So you want to cash out your start-up (or small business) or make it big. You need skills and hard work, but there is an even larger determining factor: Drive.

People can be goal oriented, but that doesn’t make them driven. Drive is the difference between Good and Great. It isn’t about hard work or who works harder. It is about the prioritization of time and effort. It’s about sacrifice and single-mindedness, maybe even putting blinders on and running straight ahead towards your goal.

People often think it’s luck. It isn’t luck: it is timing, effort, drive, focus, execution, sacrifice. Not everyone sees that. Not everyone wants to give that much.

In this article, Richard Branson makes fine points in “How to Make The Most of Your Network”. Best point, “You can’t manage via email.”

So my pal sent me a notice about a virus which will encrypt all of your personal files (pictures, office docs, videos, etc). You will not get them back without paying $100-700 USD within 72 hours. It might be nice to warn your customers about opening unknown attachments. Offer them a scanning service for extra $$; and offer them data backup so they can access files after they get the virus.

The Register has this article about Crypto Locker as Ransomware. There are others including this one.

Norton has a page about it here.

So does MalwareBytes.

How To Avoid CryptoLocker Ransomware. “This thing hit like pretty much all the file extensions that are usable, from Mp3s to [Microsoft] Word docs,” Kessel said. “About the only thing it didn’t touch were system files and .exe’s, encrypting most everything else with 2048-bit RSA keys that would take like a quadrillion years to decrypt. Once the infection happens, it can even [spread] from someone on a home PC [using a VPN] to access their work network, and for me that’s the most scary part.”

Another reminder: Win XP updates expire soon so all those computers will be subject to a huge amount of exploits, malware, etc. Jump on that too.

The big losers in the Pay TV game are the cable companies (TWC, BH, Comcast, Charter, Cox, Cablevision, WOW, Suddenlink). The winners are Telco TV like AT&T U-Verse, VZ FiOS and CenturyLink. The DBS companies are facing mixed reviews.

“Dish said total pay-TV subscribers declined about 78,000 in the quarter. The company added nearly 624,000 gross pay-TV subscribers, down from about 665,000 a year earlier,” according to Reuters. Also worth noting, “Dish added about 61,000 net broadband subscribers in the second quarter, up from nearly 11,000 a year earlier.” Total Pay TV subs is 14,014,000; approx. 310K BB subs. DISH CEO Charlie Ergen has been preoccuppied with other ventures. Namely, trying to buy Clearwire, Sprint and Lightsquared after acquiring DBSD North America and TerreStar.

Due to its first price increase in two years, the Pay-TV ARPU for 2Q2013 totaled $80.90, while the churn rate increased to 1.67 percent. I didn’t know it was a $14B annual revenue run. DTV is twice that at $30B.

In 2009, customer acquisition cost for DTV and DISH (including leased equipment) was $712 and $700, respectively. DTV pumps more money into advertising and customer acquisition than DISH.

DirecTV ARPU is $98.73. Average monthly churn is 1.53%. Total subs is 20,021,000 for US not including Latin America.

“DirecTV added 139,000 net subscribers in the United States in the quarter, nearly double the gain of 70,000 that analysts expected, according to research firm StreetAccount.” [Reuters] “In contrast, Time Warner Cable said last week that it had lost more than 300,000 video subscribers, while Comcast Corp said it had lost 129,000. Another cable company, Charter Communications Inc, reported a net video subscriber loss of 27,000 on Tuesday.”

According to Gary Kim, TWC has it the worst. “Time Warner Cable in the coming year that about 40 percent of the cable company’s service area will be overlapped by AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS.” TWC is competing head-to-head with the 2 biggest RBOCs, cellcos, lobbyists who now offer TV.

Cable companies have already offset TV revenue losses with High speed Internet and Voice revenues (and profits). However, the cablecos have spent money creating TV stations (especially sports stations and news like Bay News 9 on Bright House). With a declining viewership on their network, can it continue to provide quality content for the viewers?

Telcos are spending huge CAPEX in headends, middleware, set-top boxes, infrastructure, neighborhood gear (U-Verse, FiOS) and marketing dollars to gain TV subs. I guess you need to have about 5 million subs to make the investment and content costs worthwhile.

Who knew that there was a conference about Hacking Sales? Aaron Ross gave a presentation about “five fatal mistakes that companies can avoid that will boost their sales.” One: Pick a Niche!!! How many times have I said that? You cannot afford to advertise to everyone and you cannot be everything to everyone — otherwise it is about price.

What value do you bring to what subset of the marketplace? Target them. [What is your Elevator Pitch? Do the exercise.]

Who are your most valuable or profitable customers? Who has the highest lifetime value? Simple: Get more of them. On the flip side: who is your least profitable customer? Fire them – and stop duplicating them!

Remember that you don’t need Everyone as a Customer. You need 1000 or 2000 or 5000 that can afford to pay you enough to make it profitable. The problem most people have with marketing is saying that some people just aren’t a good fit. Learn to dis-qualify faster, so you can spend the limited amount of time and attention that you have with the most qualified prospects you can find (or who find you).

“Fatal sales mistake #3: Using Jargon and buzzwords“. Trying to rank for UC or unified communications or hosted pbx is a waste of time. That isn’t what people search for. Talk to your customers to find out what they do search for. Google analytics just shut off the organic search help feature so you will have to add a widget to get this info from your website visitors. (Look at Lijit.)

“A VP of sales at a startup should be willing to do sales themselves!” Any sales manager for an SMB should still be selling. Even a director of sales. Everyone needs to be selling — pulling in revenue — there are salaries to pay.

Cold Calling is Dying and Prospecting is Expensive. Sure. It would be great if all leads were inbound. It would be great if all it took was a fancy website, some old fashioned marketing and word-of-mouth to ring that phone with orders. It doesn’t work that way, except for Amazon and Wal-Mart. The rest of us – K-Mart, Sears, JC Penney, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Winn-Dixie and so many more including you – need to design and turn on a marketing plan that gets executed on weekly. There has to be a Sales Plan as well. That Sales Plan has to include some social elements, networking, working referrals actively and customer retention. Customer Experience is something that salespeople need to be aware of and get feedback on.

Personally, I think cold calling isn’t dead – it is harder and more expensive, but most people that do it are lazy, use robo-callers, no script, wing it badly and don’t understand what they are doing. What is the goal of that call? get help. “It takes 6.25 hours to set a single appointment,” says Jasper from taskus.

Email marketing is still king. It is about the list, the headline, the call to action, the offer – and most of all the value! Not every email is about you, your service and what they should buy. Some emails have to be just about providing value to your customers. If you are confused on this point – if your brow creased – you are NOT providing any value in your email. Stop! Now!

Retaining customers and growing wallet share of your customers is a huge part of profitability. You retain and grow by excellent customer service. Fanatical support.

One other twist on this is to examine your service to see if it is Remarkable or Awesome. If not, how can you make it so?

An interesting article about website metrics. However, don’t get hung up on metrics. Be customer-centric. It’s about the story, the searchability, and the progression. Huh? I know. The website copy is about the story that you are telling the prospect. The story that has to capture their attention in 6 seconds. And that Google’s robots can find and want to index. Then it is about stepping the website visitor through the sales process – from interest to what do you want them to do next? Sign up for a newsletter, call you, join a webinar, get a white paper, what action?

And finally: how do they contact you NOW?!

It’s about The Customers! See here.

More growth hacking.

One very well done video about the US surveillance state.