most popular social media website: With the increassing amount of noise on facebook like multiple status updates per day by friends, photos, videos, unwanted invitations, forced groups, event invitations, page joining requests etc. it is hard to focus on relevent and interesting things even from focused fan pages and groups.

On the other hand with a mailing list you can create a targeted and focused audience with only a few monthly updates.

Social media is excellent but not enough.

If you have some IT knowledge (or have access to) and want to setup your own mailing list software then you can select either ‘mailman’ or ‘phplist‘. Both of these are free and my personal favorite for all occasions.

Otherwise you should go for the hosted solutions. phplist is also available as hosted solution for a small price (free for a small list). Other solutions like mailchimp offer free service up to 2000 subscribers with 12,000/- email messages per month. This should be enough to start with or for small groups.

The best guidelines on setting up and creating an email newsletter have been written by Jakob Nielson, the web usability guru. Visit this page (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/) and search for newsletter to see all his past columns on this subject. Also signup to his newsletter to see his own advice in practice.

If you already have a customer database or friends list, you can import it into your mailing list software. Your first email to your new mailing list should inform the user about your new maling list and allow them to get off the list as easily as possibly, preferably with a single click and without asking for a reason.

Start your mailing list today because it is going to take time to be populated and effective. Feel free to add me to your list.

A mailing list about mailing lists

This new mailing list is intended to help you start your own mailing list. You can join this list in two ways:

• Visit mailing list website: http://lists.mavsol.com/mailman/listinfo/mailing
• Send a blank email to mailing-request@lists.mavsol.com with ‘subscribe’ in the subject.

Feel free to subscribe, unsubscribe and tell others about it. I shall begin posting to this email list from January 1, 2012.

Elegance of minimalist design

Have you visited apple.com lately?

And comparing Apple and Microsoft with a remote control.

Source: http://www.marco.org/2009/07/16/these-two-remotes-by-apple-left-apple-tv-and

Homeopathy medicines and treatment for dengue and malaria fever

Not all fevers are dengue or malaria infections. But in this ongoing dengue season, you should seek immediate medical advice from a qualified medical practitioner or hospital for any change in your body temperature. Following information is not a replacement for expert medical advice.

Prevention

Malaria Officinalis 30c can be used as a preventive measure against dengue and malaria fever:
One dose in the morning and one in the evening for two days.

Repeat after 1 week for 3 weeks.

Treatment

(1) If fever starts with vomiting:

Ipcac 30c – One dose only in the beginning. This will take care of vomiting in couple of hours.
Ferrum Phos 30x, Natrum Sulph 30x: Take both these medicines alternatively every 4 hours. These will take care of fever (and skin rashes if any.)

(2) If fever is accompanied by extreme pain in the body:

Ipcac 30c – One dose only in the beginning. This will take care of vomiting in couple of hours.

Eupatorium perfoliatum 30c – 4 doses with 4 hour interval. This will take care of the body pain.

Ferrum Phos 30x, Natrum Sulph 30x: Take these medicines alternatively every 4 hours for two days. These will take care of fever. (and skin rashes if any.)

(3) If blood platelets count goes down too low, bleeding can start. This is an emergency and you should immediately transfer the patient to the hospital. A single dose of Crotalus horridus 30c can help stop the bleeding.

Notes

1. The earlier, the better. I have seen some cases of dengue fever get better within first 24 hours with the timely treatment of above medicines.
2. The above are the most common symptoms of prevailing dengue infection in Lahore and other parts of the city. If your symptoms differ significantly, contact me (ar.saqib@gmail.com) and I shall put you in contact with a qualified homeopath. (All support is voluntary and free of cost)
3. These medicines can be taken safely by kids and pregnant women as well without any fear of side effects.
4. These medicines can be taken along with whatever other treatment you are on.
5. These medicines are not expensive and all of the above can be bought for less than Rs: 200/-.
6. In my personal experience, medicines made by Masood Homeopathy Stores and Hospitals are very effective. They have sales points in 3 different parts of Lahore. For details see http://goo.gl/WnSTa
7. If you have trouble arranging these medicine, email me (ar.saqib@gmail.com) and I shall get these delivered to you free of cost.

I shall update this blog post as I find more information. Bookmark this blog post or, better, subscribe to this blog to stay updated.

Special thanks to my respected friend, Dr. Asad Safdar, for sharing this information. He is a qualified homeopath currently practicing in US with experience of treating dengue patients in Pakistan.

Build your online academy with Moodle

Moodle (http://moodle.org/) is a free and opensource software which you can use to build your online academy. I have been playing with Moodle for the last few days for a non-profit project and I am amazed with its capabilities to build online learning solutions.

To start with:

1. Moodle is a free and open source solution written in php with mysql back-end.
2. Moodle is as easier to install as WordPress is on a cheap, shared hosting account. So for small setups, no expensive servers or technical knowledge is required.
3. Extensive inline and online documentation.

Moodle offers complete life cycle of a typical learning place. For example:

1. Students can self-register with "the academy".
2. Student can view which courses are being offered and can enroll themselves automatically, through an offline distributed key or manually by a teacher (Once they have paid the fee for that course, for example.)
3. Students can collaborate with each other on a particular course through forums and wikis.

Once registered and enrolled, students can learn from variety of teaching material available which can include lecture notes, audio and video resources as well as other resources like links and webpages. This teaching material is prepared or compiled by you, the teacher, in advance.

Students can submit/upload their assignments in a number of ways. Moodle’s Quiz module can be used to build question papers. These question papers can have multiple choice questions, true/false and short answers among other possibilities.

Quiz module is one of the powerful tools in Moodle. Once a student has attempted a quiz, it can automatically calculate grades. Correct answers and grades can be optionally shown to the student right away.

Last, but not the least, you can date and time limit every activity. You can also allow only one attempt or multiple attempts for each course.

You can try Moodle on its demo site here (http://demo.moodle.net/) I shall share more details and experiences here once I complete my small project based upon Moodle.

Don’t join the club – How to sell anything to any body (Part 6/n)

It seems that our brains are tuned to like gossips, conspiracy theories and negativity. We can indulge in all these activies without much effort. Contrast this with doing something useful early morning like planning your day or start working on your project immediately; it is anything but easy.

A typical day starts with discussions about what happened between Joe and boss yesterday, how you "taught someone a lesson for life", what is going to happen if your manager can’t manage to deliver his or her project on time or what happened in your neighborhood (or home) last night etc.

These are all early morning discussions. After that you can discuss what you are going to eat at lunch, why the company’s lunch is so bad, why the new guy in sales (or accounts etc.) is so stupid or how someone from [the political party you hate] is so corrupt and inept.

There are two problems with these activies:

1. You waste your valuable time.
2. You de-tune your mind to do the real work. Getting into the flow of doing real work requires concentrationw which is already lost.

Joe Girard asks you to avoid joining the informal club at your workplace where all the above discussions happen. This club is active when all sales people get togather and don’t have anything immediate or urgent to do.

Unless you are in a dead end job (where every day is just another days without any value addtion to your personality), you waste extemely valuable time by joining the club. (And if you are in a dead end job, get rid of it; TODAY).

Selling is something not limited to making a sales call and asking someone to buy your product. There are countless other activities you need to do everyday; making a list of new prospects to call or mail, upadating your mailing list, updating your website with new promotions or staff, writing some new training material for your products, sending thank you letters, greeting cards or emails, reminding existing customers any service due dates, sending some free stuff to your loyal customer or reading a book on sales and marketing; just to name a few.

An effective sales process is like sowing seeds daily. Some seeds will be wasted, some seeds may not grow and some will become trees in the time to come. Unfortunately you do not know which seeds are good and which are bad. So for better results you sow a large number of seeds.

All these selling activities, sowing seeds, require a lot of time. By not joining the club you can do one or another of these activies all day and increase your chances of more sales.

Joe says:

.. there is a lot of turnover among beginning salespeople. And the reason that is true is because just about anybody can make a few sales at the start. Whether it is cars or insurance or anything else, everybody can buy one himself, sell one to his father-in-law, and sell another one to his best friend. "After the third sale," a sales manager once told me, "is when you know if a guy is a real salesman or not."

I don’t want you to shutdown your newly started business or stop selling after your third sale. Save time by not joining the club and invest it in selling activities.

Joe narrates an interesting experience. When he started selling cars on his first job, he avoided joining the club. This resulted in such a good performance that, despite being new and inexperienced, he was selling more cars than the experienced and old guys at that place. He was then fired because old guys complained that he was taking their business but also probably because he did not join the club. So you need to be careful too not to alinate someone by not joining the club.

Girard’s Law of 250 – How to sell anything to any body (Part 5/n)

On average, everyone of us knows 250 people very well without any sales or marketing effort. These are the 250 people who trust you. You can influence them with your ideas, suggestions or acts of buying stuff.

These 250 are the people you have built contact with as you have lived through your first 20-30 years. This list includes your relatives, family friends, neighbors, teachers, friends, colleagues etc. These are the 250 people who will come to your wedding or funeral.

Girard calls this “Girard’s Law of 250″ and discovered it by surveying the catering services for weddings and funeral places. His survay showed that at least 250 people attended any wedding (250 from bride’s side, 250 from groom’s side) or funneral. He terms this law as the most important thing you can learn from him.

If someone is head of a department with large number of people working under him, a salesman of some other product, a union leader, president of a local business association, a barber or a dentist he has influence on more than 250 people.

In this chapter, Girard again emphasis the importance of treating each and every prospect and customer nicely. If you treat a single person badly, Girard’s law of 250 will kick in, and the badly treated customer can tell 250 more people not to do business with you. Those 250 people, in turn, can also influence their own 250s in this way. This chain reaction, which spreads your reputation, is much more powerful than you can imagine.

Joe Girard, the world’s best salesman with record sales to his credit, says that he can’t afford to treat a single customer or prospect badly. Which means we, who still have to make any sort of sales record, surely can’t afford to do that too.

The mooch is a human being – How to sell anything to any body (Part 4/n)

This chapter discusses a very important attitude of salespeople towards customers. When you have started selling and have faced a few bad customers, you start building a negative attitude towards all your customers. You start labeling them like "All customers are ….". (Replace ellipses with whatever negative name you use for your customers.)

According to Joe, "The mooch" is the term used by sales people in car sales business in Detroit. Words in your head can be communicated to your customer with your behavior and become harmful.

Joe admits that there is a reason for having bad attitude towards customers:

That’s because we are professionals whose time is worth money, and every day we see a lot of people who don’t seem to be serious about anything but taking up our time. That’s really the problem. That’s really the reason we think of a person as The Mooch, or whatever term you use where you come from.

And there is a reason customers behave strangely too; The sales people themselves don’t have very good reputation themselves in the world. Customers know that sales people are out there to sell them anything by hook or by crook. They also think that sales people have overemphasized the benefits or features and are hiding any product defects.

So before any selling process starts, you need to correct your attitude and you need to make your customer relax and trust. For that you need to treat him like a human by having a good attitude and giving him a fair deal for his money.

This is very important for your first sale to that customer as well as future sales to that customer. In Joe’s case, 6 out of 10 customers every day are either old customers or referrals by old customers. That counts for 60% of business brought by people who were like a human in the past.