Macon

Selling a service isn't the same as selling a product. Your prospect is buying an intangible. There are no shiny buttons to show off. You and your company are the visible representations of the service. You need to live up to them in your image. (marketing) And in how you "court" the prospect. (sales)

When you're marketing, you focus on opening your prospect's door. You're part of the day-to-day noise, which crowds in on her, every day. Your job is to break through that clutter and produce a good enough impression that she is willing to take the next step and meet with you.

Once you get to meet with a prospect, your goals shift. The two main goals in the sales meeting are to get the prospect to reveal their desires (needs analysis) and to see you as the best solution (positioning).

The sales meeting is your opportunity to take the positive image your marketing has created, and bring the sales/marketing cycle to a fruitful conclusion. In the sales meeting, the prospect must come to feel that you are more than competent, and that you can be trusted with her company, her career and her dreams.

The most important rule in sales: Talk little, listen much.

Spend 75% of your time listening. Ask questions and paraphrase the prospect's responses. As you do this, you're defining the background to the prospect's situation, confirming what their desires are, and discovering the prospect's personal agenda.

Note I say "desires", not "needs". Too many people try to sell what they perceive, believe or understand that people need. People don't deal very well with what they need, only what they want. Sometimes these coincide, but not always. Sell what your prospects want, their desires. Making dreams come true is a stronger sell--just ask Disney.

Once you've gathered sufficient data, summarize the key issues and their implications to the prospect's immediate and long-term well-being. The use of questioning, paraphrasing and summarizing, builds the perception of your expertise and trustworthiness. Your prospect will begin to believe in your ability to understand her unique issues.

And treat her issues as unique, even if you've seen them a hundred times before. Most people feel they are the only ones with their particular set of issues. Don't make them feel common.

It's important to assess your ability to live up to your prospect's expectations. If you can live up, then reassure the prospect with a simple, confident statement such as "I can help". If the prospect is interested in proceeding, begin identifying the parameters of the project. Begin by asking: "What's the specific end-result do you want to achieve from us working together?" Ask questions and follow-up questions to guide the prospect to begin defining the desired output and process, deadlines, budgets or other important project guidelines.

Before you get too far along in this contracting discussion, determine if your prospect is the real decision-maker. (If you haven't already.) Are there hidden decision-makers? (A decision-maker has the authority to approve or reject the terms of reference, any recommendations and implementation, can authorize payment and terminate the agreement.)

Tell the prospect what you need from her. Make sure that your prospect accepts joint client/provider accountability for success. Reinforce that you must be given the tools to succeed: access to information, people and other resources. Be clear about your fee structure. Make sure that your prospect understands it.

The sales cycle is completed by confirming the agreement in person and by following up with a written Letter of Agreement, or contract. It should contain your understanding of the Background, Project Scope, Project Plan, Fees, Expenses and Terms of Payment and any other relevant terms. For most small projects, don't get too wordy--one page will often suffice.

For many of us, selling is an uncomfortable, even frightening task. But it must be done if we are to have the chance to deliver the benefits we have to offer.

Keith Thirgood, Creative Director

Capstone Communications Group

Helping businesses get more business through innovative marketing

http://www.capstonecomm.com/

Markham, Ontario, Canada 905-472-2330

Subscribe to Thrive-on-line http://list.capstonecomm.com/mail.cgi?f=list&l=thrive_on_line

Part 2: "Beliefs"

Your Beliefs and Values work together to determine how you are going to feel. Let's say one of your top Values in life is success. Well, what has to happen for you to be successful? What I learned was that our Values are our targets. But how do you know if you have hit your target? That's based on your Beliefs and your Beliefs are generalizations that you have made, or rules you have set up for yourself about what has to happen for you to experience a certain result in your life.

Rules are like "If-Then" statements. For example, "If I make enough money, Then I am successful". We all have different rules. We may have the same Values but have different rules as to what has to happen for those things to be met. You have to be careful not to make your rules too difficult to attain or you will never experience the result that has to happen and you just set yourself up for failure. Your current Beliefs may be keeping you from experiencing the level of joy and pleasure that you deserve to have. You have to find out where this is happening in your life and make some changes. You have to set yourself up so that your Beliefs, or your rules, are very easy to meet. As long as you do this and keep setting your site on new goals and enjoy the process, you have some real power for your life.

Life is a process and you have to learn to enjoy that process, not just being there or getting to some place or destination. Life is not a destination. Most of us in life have Values we didn't design that are taking us in a direction that we have no clue about. We may have security up there and have no idea that is shutting us down. We may have adventure but we don't have it tempered with intelligence. So we're out there like a maniac doing crazy things. And here's one that I figured out for myself that I had fix. I had success very close to the top of my list of "Moving Towards Values" but at the top of my "Moving Away From Values" was fear of rejection and failure. Can you see where that would cause me to sabotage myself. I was having a terrible time just taking action.

But even worse, we have all these Beliefs that we think have to happen in order to succeed that are absurd. We make it so difficult on ourselves. All those states that you want to get you can get right now. All the emotions that you can ever have are nothing more than physiological storms in your brain. If you put your body in the right place physically and mentally, things you can control, focus the right way, and you will feel those emotions or states now. But here's the problem. Most people set themselves up so that it's practically impossible to win the game of life. They have set up the rules of this game so that it is so tough to win that they wonder why they are disappointed or frustrated or angry all the time. It's because they have lousy Beliefs and they have Values that someone else created and came from the environment around them.

Your goal should be to design your Values and Beliefs that automatically make it easy to feel alive and win every single day no matter what happens because you cannot completely control your environment. You want to empower yourself and be making new distinctions every day. So, take a really good look at what are really your core Beliefs?

There are two types of Beliefs. There are "Global Beliefs" which are giant generalizations about life or people or things. If fact, "Global Beliefs" are usually languaged in the form of "Life is_______", "People are_______", "I am_______", etc. The words to recognize are "is" "are" and "am". So, what are some of the Beliefs you have about who your are? Do they govern how much of your ability or skill you really use and how much of your personal power you really tap into?

Your Beliefs are going to determine what you are willing to try or not try and the success you have or don't have. They literally determine the quality of life you have. If you are unhappy in any parts of your life, it is probably because you have Values that are pulling you in opposite directions. You need to align those and you can start to do that today by changing some of your core Beliefs. You've probably heard this before but here it is again. Whether you believe something is true or whether you believe it's not, you're right. Your Beliefs are what open the flood gates of possibility in your life. Limiting Beliefs shut you down and chain you to limitation. All you have to do is adopt a new belief and you can literally do it in a moment or two.

Beliefs are not permanent things in our lives, but they do determine which questions we are willing to ask ourselves. The questions we ask ourselves determine what we focus on and what we feel. Our Beliefs determine what habitual questions we ask ourselves. So if you think you are inferior, you're probably going to ask questions like "Why do I always do this", "How come I'm not enough", etc. If you keep asking yourself why you're not enough, your brain will figure out why you're not enough. So, we have to change our core Beliefs and get Beliefs that support us.

The second type of Beliefs are the kind we already talked about. They are called "Rules". Remember, rules are "If-Then" statements. I'm not going to repeat what I have already said about rules but remember, you need to set up your Beliefs, or your rules, so that they are very easy to meet. As long as you do this and keep setting your site on new goals and enjoy the process, you have some real power for your life.

When I started my online business, I knew I had to learn as much as I could about internet marketing. And not just internet marketing, but I also had to improve my personal development skills. It simply takes too much discipline to run a business from your home to not have the right mindset. I think after what you have read so far that you will agree this is so very true. I found an incredible online school known as the University of Internet Science, http://www.allaboutinternetmarketing.com, started by Michelangelo Lopez and Mark Goodson. I encourage you to visit their site to see if it looks like a place that could assist you in your personal and business growth. You can read my own personal testimony on the Testimonials page, http://www.allaboutinternetmarketing.com/Testimonial/testimonial/index.html

So in conclusion, I challenge you to take the time to list all of your "Moving Towards Values" or the feelings that you'll do anything to experience. Then, put them in order of most important to least important. Next, do the same thing for your "Moving Away From Values" or the feelings you'll do anything to avoid. You will start to understand how your brain makes decisions.

Now, ask yourself what has to happen to make you feel each one of these Values you have listed. "What has to happen for me to feel____________?" These are your Beliefs. Study what you have written down and determine if any of your Beliefs are limiting you somewhere in your life. Now, mess with them. Change them around. Make it easy to feel pleasure and hard to feel pain. Remember, you want to set it up so you can win.

I sincerely hope this information has helped you and that you will use it to your benefit to empower yourself. I have established a blog to track and comment on the internet marketing and home based business industry and how to take advantage of them.

Gary spent 9 years in sales where he learned business & personal skills. But he found his real passion when he got involved in business for himself applying internet marketing techniques to build a successful online business.

Please take the time to put my blog, http://www.MyProfitSecretsBlog.com in your favorites section of your browser. I'll attempt to always keep you informed as to ways to profit in this exciting industry.

Gary Crowell

1. Your child is not responsible for how you react. Your stressful, angry reactions represent ways that you behave, and those ways do not work. you can parent far more effectively and enjoyably by demonstrating calm and loving self-control.

2. Improving your response to your child's behavior begins with taking total responsibility for your responses.

3. Focus on your own behavior to see the ways that you contribute to the outcomes that you do not want.

4. Begin addressing any unbalance in your life. To parent with more peace, poise and loving effectiveness, you need to eat well, exercise enough, practice some form of meditative centering or conscious relaxation, do enough of what you love to keep your morale high, and practice doing what must be done in a calm, confident, pleasant manner.

5. To remove the anger and stress from your reactions to your child's behavior, practice handling every aspect of your day without rush. The more you rush the faster you drive yourself crazy.

6. Children have two speeds when it comes to doing what you want: slow and stop. If you push them to go faster they go in reverse.

7. A calm child behaves better than a stressed out child. Your state radiates. The more calmly you interact with your child, the calmer your child will be.

8. You cannot instill better self-control in a child while you are losing yours.

9. Taking charge in your relationship with child begins with taking charge of yourself.

10. When a child can make you react, the child is in charge. Gaining control in any situation starts with controlling your reaction to the situation.

11. Watch what you tell your child. Saying things like, You make me angry. You move too slowly. You force me to yell. Gives your child and your own subconscious that the child is in charge and responsible for how you behave.

12. God sends a challenging child into your life when it is time for you to grow.

13. When you lose your peace and poise in response to your child's behavior, you lose your power.

14. Practice handling EVERYTHING with peace and poise. From peace you can connect with your deeper wisdom and love to guide you in your parenting.

15. By degrees equals ease. Be satisfied with making small steps of improvement in any situation. When you lose your patience, you lose more time.

16. Your stressful reactions to your child express an unhealthy way that you handle what happens and indicates a lack of self-respect.

17. Children need a peaceful, harmonious, stable environment to demonstrate their best behavior and positive, loving, respectful attitude. Therefore, when you react with anger and stress toward your child's behavior, you undermine your child's ability to do better.

18. Anger, stress, pleading, arguing, yelling these represent the most ineffective modes of parenting. Regard them as a choice, not as a necessity and then choose another way.

19. Children need boundaries but they do not learn healthy boundaries when you try to enforce boundaries in an unhealthy way.

20. As a general rule, if your reaction hurts you it probably hurts the one you react to. As you commit to taking excellent care of yourself you will operate within healthy, constructive boundaries in your parenting.

21. When you get stressed out in reaction to your child's behavior, you make yourself sick, unhappy and exhausted. You make yourself that way; the child does not make you that way, and your influence sickens those around you.

22. Observe how you think of your child. If your thoughts bring you anger or stress, your thinking, and not your child, is the problem.

23. You bring about what you think about. Think of your child as you want him/her to be and think of your parenting as you want that to be.

24. To be wise is t o make problems smaller, not larger. When your child behaves in a problematic way, you add to the problem by becoming a stressed out, unhappy, angry person in response.

25. Changing your response to your child begins with resisting the urge to blame your child for how poorly you react.

26. Your anger and stress reactions to your child's behavior indicate that you push yourself too hard and then take it out on the child. As you take better care of yourself your child's behavior will seem less taxing.

27. When you do not know how to handle your child's behavior, simply observe, relax and assume an attitude of confidence. Pay attention with an open mind and something constructive will occur.

28. Before you can gain control, you need to learn how to be out of control. Trust the way things are when they spin out of your control.

29. Make no big deal about behavior that disturbs you. Make a very big deal about the behavior that pleases you. A high intensity reaction rewards the behavior to which you react.

30. Do not struggle against behavior you do not want, but rather, take constructive action to achieve the behavior you do want.

31. The most essential ingredient a child needs to behave well is a deeply loving, secure and mutually respectful relationship with his/her parents. You undermine this with reactions of anger and stress.

32. To change a child's behavior, demonstrate better behavior yourself.

33. 95% of your redirection of child behavior should involve positive, loving, even playful ways to guiding your child out of behavior you want stopped and into behavior you want started.

34. If you are in the habit of thinking of yourself as a martyr and portraying yourself as a martyr you sacrifice your sense of power and self-respect in parenting. Stop seeing yourself as a victim to start experiencing more victory.

35. When you need to be firm, be unemotionally firm. Institute a consequence involving a restriction of a privilege, but maintain your composure and remain kind in the process. Be consistent and your child will get the message of the boundary you want followed.

36. When you blow up as a parent, you blow it as a parent. Anger and stress are to a child's poor behavior what gasoline is to fire.

37. The final solution: you have to trust that it can be done, that you can guide your child with love and without anger and stress. Where there is a willingness, a way opens up.

Bob Lancer leads individuals, businesses, families, and associations to fulfill their greatest dreams. He does this through a wide variety of venues, including his WSB radio show, Bob Lancer's Parenting Solutions, a show that focuses as much on the raising of ourselves and of our society as on the raising of children. The show has been on the air since 1995 and broadcasts to 35 states over the radio, and worldwide over the internet.

He is the author of numerous books and he has created dozens of motivational recordings on his themes.

Bob Lancer transforms audiences through his dynamic keynotes and seminars on parenting, marriage, and personal and professional development at live events, including conferences around the nation and overseas. He has been leading his audiences to greater personal and professional success as a public speaker, seminar leader, consultant and author for over 20 years and his work has been featured on CNN and other network television stations, in national magazines and in major newspapers.

The way of health is the way of the body which is largely the way of food, diet.

The body digests, transforms food, nutrients into blood into structure into function, into health or disease. There are only two kinds of nutrients, foods: building and cleansing. Building nutrients, foods, protein, fat, meat, eggs, cheese, beans, etc. build and fuel all structure and function. Cleansing foods, nutrients, water, minerals, fruit, vegetables, grains, etc. reduce, cleanse, cool and moisten.

The correct amount of building and cleansing produces and maintains the correct amount of structure and function where the body mind can thrive. The incorrect worsens, sickens the body mind via too much (overbuilt) or too little (under built, over cleansed) structure and function.

Food> digestion> absorption> blood> sex organs, skin, hair, nails, etc.

Pregnancy is a biological function produced by biological structures, organs, glands.

Infertility, miscarriage and short term pregnancy are examples of too little structure and function, protein and fat. Protein and fat build and fuel the fetus, ovum, sperm, hormones, ovaries, uterus, liver, etc.

Low protein, low fat and high carbohydrate diets, in excess, tend to cause blood, protein and fat deficiency, coldness, fatigue, pallor, thin skin, hair, nails and bones; anemia, amenorrhea, infertility, miscarriage and short term pregnancy. It takes a certain amount of blood, protein and fat, to hold a baby. Anything less creates deficiency, lack of holding.

Low protein and low fat foods, milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, beans, nuts and seeds build less blood, structure, function, pregnancy, etc.

Low protein, low fat and high carbohydrate (fruit, vegetables and grains) diets are generally used by those suffering from excess protein and fat: high cholesterol, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis, cirrhosis, gout, dysmenorrhea, warts, tumors, cancer, etc. to reduce, cleanse the body of excess protein and fat. There are very few cancers, tumors, heart disease, etc. that are caused by too many fruits, vegetables and grains.

Carbohydrates, fruits, vegetables, grains, water, sugar, minerals, enzymes and fiber reduce, cleanse, cool and moisten. A high carbohydrate diet is generally used by those suffering from excess protein and fat, not by those seeking to get and stay pregnant.

Many women, on a daily basis, tend to eat high carbohydrate, low protein, low fat: milk, yogurt, cottage cheese, salads, raw vegetables, pasta, bread, beans, nuts, seeds, fruit, juices, shakes, smoothies, etc. This way of eating, combined with menstruation tends to create blood deficiency, which not only causes amenorrhea, infertility, miscarriage and short term pregnancy, but also pallor, fatigue, forgetfulness, thin skin, hair, nails and bones, fear, depression, etc.

Blood deficiency can be cured by supplementing the body, blood with more protein and fat, meat, eggs, chicken, turkey, etc.

The general diet, meal plan is approximately 1/3 protein and fat, 1/3 grain, 1/3 vegetable (3-5) and fruit, spices and herbs, which can be manipulated up or down to increase or decrease blood, structure and function.

Siberian ginseng, cooked foods and spices increase digestion. Digestion is a fiery process, acids and enzymes that transform food, nutrients into structure and function. It is supplemented by cooking, spices and herbs, diluted, weakened by an excess of water, fruit, vegetables, sugar, cold drinks, etc.

Evening primrose oil and black currant oil nourish, strengthen the reproductive organs. Eating seeds, sesame, sunflower, pumpkin, etc. helps build seeds. Check with your doctor before making any dietary, herbal changes.

Laxative and bitter herbs (golden seal, gentian, etc.) should be avoided as they are laxative, downward moving in nature, which is contrary to pregnancy. Pregnant women want to hold onto their babies, fetuses which they can do when their blood is rich, protein and fat. They can not hold (miscarriage, short term pregnancy) onto their babies well when their blood is thin, low protein and low fat, and or too high in water, sugar, minerals, bitter herbs, etc. Coffee, caffeine is also laxative, bitter in nature and not recommended for pregnant women.

High protein and high fat diets, in excess, tend to build growths, tumors which can interfere, prevent conception and or harm the fetus. Most women tend to suffer the opposite, unlike men who tend to suffer both, deficiency and excess. Blood, protein and fat also build and fuel sperm, testosterone, erections, etc.

A decline in blood via anemic diet (low protein, low fat, high carbohydrate) reduces the amount of sperm, testosterone, erections (premature ejaculation, impotence), etc. Red meat, eggs, chicken, etc. build better erections than grains, beans, nuts, seeds, salad, fruit and dairy. Too much protein and fat, in the extreme, can also adversely affect the prostate, tumor, cancer and or behavior, dominance, violence.

The cure, remedy to excess protein and fat, is too eat less, less protein, fat, meat, eggs, cheese, oil, space and or skip meals, especially dinner, eat more fruit, vegetables, grains, bitter herbs, fennel, etc. check with you doctor first before making any dietary, herbal changes

Author, Hot and Cold Health
Acupuncture Physician (FL 1992-2002)
Owner, operator Food and Thought, health food store, Hollywood, FL (1984-2001)
Questioning and counseling of 30,000+
"What do you eat for breakfast, lunch and dinner?
Cooking teacher
Chi gung practitioner, daily, outdoors, since 1988
Web: http://www.hotandcoldhealth.net