AtlantaEvent.com NewsFlash - Avoid Infomercials

Intro From Jeff Glaze

Jeff Glaze
Editor



"Buy my eye-opening ebook!" from Jeff Glaze, The editor of AtlantaEvent.com

In This Issue:

The Power of Beliefs - By Kathleen Gage

Are You Throwing Money Away? - By Susan A. Friedmann,CSP

Overcome your Fears and Become a Great Speaker - By Randall P. Whatley

The Six Sigma Method and Design of Experiments - By Peter Peterka

Greetings,

Have you ever attended a FR*EE seminar or workshop? These FR*EE events are problematic to me. I have been in this business now for about three years. In that time, I have seen various marketing techniques designed to get people in the door. The latest technique is the FR*EE seminar.

My question is, "Is FR*EE really FR*EE?

( The reason there is an * in the word FR*EE? Because sp*am filters tag that word and keep you from getting the email! )

FR*EE seminars usually have a single purpose... to sell you something. This can apply to just about any seminar or workshop advertised as such. There are exceptions to the rule at times, but usually it is an upsell. If you have ever attended a FR*EE seminar that gave you a lot of information, please, by all means, email me and tell me about it!

What does this mean? It means that you can sit through a FR*EE one - two - or three hour program and walk away with little but the products you might buy or your purchased ticket to the "Three Day Bootcamp". These products and upsold bootcamps usually have hefty price tags of several hundred to several thousand dollars.

While you are sitting in the room at these events, you might ask yourself, "What am I doing here?". The answer is you might be getting one or two nuggets of knowledge to keep you in your seat, or maybe a little bit fired up from motivational stealth-speak, but you are usually just wasting your time.

You see someone once said to me, there is nothing in this life of value that is FR*EE. You might disagree with that statement but in the case of FR*EE events I often find it to be true.

My purpose in talking about this at all is simple. When it comes to information delivered in a venue that costs several thousand dollars to rent, you will hardly ever walk away with the valuable information that you went to receive. Most often you will leave either feeling cheated or possibly excited for the moment, but you will not get much in the way of the quality of program that you will get when there is actually a cost to attend. You see, there is no investment up front on your part except your time. The organizer of the event on the other hand has paid a great deal to get you in the room to sell you something.

The bottom line is how much is your time worth? You can watch commercials on television for free, why drive across town and spend your day to have the same outcome as watching an infomercial?

Think about it and write to me.

Now, I just want to remind you to attend the Atlanta Business Mixer on the 23rd. This is the last one until September ( cause I hate to get dressed up when the temperature rises above 90 degrees! ) and it promises to be HUGE. It is not FR*EE but almost with no membership required and only $5 at the door to attend. Be there this time, you will not regret it!

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Jeff Glaze - Editor

The Power of Beliefs

By Kathleen Gage

Shopping for trade show giveaways can be an overwhelming experience. One catalog is jammed with custom printed pens, another showcases mouse pads. Your boss mentions that last year, everyone was giving away really nice tote bags. The sales rep really wants you to buy keychains that can play MP3’s of your marketing message set to popular tunes.

But what happens to all this stuff after the show? Let’s follow one attendee, a buyer from a mid-size manufacturing firm. Tired after spending three days at the show, he’s returned to his office. He’s toting two bags jam-packed with trade show tschokes, which he upends on his desk.

All those fancy pens? They get jammed in a cup on his desk. Mouse pads go into a general office supply cupboard, on the off chance one of his office staff wears their mouse pad out. That seems unlikely – two or three are still in there from last year’s show. His secretary snapped up the tote bag – it’ll be perfect for her daughter to carry her ballet clothes in. And the MP3 playing keychain? He’s giving it to his teenage son.

But what’s this? A booklet slides out of his tote bag. It’s small – just 3 ½ x 8 ½, somewhere between 16-24 pages. It fits perfectly in his pocket – or in a purse, as he discovers when he hands it over to one of his co-workers. The information contained in the slender volume – tips, techniques, and strategies all related to your products and services -- is just too good to keep to himself.

Of all the trade show giveaways, only the booklet has done its job. Without being overpowering, it has educated the buying public about your products and kept your company name and logo in view. When the buyer needs to make a purchase, he’ll think back to what he read in your booklet – and he’ll know exactly who to call.

Giving out booklets heightens your company’s credibility as an expert in the industry. When prospects read your information, they perceive you as knowledgeable. Booklets also clearly signal that you’re interested in pursuing a business relationship. Giving away coffee mugs signals that you hope your prospect enjoys his morning joe.

Booklets offer a lot of bang for the buck. Anyone in an industry who is selling or exhibiting at a trade show is a candidate for using booklets as a promotional tool. They are very cost effective. A company can create their own booklets, have someone else produce them, or purchase someone else’s booklet on a topic of interest for their audience and have their contact information printed on. No matter what method you choose, booklets simply don’t cost much to produce. They also don’t have an ‘expiration’ date. One print run can easily and effectively carry you through the show season and be integrated in other sales & marketing efforts.

To get the most use out of your booklets, be sure to pack them full of common sense, grass roots, basic, practical, how-to information. Your customers won’t turn to a booklet for dry, theoretical information, so don’t waste time and money printing up journal articles. Keep it current, relevant, and important. Address everyday concerns in your industry. Sometimes the silver bullet answer everyone wants turns out to be information that is known but simply forgotten. The booklet serves as a reminder and reinforces your position as an expert in the field.

Once you have produced your booklet, you can often find other organizations that can benefit from it. Selling booklets – to your distributors, for example – can not only help recoup your production costs, but actually generate new revenue while continually marketing your own company.

Other ideas to consider include direct mail campaigns or licensing the rights to your booklet to another company. If you license the rights, you grant the client specific, limited production rights to the booklet manuscript that your company owns. Successful booklets often have to be translated into several languages to meet market demand.

Prospects for your booklets include the vendors, suppliers, and manufacturers in your own industry. Each is a marketing niche, with individual, specialized needs. Approach them in a common sense way. These booklets provide solutions to many of their problems!

Last and definitely not least, distributing booklets helps you garner a better ROI on your tradeshow participation Some industries, such as the pharmaceutical industry, are now making a concerted effort to pull back on money spent on excessively expensive and inappropriate giveaways with educational value. A booklet is perfect in these situations because is helps you create better-qualified leads. This in turn leads to larger sales over a longer period of time with well-educated clients. When your company makes one more sale because someone reads the booklet you gave them, the investment of purchasing or creating the booklet pays off handsomely. Buyers are far more likely to make a purchase based upon information they’ve read than upon any number of fancy-printed pens – even if they write with sparkly gel ink!

Written by Susan A. Friedmann,CSP, The Tradeshow Coach, Lake Placid, NY, author: “Meeting & Event Planning for Dummies,” working with companies to improve their meeting and event success through coaching, consulting and training. For a free copy of ExhibitSmart Tips of the Week, e-mail: susan@thetradeshowcoach.com; website: thetradeshowcoach.com

"All the great speakers were bad speakers at first."
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

You are already a great speaker. You give great presentations every day.

Think about how often you successfully communicate your ideas to loved ones, co-workers, or acquaintances. You make a simple point. You choose language that they understand and to which they can relate. You answer their objections satisfactorily. You close with them agreeing to do something you want them to do. You just employed the great elements of a successful speech.

Then you are asked to speak to 15 people about a subject you know something about. (Why else would you be asked to speak?) You become scared to death. You have a totally different mindset about "public speaking" than you do about "daily conversations." Why? You’re scared because you think you don’t know how to communicate. You think you have nothing important to say. You think you don’t know the correct way to phrase your thoughts. You think the audience will disagree with you. You think the audience will dislike both your ideas and you personally. You don’t think you can persuade them.

You plod on, prepare your speech, rise to deliver it and all of a sudden, you experience one or more of the following "stage fright" symptoms.

Rapid heart beat: Your heart is beating so fast and loud that you’re sure everyone in the room hears your heart pounding. Relax. Only you can hear your heartbeat. It’s beating faster than usual because adrenaline and other chemicals are increasing your heart rate. Breathe slowly and deeply. Concentrate on your speech. Focus on someone in the audience you are comfortable with for a few moments. You heart rate will slow once you become immersed in your presentation.

Trembling legs or hands: You’re embarrassed because one of your legs or hands is trembling. Everyone who sees it knows how scared you are. You feel like such a coward. Relax. Take several, slow, deep breaths. Contract and then relax the shaking muscle. Again, adrenaline and other chemicals have supplied more energy that your body needs, and irregular breathing has disrupted your blood circulation.

Shift your weight on your feet to stop your leg from shaking. Use large hand gestures that move your hands and arms. Connect and press together your index finger and thumb on the trembling hand while relaxing your other fingers. Hold the connected finger together for ten seconds and them relax your hand. Repeat this if necessary. Your breathing and tension/relaxation exercises will stop the trembling.

Shaking or cracking voice: You begin speaking and your voice shakes or cracks. Your voice sounds so weak and you’re embarrassed. How can you continue? What should you do? This problem is simply caused by irregular breathing. You can easily eliminate a shaking or cracking voice by slowing your speaking rate and gaining control of your breathing rate. Focus on someone comforting in the audience. Intentionally slow your speech, inhale, and lower the pitch of your voice as you continue.

Dry mouth: Your mouth feels like it’s full of cotton. Your lips stick together and slur your speech. You’re afraid that the audience won’t understand you because of the slurring. It’s the old adrenaline problem again! The adrenaline is pulling moisture from your mouth. If you can take a drink of water, stop and do so. Hold it in your mouth for a few seconds before swallowing. Pause for a few seconds and relax. Breathe to relax. If you cannot take a drink, pause or stop to collect saliva in your mouth and hold it there for a few moments before swallowing. To diminish the chance of this happening, chew gum or use a mint before speaking.

Perspiration: Your forehead and upper lip feel moist. You’re very self-conscious of this and feel growing embarrassment. Your perspiration is probably caused by your rapid heart rate that raises your body temperature. Then again, maybe it’s just warm in the room. Try to ignore it as much as possible. Wipe your upper lip and forehead briskly with a handkerchief, and then continue your speech.

Flushing: Your face and neck look like you’re coming down with the measles! It’s all red and you know people can see that you’re scared. These red splotches are caused by irregular blood flow to the outer layers of your skin by adrenaline. This mostly happens to women. There’s usually no way to stop it once it starts other than to relax in order to slow the adrenaline rush.

Why don’t these speaking problems occur when you’re talking to loved ones, co-workers, or acquaintances? They don’t usually occur because you’re relaxed when you speak to people with whom you are familiar under comfortable circumstances. More than anything else, relaxation is the key to delivering great presentations to groups. Delivering presentations in conversational tones is one of the easiest ways to force yourself to relax.

You can be a great speaker. You give great presentations every day. Adopt the same mindset when you’re speaking to a group that you have when you’re holding a regular conversation. These simple tips will enable you to be a great public speaker.

Copyright 2005, Randall P. Whatley

Randall P. Whatley, is a 26-year media veteran with diverse business experience. Whatley is president of Cypress Media Group, Inc., cypressmedia.net, an Atlanta-based advertising, public relations, and training firm. He has extensive experience advising government officials, political candidates, public officials, and corporate executives on media relations and presentation skills. He can be reached by e-mail at randy@cypressmedia.net.

The Six Sigma Method and Design of Experiments

By Peter Peterka

Six Sigma is becoming a proven approach for businesses and organizations to improve their performance. The spectrum of companies actively engaging in Six Sigma today is wide from industrials like Celanese, Caterpillar, GE, Honeywell, and 3M to service/retail organizations like Starwood Hotels, Sears, and Home Depot. Six Sigma has even started in the financial industry with Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase initiating major deployments in the past two years. Probably the most exciting area is in the public and healthcare sectors with success stories emerging from city government and John Hopkins Medical.

So what is all this excitement about? Haven’t these quality tools been around for years? Is it just the fact that people have strange names like Champion, Green Belt, Black Belt and for the chosen few, Master Black Belt? Okay, if it is not the names then what? Six Sigma’s success revolves around the fundamental elements needed for any successful organization. Six Sigma starts with a vision of delivering products and services to customers with no defects from the eyes of the customers. For companies it is vital to deliver these products and services at a profit. Once the organization has created their own vision of Six Sigma, the business leaders need to define their organization’s objectives in numerical terms. These “high-level metrics,” often called big Y’s in Six Sigma, are the foundation for identifying project y’s that Six Sigma Belts will execute projects on. With big Y’s in hand, business leaders called Six Sigma “Champions” breakdown these organizational level Y’s into smaller y’s a project leader called a Green Belt or Black Belt can work from.

So what’s next, do business leaders take a hands-off management by objectives (MBO) approach of, “I don’t care how you do it as long as you get results!”? For Six Sigma organizations the answer is a loud “NO.” Champions do care how projects are executed and have appointed highly trained Master Black Belts to assist and mentor project leaders in applying the Six Sigma method to manage their projects. I believe this is the key to Six Sigma’s success. In a past life I participated in a high-level meeting with executives from the world leader in the production of a product we all know. The purpose of the meeting and visit was to evaluate a critical new product design. All of the high-tech executives were dressed in dark Italian business suits complemented with gold and diamonds. I listened closely to each question these executives asked. I never once heard “how much?”, “when?” or even “why?” – every question was “by what method?.” Methodology is what Six Sigma is about.

Six Sigma Methods

There have evolved two key methods for carrying out Six Sigma projects. The first method is the most well-defined and works best if you have a problem with an unknown solution in existing products, processes or services. This method is called DMAIC or Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. The newest method, which is in the developing stages, is called Design for Six Sigma or DFSS. The goal of DFSS is to develop a new product, process or service that is defect-free in the eyes of the customer. A number of consulting companies have invented roadmaps for DFSS like IDOV (Identify, Design, Optimize and Validate) and DMADV (Design, Measure, Analyze, Design and Verify).

Six Sigma and Design of Experiments

Once an organization has decided on the method and the project y’s, Belts are marched off to training “waves” bringing management-approved projects to class. DMAIC Green Belt training is normally two one-week sessions separated by one month. Black Belt training waves are extended by two additional months with two more weeks of training. The emphasis during the extended two weeks of Black Belt training is often on learning more details about advanced tools such as Design of Experiments (DOE).

So where does Design of Experiments fit into Six Sigma? Six Sigma is about understanding and controlling the variation of key process variables known as inputs or x’s in order to obtain improved results on project outputs or y’s. In Design of Experiment terms these inputs or x’s are often referred to as factors and the outputs are referred to as responses. In nearly all Six Sigma projects the relationship of the project y’s takes on the form of y=f(x1,x2,...xn). Wait a minute, isn’t this what Design of Experiments is all about? Of course, for almost 100 years Design of Experiments has been proven to be one of the best known methods for validating and discovering relationships between responses and factors. In Six Sigma terms it is discovering the relationship between outputs called y’s and inputs called x’s.

Today’s Six Sigma Belts are primarily taught to focus their use of Design of Experiments in the Improve phase of DMAIC and the Optimize phase of IDOV. For DMAIC Six Sigma training the most common experimental designs taught are factorial and fractional factorial designs. Some curriculums introduce response surface designs and optimization designs at a high level. DFSS includes the experimental designs taught in all levels of DMAIC training and often expands to include the concept of robust designs. As an alternative to the classical approach, there are also a number of consulting companies teaching Taguchi designs as the preferred method for robust design.

Final Remarks

Six Sigma looks as though it is here to stay and even in today’s slow economy one of the few areas where there still are a number of new positions. The Six Sigma process is a great step toward creating learning organizations with its well-defined roadmaps and management structure. As with most new methodologies Six Sigma will mature and grow as it expands into new areas such as DFSS. As Six Sigma professionals learn more about the power of properly planned experiments, Design of Experiments will be integrated into most phases of the Six Sigma roadmap and not just considered an advanced tool for the improvement and optimization phases. Experienced practitioners of statistical methods like Design of Experiments should learn the language of Six Sigma and help integrate new methods into the Six Sigma process to improve its effectiveness.

Peter Peterka is the Principal Consultant in practice areas of DMAIC and DFSS. Peter has eleven years of experience performing as a Master Black Belt, and has over 15 years experience in industry as an improvement specialist and engineer working with numerous companies, including 3M, Dell, Dow, GE, HP, Intel, Motorola, Seagate, Xerox and even the US Men's Olympic Team.

Get more info on Six Sigma at 6sigma.us