Dedication To my friends and colleagues who have helped me along the way.

To all the clients who said yes.

To all the remarkable people I met on my journey.

And a special thanks to Rich Herbst, who refined my game and gave it a name – the Twenty Seed Game – I remain ever indebted.

The Twenty Seed Game methodology is the creation and intellectual property of Rich Herbst and is referenced here with his permission.

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Foreword Ted Wilson was my million-dollar seed plant. Indeed. My meeting with Ted Wilson led to a VP position that netted me more than a million dollars in salary over a six-year period. Without Ted, it’s unlikely my career would have turned out as it has. He was a new business acquaintance I had met only the week before at a Netweavers networking event when we met for coffee at Starbucks. We had spoken briefly at the networking event and agreed to meet the following week, and we did.

Lesson: It may be the people you don’t know well that end up helping you the most. People I knew well from business sent me to that networking event, but it was that chance meeting with Ted that set my whole career in the direction it has taken for the past decade. My million-dollar seed plant.

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ForewordDoug Ritter is a consummate networker. When we first met 12 years ago, he struck me as a natural at connecting with people, using an easygoing, casual style that others find non-threatening (and definitely non-”sales”). He draws you into conversation and makes it more about you than about him. And since we all love to talk about ourselves, we naturally look with favor on someone who recognizes how accomplished and special we are! In Doug’s case this interest is genuine, as he truly does want to learn about his speaking partners, their jobs, their leisure pursuits, their backgrounds. Doug knows how to find common ground with anyone in a conversation and is diligent in following up on the contact. He is a master of the art of cementing a new contact by relevant follow-up that deepens the budding relationship. Early on in our association, he discovered my interest in aviation (in my retirement career, I’m a flight instructor) and subsequently alerted me to a fascinating book I immediately devoured, as well as pointing out that I could easily bid for a light airplane on eBay.

As I read Doug’s book, I was struck by how common-sense his approach is. He had told me of his method over the years of our association, but I never really understood exactly how targeted, structured and focused it was until he laid it out in easy-to-comprehend steps. Easy to comprehend but, as he points out in the book, hard

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to execute without serious discipline and follow through. Doug’s success in securing employment, identifying prospective customers and closing new business is a testament to his mastery of the seed planting game. Follow the steps he describes and repeat. It works.

This short, easy-reading book will pique your interest, inspire your commitment to take action, and win you new business, whatever your business is. It doesn’t have to be sales. It could be anything that requires interaction in the marketplace where business, social, nonprofits and other groups intersect. Follow Doug’s guidelines, apply his system for a month, and see what results you will achieve. I highly recommend adding Doug’s book to your professional reading. Plant seeds and prosper.

Ted WilsonVice President and International Business ManagerMercuri Urval, Inc.(Retired)

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PrefaceThis is a primer, a how-to book. It will walk you through the steps so that you can duplicate my process in person. It will take practice. More practice. And then some more. And quite honestly, it’s a lot of hard work. Truly. It was designed so that you don’t need to be a “born salesperson.” My belief is that anyone who truly wants it, and is equipped with the proper tools, can achieve success. Zig Ziglar said it and I will second it: Attitude is more important than anything else. I must also pay homage to Rich Herbst, my former business partner and managing director at my last company, Ascend Marketing. I was using a method he also used without knowing it, and without tracking or using analytics. But I had used this method to find several positions (three, in fact), including the one at Ascend with Rich. It was Rich who coined the term “The Twenty Seed Game.”

This is not a long book. It’s a how-to book, with just enough firsthand experiences detailed so you’ll have real-life examples of the “why” behind the book, as well as my sales techniques.

One final and the most important note: You will not succeed by merely reading this book. The concepts contained herein must be practiced and used over and over until you master them. Much like learning to play an instrument (although you will master this sooner than the oft-mentioned 10,000 hours!).

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But if you are serious and willing to do the hard work, then I guarantee you will be successful. If you invest four to seven hours a day planting seeds, every working day of the business week, then you will close business. But just like another favorite book of mine, Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port, you won’t be successful just because you read it. You need to put the learnings into practice. A brief note: I meet with anybody looking for a job who is sent my way by friends and acquaintances, and most of the time, even people who are looking for a new position who just find me on LinkedIn. And I bet it will surprise you to hear that most of them do not put my techniques into practice. Why? While I am not entirely sure, I suspect it’s either because they don’t believe it will work, or because they don’t want to do the real “heavy lifting” eight hours a day that this will take to succeed. And the ones that do? They actually all find new positions.

So whether it’s a new position you are after or increased sales resulting from using a new paradigm, here are the chapters in this book and what you will learn in each one:

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Chapter 1 – A word about me, my career, how I came to be in sales, what I have thought about sales, how I avoided sales, and why sales are essential. How I finally arrived in sales.Note: If you are just interested in the how-to section and want to read that first, skip ahead to Chapter 3.Chapter 2 – The traditional buy/sell arrangement and pitch. The flaws. The systems, the training, the personalities.Chapter 3 – The Twenty Seed Game: The objective – 20 meetings with people you haven’t met with but aren’t cold calling.Chapter 4 – When 20 seeds have been planted, start over again on another 20 by developing your new list of 40 names.Chapter 5 – Applying the Twenty Seed Game to job hunting. How to do it; how to apply seed-plant techniques to find your next position.Chapter 6 – Using LinkedIn, the number-one tool. When people joined. In the URL. Using the LinkedIn button/tile in your signature. SEO your page. Search for yourself. See who comes up and why. You will not come up in a search from your own computer.Chapter 7 – Your brand: LinkedIn; Facebook, Google+, your Google profile, Groups. What are you truly good at? What do people think of when they think of you? Look at your LinkedIn profile and see how people voted for you in endorsements.Chapter 8 – The worst sales call ever. Yes, this really happened. Learn from this, the extreme experience in poor salesmanship.

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Chapter 1A word about me, my career, how I came to be in sales, what I have thought about sales, how I avoided sales, and why sales are essential . How I finally arrived in sales.

Note: If you are just interested in the how-to section and want to read that first, skip ahead to Chapter 3.

I have been RIF’d (Reduced in Force), downsized, laid off, terminated and fired. No matter what the euphemism is, one day you have a job and a salary and the next day you don’t. It sucks. Anyone who says it doesn’t is either delusional or lying to themselves. I have worked at 13 companies in my 30+ year career and only two of them – coincidentally my current one and my last one – have not been bought, sold or gone out of business. (And one, BBDO, became part of a larger holding company, Omnicom.) This includes two Fortune 500 enterprises, AT&T and GTE, both bought by other companies (SBC and Bell Atlantic) in the past 15 years. No company is immune to this occurrence and certainly no employee is immune either. And while it’s bad luck to get laid off when you are a top salesperson at a company being closed down or sold off, these people tend to find new positions

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quicker than others. I have come to believe that there is always a market for a great salesperson. I speak from experience. In the past 15 years, I have searched for a new position five times for a variety of reasons listed in the last paragraph. And each of those times, the longest period I have been out of work was less than four months, and I was looking for positions with a salary of $125,000 to $160,000. Not easy. The techniques I used to find those positions (described in this book in a separate chapter) are exactly the same techniques I have used to sell successfully over the years. These form the bulk of the chapters in the book.

My Career in Sales

I was not a born salesperson. I was not trained by Anthony Robbins, David Sandler or Zig Ziglar. Quite the opposite, in fact; I ran in the opposite direction from sales in every company I ever worked at. Until I could run no more. That was the year 2002 and the company I was joining was Perlos, a Finnish manufacturer of mobile phones.

Like most people (well, a lot of people), my exposure to sales was the car salesman, used or new, insurance salesperson or real estate salesperson. And while certainly not all salespeople are deserving of that image, it’s nonetheless what the public thinks of first when they hear the word “salesperson.” It certainly makes a lot of people cringe. Ned Ryerson, the pushy insurance salesman from the movie Groundhog Day, comes to mind. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkW_ZkMtmlQ)

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I came to sales rather late in my career, at the age of 51. Not only did I lack any sales training or affinity for the art of the deal, I had deliberately avoided sales functions and positions at companies I worked at for my entire career. At AT&T, early in my career, I declined the management development program because it required that I spend a year or more in sales. As a functional specialist – in marketing communications – I had no desire to be in sales. It took a major change in my career path to cause me to shift my thinking. Like losing my job many years after leaving AT&T. That did it, and confirmed that necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

In the year 2002, I found myself out of a VP Marketing job when an SVP had to trim his staff of six VPs by one. He had hired the other five – and I had been reporting to him for exactly one week. Such is life. There’s no crying in baseball, so I began my search, scheduling several meetings each day with my network and talking with them. These were not interviews. I was scheduling networking meetings.

I read a number of books that people had recommended on searching for a new position, since this was not the first time this had happened to me but the third time in three years (managerial style differences at the first in 1999; the loss of a major client – Nortel – at the other, after just six months; and finally this one, after exactly one year. Well actually, just a day shy of one year, so they wouldn’t have to pay me six months’ severance instead of three, but that’s another story).

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The technique I had been using was similar to a sales quota. I would spend literally six to eight hours a day networking and making sales calls and sending emails to potential companies – with a target of 20 emails/calls, etc., a day, five days a week. I had developed it back in 2000 when “management differences” found me out of a VP position at a cause-related marketing company. It worked when I eventually convinced Orin Wechsberg at Grey Interactive to take me on as VP Account Director on the Nortel account, sharing it with another VP, Brian – who in the interview said (honest), “Where have you been?” We were a good team.

I was the co-head of an interactive team that built the Nortel website in the year 2000. I believe when we started the project Nortel’s stock was at $84 a share, and when we finished the project, just around Christmas, the stock was 44 cents. A postage stamp stock, we called it. An amazing freefall. As soon as we finished the website build our agency was let go, a victim of Nortel’s belt tightening (they eventually filed for bankruptcy and went under several years later). Orin sadly had to let me go as well. That’s show business when your account leaves.

I went back to looking and found a wonderful job as VP Marketing for, ironically, a company that made its money selling enterprise Nortel PBX systems. That company eventually suffered losses as the great telecom bust of 2000 continued. It was sold shortly after I exited. (I was the sixth VP on a five-VP staff – not a great position to play.)

Back to the job search for the third time in three years. By now I was getting use to selling – myself, that is.

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It’s Frequently the People You Don’t Know Well

One business acquaintance, the president and owner of the small technology ad agency I had hired for my last company (thank you, Mike Crawford!), suggested I go to a networking event being held by the Dallas Netweavers. The event, while unremarkable (I admit that I am not good at “cocktail” parties and mixers), was unforgettable because of one chance meeting I had while I sipped my club soda near the bar. I encountered a retired Army colonel named Ted Wilson ordering a drink and we got to chatting. He was opening a Dallas office for a large assessment/search-type company that was headquartered in Sweden (Mercuri Urval).

We hit it off and agreed to stay in touch. I contacted him that week and agreed to meet him at a Starbucks to assist him with some marketing needs for his new career. At the end of the meeting, he told me that he had been hired by a Finnish company to assess their candidates for a Director Sales & Marketing position in Ft. Worth. He couldn’t recommend me as that would be a conflict of interest, but he could give me the president’s name, Jyrki Keronen. I would have to contact him for an interview.

I told Ted that I didn’t have any sales experience, just marketing, and he said that he had been told that the job was 95% marketing and 5% sales. OK – I figured I could do this.

So I wrote Jyrki a letter (snail mail) and was rewarded with a reply and an interview at their factory location in Alliance, Texas, a section of Ft. Worth about 10 miles from my house.

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The company was called Perlos – a Finnish company I had never heard of, but then I had never heard of any Finnish companies save for Nokia. It turned out that Perlos was a longtime strategic partner and manufacturer for Nokia. At that time they made the plastic casings for about 40% of all Nokia phones. That was almost 160 million casings a year, globally.

Just as the interview was starting his Nokia mobile rang, with a very familiar ringtone – Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” melody from his suite for “Peer Gynt.” Grieg was Norwegian, and while Jyrki and Perlos were Finnish, the country shares a northern border. Before Jyrki could silence his phone, I blurted out the composer and piece – and he looked at me through a different set of eyes and respect and said, “You know this song?” And I thought, “Of course, doesn’t everyone?” No, not really, but I did.

And I also knew how to calculate how many gas stations there were in America, another question he asked.

I was hired soon after, and by after, I mean a seven-hour assessment by Ted Wilson and Mercuri Urval, which was half written test and half oral test. My prize? I found myself with an airline ticket to continue the interview process in Finland. I wasn’t going to Disneyland, but for me this was a bigger win.

An all-expenses-paid trip to Finland (and then Sweden): First stop Helsinki, to meet with the president of the pharma division of Perlos, and

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then the president of the mobile division. The next day I took a flight up to Joensuu (an hour north of Helsinki) and took a factory tour with Richard Moore, an Irishman who went to Finland after college and stayed, and had become fluent in Finnish. We also went karting on a nearby track after he discovered my love for Formula 1. Richard and his son were avid Formula 1 fans, and every F1 driver began in karting in Europe. He had an extremely fast kart, and we spent a delightful afternoon speeding around a track outside Joensuu.

Next I flew back to Helsinki and on to Sweden, to meet and interview with the person I would actually report to, Ric Roetering. We played a round of golf and went sailing, after which his wife made us dinner. As the two days with him drew to a close, he offered me the position. I took a train from Malmo to Denmark, and flew back to the U.S. via Kalstrup, just south of Copenhagen, a very happy person.

It was only after I started at Perlos that I discovered the position was 5% marketing and 95% sales.

I did mention I had never sold before, correct? I had always run in the opposite direction? Check. Although I never mentioned this to Perlos. And in all fairness, I was not asked.

And now I was being asked to sell the Perlos manufacturing story in order to branch out beyond our one customer – Nokia.

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I had to become a salesperson, and in a hurry. Spoiler alert: By the time I met the new Perlos chairman three years later, he was shaking my hand and greeting me, “How’s my number one salesman?” And he meant globally, and he was being honest. So how did I accomplish this “miracle?” All told in Chapter 2.

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Chapter 2The traditional buy/sell arrangement and pitch. The flaws. The systems, the training, the personalities.

Are you interested in selling more? Of course; that’s why you are reading this book. Do you find that more often than not, prospects do not answer your emails or telephone calls because they know you are trying to sell them something? Don’t we all dislike “pushy” salespeople, as exemplified by the overeager Ned Ryerson character in Groundhog Day? Ned is a product of companies that train their people to take advantage of social situations. This is the exact opposite of the behavior required by the Twenty Seed Game.

Yet sales, and the resulting new business, is the lifeblood of companies. But what if there was a different way to accomplish the same thing – an increase in sales, revenue and customers, but without being perceived as a “pushy” sales type? Would you try it?

Perhaps.

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I say perhaps because I have “given” this technique away for free to scores of people over the years who were typically looking for a new position, as they were in transition, and yet few have tried it. Why? Because selling is hard work, and these folks were not salespeople. They were hoping for their techniques to work. (And no, hope is not a strategy.) Or perhaps they did not have the desire to do what I have found it takes to succeed in sales, which is just that – the desire to succeed in sales. Read that again if it does not make sense the first time. Because behind EVERY successful salesperson is the desire to succeed. I can’t teach that. But if you want to succeed, you will succeed. It’s as “simple” as that. But by wanting to succeed, I mean having the desire to work eight hours a day at this and following through on 20 meetings to close on a sale perhaps four times every two months. Yes, that was my algorithm – meet with 20 people and make one to four sales. At Ascend Marketing, I met with perhaps 500 people over four years and closed about 100 pieces of business. So for every 20 meetings I had, I landed up to four pieces of business. Some of these were duplicate sales, meaning I sold multiple projects to the same person or company, but having tracked my business development efforts over the years, I know my success rate and ratio.

The Traditional Buy/Sell Arrangement

Let’s examine the traditional buy/sell arrangement. If you are the salesperson, you are the seller and you are “hoping” that the other person, the buyer, is going to purchase. From you. So what’s wrong with this picture from the start?

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You are sitting across the desk from a prospect, thinking, “I hope he/she buys, I hope they buy.” And it shows. They have all the power.

But suppose it doesn’t have to be that way? Suppose you met as “equals” rather than you being the seller and the other being the buyer? That would level the playing field, wouldn’t it? In this scenario, the other person needs to come to the realization that they need you/your product/your service – without you pushing the sale. The Twenty Seed Game technique will ultimately explain how this is done.

My conversion to sales was not quite like Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, immortalized by Caravaggio. I had just been hired as the Director for Sales & Marketing for Perlos and had several objectives: Find new clients, and ensure that they spent around $5 million with us in my first year. That was my quota. What I was “selling” was manufacturing solutions in the plastics field for mobile phones and other electronic products. This was 2002, and mobile phones were still a new and growing market. There was really only one smartphone out there, made by Nokia: The Communicator, a true brick-like mobile phone used by all the executives at Nokia and Perlos. I was issued one my first week at Perlos. It folded open horizontally, and on the top was a screen and the bottom a keyboard. In my several years of carrying this monster/wonder, I was never able to do more than just receive and send calls, ignoring perhaps as much sophistication as a small laptop of its day.

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First order of the day was to write a business sales plan. The 200,000-square-foot Perlos factory had been completely dependent on Nokia for much of its existence, and had revenues the year before of almost $100 million. They were now looking at annual revenues of about $55 million, as Nokia had cut back their reliance on Perlos in the U.S., where their market share hovered at around 10%, while worldwide they enjoyed a 40% market share. Perlos manufactured almost everything visible on a mobile phone: the front, the back, the keys, the screen and the decoration. We were an “electro/mechanical/plastics solutions provider,” essentially selling manufacturing capacity and solutions. Additionally we designed the “tools,” large 1,000-pound steel cubes that could be opened and closed millions of times to heat and cool plastic into the shape of a front and back mobile phone cover. These tools were set inside injection molding machines the size of a large pickup truck. To work in an injection molding factory of our size was to constantly think of the paraphrased movie line: I love the smell of plastics in the morning.

We did not manufacture the “radio” (that’s what engineers call the device that allows a mobile phone to make and receive calls), the printed circuit board or other computer-like parts inside the device – save for the plastic chassis and antenna.

My business plan research indicated just how many companies there were in the U.S. that sold mobile phones. I also looked into the automotive market, as Perlos had a reference account (Autoliv) in the seatbelt industry (called the safety restraint industry). The safety restraint industry was

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dominated by Takata, a Japanese company; Autoliv, a Swedish company; and TRW, an American company. At the time, they split the market evenly. (Two sounds I will not soon forget: the very large metal stamping machine that creates a dull, loud, constant noise as it stamps metal all day at the Takata San Antonio plant, and the sound of a test car hitting the wall at Autoliv with crash test dummies in the seats. Thump! As it bangs into the crash test barrier at 30 miles an hour.)

When I was finished with my list, I had the names of perhaps 30 companies. Firms such as Research In Motion (maker of then-unique BlackBerry), Motorola, Dell, HP, Belkin, Apple, Logitech, Palm and automotive firms such as Takata and TRW, as well as one other category with a group of companies I had never heard of before, the contract manufacturers. These were firms that the aforementioned companies contracted out their manufacturing for their manufacturing builds. A very complicated business where a BOM (bill of material) was developed, and then a sourcing or procurement person/department sourced the parts and engineers figured out how to manufacture, paint and produce them. The leader of these companies was Hon Hai Precision, Ltd., a Taiwanese company also known as Foxconn, that had a manufacturing facility in Shenzhen, China, employing one million workers (that’s not a typo). Foxconn’s first big client in the U.S. was Dell. Their next and most famous is Apple. They are now currently responsible for about 60% of Apple’s production. They were founded and are owned by a somewhat reclusive now-billionaire named Terry Gou. Also on the list were Flextronics, Solectron, Sanmina-SCI, Celestica,

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Jabil, and a Finnish company, Elcoteq, founded by one of Finland’s more colorful entrepreneurs, Antti Piippo. (Having been to Finland on business more than a dozen times while at Perlos, I can tell you that I encountered very few colorful characters. Wonderful people and a delightful country, but not eccentric and few deviations too far from the norm.)

These companies were also put on my target list, as I thought they might also be sales targets. It would mean a lower margin for Perlos, as they would be buying from us to sell to their customers. Because of this, this sales strategy was controversial and not quite approved by my management. Even with Elcoteq, our Finnish “partner,” we could never seem to completely get along – and they manufactured Nokia phones, as did we. They also manufactured for Ericsson, a Swedish company, which had once been a customer of Perlos until some issues with us on their part.

Perlos senior management was wary of the contract manufacturers as (1) The margins would be lower, and (2) They didn’t want to lose control and ownership of the client relationship. And while I pursued this strategy gently – with meetings at Jabil, Solectron, Flextronics and even Elcoteq USA –nothing ever came of it, until Nokia forced their plastics suppliers to work with selected contract manufacturers. (And that strategy of forced or arranged “marriages,” known as the cluster strategy, did not work out all that well in the end.)

Armed with a sales list and no marketing dollars, I resolved to take each one out to lunch. I thought

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why not, there were perhaps 45 potential customers. I had never sold one-to-one, but I could easily do lunch, and knew enough about most subjects to carry on a conversation about a wide range of topics. And I had fast become enough of an expert on our manufacturing business to “walk the talk.” So I began setting up appointments via email, as I had always disliked making cold calls.

Several months after I joined Perlos, a new website service came into my orbit – LinkedIn. It was easy to understand, a bit like an online resume, and a service that enabled users to “connect” to former colleagues, which I found both fascinating and helpful. I was the 380,000th person to sign up for the service (the number order is in one’s public profile URL).

And while I built up a few contacts, when I left Perlos for Ascend Marketing after the U.S. operations were closed down 4½ years later, I had but 36 contacts on LinkedIn. When I left Ascend after four years, I had 1,200 contacts. And by then, LinkedIn had about 150 million members. (Note: Much more on LinkedIn later, as it became the lynchpin tool for my sales technique.) LinkedIn now has around 250 million members. Two years after leaving Ascend, I have 2,250 contacts. And while I am not a LION – a LinkedIn Open Networker – if you want to link to me, just send me an invite: www.linkedin.com/in/douglasritter/.

One sales technique that fell into my lap (and was not part of my sales plan) turned out to be the best strategy of all: Acting as a subcontractor or partner with another company looking to sell a

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non-competing part/product/service to the same client. We picked up some business with Motorola through their painting company.

Then we picked up Takata seatbelt plastics via a tip from a plastics polymer referral, although we failed to secure any business with TRW.

And then came my absolute luckiest sales call ever. I accompanied Bobby Marshall from Cybershield, an electronics coating and shielding company in Texas, to visit RIM (Research in Motion – the maker of BlackBerry, the then-ubiquitous smartphone), in Waterloo, Canada, about an hour west of Toronto. We flew up to Detroit and drove across the Canadian border.

We met with Randy Buffet, a sourcing/commodities manager. At the time, RIM was manufacturing around five million BlackBerry phones a year. (Now they manufacture around 70 million annually – or they did when I first started writing this book. Last quarter, they sold perhaps 3.8 million devices.) To put this in perspective, Nokia was selling about 400 million mobile phones annually – globally. Nokia manufactured more phones in a week than RIM did in a year. But RIM had something that was hot and every businessperson wanted – a push email device, soon to be called a smartphone. I thought Nokia should just buy RIM, which was reasonably cheap to do at the time, although the takeover would have been hostile. (And given their respective business setbacks in the past, in retrospect it might have been a great deal.)

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Nokia didn’t buy RIM, but I did – their stock, that is (bought low and sold very high, as RIM went over 100).

The RIM executives flew down en masse in the company jet and were very impressed by our operation. And indeed, our factory showed very well and was as clean as could be. The RIM VP Engineering turned to me at one point and said, “Doug, sharpen your pencils,” as they were about to place a large order. And they did, awarding Perlos one of their earliest consumer models – code-named Charm C – which was soon to be followed by a number of other models.

Long story short, RIM became a large customer of Perlos. Turns out they were having a crisis with their molder at the time and wanted to make a switch. In the first year with Perlos, RIM billed perhaps $3.5 million. By the time I left Perlos, RIM had billed a cumulative total of about $70 million over 3½ years, making me the number one non-Nokia salesman at Perlos globally.

I was dedicated to RIM, and today I’m still connected to some 100 managers at RIM on LinkedIn. Tommy Lasorda was said to have bled Dodger blue if cut, and so did I bleed RIM blue. Even as the wheels fell off the proverbial bus of our factory as we increased from 50 to 100 injection-molding machines and our DPM (defects per million) levels went sky high, I was passionate about RIM and defended the company to our management, who always placed Nokia ahead of all others regarding their priorities. (And Perlos eventually lost RIM’s business after I left because of these issues.)

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The seeds were planted for my sales career while at Perlos. While not an executive officer of the company, I petitioned management to change my title to VP Sales & Marketing for the Americas – and managed the sales from our new South American factory in Manaus, Brazil (in the Amazon jungle), as well as the factory we were two years too late building in Mexico on the U.S. border.

The End of the Road at Perlos

Then one day – about five years after I had joined Perlos – my team and I read a press release from headquarters in Finland saying they were closing most of the Finnish factories and moving production to China, where we had operations in Guangzhou and Beijing. This wasn’t news to me, as I had been advised of it weeks earlier. But buried in the last paragraph was a very new piece of news, a sentence that said that Perlos was also closing down their U.S. operations. My “brilliant” sales career was over. But it had been a great ride, and I had learned more in those five years about manufacturing, Six Sigma, mobile phones, supply chain management, international business and of course sales than I had learned in the prior decade. We found out in January, I was paid through August and worked through March, albeit at home (we had closed the factory – a sad day), and I used my old and new sales techniques to search for a new position. I was now out of a job, again, for the fourth time in seven years. Back to my proven sales technique: I developed a list of people and companies I wanted to meet with. Developed a goal of contacts per day, and spent six to eight hours a day working my search.

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When I look back at my contact list from that time period, one name stands out. A man I contacted on my second day, and the third person of the day I talked with – Topper Pardoe.

I had worked with Topper at Verizon seven years earlier when he was my marketing client. I had only seen him perhaps once or twice in the past seven years despite the fact that we lived only a few miles from each other in the same small town. We just traveled in different business circles.

He was now a partner in a small marketing firm headed up by a man who had worked with him at Verizon, who I also worked with at Verizon – Rich Herbst – as well as being the owner of Rainbow Advertising, a premium incentives company he had purchased in Ft. Worth. I met with Topper for lunch, then talked with Rich and arrived at just the right time in Ascend Marketing’s timeline, as they were expanding. It took me two weeks to close the deal, and I started May 1 as a partner at Ascend.

Before I left Perlos, I received what I believed to be the highest compliment regarding my sales ability, from a fellow salesperson on my team. She said I was the least like a salesperson she had ever met! Yes, I took it as a compliment.

At Ascend, with Rich Herbst’s help and guidance, I was able to refine my sales technique and improve my sales skills.

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Chapter 3The Twenty Seed Game: The objective – 20 meetings with people you haven’t met with but aren’t cold calling.

My primary focus at Ascend Marketing was both business development and account management. I wasn’t placed on any specific account, and Ascend didn’t pay a salary; rather, partners were paid a percentage of the business they pitched, signed and brought in as well as for hours worked on a specific account. Few of us at Ascend were pure biz-dev people, but that was my primary focus, as I needed accounts before I could work on them. Probably a scary prospect for most people when they are first starting their career, let alone a 50-year-old man who was the primary breadwinner in a family of four.

In the space of five years, I had gone from a person with absolutely no sales experience and a nice six-figure salary to a person working almost 100% on commission. Quite a switch, and not for the faint of heart. With this structure, there is no safety net.

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What did make it easier was that my friends at RIM had asked one of their Asian suppliers, a Korean plastics molder, to interview and hire me as a U.S. representative to RIM. I first met with their COO in Dallas (he lived in San Diego), and they ultimately flew me to South Korea, first class on Korean Air, seated in the upper deck of a 747 – best flight ever. I sat next to a Korean rock star who pointed out his music videos on the in-flight personal system in the seat back in front of me. The flight attendants kept asking for his autograph (and no, it was not Psy!). The Korean manufacturer not only offered me a position with their company, run by the very sophisticated and charismatic President Lee, but also had me hired by Chairman Lee, his older brother, at his company, which was a leading headphone manufacturer of not only their brand in Korea, but OEM brands to many other branded companies, like Samsung. Armed with these two contracts, I was set even if I didn’t earn a penny in commission from Ascend in my first year. And I was still receiving severance pay from Perlos for several more months. Good times.

My Korean assignment took perhaps 50% of my time, and mostly involved trips to RIM in Canada and well as working with them at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. And while the CES sounds like fun (and is), try spending a week there working from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., then going out and eating at a Korean restaurant and drinking until midnight, going back to the hotel and sleeping from 1 to 6 a.m., for five days in a row. As the only non-Korean at the company, I was toasted

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individually by each sales member of the company at the table. OK, it was fun, if a bit exhausting. And did I mention it was in Vegas?

Ascend Marketing

My association with Rich Herbst at Ascend dramatically changed the arc of my career and life, much like meeting Ted Wilson had. I didn’t know it then, but it did.

Rich had spent much time developing a sales technique very much like the one I had been using. He had developed it at the same time I had and for the same reasons. Like me, his career was in traditional marketing/marketing communications, and while he was well versed in one-to-many marketing, he had never been in “sales” and sold one-to-one. So like me, he trained himself and developed a technique that worked for him. Our techniques were quite similar, and I believed he was even better at it than I was. (He’s a natural, trust me!)

While I had used my techniques to find a new position multiple times, I now had to use these very techniques for finding new business. I always had structure in that I worked six to eight hours a day in sales, and set daily goals for finding my new positions. And now I was about to track the biz-dev results in an Excel file and develop an algorithm charting seed plants, callbacks and close ratios.

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Seed Plants

Credit to Rich Herbst for the Term.But What is a Seed Plant?

A seed plant is a formally scheduled meeting with a business associate for the purpose of networking. It is not a sales call. It may lead to a sales call, but it’s not a sales call in the initial scheduled meeting. If you sell, like most people who cold call me on the telephone, then you are back to being in a buy/sell scenario. A seed plant is effective when you have planted deep enough knowledge about you, your company and what your company does so that the recipient could tell a third party.

It is not a casual conversation you have at a cocktail party or a business event, even if you exchange business cards. It’s unlikely that the recipient will remember what your company did without a follow-up meeting – which is what the seed plant is: A meeting that you have arranged for 30 minutes or longer at their workplace or a coffee house (I have done hundreds of meetings at Starbucks – including five 60-minute ones back-to-back in one memorable day).

The Components of a Seed Plant 1. The setup 2. Getting the meeting 3. The meeting 4. The follow-up

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1. The Setup

First, make a list of 40 companies/contacts with whom you’d like to ultimately plant seeds. The key – and this is important – is that none of these 40 contacts can be ones that you have contacted before to pitch business for your current company. They must be fresh. They can be friends, they can be acquaintances, they can be people you have just met briefly at a function – but they must be people who do not know what your company truly does, or what you actually do. Plan on spending several hours for every 10 companies/names you list on your Excel file. Use your LinkedIn contact list, your email contact list, Facebook, or any other social network device. Even if you use Salesforce.com, remember that these names need to be new, in that you have not tried to “sell” them in the past. Warning, trap number two is here. If you don’t use fresh contacts here, you will be fooling yourself. Play the game by the rules and be rewarded.

Now we’re not advocating all cold call contacts here. You should be able to populate a list of 40 names based on contacts from your network that don’t know what you do for a living. It’s OK to have some aspirational companies on the list along with the key person to contact, but why make it harder on yourself?

Once you have your list, build an Excel chart with these names at the top, rows one through 40. The first column header is Company and second column header is Contact Name.

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Why 40 companies/contacts? Because in all likelihood, you will only be able to secure meetings with 50% of the people on your list. Why? Because some people just don’t wish to meet with you, and no amount of emails or personal introductions will change their mind. And that’s OK, because there are plenty of other people who will see you, typically 50% of them. So focus your efforts there. Even though I worked with Barry N. at Verizon and he heads up his own company, I have never been able to secure a meeting with him. (Sorry for picking on you, Barry! OK, no I’m not.) But for every person who won’t meet with you, there are an equal number of people who will.

An important note here: I confess that I am not a phone person.

I have arranged all my hundreds of meetings without using the phone once – all through emails. I will also grant that if you are a phone person then try it, but I have found that the phone is intrusive, that with email people can devote their full attention to the task at hand, there’s no painful introduction and “sell” on the phone to set up the meeting, and so on. I have gone almost eight years without making a new business telephone call. True.

So how do I set up a meeting?

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2. Getting the Meeting

Since I never cold call, I typically:

• Start with my list of companies (the list of 40 companies mentioned above). • Find names of people at the companies I want to meet. If I want to meet with a marketing person, I go to LinkedIn and do a search for marketing + company name, and then do the same on Google. Typically the name of the person will show up. • Look for a person connected to them that can introduce you.

A note about online introductions. LinkedIn provides two ways to do this. I use neither of them. The first one is to send an email through the LinkedIn system asking for your contact to pass it along to their contact – the person you want to reach. Sometimes this pass-along email must go through yet another contact to get to the desired person. This fails quite often, as the person closest to the contact you want to reach doesn’t know you (only the person connecting you to them). The second way is for the person you know to introduce you via a LinkedIn email and cc you. I don’t like to use LinkedIn email unless absolutely necessary.

What I do:

a. Ask my first-level contact if they mind sending an introductory email (that I will write for them) to the person I want to reach. (And make sure they know the person

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well enough to send an email introduction. Sometimes we are connected to people we don’t know well on LinkedIn.) I try to make the effort on their part minimal. b. If they say yes, then I draft a short email introducing myself and send it to my friend to copy and paste. Invariably they do this without editing. I also ask them to copy me on the email. A sample email might be:

Dear Sam: I’d like to introduce Doug Ritter to you online. Doug would like to meet and network with you and learn more about your company. Doug will not be trying to sell you anything and he’s not looking for a job with your company. I will let the two of you take it from here. BR John

I estimate that I am able to meet with a majority of these people – at least 50% of them.

c. I then follow up with an email a day later, offering to meet and reiterating the two key points from the introductory email: I am not selling and I am not looking for a job with their company. Note: Even if I am not working and indeed am looking for a job, it’s not with this specific person. The two key reasons that people don’t want to meet with people outside their company is

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that they don’t wish to be sold anything, and they are not likely to have a position for anyone seeking a new job. Take these two objections off the table and they are hard pressed to come up with a reason not to meet with you. Another reason people may not wish to see you is they are too busy and don’t perceive the value in networking.

If you are always looking for the “What’s in it for me” outcome, networking is not for you. Because you may never know when that person you casually talk to at a bar turns out to be a million-dollar seed plant!

Once your friend has sent the introduction email, wait a day or even two days (resist the desire to pounce immediately), so the person has some time to process the email, and then send the follow-up email. I don’t recommend copying the person who sent the original email, just because who needs one more email, and then they might receive all the back-and-forth emails to set up a meeting. Per Point C above, the email I send the targeted person I wish to network with reminds them of the fact that I am not selling anything and not looking for a job with their company. I ask if we can meet, either at their office or at a Starbucks of their choice. I usually get the meeting. If I don’t, I don’t worry about it and I move on. There are thousands of remarkable people to meet in business.

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3. The Meeting

Preparing for a seed plant meeting is a lot like an interview, and whether you are a reporter or a job seeker, you need to do your homework. Fortunately, we now have access to just about every piece of information necessary to know about the company your meeting partner works at, as well as, in a lot of cases, the person themselves. The former through the web, annual reports, Hoovers, Businessweek, Edgar (for SEC filings), as well as the latter through LinkedIn and Google searches. I don’t recommend LinkingIn until you have met in person for the seed plant. This is just polite protocol.

Start by contacting your seed list and setting up meetings. It can be coffee/tea, lunch, at their office, etc. I would recommend that these meetings not take place at your office, as it might feel too much like a sales call, and that’s not what you want. These meetings should be in a situation where your prospect feels the most at ease.

I generally hold my meetings at Starbucks. One can sit there all day and rarely be hassled. More deals are done at Starbucks than on golf courses, I think. But if a person can’t get out, then their office is fine as well. The dynamics are a bit different – that desk of theirs may be a psychological barrier.

You might be thinking, “What am I going to tell these people so that they’ll meet with me?” Again, the key is that you are not setting up this meeting to sell them anything. You are setting up this meeting to plant a seed about you/your company and what you do. It’s a networking meeting. There are

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few people who won’t take a networking meeting these days, especially as a favor to the person that introduced the two of you.

Most of your contacts should be “warm” leads, known entities or networked associates. Chances are high they will be happy to network with you. Most people like to talk about themselves and their companies. You are asking for a meeting to listen. Again – and this is key – you are there to listen. Their shields will be up at the beginning until they realize that you’re not there to sell them. Once they realize this, their shields will come down and real trust will begin. Almost 100% of the time, they will ask you about your company. Don’t fall into the next trap here, which is to talk about yourself or your company without being asked. Let it come naturally, and only after being questioned. If this occurs in this manner, you won’t be seen as selling. And again, the key is that you are not. Make sure you know where the meeting location is and how long it will take to get there. Also make sure you have their telephone number in case something goes wrong. If meeting at their company, plan to arrive early and wait until the meeting time to announce yourself. If at Starbucks, arrive early and find a table.

As I have said previously, all seed plant meetings have a rhythm and flow, and as you do more and more of them you will get more and more comfortable. Remember, they are not sales calls. However, they are not entirely casual conversations either. You are probing for information about their company and what they do, etc.

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Here’s the Typical Seed Plant Meeting Flow

00:00-00:10 Introductions, a few comments about the person that made the intro and other people you may have in common, and just generalities about the day. A friend calls this the “News, weather and sports” portion of the conversation. Note: Steer clear of any sensitive issues, i.e., politics, elections, gun control, political party affiliation, etc., unless it’s very clear you are both members of the same club, literally or figuratively. If you are both Mormon and you know this, great. If you are both deer hunters, great. But tread lightly on non-business matters. You are here to make a connection and an impression. Always know where they went to university. Know enough information about the person you are meeting with to make a quick connection and establish that you did your homework.

00:10-00:20 This next section should focus on your subject. Ask questions, lots of them, about their company. You are not Mike Wallace, so while the questions can be good, they are not designed to make the subject ill at ease. Quite the opposite. 00:20-00:25 In every seed plant meeting I have ever had, save one, the person I was meeting with asked me what my company did about 75% of the way through the time allotted in their head to how long the meeting would go. So if they figured we’d be meeting for 30 minutes, they asked at around the 20-minute mark. It was always a simple question: “So tell me about <your company>.” I would then recite my elevator speech in a sentence or two and then stop.

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00:25-00:30 Frequently they would ask a follow-up question, but if not, I would stop and go back to my questioning of them. This would then continue until the natural conclusion of the conversation.

The Follow-Up

At this point, it’s simple handshakes and goodbyes and a seed plant has occurred. Be sure to follow up with a nice email “thank you” and request to LinkIn, and then send a LinkedIn request. Note: Personalize it, don’t use the generic LinkedIn request email. Put their name in it:

David, thanks for the time yesterday. Enjoyed hearing about your company and wanted to LinkIn to you.

I also send a thank-you email, via LinkedIn message, after they have LinkedIn to me.

So how long did the seed plant take from beginning to end? An hour? Two hours? More?

Most seed plants take three hours. That’s a heavy investment in time. Here’s the breakdown:

1. Research on the company and meeting setup 30 minutes 2. Driving to the meeting 30 minutes 3. Having the meeting 60 minutes 4. Driving back to office 30 minutes 5. Sending thank-you and LinkedIn emails 15 minutes

And this does not factor in the time it took to come up with the list of 40 names in the first place, which

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is typically four hours, or about six minutes per company and contact.

As you plant each seed, add the name of the company to your Excel chart under the 20 original names. Add notes about each meeting to the right of the name. Was it effective? Was trust established? The key: Depth and authenticity of connection, and business dialogue with a personal quality. If you are using Salesforce.com, enter all this information there.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Right: Practice, practice, practice. There’s just no substitute. No one is a natural. Malcolm Gladwell says you need 10,000 hours to be an expert. You will not need near that. Do at least 20 meetings and see what you have learned. The more you do, the easier they will become. Pretty soon you will become an expert.

If biz-dev is your full-time job, then 40 hours a week should yield 10 meetings. The good thing about the Excel chart and the measurement is that if you are working for someone, you have evidence of your work. Who you saw, who the company was, etc. I have found that most management appreciates analytics from their employees.

Rich Herbst, when he defined the “Game,” points out that the typical Twenty Seed Game has a formal structure to it. It has a defined beginning and an end – typically taking 21/2 months to plant 20 seeds. The process is structured on purpose and must be measured. One can use Excel, Salesforce.com or other software you are comfortable with; the key is measurement and documentation of success. The structure is purposeful.

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Chapter 4When 20 seeds have been planted,

start over again on another 20 – by developing your new list of 40 names.

Twenty Seed Game Guidelines

1. Plant good-quality seeds, the right way. (Don’t cheat yourself!) 2. Get in the groove in terms of focus and time management. 3. Learn what works and what doesn’t. 4. Gain some important data points to build a strong metrics base. 5. Measure it! Excel and/or Salesforce.com are your friends.

As the game progresses, week by week, your game card will begin to fill up and seeds will be planted. Two other things will also start to happen. You will begin to get requests for proposals from these contacts, or because of these contacts. And you will also notice that it’s difficult to achieve 20 seeds having started with just 20 companies – so you will need to add more companies and contacts to the hopper at the top of your Excel file. In fact, you may

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find that you’ll need 40 names at the top to yield 20 seeds planted. The “two contacts for every seed planted” ratio is perfectly normal. Sometimes it’s difficult to make contact with everyone on your list in the two-month time frame, and some folks just resist contact from people they don’t already know.

You will also find that some of these new names will come in organically during this eight-week period, and it’s perfectly OK to add them to the list. In fact, you’ll find that networking events (for example, the local chapter of the American Marketing Association usually holds monthly networking meetings) are a great source of leads. Remember, you are not selling yourself or your company at these events. You are there to meet people. I know that we’ve all been at these events and met people so desperate to sell themselves or their company that you cringe when you see them again at another function; you don’t want to be that person. Collect a few business cards from people you find interesting, ask politely to LinkIn to them, and then again ask to set up a networking meeting. It’s even OK if you want to mention ahead of time that you’re not selling anything – because you are not.

Another game aid is to play this game with several other people (or at least one) as well as a game monitor, just to keep things “honest,” not that there’s a way to cheat here (because in the end you’d only be cheating yourself). But it helps to have some accountability in the process. We have found that weekly meetings also help, and Friday morning is an ideal time to review the week’s progress.

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As the weeks go by, you’ll notice that the seeds add up, and with about three seed plant meetings a week you will plant all 20 in the two-month time frame. Key will be how many proposals you generated out of the 20. It may be a one-to-five conversion; one proposal for every five seeds planted, or about four proposals all together. Or you may find a one-to-seven ratio – or about three per 20 seed plants. Ultimately it’s up to you to close these sales. Another key is the size of each deal. If you are closing deals but they are too small to amount to much, you will need to set your initial goals for larger fish.

And be sure to use an Excel chart to track your seed plants. Headers would be Person, First Name, Last Name, Title, Company and perhaps some notes on the meeting. Enter each name as they become a seed plant. Put all the names you intend on prospecting at the top of the page.

Why keep track? Some people might think, I do this every day, I don’t need to keep track. But the reason why is that the forced discipline keeps you on track. It’s a way of constantly seeing how you are doing against your goal.

And what happens when the Twenty Seed Game is over? Start again. Plant another 20 seeds.

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True, the list development may take longer since you used your low-hanging fruit in the first 20 names, but the process for the rest of the game is identical. As Rich Herbst, Managing Director of Ascend Marketing, says, “You plant 200 seeds and soon you have a pretty good business going.” I know what you’re thinking, that you’ve done this sort of prospecting before, so what’s new here? But I promise you that this exercise is not business as usual, is not trivial, and most importantly, is ultimately effective at building your business. I know because I have used it over the years as an effective tool to increase my sales prowess, and as evidenced in Chapter 1, I had no background in sales, no sales training, and originally no desire or affection for sales. In fact, exactly the opposite. I was forced to learn to sell “myself” to prospective employers – the ultimate sell – and did it well enough to develop the same techniques to sell my products and services at Perlos and then Ascend Marketing for seven years, the last four working on basically 100% commission. Those in sales know what that is like, and I can’t imagine those receiving a salary wanting to try it. Rich Herbst also used this technique and succeeded. Essentially so do all consultants that work for themselves or in very small businesses.

I found that you can use these techniques to increase your network, increase your sales revenue and even find a new job (as I did four times in 10 years). Fundamental to playing this game is focusing on the process, not the end game. This is important; otherwise you’ll fall into trap number one, by focusing on making a sale (or finding a new job).

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That’s not what we’re doing here. We’re planting seeds. That’s what’s important. The sales or new business will ultimately come, but the winning game here is simply to plant seeds – to ensure that the prospect understands what it is that you/your company does. If they do, and there’s trust established, then mission accomplished.

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Chapter 5Applying the Twenty Seed Game

to job hunting. How to do it; how to apply seed plant techniques to find your next position .

The seed plant system works quite well for job hunting. I have worked at 12 companies, and none of these jobs came about by answering a job posting. When job hunting in the late ’90s, I would spend time on HotJobs, ExecuNet and Monster but had little to no success. You may have a different experience. People do find positions answering ads online – but far more do not. I did find LinkedIn jobs to be the site with the most “real” positions, but ultimately I have come to believe that networking your way to a new job is the best.

And as discussed early on in this book, I have developed this process out of necessity – having found myself in transition mode at least four times in the past 15 years.

While I believe networking is the best way to find a new position, if you still want to check the online job boards, by all means do so, but I wouldn’t advise spending more than 15 to 30 minutes a day looking

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or responding. Your chances of getting hired this way are not high. It’s like answering an RFP. A very low probability.

My system of networking/seed planting is virtually the same whether you are looking to increase revenue for your company or searching for a new position.

1. Make a list of companies you’d like to work for and find names of people you’d like to talk with at those companies. 2. Find a mutual contact who can introduce you with a letter you will write (I do not advise sending a resume). 3. Remember that you are not meeting with these people to look for a position with their firm. Even though you are meeting with someone at a company you would indeed want to work for, that’s not the purpose of this meeting. The purpose is simply to network. That’s why the same intro of you not selling or looking for a job with their company applies here as well. These are not interviews. If the recipients of the email believe you are looking for an interview, it’s unlikely you will get many meetings. 4. It’s OK to tell people you are meeting with that you are “in transition” – today’s euphemism for searching for a job. But the meeting still needs to be about a discussion between equals, not an unemployed person hoping to get hired in an interview. And be careful about passing out a resume in this meeting. Then it does become more like an interview. It’s OK to bring one, but only hand

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it over if they request it. You can always send a soft copy afterward, in a thank-you email. 5. Keep the same Excel chart and set an aggressive target of one to two meetings a day. This is doable if you spend eight hours a day working at setting up meetings (or having them). 6. Mine the first-degree contacts of your first- degree contacts. Ask the latter for no more than two introductions to the former. I have found this to be hit or miss – i.e., a 50% success/fail rate – but it still adds meetings to your calendar.

If you do a month’s worth of these meetings something will happen – you will get callbacks and opportunities will come your way. You do this for two to three months, have some 40 to 60 meetings, and I am very confident that you will get an offer. I also know that scheduling and having 20 meetings a month is a very rigorous amount of work. But it is achievable.

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Chapter 6Using LinkedIn, the number-one tool.

When people joined. In the URL. Using the LinkedIn button/tile in your signature. SEO your page. Search for yourself. See who

comes up and why. You will not come up in a search from your own computer.

I am sure that most people are Jedi Masters of LinkedIn by now, but if not, here are some helpful hints and thoughts. I have found LinkedIn to be the number-one tool in selling and business development, as well as networking for a new position. I believe it’s a more powerful tool than the telephone. I said in the opening to this book that I had not used the telephone for selling/biz-dev in eight years, and that’s a true statement. I have set up more than 500 seed plant meetings without using the phone; all done through email with LinkedIn supplying me the tools to reach and research the people I want to see and the companies where they work.

I joined LinkedIn as member number 384,083 when LinkedIn was in its infancy. Today, they have just over 250 million members. How do I know my number? It’s in the URL of my profile. While on LinkedIn, go to your profile and look up in the

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browser bar. That number embedded in the URL will be the order number of when you joined.

LinkedIn is more than your resume or CV online. It’s your personal webpage. It defines you in the eyes of every business associate, prospective seed plant and employer. So have your photo professionally taken, or at the very least use a good one. Quantitative research has shown that LinkedIn profiles with photos get more attention than profiles without. My advice is to use this same photo online at every opportunity (on Salesforce.com, Google profiles, etc.).

I am sure there is a LinkedIn for Idiots or Dummies guide and perhaps a whole library or bookshelf dedicated to helping people understand LinkedIn. If you are not a “black belt” on LinkedIn, you might want to check into a book that can help increase your proficiency. This chapter is only going to hit some key points.

The Digital Dozen: 12 Tips to Optimize Your Use of LinkedIn

By Eddie Reeveswww.reevesstrategygroup.com

Eddie is a partner member in the Dallas Business Alliance with me, and has had a long and significant career in public relations and affairs. He now runs his own company – Reeves Strategy Group. He’s as sharp as they get, and a communications pro. These tips are reprinted with his permission.

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Tip #1: Treat your LinkedIn profile like a website.

Your profile is your digital business card or digital mini-billboard. Make sure it is well formatted, clean, and free of spelling and grammatical errors. I strongly suggest creating your LinkedIn profile first in a Word document – not only so you can “catch” errors, but also so you can get a better idea of what your profile will look like on LinkedIn. In some sections of LinkedIn, you can also pull in bullets and special characters, but make sure you check carefully after doing so, to make certain that you haven’t harmed the formatting in other parts of your profile. Unfortunately, there is still no bolding or italics other than those provided by LinkedIn itself.

Tip #2: Know your keywords.

Like any website, LinkedIn’s internal search engine weighs your keywords heavily in searches. Make sure you place your most important search terms or keywords strategically throughout your profile. Some places you might want to consider are your Professional Headline, Interests, Recommendations, Specialties and Education.

Tip #3: Keep your photo professional.

I strongly recommend a close-up headshot and a smile. A full body shot of you and your family, you and your cat, or you and that fish you caught last week doesn’t engender affinity with professionals. I have seen some artists use renderings of themselves – which might work for an artist (and even then, only if the image is clear).

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Important: LinkedIn doesn’t like logos! If you put a logo in as your avatar, you are likely to get a digital hand-slapping from the LinkedIn gods.

Tip #4: Don’t ignore the “post an update” function.

LinkedIn’s update function is more robust and more important than it previously was. Taking a page from Twitter and Facebook, people can now comment on and “like” your updates – which helps to build relationships within LinkedIn. Make sure you take time each day to “like” and “comment” on the updates of your network.

Tip #5: Personalize your public profile URL.

Make sure your public profile reflects your name or that of your business. Nothing screams, “I’m a LinkedIn rookie” like a public profile like this: http://linkedin.com/pub/firstname-934-shfio. In addition to letting your prospects know more clearly who you are, it also makes your LinkedIn profile more search-engine responsive. Make sure you waste no time in editing your profile to personalize and humanize it to include your name or that of your company (preferably yours).

Tip #6: Personalize your websites.

When you edit the website field, the drop-down menu gives you the option of “other.” When you click that, a new field opens up that allows you to type in your business name, website name, call to action or description of your website. So instead of “Company Website” or “Personal Website,” this section can read “Savvy Financial Planning” or “Click for Smart Biz Technology.”

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Tip #7: Juice up your “experience” section.

“Experience” is not your resume. Make sure the jobs you choose to list support each other and emphasize your unique brand promise. Make sure you put all your keywords in the title section. Utilize all 1,000 characters in the description section to tell people why they should want to know more about how you can help them meet their goals. Tell a “here’s how we saved the day” story. Include a testimonial. “Experience” is a great place to list “wins,” different companies you have helped, seminars or workshops you have presented, etc.

Tip #8: List your “additional education.”

Make sure you list your certifications and licenses as well as traditional education. LinkedIn has now added new sections where you can list areas of expertise, publications, patents, licenses and other certifications. Remember to list those that bolster the specific value you convey to your customers and prospects, as long as they are legitimate.

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A few other tips:

1. Personalize your invite when you wish to LinkIn to someone. Don’t use the default; it makes you look lazy. Start the invite with the person’s first name and a brief reminder of where you met. 2. Once a person links in to you, send a brief thank-you note, via LinkedIn email, thanking them for linking to you. 3. If you have a little tech knowledge, you can download all your LinkedIn contacts to an Excel spreadsheet (this is easy) and then send a “personal” email to all of them, using variable field technology so the first name of each contact is used but the body copy remains the same. Always have an opt-out sentence at the bottom and don’t mass email those people again. I would caution against using this mass email more than once every few months. 4. Download LinkedIn Contacts. It’s free and it will provide a very rudimentary CRM-like experience similar to Salesforce.com for each of your contacts. (Do a Google search for this and download it to your computer or smartphone.)

I occasionally do searches of myself on LinkedIn to see who my “competition” is in my field. There was a time when I was always in the top five for business development in Dallas. Another associate of mine, Tom Jackson, was frequently number one or two, and a third person I did not know was also in the top three. I invited the third person to LinkIn to me, and then invited him for coffee to meet him.

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I searched using the LinkedIn search box like any other web browser search box: “Business” and “development” were the two words I used. Then I used the filters on the left to narrow down the location. The people who showed up first were all my connections, with Tom Jackson leading the list. After these names are the other people who are tops in biz-dev that I am not connected to.

Note: For some reason, LinkedIn doesn’t always include your profile in your own search rankings. So you need to perform this search on a friend’s computer and look at the results.

LinkedIn Tip

Also know that frequently Linkedin won’t let you see the full last name past the first initial when you search on LinkedIn (typically when you are a second- or third-degree connection), but that when using Google to perform the same search with the person’s first name and first initial of the last name, the full name will frequently come up in the search results.

LinkedIn has been making constant changes to who and what info you can see for free in an effort to upsell LinkedIn Premium.

I also suggest using a LinkedIn button for a hotlink to your profile. Mine is under my email signature so people can find me quickly. (Warning: Adding this button hotlink is not always easy to do and some of the Google search results instructions on the subject are out of date.)

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LinkedIn Premium

I use the free version of LinkedIn. If you are a recruiter, I believe LinkedIn Premium is a necessity, as it provides invaluable tools. But I have yet to find a reason to pay a premium for LinkedIn. For the monthly cost, you get a few free in-mail emails you can send out to people you don’t know, but so can I – through the connect email. But do some research and determine which version you need.

Some Pointers for Job Seekers

Benchmark your profile page against people that come up high in searches for people in your field. They are obviously doing something right. And resist the cramming and repeating of key search words in your profile, as such games will turn off any prospective employers and recruiters.

CRM Tools

What about CRM tools for salespeople? Wonderful – if used. But I find nothing better than a simple printout of an Excel chart where you can clearly and quickly demonstrate the work you have been doing, the effort and the results. I have found that management is usually happy with evidence of work being done.

LinkedIn Endorsements will be discussed in the next chapter, on personal branding.

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Chapter 7Your brand: LinkedIn; Facebook, Google+, your Google profile, Groups. What are you truly good at? What do people think of when they think of you? Look at your LinkedIn profile and see how people voted for you in endorsements. You are your brand. Your brand is you. What is your elevator speech? What is your USP? Your positioning? Why you? Sell me on yourself.

Do you have these answers prepared? You should.

We’ve covered LinkedIn, but did you know that a large number of clients, recruiters and prospective employers check the social sites of prospects? It’s not enough to just have your LinkedIn profile up to date, you also need to ensure that your Facebook and G+ social media sites are clean and that you are well presented. It’s possible to dial up your Facebook and G+ sites’ security so that people can’t snoop around and see much of anything.

LinkedIn Endorsements

Like these or not, they are here to stay. Do not confuse these with LinkedIn recommendations.

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Those are harder to get, and are more useful. It takes time for someone who knows you well to write out a recommendation. Note that LinkedIn sends you a copy of every recommendation before they are posted and requires that you approve them first.

But LinkedIn endorsements are easier to get, as they are pushed to everyone who signs on to LinkedIn at almost every profile page; a box of four of your contacts will open up and ask you if you wish to endorse Sam Sample for “Strategy.” If you know Sam and you believe him to be steeped in strategy, you can press yes. This “game” will continue until you get tired and X out of the LinkedIn box for endorsements.

Those endorsements are tallied in real time and posted on that contact’s profile page. Directionally, they provide an indication of that person’s skill-set. It’s not an exact science, but directional. And it only goes up to 99 endorsements (like your public contacts stop at 500+), yet they keep asking people to endorse you after you max out at 99 in a category.

Facebook, Google+, Google Profile, Twitter

I maintain an active Facebook page, a less-active Google+ profile, and an even-less-active Twitter account. And I have stopped using Foursquare to check in. Will Facebook net me any more business? It’s doubtful, but it did help me sell almost 400 copies of my first book (targeted only to people who grew up in Rome, Italy, and went to school there – a very discrete audience). I find Google+ a lonely place, but great if you want to follow the founders of Google through their posts. Setting up a Google+

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profile is free and easy – and once it’s set up you need not do much more with it. This profile gets pulled up every time someone searches for you on Google. I have no use for Twitter in business, but some people do, so if you want to try it, do it. I don’t separate my personal Facebook page from a business page. But I am careful about what I post. No wild and crazy posts or photos.

The key is that everyone creates his or her own brand and digital footprint. Everything you do online stays online, and for a very long time. That kegger you hosted in college – if there’s a photo of you out there that’s not good, it’s not going away. Just ask Michael Phelps, who was seen smoking marijuana at a college party in a well-circulated cell phone photo.

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Chapter 8The worst sales call ever. Yes, this really happened. Learn from this, the extreme

experience in poor salesmanship.

The Worst Sales Call Ever

There’s no doubt that at one time or another you’ve been subjected to a bad sales call. Or perhaps you brought it upon yourself by claiming that free set of Calloway clubs and iPad from the timeshare people. Whatever, be it car sales or insurance or a timeshare, I am sure it has happened along the way. Here’s mine. A cautionary tale.

It begins with a telephone ring.

To be honest, my desk phone rarely rings. In fact, it rings so infrequently that sometimes I have to think for a minute what that sound is when it does ring. Oh, right. The desk phone. I still have one of those.

My phone screen said it was a company I will call the XYZ company (while the initials are made up, the actual company does go by three initials). A very undereducated person with poor language

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skills was “appointment setting” – using the old “Our consultant, Mr. John, is in your area” line and asking if they could see me. Despite the fact that this woman was doing a very poor job, I suppose I felt sorry for her and said yes. I’m a soft touch, I suppose, on appointment setting; I believe in professional courtesy since I am in sales as well. (Although I am surprised at how many people don’t do this when their own livelihood and company depend on securing appointments and sales meetings, but that’s another story.)

Hours later, a far more professional man calls me to confirm that indeed an appointment has been made. I confirm.

Mr. John shows up promptly at 8 a.m. on the appointed day; he is an older man who is selling consulting services, although he has a hard time describing just what these services are. A very hard time. Honestly, after five to 10 minutes of his describing his company’s services I still have no clue what he said or what his company does or is selling. He tells me he lost his job at a Fortune 500 company some years back and then his wife lost her job, and he has found a new home with XYZ because they care about their people. He keeps telling me I’m an “important” man and he doesn’t want to waste my time – yet continues to do so. He mentions this twice during the sales call.

And then he actually pulls out a contract, one page, and begins to fill it in as he talks about the services they offer, which are still not making sense. Finally he gets to the end of his pitch and asks if I will sign. The consulting will be for three days and if I’m not satisfied, I don’t pay. If I am satisfied, it’s $1,000. But I still don’t know what he’s selling!

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Now I’ve seen this contract trick before – and done better than this – at a car dealership. Then I actually did buy, specifically because I wanted the car, and the price was right.

But this time I say no, I will have to review this with my CFO and senior team. He seems astonished by this fact. Truly amazed that I won’t sign. And then, wait for it … He actually pulls out his mobile phone and calls his sales manager! Right at my table in my office! He explains that he’s here with customer number 12345 (yes, I have been assigned my own customer number) and he’s explained everything – which he tells the manager, listing all their services – and that I won’t sign. Then, yes – incredibly (!), he hands me the phone to talk to Mr. Sales Manager, who proceeds to ask me if their consultants can come back next Monday. I say no. He proposes Tuesday. I say no. He continues to press for a date. I continue to say no.

He asks why not. I repeat that I need to do my due diligence and look them up on LinkedIn. He then gets very perturbed and I hand the phone back to Mr. John, who says a few words and ends the call. He asks me if the man was too pushy. I say yes. He pretends to sympathize with me. I’m not buying it. The whole meeting, from the appointment setting to this 45-minute hard sell, has been completely scripted by them. I fold up his contract and hand it back to him along with his card, then stand up and tell him we are done and escort the poor man out the door. I almost feel sorry for him. I’m sure when he began his career he wasn’t like this and perhaps he was once a good businessperson. But now he’s a

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shill for a scam company. And being literally kicked out of an office.

After he’s gone, I spend an hour reading about his parent company, and how it’s alleged to be a scam. On Ripoff Report online, there are scores of testimonials from former employees and customers alike who tell of how they have been scammed by the company, and some very telling articles by major media outlets.

60 Minutes would have a field day with this company.

And while I wasted my 60 minutes with Mr. John, he’s provided a case study in how to NOT sell.

By the way, the reason this company uses three initials in their title is so you can’t look them up easily on the Internet. Their three initials are very common to other acronyms. And they have a history of closing down companies and reopening them with new sets of initials. They run a boiler room, back office appointment-setting operation that preys on small business owners only. No enterprise customers.

Worst sales call ever? I’m sure everyone reading this probably has been exposed to one in their life. My point is that there is another way. This book details that other way. While there are many other successful methods, the Twenty Seed Game could be your way to sell.

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PostscriptWe’ve come to the end of my primer on how to increase revenue for your company, and personal income for yourself – without “selling.” And yes, I know that deep down we are all almost always selling, and that meeting and networking is a form of selling. But it doesn’t always have to be like the person in the previous chapter. And while I hope you have enjoyed this book, I know it’s hard work to implement. Very hard work. But I have yet to find a job done well that isn’t. Or a successful person who hasn’t done the hard work necessary to succeed.

I invite you all to please LinkIn to me at www.linkedin.com/in/douglasritter/ if you are not already connected to me.

And if you have any questions, I will try to answer them. Thank you for your time and I wish you the best of success!

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One Final NoteA further note on my former managing partner and founder of Ascend Marketing, Rich Herbst: Rich is also planning on writing a book on the same subject, but one that goes far deeper into the notion of engagement. In his words:

Philosophy – The attitude of openness and network-building, which is very much about breaking out of “sales mode.”

Concept – The specific concept of the seed plant and how it’s defined/understood in this whole process.

Approach – The “way of life” that goes with all this, and the specific activity rhythms.

The Game – The specific structure, the “game board” and how it’s applied.

I look forward to Rich’s book, and I believe it will be a companion to mine. I know it will be more philosophical and I urge you to find it when he’s finished. I will maintain a mailing list as well as promote his book on my social media outlets.

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Published by USFI.If you would like a copy, please contact

Douglas Ritter, President of USFI/Safeguard, at dritter@usfi.com.

Visit our website at www.usfi.com for more information about our company

and how we create desire for your products and services.