Beliefs Actions Results
Written by:
Wendy Weiss
Article Overview: What separates the people who are amazingly successful from those who struggle? Why is one person able to start a business or begin a new job in sales and succeed, while others with similar qualifications and abilities fail?
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Free Download - All Sales People Use Scripts By Wendy Weiss
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Beliefs Actions Results
What separates the people who are amazingly successful from those who struggle? Why is one person able to start a business or begin a new job in sales and succeed, while others with similar qualifications and abilities fail?
More and more I've come to realize that what makes the difference between those who succeed and those who do not comes down to thoughts and beliefs.
You see, whatever you believe affects your actions. If you believe that a certain action is negative, you will not want to take that action. If, on the other hand, you believe an action to be positive, then it will be far easier to move forward with that action.
Taking action (or not taking action), gives you results of one sort or another. If you evaluate your results and if you don't like what you find, or if you want different results or better results, it circles right back around to what you believe.
In a recent semester of "Cold Calling College-Live," (the 8-week, intensive, virtual coaching program to help entrepreneurs and sales professionals set more new business appointments in less time) one of the participants said that she was struggling with knowing what to say to prospects. I asked her to tell me about her company. She did so and her company has achieved some amazing results for its customers. I suggested to her that she simply say what she had told me. Her response: "If I do that, I feel smarmy (yes, she said this) and like I'm bragging."
I asked this participant, "Are all of these results that you have described true?" She told me they were. "In that case," I said, "you're not smarmy or bragging, you're simply telling the truth. These are facts."
Just because you feel something, does not make it so. In this case, this participant felt "smarmy" and as though she was "bragging." These were her feelings and she was truly feeling them. However, those feelings did not necessarily reflect reality. And in this case, those feelings were keeping her from prospecting successfully.
Here is a question that I received recently from an "Opening Doors & Closing Sales" (the twice monthly free e-newsletter) subscriber:
"Is there a good script I can customize to reach the hearts of my prospects without giving them the feeling I want to 'sell' them something?"
You'll notice that the word 'sell' has quotation marks around it. This subscriber obviously feels that selling is a negative activity. Selling is actually neutral; it is the ethics of the sales person that makes the activity positive or negative. I'm willing to bet that because of the way this subscriber feels about selling, her beliefs about selling as a negative activity have kept her from taking action, which has kept her from getting the results that she wants.
So what do you believe? And are your beliefs standing in your way? If so, it's time to change some of those beliefs. Remember: At one point in history everyone believed the world was flat. Most of us no longer believe that. It is possible to change.
© 2008 Wendy Weiss
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Related Forum Posts
Run a major competition
- You beat me to the punch LoveInventions! I was just on my way to post this!
The idea is simple: run a competition for a major prize to get people posting. In this case Darren put up a $729 Nikon DSLR up for grabs as the top prize. The winner was selected randomly and each post you wrote gave you another chance to win.
[quote:1nc4sv0r]The Goal - the aim of the exercise was simple. To sign up new members to my forum and increase page views. My hope was to have a bumper month but also get new members signed up to have an ongoing impact on overall activity going forward.[/quote:1nc4sv0r]
[quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: Traffic - Over the full month traffic was increased 66.7%.[/quote:1nc4sv0r]
[quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: New Members - Recruiting new members to the forum was another goal of the competition. We’d had an influx in January of 1803 new sign ups as a result of a previous smaller competition but since had been around the 1200 per month. April however saw a boost in numbers by an extra 2823 members.[/quote:1nc4sv0r]
[quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: Activity - Another bonus related to increased traffic is the increases in user activity on the forum. Here’s the increase in new ‘threads’ to the forum (up from the 1500’s to just over 4000 for the month). And here is the increase in new posts (up from 1400 per month to over 43000 for the month).[/quote:1nc4sv0r]
[quote:1nc4sv0r]
The Downside
So far it’s sounding fairly rosy isn’t it. Increases in traffic, members, activity and even earning are all good. However there was two downsides.
1. Moderation Workload - I have an amazing team of moderators to DPS but the month of April was the hardest that they’ve ever worked. I totally underestimated the extra load upon them in setting up this competition. It has made me reconsider how I run future competitions.
2. Impact upon Quality of Reader Interaction - over all the increased activity of the site brought in some wonderful new members who are interacting on the site with genuine interaction. However a small number of new members were just there for the competition - even though I made it clear that spammy entries wouldn’t win. This impacted moderators workloads but also the overall morale on the site a little. I think we managed to contain it but again - next time I run a competition it’ll not be based upon post numbers but rather some sort of quality level of interaction.[/quote:1nc4sv0r]
What do you guys think? Is it worth testing out? Considering we already give out over $1,000 in month prizes, what would be the ultimate prize that we award at the end of the competition?
$3000 per mo Site for Sale: $65,000 OBO
- $3000 per mo Site for Sale: $65,000 OBO
Content and Community Driven Pet Websites
________________________________________
Profile: Two Pet Related Websites
Price: $65,000 OBO
Age of sites: 2 years 4 months
Monthly revenue: $3300 (plus or minus a couple hundred)
Key details:
Growth Year over Year: 641%
Uniques: 200,000 per Month
Page Views: 1 mil + per Month
Referrers: 10,000+ Monthly
Search Engine Traffic: 61%
Members: 7500+/-
Articles: 318
Blog Posts: 189+
Forum Posts: 256,000+
Topics: 19,000+
Adsense Revenue: $1500-$1700 per month
Kontera Revenue: $900+ per month
Direct Advertisers: $90 - $300 per month
Monthly Server Costs: $100
Monthly Advertising Costs: $0
Total Profit Per Month $2500 - $3000
Organic Growth Month over Month: 10% +/- (Zero spent on advertising – all word of mouth and search engine)
Software Licenses: All Open source and thus free: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Zen Cart, PHPLIST, WordPress, SMF, and the rest Custom Programming.
Software Editions: All software running latest releases.
Uniques Last Month: 200,000
Page Views Last Month: *2,000,000+ per month
Referring Sources: 1,000 different referrers
Referring Keywords: 60,000 Search Terms
First Page Results: Thousands of keywords and keyword combinations
Indexed pages (Google): 65,000+
Indexed pages (Yahoo): 26,000+
Google page rank: 5-6 (Lots of 3’s and 4’s throughout the sites)
Pages of Content: 60,000+/-
Alexa site rank: 124,000 (way off the mark due to audience profile)
Compete Site Rank: Much closer but still off.. See image
Brand Value: All Original Creative and Content including Logo, Forum Template, Front-end, CSS, Code, Images etc. Extremely well made to render fast as well as accessible, to both humans and search engines. Search optimized throughout.
Description:
I actually posted this for sale almost 11 months ago but didn’t take any offers. Since then traffic has increased almost 650% and revenue has increase by almost as much, closer to 600%. Revenue comes from direct advertising ($150-$350 per mo) but primarily Google Adsense ($1500 - $1750 per mo) and Kontera Links ($700-$900 per mo).
Letting go as I’m working full time and just started Business School… I just don’t have the time. However, these sites are ripe for one to build a better business direction.
I started these sites as the pet industry happens to be exploding, exponentially and almost parabolically. Google “pet spending” to find a glimpse. Some articles you’ll find:
“The Growing Pet Industry Is One Trend You Can Bank On”
"In the past 10 years, pet spending has more than doubled to an estimated $38.4 billion for 2006."
"According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the pet industry is now the seventh largest retail segment in the country."
“We have only begun to see the tip of the spending iceberg"
“Pet Spending at All Time High”
"Pet ownership is on the increase in the US, and the amount of money spent on pets is dramatically increasing too."
The two sites are content and community driven websites with 350+ health related articles on pets, a pet blog that discusses current issues, and a very active message board and community. They compliment each other perfectly and as such are being sold together as a package. The templates are completely custom designed and CSS powered. They would be XHTML Strict Compliant however we’ve included a couple of things that just wouldn’t let it pass. There are almost 8000 members between the two sites. Several hundred more between the blog subscribers and the email list subscribers. At one time we had a store (its all still there however it’s been shut off) and we had about 200 customers. The store lasted only about a month and a half as our careers just didn’t allow us to provide the customer service this site deserves. We also had a drop ship company that worked out really well, (and we still do if we want them). Much more work than our careers had time for. The logos are custom. I’ve got the logo in vector version for Signs and tee shirts. The Design is custom. All software front-ends are custom and running clean - open source applications. Runs extremely well.
The entire 2 sites run on a dedicated server that runs about $100 a month.. The sites run on a LAMP environment, meaning Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. All of the software is open source and requires no fees. We run PHPLIST, Zen Cart, and SMF Simple Machines Forum. The blog is Word Press. The article system is completely custom however the back end panel is ran simple from phpMyAdmin – straight to the database.
I think there is enormous potential with the two sites as the brands have a very loyal following and is growing by leaps and bounds. It has been mentioned in 10 or so online and offline newspapers (that I am aware of) as well as a magazine – all of which will be provided. The site was featured as Yahoo’s Site of the Week. The site was forever (and perhaps still is) the number one pet site viewed on StumbleUpon.com. The blog also has 177 links from 56 sites according to Technorati.com and ranks 52,000. The database is huge. It’s full of fully owned content, images, customer data, subscriber data, members etc etc. The brand really sells when it comes to tee shirts and calendars. We have a drop shipper when needed that we buy tee’s at 4 dollars a shirt. Each shirt sold for $20 so there was a great margin.
The two sites have a solid existence and are trenched well into all the major search engines with perhaps thousands of first place results for keywords and keyword combinations. The majority of traffic is all organic from Google, Yahoo and MSN and it will stay that way forever. The site was built solidly by SEO pros with Search Engine Spiders in mind as every part of the site is search friendly. All pages have been correctly and lightly coded. The database powers the meta tags, title tags, h1’s, h2’s, image titles and bold tags. The site has tens of thousands of dollars put into the design and functionality.
petsite4sale@gmail.com
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