The important question is how does this advice affect you?  Is this where your next speech comes from, where your next project comes from, where your next success comes from?

The notes from the Edge Summit are presented in chronological order. If you have some thoughts I missed, feel free to e-mail me at contact@robchristeson.com and I’ll include them here with attribution and a link (if you want). Please note that links to the Edge site are affiliate links.

Also, I’ve done my best to properly attribute information as I typed it in the session. Most of what you read here comes from World Champions Darren LaCroix, Ed Tate, Craig Valentine or Lance Miller from the Edge event. Mark Brown also participated remotely, and some material comes from the awesome Alan Weiss and the amazing Patricia Fripp. If you do spot any errors or omissions, they are unintentional and I’ll correct them immediately.

Here we go…
“Ya ain’t gonna learn any younger” – Lance Miller quoting advice he received from a story about learning to back up a semi trailer truck.

lightbulb moment – think chandelier moment – Maureen Zapalla

Three questions you should ask about your business
why you?
who will pay?
how will I reach them?

Topics members wanted to discuss (questions in bold)
coaching – developing a multi-session plan (this one didn’t get touched on) 

marketing a seminar - 3 months out – marketing blasts – touch multiple times – research says you can reach out to customers 220 times per year without annoying them – multiple items (e-mail, Facebook, twitter, etc.)

what 3 tips for the 73 people who didn’t make the finals - there were some thoughts later on the finals, read my notes here: http://robchristeson.com/toastmasters-why-you-wont-win-your-contest

Selling from the back of the room - selling without annoying people (SWAP) – sell another’s program before selling your own – Seeding (plant seeds) – weaving () – you aren’t selling products,you’re selling results
Lance – going from zero to moving – change from manipulating your client to helping them – 1. believe in the product, 2. care about the customer, 3. 
Craig – everybody has a story to tell, but rarely do they get to tell it, because (wait for it) everybody has a story to tell. Be the one to listen to other peoples stories.
#1 reason they buy – confidence in you – confidence comes from familiarity – familiarity comes from repeated exposure – sell the results (Craig’s car story) – put the result before the resource – not just for products, but in your speech too
Lance- present and ask for feedback – take the materials that work and use them to make your product

Ed – retention after 48 hours – 10 percent; take notes – 50 percent; notes and discuss – 75 percent; notes, discuss, and teach – 82 percent after one year

Should you have a book first, DVD, or other product?
Craig – never create a product without teaching it several times first – your first product should be an audio CD

Details about being a small business
Ed – this is a business first, you speak second. If you don’t treat it as a business, you won’t get to do either. More will come in the 2-day Get Paid to Speak seminar.

Using YouTube, how much is too much - embrace the concept of abundance – answer the question – 2-3 minutes – give a next step (more below)

Craig – recommended a book – Launch by Michael Stelzner

Maleki (District 71) – Take the Talent to Training and the Treasure will come out – not about the price, it’s about the process

“Be careful not to keep your ego to close to your position, if you lose your position, your ego will go with it” – Colin Powell quoted by Ed

Ed – the word is receiving – 3rd place Scott Pritchard stayed on stage after speaking and saying “mister contest master” (at the finish) and smiled at the audience for about 10 seconds – what’s the word? receiving

Ed – number one job of a speaker is to make an impact – not to be liked

Ed – Talk in Tweets (talk in sound bytes) <–blog topic

Craig – speaking in sound bytes creates a memorable message – what is his focus? two words – touch lives – before you speak, say “please help me forget myself, remember my speech and touch my audience”

Lance – conviction – convict – what happened to become a convict – trial with evidence beyond a reasonable doubt – conviction is having a position you believe beyond a reasonable doubt 
- passion – in dictionary, passion came from ancient word for suffer. 
Practice to execution ratio (pro football)
Passion are those things that we do that we would suffer through without feeling like we are suffering
Sincere – means we have a clean, clear message
Do a raffle for your product- collect business cards and draw one to get a free copy of your product. Be clear “I’m going to email you with an option to opt in” so they know why you’re collecting the cards

Ed – Presentation variety- in order to maintain peoples attention, change your delivery method every 5- 10 minutes (I.e. You talking, asking questions, audience interactions, etc.)

Ed asked a few of us to run the 10 minute review after lunch
Take one minute and review your notes and write down your three favorite tweets or sound bytes of the morning. – you will learn…
Instruct online folks to tweet to hashtag Championsedge 
Take two minutes to turn to your neighbor and choose your best tweet
Next we go one group per row to give their top tweet
Maureen will write them down

general or specialist? – start with what you know – package/title it in what they want Book “how to earn more than a million dollars …”  

“the Psychology of Money” – became  ”the millionaire mindset”
“anatomy of an audience” – “connect with any audience”

Esteem
Do
Gain
Enjoy

Craig – touch all 4 categories to reach your audience
Darren – start with 3 topics, 2 specific and 1 general (or 1 and 2)
Craig – your audience is going to come up and tell you what you are speaking about – “never strike oil by digging an inch deep”
Ed – you can also specialize by delivery methods – be known as “the person who is known as…”

Make three colums – Experience     Delivery     Results

Experience
Specifics about your experience

Delivery
Speech          
Seminar
Book
Process CD

Results
increase profits
decrease costs
decrease turnover

Homework – flesh this list out for yourself

Mine – Experience
Teaching
PM Increase knowledge (anecdotal)
Military
Logistics
Supervision
Evaluations
Speaking
Blogging
Writing

My Delivery
Blog
Speaking
Seminars
Lunch ‘n learn

My Results
Increase productivity
Decrease turnover
hmmmmm….(homework)

 
Focus on results, not experience and delivery – discuss results, leave out experience and delivery – Craig, focus on the pain – ask questions and turn their pain into your promise

Social Media is a hot topic right now – Be careful about speaking about making money with social media when your aren’t making money yourself (credibility)

Marketing a seminar - sign up on edtate.com - special report 
Ed – make sure that you have enough time i.e. three months to market it
Delivery mechanism – e-mail, linkedin, postcards, newspaper, business journal,
Darren – web page – convert them – title – split test to find best conversion method
Shopping cart – all three of them use the same one speaker resources.com

6- minutes to a keynote
Craig – structure – you have 7 seconds before they decide if they like you, 30 seconds before they decide to check out. Open with a question or a story – then make a big promise. i.e “By the time you leave here today, you will have the tools… you will have ideas…etc.” Then the roadmap. “…and these come to you in the form of 4 R’s to remarkable results”
10-1 rule of thumb, 1 story/point to every 10 minutes
Phrase
Anchor – what’s loose is lost – Acronym, anecdote, analogy, activity
Reflection – Take your story and have them reflect on how it affects them
Technique – how do they practice it i.e. “write down your perfect day”
Sale – Push them into the Pull – Push away from what they want to avoid and pull them toward what they want
Use the PAR for newer speakers

Demo video - less than 10 minutes on site (have report, need to have a point, need solid audio) – less than 10 seconds on who you are
YouTube 2-3 minutes (1 minute if you can) – 1 video, 1 purpose, 1 next step. no more than 3 scenes (locations)

you must package your process in order to profit

Ed- what do you want people to Know Feel or Do

Darren – watch the first 5 minutes of a movie – notice how they are introducing characters through dialog
Time management from NSA
Focus day – product, speaking
Administrative day – mundane activities
Free day  - free of everything – phone, e-mail, etc. 
Same model for athletes and entertainers

Darren -every time you speak, build your list – then, touch your list – at least once a month
Do interviews
an a-ha moment is a letting-go of a previous belief 

Charles speech (coached on-site)

longer pause after first “so was I”
pauses

“do the thing you fear, and the death of fear is certain” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Concluded twice 

too many I’s, My’s and Me’s

My homework:

Work on 52bloggingtips.com – finish creating the tips and start filming videos

Talk to the Human
New tagline – an IT guys perspective on communicating with real people

Affiliate link alert: World Champions EDGE. This link will take you to the Edge website, where you can see some free materials or sign up for just $1 for the first month.

In the last few months I’ve been reading some great blogs, and decided to try one of the products I saw. There was a product that was touted as something that would help me see success as a freelance writer. In what is an understandable sales technique, it was offered at a special rate until the end of 2009.

In mid-December, I decided to allocate the required investment (~$87) and clicked on the link to purchase.

The only option for purchasing this product was to use PayPal, a normally reliable service where I have had an active account for about eight years.

For some reason, PayPal decided to decline me this transaction. Per PayPal’s policy they “don’t care”. Actually, that’s a mis-quote. Their site says something to the effect that if they denied an individual transaction, it was in your best interest to insure people aren’t mis-using your account and they don’t have a method for overruling this on any specific transaction. It’s something they’re proud of. I sent a note anyway asking for assistance. No reply.

Okay. PayPal is PayPal. I’m stuck there, but I still wanted the product. I clicked on the “contact” button in the corner, and sent a note asking, essentially, “may I please buy your product?” I said something about requesting a different form of payment.

My logic was that PayPal might be willing to help eventually, but the seller would want to figure something out right now.

Of course, if that had happened, this would be a review of the product, not a review of not being able to buy the product, right?

I did receive a follow-up e-mail the next day, and was told “they would look into it”. That was, temporarily, comforting. However, the lack of follow through into mid-January is disheartening, to say the least. And of course, now a look on that site shows the product ”is temporarily off the market.” So if I wanted to go out of my way and create a new PayPal account with a different credit card, I’m still out of luck.

From the business point of view, what do you think goes through your customer’s mind when something like this happens? Here are some of the thoughts, temporary and permanent, that I have had in the last month:

Do I still want this product?(no one referred me, so in my mind I was taking a risk anyway)
Do they even care if I want this product?
Will they even miss the lost sale?
What if I had been successful and bought the product, would this be how they would support any future issues?
Are there comparable products out there? (and yes, I am now looking)
How do I handle my disappointment? (clearly I’m blogging it)
Is all of this even worth my time?(hmmm…only for the single blog value)

As I prepare to deploy my own products on-line, here are some lessons this experience has taught me (and yes, I’ve heard many of these before):

1. Decide on a response standard and stick with it. (i.e. one business day)
- No one wanting to send you money should be made to wait more than 72 hours to be allowed to do it.
- Same standard for any reasonable customer requests, even if it’s an “I’ll find out” answer to get time to research a better answer.
2. If you say “I’ll get back to you” to your customer, do it. Especially if you take time to post multiple blog entries in the same time period.
3. Plan for back-up payment options, in case your primary doesn’t work. If your audience is a blog/web audience, they’re probably used to on-line transactions. That doesn’t mean they should have accounts at every payment site out there. That said, PayPal is well known and (usually) reliable.
4. If you leave a product page up with a “temporarily off the market” note, maybe mention why or when it will be back.
5. If you decide to blow a customer off, you might want to make sure she/he doesn’t have a blog!!!

Final note:  This post is based on what is probably a blip in their process. With this site’s reputation, I doubt this happens to many people. My idea here was not to rip them, but to show what can happen when the blips go uncorrected. Maybe their $87 loss will be my gain down the road…

The book’s tag-line is Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from your Small Business. I found it interesting to read and packed full of great ideas, references and stories about success in small business. The strategies discussed are designed to be within the capabilities of a one-person show, or a small business with a reasonable budget as well. It has a how-to feel about it, along with the success stories built in for credibility.

Like some other books I’ve read, I found that this book is a fantastic reference to look back on for ideas. It includes a thorough index and an attachment labled Information Arsenal for Guerrillas that includes 14 pages of books, DVDs, CDs and websites to help you further your knowledge and be successful.

What’s great about this book:
Sparked a revolution in the marketing world, and is updated and supported by the author and an army of others.
200 marketing weapons are invaulable as a reference and to spark creative ideas.
Sixteen monumental secrets to Guerrilla Marketing really set the stage for the whole process.

Limiting Factors:
It’s enough to read this book from cover to cover to get an understanding of the power and usefullness of Guerrilla Marketing. But to really move forward, you’ll need to plan on doing some real work.

Great Quotes:
Your compitition won’t quit
Ignorance is more expensive than paid research
Value is far more crucial than price. And perceived value is far more crucial than value 

Recommendations:
This book is a must read, unless you have no plans for your future. If you haven’t read it, stop reading this post and go get it.

Rob’s Rating system (bolded, the rating is)
Buy at full price (even though you won’t have to)
Buy if you get a discount
Wait for the paperback
Wait for someone else to be done with the paperback
If you’ve read my reveiw, you got the jist of it