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Saturday Night Sales and Marketing

Guest post by: Hussain Zaidi

Article Overview: If you are not thinking about sales and marketing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, are you in the wrong line of business? According to Mark Twain, turning your vacation into your vacation is what leads to success and this means becoming passionate about what you do and doing what you are passionate about.

Saturday Night Sales and Marketing

If you are not thinking about sales and marketing 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, are you in the wrong line of business?

I recently wrote a number of articles about email marketing (under “Communication”) and one of the many hundreds – if not thousands! - of tips and strategies I researched out for readers was to never email people on holiday or on weekends. The reason is that most people also like to take a break from email when they are not in the office. This is why the best time to send a newsletter or mass communication is, of course, during business hours. So why am I emailing you at 8:30 on a Saturday night while rushing to get ready to go and see a movie? Simply to impress on you the fact that your business comes first!

While you may not be thinking of sales and marketing for your business literally 24/7, I want to offer that dreaming about work from time to time is not a bad thing and not unusual for a dedicated professional. Or waking up in the middle of the night thinking about it, for that matter! What I mean by this and what I am trying to say is that you have to live and breathe what you do; it has to be your passion and you primary obsession in life. You have to find yourself form time to time at your keyboard or on the phone or on the road and you pull yourself out of your work and think, “God! It's that late?!” You have to be obsessed.

If you are not obsessed with your work, or at least your field of expertise, then let me suggest that there can only be 2 reasons for this: either you are not excitable or you are not doing what you were meant to. The first case is more a philosophical discussion than a practical one because what it boils down to is belief. If you don't think you are excitable, then you are not. My own opinion is that everyone is passionate about something, even if you are not a Type-A extrovert; there is such a thing as quiet genius too, you know! Anyway, the second point is something that everyone can agree is within your control to some degree, so think about it: are you really happy with what you do?

If you are happy with what you do then there is a simple way to test this: would you do it for free? I don't mean your job but the work that you do, what you are good at, what you can get lost in for hours at a time. Would you do it for free if money was not a problem? It's like a great line from the movie “Frida” where the young painter Frida asks the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera – the film is based in fact, by the way – to look over some of her paintings and give her some feedback. She keeps bugging him about it and finally, in exasperation, he comes down from his ladder and says: “Listen, if you are a painter then it does not matter what I or anyone else tells you. If you are a painter then you will paint until you die and that is that!”

Will you sell and market under the very end? Okay, that is kind of a joke but what is you dream? Really? Are you just plugging along from one day to the next or do you already have your retirement planned? Is it simply how to balance the books again this month or are you fantasizing about the new house your wife and yourself have been planning? Thinking about your business 24/7 simply means that you are thinking about you and what you are doing with your life. When you are plugged into what you should be doing then all of these things happen: passion, losing yourself in your work, dreaming of a bright future and so on. On the other hand, the unfortunate case is that 80% of people really are living day to day and work for them is no fun.

”"Make your vocation your vacation. That is the secret to success." - Mark Twain

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Article Tags: business, customers, sales and marketing



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Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - [quote="ltrahan":31w9r2iz]Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing[/quote:31w9r2iz] I second the request...
illegal signs - I've heard of this type of Marketing done a lot in the Real Estate Investment world. Typically the posters are put up on a Saturday evening in high traffic areas with the intention to get exposure from Saturday right through Monday morning when the city workers then take it down. I know there are fines involved but not sure how much. I also know typically the neighborhood gets into action and the RE investors typically get more calls from angry neighborhoods than actual leads to buy homes at a discount. It's a cost of doing business for them.
Re: First Facebook Ad - Experiment! - Hi GT, Thanks for the prod! As you know, this was my first ever Facebook campaign and results have been... so so! Here are the latest stats: Impressions 115,246 Clicks 44 CTR 0.038% CPC $0.75 CPM $0.29 TOTAL SPENT $33.04 Subscribers 1 Sales 1 A single sale brings in $100 so I'm ahead of the game, but won't be for much longer at this rate!! I tweaked the ad a couple of times. I also need to point the ad to a landing page. At the moment it sends people straight to the sales page. I'm going to set up a Facebook Fan page and see if that converts better. The Cost Per Click has been slowly going up. I was getting a better rate, but suddenly clickthroughs have dipped down to ZERO on Saturday, and just 1 per day thereafter. Best number of clicks in a day was 6. The ad is now in its second week. I'm letting it run for four weeks to try and see if any pattern emerges.
niche forum categories - I think Kevin just touched on the point that I was going make... and that is developing 'categories' that stick. Sales and Marketing may be too broad for example. However I can almost guarantee you that you would see many more sign-ups if you tailored a category to 'internet marketing' for newbies. I've seen this work on other forums, however, [i:1i903wkn]it can get a little frantic[/i:1i903wkn]... Fine tuning the categories, or expanding the scope should be effective. I think a lot of IM folks are surfing right on by because they're not finding what they're looking for here... Just a few thoughts: Better Blogging Developing Info Products Internet Marketing Presentation Skills More How to's Another point is... a lot of people don't know that they can benefit from participating in forums. The signature links to their site - if they have one - can / should be motivation enough to get more involved. The more internet savvy members that have signatures seem to stick around more... Don't you think?


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