Orvel Ray presenting diplomas in Nairobi, Kenya

In September, speaker and consultant Scott “Q” Marcus did a program and workshop for NSA Colorado on an advanced audience-interaction technique called “Sculpting,” in which participants collaborate to build a living model of a problem or situation, then work to solve it. It was outstanding in every respect, and we all left the day eager to give it a try.

The opportunity arose in the opening hour of a two-day Advanced Guerrilla Selling Seminar that I was teaching last week in Nairobi, Kenya. After the opening story and overview, the room was just flat. At first I just chalked it up to my America accent; after all, their first language was Swahili. Or maybe it was a bit of a cultural thing (here’s another White man telling us what to do) but it just wasn’t connecting. Here were 90 Sales VPs and Managers, from three countries, representing the biggest companies in East Africa, sitting quietly and looking skeptical. I was in trouble and I knew it.

So I did a sculpt, based on the “Get through the Day” theme that Scott had demonstrated. I called for a volunteer to represent the role of the Salesman. Mark, who sells big transformers to electrical utilities, stepped forward, and we positioned him far stage left, and gave him the goal of getting across to the far end of the 20-foot stage, which would represent his goal of making the sale.

Then I asked the audience to shout out possible obstacles that could get in the way.

“Competition!”
“Traffic” (Nairobi is notoriously gridlocked)
“Infrastructure” (temperamental at best, or lacking altogether)
“Technology”
“Dead mobile”
“Corruption”
“Time”
“Price”
and so on.
As each participant spoke up, we brought them in turn up onto the stage, asked them to pose in a way that would show us what their obstacle might “look like,” and “where in the day” it should go. After arranging themselves across the stage, we set the sculpt in motion. “OK, Mark, time to go to work.”

It looked like a Rugby scrum as Mark struggled to push his way over, around, under and through one challenger after another. It was hysterical. When he finally made it to far stage right, the room exploded into applause and cheers.

“So, is this what it feels like to do business in Africa?” I asked.

A resounding, “YES!”

“Ok, then. Over the next two days, this seminar is going to teach you strategies and tactics to help overcome all of these obstacles, and more.”

It was as if someone had waved a magic wand. What they got from the sculpt was that, first of all, this was going to be a fun, collaborative, participative environment, rather than a formal stuffy lecture. (Kenya was a British Protectorate, and that culture still lingers. It’s subtle, but Kenyans are resentful of white authority figures). It also set their expectations that the content would be practical and street-wise. They could see that, “this guy gets it.” I think it gave them permission to relax, speak out and play along. And it humanized me in a way that bonded me to the group. From that moment on, they were fully engaged, relaxed, chatty and eager to speak out and participate.

Imagine my shock and surprise when this same group gave the program a standing ovation at the end of the second day. Absolutely unheard of for a long seminar; certainly a first in my career.

The sculpt set the stage for a successful learning experience that transcended language, race and culture. Scott, I can’t thank you enough for teaching us this very powerful technique, and I look forward to using it again in my next seminar.

Africa is like a whole other country, and it’s hard to find stuff.  The same could be said of Lincoln, Nebraska.

Every Professional speaker should take responsibility for their own comfort and equipment, and always be prepared for the inevitable catastrophe.

The Professional Speaker’s Gig bag should contain:

1. Your laptop computer
2. A dedicated power supply that stays in your bag.  (I recommend the universal Targus AC70U.)  Leave the factory one at your desk.   That way you’ll never make the mistake of forgetting to pack it. And you won’t be too disappointed when you leave the universal one behind at a venue.  You can get another at most any office supply box store.
3. Your own PowerPoint controller (I highly recommend the Logitech Professional Presenter R800, which includes a green laser and a cool timer that vibrates to tell you when to shut up. )
4. A small portable mouse (a cheap one works fine; you won’t be using it that much.)
5. Copy of your install disk for Microsoft Office for when you’re sitting in a Kinko’s at 2:00 AM and need that obscure printer driver.
6. A 4 gig flash drive for backing up your presentation, and another for using sneakernet to transport it to another platform. Better still, carry a second backup  in your pocket or purse. It will save your show when your laptop dies or is stolen out of the meeting room while you pee.
7. Portable travel alarm clock with a display that you can read from across the stage.  (I also recommend the free iPhone app NightTime for its  big red-number display.)
8. Portable digital thermometer, to settle the argument between the hotel engineer and the whining guest who insists it’s too cold.
9. Fully loaded iPod, with royalty-free music that you can play during walk-in and breaks in your program, plus news podcasts, a movie and a favorite TV show or two.
10. iPod/iPhone USB connector cord and AC adapter/charger
11. A spare pair of Apple earbuds so you can listen on the plane
12. A stereo 1/8″ (mini) phone to 2 mono 1/4″ phone send return (insert) cable so you can plug the iPod directly into the sound system (ask the guy at Radio Shack).
13. Noise canceling headphones (I highly recommend the Bose Quiet Comfort 15′s.  They sound much better, and are a great comfort when strapped in next to the inconsolable crying baby.)
14. Three or four spare AAA batteries to power your remote and headphones.
15. Package of 2 spare Duracell 12V batteries for the wireless mics, even when the hotel supplies them. When they go dead, it’s always in the middle of your show.
16. Package of Halls Honey Lemon Cough Drops (the Cherry ones make your tongue look weird)
17. Pack of chewable Pepto Bismo tablets
18. Package of Imodium AD (for when Pepto Bismo doesn’t help)
19. Melatonin tablets. The absolute best herbal remedy for jet lag. Take two an hour or two before  sleepytime.
20. Blindfold (for airplane sleepytime. Also handy for terminating unwanted conversations with annoying seatmates. You can buy them in most airport shops, but they hand these out in first class, so ask the cabin crew for one on your next long haul.
21. Copy of your room setup instructions. The hotel will have lost the one you sent ahead. Trust me on this.
22. Copy of your standard introduction, printed in 24 point type. Your introducer will have forgotten the one you sent ahead. Trust me on this too.
23. Color copy of your passport (and applicable visas)
24. Color copy of your drivers license (enlarged 2x)
25. A crisp $100 bill (series 2000 or later; some overseas hotels won’t accept the older ones). Hide it in a pocket or fold of your computer bag. This can bail you out of a lot of trouble almost anywhere in the world.

All this, and more, fits neatly in my IBM Thinkpad’s little backback. Not only has it saved my skin, but it’s rescued more than my share of other speakers as well.

Earl Nightingale had it right when he wrote The Strangest Secret. “You become what you think about.” A friend gave me this cassette when I was a sophomore in college, and it changed my life. It made me aware of the internal chatter in my head, and all of the negative, discouraging things I had been saying to myself. That’s because I grew up in an abusive, dysfunctional family where I was told I’d never amount to nuthin’. My mother mocked me for wanting to go to college, and she was shocked when I won a scholarship.

My dorm roommate thought I was nuts. I started reading affirmations from a deck of 3×5 cards. Out loud. After nearly flunking out my freshman year, The Power of Positive Thinking turned me into a deans-list scholar. Then one day the psychology professor was lecturing about a study that suggested that most of our thinking takes the form of pictures, and that memories are stored and retrieved as pictures. That got me thinking.

A speed reading course had already taught a technique for remembering lists by turning them into pictures. For example, let’s say I needed to go to the store and buy toothpaste, beans, rice, coffee, sugar, bread, cereal, and bananas, I could conjure up a picture of a chimp with bad teeth, wearing a baker’s hat and eating a banana, while holding a mug full of corn flakes heaped with sugar, sitting on two burlap bags stenciled “RICE” and “BEANS.” You get the picture.

Our debate coach taught a variation of this technique, called the “loci method,” to organize important facts by visualizing a walk through the rooms of a house. This trick was popular in ancient Greece for memorizing long speeches and texts. It worked for Aristotle.

One afternoon, Denise, my wife-to-be, was working on a collage for an art class, and it occurred to me that I could put pictures together to represent my affirmations, and this might even be more effective than just words. So we each started building a scrapbook of things we’d like to have, places we’d like to go, and things we wanted to achieve in our lives. The format was simple: a cheep ring binder filled with plastic sleeves where you can slide in the pages. We cut photos from magazines and pasted them together into pages that represented our dreams and goals. We were too poor to afford a television, so we jokingly called our project “TomorrowVision.” We kept these books on the night table, and we’d review them together just before going to sleep when our subconscious mind would be most impressionable.

Years passed, and after a time we fell out of the picture-book-on-the-night-table habit. So much for applied psychology. We both had busy professional lives, then a son, and then another. We still followed the discipline of writing down our goals each month, and keeping a To-Do list in a DayTimer. But I completely forgot about TomorrowVision until I developed the film from Nassau.

One of those early life goals was to learn to scuba dive. This was represented in my scrapbook by a half-page underwater shot, torn from a magazine, of a diver with a big colorful fish on a reef.

When a client asked me to teach a series of seminars in Hawaii, we seized the opportunity and registered for pool classes, and finished our open-water certification in Kona. It was many trips, and many, many dives later that I rented that underwater camera on a whim.

As I was flipping through the dive pictures, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was the fish, the SAME fish (which I now recognized as Holocanthus ciliarus, the Queen Angel). I called out to Denise, “Darling, do you know whatever happened to those old visualization notebooks we used to have?”

“Look in the pile of books under the bed.”

There it was. The picture in the TomorrowVision book looked as if it had been shot on the same roll of film.

Shock and surprise faded into deep satisfaction as I flipped through these pages. These images that had once represented life-long goals had already been realized: our home in the mountains in Colorado; writing a book; sailing the tropics; skiing with our boys; kayaking in Alaska; teaching at the University; cycling around Ireland; speaking in Mexico, Europe and Australia. I held in my hands a virtual scrapbook of the past ten years of our lives. The music from “Twilight Zone” started playing in my head.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz taught us that, “Your subconscious mind can not tell the difference between an actual experience and one that is vividly imagined.” By looking into our future through our TomorrowVision, we were programming our brains to seek out and recognize opportunities, large and small, that would bring us closer to those goals. Looking back, it seems as if those events were inevitable, because even our most incidental daily decisions were informed by deep, subconscious intent.

Over the past 30 years, leading experts like Louise Hay, Anthony Robbins and Depak Chopra have spoken passionately about the power of creative visualization. It’s no longer viewed as a mystical phenomenon. Today you can even buy an affirmation app for your iPhone. Psychologists and neuroscientists are looking deep into the brain, and can explain in scientific terms exactly how this seemingly magical process works.

I recently read how competitors in the World Memory Championships use variations on these same visual imagery tricks to perform mind-boggling feats, recanting long strings of numbers, like the mathematical constant pi (the record now stands at more than 80,000 digits) or memorizing the sequence of a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than a minute (30 seconds is the new Four-Minute-Mile). MRI scans of the brains of these mental heavyweights shows them lighting up areas normally used for visual recall and spatial navigation. The evolutionary explanation is simple. Presumably our ancestors found it particularly useful to recall where they found their last meal, or the way back to the cave.

The same mechanism allows us to remember our future, and then automatically steer around life’s obstacles until we arrive. The life we’ve lead has been extraordinary beyond my wildest dreams. I have only one regret; what if I had kept up the discipline by changing out my TomorrowVision pages as each goal was realized, replacing them with new images and loftier goals? What more might I have done?

Today that old ring binder is sitting on my desk, awaiting a new set of pages, and I’ve included these two extraordinary photographs for your review. This simple technique can help you achieve your goals and live your dreams as well. Here’s proof that when we give our lives a roadmap, our deep intellect will eventually navigate a course to it, even if it’s hidden away on a reef, deep beneath some distant sea.
/>

Rapid Repair, a little company In Kalamazoo, Michigan, will install a 240 GB hard drive upgrade in your iPod. I can’t make this stuff up, folks. For about the price of a NEW iPod, you can expand your old iPod to 240 GIGS! For cryin’ out loud, the IBM laptop I’m using here only has 40 gigs. Two-Hundred-Forty GIGABYTES is enough disk space for 20 hours of MP3 video or 60,000 songs! What on EARTH would anyone DO with THAT much content? Whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want. That’s what.

In advance of Team Summit, I was doing Guerrilla sales training for DISH Network’s National Sales Meeting at the Grand Hyatt. A video billboard just outside the ballroom promoted the hotel’s newest room amenity. They have replaced the typical (and SO last millennium) bedside clock radio with a HI-FI iPod docking station. (And I’m old enough to remember when having a coffeemaker in the room was a big deal!) What do you do with a HI-FI iPod docking station? Well, you listen to your 60,000 songs. That’s what.

So now, you can take exactly the music you want, listen to it whenever you want, wherever you want And when you’re a guest at the Denver Grand Hyatt, you can play it right in your suite, and even wake up in the morning to your favorite (is this beginning to sound a lot like SLING?). No more annoying all-country stations to sift through. No more of those poor people at NPR of nagging you to donate a car. Hyatt has found yet another weapon to deploy in the room-amenities arms race.

Alvin Toffler predicted this kind of made-my-way-on-demand economy way back in 1970. Today’s consumers have more choices than ever, and they still demand more and more options. Ragu now offers 36 flavors of spaghetti sauce in 6 varieties. (Watch Malcom Gladwell’s short video on TED about this phenomenon!)

What this means is that guerrillas can create a competitive advantage by offering their customers hyper-customized versions of their product or service. These same customers will pay more, and they are more loyal.

home

by Guerrilla Selling Speaker Orvel Ray Wilson, CSP

How would you like to see a 10% sales lift on a $10 investment? Start by making individual production public.

Go to the office supply and buy a white dry-erase marker board, a set of colored markers, and a couple of rolls of black border tape (that skinny, vinyl tape used for making lines on your whiteboard).

Use the border tape to divide the whiteboard into 9 columns.

The first column is NAME, then a column for each of the seven days of the week, and a column on the right for TOTAL. Now create a line for each salesperson.

Hang it on the wall in the warehouse, break-room or back office where everyone (except customers) will see it.

Each day, require each of your sales associates to write their sales figures for the day in the appropriate box before they go home. A blank indicates that they were not in the store that day. You may have to enforce the rule at first; if they skip (or just forget) fine them a dollar for the coffee kitty. But soon, everyone will be eager to play the game.

This works on several levels. First, your stars will set the pace for the rest of team, because salespeople are genetically competitive. That alone will increase their overall sales performance by the promised ten percent. Great sales trainers and coaches capitalize on that trait to help team members improve their skills.

It will also make everyone more consistent, because no one wants to post a zero for the day. And nobody wants to be consistently in last place, so they will work to improve their product knowledge and sales skills. And that one person you have on your team who you wish you hadn’t hired? After a few weeks he’ll get the message and leave on his own.

Raising the Bar

You can produce even more dramatic results by tracking all of the associates’ performance on three key performance indicators. At end of the month, calculate their total sales volume, their average ticket amount and their gross margin, then compute the overall averages for each variable across the store, and compare each associate’s performance to the average.

Post the results, or print them in a spreadsheet to hand out, for example:

Table 1

Congratulate those who beat the norm, then meet individually with each associate to discuss his or her individual performance. “You’re doing a good job over all, and I noticed that last month, you were above average on (parameters) while your (parameter) was just a little bit below the average. Why do you think that was? How could we work together to help get you up to the average (on this parameter)?”

This is a highly motivating combination. Nobody wants to perform “below average,” but suggesting that you just expect them to work up to the norm will always be perceived as reasonable and achievable. It should be easy enough. After all, you’re not asking a low performer to shatter any records, just to improve in one specific area enough to make the middle ground.

In the example above, the average sales volume per associate for the month was $21,557.14. So you might take Ted aside and ask him to suggest ways that he might sell an additional $1,300 this month. After all, he only needs $1,300 to get up to the average.

You’d have the same conversation with Jeannie, Chris and Michelle, and suggest ways that they could increase their overall sales. Maybe they just need to put in more hours, or take a Sunday shift or two. Perhaps they need to pay closer attention to customers when they’re in the store, or be more proactive about suggesting companion products or accessories. Perhaps you can coach them on effectively handling more than one customer at a time.

In the same example, the average number of sales per associate was 26.9, but Jeannie, Ted, Michelle and Ryan all fell below that average. You can talk to them about qualifying customers more carefully, or help them improve their closing skills. They only need to close a few more sales next month to move into “above average” territory.

Similarly, while the average gross margin was 30.7%, Ryan, Pat, Chris and Jeannie made above-average profits, while Ted, Aaron, Linda and Ryan were below the bar. Perhaps they’re over-emphasizing sale merchandise. You might coach them on up-selling to full-feature products, or adding high-margin accessories. Or show the best first. After all, they only need to cross-sell or up-sell every now and then to be above the average.

From time to time, you can change the parameters to help associates improve in other areas such as closing ratios, total accessories sold or extended warranty penetration.

Very quickly, you’ll find that the averages start to climb, as each associate gets exactly the coaching they need from month to month to improve their most critical skills.

To learn how we can help you built a top-performing guerrilla sales team, or to order your own copy of Guerrilla Retailing, call us toll-free 800-247-9145.

Home

Some people, when they hear the title of our materials, think we’re advocating something manipulative or dishonest. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. The truth is that Guerrilla Selling relies on Time, Energy, and Imagination to gain a competitive advantage.

On the other hand, it’s no wonder some people get confused.

Camo is back in style

–Orvel Ray

Home

With 47 titles in the Guerrilla Marketing series, in 60 languages, and more than 20 million books sold worldwide, we’ve learned a few things about how to name books.

Publishers love a series. So do readers. String your titles together around a moniker, “Guerrilla Selling,” “Guerrilla Negotiating”, “Guerrilla Retailing.”

Try to shorten your title to two words. Two Words. “Emotional Intelligence.” Three if you count the article (“Made to Stick,” “Good to Great”).

Keep the sub-title 7 words or less, and make it stand on it’s own as an elevator pitch.

Home

We have this argument with our clients all the time:

“Oh, we can’t afford to spend money on training.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, what if we train them and they leave?”

“What if you DON’T train them and they STAY?”

Savvy Guerrillas know that marketing is an investment, not an expense. Skills training, and particularly sales training, is one of the most conservative guerrilla marketing investments you can make.

At a “Guerrilla Selling” seminar I was conducting recently, we were discussing creative ways to get through to reluctant prospects, especially C-level executives. One of the participants got up and walked out. He returned a few minutes later to announce, “I didn’t think it would work, so I stepped out in the hall to prove you wrong. Not only did I get through; I got the order!”

Later I learned that the profit from that single transaction was more than enough to cover my fee for the day. We can only guess that the return on investment for this client was hundreds of times their investment in guerilla training.

Home

Continuing my discussion with fellow professional speaker Suzannah Baum, she shared some concern about how to approach the client after they have already videotaped her presentation.

As a Guerrilla Selling Speaker, I often have clients video my keynote for internal publication. Guerrillas believe in the power of Investment, so they invest first in their customers and clients. Explain that your copyright attorney had advised you that you need to write a letter specifically granting permission to use the video, because it may otherwise infringe on unforeseen future uses of the material in books, magazines, pay-per-view, etc.

Prepare the letter on your stationary, using the language, “[Your Company] hereby grants limited, non-transferable License and permission for [Client] to publish the [length] minute video, ["Title of Your Training”] recorded on [performance date] at [location], hereinafter referred to as “the video.” [Client] may publish an edited version of the video, subject to approval of the author, on their company website at [http://www.clientswebsite.com] for viewing by employees of [Client] and the general public, for a period of [one year should suffice, but not more than three]. Commercial use and mechanical distribution are specifically excluded.

“[Client] agrees to indemnify [you] from any action which may arise as a consequence of this publication. [You] reciprocally indemnify [Client] and affirm that [your company] posses all rights to the video content, and have the authority to grant such license.

“In consideration of this license, [Client] agrees to surrender to the author all original master video tapes of the video, together with a DV or QuickTime version of the finished product on DVD within 30 days of completion of their edits. All Other Rights Reserved.”

Sign and date two copies, and have them countersign, date and return a copy of the letter. That should do it.

Then point to it from your website, your one-sheet, your bio, your eSpeakers listing, your bureau listings, etc. Here’s the guerilla twist: why go to all the bother of hosting a long demo video on your own servers when they will do it for you?

–OrvelRay

Home

Fellow guerrilla Vince Golder posted a question on the Guerrilla Marketing Tips for Small Business forum on LinkedIn, asking:

“I’ve had a couple of debates over the years with people who were quite firm in their belief that any form of cash/gift commission given in return for a successful referral was a bribe!! I would rather pay one of my own clients or contacts a just reward for promoting my business, than an expensive agency or media company.” What do you think?

Let me start by saying that cash, gifts and commissions are three very different things. Each may be appropriate or not, depending on the circumstances. Guerrillas ALWAYS look for appropriate ways to REWARD customers for their business.

As I’ve said before in this forum, the best way to get referrals is to ASK for them. (See my recent blog on the topic, March 4, 2009, below) And only reward referrals if you want to KEEP getting them.

No, it is not a bribe. And no, it is not enough to simply express your appreciation.

A nice Thank You card is a good start, but don’t be tempted to send it by e-mail. Personally, I use Hallmark, because I care enough to ____________________ .

Cash is awkward, so enclose a gift card instead. Coffee at Starbucks, free fries at McDonald’s. Better still, relate to their interests: something from Amazon or Borders for bookworms, or office supplies from Staples to reward the whole office.

If the referral is unsolicited, keep the amount something under $100. For bigger referrals, consider bigger rewards: a bottle (or case) of nice wine, a magazine subscription, dinner for two somewhere special, or the fruit-of-the-month club from Harry & David. You can always take them out, for coffee, for lunch, for a round of golf. We’ve given clients pairs of plane tickets. We once took a dozen people from United Airlines to a Rockies game.

There are two guerrilla gifts you can give to people who can’t accept gifts: flowers and food. For women, send a simple bouquet with a business card, delivered to their office by FTD. A variation is to send a large bouquet (something everyone can enjoy) to the Reception desk, with a “Thanks Everyone” note. And if you send flowers on a holiday, like Easter or Halloween, all the better. If you customer is a man, send roses. Red ones. You send me a dozen red roses with a “Thank You” note, and my wife is going to love me, and I’m going to REMEMBER you.

Food works if you send enough to share. Send Domino’s, KFC, or a monster Subway at lunchtime. Or a big birthday cake decorated with your logo and a big “Thank You” in icing across the top.

A professional speaker routinely pays bureaus 25% commission, but the agent who recommended you sees only a fraction of those funds. So I send the rep a very large box of Godiva chocolates. (Wasn’t it Will Rogers who said, “I never met a chocolate I didn’t like.”)

In another example, Wendy Kruger, with Speakers Platform in San Francisco, booked me for a string of several seminars. I knew that she was a fan of Cirque du Soleil, and a bit of browsing revealed that there was an engagement running in San Jose. So I used the Internet to book a pair of VIP back-stage tickets in her name at Will-Call. She took her boyfriend out for a surprise date, and nobody’s the wiser. (That is just SO California!)

If you’re closing a big contract with a new customer, buy a nice pen. A RILLY nice pen; a Cross or Mt. Blanc. After you’ve signed the paperwork, “accidentally” leave the pen behind. They’ll quietly put in their desk and remember your generosity every time they use it.

If you’re concerned about ethics, give them an award, a brass plaque or silver trophy engraved with your appreciations. It will be given a place of honor on their desk or bookshelf.

Here’s guerrilla work-around; send an age-appropriate toy for their kid. Who would begrudge a child a new toy?

Another loophole: if the item has your logo on it, it’s a tchotchke, not a gift. It’s not a bribe; it’s ADVERTISING. So you can send them a coffee mug or a golf towel or a $200 down parka, or any useful item for that matter, imprinted with your advertising, and they will wear it with pride. And they’ll tell all their friends.

Still not sure what to do? I once received a birthday card that read, “People who say you’re hard to shop for obviously don’t know where to buy beer.”

Home