Is Your Weird, Stupid Business Idea Really That Weird and Stupid?

Do you have a fascinating business or project idea that you have never tried because you just know there is no audience for it? So many interesting ideas get squelched because their creators discount their value before they ever test them out. But with a little courage and curiosity, you might just find they have more value than you think.

Not too long ago, I tried a little experiment to test my writing skills and also my ability to think outside the box. I started a blog called GoblinStop.com, which married topics related to social media (one of my newer interests) with Dungeons and Dragons (something I’ve been doing for most of the last half of my life). This was purely meant to be an amusing diversion, as I thought there surely would be no audience for such an odd combination of subjects.

After the first blog entry gained me exactly 3 page hits, probably all of which were accidental, I started writing notes in Facebook with sample text and links to the site, and I even started adding images to each. I had also begun playing around with Reddit some recently, so in addition to forwarding others’ blog posts and articles, I placed links to my own entries on the RPG board. I even used Twitter a couple of times to link to posts. Within a month, I was consistently getting between 150 and 200 hits a day, and I even got offered a full time blogging job for a copy-writing company (unfortunately they couldn’t work with me quite enough on my school schedule, so I had to decline). I know this is small potatoes for many bloggers, but it impressed me that such a niche topic would gain that much of a following in just a month.

That little taste of success has caused me to seriously reconsider GoblinStop.com’s viability, and I have taken a little hiatus from the site to regroup and consider if and how I might be able to really turn this into something. It still might be a stretch, but now I have tested the waters a bit and I know there is a bigger audience than I thought.

And that’s what this post is all about. We tend to beat our own ideas to death before we ever test them out, coming up with seemingly endless reasons why they wouldn’t work. I’ll bet you can think of 50 reasons why your business idea would fail miserably, but how will you ever know unless you try it, even just on a small scale? The truth is that you don’t know if a market exists for your ideas until you share them with some people.

What business ideas have you had that seem kind of crazy/weird? What advice would you offer someone who is tiptoeing to the edge, getting ready to take the entrepreneurial plunge?

Learning from Other Sales People

A couple of weeks ago I was mentally brainstorming topics for posts as I meandered about Guitar Center (I know this sounds like an odd place to think about business writing subject matter, but trust me, I do some of my best thinking in Guitar Center). In doing so, I stumbled upon an interesting opportunity for eavesdropping. A 40-something man approached a seemingly time-killing sales person and began asking questions about a particular guitar that his teenage son was fiddling around with a few feet away. I immediately began keeping one eye and two ears on this exchange, breaking down the sales guy’s entire game, from product knowledge, to communication skills, to how long he paused to think before answering questions (unfortunately for him my analysis was not very favorable, but that’s neither here nor there). The point is that listening in on this situation caused me to project his selling behaviors against my own so that I was thinking about my own skills in relation to those of another sales person.

I think using one’s experiences with other salespeople to improve their own abilities is an excellent tool for success, and we all already go halfway there without even thinking about it. Much the same way that an actor cannot simply watch a film for the fun of it without subconsciously breaking it down and critiquing the acting, cinematography, musical score, use of light, etc., we sales people cannot be given a pitch without analyzing seller’s confidence, knowledge, body language, etc.

The trick is going that extra step, and actually taking our analyses and applying them to our own selling behaviors. Now that you know what you liked and didn’t like about another sales person, what can you learn from them to improve your own abilities?

Salespeople: Thinking Like Marketers Will Help You Qualify Leads

Target Audience is a concept which with marketers are intimately familiar. Recognizing which demographics make the best potential customers for your product or service is important if you intend to drive brand awareness. However, salespeople often are not always as savvy as the marketing department when it comes to knowing who is the best target for their efforts.

Oftentimes, we in sales will relentlessly chase anyone and everyone who even remotely looks like a prospect, just to find out after many months that they really never had any interest in our product anyway. In some cases, business owners and managers will let salespeople court them for a long while, just because they don’t want to be rude and just outright say “no.” Needless to say, this is a big waste of everyone’s time, and could be avoided if the salesperson had done a bit of preliminary planning on the types of prospects they were going to approach.

Here are a few questions to ask yourself before contacting decision makers about your widget/service:
1. What common traits do your current clients share? Organize a diverse sampling of your clients into different groups and classes that each have different characteristics. What common themes exist? What distinctions are clear?
2. Is this business experiencing enough growth to have a real, foreseeable need for what you offer? The need for different products and services depends upon the health and growth rate of the prospect. Is a doctor’s office seeing tons of referrals, and in need of a new automated phone system? Is the comic store on the corner expanding its volume so much that it could seriously use your inventory management software?
3. What is the most common client profile with which you see success? With what size company do you do the most business? What industries?

Just a little legwork can go a very long way when qualifying leads. If you take some time to determine who your best customer demographic is, you can more effectively manage your time by going after only likely candidates. What other steps/questions have you used in determining who your most qualified leads are?

So I'm a little over one week in to Operation Productivity, and things seem to be according to plan. I am writing to you from the darkness of 4:30 AM in Dallas; this morning is a little earlier than "normal" because I have a 7:45 meeting. I've been getting so much more done than I used to just by shifting my schedule back. I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do is either write or read, followed by going for either a jog or a hike. Then I take a shower and get cleaned up, and then take a bit of extra time for breakfast and catch up on my blog feed.

In addition to extra productivity in the morning, I have seen that I am enjoying a few other unintended advantages as well:

1. Energy All Day: I have just had a ridiculous amount of energy all day after waking up by 5:00 everyday. I hardly ever turn things down now out of a lack of energy.

2. Healthy Habits: I have been naturally eating better and getting more exercise as a result of my new habit. I didn't plan to do this; I just find that now that my body is on a more comfortable, consistent sleep schedule, I am not craving the junkfood I have come to know so well over the years.

So far, so good. We'll see where this habit takes me. I'm starting to think I don't want to end this after 30 days like I initially thought I would. This started as an experiment, but it's quickly becoming a life-changing experience.

Does Waking Up Early Actually Promote Success?

Are you a night owl? Do you wonder how someone else can possibly look so awake and full of energy in the early morning, when you are doing your best to drag yourself out of bed? Getting up early has long been extolled as a huge contributor to career and fitness success, so I'm taking 30 days of waking up at 5 AM to change my hibernating ways.

Turns out lots of people have been pushing the 5 AM wakeup time as a catalyst for success for quite awhile. Common-sense financial advisor Dave Ramsey has been saying for years that if a person can make themselves get up by 5 AM every day for a decade or more, they will very likely be highly successful. Lifehack provides tips to help you get into an early-rising routine, as well as some of the benefits of doing so.

On the uncommon occasions that I have to get up before 8 AM to head into work, I notice these people. Over-achievers. The extremely motivated. The "Highly Effective," as Stephen Covey would refer to them. Their clothes send a message of both influence and affluence. They are in fantastic shape. They are bursting with energy and ambition at 7 o'clock. Everything about them screams "I'm in control of my whole world." And I have often wondered, what are they doing that I am not?

Turns out it's pretty simple. Basically, it seems to be an exercise in discipline. In the rare instances that I get the idiot I stare at in the mirror to go to bed at a decent hour, and wake up by 5 AM, I find that I am super-ultra-mega productive all day long. And then that night, I am actually sleepy around 10 PM, which is great, because if I stick to it, it creates this never-ending engine of daily productivity. Based on my experiences with this, I am starting to believe there is less of a distinction between morning people and night owls, and the real difference lies between people with self control, and those without it.

And then I think, "I want to be a person with self control all the time, not just once every couple of weeks." So yesterday morning was day 1 of my 5 AM 30-Day Challenge. Every morning, I am going to get up at the same, dark-and-early hour, and make sure that use that early time productively, either with a workout, writing, budgeting, or something else useful. I hypothesize that this consistency will be very good for me.

Have you made a change to an earlier schedule? How has it affected your career success/fitness/life? Do you think this theory is full of it?

Being Careful What You Wish For Is Not Just A Saying

Ever made a career decision that didn't turn out for the better? Sometimes we think we know exactly what we want, until we get it, and then we realize that it's not at all what we expected. With frequent situational evaluation, you can make sure that you discover these mistakes when they happen, instead of months or years down the line.

A few months ago, I took a job that I thought was going to be near perfect for me. I was doing IT sales for a small, independent firm here in Dallas, and I was excited to finally be in outside sales rather than inside. However I quickly discovered that, while I have a passion for sales, my new industry was not for me. Here's the problem: 98% of the prospects I was chasing either already had sufficient systems in place or operated on such a small scale that they had no need for the products I was selling. I don't like to hard-sell or use pressuring tactics to get people to cave in and buy things they have no legitimate use for, and it was clear to me that this is what I'd have to resort to if I wanted to see any level of success. I knew within 3 days that this role was not for me, and I parted with my company amicably less than 3 weeks later.

Never in my life did I think I would leave a job so fast. I pretty much always give everyone a fair shake. Heck, I even give girls 2 dates to catch my genuine interest, because, hey, everyone has an off night. But ultimately I had to be honest with myself about my long-term career goals, and how spending my time in this position would contribute to them. And the reality was that it wouldn't.

Fast forward to today, 3 months later. I am now working in my previous industry, retail sales of high-performance kitchen equipment and cookware, as a sales manager and culinary coordinator of my store. I am having a blast in my new job, making as much money as I would have in the short-lived position, and gaining a ton of transferrable sales and management training in the process.

There is nothing wrong with second-guessing yourself. Frequent evaluation of the fruits of your decisions is the best way to help you make better ones in the future. Sometimes

Prioritization for the Hyper-Connected

Recently I made the decision to become very digitally connected. This was mainly a career decision, and I have treated it as such. I have been spending much more time with my blog, People Sales. I edited my Facebook profile to be a business networking tool, and to focus attention on the blog as well. I joined Twitter and have been building relationships with my contacts on it as well. I am currently building my LinkedIn profile, too. I even finally broke down and bought an iPhone, which has tied all my other efforts together into one big powerhouse of constant networking connectivity.

So far, my efforts are doing exactly what I want them to. My blog actually comes up on the front page of Google when I search David J. Dotson now (awesome!). I have had 2 job interviews in the past week when I previously went 2 months with only 1. My name and my ideas are getting out there to people I haven’t yet met personally. In short, a lot of things seem to be falling into place now that my networking engine is picking up speed. But is it possible to fuel the fire too much?

I’m very new to the hyper-connected lifestyle, so maybe I’m just in cell shock. But I already find myself constantly hearing my phone beep at me because someone’s tweeting, I have a new email, I have a new blog or Facebook comment, or (in a few instances) an actual missed call. I try to respond to everything relevant as quickly as I can, but the time adds up, and I can already start to feel as if I’m a little removed from what’s going on around me.

The biggest 3 questions I have been using to prioritize my responses are:
· Does it require my attention? Is this a comment, message, or opportunity to which I should respond, but is not urgent?
· Does it require my IMMEDIATE attention? Am I going to miss out on a chance to build a relationship or participate in something time-sensitive by postponing this?
· Is it relevant to me whatsoever? Is it just a tweet of an article or URL that, while it may be interesting, really doesn’t affect me or mine one way or the other?

So far, using these as a guideline for allocating time and responses to my contacts has seemed to help some, however I am still it out. Do you have any opinions or tips on how to achieve a good balance in one’s connectivity? Or should the Gen Y professional just accept that they need to be able to be reached at all times? Any other thoughts on the subject?