Category: Blog

Not long ago, I did a post, encouraging you to find out from your friends what you are truly good at.  Well, I did this exercise, and it really helped me.  But, keep in mind, it’s not everything that you’re good at.  While the people close to you might be able to help you see things you didn’t think of, rarely will they know what really sparks your creativity.  Hell, even I don’t know what really sparks it.  I’ve been reading/listening to a lot of Perry Marshall lately.  I love the possibility of going on vacation, meditating on a beach, or reading a fun book alongside the pool and having my best ideas come to me…  Mostly, I like the idea of vacations 🙂  But I just had another lightning bolt hit me tonight.  A lot of my creativity actually comes from writing.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I don’t fancy myself a writer, I don’t expect I to make my fortune writing novels.  But what has been happening is as I write, ideas start to flow.  Now, I tend to suffer from constant writers block.  I feel like I’m always struggling for something that will actually provide you, the reader, something of value.  I know how valuable time is to all of us, so if you’re going to take the time to read my stuff, I want to give you something worth your time.  I know that I may fall short, but trust me, I’m trying hard 🙂  But tonight, I saw that I needed to get some posts written before I head out of town.  So I searched through my notes, and looked for a topic that I wouldn’t have to spend a week researching.  I noticed some more ideas on the ROI that I haven’t typed up.  Those posts have been entirely off the cuff.  I truly just came up with a point to talk about, and pulled the ideas out as I started to type.  I used to think this was rare for me, but I realize that when I start to write/type, things will often just flow, new ideas will hit me (and I apologize, might often take you on a complete tangent).  But in the end, I look back and realize that I didn’t know I knew some of this stuff.

When I look at the ROI posts I recently put out, this is a perfect example.  It’s all stuff I should be using in my marketing, but I never put 2 + 2 together until I started typing.  Now my real lightning bolt moments don’t come from writing.  Those usually hit me for no reason.  I decided to start this software business one night on the airplane coming home from who knows where.  The trick for us all is to figure out when creativity hits you.  And then do more of that.

For me, I need to keep writing, and take more time off.  How about you???

Thanks for reading,

Well, if it’s one thing I’ve been getting drilled into my head about marketing, it’s that it needs to be constantly measured.  What do I mean by that?  simple.  You need to know what works, what is driving new leads, new customers, and ultimately revenue.  If you’re sinking a lot of money into marketing for “brand recognition”, or if you’re told that you can’t put a value on the current approach you’re using, well, then you’re probably throwing your money away.  If you’re a big player, maybe you can afford to throw money at fancy ads and random billboards, but if you’re like the rest of us…  if you sink $5k into something, you better see some returns.

I’m currently at a crossroads with one of my current marketing approaches.  I really like the company, I like the people.  But ultimately, it comes down to results.  I’m 4 months into a campaign, and I can clearly see how my “audience” has grown.  The problem is that I have this huge audience of people that aren’t in my industry, will never buy my products, and likely only want to sell ME something.  The initial pitch was dead on.  You need to get quantity to get quality.  I can buy that.  It’s all about finding the right connections, and sometimes you need to take a round about approach to get there.  The problem is that after 4 months, I have 0 new prospects, most of the people at the conference still aren’t connected to me, and I’m $5k in the whole.

In order to help me gauge a little better, I just spent the night doing a little prospecting of my own.  First, I picked a company that I wanted to target.  I found all the people that might want to hear my message, hear more about my products, or might benefit from my blog posts.  All in an effort to find out if I could work my way up the chain to someone with the checkbook.

My second experiment was to work my way through the list of people I met at the tradeshow.  I have full names, emails and companies.  So it should be pretty easy to reach out to all of those.

Depending on the results I receive, will directly determine if I can afford to keep my hard earned marketing dollars flowing, or if I end up taking over this responsibility myself.  A prospect I certainly don’t want…  but ultimately could be outsourced to pretty much anyone if my instructions are clear enough.

The good news is that I don’t regret the money I’ve spent.  However, I’m really questioning the value going forward.  Especially if I can carve out 1 hour a week, and I can find the same contacts, or perhaps, I look to other ways to find my prospects.

The moral of the story.  You have to measure your marketing.  Don’t take for granted that it’s working.  Obviously, things like adwords are easier to measure, but at the end of the day, prospects, customers, dollars.  If you aren’t getting them, you’re wasting your money.

thanks for reading,

Well, on top of everything else I have going on, it’s time to start one more thing =)  I was recently hanging out with my good friend Justin, and we go to talking about new ways to promote the business.  He mentioned that it might be good to look at a cheaper customer base and look at selling a small e-book.  Well, like everything in the universe, the ideas come at the right time…  and often hit you from multiple directions.  It was just the day before that I was listening to an audio program from Perry Marshall that said the same thing.  Be the person that wrote the book… literally.

Well, of course, the bad news is that this add just one more thing to my to do list, but this could be another piece of marketing gold for me…  or it could turn out like the white papers…  just another file on my HDD 🙁  Well, to be honest, the White Papers need more work, and with the feedback that I’ve received, could also work for me…  everything is a work in process when you’re small business guy.

But I digress.  So, the e-book is my latest marketing method.  Now, writing a book on it’s own sounds overwhelming, time consuming, and just plain hard.  Well, this isn’t entirely false.  However, the good news is that with all of my blog posts, I have a good chunk of material that can be converted into a book…  Like everything though, it will need a lot of editing, it will need some fresh content to go with what I’ve already given, and it will take some serious effort to make it usable.  So, don’t be surprised to see more posts about this latest adventure.  In the meantime, if you have any advise for me on writing a book, please comment on this post 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Since I’m hoping to be relaxing a bit (as much as you can with 2 kids under the age of 4) tomorrow, I wanted to wish everyone a great July 4th.  Today try to remember exactly what our founding fathers fought so hard to provide for us.  I know, there are BBQ’s, picnics, parades, etc…  But just think back about where we might be today if those people hadn’t fought a revolution.  We could have King Obama or King Bush right now…  well, maybe sometimes it feels like that’s how things turned out anyway, but I digress.

In my opinion, what they really wanted was liberty.  They wanted the ability to do what they wanted, when they wanted to and not pay a whole bunch of money for “protection” or to fund the machine across the ocean.  And as long as that didn’t hurt anyone else, it seemed fair, after all, they were the ones risking their lives on the frontier.  So all those those traitors to the crown, terrorists, or whatever they were called back in the day, gave up everything to help start the most free nation in the world.

Unfortunately, if you look at our government today, it looks a lot like that same government we freed ourselves from a couple centuries ago.  Maybe it’s even worse, because technology increases the reach and power.  Anyway, take a minute and be thankful for our freedom we still have, be thankful for those founders that fought to give us this nation, and remember to NOT take that for granted, and don’t give away anymore of your freedoms.  Be like the founding fathers, and do whatever you can to take back your liberty.

Thanks for reading,

Just the other day, I had one of those flashes of brilliance (at least I think so).  It involved crossing over out big production product (Proximity) into the service world.  Well, instantly, I felt like I hit the jackpot.  This is one of those things that really ties our entire offering together.  Now it’s not a production product and a service product.  But it can packaged as a giant service suite.  My head began swimming with the possibilities of tieing in all my utilities that I’ve been designing, and on and on…

That’s when the other side of the coin hit me.  Why the hell didn’t I think of this sooner?  I mean for crying out loud, my partner and I had even mentioned doing this multiple times in the past.  But it was always just a passing comment, “when we get time we can do this”…  you know those comments.  That’s when I felt pretty stupid.  I mean really Piehl…  this idea has been just sitting there waiting for you pluck off the ground at your feet.

So…  once I got past that 🙂  I again began to realize that idea don’t always hit us until we are ready for them.  When we’ve talked stuff like this in the past, it was already around a feature or product aspect.  It wasn’t about the big picture.  It wasn’t about providing an all encompassing offering, making our stuff even more unified…  it wasn’t about me become more invested in both sides of the house, instead of just the developer of a production tool.

So, remember, it’s ok to feel like a moron for a few minutes.  But then come back to reality.  The ideas really do come to us when we’re ready for them.  Me, I needed more marketing knowledge before I could really see this for what it was…  A perfect way to position our entire offering to everyone.  This doesn’t take anything away from the awesome tool we made to compete with MES systems.  Just the contrary.  We now have 2 totally different customer bases to market the same product to.  Like I said, in the title…  a little bit of both…  but just remember, when the idea hits, run with it right now.  Don’t waste too much time, because when that initial boost is gone, it could get shelved along with the other things to “work on when we get time”…  which is never.

Thanks for reading,

This is another one of those tips I got Perry Marshall.  When he first asked the question, it seemed obvious  I’m good at SAP, particularly Service Management and Variant Configuration.  That was easy…  but he gave us a homework assignment.  He said email 7 people that know you very well, it’s best if they’ve known you for at least 5 years.  And said, ask them 2 questions:

What is my unique capability?

What do I naturally do better than most people?

So, I did it.  Wow, was I surprised and flattered at the answers I got.  While some of my friends told me I was good at SAP, it was my friends that focused more on my general talents.  They tended to tell me things like ability to focus, drive projects to conclusion, simplify the complex, translate the function to technical.  Now, when I look back at my career, I can see all of these skills in myself.  More importantly, when I started to look at the list of things my friends said about me, in general, these are the things I really enjoy doing.

For example, I love problem solving.  I love finding clever solutions to keep things generic, but still meet the needs.  Those are also the times I find myself in a state of flow…

So, if you’re anything like me, you might take for granted what your true skills are.  More importantly, those skills are where you start to make the $1000/hr.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m good at the minor book keeping, and I’m trying my best to learn this marketing stuff.  But I also know it’s not what I’m best yet…  but, if I can take some of the things my friends told me, I might be able to apply those to new skills that will truly launch my business.  If you’re serious about taking yourself to the next level, you need to do this exercise.

Thanks for reading,