Trade Show Guru

While there are many factors or “keys” to sales and marketing success, as well as success in life and in general, five keys stand out and are worthy of review. As an aside, I was inspired to write this post because of my recent post Please help Will. Will employed the second key, and because of the third key, I decided to use the first key. If you get a chance, please read that post and see if you can help me build on its success.

Key 1) Act – A lot of us have all sorts of ideas that we think might lead to success. I know I do. But ideas are just ideas unless you act on them. You must take action to see results. Often your action may not result in success, but if you don’t act, you won’t succeed. As the famous Nike motto goes – Just Do It.

Key 2) Ask – Often times, a key to success is just to ask. If you need help, ask. If you want something, ask. Although the answer may often be “no” or “I’m not interested”, you’ll never know if you don’t ask. If you want comments on your blog, ask. At the end of a post, add “So what do you think?” Or even better, ask a question like “What do you think is the biggest key to success?”

Key 3) Good Luck – I believe in luck, both good luck and bad luck. Often times success means being in the right place at the right time. I also believe that you can help make good luck for yourself (proper planning helps to make for good luck). I also believe in Karma, and that if you do good for others, good will come to you. At the very least, I think we should acknowledge that luck plays a part in our successes and failures, and that life isn’t always fair. If you have a string of bad luck, you need to keep trying, which leads us to the fourth key…

Key 4) – Persevere (keep at it) – Because often you will act, but will fail; or you will ask, but will get turned down; or you will have just have bad luck… if you want to succeed, you must persevere. You must keep at it, and keep trying. As the story goes, when Thomas Edison was asked what he thought after failing to invent the lightbulb 999 times, he said, “I didn’t fail 999 times. I learned 999 ways not to make a light bulb.”

Key 5) Work Hard – As I wrote in my earlier post “Marketing Basics“, good marketing involves hard work and knowing your product and customer. I know of no people that have succeeded without hard work. I’m sure there may be people out there that have, I just don’t know any. To my mind, good luck only goes so far. Don’t spend your life waiting to win the lottery, or expecting to find the easy way to getting rich quick. Some people probably think they just need to discover that secret sauce, and that then they’ll have it easy and won’t have to work hard. Call me when you find it.

So there you have it, the trade show guru’s five keys to marketing success. I’m sure there are other keys as well, but these five keys will unluck a lot of doors to success. Now go get ’em. And feel free to comment if you have another important key to marketing success.