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Introduction This book is comprised of the tips and insights that have been sent out by Robert Cornish, CEO of Richter, to our subscribers on our mailing list. Because we receive consistent favorable feedback from these mailings, we decided to put them all in one place for you to read or re­read as desired. We hope you enjoy them. Should you need anything, reach out to us: info@richter10point2.com 727­447­3600 http://richter10point2.com

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Preparation is your weapon

It’s a problem with the goal....

Last minute panic

Where is Your Marketing Budget Going?

Get In Control to Make Forward Progress

Movie Trailers Work

Know Your Target Public

Stay Engaged

A Senior Focus

Abundance Will Take Care of It

Alignment

Get Them Focused

Finish the Race ­ No Matter What

Making Informed Decisions

Know Your Target Public

Are You Irresistable?

Battling Noise...

Be The Prospect

Before You Do Anything...

BofA Uses Them...

Business Doesn’t Stop

Campaign Like It’s For an Election

Communicate… A Lot

Distraction is the Enemy of Growth

Doing the Basics

Don’t Chase Success… Chase Greatness

Effort Has Increased

Excitement Fuels Sales

Follow through…

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Fresh business

Get Focused

Get In Their Head

Go To Them

Graphics Are Worthless

Here’s What We Know

How Does This Relate to Me?

I’m Busy...

Intention Drives Sales

A Drop in the Ocean

It’s a Process

Waiting Solves Nothing

Know The Public

Know What Wins

Lack of Follow Through

Let It Do Some of the Heavy Lifting...

Make the Communication Count

Making Stories

The Homework Prior to Sales

Creating Motivated Buyers

Massive Assault

More Isn’t More

More...

Mountains, Not Budgets

Muscle your growth

Not Enough Effort, Work or Action

Last Two Days

The Window is Small

Next Week Becomes Next Week

The Answer is “Yes”

One Video? Pfff...

Having One Video

Perseverance

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Play Like the Scouts are Watching

Play to Them

Products Need Evangelists

Revenue IS your Venture Capital

Run, Don’t Walk

Sales Controls Budgets

See it Through

Conclude Your Cycles

Sell Better Than They Can Object

Sell From High Ground

Apple’s New iPhone Video

Developing New Business

Speak to Someone

Spotlight the Products

Stars Never Align...But They Don’t Need To

Strategic Growth

Subtle Selling

Survey Them

Promo Email ­ The Way It Helps

There’s a Stat

They Need an Excuse

Three Key Points

Three Sales In Selling

Thunderous Forward Motion

Time to Hustle

Two Phases of Sales

Urgency Dictates Budget

Viewer’s Choice

Demo it for the prospect

What does it really take?

You Create Urgency

Your Story

Case Study Videos

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It’s an Equation

Considerations Bog Sales

What You're Trying to Avoid

Why Multiple Videos

It’s in the writing

A Different Origination Point

Change Is Constant

Cows Meander

Don’t Run Out of Fuel

Focus on Outflow

Turn a Spark Into a Bonfire

More of Everything at the End of the Year

While Your Competition Procrastinates

Keep the Team Energized

Attention Works

Piggy Banks Can’t Work

Power of Focus

Apple and Google Take Products to Market with Video

Who Are You Communicating To?

You Want the Right Relationships

What Your “About Us” Should Be

It’s Not About Price ­ It’s About Value.... Always.

Why Isn’t It Closed?

Business Doesn’t Stop in Summer

Follow through

The Time is Now

It’s Always More

Run, Don’t Walk

Why So Urgent?

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Preparation is your weapon In any given week or day, the thing that you can depend on to ensure success is preparation. Back in the day when I played competitive hockey, our 5AM practices each morning were the thing that led to a successful game. The game is won before it ever started. Being prepared is a core part of success. If you plan for each day and each week and get completely ready for it, the odds will turn in your favor. I see people on a daily basis under prepared if prepared at all and it shows in their performance. They scratch their head and act bewildered when things don’t work out for the day or the week but it only comes down to their lack of preparation for the task at hand. So prior to any day or week, prepare yourself fully for what needs to be executed the next day or throughout the week. This includes things like:

Having a daily list of targets that need to be executed in a detailed, doable manner that will align your actions and keep you organized.

Preparing any calls, appointments or details you need for the week to

make a definite agenda that you can focus on and simply execute.

Studying any training material or reading relevant books that will help you be mentally prepared and trained for what you need to do. Few people put enough time and energy into studying and training on relevant material that will allow you to excel in your position.

Drilling any processes or in sales, patterns and objection handlings

that will help you smoothly execute your tasks. Drilling can be enormously effective because it makes you perfect. It fully prepares you and makes your work and actions become second nature. So drill until you know your position cold. Actors do it. Top athletes do it and you need to do it.

The bottom line is ­ be ready. In sports, training and being prepared is everything. When you’re fully trained and prepared, you're competent when the game comes and playing at your best is a natural course of action since the training and preparation has been done. I can’t stress this enough! Be prepared.

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In an interview with Usain Bolt when asked where his self confidence came from, he replied, "I trust my trainer, myself, and the hours and hours of sweat that I put in." Bolt's trainer Glen Mills added, "I see too many athletes having to try too hard on the day, because they've not done the work. The result is their muscles are too tense and they can't flow. If you put in enough of the right practice, the execution becomes automatic, and the result will take care of itself." So train and be prepared and your goals will be realized and your work life will become easier. ­ Robert

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Thank you! First and foremost, Happy New Year! I genuinely hope that you have the most productive, exciting and adventurous 2013 imaginable. Next, I want to truly thank you for your support. If you’re reading this it means that you are a client, contact, partner or friend and we are very thankful to have you as part of our group. Richter has grown by 60% in 2012 over the previous year and we know that we only attain that by partnering with our clients to help their companies grow which in turn allows ours to grow. So thank you! We’re genuinely excited about 2013 and have been working on some services that will help drive your business into the stratosphere. It’s why we exist. Our basic purpose here at Richter is as follows: “to apply our ideas, strategies, knowledge and care to our clients' companies as if they were our own to help them attain their goals which can be directly measured to our efforts.” So in simple terms, our purpose is to help our clients strategically grow their revenue and their companies through our efforts. Whether that be with really well crafted and written video trailers or with our strategic relations programs ­ that is what we do.

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It’s a Problem With the Goal When dissecting a video to gauge its effectiveness, the way we see it here, it comes down to the goal of where you start. In other words, what are you trying to solve and what is the key goal of the video? We see a lot of videos out there and we tend to feel that an ineffective video or one that lacks punch is a problem with the goal itself. See, a lot of videos are starting with a goal of trying to explain a product or service and in doing so, they do indeed explain it and leave the viewer no motivation to “reach”. The failure is in where they begin with the video. The mission is not to explain but must be geared toward who the target public is and how to create the urge to reach. This means that the urge to explain or define everything needs to held back and the focus needs to be on who the target public is (who’s clicking play), what their motivations or needs or problems are and how to communicate in such a way that the end result is the viewer saying... “we need to call them asap!” ­ that is reach. So what we tackle here is how to create reach and it starts with asking the right questions and starting with the right goal.

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Last minute panic Let me walk you through a familiar scenario.... you're very busy with what you're doing right this minute, you have deadlines and tasks to get done and anything off in the future is a bit of a distraction at this moment. You then push off any planning needed for the coming months and then are faced with a time lets say in mid to late November where you urgently need to get some promo or marketing material out and are now in a squeeze because you neglected to prepare for it and have nothing to send out to help bolster and improve the sales numbers when you need it most. I'd like to help circumvent this entire scenario. Plan now and get a few wheels in motion that will arm you with items needed for the future because the future quickly because the present and the need goes from "then" to "now.....urgently"

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Where is Your Marketing Budget Going? Unfortunately, the field of Marketing, PR and Advertising have become games of sales to push products and services onto their clients that appear to be bright ideas or the latest fad for promoting a company but few have any workability comparative to the costs. It's been said that companies lose 50% of their advertising and marketing budgets but they don't know which 50%. We saw this as a problem when we started our agency and set out to change it. Whether we're doing a video trailer that communicates our clients products or services in a crystal clear fashion that impinges to get a reaction causing an email or phone call or developing a strategy using our Strategic Relations methods to zero in on the exact right target public for our client to help chalk up new relationships that have the highest probability of being sold and closed.... we've cut through the fluff and created the most workable method to develop new business. I just returned from an international business conference and found that the number one thing companies are looking to accomplish is how to get their company to the next level. How to expand and drive new business that will fuel growth. Many companies are excellent at what they do. They have incredible products and services but they are not driving consistent business that will result in quarterly growth. They throw money at marketing and advertising methods that work to some degree but are clearly not doing the trick.

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Get In Control to Make Forward Progress I think these days with the pace that things run and the amount of things to do…. it’s quite easy to become overwhelmed. It sometimes, at least to me, feels like a tsunami of work or things to do when I review my emails, task lists, phone calls and on and on… It’s also amazing how often I hear a client or prospect use the word busy. To me, it’s a clear indication that we live in a busy, sometimes frantic and on occasion overwhelming environment. So the challenge then, is getting in control of it all to make forward progress. You can write down all the key objectives and then how to handle them and knock them out one by one methodically or you can look for what will help unburden you. In other words, where are you spending more time than you need to? What can be delegated? What’s repetitive as a process that you can find a better process for? Start looking for any areas of waste or inefficiencies and work to get those areas handled so you can focus on what’s important. This then, happens to be one of the key reasons we created the video campaign product we now offer. We’ve found that sales is a methodical process that goes through specific steps bit by bit. There are many elements of this process that are repetitive or repeatable. The sales and marketing team of most companies are already up to their eyeballs in work so why add to the workload with things that could be taken off their plate to unburden them. The campaign does that. By building these 12 videos that follows the exact sales sequence, we have essentially taken that part of the sales process off the sales teams plate and made it into a model that can be sent to the prospect to nurture them bit by bit and ensure follow up and follow through is occurring which helps bring in more business overall and leverages the sales and marketing teams time allowing them to do more.

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Movie Trailers Work

Think about this for a second. Movie trailers are the number one form of getting you to go see a movie. They run between 1 minute and 2 minutes on average. They show a glimpse for what the movie will be and use very effective copy, great visuals and follow a flow that entices you to reach (“I’m going to see that movie!”) Business is no different. You have an audience. You have a message that needs to be artfully composed to create a video that will have an emotional impact on that audience to cause them to reach (I’m going to call/email this company.... we need this!”) When done correctly, a video trailer is one the best tools to drive a response/reach for your company, product or service. Here’s a question though: how many trailers are created for one movie? Many! Don’t think for one second that one is enough. You need to be firing on all cylinders. Present your company, products and services in smart video trailer pitches from many angles that will inspire interest and reach. If something works, use it! The fact is that movie trailers work and so do business trailers. This should be the leading strategy for your business development efforts not an afterthought. You need to be heavily invested in trailers for your company and have many of them that pitch the company, products and services from all angles which are being used all over the internet.

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Know Your Target Public If you know your target public, you can know how to control and drive sales. It's a critical element that most companies completely neglect. While they may know the broad strokes of their demographic ­ that won't cut it. You need to know who's buying from you, who you're speaking to and how to communicate with them. Your target public will go right into communication with you with interest when you communicate the right things while ones who aren't, really couldn't care less. Yet many companies spend hoards of time and money communicating to the wrong public simply because they have no idea who their target public really is. Here's an example: If I walked up to someone who loves golf and is a Titleist fan who uses Titleist clubs and golf balls and I said, "did you see that new Titleist putter?...." that person would immediately go into communication with me with interest and I could then control the dialogue and direct it as needed. On the other hand, if I walked up to a Microsoft fan and said, "that new iPhone 5 is gorgeous!..." they would most likely make some critical remark and that would be the end of it. So when developing new business, it comes down to knowing the target public as a critical element to reducing effort and increasing results. Knowing your exact target public for your company is a game changer. When you don't, it's an uphill crawl to try to grow new sales and revenue due to the hit and miss nature of it. I’m always amazed at how many marketing, PR and advertising strategies or campaigns occur that never truly take the time to understand who their communicating to. It’s the equivalent of walking down the street on a megaphone telling people about your product or service with the hopes that the right person hears it and comes flocking in. Focus on the people out there that are already most likely to buy from you. Every company in the entire world has a target public ­ this I assure you.

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Stay Engaged This week I’m on vacation with my family and it reminds me of how easy it is to have people, tasks and cycles fall of your radar or agenda when you’re not actively in the game. :) I always tell that to our prospects because people forget how easy it actually is for a prospect to forget about you or just get distracted by other things in life. They certainly don’t intend to and are not actively trying to evade you but more often than not, they’re simply distracted by work or life and you have fallen out of sight for them. So you need to remind them and ensure that you stay connected with them in some way. Does this mean you have annoy them and push them? No. It means that you need to creatively stay on their agenda. Rather than just calling or emailing saying you’re “following up…” you can send them a video from your company in a link in an email and say, “I realize you're tied up this week so I’m sending this short video that you can share with the key people you mentioned and I will send a calendar invite for a call the following week…” The key here is to remind them and ensure your company and products are firmly insight for them so it gives you a much better chance to conclude the cycle with them. Remember that you forget about things all the time. Just think about any time you went to a mall and had an initial interest to buy something and then decided to walk around the mall to “think about it” and then became distracted by other things and forgot about the item altogether. The same happens with your prospects by work and life everyday. The recommendation is to have a campaign of videos that go over things like about us, your value propositions, a case study style video, a testimonial video, a product video, company story or culture video, your basic purpose, our people etc. It sounds big but it’s very effective. If you have a campaign of 8­10 videos, your sales team will have a whole set of tools to use to keep the prospect engaged and will have a reason to follow up.

A Senior Focus

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Over the weekend my dad came in town to visit for my son’s birthday and we discussed business as we typically do and while discussing I was asking him questions about how their company was doing and he mentioned that they had revenues around $200M so far for what is still a relatively new company. His previous business built to $2B and then they sold it. This lead me to the question of how they did it and what he felt was key. His reply was unequivocally sales and driving new accounts to grow revenues which then allows you to do all the other things you want to do but nothing is senior to that. It definitely got my gears turning even though I push that item very heavily here, I realized that I don’t push it near enough and neither does 99% of the companies I come in contact with. It’s so incredibly easy to get distracted by all the other areas of a company but if you don’t have a strong sales effort which includes prospects, sales material, videos, outreach strategies, websites, sales team, training etc ­ then your growth will be slow if any at all. It’s time to look at your current sales operating basis and write down what the existing scene looks like. Then write down what it should ideally look like or how it would look if you did 10 or 20 times what you’re doing now. Do you have a large accounts strategy? Do you have introduction products to entice new buyers? Do you have a strong position and defined target public? What’s your outreach strategy like? Does your sales team have sufficient prospects to flood their pipeline? If you acted as a prospect and walked through the sales process, is everything covered and is the sales team armed with material to handle your every concern? If not, it’s time to seriously ramp up your sales efforts. That’s what we do here. We help augment our clients current sales strategy to drive new business, revenue and growth through what we do so we make their sales teams lives a lot easier which impacts the overall company growth.

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Abundance Will Take Care of It If you're not focused on abundance in all areas of your company, you're going to be caught off guard by adversity. Things happen everyday that companies don't plan for and the result is a hiccup or contraction on some level which no one enjoys. While you're busy focused on day to day tasks, you need to peer into the future to view possible problem areas and then overcome them regardless of whether they occur or not. Things like losing a key salesperson, holiday seasons that cause dips in revenue, unplanned events etc can all be avoided by simply focusing on abundance. In other words, think in abundances not in normal and usual levels. There's safety in numbers. We always push our company and people to operate in abundance. We focus on doing and having more than we need when it comes to prospects, proposals out, videos, sales reps etc and then we drive all of our numbers forward with intention to ensure we don't miss targets. The truth is, most people are pretty terrible at correctly estimating the amount of effort something will take to accomplish a specific target so always ask yourself, "Is this enough?" I hear people say things like, "Well, we have a video and it's on our site..." to which I reply ­ “you need a new video every single month that promotes your company from many different angles and arms your sales team with an excuse to follow up with active prospects to get them consistently closed!” The expense is nothing compared with the income earned from this sort of action. So think and operate in abundance. When it comes to sales, never let off the throttle. Abundance is the very makeup of our Prime Strategy. Things like videos, elevator pitches, defining the target public, reaches (sales prospects), copywriting, pitch pages, etc are all included components of the Prime Strategy. So my suggestion is that we jump on the phone to discuss what we can do and how we can help drive your fourth quarter results. Here's a recent quote from a client: “The Richter10.2 Media Group reach strategy drives 80% of our sales in the door. There were many other services and processes we tried and would result in some sales, but nothing like this.

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We have used this to get in touch with the exact target public we are reaching for and it has 4X our sales in the past 9 months. We continue to drive in new business and are expanding as a direct result. Thanks Richter! RP”

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Alignment An aligned company is a successful one. By aligned I mean having everyone on the same page with the same goals and a clear picture or vision of where you are going, what you stand for and what your message or position is. Every person in the company should be able to clearly state who you are, what you do and where you are going as a company. If you can accomplish this and everyone is articulating the same picture and future vision, you have alignment and with alignment, things flow well and the company will flourish. We recently had a meeting with our executive team to coordinate our vision, position and products further and it truly works magic once everyone’s aligned. Once the key execs are aligned you can then get everyone else in the company aligned through a meeting or brief or even better.... a video! So here’s an idea for you... take your goals or vision or what you stand for as a company and where you’re headed and create a video that’s meant specifically for your own people to watch to get them focused, fired up and motivated and …. aligned.

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Get Them Focused You know, there's the external benefit of having outward facing material that promotes your products, services and company to your audience to drive fresh business and revenue but there's also an X factor that most don't really consider. Think about this for a second; what's it worth to have your people fired up? Your sales team reinvigorated and enthusiastic about your company and it's products or services. We all know that the first step in selling anything is to be sold yourself so it would lend to the idea that the first thing to do to drive revenue is to sell your people. Get them energized and excited for the new year. Let's face it, most come back with a Christmas hangover after January 1 and the remedy is to get them focused. Get them excited about 2014 and their future. That enthusiasm is contagious. So keep in mind that when you create a new video that communicates your message to your audience making your company and it's products irresistible, it also reinvigorates your people. The very first thing to do with the video is to show your people and specifically your marketing and sales team to give them a shot in the arm that reminds them why your company is great and remind them why they need to go hard to sell to your prospects and clients. This is one of the quickest ways to drive new sales revenue from a video project before any email is ever sent to promote the video to your audience. Just showing it to your people will drive morale and boost action which in turn will expand revenues. Works like magic.

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Finish the Race - No Matter What When I was a kid, I was a fast runner and loved to race. I raced my dad one day and he was beating me …. so I stopped. He crossed the finish line… won the race, and then came back to tell that I must never ever ever stop running. Anything can happen. The other runner could trip and fall or take a misstep or get winded and I could catch up …. etc, but never to stop running. Finish the race no matter what. I never forgot that. To this day I still apply that lesson. Even if we’re behind target, I keep running and keep the integrity of our goals in sight and pursue them. The important thing isn’t hitting the target or winning the race ­ it’s that you went all out for it. That’s what matters. Sometimes you’ll hit it, sometimes you won’t but the key is to go for it. I’m still a runner today and have a monthly target to hit 100 miles for June. I’m a touch off pace and three times had the thought cross my mind that ... “if I hit 90 miles, that’s pretty good…” or “I don’t really need to hit 100 miles…” and each time I’ve corrected my thoughts on it and re­focused on the target to go for 100 miles. It’s incredible how easy it is to mentally give up on a target. So my message is this, it’s the end of the month and quarter ­ stay focused on all targets and push them through. Then, make new ones for Q3 and go after those. Hopefully this helps inspire action toward your goals and targets for this ending quarter and for the new one coming.

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Making Informed Decisions A big part of selling is helping your prospect make an informed decision. It's pointless to spin your wheels and spend hours trying to convince a prospect through emails and calls if you haven't taken the time to send them material that will help give them enough knowledge to make a decision. Think about any decision you ever made. Did you have the knowledge prior to making it? I'm assuming the answer is yes. And now, think about any decision you were going to make but didn't have enough knowledge. It made you stall and delay the decision right? So, to help expedite the process and get your prospects to make a decision, arm them with knowledge. This can be in the form of a PDF, case study, video that clearly explains the product or service etc.

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Know Your Target Public A big part of sales has to do with knowing your target public. A lot of people get this confused with demographics or think that it’s the same thing ­ it’s not. Target public is who ideally aligns for your company based on past successful clients. Demographics tells you who has been doing business with you and it’s a broad scope range such as women from age 20 to 40 etc. Target public is who’s right for you. So for the purpose of really building your sales and company, demographics are useless. Not all clients are good for your company and truthfully, the ones that are not right and cause problems or are a abrasive within your company ­ you want to get rid of as fast as possible. When you identify and focus on the target public, good things happen. Your products and services will get better by catering to the needs and wants of the exact right clients. Your company and people will flourish because you’re taking on the clients that work and mesh well for your company. Your sales and revenue will soar because when you only focus on your target public it becomes effortless. When crafting a video or working with our clients on our strategic relations program, we obsess about target public. We get our clients focused on identifying who their target public is and how to communicate with them because we know that by doing this, our services become a heck of alot more effective and we tend to look like magicians in the process.

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Are You Irresistable? When looking at your company, message and products or services, the question to ask is; are you irresistible? In other words, is the overall message and position of your company and products so strong that it creates a gravitational pull with your target public that they can’t seem to resist? That’s the bar. That’s where you need to go. Sales can become a natural course of action and a sales team can essentially become order takers if your company and products are irresistible. So the mission then becomes, how do we make our products, marketing and our message so good that it’s at that level? Work with and from that goal and you can’t lose. Think about other companies or products that are absolutely irresistible to you. When you think of them you’ll probably find that you want to either buy their products or work with them or partner with them or be associated with them in some way because you feel drawn to them. A lot of this starts with a great product or service but also keep in mind that a lot of it has to do with incredible communication, position, marketing and message. You want to invest a lot in becoming irresistible because it will fuel sales and revenue that allow you to make your company, products and services better and better so you can reinforce that position. Here, we work to make our clients irresistible through the copywriting, video trailers, case studies, message, elevator pitches, positioning etc. We always work with this goal in mind. We want the clients company to be irresistible so sales becomes effortless and most of that irresistibility is derived from communication in some form which we happen to specialize in.

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Battling Noise... I had a call the other day with one of our new strategic relations clients and we we’re discussing their existing sales and marketing strategy and it was apparent how much confusion there was as it related to their strategy. Just hearing the client talk about their clients, audience, approach and all of the details related to their existing scene, it was amazing how fragmented and disjointed it all felt. They’ve been around for many years and are well into the double digit millions in revenue but the amount of effort that needed to go into landing new business and the level of confusion related to their strategy was significant. It reminded me how much noise and confusion there is these days with things like social media, constant pounding of ads, email traffic, sales teams trying to hunt for prospect and deals, lack of strategy, new websites needed, marketing approaches and on and on. The average company has to try to make sense of all this noise and develop a clear and workable sales strategy that uses the least amount of effort and creates the biggest impact to drive strategic revenue. But that’s a nearly impossible task with all the ideas and noise surrounding marketing and sales these days. So while it can feel like a sea of confusion, I assure you, there's a calm, focused and sane approach to developing new business that strategically grows revenue. We help clients every day implement and apply these methods with what we refer to as our strategic relations program. We’ve created what’s arguably the most focused, workable method to develop new business that’s ideally suited for your company. We’ve combined all the ingredients like research, creative assets, communication strategy and relations work to develop strategic business for our clients companies so they can spend time catering to the right clients and focus on growing their company strategically. We just completed what we refer to as a “process flow” video for our strategic relations program so if you’d like to learn a little more about what we do and how we bring a drop of sanity in the storm of confusion to your strategic growth efforts, shoot me an email and I will send the video link along.

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Be The Prospect Communicating your message in a way that really impinges with a prospect can be challenging. It so easy to communicate from the origination point of your company. In other words, because you’re excited about your company, it’s products or services, you end up wanting to communicate all about it along with benefits and anything else you can fit in that will make you sound better. It’s really hard to hold back from doing this. Everyone is trying to talk about why they’re great and why they’re better than the competition and so on…. but this approach often loses sight of the most important aspect, the prospect. So you need to “be the prospect”. By that I mean, really work to take on their viewpoint and work to be them, to see from their eyes. What would they need if you were them? What will communicate to them? We tend to obsess over this viewpoint here for our clients with every communication we craft. It’s not always easy but the results are far superior to what’s typically crafted by most. Communication should be tailor made to a specific audience or target public.

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Before You Do Anything... We have hundreds of phone calls with clients and prospects alike that come to us for communication related work such as our videos and frequently the prospect or client has ideas about what they want to have the topic be for the video. In other words, they’ve been talking to their sales team and have concluded that because of some of the barriers the sales team is running into… they’re going to do a video that talks about benefits and explains the product or service. Now… this sounds logical for sure…. only…. it’s addressing the problems the sales team is having handling the prospect which certainly may be a training issue but who does the video then become for? The sales team. But who is it supposed to be for? The prospect (viewer). So with that, you end up with a video that is decent but not one that communicates the exact message to the prospect that will get them to reach or help close the sale. Instead, you have a video that handles the objections or questions or misunderstandings and the prospect goes on their way. What’s truly needed is to obsess over who is actually watching the video. Who is clicking play. Why are they watching it? What are they trying to handle or what do they need or want. Lets not waste their time. We need a concise message that resonates with them in simple terms and causes an urge for them to reach out (call or email) while being mindful to not address and handle everything so they have no reason to. So while crafting a video seems simple enough, keep in mind that the copywriting can change the effectiveness from something that is pretty good to something that works like magic and it all revolves around who you’re communicating to and how well it’s done. So with that, we would love to obsess over crafting a really impactful communication for you that will truly work to help handle what your sales team is trying to handle making everyone’s (including the prospects) lives better.

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BofA Uses Them... I logged on to the Bank of America site the other day and noticed a button at the bottom that said “Better Money Habits” with a video play icon and so I clicked it. It lead to a site that was filled with whiteboard style animated videos that educated people about money. We’ve found that using the whiteboard style animated video is a winner for explaining a concept which either educates or sells or both. Visuals help sell a concept and many people tend to need help visualizing what you’re describing in sales. It’s fine to talk to people over the phone or send them an email to read but there comes a time when you need to show them in some way so they can get the idea visually which helps sell them. Most people are quite visual which is why this works.

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Business Doesn’t Stop Although many vacation through summer… the fact is that business doesn’t stop moving. It can’t and won’t wait for anyone. Your company and it’s message needs to be in front, top of mind, working to sell your company and its products or services…. even while you’re not there. That’s where we come in. We’re here to ensure that our clients have their company in front of their audience at all times. And during the summer months, it’s truly not the time to ease off the pedal ­ it’s a time to triple the efforts so there’s no lull. Here, we don’t agree with the concept of “peaks and valleys”. It tries to make reasonable sense or excuses for why the numbers go down. We don’t. We remind our clients to push ahead, triple their efforts and stay ahead because…. we care about their growth and are unrelenting about keeping their numbers up. Factually, the better they do, the better we do. So we’re all in it together. So let’s push your growth through summer. Yes, you may be on vacation. Yes, they may be on vacation. But business doesn’t stop. Sales still need to happen and efforts need to increase through summer.

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Campaign Like It’s For an Election With the elections coming up I’ve been driving around lately and noticing all of the signs and promo for candidates in the running which made me think about the level of promotion that’s really needed to get attention. From what I observe on a day to day basis with various companies, it’s clear to me that most companies do not put enough emphasis on their promotional strategy. Think about a political campaign for a second and imagine if you took your strategy to that level. Constant outflow and constant attention that gets you noticed, talked about and drives your sales and revenue. The political campaigns use signs, billboards, online ads, videos, emails, TV commercials, TV interviews, magazine interviews, 3rd party interviews, social media, blogs, etc So when creating a strategy for your company, you should think of it in large magnitudes like this that will really get traction. Sure it costs money but it makes money too.... more than it costs if done correctly. Keep hammering your promotional strategy to get the word out about your company and it will pay back tenfold in the form of sales and revenue. We would love to help so get in touch to discuss our Prime Strategy or Videos. Here’s a recent client commment about our Prime Strategy: “The Richter10.2 Media Group reach strategy drives 80% of our sales in the door. There were many other services and processes we tried and would result in some sales, but nothing like this. We have used this to get in touch with the exact target public we are reaching for and it has 4X our sales in the past 9 months. We continue to drive in new business and are expanding as a direct result. Thanks Richter! RP”

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Communicate… A Lot It takes a lot of communication being sent out to result in communication sent in to your company. Nature of the beast I suppose. So with that in mind and being that this is the beginning of a brand new month, you need to ensure you have a communication strategy that has sufficient floods of communication going out to your target public this month to result in new interest, sales and ultimately revenue. Hitting all time highs in terms of sales and revenue doesn’t just happen ­ it’s caused. A large communication strategy will help drive new business and current business and will help ensure that May is a successful month. So be thinking in terms of:

Sending effective email communications to your mailing list and schedule them out for the month

Having your sales team send email follow ups and ideally a video or

several videos that communicate your message and value proposition

Sending active communication to your social networks to post videos,

updates, news, messages, client successes etc

Reaching out to brand new potential clients to make introductions

Sending out PDF’s or case studies to current prospects in your pipeline that help move their interest forward

Send a press release out for May to update the public on recent news

Ensuring new blogs are created weekly or daily and posting them on

social networks as well. You can also post your videos to your blogs. This is just to get your gears turning here. Mass communication going out to your target public will absolutely help drive new sales and revenue so ensure for the month of May that you’re team has a communication strategy and is doing it daily. As always, I’d recommend having several well crafted videos that communicate your message that you can put in the hands of your sales and marketing team to get out broadly and keep posting to grab the attention of

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your target public. It flat out works!

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Distraction is the Enemy of Growth Distraction is the enemy of growth. In other words, when you can’t focus, it hurts your ability to grow at the pace you want or need. This infects all areas of the company. We chant the beat of “focus” here in everything we do and look to snuff out distractions when we find them. While this can be applied as an overall management rule throughout the company, this also seeps into your messaging and sales strategy. When creating a sales pitch or messaging for something like a video, you need to be able to stay focused. Know and select one target public with a specific goal of the message to that audience. Don’t attempt to add in everything you do in one pitch or try to communicate to many audience in one message. Get focused. The more focused you are, the more effective the message or pitch. You need the audience to feel as though you’re speaking to them. So I’d advise that you stay aware of distractions in your messaging and sales strategy and if found, work to cut out anything that distracts until you’ve accomplished something that is focused and by doing so, you will see the effectiveness increase.

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Doing the Basics It's quite astonishing to me to see how often the basics are dropped out and it tends to crash the stats. In other words, basic actions that are known to be successful and that lead to new business consistently tend to be forgotten and simply neglected. In sales, basics include things like:

Making a detailed lineup of active prospects for the week Setting up and having discovery calls Sending proposals Sending follow up emails Following a process and executing next steps Using effective material to sell the prospect such as videos, PDFs,

websites, articles etc We know these to be successful and yet, they get dropped out or forgotten. So, it's key as one who's in sales or one who manages sales to have a checklist or system to remind you of the basics and ensure everyone sticks to it... religiously. Success in driving revenue involves pushing all successful actions at all times and consistently. Being that we're in the business of driving sales and revenue for our clients, we tend to study and obsess over what works, what does and how to maintain and expand successes. One thing we know for sure is that a steady flow of fresh content needs to be going out and being put in front of your prospects if you really want to drive sales consistently. Video is arguable the best way to do this these days. The truth is, prospects have become a little lazy or impatient or perhaps they're just overwhelmingly busy so it results in them being antsy and not wanting to read content on your site or anywhere else but they will watch a video. In fact, it's one of the most likely things they'll do. With a really well done communication and aesthetic delivery, your chance of getting their attention and interest is very good. So I say all this for two reasons, 1. keep the basics in and 2. create smartly crafted video pitches, demos, overviews, case studies, testimonials etc that you can get in front of your prospects consistently.

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Don’t Chase Success… Chase Greatness I read a quote about Mark Parker, the CEO of Nike, that he had a phone call with Steve Jobs and asked advice for how to improve Nike and Steve's reply was this, “Well, just one thing,” said Jobs. “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.” Mark waited for a chuckle from steve but he didn't laugh. He was serious. And he was right. I think this is true for any company or any position. People lose sight of it along the way but the level of your craft and caliber of the products you produce is everything. I see a lot of people and companies chasing "success" which I feel is misguided. If you chase success, as in just revenue growth, profit etc, you end up with a revenue hungry, passionless mediocre company. Focus on chasing great. Start with great products and work through to attain great talent, great marketing, great sales and a great organization. It's easy to market or sell a great product. In fact, they nearly sell themselves. It's hard to market and sell a crappy product. Very hard. It's tough to get your heart in it and your people behind it. Focus and work to only accept great products and marketing and sales becomes a real joy. It's filled with passion resulting in messages that are irresistible. Here at Richter, we constantly critique our products and continue to push ourselves to only have great products. Nothing less. It's a constant evolution with a bar that keeps raising. While it can frustrating to continue to tighten standards, we know that everything else revolves around and counts on great products. So we're here to communicate your great products to the world to make them absolutely irresistible by ensuring that our products are also great in doing so.

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Effort Has Increased In the current and coming months, November, December and January, people tend to check out a little mentally. They get into the holiday mode and things tend to get delayed, people drag their feet or operate in a more distracted fashion. Every year it also seems that companies fail to predict this trend and fail to take the correct amount of effort to offset it. For example, if you went to a basketball court and shot hoops everyday on a 9 ft net and could hit virtually every shot and one day I changed the height to 10.5 ft and you maintained the same effort you were taking for the 9 ft height.... it’s easy to see that you would miss a lot of shots. In other words, you can’t take the same amount of effort in times during the year when the effort required has actually gone significantly up. Make sense? People talk about it being slow around Thanksgiving and Christmas but what’s really happening is that the effort required has gone up and they have not increased their efforts to match the amount required and so things seem “slow.” So take a look at how much effort you realistically need to take between now and the end of January to blow through the end of the year with strong numbers and start the new year off right. Juice up every outflow and sales related activity like crazy and you’ll be thankful you did by Thanksgiving, wishing seasons greetings to all the new business you’ve created by Christmas and setting a new resolution to do it again in the coming year by New Years.

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Excitement Fuels Sales If you can excite a prospect, you can sell them or at the very least make the sale a lot easier. But how? By communicating to them and about their company, product or service. Get them visualizing how their company, product or service could be better. Discuss ideas about their company, product or service for the future or how it could be improved with your products or services. The prospect only cares about their problem or ideas or challenges they’re trying to handle. They’re speaking to you because they feel there’s a chance you can help. Your job is to get them excited about their company, product or service while showing them how your company, products or services remedy their exact problems to create alignment. When we write copy for a video, we focus on the viewer who will be seeing the video. We write the copy to impinge on the viewer to get them excited about their company, product or service so they recognize how your company, products or services will be exactly what they need. It all boils down to effective communication and how to correctly address the prospects needs or wants. So arm your sales and marketing team with video trailers that communicate to your audience to get them excited and fired up which will cause them to reach (call or email) and help fuel your sales.

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Follow through… One of the biggest barriers related to sales is follow through. It plagues both sales and marketing teams. Because the marketing folks work like crazy to get quality leads and then the sales team needs to see those through from start to finish to conclude sales. Only, many times the follow through doesn’t happen. Why? Because the team gets distracted, is unorganized, moves on to other things or is not armed with tools that will help them enlighten and sell the prospect from start to finish, so they run out of gas and just let it drift off into the darkness…. This costs companies a fortune in lost opportunities and revenue. We’re here to prevent and stop that from happening. Our job is to help you get the tools your team needs such as videos, that will help sell prospects and arm your team so they can use these tools to follow­up and follow through on the active cycles. So when you’re considering budget as it relates to creating a video project, also consider how much is currently being spent and lost from lack of follow through on active cycles. You’ll see that having really strong communication tools is one of the best investments you could make.

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Fresh business When viewing all areas of the company, it’s obvious that every single division and component of your company is critical but ultimately, none of it really matters unless the company is bringing in fresh revenue in high enough volume to pay for the overall company and help it grow. It’s not everything but it is a critical focus and without it, there’s no company, products or services whatsoever. We’ve built Richter around the mission of driving new fresh business for our clients that align with their company strategically. We focus on two key things, knowing everything about our clients target public and then crafting the best communication possible to impinge with that audience and help drive new business. But with our strategic relations program, we cultivate the communication to what we call a “reach” and essentially walk ideal candidates through our clients front door. We’re not concerned with volume here, we focus on precision. In other words, when you look at the companies that are best suited to be a client for you and you know you need to get to them but aren’t sure how, that’s where we come in. We handle this component for our clients to essentially be their ideal relationship maker. There’s a huge amount of ideal clients out there for your company but you need to know who they are, how to get to them and how to get them interested so they’re reaching and are ideal sales candidates ­ which is what we do.

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Get Focused The concept of focus is a very powerful one and one that I feel needs to be used quite a bit more in most businesses. It’s challenging and takes discipline to use but powerful when applied. By focus I mean getting all areas of the company to have laser precision on what it is or what they do or what they sell or what the message is etc. This can be applied across a company to make it better. Here’s a few ways:

Getting your products or services more focused so you only sell the best ones and get rid of any that are not that workable, helpful or profitable

Getting the sales team focused to make them specialized and only

have them sell a focused product or service. You’ll see dramatic improvements by doing this.

Making your marketing focused to a very specific audience that

communicates solely to them and no one else.

Crafting your message to be focused to a specific audience about specific products or services that is completely crystallized and clearly communicates.

Deciding on and focusing your efforts on who you sell and who you

need to pursue rather than trying to go to anyone and everyone.

Getting all of your people in the company focused on exactly what they do, what their role is and what their end results need to be for their area so there’s absolutely no confusion on what they need to work on day in and out.

These are just a few examples to show that focus applies across the board. I’m fairly obsessed with this topic and have found that getting a company more and more focused helps drive expansion and success. It’s a strange thing because people tend to think that … “well, if I had more products to sell, we would bring in more revenue...” but experience tells me that this isn’t the case. Less products that a company puts all of their creativity and talent behind to make them world­class is actually a more profitable and successful strategy. Salespeople that only sell one thing as opposed to 5 different things is a more successful strategy. Marketing that communicates one message is

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better than 5 messages jammed into one..... etc That’s a big part of what we do here at Richter. We get our clients focused, we make their message focused and by doing so, we help drive their sales revenue.

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Get In Their Head It can be exasperating trying to get your prospective clients to understand that what you're offering is completely in line with what they need enough so they do in fact buy. But a big part of the problem is that a lot of companies are beating the drum for their companies, who they are, what they do, how long they’ve been around, the benefits of the product or service and so on…. and the prospects are being hammered with this from many companies at all angles, not just from you. So the focus needs to change. You need to really plant yourself in their shoes. Who are they? What are their needs or wants and motivations or problems and why? When communicating, you need to adopt their view so you can imagine receiving your communication as them and this will give you a better idea for how to communicate to them. It’s certainly a challenge and one that we obsess over daily. So while it appears that we produce videos here, the reality is, we develop communication strategy that comes in the form of a video because video is the chosen platform these days to view messages and is the easiest way to spoon feed that message to your prospective clients in a way that will make them reach (call or email).

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Go To Them When your audience is a higher level position like the VP or C­level, you can’t wait for them to come to you rather you need to go to them. Why? Because they aren’t searching. Think about it for a second. This is a very busy group of people that are focused on their daily objectives and typically aren’t online searching for products or services to buy or invest in. There’s a lot of strategies that promote improving your search results, ads, etc but if your audience isn’t typically searching then it becomes wasteful or pointless. You need to go to them. Find the audience and reach out directly to them to get their attention. They may have the exact need for your product or service but aren’t specifically searching which requires you to directly reach out to them to make your product or service known. Our audience is solely focused on key executives or key people so we know that we need to go to them. We use things like video to communicate our value proposition in a clear and simple way (and short way so we don’t waste their time) in order to spark their attention and get them engaged. It works.... well. So first identify exactly who you are trying to get to and then craft a video that communicates to them in a simple but clear message that will entice their interest. Being that you're most likely not going to catch them on an elevator these days, this is the online equivalent and the pitch will be more refined through video.

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Graphics Are Worthless Ultimately graphics are worthless…. without effective messaging. Strong statement, but true. It’s easy to get caught up in the visuals or animation of a video project and lose sight of the copywriting that forms the message itself. The visual work of a video is meant to hold the attention of the viewer while the message sinks in. If the message is poor, the visuals will simple entertain and nothing will really happen from the video as a result. On the other hand, if the message is really strong, the visuals will hold the viewer's attention while the communication woos them to take action. So never underestimate strong copy. Ultimately sales is in fact just communication. Great communication to an exact target public will move the needle. This isn’t to say graphics or visuals don’t matter because they really do, but without incredible copy…. the effectiveness dramatically decreases.

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Here’s What We Know Here’s what we know about sales ­ it takes a heck of a lot of follow­up and follow through in order to make things happen. Why? Because people are busy, distracted, overwhelmed, not totally sold, have other things to attend to ….. and the list goes on. But it doesn’t mean they don’t need your product or service and aren't interested. The truth is, most salespeople seem to fall off the face of the earth after 2 to 3 attempts to communicate with a prospect. When the prospect doesn’t reply, they chalk it up to reasons like “it’s dead” or “they're not qualified” or “they must not have a need right now” and so on. These reasons only really work to serve the salesperson so they feel better about stopping there and not continuing with the cycle. But there’s still a lot more work that needs to be done. To help support sales and help remedy this issue, we created our campaign strategy. Here’s the latest video in a series that explains what it is: http://vimeopro.com/richter10point2/video­campaigns/video/101248090 The bottom line is, there’s a lot of sales revenue left on the table because sales teams often don’t follow­up and follow through at the level required, which the campaign helps arm them with tools and organizes the process so they’re ready to persist through the cycle, helping them capture the sales revenue that was previously lost.

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How Does This Relate to Me? Yesterday I had a sales call with a company that was presenting an online platform to me that is meant to help manage a company's analytics. Prior to the call I watched their video and the thing I noticed was that the entire video was showing the platform and it’s benefits and attempting to explain using jargon terms that, if the viewer was not clear on what they meant, caused the viewers eyes to glaze over …. I then had the call with the sales rep and it continued along the lines of what their platform can do and it’s benefits and features and I couldn’t help but wonder, how this relate to me and is this company actually closing sales and making money from this pitch? I then asked the sales rep to walk me through how this actually relates to me… which he couldn’t necessarily do. This isn’t to rant about that company. In fact, it’s a great company and they have a great product but they have a communication problem. While on the call, I was visualizing how I would tell their story to their audience to actually show a real life setting of a real company using their platform to manage their day and make their company better. They had a case study of a company that found $250,000 in lost revenue so I would incorporate that story to really impinge with the viewer. Because the only thing that matters is the viewer. Your audience and what their problems or pain­points or motivations are. When you're crafting your communication strategy, you need to obsessively focus on them. How does your company, products and services relate to them? The more time you spend on answering and delivering communications related to that question, the easier sales will become. Don’t rant about your product and it’s benefits or your company on and on and don’t pitch right out the gate without taking the time to get to know and understand your prospect (audience). Commit to understanding them and clearly articulate how your product or services relates to them and then deliver your message via things like videos and your sales pitch in a way that is completely tailored to them and you’ll see your sales numbers improve.

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I’m Busy... I find it interesting how common some phrases come up in sales like “I’m busy... not a priority right now.... next week..... follow­up next quarter..... not in the budget.....” but truthfully, all of these statements are a bunch of baloney. You know it and I know it and if you realized that your competition says it too, well, you’d be in a position to take advantage of it. In other words, let your competition use stall tactics, delay projects, add time into every equation, delay, procrastinate etc ­ but don’t do it yourself. Be swift. Act fast and get things implemented immediately that are going to help drive the business forward. Otherwise, when you push things off because you’re “busy” you miss opportunities which slows your growth or tends to bottleneck your work making you all the busier. Heck, we’re all busy. I haven’t met one person who isn’t these days. It’s how you take advantage of situations, how you mold time to fit your needs and how to be efficient to out­pace, out­smart and out­work your competition that counts. So now that we got that resolved and out of the way, I’d like to sell you a video that will drive fresh interest to your sales team because they need it! Just go and ask them if they would like a video that helps them pitch and sell your products or services and I can assure you the answer will be resounding “yes”.

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Intention Drives Sales Almost more than anything else, intention drives sales. You have to intend to sell something and you have to intend for your prospect to buy. Part of that intention comes in the form of communication. When you communicate with your prospects, the intention needs to come across to them and strike them in a way that grabs their attention. The dictionary defines intention as: “an act or instance of determining mentally upon some action or result.” So with sales, you first and foremost have to intend to sell your audience and from there your communication needs to come across with intention that results in action. The question then is, does your current communication (website, video, emails etc) come across with intention that results in action from your audience? If not, then we have some work to do. We tend to be obsessed with the topic of communication here and we’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years. If you feel you need to ramp up your communication efforts in a way that delivers your message with intention and gets your audience to take action ­ lets have a call. It’s all we do all day, everyday around here....

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A Drop in the Ocean I think we can all agree that the internet is the equivalent of an expansive ocean that never seems to end. So using that as the analogy for getting attention for your company, I would then state that you can’t toss pebbles on one side of that ocean and hope to make an impact. Being that it’s such a big place it requires sufficient action to gain attention and traction. Of course, you don’t want to take any action willy nilly. You need to be strategic and efficient. So here’s a few recommendations:

1. Define who your target public truly is. In other words, who are you going after.

2. Do some research to understand where they’re located online.

3. Survey them to understand what their pain­points and motivations are

as it relates to your products or services.

4. Create videos or other tools to communicate to that target public where they spend time online.

5. Focus your time and energy on staying active in the places your

target public is online rather than aimlessly promoting anywhere and everywhere to be efficient with your time and resources.

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It’s a Process There’s a line in the movie Moneyball where Brad Pitt is coaching the team in the locker room and he says, “it’s a process..” This is true in baseball and it’s true in business and very true in selling. It’s a process. With everything, there’s a sequence of steps you have to go through. Your job is to control each step as well as you can and handle them expertly to provide the prospect with the information needed so they become enlightened, excited and sold on your company, products or services. So then knowing that it’s a process, you need to know the sequence steps in that process and ensure each one is handled fully toward concluding the cycle. After years of studying the sales process combined with our communication work toward a given target public, we married the two up to create the campaign product. The campaign is a series of videos that follow the process to help the sales team handle those steps fully so each step can be done leading the prospect to being interested, informed and ultimately, sold.

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Waiting Solves Nothing It’s a new year and we all have a lot to get done. It’s relatively easy to fall into old habits and delay critical moves that will take your company further into the future so I wanted to send a quick message to encourage you to keep your sights firmly planted on your goals for 2013. What’s urgent to you? Are you correctly estimating the amount of work and time needed to pull off your targets? In terms of using things like video, if I had it my way, our clients would do no less that 12 videos this year (one for each month) because I firmly believe that they will make well more than what the video costs and the amount of attention they would get from the videos and uses are valued much higher than the cost. Just imagine for a second if you armed your marketing and sales team this year with 12 new videos that communicated the story of your company, details about specific products, announcements for events, a trailer about working at your company for prospective new hires, a quick 30 second pitch that spikes attention, a 2 minute explainer whiteboard video that walks someone through your product or service.... and so on. The impact of that level of outflow and promotion would greatly impact your inflow and bottom line for 2013. Check any latest movie coming out and you’ll see that they have no less than 4­5 trailers or teasers for it. You need to think big and act big to make a dent. The internet is a big place. It’s easy to get lost or drowned out by the noise of it so take big action to get big attention and it will pay off big in 2013.

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Know The Public Let’s say you drew a triangle upside down. So, wide part at the top and sharp part at the bottom. Then you drew sections in the triangle to break down things related to marketing material, outreach, leads, qualification and sales as steps. Most companies operate this way. The focus gets narrower and narrower toward the bottom and the step before sales is qualification after leads have come in. Now, flip the triangle the other way. Point at the top and broad base at the bottom. Target public should be the first section. From there, you can do research, material, messaging, reaches and sales. Think about it for a second. If you don’t do your homework upfront, you’re potentially wasting enormous amounts of time, money, energy and resources doing it the other way. You need to know your target public as objective number one and from there, you can know where they are, what to say to them and work toward selling them thereby cutting the waste and executing a focused and effective approach. Whether we’re creating a video, campaign or executing our strategic relations program, we’re always addressing it with this approach. Qualification is not second to last…. it’s first.

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Know What Wins Do you ever inspect your numbers or stats to see what's working? It's an incredible process and it reveals key data that will help you build a winning formula. About a week and a half ago I was thinking about the weeks when we had our highest ever weeks and started to ask myself questions related to those weeks. Questions like, how many times did we hit above a certain number which made our highest ever? Who sold the most? Why? What did we sell? Where did the revenue come from? I then started to dig up our data to find out what weeks we hit a certain range or better. We keep each week on a google doc spreadsheet that we then turn into PDFs and save. So I found those weeks and then looked at the data to see if I could find commonalities. I did. I then took those commonalities and made a basic profile for our best week. I then reported what I found to our executive team and our sales team to make it clear for them so they could put their attention and focus on doing the things that would lead to our highest ever week. I kid you not, the following week, we went on to produce our second highest ever week. I was blown away. So I thought I would share this little tip with you to do the same. We then want to play a role to help you with your winning formula by crafting strong communications through our videos or a full campaign or our end to end strategic relations program all focused on pushing your strategic revenue and growth to much greater levels. Hope this helps. Have an incredible end to your July.

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Lack of Follow Through Often I’ve observed that prospects don’t become clients simply because there was a lack of follow through on the part of the salesperson. If there were 10 steps to go through in order to sell the prospect through the sales cycle, the salesperson only really executed 4 or 5 of those steps. To me, this is one of the most wasteful areas in sales and results in a lot of lost potential business for a company. Often though, the sales team is not armed with tools that help organize the process and that assist them to follow up and follow through. So, they get distracted by new cycles or opportunities and with prospects that are active. So this ends up creating this enormous amount of lost potential business that builds and builds unless addressed. We created the campaign to help handle this issue. The truth is, most salespeople don’t really have the time, attention or organization ability to ensure that these prospects are not lost. So the campaign is a series of videos that helps ensure the follow through is done and continues to stay on the prospects radar to enlighten and sell them bit by bit.

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Let It Do Some of the Heavy Lifting... We all know sales can be a tough game and if sales are down, revenues are down and revenues are arguably the most important part of your business. So part of your role is to make sales easier and faster. The more you cater to your sales team to make their job easier, the bigger payback you’ll get. You shouldn't have to rely on a team of rockstar salespeople to handle everything. Load them up with ammunition and tools that does part of the selling for them. Take a company like Apple for example, they've done a brilliant job with their videos to communicate the emotional appeal of their products. They've done such a good job that they've turned their sales team into order takers rather than having to actually sell something. I don’t see too many people in the Apple store hard selling anything. :) Of course the products are great but that’s not enough. The communication and marketing of those products needs to be equally brilliant. With fantastic videos, not just one but many that communicate your products or services in an aesthetic way with a powerful message, if done correctly, will do a lot of the selling for you making your sales teams life easier which then drives revenue. You need an arsenal of beautifully crafted video trailers that communicate your message. Here's a few questions to ask yourself to help you think in terms of messages that need to be communicated:

To demo your product or service

To pitch possible new employees for recruiting purposes

To thank your new clients for their business

To handle a specific barrier or objection your sales team is hitting up against

To pitch your company, products or services in an enticing way that

elicits reach

To provide a 30 second message that’s used to open up initial conversations

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A case study to highlight your value proposition

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Make the Communication Count We’ve all experienced in sales where you’re trying to communicate with a prospect and they just sort of…. neglect to communicate back. It’s certainly frustrating but what’s the real issue here? The issue is that your communication is not penetrating. You’re not hitting home to address the prospect in a way that sparks their desire to communicate back. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a salesperson communicate along these lines: “Hi John, I’m following up to see if we can get this started…. let me know…. call me back thanks!” This sort of thing just doesn’t hit home and misses the reason they're not communicating. So when you’re stuck with a prospect, go all in on the communication itself. Put your heart and soul into what’s being said and hit them with an emblazoned passionate email or call that shows you’re taking an interest in them and that you care. You need to imagine what’s happening on their side and preemptively work to address that in your communication. If done right, the prospects will get back into communication with you. Using a video link in this kind of email is a great way to improve the effectiveness of the email itself as well. If you arm your sales team with videos that cover key points in your sales process, they can use the videos along with strong emails as suggested here and you’re sure to see their prospects in better communication with them while also making the process easier overall.

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Making Stories There’s a funny thing that goes on in sales…. the salesperson will make up stories for what’s happening on the prospects side. Let me explain. The salesperson had a great call with the prospect, worked the cycle along well and then the prospect is slightly (or a lot) out of communication with the salesperson. Here come the stories…. The salesperson then starts to create the scene for what’s occurring on the prospects side. It may go something like this…. “Well, I called the marketing director and she needs to get approval from the CEO and she said he’s traveling this week so he’s probably out with his family and he probably hasn’t even looked at his emails or checked his voicemail let alone seen the proposal I sent over to her that she was supposed to present ….” I’m sure you’ve seen this before. :) Am I saying that the above isn’t possible or realistic? No. But you don’t know exactly what’s going on from their side so don’t make up stories that make you feel better about them being out of communication with you and cause you to back off taking actions toward wrapping up the cycle. Only operate based on the data you have and know, then take action based on it. Now, using the above example and only operating based on the information you absolutely know …. you could simply put a quick email directly into the CEO to acknowledge that they’re traveling and just to ensure they did indeed receive everything and to to reach out if needed or put a quick voicemail into them along the same lines to ensure you’ve got traction. The point being that you should simply focus on what you know and act based on it. Don’t make up stories for what’s happening on the prospects side because it will misguide you and reduce your level of actions because you’ve made up the story all the way to the point that you’ve concluded the outcome and don’t end up taking the right actions to see the cycle through. It’s a lot more effective to just operate based on what you know from your side. This then leads you to take further actions toward getting clear information and moving toward closing the cycle. Hope this helps. Oh and since you’re now going to be operating only from data that you know to be true…. you’re going to need to take sufficient action and have more ammunition to make your product or service irresistible to your prospect so I’d encourage a mid­sales cycle video that either walks them through your process or hits them hard on the core benefits or handles the frequently asked questions. These are the sorts of things that tip cycles over the edge.

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The Homework Prior to Sales Prior to sales there’s actually a secret sauce that makes life alot easier. A lot of companies miss it altogether and it just so happens that we specialize in it so I wanted to share some knowledge. There’s two key elements related to cultivating sales that we obsessively focus on: 1) Target Public ­ this has to do with who you sell. Not the demographic or a vertical but the actual target public meaning, who’s currently successful for your company that completely aligns and that you should focus all of your time and attention on. We define the target public for our clients so we have a clear picture of who we need to go after on their behalf, who we need to communicate to and how to find them. It’s an area that both large and small companies miss most of the time which results in more effort than needed on the sales front. Once you know this, you can craft your message and sales process as well as all marketing to the target public and create alignment for your company starting with sales. 2) Copywriting and Message ­ once the step above, defining the target public, has been done, the communication can be crafted specifically for the target public. It wouldn’t make any sense to craft copy and the overall message if one didn't know who they were communicating to, would it? So one needs to understand who they’re communicating to and then craft the message that plays to their needs and wants and to their pain points, problems or challenges in order to get a receptive response. Once the target public is defined, the copy and message can be precise, accurate and personal to make it impinge. These two items are core components to our strategic relations program which leads to a successful strategy. If you’re having trouble developing new business or the business you are getting seems disconnected with clients that don’t seem to align with your company, it’s time to look at your target public, your copy and overall message. By addressing these, you can create alignment for your company that makes driving new business development efforts a heck of alot easier and enjoyable. While these are both core components to our strategic relations program, we also deliver these individually so let us know if you’d like to discuss the details

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of having us define your target public and craft the copy and overall message for your company. It's quite the game changer.

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Creating Motivated Buyers The keyword here is motivation. Initially when a prospect reaches out to your company, they have some level of motivation. In other words, there’s a reason they reached out. There’s some kind of thorn in their side that they may or may not tell you but you can be assured there is. Your job is to find out what it is and then keep the motivation active and in sight for the prospect. The truth is, we’re all a little forgetful and a problem may blow up at the company that causes the motivation to flare up and only then, do we act. But once the problem sort of fizzles out, we forget why we were ever interested or motivated until... it happens again. So with your prospect, keep this in mind and focus their attention on why they initially reached out and what their motivation is. What is it that they’re trying to solve? You can use a video that communicates the key pain points your prospect has and then make sure your marketing and sales team uses the video frequently to keep the motivation fresh in their view. This will help sales convert to closed deals.

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Massive Assault To get attention that drives interest and fills your sales teams pipeline, it takes a massive effort. There are many tools that can help but the honest truth is, you have to have a consistent "assault" of outflow that grabs attention to land on your target prospects radar and stay on the radar to turn them into interested parties that become sales cycles. Headed into the end of the year, you need to be completely focused on gearing up all efforts in order to push your numbers up for the end of the year. That means, a much bigger pipeline, more communication with clients, more calls out to prospects, sales proposals sent out..... you get the idea. Take what you've been doing and ramp it up 3 to 4 times. We use short, punchy videos to quickly grab attention that results in interest and reach from our target prospects. They work. A 2 minute smartly done video will give your sales team ammunition to push deals over the edge and will rake in new fresh interest to help fill the pipeline. You can place the video on your site, on blogs, on facebook, send them in follow up emails as a link, send them in your weekly email newsletter ...... anywhere really, just get them out on a wide scale. Most of us are pretty terrible at estimating the correct amount of effort it will take to drive in new business to attain the sales we need. So my recommendation is for you to fall on the "way over­estimated" side of things because in business, it's way better to have a pipeline so large that you have to turn people away that be worried about a pipeline that is far too skimpy.

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More Isn’t More Common logic seems to lead us to the idea that more is more. In other words, more products or more services equals more revenue. Or more people to market and sell to equals more sales. But more isn’t more. It feels counterintuitive to go against this idea though. When you apply a “more is more” strategy to things like products, services and prospective clients, you’ll find that it creates confusion, overwhelm and less efficiency as well as less quality generally. Most people and companies can’t deliver on more is more because they need to support all of those products or services to market, sell and deliver them or as it relates to prospects, they need to cater to the needs of too many and it waters down the company. So I’d encourage you to focus. Zero in on the exact products or services that cater to your specific target public (audience) needs or wants. Also, focus on your target public. In other words, who the exact ideal client profile is for your company, product or service. Every company has a target public or various target publics regardless of size and you’ll find that by knowing it and zeroing in on it, that your success rate improves.

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More... It’s funny in business how these norms come into play that tend to constrain and limit a company. People and companies tend to do just enough. Every now and then you come across a company that pushes the boundaries and continues to push their reach or efforts further out. I hear people say things like… “we already have a video” or “we just re­did our site so not sure we’re ready for a marketing push right now”…. and it makes me squirm in my seat. I personally cannot think with this idea. It’s limiting. Here at Richter we apply the principle of “more” to our agency and to our clients. There’s always more that can and should be done. More push. More videos. More attention. More prospects and clients. More outreach. It’s so simple and perhaps that’s why it’s overlooked all the time. Just do more. Push to do more in every area and the company will grow. Do more than last week on a continuing basis. It’s magic. Don’t do a video and say… “great… now we have a video, we’re all set now.” Go and build a video catalog for your company that can be blasted out on the social channels, your website, have the right keywords added on each one on YouTube and Vimeo to make them searchable, arm your sales team with them so they have the right message to send at the right time etc. Always do more. While it may sound expensive or the idea that you don’t have the budget to always do more comes into play… it’s not true. Doing more is a prosperous approach. Push each and every area to do more and you’ll be loaded with new business to handle which will help pay for the “more” efforts.

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Mountains, Not Budgets Around this time of year, people talk about budgets for next year. I don't. We've already beat all of last years revenue plus plus and part of the reason is that I never talk about budgets. I talk about mountains. I obsess about mountains and I visualize bigger ones. And I know the thing that conquers mountains is energy, forward momentum, action and intention. These are also the things that build budgets. People tend to lose sight of senior ingredients to winning. It's a bit like the chicken and egg analogy. Just remember, budgets didn't come first, action and revenue did and they built budgets. So when you're planning for the coming year, ensure you dream up mountains and how to conquer the mountains first and work your way back from there. Know that driving revenue equals driving sales and driving sales means doing the things that will fuel sales making your company, products and services irresistible to your prospective clients. These then build bigger budgets for you to use to conquer bigger mountains. Ultimately everything should be assessed by this; will it help tackle the mountain to forward our goals by giving us the energy (revenue) to attain it? So peer into 2014 and look where you want to go. Identify the mountain fully and then work your way back to clearly articulate what it will take to actually pull it off. I can assure you that this exercise doesn't start with budgets.... it ends with them. You need to be focused on creating new sales to push revenue so it affords bigger, more powerful budgets and puts the wind at your back so you can actually conquer the mountain. This may seem counterintuitive at times.... but this is the way it is. We obsess over this here at Richter for ourselves and our clients each and every day and we've gotten very very good at it. So while planning your future year, we'd love to have a call to discuss how we can help be the wind at your back to conquer your mountain by providing the energy you need through doing what we do here. We're an agency of mountain builders, climbers and conquerors.

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Muscle your growth There's an element of sheer attention and pounding out your message and your products that has an unshakable workability to it. Take tesla or apple or google and you quickly see that you can't escape their sheer presence. They’re constantly in sight. But you don't have to be that big to go that big. In order to grow a company, there’s a level of force that’s required. You need to almost muscle your growth by pushing every area a little harder than your previous efforts and this includes your sales efforts. Always push harder and never settle on the idea of something being enough action or effort. You want to get as much attention as possible and have enough assets like videos to make your company irresistible to your target audience so they come in droves. With the use of the internet you can make your presence known using videos in every crevice imaginable. A lot of prospects we speak to talk about putting a video on their website but that's honestly the tip of the iceberg. To gain attention and to drive new business you should be using a campaign of videos across the internet taking actions like sending it out to your email marketing list, posting it to all social media channels, using it as an ad on Linkedin or Twitter, adding it as a link to your email signature, posting it to your blog, having a standard email reply that your sales team sends out with a link to the video to all new prospects, positing to Vimeo and YouTube and so on… There’s no shortage of ways to get your message out and you truly need to ensure you’re getting it out in a wide enough sphere to ensure it drives new business, the right people see it and your sales teams pipeline is loaded. We’ve always thought with the concept of muscling our growth here and it always forces us to think in much bigger terms. When we’ve considered doing one video to promote Richter, using this concept we’ve realized that we need 8 or 10 videos because we know what it takes to gain attention in the right magnitude to grow our agency. So assess your overall marketing and sales strategy and look at what you need to do to force expansion further and then accurately list out what’s truly needed to pull it off. It’s always worked for us.

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Not Enough Effort, Work or Action Sometimes it just boils down to mis­estimating the actual effort or work needed to pull something off. I’m amazed at how often this is true. While people often search for a more complex answer to solve the problem, so often it’s just that the level of action or effort or work is flat out off of where it needs to be. This is is true in sales and marketing related to sales. Many companies don’t put the required effort to attain their specific goals or target and so they fall short. The truth is, people are generally chronically bad at predicting the amount of effort, action or work something will take to pull something off. They usually underestimate which creates poor results. So as it relates to your sales efforts and revenue growth, it makes sense to overestimate everything. I think we can all agree that more business won’t hurt but less will. So whatever you think is sufficient, you should focus on increasing that amount dramatically and you’ll start to see much better results. I realize this sounds like a simple no­brainer type of thing but people rarely apply it. We tend to hear a lot of people say things like, “I don’t have the budget” or “we already have a video” or “we’re already working on an internal strategy” but these are all things that indicate that they’re thinking too small. If you have one video, you need 30. We’re in the middle of producing 36 for ourselves right this minute. If you already have a strategy, augment it with another strategy that does it slightly different and helps drive new business to your team. If you don’t have the budget, find the budget or go and create the budget so you can make revenue to help build a bigger budget because at the end of the day…. we all know that budgets come from revenue and if you’re not pushing revenue, you won’t have a budget.

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Last Two Days November is officially winding down which means we’re coming to the very end of the year so here’s a brief checklist of items related to promotional activities you should be doing to drive sales through the end of the year and to start January off right.

1. Craft a smart email for you sales team to send out to all active prospects. This is where having a video plays a role because you can add it as a link to help spark interest.

2. Ensure you have your marketing emails worked out between now and

then end of the year including some kind of video or email either thanking your clients for their business or wishing them seasons greetings.

3. Post any video or promotional material you do have to all social

networks on a consistent basis since people become pretty active on social media channels around this time of year and you need to stay on their radar. (use Linkedin, Google+, Twitter and Facebook for business)

4. Have your marketing and sales team update any social networks

they’re on with a video or promotional item to help leverage their reach.

These are just a few ideas but the common theme here is that you can use video to stay on your prospects radar and spark their interest to get in touch because that’s really all you need, their foot in your door so you can take it from there. The challenge is typically getting the initial sparked interest which videos tend to play a strong role in if done well..... which we do.

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The Window is Small Every ounce of doing business has to do with communication in some capacity. When you’re trying to capture the attention of your audience, you want to communication to impinge in the short window of time you have their attention. I hear the word “busy” fly around a lot these days which means the window has gotten even smaller to grab someone’s attention. This means that having lengthy text on your site to explain your company, product or service is not the smartest play. It also means that long sales emails are rarely read. Easily the best and most effective method to grab attention and allow your message to sink in is video. Your can make a 30 seconds, 45 seconds, 90 seconds or 2 minutes video depending on how long the pitch needs to be and how much time you feel you have to penetrate and establish interest.

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Next Week Becomes Next Week Unless you handle the cycles that need to happen this week, they become cycles that you label as "next week" and then next week; when next week is now this week, the cycle becomes a "next week" cycle yet again which creates a constant cycle that delays the company, hurts productivity and adds work to your plate simple because cycles are not being addressed right this minute, decided on and concluded. This causes huge inefficiencies in companies today and is part of the reason you feel "busy" all the time. Procrastination is not a desirable trait in business. Force yourself to address each item on the spot and work to handle things within the constraint of the 5 days in each given week. I promise next week will have all new cycles for you to handle so if you let work that needs to be done this week roll into next week, you start building yourself a mountain of backlog! You'll be absolutely amazed at how much you can get done if you focus on working within the constraints of this week and not letting anything roll into an endless pattern of "next week"

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The Answer is “Yes” We get asked every day:

Can you create an animated video like this example?

Can you create a video that's part live shoot and part animation?

Can you get our video done in time for our upcoming trade show? With Richter, chances are that the answer is "YES!" 99.9% of the time. We started our company not because we're proud of our creative abilities but because we understand what businesses need to succeed. Our entire purpose is to help you reach your audience in a way to gets them to reach back. We do that with world class copywriting, animation, voiceover, live shoots, editing ­ whatever your specific project requires. It's not about us and it's not about you. It's about your audience. And we make sure that when you trust us with your audience that we deliver a communication that they will appreciate and understand. If you have a "Can you create" question, the answer is almost certainly "Yes!". So ask away... :)

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One Video? Pfff... You now have one video and it’s on your homepage and it explains your product or service or company overall…. great. I guess we’re done here. :) Or are we? Be a prospect for a second. Put yourself in their shoes. Sure you’ve gained their interest to get them reaching but ideally, what’s really needed here. What’s really going to make sales easier and probable? Imagine having a video for each step in the sales process with each being a continuation of the previous one. The branding, look and feel all coordinated with each other and the series of videos working as a team to gradiently increase the viewers interest, urge to reach and ultimately to be sold on your company, products and services.

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Having One Video One video on your site will most certainly help to spark interest as long as it’s done correctly but put yourself in your prospects shoes for a second. Does it answer all your questions and handle each step on the sales process? Does it fully enlighten you so you are nearly sold on the product or service? One video is meant to wet the palate but in order to sell them, you’re going to need a series of videos that the marketing and sales team can use to woo the prospect and handle each step of the sales process. The mission is full enlightenment here and the end result is an urge to reach that converts to a feeling of being sold in the prospect mind. By having just one video on the homepage, it creates more traffic for the sales team but leaves them with needing more material to be used through the sales process. I went to Bank of America’s website yesterday and noticed they had a link to a video on their homepage and it took me to a page with a whole catalog of videos that educates their prospects and customers on financial management. This is really the order of magnitude that should be created. I realize Bank of America’s budget may be a little different from most companies but there’s a way to have the same effect with 12 videos, which we call a campaign, that can pull this off and will pay for itself many times over.

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Perseverance There’s a lot of info out there about growing a company and gaining sales but there’s one simple thing that can’t be underrated and that’s perseverance. It’s truly incredible what you can accomplish strictly through persevering. The amazing thing is, most don’t. I’ve had sales calls here from companies/people trying to win my business for various things and one of the things that never ceases to completely blow my mind is the fact that these people don’t persevere. I may hear from them twice…. maybe three times and then…. crickets. It could be fear of rejection or the fact that they make up stories about why I’m not interested or “well, he didn’t call me back so….” and on and on and I’m sure this makes them feel better about not winning the deal but the funny thing is, they could have, had they just persevered. I often see salespeople fall short of what they needed to do to completely conclude a cycle simply because they didn’t persevere. So the issue isn’t with the prospect, it’s with the salesperson. They don’t persevere to handle any and all concerns, questions, objections. They don’t follow­up all the way through the cycle. They don’t see it through. I can only imagine how much revenue is left on the table for companies because of this. This is one of the key reasons we created our campaign strategy for our clients and specifically, for their sales teams. The campaign helps them persevere and arms them with tools to do so. We’ve found that this happens to be an achilles heel for most sales teams and people.

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Play Like the Scouts are Watching I caught a bit of the Giants ball game over the weekend. They have a player who just looked off. He looked, acted and played sloppy. After I made a comment about it, my father­in­law who’s an enormous Giants fan and knows the details about each player mentioned that this particular player gained 30 lbs when he showed to spring training and was fined for it and had been dragging all season. It occurred to me that somewhere along the line, this guy lost his focus. He lost his burning ambition and his desire to be great. I thought back to my hockey years and thought about how hard the players hustle when there was a potential scout in the stands. It then made me think about how that relates to business and how each day, you should play like the scouts are in the stands. You can’t lose with this strategy. This should affect each area of the company starting with you. Everything should be taking to that level from your products, marketing, execution, customer service, sales etc. Always play like the scouts are watching.

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Play to Them In any sales discussion I’ve ever had, the one thing that people consistently agree on is that the prospect or viewer of a video, only really cares about themselves. That sounds funny at first and perhaps selfish but it’s accurate. The reason is because they have an issue or problem or challenge related to them and their company that they need handled. It could be related to an ambitious goal or it’s a genuine problem for them at the time. So when they watch a video, they’re looking for something as it relates to them. It’s easy to see then that when a company creates a video that talks about their brand, history, and benefits ultimately ending up being a puff piece for the company…. the viewer has a certain “cut the crap..” emotion that comes over them because they need to dig through it to understand quickly and clearly how it relates to them and if they can use it. It can be incredibly exasperating to have to sift through puff marketing via videos and websites to try to get real questions answered. Here at Richter, we obsess over the target public (viewer or prospect) and communication as it relates to the target public because we know that taking a direct approach done correctly will move the needle the most. Just think of any time you were the prospect. What were you looking for? What did you need? There’s no shortage of content out there these days. In fact, we’re probably all on overload. So do your prospects a favor and truly deliver a message that plays to them and their needs or wants as it relates to your product or service. It will be the breath of fresh air they need that will make their life easier and will thereby make your sales easier. Now I realize that because you love your company, it’s products and/or services that holding yourself back from talking about the benefits and so on can be challenging and shifting your message to revolve around the prospect can be a daunting task… lucky for you, that’s all we do.

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Products Need Evangelists I just came back from the 2013 Inc 500|5000 conference in Washington DC and here I am surrounded by incredible entrepreneurs and companies alike. Here’s one thing I noticed about this bunch…. they’re evangelists for their companies products. Complete and utter evangelists. They've built their company around highlighting, promoting, marketing, spotlighting and pitching their companies products all supported by incredible organizations and systems and teams to deliver their incredible products. They’ve earned a spot on this prestigious list composed of the fastest growing companies in America because of it. Note: For the sake of making things simple, I’m referring to all services and what you sell simply as products. You’ve put in blood, sweat and tears over your products and company that supports those products and they need your help. They need an evangelist to go the extra mile constantly because they can’t do it themselves and they need to have a constant spotlight on them. The companies that made the list to the Inc 500|5000 understand that. They know that by doing this, it drives sales and pushes their companies survival, growth and future. They’re in the position they are because they know this works. As are we. So I would encourage you to go all in for your products. Figure out how to support them, make them known with a constant flood of attention. No, it’s never enough attention. You need to figure out every way possible to make your products known to the world so your company and you can be the evangelists your products so desperately need. This will drive an absolute tsunami of demand for your company and will also create this funny effect of making you live up to your reputation. When you take things this far, you have thereby forced your company to play at that level and increase your game across the board and your products will actually improve and benefit from it. Product videos are a great way to start. Creating irresistible videos that work to showcase your products to your audience is something that is an on­going thing and something you should have in the works or in use at all times. As a note…. at the conference they had an artists throughout the entire event drawing out every speaker’s talk on paper to make animated whiteboard videos for people to watch later… highlighting the “product” which in this case was the actual Inc conference itself which I’m sure will be used to promote to others so they will come to the event next year. Smart.

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Revenue IS your Venture Capital I had a really nice business dinner the other evening in Palo Alto with several other very smart entrepreneurs here in the valley and we were discussing the most critical stages of a startup or any company for that matter. All of them that I spoke with agreed that the critical issue was driving sufficient sales and revenue to afford them the ability to operate, improve their product, hire key talent, invest in their company etc. I obviously completely agree. It’s the highest priority. See with consistent sales and revenue it affords the company the ability to:

Hire “A” players Work on and improve the products and services to make them

irresistible Invest in incredibly enticing marketing strategies that further drive

business Build the sales team further Make mistakes (without sufficient sales and revenue, you can’t afford

to make mistakes) So while it’s easy to focus on the product or service, the business model, the talent, legal structure etc ­ all of it is really secondary to the immediate and top focus to drive new sales and revenue consistently. Now, I’m not saying that this is the only focus, I’m simply saying it’s a senior focus and allows all the other components to come together. That’s what we do here at Richter, we focus our clients efforts as it relates to us, on driving new sales and revenue from their target public so it fuels their organization and allows them to grow further.

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Run, Don’t Walk It’s always scary to me to experience time flying by. When I look up to peek around and realize that we’re now mid­March… there’s a part of me that freaks out a little. I’m always checking pace here. Because pace dictates final outcomes to me. As it relates to goals and ambitions, it reminds me to run rather than walk. It takes a lot to get a little. I think we’ve all experienced our estimation of effort being off by a little or a lot! Ouch! So look, I’m here to push you. I want you to have your best year ever and I want to play a part in that. We had a sales meeting last week and one of our vice presidents said it like this, he said, “I consider myself a video arms dealer and my job is to build an arsenal for our clients. I want them to win the war!” :) Half jokingly of course but he makes a good point. We’re here to help you win. It takes a lot of work in sales to get through to the prospect and it may mean that you need a well coordinated campaign of 12 videos to ding in your message to truly sell them. We know two things cold, how to identify a target public and how to craft communication that will resonate with them so they have the urge to reach (call, email or buy). So I want to ensure you’re on pace for the year and taking actions in the right orders of magnitude that will lead to hitting the numbers you want to hit this year. It’s mid March. Lets hammer your message home.

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Sales Controls Budgets I’m amazed at how frequently companies come up with the term “budget” when assessing an expansion expense related to promotional strategies. Sure, budget needs to be considered but keep closely in mind that all budgets come from sales. A budget is in fact essentially a savings account that is money that can be allocated toward purchases or expenses. But it starts with driving new fresh income in the door from promotion and sales strategies. So the senior and vital strategy above budget is always promotion and sales because without it, there is no budget. You should assess a promotional item by it’s ability and probability to create sales and income. If you spend $3000 on something, the question is not, “do we have the budget” but “will it produce $6000 or $10,000 or $50,000?...” and based on the answer either invest in it or don’t. We invest heavily in our own videos to help drive our sales because we know that budgets come from sales income and budgets are subjective, they can expand and contract depending on what we do. So the buck doesn’t stop with budgets, it stops with promotion and sales and how to increase the expansion and revenue for the company. If something will help drive in more revenue than what it costs, then it’s a smart move and you should do it. Don’t get too caught up in budgets. If the investment makes sense, find the funds and focus on forcing expansion and I can promise that the budget will take care of itself.

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See it Through All too often salespeople stop prematurely in an active sales cycle simply because the prospect hasn’t called them back or returned an email or two. My advice is to see your cycles all the way through. You’ll close a lot more sales this way. What I mean by "see it through" is to push through each and every step of the sales process. Now this requires you to have a sales process that you stick to. But once that process or steps have been worked out IE, discovery call > proposal > proposal review > selling and handling > asking ….. etc you need to focus on tackling each step one after the other and moving the prospect to each step. You need to adopt a level of tunnel vision for each step and relentlessly focus to get each step checked off. This also requires you to be armed with strong tools that communicate your message and make your products or services irresistible. In each step you need to be putting things in front of the prospect that help maintain the initial flames they had for your product or service when they initially expressed interest. Things like videos, case studies, a client testimonial (which can also be done in video format), a elevator pitch PDF that pitches or highlights the product or service.... and so on. See each step through and tackle one at a time until that step is concluded and you can “sign off” on it and then move to the next step. We beat the drum like crazy here telling our prospects and clients over and over that they need to arm their sales team with enough incredible content and communication tools to handle each of these steps so the sales process can become simpler and shorter. You don’t want to be the salesperson simply calling and leaving voicemails or emails that are just... “following up”.... You need to send your message in many different ways to really get through using things like video case studies, the video pitch, the pain points addressed for the prospect.... Give them fresh content and be armed with content for each step of your sales process. This will make your sales teams life easier and honestly, your prospects prefer it because they have new things to look at which then further fuels their interest. Here at Richter, we've stacked our team with A caliber talent comprised of animators, music editors and incredible copywriters that are trained the Richter way. We’ve gotten kudos and recognition for our ability to write copy taking complex topics and making them communicate in a simple way. We

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obsess over communication. We’d love to help you create new and better communication that grabs your prospects attention and interest making the sales process a little simpler for everyone. :)

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Conclude Your Cycles Sales has a lot to do with concluding cycles. It’s great to be able to have a great chat and get a sales cycle started but there’s a key crossing point in the sales cycle that deals with concluding the cycle and that many (or most) struggle with leading to lost sales or drastic time delays. It’s certainly one thing to be able to sell enthusiastically about your product or service but at some point you need to know how to manage the sales cycle and navigate it to conclusion because like it or not, prospects don’t sell themselves and ask themselves to close and then move themselves through the actions to move forward. It simply doesn’t work that way. Someone has to ask them to get started and then walk them through the final steps. It’s the nature of the beast I suppose. This seems to be one the biggest falling down points for salespeople and one of the biggest barriers to closing a sale. Salespeople either don’t want to do the work to walk it through or they believe that selling them initially is enough and if the prospect is interested, they’ll close themselves. But this leaves a lot on the table and causes time delays and missed deals simply because no one asked the prospect to move forward and then walked them through the steps to get it wrapped up. In final stages, we’ve found that there’s typically logistical questions as it relates to things like process or deliverables. These questions need to be answered in order to move forward toward concluding the sale otherwise they can act as clogs in the flow of things. So we’re creating what we’ve named a “process flow” video to help walk the prospect through our process and answer those last lingering questions so we can move forward. The final stage of any sale is where you want to be armed with the correct information and tools to help ease the prospects concerns and make them feel comfortable to move forward. So don’t neglect this stage. It’s certainly important to gain their initial interest and get them to call or email you to begin the sales cycle but you also need arm your sales team with tools that will help them conclude the sales cycle and get through those last steps smoothly.

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Sell Better Than They Can Object You're going to get objections or originations or barriers that come up in sales. No question. But you need to be totally and utterly prepared and have the ability to sell better than they can object. What does that mean? It means that you need to be able to steamroll any possible objection under the sun moon or stars. Without hesitation. Sales is a game of communication and usually if a prospect is on the phone with you ­ they're interested so it effectively becomes your sale to blow. I used to have this teacher in 5th grade that said at the start of the year that everyone had an A and it was up to you to keep it or have it be reduced based your efforts and work through the semester. Sales is kind of like that. You start out with a clean slate and from there you screw it up. So your mission is to be so good that you don't screw it up. I think the Achilles heel of most salespeople is in three areas. Strong discovery calls with smooth delivery, handling objections flawlessly and controlling the cycle at the end to ask for the deal and walk it over the finish line as smooth as possible. Most of the reasons salespeople are weak at these three areas is because they get caught off guard and ineffectively answer questions that exudes confidence and sells the prospect further. Deals are lost everyday by this. Keep in mind that the prospect is selling too. But it's more of a challenge sale because they're trying to ferret out companies or products that don't suit their needs or find the holes so they make a safe bet and good decision for their money. Any flinch and they've got you. So your job is first and foremost to absolutely believe in your company and your products or service to the full. Then to know every objections that typically comes up and be absolutely ready for anything they could possibly say. Then be so sold on the product or service that even if you don't know the objection handling point, you can come up with one on the fly because you're practically an evangelist for your company. Objections need to be confidently steamrolled so the prospect feels comfortable and ends up drinking the same kool­aid you drink. Never ever let objections stop you or make you hesitate. But this means that you need to be armed. You need effective tools like really well crafted videos that communicate the vital points of your company and that play into the prospects needs so their objections are handled and their mind eased so they move forward. This is precisely what we do here. As Claude C Hopkins (considered the father of modern advertising) said “The

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only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is not for general effect. It is not to keep your name before the people….”

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Sell From High Ground You know when a salesperson starts by diving right into the pitch or their message out the gate and you immediately feel the disconnect or urge to pull away or resist the sale? That’s selling from the low ground. In other words, that’s not an advantageous position to sell from. Why? Because you never establish communication with the prospect. The first objective is to get them into communication so you can move to the sales part but without them actively being in communication, the pitch is useless. So, the call or meeting needs to start with getting them engaged. How? You need to be a little more proactive with your dialogue to quickly ask questions that express your interest and curiosity as it relates to their company and goals. Keep in mind that this needs to be genuine and you really do need to care, no fluff superficial stuff will make the cut. Dive right into questions about their company as it relates to what you sell to start them talking. From there, you need to listen closely and intently. People love to talk about their company and they’re typically very interested in their future so never forget that you’re there to help them with that. Once the prospect is talking, your mission is to listen and acknowledge and take good physical or mental notes. This will provide you with a lot of the fuel you’ll need to sell them so pay attention. At the right point, you can dive in and walk them through what you do. This is selling from high ground. It puts you in a causative position and gains their engagement in an authentic way. Never ever pitch first, even when asked. Ok, hope that helps this week and in the future. Here’s something else that will help, this week is the end of the month and the end of the quarter…. I know, they come fast! :) So we’re going to give you a 10% break on our fees this week for any video project started this week. So now would be a great time to kick off a project that will help drive the fourth quarter results.

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Apple’s New iPhone Video Take the launch of the new Apple iPhone and you’ll see that the number one method they used to communicate and sell the iPhone is video. Beautifully crafted and communicated videos no less. Apple fan or not, you have to give them absolute kudos for their use and the power of how they have composed their videos to make the iPhone 5 enticing and practically irresistible. I’m not even an iPhone user ­ I’m a Blackberry guy! But even I can barely resist the urge to buy one! The video is so aesthetic and it communicates at the right wavelength that it reminds me of what can be accomplished using online videos as a core sales strategy. If a video is done correctly, it can be central to your sales strategy and help push new business to new levels. As the old saying goes, “cash is king” …. but in reality it needs to be changed to “communication is king” because communication is what actually drives “cash”. How much would you say that iPhone 5 launch video is worth? $20 million? $200 million? $1 billion? Think about it ­ that beautiful live video will probably help produce over $1 billion for them. Now I realize this is Apple ­ an enormous company with giant resources but keep in mind that any company can create a video of similar caliber to have a strong outcome on their sales and revenue.

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Developing New Business When it comes to developing new business relationships that drive sales, we happen to be the authority in the area. Bold statement ­ sure, but when you look at what’s out there, we’re very confident that you’ll agree with us. Here’s a review: Google AdWords ­ if you’ve tried this approach, I'm sure you’ll agree that everything needs to be right to make it work. Such as text, keywords, dollar amount per day, placement etc etc. This creates so many moving parts that it becomes a bit of a hit or miss strategy. So, you need to dump a lot of cash into it to overcome the hit and miss aspect. Can it work? Sure. Is it the best? No. Telemarketing ­ these days, people really don’t like to be cold called, especially from someone reading a script trying to bend their arm into an “appointment” which they sometimes give in to just to get off the phone. Does that make it a qualified lead? No. This is a very intrusive model and one that most people on the receiving end hate. Again, you can get results with it, but it’s not the most effective. Business Development Rep ­ you can certainly hire a business development (sales) rep to go and prospect business and bring in new sales ­ I recommend you do. But here’s the thing, almost all sales reps are much better at working prospects and selling and closing them than they are at finding and developing the business in the first place. It’s also not efficient to pay to have them spend their time searching for prospects. You want them on the phone or in a meeting closing business to get the best ROI. Direct Mail ­ in some aspects this can work well but it’s incredibly difficult to know that you are getting to the right person (qualified target public). For all you know, the kids picked up the mail or if it went to a company ­ the receptionist got it and threw it away as mail spam. This is a hit or miss approach and you have to spend huge amounts to actually hit. The typical response rate is usually 1% to 2% and you still need to filter that to qualify the leads leaving you with more like .002% of actual qualified prospects that can be sold and closed. SEO ­ here’s the thing, not everyone is out there searching for you. Many times, they need or want your product or service but don’t even know what to search for. So, even if you have the perfect keywords and placement it really

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doesn’t matter because they aren’t looking. You need to go and find them and get “in front” of them proactively. This makes this approach a very reactive model. If you are selling ski’s or a product or service that people typically search for ­ great. But if you have a business to business model ­ there’s a very good chance that your target public isn’t searching. White Papers and Fill In Forms ­ many people will express interest in a white paper because they want the information. Maybe they’re a competing company trying to gather information. Or, they could be someone who has an interest but is in no way qualified to buy. This method can cultivate a lot of “window shoppers” that really have no intention to buy anything which wastes huge amounts of your sales teams time. Networking Events or Conferences ­ the main problem here is that most people attending are there to network leaving very few actual buyers. Obviously, you can develop business at these events but there’s no guarantee that your target public ­ the qualified person, is going to be there and so you will need to spend time, energy and money spinning your wheels which makes this method inefficient and costly. So, with all that said, there’s a better way to develop business from the right target public at the right time. You pay for performance, not fluff. In other words, you pay per qualified relationship developed that is reaching for your product or service making them the most likely candidate for a sale and the least resistance to sell. We’ve used these exact methods to develop our own new business month in and month out.

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Speak to Someone There’s a difference between speaking broadly and speaking to someone. Most communications I see such as videos, websites, articles, marketing emails etc are speaking broadly. What’s needed is to speak to someone. There’s someone on the receiving end that’s reading or viewing the communication. That’s the person you want to speak to. So when you’re crafting your communication for a video, website or anything else similar, write for that person. Don’t speak broadly about your company, benefits of the product and on and on. Speak to the person. Using real life as an analogy, imagine a group of people talking with one person just speaking out loud in the air about a topic. It wouldn’t be long before others in the room decided that the person must be crazy. On the other hand, if you were having a direct communication one on one with someone and their communication was crafted around you or if there was a speaker in the room and their talk was directed at you, they’d have your interest and attention. Always speak to someone, not broadly.

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Spotlight the Products Sales happen because you have great products (or services which I will also refer to as a kind of product). Keep that in mind. Ultimately everything about your company boils down to your products. But all too often we lose focus of the products and take the emphasis off the product you sell and deliver to your clients to make their lives better. Great people are hired to help make the product better. Marketing is done to make the products irresistible. Sales efforts are created to get the products broadly out to the market. Organizational efforts are done to help facilitate the company to be orderly and allow a clean flow to get people to produce the product and have people sell the products broadly. Everything revolves around the products of your company. And ultimately that's where revenue comes from. Great products that people yearn to buy. So they need to be spotlighted ..... or rather showcased so your audience comes in flocks. Your products need to be communicated to your audience in a way that makes them irresistible and creates reach that then by extension causes sales, revenue, growth and a better company so you can then make better products that your clients can benefit from. Our job here is to make sure that when we create a video communication for your company and its products, we do it in a way that it serves to magnify every detail of your products and crisply communicates them so the viewer is wooed and has the urge to reach. That's our role here. We know you have great products but we need to polish their appearance to help make them communicate in a way that triggers your audience's interest and commands attention that results in an irresistible pull.

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Stars Never Align...But They Don’t Need To Frequently I deal with people that think they need to do something so they can do something else and it's typically untrue. It's almost a sneaky form of procrastination people do perhaps without even knowing it themselves. While it can seem logical that you need to have everything perfectly lined up so you can do something, more often than not it simply isn't the case. Focus on action and on doing things and tackling objectives that all have the theme of helping to expand and improve the company and don't wait for things to be perfectly lined up. Just take action and have a high amount of execution and things will all come together. So with that said, I'm here to remind you that you need to promote .... a ton. More than you are. No, you don't need to have the budgets perfect. No, the timing is never right. Just take action, crank the outflow and hammer your audience with fresh content like a blockbuster summer movie with trailer after trailer, news, updates, billboards etc. You’ll see traction and sooner than later.... have a flood of fresh sales interest, an overflowing pipeline and new revenue flowing in.

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Strategic Growth In July we hear companies say that sales are slow or similar statements but it really doesn’t have to be that way and it’s not something you necessarily have to agree with. Sure, people are out of town traveling with family and things like that but business goes on regardless and things are always happening in the business world whether people are out of town or not. So if you hit a slump in July of any kind, it really just boils down to the wrong estimation of effort to take sufficient action that will result in fresh business coming in. We consistently drive fresh business for ourselves and our strategic relations clients regardless of the month. But we’re not trying to get any and all business; we help them acquire strategic new business which in simple terms means the exact right target public that aligns with their company and that is ideal for them. By doing this, we can take a lot of the new business development efforts off their plate and simply allow them to focus on using those new ideal clients to strategically grow their company. So I would simply advise that if you’re having a challenge in sales and specifically in bringing in the right clients for your company, reach out so we can discuss our strategic relations program with you.

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Subtle Selling We all know that sales is a process. It may take many contacts with a prospect hopefully leading to a closed sale. The problem is that you may have to doggedly chase a prospect over and over and set up numerous calls to get there. This natural process consumes time and energy from your sales teams day and depending on how organized they are, may extend the runway to be much longer than it needs to be. This is a key reason why we developed the campaign. It’s a subtle and …. sort of ninja sales strategy. Let me explain… By using a series of videos that are coordinated with each other and that walk the prospect through the sales process bit by bit, you can get to them with less effort. Why? Because people are more inclined to watch a video rather than reply to your email or pick up your call. Frustrating, I know, but it’s the truth. You may not be able to book 5 or 10 calls with a prospect but you can craft simple and concise emails with a link to a video that they’re highly likely to watch. So as they watch the videos week after week, it’s subtly selling them through the sales process bit by bit. Meaning that your sales team can focus on selling the key cycles they have while the campaign does it’s job to bring the other prospects up to the right stage so they’re interested and reaching. In other words, the campaign, used correctly, can subtly sell the prospects and remove some of the workload from the sales team so they can focus on key sales cycles. Our mission is to remove a lot of the busywork from the sales teams plate so their time is freed up allowing them to use it productively.

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Survey Them As it relates to having a video created for your company, you obviously need to know what the message needs to be. We work on this with our clients on a daily basis. One recommendation I’d have for you is this ­ survey. It doesn’t need to be long or formal but you should survey your sales team to understand what barriers or objections or questions keep coming up and then survey some of your clients or prospects to understand what needs or wants they have as it relates to your product or service and gather any motivations or pain­points they have as well. Once you have this information gathered from your sales team and some of your prospects, it will give you a very good idea for what the video should or could be on. In other words if the same thing is being communicated by the sales team and the prospects …. that thing should be the topic of a video that communicates directly your prospects in order to make it impinge with them and get them to reach (call or email) This is a simple strategy but very effective when incorporated into the message of a video. You’ll find that by communicating the right message that has been voiced by your prospects, your response to that video will go way up. We do this with every new video client to survey them through a questionnaire that helps us gather valuable tidbits we need to know in order to write effective copy. Give it a try with your sales team and prospects and you’ll have plenty of ammunition for an effective video.

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Promo Email - The Way It Helps Being in this business and seeing from my side I can tell you that there are three major ways that a video project helps our clients:

1. Sales and Company Morale ­ Once a video project is done, there’s a level of excitement and pride related to a video for your company. For the sales team, this motivates them and gives them a shot of enthusiasm to close that next deal which is critical in sales. You want to keep your people fired up and that energy creates momentum which helps boost the companies stats.

2. Outflow generates inflow ­ this is literally a mathematical equation that

you can keep at your company. A certain amount of outflow is going to result in a certain amount of inflow in the form of new prospects, opportunities, sales and revenue. So when you get a new video and you send it to your mail list, post it on the social media channels, put it in your sales teams email signature and get your sales team to send it to their prospects..... it’s going to result in inflow. If you have a shortage of inflow, focus on outflow.

3. Spending money increases necessity ­ there’s a strange phenomenon that happens with people and companies.... when you spend money your urgency alarm bells go off and the need to drive more money/revenue to make up for the money spent kicks in. I’ve seen this a lot both with myself and with client companies. So it’s good to spend money that you then need to replenish because you tend to go into overdrive in an effort to make it back which tends to help the company positively. Strange but true.

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There’s a Stat There's a statistic that tells us that 80% of all sales happen after the 12th contact. Wild. We were certainly blown away by this the first time we discovered it but over the years, it's proven to be quite true. We also know that sales is a process. Very few sales skip through the process. So knowing these two pieces of information, we then act accordingly. When we look at the sales process then, this would mean that your sales team needs to be armed with the right material to be used at the right time to work the process through and continue to improve the probability of closing the cycle. So while a lot of companies focus on things like gererating a lead, when you think in terms of the process, a lead is just a new problem for the sales team. It's just more traffic to handle. In other words it's good but it just floods in new work which they will need to work through the process which requires more work and more steps. So what's truly needed are the right items at the right time in the sales process following each sequence step one after the next to help walk the prospect through to the point where they're fully enlightened and really being worked through the sales cycle toward them wanting to get started with your company. After creating 2500 plus videos and over 6 years of doing strategic relations work, we married what we know about communication and sales process and created what we now call the campaign. So a campaign then is what we consider to be the absolute solution to taking a large amount of the workload off the sales teams plate so they're armed with everything they need to work the cycle and take the traffic they're getting now and work it through in a methodical, process oriented way with content that will make your company, products or services irresistible to the prospect and help push the probability of closing 80% of all cycles.

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They Need an Excuse Sales isn’t always the easiest thing to do. But, it can be made easier by supporting the sales team with tools that will make their job require less effort. Ask any salesperson if they’ve ever had a time when they needed to put a follow up call into a prospect but had nothing to really say other than “I’m just following up..” or no reason to call other than essentially just following up and they’ll tell you “yes”... many times. It’s awkward. They need reasons to follow up. They need tools or ammunition to help woo the prospect. By providing a video to the sales team, you’re effectively giving them an excuse to follow up. I assure you that they need an excuse to follow­up, any excuse and many of them. Sales is a process and it takes many contacts in order to conclude a cycle. If the sales team isn’t armed with the right material, it simply makes the process longer and harder. Now, imagine having a whole series of videos that follow the sales process step by step and give your sales team ammunition and an excuse to follow­up throughout the sales process.

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Three Key Points I had a great call with one of our strategic relations clients the other day and wanted to relay a few pointers to all of you as it relates to key sales points not to be left out. Our client was getting reaches (new interest from their target public) and a few seemed a little off at first glance. The client couldn’t quite see how they fit with their company but this was prior to speaking with them. On another instance, the client received a reply from one of the prospective companies and it sounded like they weren't interested but upon further discussion it was discovered that it was a near perfect fit. So while working with this client we focused on three things:

1. Always follow­up with prospects ­ no exceptions here. You need to persist through the stages until you can get a phone call. Never give up on them if you believe in your product or service and believe it’s a good fit for them. Far too many salespeople neglect prospects who don’t immediately reply or respond to their outreach and give up on them. Remember that their busy and distracted but also remember that they need your help and you need to believe in your products or services enough to persist for their good.

2. Never take what the prospect says at face value. In other words, even

if they look at your site or email or material and say, “I don’t see it as a fit...”, just know that they most likely don’t understand what you're offering is yet and your role is to connect and enlighten them to understand while also working to understand their needs and wants so you can intelligently communicate how it all fits together.

3. Always have a discovery call. This is an absolute must. Never

“write­off” a prospect prior to doing this. You need to get them on the phone for at least 15 minutes to discover their needs and wants, problems, motivations and learn more about their business so you can then have a clear picture and communicate how your offering fits or can help. If you neglect having discovery calls, you’re missing deals consistently and losing revenue.

So the outcome of these three things was that our client called us to thank us for persisting through these three steps to help them land what looks like three new great accounts for them. Keep in mind that sales is a process and

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it requires pushing through the standard actions that leads to new business. Always be willing to persist and always do the standard successful actions. Hope this helps you with your own sales efforts! Feel free to get in touch if you need anything.

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Three Sales In Selling There’s essentially three sales in any sale. The first is that you need to sell yourself. You personally need to be sold on what you’re selling otherwise your numbers will be meager at best. The second is selling the prospect to be in communication with you. This is what a lot of people forget or leave out. In other words, you need to communicate a message to the prospect that makes their ears perk up, gets them interested and is personal to their needs and wants. If done well, they will go into communication with you and from there you can move to the third sale which is to sell and close the prospect on your product or service. We’ve found that using video (and really well done copywriting) helps all three sales. It helps to get the marketing and sales team fired up about the products and services you sell (first sale). They help to communicate a message to your prospects to spark their interest so they initiate communication with you (second sale) and it then helps to actually sell the prospect on your products or services making your teams life a little bit easier (third sale).

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Thunderous Forward Motion You can work on strategy all day, tinker and try to make your company perfect, read books to study best practices … but ultimately goal attainment often boils down to thunderous forward motion. And it seems the physical universe can’t quite keep pace with this so it tends to throw in the towel and scream uncle. By thunderous forward motion I mean moving forward and pushing all areas with full intention into levels of action well above the normal daily operating basis. It’s magic. Get your team to obsess and focus on the goals and tasks at hand and lock in on those with the highest level of persistence and determination to methodically muscle them through to a completed action. Apply all of your energy and fiber to push goals through. It works. In sales, you need to map out what the average or regular numbers are for your team to get a snapshot of what they’re doing now and then get them to take action doing numbers much much greater than the existing numbers. Sounds simple and it is. Growth can actually be that simple. People get lax. A little too comfortable and it sometimes takes a shakeup to make them a little less comfortable. Crank calls out, emails out, proposals out, ramp up the sales material as ammunition and get the team firing on all cylinders. Because that’s what it takes to grow. It doesn’t just happen. It’s caused with the utmost intention and with thunderous forward motion. Competition certainly can’t keep up (or won’t try) with this sort of method so it becomes a competitive advantage. Ok, so now lets talk ammunition. Based on the above, what would you say you really need to do to arm your sales force with the content needed to knock deals over like a tenpin? Lets not skimp here. Lets load it up. A campaign is what’s needed. You’ll need a fleet of 10 incredible video trailers that communicate your message in the most direct, crisp and irresistible way from your value proposition to your products, your story, client case studies, testimonials, short punchy teasers and solid objection handling videos. If you want to grow, you have to commit to it and it takes this level. It sounds like work and it is. But it pays off. Big. We can craft a communication strategy that will immerse your target public with your message to create an urge for them to reach to drive sales. We know this works because we’re currently up to our eyeballs in work from applying this exact strategy.

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Time to Hustle Welcome to the 4th Quarter ­ now it’s time to hustle. With this quarter being packed with holidays.... it’s an important quarter to get focused. All too often I see companies mis­estimate the effort it takes to actually drive sales and revenue strongly through the fourth quarter and low and behold ­ their numbers sag. You have to predict and plan for what's ahead and ramp up all efforts that will allow for that extra push to make up for any crazyness related to this time of year. So what I’d recommend is two things:

1. Fill your sales pipeline to the very top to give your team consistent new flows of prospects to speak to. We do this with our Prime Strategy. This gives our sales team fresh “reaches” as we call them, every week for them to work to sell and close. There’s nothing worse than to leave your sales team to “hunt” for their own business with the hopes of druming up some viable prospects to close... and consistently no less.

2. Create a few smart videos that clearly handle the very things your

sales team is battling now in terms of objections. Just ask your team “What is the biggest barrier you are hitting right now?” then tally the results to see what the number one item is and then create a video that addresses and handles this point. From there, put it in the hands of your sales team and marketing team to use to help tip sales cycles over the edge to close. (You may not know this but our high end animated videos are actually part of our Prime Strategy so you can knock out both of these steps with Prime)

So plan ahead. Predict smartly and the 4th quarter will pay off handsomely. We can help tilt the odds in your favor.

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Two Phases of Sales I’ve talked a little about our campaign product which is a series of tightly coordinated videos that walks through the sales sequence but I wanted to clear up where and why this is key. There are two phases of selling. The first phase has to do with the marketing component. Most companies spend a lot of time, energy, money and focus on marketing to attain leads for their sales team. So the marketing team is mostly focused on that as their mission. This is what I would refer to as the first phase of selling. Marketing to attain the result of leads. But once the leads come in and are turned over to the sales team, the second phase of selling begins. So the sales team needs to take that lead, follow up, work the deal and follow through all the way to a completed sale or closed deal. This is where the campaign comes in. See, the sales team needs support and help through the second phase to ensure the leads are worked all the way through from start to finish to increase the probability of a closed sale. So where the first phase ends with the lead, the second phase begins which is where the campaign starts. So a campaign is meant to help support the sales team through the second phase to nurture each lead and work the sales process steps bit by bit to preemptively sell the prospect (lead) toward a closed sale. Most companies have a lot of resources tied up in the first phase toward marketing to gain a lead but few have enough emphasis on what happens after to help the sales team in the second phase so they’re armed with the right material to create a better probability of a closed sale. What’s a lead really worth anyway if the second phase of selling falls to pieces?

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Urgency Dictates Budget In sales, urgency really dictates budget. I was working with a client the other day and we were discussing a video project that was sizable for sure, but this specific company can afford it. It ended with the client coming back saying that they didn’t have the budget for the project or it was out of their budget or something similar. I’m sure you’ve heard something like this before. Anyway, the very next day, he calls me. They had a situation in the company that required multiple videos on an immediate basis. We sent a quote for the project and it was approved that day, payment and all! So the lesson here is remember that budget is dictated by urgency. In other words, the prospect needs to feel that your product or service solves a problem and is urgent to them or to their goals or growth. Ultimately, that’s the key thing. They’re trying to accomplish something and are convicted about it and will do almost anything to accomplish that and you need to help them do it. So your communication strategy needs to align with their goals and be in line with their priorities to make it urgent. Don’t ram benefits or your company history or how great you are down their throats…. focus on what they’re doing, why and how you align with that and the sales cycle will become effortless. Budget will just simply show up…. out of thin air, when it’s urgent. We’re completely obsessed with helping our clients companies grow using communication strategies. We’re not here to sell video. We’re here to craft communication that aligns with their business development efforts to get their prospects to reach (urge to call or email and enter the sales cycle or close the sales cycle) so we can forward their growth. In that sense, what we do is urgent to our clients. We’re helping create revenue leading to their goals being attained.

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Viewer’s Choice Put yourself in the viewers shoes for a second. Let's say you've come across a company with a product or service that you may need but you'd like to explore further. How do you prefer to educate yourself on what they do? By reading their website or by watching a short video that succinctly sums it up and answers your immediate questions so you can explore further? I've obsessed over this viewpoint many times and as a prospective client of various companies I've used, I can answer this wholeheartedly to say, I greatly prefer to view a well done, clearly delivered communication through video rather than sift through website content more suited for SEO purposes than human consumption. Stuff that only seems to make sense to Google algorithms but virtually make no sense to the average human reader. So focus on doing your viewers a huge favor by creating a communication meant for humans that truly delivers your message and answers their immediate questions. As a testament to this, I’ve actually noticed these days that I generally view the videos as my main source and then I skim basic content on the site if needed. I tend to prefer bite sized content that is easy to digest and that I have the patience for rather than pages of it.

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Demo it for the prospect Using a visual aid in sales can be incredibly effective to demonstrate a product or service or communicate a message. A lot of people tend to be visual learners and need to see something in order to establish their interest. It’s also said that in order for people to make a decision, they first need to understand. So if you’re trying to sell and prospect and they don’t fully and completely understand what you're selling, well, you’re making your life harder than it needs to be. Arm your marketing and sales team with visual material like videos to communicate what you do and how and get these out in front of the prospect. You can have the prospect watch the video while on a phone call as well and just be quiet while they watch, it works! Here’s a great example of a demo style animated video we recently completed: http://vimeo.com/59585988 If it were up to me, you would have about 20 videos like the above that all communicate different angles for your company, products and services and then I’d follow­up with you to get a testimonial and case study because I can promise that your sales numbers would be through the ceiling! :)

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What does it really take? More often than not I see people and companies mis­estimate what it really takes to execute a specific target or cause a specific action to occur and this tends to lead to missed numbers or simply causes things to take much longer to attain. From what I’ve learned and experienced, this boils down to the estimation of effort needed to accomplish something. Human beings are generally really terrible at accurately estimating the amount of effort something will take in order to accomplish a specific target or goal. Take any missed goal, quarterly target or objective and you can simply sum it up to a misestimation of the effort required to pull it off. As an example, if you're shooting a basketball to get it through the basket and the basket is 9 feet away and you consistently only apply enough effort to throw it 7 feet.... it’s safe to say that you’ll always miss. So when you're looking at expansion activities within your organization, you need to really dig in to know what it’s really going to take and then map it out and simply execute. As an example, as it relates to sales, you’ll need to know the following:

How much outflow or promo needs to go out per week to get one interested response?

How many prospects does a sales rep need in order to close the desired amount?

What’s the runway to close each deal? In other words, how long does it take to close one deal from start to finish?

What’s the current average close rate for the sales team?

Is each step worked out so you can assess where the sales cycle stands at any given time?

How many proposals need to go out to close one deal? These are all questions to ask in order to figure out what effort is required in order to pull off a specific goal or target. Once you know the specific details you can then write down the items you know to create a roadmap of the effort required to accomplish a sale. From there you can hand it to your sales team and then have them apply the right amount of effort or be sure to surpass it

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and you’ll start to see your numbers increase bit by bit with better and better prediction week after week. We know internally here that we need to know all of the above questions and more and we then measure each and every one of them so we constantly have our finger on the pulse. We also know that as it relates to sales, it starts with applying enough effort to drive the initial interest first so we consistently create new videos for our team to send to prospects that reignite their focus and gives them fresh content and tools to drive sales. Now that we’re in August and September is right around the corner, I’d advise that we ramp up your efforts so we can help drive your numbers in September through the end of the year.

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You Create Urgency Urgency for your prospects to buy your product or service emanates from you. In other words, their sense of urgency or demand is actually manufactured by you. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking the opposite; that the prospect will reach out to you when they have the need and will realize when they have that need. But that’s not the strongest and most causative play here. You need to produce their sense of urgency. You do that from reaching out to them, staying on their radar, enlightening them or educating them with key material that will spark their interest. Just because they aren’t immediately interested to start with doesn’t mean you should stop. While you continue to reach out, enlighten, put articles in front of them, show them case studies, present videos to watch etc.... the prospects awareness comes up up up to the point where they realize that they need or want you product or service and that need or want enhances into urgency that is then spread internally at their company which then creates the sale. As long as you’ve done your homework to know your target public so you know that you’re reaching out to the types of companies that need to be clients of yours, then you should continue to reach out and work to increase their awareness and create urgency for them. Because the fact is that they probably already have a need for your product or service but they’re simply not fully aware of it or it’s not immediately on their radar. They most likely have or can get budget for it which leaves you with the task of staying focused and on their radar to enlighten and raise their awareness to then manufacture a burning urgency that then turns into a sale. Always keep in mind that people are busy, distracted, overwhelmed in work etc etc which can make it tough to get their attention but this isn’t a reason to stop trying, it’s a reason to take further action to ensure your message makes it through all the way until you’ve got their attention and they now consider your product or service an urgent demand. Videos can help immensely with this because people watch video these days and it’s become the default tool for getting a message across. If you have a series of great videos that deliver your value proposition, show a case study example, handle a main sales objection point, tell a story or your history, isolate what their key pain point is and how your company solves it.... you’ll be that much further along toward closing sales consistently and their urgency will continue to rise.

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Your Story What’s your story? Every company has a story or culture that needs to be communicated to their audience. These days more and more business is done over the phone or online which means prospects don’t get to interact with your company and the people internally as much. But you still have a story and culture to show to your prospects that will help increase the relationship with your prospective audience... This is where live video plays a role. With a live shoot, you can show the experience of your company. Tell your story or reveal your internal culture to your audience which will help drive engagement with and give them a feeling that they “know” you. It’s truly hard to replace showing your story or culture and delivering an experience to the viewer that creates a sense of loyalty and further increases their reach for your company. And the only way to really accomplish this online is with a live video. We just completed a live shoot for an aircraft company that reveals their experience, brand and culture in a way that causes the viewer to “reach” toward learning more about this company and feeling the urge to look into their aircrafts. If you’re the correct audience for this video, I’m sure you can imagine how this helps the company drive sales …. take a look: http://vimeo.com/69347446 A week or so ago I emailed you a survey related to website viewing habits and I wanted to comment on a bit of the feedback we’ve received so far. Here’s some interesting facts from the survey results:

43% of all viewers watch video

They only visit the homepage, about us and product page.... by far! (This tells you that you need a video on these pages asap!)

The most important element of a site per the survey was that it easy

to navigate and they didn’t feel overwhelmed from content and pages and tabs. (Again, this tells you to keep it simple and have simple, clean videos that clearly explain who you are and what you do)

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You’re Trying to Communicate Better Here’s two things you’re trying to do:

1. Communicate your product or service in a way that your prospect understand it and see’s the need and

2. Communicate in a way that causes them to have the urge to “reach”

meaning that they feel they need to call or email to get in touch with your organization. It’s an ongoing battle with many many companies and typically the people internally at the company are not the best candidates to write the copy.

So once the above is handled and you’ve nailed the communication, you then need to figure out the best platform to deliver that communication to your audience. When I say platform I mean the way the communication is delivered such as website, video, PDF, email marketing messages etc. So while I would advise that they all need to be tackled and done.... I would also suggest that you look at popularity and what the audience prefers or tends to lean toward these days. So think about this for a second..... lets pretend you’re the prospect and someone is trying to gain your attention. What platform do you prefer and what do you feel is the easiest way for them to grab your attention? An email? Their website? A video? A PDF? I can’t answer that question for you but if you’re anything like me (antsy.... busy.... sometimes distracted) then you’d opt for video because it’s simple.... it doesn’t require a lot of work on your part and you can quickly conclude whether you’re interested or not. You know it will be a 1 to 2 minute investment of your time and if you have a slight interest, then you’re likely to click play. So with that, if the communication is well done (and it MUST be) then your chance at grabbing their attention is very very good and if you’ve done both step one and two as listed above.... then they're going to reach (call or email...) and from there.... you’ve got it made. Richter is in the business of communication to an exact target public that elicits reach. The reason we choose video as the platform is because it’s the most workable method these days to deliver a communication that, if well done, will cause the viewer to reach.

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Case Study Videos A key ingredient to sales is confidence. You need to inject confidence into your prospects mind to inspire action from them. Nothing sells like confidence. So while it’s key to establish their initial interest and motivation to speak, the thing that keeps the sales process and conversation moving along is reinvigorating their initial motivation and gaining confidence with the prospect while you work through the sales process. How? We call it confidence material. A case study or several case study style videos that show the prospect what it’s like working with your company. How the process went. What the final outcome was and so on. Keep in mind, at the end of the day the prospect is thinking... “yeah, but how does this affect or help me?” and you need to show them that. Being empty handed at this stage isn’t smart and makes selling longer and harder. We help our clients create well crafted case study style animated videos that deliver a real life walk through experience so their sales team can use the video to help push deals over the edge to a closed sale.

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It’s an Equation There are basic laws when it comes to driving new business and revenue such as this: the amount that you send out into the marketplace will result in a certain amount back in to the company. In other words, you can actually chart and come up with a percentage for how much inflow you get from your outflow efforts. So while many come up with other reasons for why sales might be down or why you’re hitting barriers such as economy, time, budgets and so on, the truth is that the simple math in terms of what’s needed to result in a certain amount of inflow is off. You need to be driving your outflow efforts consistently and expanding those efforts week after week to ensure you drive in new business. The challenge is that you may not know what the most effective method are. What to do. Who to target and ultimately probably don’t have enough time in the day even if you did know.

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Considerations Bog Sales If you have ever experienced a sale that seems to come to a slow halt and moves into a waiting mode.... it’s due to a consideration that has not been handled by the sales rep. In other words, the prospect has a concern that your product or service won’t handle their problem or some other concern about it that they aren’t telling you. So, you need to find out what those concerns or considerations are in order to handle them. The second you can get the prospect to tell you what they are, you can then move to sell and close the deal but up to that point, it’s basically dead in the water. Once handled, the cycle can go from a close that was quickly becoming a future cycle or possibly never, to one that happens now. It’s a massive time saver. A great way to handle this is to email the prospect and ask them point blank, “is there any consideration or concern you have that I haven’t gone over with you that would prevent you from moving forward.... let me know so I can help...” Then once you have gotten the feedback, handle it with whatever is needed, a case study, client testimonial, video that really sells the product, phone call to walk them through the process etc. Hope this helps you with your sales!

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What You're Trying to Avoid Most of us look where we’re trying to go. Goals we want to attain. But more often than not, we forget to look into the future to predict and see what we need to avoid in order to attain our goals. In other words, we aren’t assessing future obstacles or problems that need to be addressed now in the present, in order to avoid them in the future. For example, Sunday is July 1st. We’re headed straight into summer which means all efforts need to be heavily ramped up in order to push through this time of year when we battle “out of office” messages, crazy schedules and sub­par sales numbers. This can be avoided altogether but it must be planned for and the execution of that plan needs to be put in motion today.

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Why Multiple Videos As it relates to marketing, PR, advertising and sales.... operate on the basis that you are never doing enough. This viewpoint will dramatically drive sales. You need to immerse the audience with new fresh content from your company coming out consistently like a tsunami.... sounds funny but I’m serious. Get the word out there on a massive scale. One video is a good start but my recommendation is to have many videos that have different messages for your products, services and company. One video will help sales but 20 videos... or 30 videos that are flooding out from your company will take things to a new level. I realize that it sounds like a tall order but it’s a very smart play. Take it one at a time and keep it flowing. Lastly, our videos work because we don’t write copy like most out there. We actually have a special technique which is a formula that causes a “pulling” effect. While many copywriters write what they feel is interesting or answers questions or follows a specific message, we write what creates reach. There’s an actual method to do it and we train all of our copywriters on it. So, my recommendation is to focus on volume and never be satisfied that you’ve done enough. Drive a volume of content out to your exact target public and your sales.... will be positively affected.

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It’s in the writing When writing a communication to your prospect, remind yourself to really write from their viewpoint so you truly understand what they need or want and how you can serve them better. It’s easy to fall into the trap of emailing to simply nudge or follow up or try to confirm an appointment but it can be wasteful. In other words, why are you emailing? What’s the purpose? What does the prospect need and why are they motivated to stay in communication with you? How does your product or service help them? Why are you sold on it? What problem are they specifically dealing with or what frustration do they have that they need help with? These are the things you need to answer for yourself and then act upon. The result will be a communication that shows you care and the intention will impinge on your prospect to result in them getting into communication with you and moving the cycle along. All too often I’m sure you hear your sales team say something like, “they went silent” or “they’re out of communication”..... which is directly the result of the communication being sent to them is not interesting, genuine or communicating to their needs, wants and problems with intention. Start communicating as stated above and you will see more prospects get into ative communication with you and of course, sales will increase. Sure, it takes a little more time and discipline to do it this way but that shows all the more that you care enough about the prospect to take the time to do it. At Richter, we specifically train our copywriters to take on the prospects viewpoint and to understand how to extrapolate key information that they can use in their copy that will help gain a response and forward the sales cycle when writing copy for videos. It’s vital and it works.

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A Different Origination Point The word “compare” comes up a lot in our business as it relates to videos but when you look at the origination point of a video, it completely changes everything and puts us in a category that doesn’t compete whatsoever because the origination point is completely unique to us. This differentiating factor for richter compared to other companies that create videos is the way we craft a communication. The degree of success boils down to the origination point of the communication. Most companies start from various different origination points such as "explainer" or from the company and its product or service benefits for the prospect while Richter specifically focuses on the target public and their needs, wants and motivations all toward creating what we refer to as “reach” as the main origination point which when done effectively creates an urge in the audience viewing the video for them to reach out and call or email. That's something unique to Richter. We’ve actually created a formula for writing the copy and have a training manual for our team to follow so they standardly create that result. So ultimately when comparing video companies it’s not really an apples to apples comparison although it appears it is. The little change and difference in the way we tackle a communication project makes a world of difference in the final results.

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Change Is Constant Imagine for a second if a business didn’t change things up on you to show you fresh products, fresh ads, fresh ideas, fresh content..... I think it’s safe to say that a sense of boredom and disinterest would set in wouldn’t you? We know change is a constant in business which means you need to keep fresh products, ideas, ads, content and so on in front of your prospects and clients in order to maintain interest, excitement and passion. Apple recently had another one of their major keynote events and change is one of the things I think their doing very well. Not drastic changes to revamp the company but rather changes that keep their audience excited. Fresh products, fresh aesthetics, fresh ads, fresh content etc. It creates excitement for their products and company overall. People look forward to what’s next. So with your company, start looking at what needs to be changed or updated to keep your prospects excited and interested to make them buy or continue to buy from you. Since we deal with video, imagine if you just used the same video over and over again..... it’s easy to see how this gets stale as an overall approach. Now imagine if you had fresh videos every 1 to 2 months that you could put in front of your prospects to fuel their interest and excitement. The same can be said for your website, website copy, email copy, marketing efforts and so on. Keep it fresh. Keep them energized and keep changing it up on them. It will help drive sales.

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Cows Meander Cows meander. They don’t just walk straight into the gate where you’re trying to get them to go. They need to be ushered and prodded to get them to go precisely where you want them to go. If you let them, they’ll walk outside the gates and eat grass. You’re role is to poke, prod and if needed…. muscle them through the gates with total control. So using this concept lets dissect the last stages of a sales cycle. While you may have done a great job to have a discovery call, get them a proposal and walk them through the stages to make it toward closing …. you can’t just let them loose at the end and expect for them to walk through the gates to close the deal. This happens all the time. Salespeople just let the prospect loose at the end and lose control while expecting the prospect to just wrap themselves up to conclude the deal. But this actually adds more time to any cycle and more unnecessary barriers than almost anything else. So while I’m being very mindful to not refer to your prospects as cows…. you should indeed think of this analogy to understand the level of control and effort needed to actually control your cycles and muscle your cows through the gate. When you start to think in these terms, you realize how much additional control is required at the end to fully see the deal through to a completed cycle. So don’t let them meander. You’ve done a great job getting them to where they are…. now do what it takes to see it through. Apply the utmost control at the end to ensure that they get through the gates because truthfully it’s good for everyone involved. Letting them meander is a disservice to them and pain for you. Sometimes at the very very end, the prospect needs to see something additional to just tip them over the edge… this is where an irresistible case study style video or PR style video with press comments, testimonials etc can play a strong role.

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Don’t Run Out of Fuel One of the worst things in sales is to have lack of content. Lack of tools to help provide confidence and inspire action. It’s the worst because now you’re the sales rep leaving voicemails and sending emails along the lines of …. “just following up….” …. yuk! Don’t put your sales team in this predicament. They need fuel and fuel comes in the form of things like videos to show your company's story, case studies, customer testimonial, your pitch, etc. This combined with things like elevator pitch PDF’s, other case studies, infographics and so on will help your sales team get and keep the attention of your prospects and will give them confidence to move forward. There’s something to be said for a strategy with sufficient quantity of great content. After a while, the prospect can’t resist. So ensure that you truly have done enough to fuel up your sales team with content that will help provoke the next steps, get prospects in communication with them and will inspire confidence and action to close deals.

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Focus on Outflow After holidays and long weekends, the communication level can sometimes die down a bit especially on the sales lines and then people tend to say things like... “well it’s just after the holidays...” to try to justify the lack of activity happening. So the immediate and best handling for this is always outflow. You have to get everyones attention on outflow activities ONLY and take any and all attention off of inflow elements such as getting call backs, having proposals signed, emails back etc. Don’t worry about any inflow item, only focus and push outflow related items like, phone calls out, voicemails left, proposals out, marketing material sent, emails sent, marketing emails sent, meetings booked etc. Have everyone adopt this viewpoint to crank on the outflow and you’ll see that the inflow will take care of itself. This is and always has been a very successful strategy we’ve applied here and it works wonders. So crank up the outflow and do it in volumes that are much much bigger than you are currently doing and you’ll see that inflow will magically trickle in and then start to become a flood! Keep in mind that videos are incredible outflow tools. You can post them to all social media sites, your blog, email them through your marketing list, have your sales team send them to prospects, post them on your website, place them in ads on Linkedin etc. So use videos and lots of them! People tend to watch more and more video these days.

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Turn a Spark Into a Bonfire Sales has a lot to do with interest. Gradients of interest. Your job is to increase the level of interest to a point that it flares up to a concluded sale. Every person you speak with via phone or email in sales has expressed some level of interest. So the challenge is turning that initial spark of interest into a bonfire that fuels the sale. A lot of salespeople get caught up with the mechanics of selling like objections, barriers, timing, budgets etc but the truth is, it’s almost all about interest. If the prospect is interested enough, the barriers, objections, budgets, timing ….. just melt away. Take the new iPhone 5 set to release this week as an example. The people who stand in a waiting line in front of the Apple store do it because Apple has done a fantastic job to fuel their interest to such a point that budget, contracts, timing etc are all secondary issues. You have to get your company and it’s products or services in front of your prospect to fuel interest and increase it to the point that it exceeds any other issue. Once the prospects mind is at the right level of interest for your product or service, all other barriers become a non­issue. So your challenge then is keeping them interested and doing it over and over to turn that spark of interest into a bonfire. We do it with things like videos each month presenting different angles or services, new elevator pitch PDF’s, case studies, enticing emails, websites, etc. Don’t expect the prospect to keep themselves interested because there are far too many distractions these days. Continue to interest and fuel their initial desire or problem they’re trying to address and handle and you’ll see that many will finally say, “Ok, we’re ready to get started…”

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More of Everything at the End of the Year With the end of the year coming into sight, it’s critical not to mis­estimate what it will take on the sales side of things to finish strong for the year and avoid any dips in the coming months. Be proactive by ramping up all sales efforts to bolster and expand sales through the end of the year. By doubling or tripling the current efforts through October, November and December you can avoid making your life harder than it needs to be.

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While Your Competition Procrastinates Right about this time of year a lot of people and companies push off vital actions they should be taking and let off the gas pedal when they should be flooring it as it relates to sales and revenue. Think in these terms; what if your competition is slowing down or procrastinating coming into the new year on things related to sales and revenue and rather than pushing every action to the fullest, they are operating on the basis of "after the new year".... or "in 1st quarter..." Then imagine while they are pushing off key actions, that you are driving forward to increase your actions related to sales and revenue. You want to start January 1 already running as opposed to being lethargic and just starting to work on items for the new year. I can promise you 100% that many of the companies you compete with will be dragging their feet around this time of year. They won’t be focused on making decisions to set things in motion that will work to drive new business starting January 1. They will be focused on delaying those decisions in order to setup a meeting to discuss those decisions after January 1 and by that time, you will have already put things in motion that will ignite the new year and give you a competitive edge to get the year started on course. It’s certainly easy to fall into the trap of coasting toward the end of the year and pushing off decisions and actions into the new year but it’s not a smart play and it hurts your overall momentum. So make a list of all of the key items that you want in motion and get them in motion now. As it relates to creating a video, keep in mind that it takes about 30 to 45 days to complete the project from start to finish which means if you started now, you would have it ready to blast out at the end of December right before Christmas or at the very beginning of January.

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Keep the Team Energized There’s the strategy of using a video to sell your prospects but keep in mind that you also need to keep your sales team sold and energized. In other words, your sales team gets bored or uninterested in your products or services and wind up producing lackluster sales performance. It’s as important to sell your own sales team as it is to sell your prospects. By keeping your team energized and excited about what you sell, they will then convert that energy into better sales performance. You should have fresh sales videos in front of your team monthly that gets them excited and that they can use to put in front of all of their active prospects to talk about. A simple strategy like this can go a very long way in terms of sales performance. In sales, it can be tough to stay excited, energized and motivated day in and day out. It requires fresh products and material to keep the team interested and pumped about their day. So while videos are great for selling prospects, they're also great for selling your sales team on your companies products and services which leads to more sales for your company.

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Attention Works There's a simple fact that attention alone helps to drive interest and sales. Not being known can be one of your biggest barriers to new sales. So simple yet so many companies don't get sufficient attention. I was in Seattle recently and the city is plastered with promo and banners for the King Tut exhibit. I mean plastered. It was on my hotel room card, signs in front of the ferris wheel, park benches, retail shop windows, the top of taxicabs, on the back of restaurant menus.... I mean they’re seriously getting the word out. By the time I was leaving the city all I could think about was how I needed to see the King Tut exhibit before it leaves the hemisphere in January 2013 as they promoted.... so I'm planning to go back to check it out. Point being ­ attention works. Get attention. Not a little ­ A TON! I personally think people are utterly crazy when they make comments about budgets and monetary concerns when it comes to getting promotion and getting attention. It's absolutely not a senior factor. The senior factor is to strategically get the word out in ridiculously huge amounts to get attention that drives revenue. This strategy aligns with the very core of what Richter is all about. We focus on driving attention strategically for our clients to get them in front of the right people and companies at the right time to flood them with fresh interest to help them drive sales and overall growth. We're obsessed with it. Don't take a delicate or conservative approach to getting attention. Hammer it as hard as you can to drive interest and you will inevitably drive growth. Think about it for a second. What if you created a new video to put in front of your audience or prospects every single month. A new elevator pitch PDF or case study every week.... you get the idea? You would start to spike the inflow of communication because you’re getting peoples attention.

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Piggy Banks Can’t Work I hear my sales team talk a lot about prospects that tell them that the budget is tight or they are re­working the budget or some other concern related to the budget and I always get this vision of my son’s little blue piggy bank he has. In other words, a budget is basically just a saving account or a piggy bank that you put money into and take money from as I’m sure you know. The point is, as it relates to a business, the only way to build the piggy bank (IE budget) is to deposit more money into it. And the way to do that is to drive revenue which comes from sales. So, when it comes to sales, you need to constantly invest in new ways to help your sales team and marketing team to get the word out about your company to spark interest and drum up new business. This means that money needs to be taken from the piggy bank and spent wisely in order to have more money to put back in the piggy bank. So the vital focus is not on what’s in the piggy bank or how to count it better.... but on how to use it better to make more of it. Piggy banks simply can’t make the money themselves and budgets are not the main concern.... revenues are which come from sales. So, when there’s budget constraints, it’s actually a revenue problem. In other words, the issue is that not enough revenue is coming in to build the budget and the budget shrinks and makes things “tight”. While I’m not an economics professor, I do know that revenue is senior. In terms of priorities, you need to ensure funds are being allocated to smart marketing and sales strategies that will help your people and company drive new revenue and grow sales that will ease the budget constraints and then again, allow you to invest further to grow sales and revenue.

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Power of Focus I think we can all agree that it’s really really simple to get distracted or to chase butterflies (be all things to all people) in business. And while we can chalk up revenue to some degree with a less than focused approach, it’s simply not the smartest, strategic or efficient. Being focused means knowing your exact target public (no, not the demographic... more specifically “who”) and the exact communication for that target public that will spark their interest. The target public also means the exact companies and people that align with your company and your people. It could sound narrow but lets not forget that we now have 7 billion people on this planet and growing so your target public is probably quite a bit bigger than you may think. Once you’ve done your homework on the target public and crafted the communication that caters and truly communicates to that audience ­ you can then work to position your company, products and services and your people to invest every fiber of that focus to become a world class leader. This is where things get interesting and your revenues blowing through the roof of your building.....becomes a natural course of events. We obsess here at Richter on this focus for our clients because we know that focus is the road to aligned revenue and growth.

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Apple and Google Take Products to Market with Video I think it's safe to say that we can all agree that Apple and Google are successful companies. They've proven time and again that they know how to promote their companies and their products well.... very well. They’re smart companies that apply sophisticated methods to entice their specific audiences. So I think it's worth observing that these powerhouses always use videos to launch their new products to market. Why? Because it works. It's proven out as a standard successful action. They know that so they invest heavily into smart video trailers that help to make their products irresistible. Here's two recent examples: Apple ­ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGXFGjponC0 Google Nexus 7 ­ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LysTmwDan8&feature=c4­overview­vl&list=PL42252559AEF0E0CB So when you're developing your sales strategy, a core focus truly needs to be on videos that deliver an emotional punch. That resonate with your audience. That create an urge to reach out and that ultimately help facilitate sales actions to occur. I'd then strongly suggest that you don't look at video as a one time project like a website but rather look at it as a campaign. You need a full arsenal of video trailers that woo your prospects and create an impact on them that causes an effect giving them the urge to reach out or be a part of your company somehow. A campaign could mean an overview trailer, a product video, a story video, a client testimonial, a case study style, a mid­cycle sales video, a basic purpose video, a culture video etc.... so think in terms of a campaign and think to truly immerse your prospects with a tsunami of incredible copy and communication coming at them in waves in the form of videos that makes your company and its products or services irresistible so they reach and so you actively drive fresh business from both new and current clients.

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Think Like Sales Sales can be a tough job. It takes constant follow­up and follow through as well as energy focused on interesting the prospect, getting them excited and energized to truly sell them on your product or service to result in a closed sale. You have to have a dynamic approach that is methodical and keeps the prospect focused, interested and moving along the process. If you’re relying on calls and emails exclusively, you're making life harder than it needs to be for your sales team and you're hurting revenue potential. The sales team needs all the support you can muster up. Go and ask them what barriers they are hitting up against? What problems or objections are coming up? What issue do we need to nail in order to handle the prospect and close the sale? Then ask them “if we created a video that fully communicated and handled those points that you could send to your active prospects, do you feel that would push your deals over the edge?” The sales team needs help. You need to provide them with tools like new videos consistently so they can send them to their active prospects to help close deals. They need an excuse to follow­up because no one likes leaving a voicemail that says” Hi.... just following up to see how....” because it doesn’t work. Give them an excuse to call and say, “ Hi John, I just sent a new video that aligns with what we discussed earlier, call me once you’ve seen it.....” You need to assess whether you are providing your sales team with sufficient tools and resources to keep their pipeline interested, engaged, focused and moving along the sales process toward a closed deal. You’d be amazed what can be accomplished with a well articulated 1 minute animated video that nails a specific point for the prospect resulting in a communication along the lines of “Ok, we’re ready to move forward.....”

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Who Are You Communicating To? There's only one important person when it comes to writing copy that you need to focus on ­ the audience. It's so easy to be proud of who you are and what your company represents that it's nearly impossible to resist the urge to write copy to the effect of "here's who we are... how long we've been around, why we're great..." but it’s a mistake to do so. The only thing the audience cares about is themselves as funny as that may sound, it's true. They have needs or problems they’re trying to handle and the only reason they care about you or your company is because they’re trying to handle it. That sounds a little brash but it's the way people are. They’re simply trying to solve some problem related to them and they’re seeking answers and solutions. Think about any time you were buying something. You did it because you had a problem, need, want or desire of some type right? Ultimately you didn't buy because the company won 10 awards or started in 1971 or anything else ­ you bought because the product or service served you in some way that aligned with your motivation. So when you’re communicating about your company on your website or in a video ­ do it in a way that focuses on who you are communicating to rather than where you’re communicating from. In other words, the communication should be tailored to the reader or viewer as opposed to it being created from the sending point like the company.

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You Want the Right Relationships As it relates to revenue, it’s clear that you need new business coming in consistently but what tends to happen is that you end up taking on any and every new prospect that may or may not align with your company. This approach can be costly, inefficient and ineffective in the long run. Ultimately what you need is the right type of business. Sure you could essentially sell anyone, but why would you? If you had clients that aligned perfectly with your company, were profitable and meshed well and were already inclined to buy from you ­ it would exponentially launch your business development and revenue efforts to help fuel growth. With our Strategic Relations program, we do just that. We deliver relationships with the exact audience that aligns with your company that are most inclined to do business with you. We handle all of the pre­sales efforts leading up to the point where we can turn over the right kind of relationship to your sales team which makes their life easier and aligns with your company. If you're a business to business company, you don’t need to waste so much time and effort on methods that can be very costly to be fruitful and that bring you hoards of the wrong audience that you need to cull through to find the ones that are right. We’ve developed the most effective, zeroed­in approach to define, find and create relationships that are ideal for our clients. If you would like to discuss our Prime Strategy a little further, let us know.

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What Your “About Us” Should Be In a perfect world, all companies “About Us” pages would be a huge video player that communicates who the company is and what they do in simple terms that has beautiful music, animation or live footage and a message that packs a punch in two minutes or less. I frequently come across sites and honestly just want to know who they are and what they do in simple terms so I can get my immediate question answered and from there, I can dig further to learn more, read more or have a call to discuss further. Very few about us pages accomplish this. With video, you can write a powerful message, use aesthetic visuals to communicate along with music that helps deliver the message to make it all sink in to a captivated audience.

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It’s Not About Price - It’s About Value.... Always. A business needs to be smart about what they spend their money on ­ no question. But ultimately every decision is about value. It’s about what something is worth. If you hire a new employee, it’s not about what they cost, it’s about what they will bring to the table. What they can produce and how much value they will bring to the company. Sure you don’t want to spend through the nose for that person but I’d be willing to bet that if you knew they were an absolute rockstar that you would be willing to spend more on their salary because you know they are going to perform and create more value for the company right? That’s the case for everything. You assess things based on value. When you assess based on price alone, you're at risk of making a poor choice. Take our business for example, lets say you’re looking at doing a video but you feel you can get it done cheaper somewhere else. Now, the question that enters in here is are you going to get the same value? Take the copywriting alone.... what if the message is written in a way that completely misses the mark with the audience? You’re left with a video that you got a great deal on but is basically worthless. Value is senior in terms of making decisions for any company. You can and should assess every single decision based both on price and value with value being the key factor. If you always make decisions after assessing value to ensure that the value exceeds the price involved, you will always end up with good decisions and good outcomes. We set all of our prices at a fee that we know is well below value which makes our products and services easier to sell. We know the value is higher than the price and we know the value to our clients in terms of helping them expand their companies and bring value will be much greater than the cost of our products or services. We don’t sell price here, we sell value.

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Why Isn’t It Closed? What’s stopping your sales prospects from becoming a client? Think about it for a second, if a deal isn’t closing or seems stuck there’s something missing. Sales has a lot to do with confidence, considerations (or thoughts that become barriers) and objections that are lingering in the prospects mind. So your job is to find out and understand what they are and then work to handle them to get the prospect completely sold, convinced and confident in your product or service and company. But how? You need to remind them and continue to push their “interest” button. What gets them interested and keeps them interested to the point where they say... “lets do it!”...? When you use videos such as animated ones that explain a product or service or text on screen animation that hits them on an emotional level, they tend to watch them if they’re between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. Each video they watch helps to fuel their interest and keep them interested if it’s done correctly (by correctly I mean fantastic copy combined with great animation that clearly communicates the message)

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Business Doesn’t Stop in Summer Although many vacation through summer… the fact is that business doesn’t stop moving. It can’t and won’t wait for anyone. Your company and message need to be in front, top of mind, working to sell your company and its products or services…. even while you’re not there. That’s where we come in. We’re here to ensure that our clients have their company in front of their audience at all times. And during the summer months is truly not the time to ease off the pedal ­ it’s a time to triple the efforts so there’s no lull. The people who promoted the concept of “peaks and valleys” were reasonable slackers. We’re not. We remind our clients to push ahead, triple their efforts and stay ahead because…. we care about their growth. Factually, the better they do, the better we do. So let’s push your growth through summer. Yes, you may be on vacation. Yes, they may be on vacation. But business doesn’t stop. Sales need to still happen and efforts need to increase through summer. Let’s get to work!

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Follow through One of the biggest barriers related to sales is follow through. It plagues both sales and marketing teams. Because the marketing folks work like crazy to get quality leads and then the sales team needs to see those through from start to finish to conclude sales. Only, many times the follow through doesn’t happen. Why? Because the team gets distracted, is unorganized, moves on to other things or is not armed with tools that will help them enlighten and sell the prospect from start to finish, so they run out of gas and just let it drift off into the darkness…. This costs companies a fortune in lost opportunities and revenue. I’m here to prevent and stop that from happening. My job is to help you get the tools your team needs such as videos, that will help sell prospects and arm your team so they can use these tools to follow up and follow through on the active cycles. So when you’re considering budget as it relates to creating video projects, also consider how much is currently being spent and lost from lack of follow through on active cycles. You’ll see that having really strong communication tools is one of the best investments you could make.

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The Time is Now Frankly, the times now... Always has been Every now and then we have a client or prospect tell us to be patient. I get it. They want to subtly tell us to allow time because they're dragging their feet a little or feel there are more important things. Only, there aren't. Look, I've never read one business or sales book anywhere that ever advised patience as a strategy or procrastination. So while I realize that no one wants to feel rushed or pushed, the truth is that we've built a culture here to be that driving force behind our clients to help them grow. We're not ashamed of it. We aren't going to feel bad when you've doubled your monthly revenue because we nudged you to do it now instead of later. :) Now is the time. It always has been. Let's act now. Let's get a project started now that you can be proud of and thankful for in August, September and October when you need it most. We're in the middle of shooting two live client testimonial videos right now for our work because of one reason, what we do works. We help our clients companies grow. I've attached a letter from one of our recent clients for your review. If you have any concerns or apprehensions that are holding a project back, please let me know them and I will do everything I can to address and handle them so we can remove the roadblocks and get things rolling.

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It’s Always More It’s pretty amazing how much action and energy it truly takes in sales and business to attain the results you’re after. But with all the noise a commotion from social media, email, daily distractions etc ­ it’s just the nature of the beast these days. So, my job here at Richter is to ensure my clients get fresh tools that they supply to their marketing and sales teams to help arm them and to help them woo new prospects so it then helps my clients successful attain their revenue and growth targets. Often, it just takes more action than anyone estimates. So I want to absolutely ensure that you have an entire fleet of videos that walk the prospect from start to finish and that helps get them to the point of desiring and demanding your products or service. And, unfortunately, one video or one contact with a prospect isn’t enough. We need to build out an entire campaign for you. Sure it requires an investment but that goes hand in hand with growth. So lets push forward and get you the tools you need to really communicate your message end to end so we make your marketing and sales efforts easier while not falling short on what’s truly needed to get there.

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Run, Don’t Walk It’s always scary to me to experience time flying by. When I look up to peek around and realize that we’re now mid­March… there’s a part of me that freaks out a little. As it relates to goals and ambitions, it reminds me to run rather than walk. It takes a lot to get a little. I think we’ve all experienced our estimation of effort being off by a little or a lot! Ouch! Look, I’m here to push you. I want you to have your best year ever and I want to play a part in that. We had a sales meeting last week and one of our vice presidents said it like this, he said, “I consider myself a video arms dealer and my job is to build an arsenal for our clients. I want them to win the war!” :) Half jokingly of course but he makes a good point. We’re here to help you win. It takes a lot of work in sales to get through to the prospect and it may mean that you need a well coordinated campaign of 12 videos to ding in your message to truly sell them. We know two things cold, how to identify a target public and how to craft communication that will resonate with them so they have the urge to reach (call, email or buy). So I want to ensure you’re on pace for the year and taking actions in the right orders of magnitude that will lead to hitting the numbers you want to hit this year. It’s mid March. Lets hammer your message home.

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Why So Urgent? It’s so incredibly easy to push off an activity like buying a video and starting production because there’s virtually unlimited other activities that can distract us in business.

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