Let your customers make their own change …

Is it not strange? No Cure, No Pay …. Why is this considered special these days? It should be standard!

The only argument that you can make that this shouldn’t be standard is when you distrust your customer. If this is the case … how can you expect the customer to trust you?

Let’s take it a step further. Why not say, this is what I think it is worth, but lets agree on this …. ‘If you do not think it’s worth that, please pay then what you think its worth.’ This also could result in somebody paying you a lot more then you asked.

To inspire you ….. look at the following little movie and rethink. Trust is like value, if you bring value you will receive value, when you bring trust you will receive trust.

And that why I like to do business on a No Cure, No Pay basis.

Let’s all make the world a little more pleasant.

Have a great day,

Ben Mastboom

Value propositions …. mostly they suck! What about yours?

Every body who is in sales and marketing have it …….. or let me rephrase this, should have it …………. A good value proposition! Unfortunately they are scares to find.

How should a good value proposition look like? Below you can find a link to an article that can tell the answer.

Did you ever take a good look at those value propositions and asked the question: “What value are they exactly talking about?” When I ask this question, I mostly come to the conclusion that it is mostly very vague. More often then less I only see a list of some product specification and when there is an effort to mention ‘What’s In It For Me’ I have to try real hard to push my own imagination how this all can help me with improving the results I really care about.

To many value propositions are put in a way that at best I experience the product or services as ‘nice to have’ instead of ‘necessary to have’. Resulting in me moving on without looking back. Because let’s be honest …..  the only things that I and many others in this world are interested in are in those products and services that can deliver me better results in only three things:

1. more gain (profit, prestige, success, etc)
2. more ease (because every body is at its core lazy)
3. more pleasure (fun, good sex, relaxation, etc.)

Enough reason for me to write an article about reason # 1 and then specifically about the money and success part. In this article I mention what you can do to improve your value proposition so your audience can see you can make a difference. The article has just been published in Sales Expert, the biggest sales magazine in the Netherlands so it will be no surprise that it has been published in Dutch. For our English readers ….. well you guys have to wait a while till it has been translated, but don’t worry this will be soon.

Download the article at http://bit.ly/d6WX5I

Have a great week.

Ben Mastboom

What it is all about …….

I like to keep it simple.

It is always about growth. Whether it is about your personal life or about your business life. Let’s look at it: the first 14 -17 years of your life it is literally all about growth. For most of us, knowledge wise this continues a little longer, but unfortunately a lot of people stop growing their knowledge in a systematic way after they are 25 years old. Big mistake if you ask me, but I will come back on that in an other blog!

But let us continue: you grow your career, your kids, your wealth, your pension, your inheritance and let us not forget, your happiness.

In business it is not any different.

Sometimes I wonder: “Why do we make it so difficult” by putting distracting labels on the process? What it is all about? Labels that often start to live a life of their own. Some examples in sales we have been talking about: SPIN Selling, Solution Selling, Consultative Selling etc. In marketing we talk about: Direct Marketing, CRM, Internet 2.0, Second Life, Social Media etc. By putting a lot of focus on those labels, I think we often get distracted from what it is all about.

And what is it all about?

In 1954 one man said it, in my opinion, the clearest and simplest way I have heard up to now. This man was Peter F. Drucker, on the biggest management brains of the last century.

“The true business of every company is how to get keep and develop more customers.”

Let me give you a tip: Every time someone (including yourself 🙂 ) comes to you with a “brilliant idea”, ask that person one simple question: “How is this idea going to help us get, keep or develop more customers in a profitable way?.” If you can not answer this question in a S.M.A.R.T. way, send them away until they can. It will save you a lot of time.:-)

Please do not think that I want to throw over board all the insights we have gathered in the last decades. More importantly, I want to discuss them with you one by one in this blog. By discussing them I always want to come back to the central question: ” How is this helping us to get, keep and develop more customers in a profitable way?”

Next time I would like to go a little deeper into Social Media. It is hot right now, but how does it help us to …… well you’ve got my point.

I also always like to look back at things by asking the question “Haven’t we heard this before?”

Please take notice of another classic “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie written in 1936. For a tree page summary go to Dale Carnegie You will be amazed how true this all still is. Almost mandatory literature for anyone who wants to take their business and life, seriously :-).

Have a great week!

Ben Mastboom

Hello World!

Why this blog? …… To be honest? Just to give it a try, but more importantly because I also think it can be valuable for you and for me.

It will deal primarily about growth. Growth of yourself and your business. More about this in the next blog.

Maybe some of you have noticed that I just revised my website www.OptivityInt.com, as you can see it is a Beta version . In this blog I will discuss bits and pieces of this website, training courses and materials that I’m about to launch. Webinars and much more with you.

What’s in it for you? FREE STUFF, I developed and gathered a lot of material and insights during my career.To be able to discuss them with you I will have to make it available to you. How else can you give your opinion? With these materials you can help train or inspire others like your people or colleagues and maybe you also will get inspired yourself. This can save you thousands of dollars on materials. Because my chimney also has to smoke, I always will put these materials available for one or two days. After that it is paid content again.

Now that you know why it is valuable to you, I will tell you why this blog is valuable to me: Quite simply, I will learn from your comments and in this way can improve my products to meet better meet the needs of people like you.

I stole the idea from Google. Google launches their product always first in a Beta version and invites everybody to try-out and adjust. Brilliant because you have half of the world working on your product to develop it to a higher level for FREE. Because almost everybody likes to give their opinion on something, you are pleasing people with a half-finished product. When you adjust something accordingly, you have bonded them to your company for life because who abandons something that they helped to create?

I think it was Albert Einstein who once said: “If I have seen a little farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”

Inspired by this quote, I hope with this blog to establish a platform where we all can stand on each others shoulders once in a while to look further. I hope you are interested in joining me in this experiment.

Tell me what you think.

Ben Mastboom