Chapter 27 for Einstein’s Business

By Paul J. Krupin

The Magic of Business

Are you ready to do business? Are you sure? Really sure? Really, really sure?

How do you know when you are really done designing and developing your products and services? When do you say “I’m done creating” and say “I’m ready for business”?

How do you know when you have what it takes to be successful? Have you reached a point where you truly know you are ready to fulfill your destiny?

It doesn’t matter who you are, you’ll need to pull a rabbit out of your hat. If you are an author or a publisher, you’ll need to be successful with your book. If you are an inventor then your invention will need to be remarkable and sell. If you're a scholar, you have to sell the importance of your work to your peers. If you're a nonprofit, you have to sell the value of your program to funding agencies. Even if you're a parent, you have to sell your vision of the family to the rest of the family members. If you are married, you need to be effective at communicating so your marriage succeeds.

It doesn’t matter what your business is, there is a way to make sure your business works and works well indeed, whether it’s on the very first try or whether it’s your tenth or one hundredth time at bat.

It involves learning how to become remarkable. All it takes is a little homespun business magic.

Let’s first take a look at a simple definition of business success:

Business success is reaching the people you can help the most and not losing your shirt doing it.

This means providing people with a product or service and making a profit, after salaries and expenses, or at least not losing money as you do it. If your business maintains, then you get to live another day. This is business success.

Now to achieve business success requires the delivery of a product or a service that people will buy.

Let’s say you are a publisher of books - even one single self-published book. You are in business. To be successful as a publisher, you have to sell books. That is, you have to write to sell and your job of writing isn't done until the book sells. This is where many self-publishers go astray. They publish their book without verifying it is really ready for market. They sell very little of their product. They get no return on their investment. They may even operate their business at a financial loss because they failed to sell their product.

Yes (choke you may) to be a business success you have to sell. In order to be successful, you have to test your ideas and test your product on real live people. You have to identify your end users and the people who will buy the book for your users. And finally you must learn what it takes to sell your product.

So you must write to sell and test, test, test your sales process. You do this in small doses till you get the right buy signals. Reliably. Not just once or twice, but repeatedly and reliably.

Nowadays, you can do this in small quantities using print on demand (POD) technology. You can do 25 to 50 POD versions and test it with these important people.

The same is true with any business. To achieve success, you have to design your product and services so that you really and truly deliver what people want and so that you can sell your wares.

In marriage, this is called keeping love alive. In business, it’s called survival.

If you can be even a little remarkable, you can sell quite easily. To be even just a little remarkable you have to use a little magic.

How do you find this magic? You create it.

And there is a way to make sure you create magic.

Creating Magic in Business

But first, what is this magic?

It is the spark of energy that you create when you communicate effectively with your prospect or your customer. It is the energy packed communication that creates the intense desire to have what you offer. It is the force that instantly converts a prospect and turns them into a willing customer.

Where do you find this magic?

It is the things you say or do when you talk to a customer.

It may also be in the things you hear about a product when someone else is talking about it.

It is the feelings that are created and the energy that is imparted to a person when they pick up your product.

It is the mental affirmation that comes with a realization that your product can make their dreams come true.

The bottom line is that it is information that galvanizes your prospective customers’ attention, commands their interests, and persuades people to take an action – to buy what you are selling.

Do you want to see this magic?

Look around you and you will witness when it occurs again and again. Here are four key typical examples which illustrate this magic and when it occurs:

1. You read an article in the newspaper or a magazine and it motivates you to find the source so you can buy a product using the toll free number at the bottom or through the web site listed at the end of the article, or even through a search when the contact information isn’t listed.

2. You are driving down the highway in traffic at 65 miles an hour. The announcer on the radio says something and even though the hazards are all around you and coming at you, you are so galvanized by what the announcer says that you take your eyes off the highway and stare at the radio even though all it tells you is four little numbers and two letters.

3. You are shopping in a bookstore and you pick up a book. You look at the front cover, you look at the back cover, and you then open up a look at a few pages. Done deal! Without any further hesitation, you head straight to the cashier.

4. You hear about a product or a service from a friend, an expert, or a trusted colleague or a consultant, and you know in advance that this is what you need to have, and sight unseen, you buy it.

Do you see the lightening spark in action? Do you see the point at which the instant realization occurs?

If you are in love it is in the looks your beloved gives you when you say something or do something that makes them feel wonderful.

If you are in business, you can build this magic right into your products and services. You can also design this same magic right into your promotional and marketing communications and your public relations.

Here’s how:

First thing you need to do is pay close attention to your prospects and customers when they look over what you offer. Watch customers when they shop in your store. Look at their eyes. Study their body language when they interact with your sales personnel.

You must watch and wait till you see something magical occur. You will know it when you see it by what the person does. Their body language and the action they take tells you.

The question is what signals do you see? What signals do they send you that confirm to you that you are giving them what they want?

In other words, how do you know when you have you built a remarkable experience into the product? How can you tell when you are done?

You can tell when you have

Do they experience magic when they pick it up and hold it in their hands?

Does your product or service give them a spark when they touch it?

You will see something very special when you give people the magic they want!
You'll know by their behavior and response whether you are really have what it takes.

You will also know if you don’t have what it takes:

If you can't get people to even look at it, then you're not done.

If they look at it and put it down, then you still have work to do.

If people look at it and grab it, you might be done. It depends what happens when they then pick it up and peruse it. If they put it down, then you're not done.

If people walk away without taking the desired action. They very simply, you did not produce magic.

You may have to redesign and re-write it till you know you are done. You have to work with your prospective audience to get real feedback, and you must listen to what people say and address the issues you receive.

This may take a lot of reiterations.

But one thing is for certain, there is a point that you will reach when you know that you are done. It's a wonderful thing when you get to this point and know it. This is because you will see the magic.

You know when you are done...

When people look at it, grab it, look at it and head to the cashier.

You show your product to someone and they turn to their colleague immediately and say “get a load of this!”

If people look at your product, and they pick up your product and after looking at it they hold it close and won't give it back freely, you’ve got them.

You show them the book and while they are clutching it in their hands, they reach for their wallet.

They pick up one, look at it, and grab four or five of them and head to the cashier.

One person picks up the book, grabs it and heads to find and show his or her friend the book, and they both grab one for themselves and buy it.

You know that you have something when kids pull it off the shelf and haul it over to their mothers and fathers with a look of desire and wanting and excitement in their eyes that says please????!!!!

I call this the clutching response or the hoarding syndrome. There is no doubt that you have seen and experienced this in a variety of ways.

This occurs when people clearly indicate to you that your product has such inherent value and importance that they are willing to pay for it. They know it and you know it instantly.

This is what you have to create. You have to create something that people covet when they see it, feel it, or touch it.

Identifying Your Magic

It is very cool to observe it directly and it is very clearly an accomplishment when you design your product and service so that it produces this response reliably and repeatedly.

But the next challenge is figuring out what it is that produces the magic

This is what you want to identify and document. And you want to do this systematically, so that you can tweak it and reproduce it, and make it better and better.

The bottom line is that you build to sell. You create to sell. You design to sell. And you must redesign to sell, and redesign, redesign, and redesign until it sells.

But you don’t stop revising and improving until you know it sells, and sells easily and continuously.

You can prove it with small test numbers. Use the technology that is available to create and test your products, services and processes wisely.

Then move it up through the production and promotion chain level by level.

What should you do if you think your product should excite and grab people, but it simply isn't happening?

You still have work to do. You can't speculate about what's wrong, you need real data.

So ask your candidate customers for feedback and advice. How would you improve this? What would you like to see? What would make this product magic to you?

Ask until you are blue in the face and get the hard difficult data and feedback you need to redesign and redo this project.

Think about other super successful products. Learn why they are magic to people. Learn why people love products. The think about how to add magic to what you do.

You are not done until people fall in love with your creation. That's when you are done.

And guess what -- what people really want turns out to be what most people in America wants!

They want a remarkable experience. They want to experience a vivid emotion. They want energy, hope, vision. Yes they want physical satisfaction but what they really crave is emotional satisfaction. They want to be loved.

It should come as no surprise. People want an emotional experience that takes them out of their boring, hum drum lives and temporarily takes them away -- transcends their reality to a time and a place far, far away.

They want information, education, or entertainment that allows them to experience the dramatic personal gain, pain, suffering, pleasure or an achievement that someone else is going through.

You’ll see this in the media almost everywhere. Look around you and you'll see that all news coverage is basically designed to cater to this very special goal - this is what the people want.

People want to be stimulated emotionally. Not just intellectually, but deep,
deep, deep inside. They want to feel what it's like to be in someone else's shoes.

And once you realize this, then you'll realize and learn how to push people’s hot buttons.

A Real Magic Spell

If you are going to be successful you must give them more than just what they need. You must give them what they crave, fantasize and dream about.

This is not rocket science. It is psychology.

You design this magic not only into your products and services but into your marketing communications as well.

Let’s just say if you hope to jumpstart your business by getting publicity you will aim at getting coverage for your business in newspapers and magazines, or on radio and TV.

Editors and producers are publishers. They produce magazines and newspapers. They are in business and survive and thrive because they provide their audiences with written, audio or visual materials that people are willing to pay for. They are always looking for useful, educational, entertaining and inspirational content. This is how they make a living. This is what drives them.

You can't get them excited by sending a news release that begs for a commercial endorsement. Don't write a commercial ad. Don't ask for free advertising. This is not what they want. This will not help them survive.

They want education and entertainment. This is what they do and this is what you must provide them.

You must analyze what you have that you can give an editor that they will truly appreciate you for. So what do editors want?

Study any publication. Listen to the radio or watch any TV show.

You will find that they want distinctive, informative, remarkable and emotion provoking material. They want to positively affect the lives of millions of people. They want to generate or contribute to social controversy that produces beneficial social change.

In order to do this they need written materials that they can publish that produce enthusiastic thank you letters for the information and insights. They want to be appreciated by their audience by repeat subscriptions, due to the fact they their publication provides the best information available in their field.

This is where you come in. This is what you need to provide.

As a publicist or promoter of your own product, services or creative work, you can be inside the pages of another publisher only if you provide the materials that person needs to fulfill his or her business needs and that of their audience.

If you study what the media actually publishes you can boil it all down to one simple magical little formula which describes how they do what they do. Here it is:

DPAA+H

These letters stand for "Dramatic Personal Achievement in the Face of Adversity plus a little Humor."

If you look at almost every media around you, from the front page of USA Today to the Olympics to the evening news to the sitcoms on TV, you'll see that this is the magic that describes what the American public wants, desires, and craves the most.

As a culture, we crave to see the human spirit triumph in matters of the heart, and in trials of hardship and tragedy. We ask to be uplifted right out of the humdrum of our everyday reality into the exhilaration and extreme emotional of those who are living life on the edge.

This is the magic that galvanizes our attention. It rivets us to our seats. It captures our attention and our hearts.

And this is what the media seeks to provide. This is what works.

Now look around you and see that this magic exists everywhere. Look at the front page of the newspaper and at each and every article. Look at the TV news, shows, soap operas and even the commercials. Look at the shows produced by the shock jocks and reality TV.

One thing is for certain, you will see these elements everywhere you look in varying degrees. It is a rare media feature that doesn't contain most of these elements. In fact if you think about it you will realize that the media constantly uses better and better technology to increase the assault on our senses, enhance the effect, and make our experience ever more compelling and memorable. This is how they command people’s attention.

And to get a piece of the action in your business what you have to do is recognize this desire and need, and then cater to it as well.

Who is your audience? Think like the media. Look at your products or services, your news releases, your advertising, and your promotional communications. Look at how you and your people communicate with your prospects and customers.

Do your best to write, speak, and present your products and services and creative works and your communications so that it interests as many people in your audience as possible.

Ask yourself who these people are and talk to them. Do your homework and know who your book, product or service will appeal to.

Then, write your communications strategically and deliberately so that it tells a magical story and engages people emotionally.

Describe the 5 W's: the what, who, where, when, and why, in dramatic personal adversity and achievement terms. Use a little humor if you can. This helps you cast your spell to the widest possible audience.

There's a real business reason why this works -- attention results in sales and profits.

So use DPAA+H.

When it comes to whether you’ll be successful getting publicity, if there are more dramatic personal stories of achievement in the face of adversity, plus a little humor available that day, you lose.

If not, you win.

When it comes to whether your business will succeed. The same is true. If there is a more dramatic, personal product or service, that delivers more achievement in the face of similar adversity, and even offers more fun, then they will get the business, and you won’t.

One thing is for certain. If you learn how to use DPAA+H you will get more success.

Casting Your Magic Spell

It takes a little thinking and self-analysis, but you can identify the right things to say and provide to people.

You do this by analyzing your own experiences to identify the successful sales pathway.

First, think very carefully about who your customers are. Visualize them. Identify the representative customer and create a word picture of who they are.

Think about a real situation.

Think about the very last time you were in front of a person like this. In fact, think about all the times you've been in front of people like this.

Now ask yourself: "What did you say or did you do very specifically, that resulted in them buying your product or service?

Get this information! This is the crucial data. Document what you said.

Make a list of the things you said, the order in which you said them, and think about the other person's response.

Think very specifically about what you say that turns them on and results in them on deciding to buy your books or services.

If you don't know, then you need to first pay close attention when you are speaking to them. You may need to have someone watch you and take notes or record what you say so that you figure out what you say that gets heads shaking up and down.

You may even need to ask them "Why did you buy my product or service?" What did you like the most about what I said or did?”

This is the critical business intelligence you are seeking so pay close attention to the answers you receive. In particular, you are looking for the specific statements and phrases you use when talking that absolutely rivet their attention. The show stoppers. This is what you are looking for.

You must identify these emotional triggers that persuade people that they must have whatever it is you are selling. These are your hot buttons.

Remember the examples.

If you are driving down the highway and listening to the radio and the announcer says something that literally forces your attention off the road and you find yourself staring at the radio dial.

Your hot button has been pushed. Think again about what the announcer said that was so startling and earthshaking that it really got your attention. It literally motivated you to take your eyes off the hazards of the road and stare at those little numbers on the radio dial.

Yes, it doesn't happen that often, but when it does, it is really that good. It’s magic.

You need to do learn how to do this yourself.

You need to identify the hot buttons that you can use to galvanize attention and get people to buy your book, or your product or your service. It may be things you say or do individually, or when you speak in front of a group.

Whatever it is, the crucial thing is that you must know what you do and you must be able to repeat it again and again.

This is the essence of your magic potion. Get it right and you have a very powerful magic potion.

You must be sure that you've identified the right sequence of statements.

You must repeat the experiment till it works just about wherever you go.

Once you carve a positive known reaction using your formula. You can tweak it carefully and experiment with modifications using the following criteria to guide your actions:

If it works, do more of it. If it doesn't work, stop doing it.

This is the essence of continuous improvement and even though it is simple it is the most powerful thing you can do to create magic in your business.

So the first step - identify what works!

The second step is to verify and prove that it works through repetition.

The third step is to apply these hot buttons to your products, services and communications.

The fourth and last step is to improve it. When you discover something new you add it to your potions. At any time you can always return to your basic formula.

Each and every new hot button gets clearly identified and incorporated into your presentation. Your use of numerous hot buttons convinces your prospects that you have what it takes because they are emotionally engaged at several levels. It's not just the individual products or features, but rather it's the complex way the product or features combine to produce a cascade of emotional feelings.

Sprinkling Magic Dust Wherever You Go

The amazing thing here is that once you define the hot buttons with one person, and then with two people, and then with three people, you really have developed a truly amazing and magical tool that can renovate your business and the lives of those that you hope to serve.

This technique works on products and services, and it works the same with media and with your advertising and your direct marketing. It works on any and all of your communications with the people you care about. It works because people are human beings who in our westernized modern society are remarkably homogeneous when it comes to how we respond to communication stimuli.

There are presently 300 million media loving and totally trained and media indoctrinated individuals and we respond to communications nearly the same coast to coast. We watch the same news shows, laugh at the same jokes, cringe at the same horror movies and cry at the same tearjerkers.

What this means is that the implications of the success you design and develop and confirm in the microcosm of a few isolated individuals just about anywhere are phenomenal when you apply it to the whole.

This is incredible power because you will find that what turns people on in one tiny little corner of the country can turn others who have similar interests or demographics on in other parts of the country.

That we respond to the same physical communications stimuli the same way create an incredible opportunity.

You can get up in front of a group of people in San Francisco for three minutes and tell people ‘A – B – C – D and E’ and you can produce a certain response – that is you can sell a certain amount of product.

You can then repeat the same sequence of communications to a similar group of people in New York and produce the similar result.

Then you can do it in Miami, Denver, and Des Moines and continue to produce the same result.

Now you can project costs for doing business against return on investment.

And now you can run a business.

Once you determine how to make people's mouth water and produce the same Pavlovian response, you can do it everywhere you go. Think about the carnival barkers at the traveling circus or county fairs. Think about advertising.

You can use this to your advantage once you learn to create your magical spell.

All you then have to do is design the success sequence and apply modern technology as a force multiplier to reproduce and duplicate the communications so that you reach people again and again.

What this means to you is that when you design, build, and publicize, promote or sell your products and services you must carefully identify those magical things you say and do that motivates people to buy your materials.

This may be things that you find in your best writing, ideas, or material but then it may come flying out of your mouth on the fly as you think and create responses as you deal with people.

It could also be things that come from reviews, since it may be that what other people say about you is even better than what you could say about yourself.

Whatever it is, you must identify what it is. Then you capture it and make it into a repeatable program.

So pay attention and concentrate.

Remember why you are doing this. You are creating magic. This magic only occurs when you push key hot buttons that produce the emotional triggers that convince a person to want what you are offering.

Emotions trigger deep personal attention. When people feel fear, happiness, horror, laughter, concern, hate, envy, jealousy, hunger, material desire, sexual desire, they pay attention and revel in the feelings you provoked.

The depth and duration of the feeling experience creates the lasting impression. This in biological terms is chemical memory. It is the feeling that produces memory, not the information itself.

When you have discovered what you can do to trigger and produce emotional feelings on command, than you have figured out the key to your success. The emotional feelings trigger a desire to have and control and this in turn create the buying impulse to purchase and to own.

This is why people buy what you are selling. They want to have what you have. They want to be able to experience more of what you've just allowed them to taste or experience.

Sound like fun?

It is! This is the magic of business.


Bio

Paul J. Krupin, is President of Direct Contact PR (formerly IMEDIAFAX - The Internet to Media Fax Service), a custom publicity service. Now a retired federal government scientist and once-upon-a-time attorney, he is an author over 25 books including the book Trash Proof News Releases. He has been described as a long time PR Guru who has developed sure-fire proven strategies for getting publicity. He works with individuals, companies, and organizations, helping them write effective news releases and copy, select and deploy the right tactics, to reach the right media. He sends out over a million news releases each year, on behalf of hundreds of inventors, authors and publishing companies.

He has worked with numerous best selling authors on everything from books to publicizing events to inventions and late breaking news. Although he is experienced and works in numerous areas, Krupin’s work is most highly regarded in the independent publishing industry, and his expertise and book publicity achievements have been written about in dozens of books.

He offers a highly personal set of copywriting, consulting and custom targeted news release distribution services. If you can catch him (he goes fishing a lot) you can ask him questions and he will offer you specific analysis and recommendations on projects you are working on. If you ask him he will judiciously sprinkle his highly relevant advice to you with delicious horror stories and lessons learned getting publicity with other clients.

The Direct Contact PR web site contains numerous articles and a free download of his Trash Proof News Release book.

You can reach him by phone at 1-800-457-8746 or 509-545-2707, send him an email at Paul@DirectContactPR.com or visit www.DirectContactPR.com

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