Online Resources:

• Surveymonkey – to survey or poll your customers.
• Mailchimp, iContact – for email marketing with metrics
• campaignercrm.com – email marketing and CRM
• Eventbrite, Punchbowl – invites for webinars, lunch-n-learns
• Freshbooks, QuickBooks, Batchbook, insightly – invoicing and CRM
• Go Cloud for CRM, email and Apps with Office365, Zoho or Google Apps*
• Slideshare – for your marketing Google juice

*You need to use Cloud services to sell cloud!

How to Market your Consulting Biz (slides)

Offline Resources:

• SCORE
• Colleges (especially business schools)
• Meetup.com
• Trade shows and associations
• RAD-INFO INC

Other things mentioned during the presentation:

SELLECOM 2: Selling Cloud Services

Jim Rohn

Goal Setting

Seth Godin – Permission Marketing, The Dip, Linchpin, Knock Knock and more!

Tom Peters – Brand You and In Search of Excellence

Michael Port – Book Yourself Solid

GTD – Get Things Done

TCA Certified Telecom Professional!

Marketing Outrageously

Master Mind Group and here.

Need a Coach? Jim Rohn, Noomii, Find Your Coach, and CoachU.

EO and CEO member peer groups.

E-Myth

Tampa’s third Startup Weekend was this weekend. It is a 54 hour stretch from Friday evening till Sunday evening, where the community comes together to create startups – in 54 hours!

You show up with an idea for a startup. All the attendees vote on the ideas to see which ones will be worked on. Teams are formed to work on the top ideas.

The best ideas do not always win. The clearest messaging wins. The idea owner that can socialize his idea and create a team wins.

There are lessons to be learned. First and foremost: Fail Fast!

Attendees didn’t know everyone and what their skills were. We live in a time of Google+, FB, LinkedIn, WeareTampaBay, Nulister — plenty of places to figure out what people do.

There is also twitter to ask: Hey looking for ______ @ #SWT

How about old-fashioned face-to-face networking — work the room!

Each team has to have a programmer, a business person and an idea creator – at a minimum. Coaches are available. Plus, like Who Wants to be a Millionaire, you can call a friend or Skype on in via video-chat.

The weekend culminates in a pitch. This is where the rubber meets the road. Can you clearly and concisely tell the audience (and judges) what your idea is, what problem it solves and how you will go-to-market?

Well, got to go listen to the pitches!

Last night during a talk, I mentioned a bunch of books. Here they are:

• E-Myth Revisited by Gerber – here’s a chapter
• Linchpin by Seth Godin – my review and someone else’s. And 1 more with a video of Seth.
• Tribes by Seth Godin – here is Seth’s TED talk about Tribes and here is audio.

My last seminar with Seth was about Picking Yourself. I had slides on that last night.

• Think and Grow Rich by Napolean Hill – wikipedia cliff notes and here it is in a PDF.
• Endless Referrals by Bob Burg is the first sales book I ever read.
• Drip Marketing by Glenn Fallavollita
• Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy about Time Management
• Tim Ferriss launched 4 Hour Work Week at SxSW with this 40 minute talk.

Jim Rohn was my first coach. This is his 1 year coaching program about personal development. Here is Jim talking about Happiness is an Art.

Keith Rosen was my sales and busness coach for a while. If you want a coach, you can try CoachU or Noomii. If they don’t test you about your coachable and what your goals are, that is not a good coach.

Loral Langemeier – The Millionaire Maker’s Guide to Creating a Cash Machine. Her 12 building blocks of wealth.

Les Brown is one of Jim Rohn’s disciples and he is a good motivational speaker – YouTube.

Michael Port – Book Yourself Solid.

Other Books:

• The Accidental Salesperson by Chris Lytle
• Marketing Outrageously by Jon Spoelstra
• 1001 Ways to Market Your Services by Rick Crandall
• Practically Radical by William Taylor
• The Wealthy Barber by David Chilton
• Becoming a Category of One by Joe Galloway

Seth Godin started with Permission Marketing, which was about getting permission for the attention of your audience. Your audience is your Tribe. His book Tribes is all about building and more importantly leading a tribe.

In The Dip, under 100 pages, Godin talks about knowing when to quit – and when to forge ahead.

In Purple Cow, he talks about being Remarkable. Baking something special into each product or service. “Advertising is for the boring!”

In Linchpin he combines it all. More than just building remarkable products and leading tribes, but putting Art into the world. Art is the gift you give the world. It’s about shipping your gift, your Genius, to the world. That can make you a purple cow. That will make you a Linchpin.

There are many ways to be a Linchpin. Your art can be in connecting people, like Keith Ferrazi or Michelle Welsh. Your art can be about making the complex simple. In programming and in tech sales, this skill is needed to be successful.

When I read Linchpin, it tied all of the other books together for me.

As a consultant, I am a freelancer. Freelancers have their own set of challenges. One is how to set yourself apart. Risk and fear play roles in many people’s minds. (That’s the Lizard Brain talking – IGNORE it!) The mindset for being a successful freelancer is significant if you are want to separate yourself from the crowd of web designers, marketing consultants, social media guru, etc.

When I went to the Pick Yourself event, Seth was giving us permission to go do our Art. Go be Weird. Go Ship!

Poke the Box and We are All Weird were books to help people realize that Picking Yourself and taking risk – being weird, shipping good enough art – are necessary. Risk and experimentation help us hone our craft. Weirdness helps us stand out.

I’m not discounting his other books – Meatball Sundae, All Marketers, Big Red Fez, Knock Knock, Prize Inside. I think those were stand alone guides for marketers for this new age of marketing – blogs, websites, social media, etc. Valuable books, just outside the map of Linchpin.

Just some thoughts today as I was asked about Seth’s books today on twitter, last week at BarCamp Tampa, and by Vic.

On Tuesday, September 18, 2012, I will be speaking about marketing at a conference in Chicago. The expo was nice enough to let me invite non-members to my sessions on that day at the James Hotel.

At 10 AM I am presenting How to Compete, a session I have done a couple of times about competing in the telecom sector. I will hit on these 3 sales scenarios:

Do you get beat on Price?
Is cable stealing your business?
Are you having trouble selling Hosted PBX?

At 2:15 the session is Marketing: Grab your Umbrella, It’s Cloudy Out. In this session, I am going to run through cloud services you need to offer and how to market them. Fast paced.

At 4:15, Marketing in 3 Easy Steps will give you (at least) three action steps to take in order to market your cloud services.

All sessions are fast paced and I encourage questions.

There is a special day rate of just $49 for you to come to the expo – and that includes lunch and a luncheon keynote on Leadership. If interested, email me for the discount code. Hope to see you in Chicago!