SOBCon08 Notes David Bullock: Business Development Action Plan

Speaker David Bullock: www.davidbullock.com on START Selling: Business Development Action Plan

About the SOBCon08 notes series . . .

On May 2-4, Liz Strauss hosted SOBCon08: Biz School for Bloggers in Chicago. During the sessions, I typed notes to share with you. To presenters and attendees: please feel free to clarify and comment. I will share notes from each session along with how I’m using the knowledge to improve my reader/customer experience. David recently posted his SOBCon08 business and blogging insights.

David Bullock is president and owner of White Bullock Gorup, a business development firm. David is certified by Dr. James Kowalick as a TRIZ/Taguchi Ad Optimization Specialist and is the only individual in the world to hold this certification. In 2006, David published the first of his books and DVDs teaching his innovative marketing method. He was recently featured in Black Enterprise in a article on data mining.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

David says this content comes from a presentation he was asked to make to college kids: what can you tell them now that they’ll need to know in 10 years?

He will attempt to compress the two hour talk into fifteen minutes. David’s background is in mechanical engineering; he’s developed process systems for major manufacturers and organizations.

It’s cool to be a geek now. What you want to do is get into a position where you create a system that makes money once. And then you do it over and over again.

Whole empires have been built on the written word, you just have to figure out how to repeat it.

What you have now is text and images, your goal is to take your content so that someone can consume it and you can moneytize it so that once you make money you can do it over and over again as part of a system.

No money will move until the communication line is in place. It’s better to get less people, but the right people, than to get more people and no money.

Business Systems Engineering

• customer acquisition
• market/competition analysis
• promotional
• traffic generation
• customer retention
• product delivery
• product creation
• customer feedback
• tracking and testing

There are 16 levels of tracking, Google analytics only covers the first four. You can look over the shoulder of your client without being there with some of them.

START formula

Strategy – overall story, what are you trying to do? How does your story match up with the story of your marketplace? Your content is the bridge between the two. They’re where they are, and your content gets them someplace. Give things away for free when it makes sense. Study the 20 master plots – there are 20 stories that people are always in: quest, conflict, adventure, forbidden love, etc. When you know the story, there’s nothing else to do but tell it. Everyone wants to live vicariously and they want to live as someone else.

Tactics – next step, you got this story and I got this market. Blogging might not be the best way to get to your folks. Having a market versus having a concept are two different things. It’s easy to get 5-10,000 people to the site and nobody does what you want them to do. Maybe you’re doing something that doesn’t make any sense. What do you have to do? Who do you have to hire?

Action – now you have to do something, put something out there in the marketplace and see if it works.

Result – at the end of the day, you have to know what you’re trying to get – is it an opt-in? You have to get the same thing over and over again. Are you getting the opt-in or the sale? “Almost got that one,” does not help to pay any bills. The online marketplace is the only place where you can see everything and track every action.

Tracking – increased a client’s traffic by over 250%, used a tool called www.crazyegg.com , if you can’t track, you can’t test. Click Density is another tool. Transaction velocity [David coined this term] is what you’re looking for. All you have to do is pay attention, don’t be afraid to do send pay-per-click campaigns to a blog post. A blog post that works is evergreen.

Steps to Creating Your Business Process Map

Use Dragon Naturally speaking to write blog posts.

1. Speak/write the process 

2. Determine the outcome of every step

3. Set the sequence

4. Do the process

5. Refine the process – if you have someone else doing this, then they find holes

6. Rinse.Repeat.

Tools for Charting Your Business Process

Map out a flow chart that automates your business so that you can hand off projects.

1. Yellow pad

2. www.simpleflowchart.com

3. www.gliffy.com

4. www.flowchart.com

5. Excel’s drawing functions

You want to free yourself up to create that stuff that people really want. Thinking is what people buy.

Your Major Marketing Channels

1. Your Customers – ask them to get you more business, it’s easy for you to send them an email

2. Your List – capture the name so you can do anything with it

3. Your Identity – use and build your identity, take the time to nurture and protect your reputation – what is written is true, whatever is spoken is true.

4. Your Successes – have to let people know what you’ve done, have to spark your own PR campaign, get it out of your head and get people coming towards you.

5. Internet – nothing but a media – it’s links and pages, that’s all it is.

6. Offline – connect with fewer people and get more things done. Whoever can cover all media channels right now, you will own your space. Do yours and own yours. Don’t think that because you’re a blogger, you have to abandon everything up to that point.

What are they saying 

about you

about your service

about your results

Are you going through it over it? 

Questions

Testimonials: Use them, make sure you cover the full range of ways people can get a hold of you: email, video. Are they credible?

Comment from the audience: Book proposal guidelines for authors really help you find out what’s special about you and what helps you develop your platform.

Reflection and Implementation

Wow! David really compressed a complete business guide into a small space. His START formula lays it all out into steps, beginning with writing your story. First, you have to choose a master plot, such as “the quest:”

The quest is the “search for a person, place or thing, tangible or
intangible.”  Specifically, the main character is looking for that
certain something that they expect or hope will change their life.

Source

For a creative writer, saying the same thing over and over again sounds, well too simple and boring. Let’s face it: if you say it once, why say it again? And yet, that’s how many of the public speakers I know become successful: they tell the same stories over and over again. Why? Because that’s what people want and that’s what works. The best copy writers use a formula to craft top-performing sales letters. Once you develop a memorable story, people will tell it, for you, over and over again.  What’s yours?

Technorati Tags: Business Development,Blog Marketing,David Bullock,SOBCon08,Barbara Rozgonyi,Wired PR Works