Friday Humor: Can’t Buy Happiness

18 Tips And Tricks About Reading People

Image: Rounders

By Kim Bhasin

You don’t have to be an FBI interrogator to figure out what’s going on in someone’s head.

The signals are always there, but most people don’t even realize it. You have to know what to look for and understand what certain gestures mean in order to solve the puzzle. Keep in mind, there’s no single surefire way to tell what someone is thinking — even the greatest mind-wizards in the world are only right 80% of the time.

We collected a variety of insights from Psychology Today that can help you learn to read people’s verbal and nonverbal hints.

Start by getting a baseline reading so that you can distinguish personal quirks from real tells. A common way to get this reading is by simply observing a person’s habits over time

A seemingly innocent question such as “How are you doing today?” by a salesperson may be an attempt to gauge your baseline, setting up for inquiries that are more probing

Source: Psychology Today

Here’s What Makes A Good Brochure!

By Duncan McAdams

Following on from what makes a brochure crap…

We humans don’t talk in bullet points or rave about how good we are or crap on about our history ad nauseum. We look into someone’s eyes and tell stories that engage and delight the recipient. We are friendly, offer something valuable and are keen for a response.

Now go look at your companies’ brochure – does it contain the following:

1. As many compelling reasons for me to buy from you as possible. What’s in it for me, how will I benefit from your product or services? (Include benefits, outcomes, features and interesting info – the lot. No holding back!)
2. Who else has bought – that is happy testimonials? I will believe your satisfied clients before I believe you.
3. What incentives are there for me to hand over my cold hard cash? How are you enticing? Do you have a special offer?
4. Tell me the easy way for me to buy with a number of payment options – you don’t know this but it’s really helpful if I can pay over a three-month period with my credit card (for example).
5. Guaranteed – I don’t trust you yet, what if I’ve made the wrong choice? I’m a good person but I don’t want sole responsibility in this transaction. What happens if it breaks – will I have a huge amount of trouble getting a refund or replacement? Are you good enough to guarantee your work 100%?

I will repeat myself a hundred times in marketing when it comes to spending any money on it. GET IT RIGHT! It’s hard enough with the competition, staffing, compliance and so on to spend money and not get a result.

Who has got boxes of brochures in the back room that never really worked?

If you are a small or medium business owner, have no fear – the big corporates buggar it up as well. So a competitive edge is to get your ‘brochure’ working for you as a sales tool – something that will compel someone to buy from you or at least enquire further.

Brochures are a sales tool. A tool to work for you when you aren’t there in front of your clients. If yours don’t work – biff the lot and start again.

Source: http://www.dmcadams.com/marketing-that-works/heres-what-makes-a-good-brochure/

Marketing Metrics: Where to get them? Which ones work?

by: Lyla Hamilton, Ron Kahan, Laurie Lavelle, Ken Sabey

Local marketers say metrics are key to credibility and client success.

Numbers rule. More than ever, marketers are being pressured to deliver hard data on how their efforts increased the company’s bottom line. In these days of lean profits and leaner budgets, a focus on metrics can mean the difference between a marketing department that’s considered highly valuable and one on the brink of extinction. Want proof? Research giant IDC recently surveyed senior marketing executives in IT companies to determine their priorities for 2003. Measuring and justifying their efforts and steering marketing initiatives towards tangible results were at the top of their lists.

There’s less agreement, however, on which metrics truly demonstrate ROI and, more importantly, how to get them. The Advertising & Marketing Review wanted local marketers’ views on justifying the value of their work to management or clients. We asked four marketers about how they measure return on investment: Laurie Lavelle, CBC, MarCom/Advertising Manager, Arrow Electronics, North America; Ron Kahan, President, Ariss Kahan Database Marketing Group; Ken Sabey, Account Executive, HostWorks; and Lyla Hamilton, Director of Marketing, SageCircle. Their answers appear below.

Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics is the world’s largest distributor of electronic components and computer products and a leading provider of services to the electronics industry.

Justifying the value of the work we do within MarCom on behalf of Arrow Electronics and Arrow’s supplier-partners to management is an ongoing effort. In the last seven years that justification has changed to a more measurable, quantitative justification. Prior to this it was a “softer” justification and not looked upon as critically as it is today. We typically use the full spectrum of marketing communications tools, however for this article I’ll focus in on our direct marketing efforts.

How do you determine the objectives of the marketing effort?

We use several methods depending on which type of project we’re doing. If it’s a product direct marketing effort (print, web or sales walk-in) we meet with the appropriate Arrow and supplier-partner marketing teams to determine what their overall goal is and align the marketing communications stimulus back to the overall objective/goal. An example of this would be: marketing needs to increase analog device sales by 10% over the next two business quarters and we can gain this extra 10% through existing customers that we identify as a viable target utilizing our in-house database. So, to determine the objectives of the effort we go to the heart of the request – if marketing approaches us to do a mailer, we dig deeper to find out what the underlying business goal is and then we make the determination if a mailer is the appropriate communications medium to meet this goal.

14 More Of The Coolest Resumes Ever

These are some darn cool resumes! Click the picture above or the link below to see 14 of the coolest resumes ever!

“A creative résumé isn’t for everybody, or every job, but for the people we talked to, their innovative approach paid off.”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/coolest-resumes-2011-7?mid=5270