Thought-To-Action Attitude

I’m sure you have heard of this famous Zig Ziglar saying: “It is your attitude, not your aptitude that determines your altitude.”

It is true: Our attitude determines what we are and what we are is what we get. Attitude not only determines our destiny but also it determines what kind of journey it will be. We are where we are because of the choices we have maid.

The marketers, have chosen to be marketers, no one has forced them, I suppose. Once a multimedia programmer, I found my way into the wonderful world of advertising, and after few years, I chose to move to client side. I am now the marketing manager for a medium size company in Dubai. That was my decision.

Most of the B2B marketers, are charged with training their sales team. As if we are perfect sales pros! We show them how to make cold calls. We tell them to build relationship. And we tell them that they have to adopt new attitudes.

But who tells us what the right attitude for a marketer is? Do we have the positive attitude?

“Thought to action”, is an attitude that I constantly ask my sales reps to develop. I tell them: Successful sales people take their thoughts and ideas to the next dimension: action. People tend to procrastinate. In fact, it is how many of us start our day. Procrastination becomes our worst enemy, a kind of virus. Never procrastinate, think, make a decision and act.

Previously I blogged on Adult daycare centers. We know that our sales, admin, HR, Procurment and so forth, live in the adult daycare centers. How do we know it? Because, we, the marketers, are there too.

We procrastinate, like our sales do. That is not only our worst enemy, but our organization’s worst enemy. We are charged with generating and nurturing qualified leads. The life and death of our organizations is in our hands. Without those qualified leads, our company will not survive. Yet, we tend to procrastinate.

I have seen many marketers (including marketing directors of a Fortune 500!) spending hours of their valuable time, surfing the web “researching” their target market, reading marketing articles, studying marketing books and so forth. These are good things to do, but not during working hours. 8 hours a day, you are being paid to market your company.

Now why we procrastinate? I read on Dave J’s blog , quoting Big Picture Guy as saying “Procrastination is seldom about not wanting to do something; it is most often about not knowing what to do."

So don’t we know what we should do? Or how we have to market? Probably not. We as marketing pros know “ a little bit of everything” but not everything. We and no one else knows exactly how we can generate and nurture leads. It’s a multimodal approach, we think. We have to keep experimenting. We have to keep on learning. Reading marketing books is good, as I said, but not during working hours. The best thing you could do is to listen to audio books, or you could create your very own audio book. Print out your favorite article, you want to study. Take it home, read it lout; record your own voice and listen to it several times. Do the same with the latest book you have ordered from amazon.com.

But during working hours, market your company. What was the excellent marketing idea you had last evening, while driving towards home? Realize that idea, now! Was it the idea of dropping an email to your old and none-active customers to convert those lapsed customers to born-again customers? Or was it to call that big company to expand your distribution channels?Whatever it was, do it now, you organization needs you to do it. Your sales reps needs you to do it. You are the most important guy in your company. How could the company live, if you procrastinate?