Passion for Pimpin’

How strongly do you feel about your brand and the unique services that you deliver?

Those of you that follow me on Twitter know that I’ve been in Miami for the past two days. One, well the only one, thing I love about my old home town is the incredible sense of opportunity and the enormity of the markets to make your dreams come true if you work hard. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and I feel that many are mentally crippled by their own small vision of their world and the possibilities – some are so scared and petrified of it that they have mentally locked themselves down to their routine that they can’t even think of a way to grow into the future.

Time for a field trip to Miami.

I kind of grew up around this culture which in no small part accounts for what drives me to keep this stuff moving and growing, here and abroad. What kind of culture is that? Well, true story (cause you can’t make this stuff up):

Earlier today I was driving back from breakfast down Broward and a silver Tahoe pulled up to my Vette. Guy rolls down his window, leans out, starts pointing at me.

Did I leave my trunk open? Is there a hobo I’m dragging behind me? Who knows, I roll the window down:

Vlad: What’s up?

White dude: Hey man, we install home theatre systems and we just had a cancellation. I can give it to you half off!

Vlad: Sorry to hear man, appreciate it but I don’t need one?

White dude: I hear you but it’s over half off, everyone needs one!

Vlad: Thanks man, but I live in Orlando.

White dude: <shrug> It’s a great system, maybe for an extra room? We can have someone come out and install it for you there.

Vlad: I appreciate the offer, good luck with the sale.

Now, was the system hot? Unlikely, company logos all over the car and he wore a logo shirt.

Could it be that they really just got an order pulled after they drove all the way to the place to be rejected at the doorstep? Doubt that too.

So what is the deal really?

The deal is that you can count on wealthy or busy business people not to be aware of what the things are actually worth. But one way they got to that point was by working hard and taking advantage of every opportunity that comes across. You want to come into my home and install some stuff that I’m practically stealing on the street? Who am I to say no?

The unique selling opportunity is that these guys likely travel up and down the street all day long between installations and they pull up to the cars and run a sales pitch that is far more sophisticated than most of the people reading this post can ever pull off.

Profiled audience (expensive car) with vanity issues (“VLAD” license plate) and most of all a captive audience stuck in traffic likely bored out of their mind.

It’s like ghetto Skymall – I’m stuck here with nothing to do and someone wants to entice me to play with shiny toys?

The largest component of marketing for sales and leads is originality. Most of the time it’s not about the price (that comes later) and it’s not about the features (remember the purchase is emotional for the benefit not logical) and everything else comes only after you have their attention.

Folks complain that their marketing isn’t working because they are operating in a crowded market with indistinguishable alternatives all trending towards being commoditized. So the only way to uniquely distinguish yourself is your marketing – and many opt out for the cookie cutter advertising, pre-canned and sent by other people in your own market. Your ability to convert a disinterested third party into someone that will pick up the phone hinges on your marketing budget to continuously slam the person with junk mail and phone calls – all of which they receive all day long from your competitors.

How much money could you possibly save if you could clearly communicate your differentiation on the very first interaction that sets you apart from the others – good or bad?

This is how I roll..

I know you’re probably thinking that this is a nice story but how do you implement it. If I told the 60,000 of you reading this then there would be 60,000 of you doing it and the whole concept would fall apart. Does it actually work to stand out? Well, you are reading this, so yeah, it works.

The last bit of unapologetic, shameless, slimy vendor whore, pimping I’ve done was in Dallas a few months ago. I have long term hopes of replacing my staff with a webcam and a Lego robot. It’s a dream.

I was installing a webcam that pointed at my development server rack (read: fire hazard compiled from things Vlad found on eBay) and while I was working I invited people to hang out with me. So people came on, chatted with me, I talked, did tours.

One of my Twitter followers emailed me for the first time and told me that they were thinking about going with us but got a contract in the works with RackSpace because they didn’t know what the infrastructure looked like.

Oh reeeeeeaaaaaly? 

Hard selling – 4 TB on my shoulder, bitch!

I added the guy to my MSN messenger, started the webcam on my laptop and took him on an impromptu tour of the data center. This is the server room. This is the switching cage. These are your options of racks. This is the cage we can do when you want to grow. This is the HVAC. This is the readout on the A/C – 65 degrees, brr.

Then I showed off the raised floors, the Diesel generators, the different cage configurations. I did a on-demand pimp session of the data centers that I never could have recorded on the camera and put up on the web – nobody would watch a goofy guy run around a data center blowing his pants off by the air flow output from a huge 42U rack.

But by the time I had made it back to my development cage and put my servers down there was a quote copy in my inbox that we beat by 20% the same day and by Monday closed a huge contract.

Aaaaalways be pimping.

Is it so different from the guy leaning out the window trying to push a home theatre system? Is it so low to take pride in your work that you can sum up the courage to show what you’ve built and can offer people?

If you are in this market and you’re struggling… you need to step your game up.