He Who Burns Bridges Better Be A Damn Good Swimmer

January 30, 2012 By

Real-estate operators are legendary for slow-pay practices, but I know one who hangs them all out to dry. This gentleman–we’ll call him “Bob”–was the son of a milkman. He made a fortune in the trucking business and wound up owning major-league sports franchises on both coasts. To give you an idea of how nimble he was, after he bought his first sports franchise in the Midwest, he also bought– quietly and cheaply–an obscure FM radio station on the West Coast. In a big surprise move, he then shifted the franchise to the Coast and scheduled the game broadcasts exclusively on his new station. Moving not only revived the failing franchise, it also multiplied the value of the station. One move. Two profits.

Bob also owned a chain of hotels. A large, sophisticated New York insurance company held the mortgage on his flagship hotel. One Friday, the insurance company n question, exasperated over years of delayed payments or no payments, sent their man to see Bob. The intrepid rep marched into Bob’s office, threw down a sheaf of legal papers, and announced that as of Monday, the insurance company would take over and operate the hotel.

“That’s fine,” said Bob, “but where will you park the guest’ cars?”

“Why, in the parking lot behind the hotel,” said the insurance company’s man.

“No,” said he, “you won’t be parking them there. I own that parking lot. The minute you take over the hotel, an eight-foot chain-link fence goes around that lot, and in case you haven’t noticed, there isn’t another adequate parking facility you can use within a three-block radius.”

The New York insurance company decided it could live with Bob’s payment practices.
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Filed Under: Best Business Book, best sales book, Decision Making, Ethics, How to Be Successful In Business, How to get more sales leads, How To Improve Sales, Negotiating, Negotiation, Network Building, Networking, Running A Business, Sales, Success, Swim With The Sharks, Top Business Book, Top Sales Book Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

You Can't Solve A Problem Unless You First Admit You Have One

January 23, 2012 By

The Same Goes For Business Problems

Alcoholics Anonymous has used that principle as a starting point to reclaim thousands and thousands of lives. Thousands more are never reclaimed because it’s so hard to change.

Sheer stubbornness has destroyed a lot more bottom lines than new technologies.

There were just as many mean spirited jibes at Coca-Cola for abandoning its original formulas as there were at Ford when it unveiled the Edsel. The difference was that Ford decided it was going to prove the marketplace was wrong and stuck with its mistake far too long. Coca-Cola realized early that while humiliation was inescapable, horrendous losses need not be. It cut its losses, and its mistake cost it a lot less money than stubborn pride cost Ford.

Campbell’s spent years developing a new offering in what’s called the “functional food” category. Named Intelligent Quisine (IQ), marketing consultant Sangita Joshi describes it as ” a frozen food line that would help older Americans” needing to modify their diets. It had “great endorsements from the medical fraternity; many trials…and yet it bombed due to poor taste.” Campbell’s acted quickly and regrouped.

Product withdrawals these days don’t have to be just timely. Sometimes they are real time. Bill Gates was demonstrating the introduction of an improved Windows 98 program in front of a slew of journalists and live TV cameras. As the demonstrator touted the program’s virtues, Windows crashed in front of GOD… and Gates! On the monitor appeared the infamous “blue screen of death” and its white-typed error message. The ever quick-witted Bill intervened in a nanosecond with: “That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet.”

One thing professional stock and commodity traders learn early is that they don’t give away medals for courage in the marketplace. There is only one reward the marketplace has to offer: money.If you’re not making any, bail out. Quickly

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Arrogance: The 7 Deadly Signs

December 6, 2011 By

Here is my watch ist for the seven deadly signs of salesperson arrogance:

1. “Our product sells itself.”

2. “The only people on our sales team who matter to me are my superiors or at least my equals.”

3. “Who cares that our competitor’s accounting manager is afraid they’ll be taken over and is out looking for a job? I listen to input only from vice presidents and above.”

4. “I don’t need to walk our plant. Leave that to those grunts in manufacturing.”

5. “You’ll never learn a thing from a competitor weaker than you.”

6.”We can always rely on X for a reference. I may not have talked with him for a few months, but he will never forget how we saved his bacon two years ago.”

7. “Customer complaints don’t matter. Those e-mails are just written by oddball cranks.”

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Filed Under: arrogance, Best Business Book, best sales book, How to Be Successful In Business, How to get more sales leads, How To Improve Sales, Running A Business, The Mackay MBA, Top Business Book, Top Sales Book Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Mike Litman Show

November 21, 2011 By

I had the pleasure and opportunity to talk with Mike Litman on his radio show about my new book The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World. This whole launch process has been a great opportunity to meet and talk to so many impressive and amazing people.  Mike has been working since 1997 to develop a platform where he could positively influence as many people as possible. He is a success by any standard and he has plenty to offer the world.  You can listen to the interview below or Click Here for the post on Mike’s website.

Mike Litman Show by HarveyMackay

Learn more about my new book, The Mackay MBA of Selling in the Real World

Click here to help me spread the word about my new book.

If you already bought my new book, make sure you download or request the hard copy of my new Network Builder for FREE Here.

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Acting Smart and Being Smart

August 30, 2011 By

Of all the human failings that can destroy a business, arrogance is the deadliest.  it is the most readily acquired, the easiest to justify, and the hardest to recognize in ourselves.

It’s different from greed, laziness, or dishonesty.  These faults are usually individual flaws, not contagious to entire companies.  We know them when we see them, and we know they are wrong.  When they are detected, correction is usually swift, certain, and severe.

But arrogance?

When we’re successful, we reason, don’t we deserve a bit of special consideration?  Aren’t we important enough to avoid the everyday annoyances and the tedious responsibilities that ordinary mortals must endure?  No one is “entitled” to be dishonest or greedy, but a bit of smugness, well, that’s just natural in a leader.  We accept it.  We even nurture it as a sign of success.

But arrogance can infect all the employees in a company with the silent destructiveness of a computer virus.  After all, if the company is making money big-time, and everyone in the shop has a chip on their shoulder, then shoulder chips are right, proper, and normal, aren’t they?  It’s like the few, the proud, the marines.  Okay for landing on contested beaches, but dangerous when carved into the brain pans of, say, envelope makers.

How do you know when you’re getting arrogant? When the only people you care to listen to or deal with are either at your own level or above it.

Mackay’s Moral: Arrogance is believing you’re so high up that you don’t have to keep an ear to the ground.

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Knowing Something About Your Customer Is Just as Important as Knowing Everything About Your Product

August 23, 2011 By

Take politicians, for example.  A politician will support your proposition only as long as it is politically popular or uncommonly rewarding.

That isn’t to say that pols are any less honest or reliable than the rest of us.   it;s just that politicians must shift positions constantly to keep up with the people they are supposed to be leading.  Legislators, particularly in faraway places such as Washington, tend to be a little less reliable than governors, who are under closer local scrutiny, but the same principle holds.  It is the duty of someone who wants something from a politician either to (a) create the public climate that makes supporting that position attractive, or (b) do whatever is necessary so that a politico will return a favor from time to time–like fundraising or even organizational work.

Before you choose one tactic or the other, you had better be certain with whom you are dealing.  In this case, the governor was the type of politician who thought he had something his constituents would truly want.  The Ghermezians and the governor both went to public together, and when it became rapidly apparent that the brothers had not created the proper climate of public opinion, the governor backed off.

To the Ghermezian’s credit, they finally got the message, hired local lobbyists, and put the pieces back together.  After having asked for several hundred million dollars at the legislature and getting completely skunked, they got help at the municipal level.  The current scaled-down version–call it a mini mega-mall–could have been even bigger.  In fact, the Ghermezians created the 5.3-million-square-foot West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, the largest shopping center in the world, starting in 1981.

Identifying the customer does not mean that you make your pitch directly to that customer.  Selling the governor in this case was easy…too easy.  What the Ghermezians should have done was first build a support structure of “influencers” around that governor–the press, the unions, popular opinion, his own party, and so on–before pitching the main man.  That involves a professional PR effort: stories extolling their already successful mall; leaks about competing cities plotting to sweep the Ghermezians into their fold; orchestrated demand for the product from leading opinion-makers.  None of this groundwork was laid.  Unfortunately (for the Brothers Ghermezian), once the governor discovered he had no crew, it was time to abandon ship.

At Mackay Mitchell Envelope Company, you wouldn’t believe how much we know about our customers.  The IRS wouldn’t believe how much we know about our customers.  All our salespeople on staff fill out a 66-question profile of each one of their customers.  We’re not talking about the customer’s taste in envelopes, either.  We want to know, based on observation and routine conversation, what our customer is like as a human being, what he feels strongly about, what he’s most proud of having achieved, and what status symbols are in his office.

When you know your customers, some of their special interests or characteristics, you always have a basis for contacting and talking to them.  I have a customer who’s a devoted Chicago Cubs baseball fan.  The Cubs’ failure to make it to the top continues.  That’s usually good for at least half a dozen condolence messages a year.  I don’t sit there scribbling notes about the latest fashions in envelopes.

Knowing your customer means knowing what your customer really wants.  Maybe it is your product, but maybe there’s something else, too: recognition, respect, reliability, concern, service, a feeling of self-importance, friendship, help–things all of us care more about as human beings than we care about malls or envelopes.

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Get Bored Easily

August 17, 2011 By

Professional managers can repeat the same task over and over, but most successful entrepreneurs can’t handle boredom.  The difference in these two familiar types runs so deeply that, if you’re a manager, it’s unlikely you’ll succeed in the role of entrepreneur, just as entrepreneurs tend not to make very good managers. There’s a place in the world for each.  The message here is to entrepreneurs.

McKinsey & Company did a study of the members of the American Business Conference, which grew 20 percent per year over the five-year period prior to the publication of the report.  There is one common thread running through these operations: The people who run them tend to be entrepreneurs who just can’t stand corporate bureaucracy, organization charts, and manuals for operating procedures.

Entrepreneurs share a common trait with good salespeople: Both are able to communicate a sense of self-confidence and importance about their mission that is contagious to all around them. Entrepreneurs scratch before they itch.  They dare to fix things before they break because it is part of their makeup to seek out fresh challenged.

They determine the agenda; they set the pace; they dominate the field of play.  Pit an entrepreneur against a manager, and the entrepreneur is constantly forcing the manager to abandon his own plans and react to the entrepreneur’s initiative.

If you’re an entrepreneur, you know it.  And if you are, your competitors have a reason to dread it when you feel the onset of restlessness.  It means you’re ready to make another move.  Don’t fight it–it’s the entrepreneur’s greatest strength.  At the same time, recognize your greatest weakness: an eye for detail, which all too often translates into an inability to manage the financial end of the business.

If you’re an entrepreneur, be frank enough about your own limitations to get yourself a George Wilson to handle the day-to-day operations.  Thirty-five years ago, when Wilson was stewing over whether to take on the commitment of moving the Billy graham offices to a newer building, he called Graham and asked his advice.  ”I don’t call and ask you what I should preach,” said Billy.  ”Don’t call me about what you should do with buildings.”

I want to thank you for reading and I would greatly appreciate it if you would take the time to share your thoughts and input with me on Facebook and Twitter.

Harvey

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Speed Kills

August 9, 2011 By

The greatest trick in business is to create a breakthrough product category, like the computer.

The greatest trick in marketing is to convince people that they actually need it.

The computer has three basic strategic values: speed, cost effectiveness, and quality. Three, not one. Three.

The problem is, there is too much emphasis on speed.  Speed is a yardstick, a measurement.  In and of itself, speed is a meaningless number.  To have any business value, speed must serve a purpose.

I make envelopes.  I buy high-speed envelope-making machines bristling with all sorts of computer gizmos.  But sometimes, I wonder why.

Is it to save money?  Well, yes, but at a million bucks a pop, it takes a long, long time to recover your investment, and by then, they’ve got a $2 million machine all greased up and ready to go.

Why then? I’m afraid a lot of what I’m paying for is “We’ve-got-the-fastest-envelope-machine-in-the-upper-Mississippi-Watershed-District” bragging rights.

Marketing hype.

In pursuit of speed, we lose track of cost.  While speed is infinite, the cost of effectiveness of speed is finite. Going twice as fast may provide you with twice the cost benefit of your previous speed.  But I can assure you that whatever it is you do, going a hundred times as fast does not assure you of 100 times the cost benefit.  the faster you go, the less incremental cost benefit you receive.

Speed is glamorous.  Cost accounting is dull.  it’s for people who carry their pens in a plastic sleeve in their front shirt pockets.  And quality is for the old-timers in overalls who use hand tools, fine sandpaper, and camel’s hair brushes.

The German magazine Focus ran an article titled “Race Without Victors.”  the subheading was “Always faster, always more expensive.” Speed, as with any other virtue carried to an extreme, becomes a vice.

Mackay’s Moral: Don’t get high on speed.

Filed Under: Advice, Pushing The Envelope, Running A Business, Sales Tagged With: , , , , , ,