Make $1,000 Per Hour Doing What You Love
You want a marketing system that feeds you quality leads so that you spend your time only with customers who are ready to give you money.
Use Your Gifts: Focus on Your Talent Zone It’s not actually that hard to be worth $100 per hour. For the most part, you simply need to get competent. But to consistently be worth $1,000 or $10,000, you must be excellent. You can be excellent in only so many areas. You need to build your excellence in the $1,000-per-hour and $10,000-perhour jobs, not the $10-per-hour jobs. Some people are excellent at washing clothes, but washing clothes is never gonna pay the big bucks.
There are many tasks that you are good at, but they’re not the highest value things you do. Let go. Pay someone else to do them. That’s because . . . Cold Prospecting and Futzing Around with Websites = Low-Paid Grunt Work After consulting with thousands of entrepreneurs across 300+ industries, building my own team, and experiencing all kinds of challenges, I realized a tool was needed that could help each person know where to focus his skills. So I created the Marketing DNA Test to measure how you most naturally sell and persuade. Go to http://www.perrymarshall.com/8020supplement, and access the Marketing DNA Test. In 10 to 15 minutes, it will report your unique profile, measuring eight different communication styles: • Alchemist. How much creativity and imagination do you use to persuade? • Producer. How much do you employ systems and rules when you persuade? • Live. How naturally do you persuade on the spot? • Recorded. Do you like to refine and edit in advance? • Images. How much do you rely on visual elements to communicate? • Words. How much do you prefer written and verbal communication? • Empathy. How much emotion do you use to persuade? • Analytics. How much do you count on facts, numbers, and logic when you persuade? Here’s the Marketing DNA Test result, for my friend Dave Frees, an attorney in Pennsylvania. Dave also speaks and writes on communication and persuasion for both sales and family relationships. Dave says this test, in Figure 16–1, on page 127, “nailed” him: As you can see, Dave sells by leading with empathy—his emotional connection with the person he’s with, by means of words. He does his best persuasion live, on the spot. He does not like to be analytical when he persuades; he dislikes “recorded,” meaning he doesn’t like to polish and perfect; he wants to just stand and deliver.
Have other people on your team take the test, too. You’ll see that people vary hugely in their natural communication styles. This kind of information is critical when you’re building your sales and marketing team. Persuasion happens in all kinds of different ways. Some people get in front of another person and negotiate face-to-face. Some people sell best by giving presentations to audiences.
Some people sell best by writing. Others with pictures. Others by studying best practices and following them; others by astounding customers with ingenuity. Some pluck heartstrings; others deliver cold, hard facts. It is rare these days for one person to be able to successfully cover all the marketing bases—even in a small company in a small niche. Whatever you’re good at, focus on—and make sure if you’ve got gaping holes, that you have people who can fill them. Do this: 1. Invest heavily in building your strongest skills, and 2. Find other people to do everything else. Someone else is great at what you’re bad at. Before you hire anyone, have them take the Marketing DNA Test. Most of us tend to hire people like ourselves. Alchemists like alchemists, producers like producers, writers like writers, and video people like video people. But every movie needs great writers, and every creative genius needs to be surrounded with people who can stick to a plan. The Marketing DNA Test will generate a detailed report for you just like Dave’s, plus a whole lot more. The test system will also send you a series of follow-up emails, which pinpoint items that the initial report couldn’t cover, so you can further refine your efforts.
Know Thyself I spent most of my 20s fighting my own nature. I was a multilevel marketing junkie, an engineer, and a sales rep. I was trying to be just like every superstar that I admired, killing myself in the process. For several years, my mantra was: “Massive action solves every problem!” Which was just incredibly stupid, because “massive action” without a really great strategy gives you only more problems. Your efforts create work that is unfocused and dissipates your energy. I spent thousands of hours pounding the phone and busting down doors and battering brick walls with the tender skin of my nose. I constantly put myself in situations where my greatest strengths got shoved in the closet, and my weaknesses were on display for all to see, all
day long. I felt horribly inadequate, and my cumulative string of failures clung to my leg like a ball and chain. At one point, I went to a church retreat about giftedness. We sat down and did a bunch of evaluations. The results said I should be doing totally different things than what I was trying to do. I remember climbing into my green Toyota Tercel hatchback at the end of the retreat, sliding another motivational tape into my car radio, and muttering to myself, “Self, that’s nice and all, but you can muscle your way through anything. If the dream is big enough, the facts don’t count. Dude, keep the hammer down!” Fast forward a couple of years . . . I’m on the brink of financial collapse and almost ready to crack on the inside. Each day I’m dragging around a ball and chain of failure and shame. Then I get demoted to production manager from my sales rep job. I pull out my notebook from that retreat and say to myself, “Self, maybe you should take this seriously.” I did a serious self-inventory. I realized I had all kinds of skills I was ignoring, and I was trying to be someone I wasn’t. My plan was not working. I decided to respect the test. The Marketing DNA Test recognizes that everyone has to sell some time or another, even if they’re not a salesperson. Everyone has to get a job. Everyone has to play patty-cake with bosses and committees. Everyone struggles to get their ideas accepted. It’s not whether you need to persuade or whether you’re trying; it’s a question of how you persuade. Since you’re in the business of persuading, you might as well persuade in the way that’s most natural for you. If you’re a natural writer, you’ll earn compound interest becoming a better writer. If you’re an awesome amateur video producer, you’ll earn compound interest building your video chops even more. If you thrive on presenting to live audiences, hone that skill to perfection. By the way, one of the things in my notebook from that retreat said was, “You should be writing.” Writing? Whatever for? What would I write about? This made no sense to me at the time. I didn’t believe there was any money to be made in writing at all. I didn’t know there was an entire spectrum of selling opportunities
that were fueled by writing (the entire direct-marketing industry!). I didn’t even know what a copywriter was. I thought it was someone who mails registrations to the U.S. copyright and trademark office. I’m sure one of the reasons I didn’t know this was, that I had blinders on. But my very act of paying attention to that advice took the blinders off. Ever since, writing has grown into one of my personal selling tools. Your gifts may be completely different from mine. But whatever they are, you need to find a selling environment that harnesses them to your maximum advantage.
Assignment: Unique Capability Survey I’d like you to email five friends and colleagues who know you in different ways and from different walks of life. This is the “Unique Capability” survey. Choose people who have known you for at least five years. Email them and say, Hi, I’m taking Perry Marshall’s productivity course. You know me well, and one of the assignments is to ask: What is my unique capability? What do I naturally do better than most people? Please reply back with any thoughts you have. This really means a lot to me. Thanks. Then when you get replies from your friends, sift and sort through their responses, and ask yourself: • What talents did ALL of your friends mention? • What talents did most of them mention? • What talents did at least two of them mention? This exercise indicates what you should be doing every day. You will also find this exercise encouraging and edifying, because most of us do not normally get a lot of positive feedback from other people. Mostly we just hear about our screw-ups, and it’s more socially acceptable to give people “constructive criticism” than to praise them for their gifts. But you can’t build a successful career on your screw-ups or even by fixing your faults. You build a successful career despite your faults, by investing time, money, education, and practice into your gifts.
I’d like you to pull all of your friends’ answers together and condense them into a single paragraph that describes what your “giftedness zone” is. That, in combination with the Marketing DNA Test, will give you a clear idea of where you should be focusing your energy. I borrowed this Unique Capability exercise from Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach, and it’s one of the greatest things you will ever do for yourself. Not only should you do it, you should celebrate it, focus on it, and make sure that this time next year, you’ve invested in the gold that your friends called out in you.
Build on Your Team Members’ Strengths Ask the people on your business team to take the DNA test and the Unique Capability survey. Then get together, have everyone share the results, and give everyone a chance to elaborate on what they see in each other. Ask everyone what tasks they crave and what tasks they really don’t want anymore. I guarantee you, it’ll be one of the most fun, most productive get-togethers you’ve ever had. The reason is, it’s pretty unusual for people to plainly and openly praise one another for their strengths. I think people are somehow afraid it will go to the other person’s head. It’s actually more socially acceptable to nitpick and issue minor criticisms, to qualify any praise item with “And if you could just do _ a little bit better next time,” as though the goal were to balance positive with negative. Think about it: Positive is just plain better. Sure, we need correction every now and then, but when somebody does a good job, they need to hear about it. We can only build on our strengths. Make calling out other peoples’ strengths a value in your company culture, and everyone will love working for you.
Everyone’s Unique Capability Is Different The beauty of bringing 80/20 to a team is that it honors peoples’ giftedness. If you have 30 kids in a classroom, one of them has vastly more ability in math than the others. Another’s passion is science. Another is into martial arts. Another is fascinated with beats and music mashups. Another plays the violin. Another loves sewing. Another plays basketball. When you stop trying to make everyone the same, their true passions and abilities shine.
Love List, Hate List Your Unique Capability survey, together with some of the other things you love to do and know you’re good at, form your Love List. You need to be clear about what you want to be doing every day. You also need a Hate List. Your Hate List is things you’re not good at, don’t enjoy, drag you down, confuse you, waste time, embarrass you. Just in case you’re interested, here’s my Hate List: • Administration • Paperwork • Politics • Petty arguments • Criticizing. I hate criticizing people. It’s not me. It’s not what I like to do. • Micro-managing. I couldn’t micro-manage anyone else to save my life. Please notice: Some people are great at all these things. Some people love all those things. My wife is a great administrator. My personal assistant and my CPA are fast and efficient with paperwork. Some folks are brilliant at navigating politics, and everybody’s got a relative who loves to argue about anything and everything at Thanksgiving dinner—the pettier, the better. Some people are professional critics (they trash bad movies and relish every minute of it), and some people micro-manage everything and everyone in their life. When you put any of those people in the right role, they shine. Whatever it is that you hate to do, somebody else loves to do it. Define your Hate List, right now, and give somebody else a job. They will thank you for it.
————————————————— PARETO SUMMARY —————————————————— p Score yourself with the Marketing DNA Test. Gain free access at http://www.perrymarshall.com/8020supplement/.
p Email five people who know you well, and ask them what your Unique Capability is. p Develop your Love List and Hate List, and remember—anything you hate to do, somebody else loves doing it.
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