Why Change Selling Blog

This article is a warning and some sage advice from someone who has been burned by making some of the mistakes listed below.   

The industry is rife with consultants offering best practices on Linkedin and selling services around helping you get started and leveraging the power of the network. This is not one of those articles and I have nothing to sell.
I offer this free advice so that you can learn from my from experience.

This article will be of interest to anyone using Linkedin Groups and in particular the HubSpot Social Media Publishing capability.

HubSpot allows you to set up and automate social media publishing and monitor buzz for any number of keywords in an integrated fashion… it's great, it's powerful and it's convenient.  

LinkedIN groups are very useful as well, - if you can find the ones that are well controlled and where people you wish to influence are participating in the dialogue.  

The fact that HubSpot-Linked combination is so powerful and convenient comes with some warnings and a few things to consider when you start up.
  
Here are few simple rules to follow:

1. When you set up social media in HubSpot and enter your Linkedin credentials, HubSpot will auto-populate all of your groups. Do not check all of your "Publish to the following groups as..." or "select all" buttons when you post an article in HubSpot. 
This is how to get blocked on LinkedIn with just one post.
    
2. It’s OK to be a member of 40 groups, but as a rule your blog posts will be relevant to only a handful of groups. Therefore vary what you post according to the audience with highest interest/relevance.
3. Quality, not quantity is the rule. 3-5 groups that you focus-on for a few minutes each per day, trumps 40 that you drive-by once a week. Think about it, what buyer is going to spend time on more that two or three groups? Your job is to figure out which ones they are.
4. Don't post to Alumni groups unless it's relevant to the group;  e.g. you worked at say MicroStrategy and you post a story about your experience or a learning from working there.
5. Whenever you post something to a group, you must add a comment, challenge or reason why you are posting it, so that it relates to the WiiFM antenna of group members.
6. Many Linkedin groups are very spammy, much noisier than just a couple of years ago…. so being a member of a 40,000 member OPEN group may not give you as much clout as a 500 member group with the right audience, which is CLOSED and well controlled by moderators.
7. The best way to engage on LinkedIn when getting started is to read and comment on others posts and ask questions…. Get the feel for the group before you post anything.
8. Many LinkedIn groups are forum only groups and don't allow blogs or links. If you have something to ask they can be very useful and if your insights are helpful, people will check your profile and may visit your Website. If you post blogs in some of these groups, you will get a warning and if you reoffend will be ejected.
9. First base on LinkedIn is to build reputation as someone with something of value to say with the audience and group administrators, -not to autopost everything you publish to your groups, unless it’s your own group. 
10. It's perfectly OK to post other people's stuff in groups provided it's relevant and if it gives you an opportunity to add a comment that shows insight and will be of value to the group.
11. Be aware that Linked is involved in a class action lawsuit of their own for their practice of emailing every contact you have ever sent or received mail from, when they offer to “invite your friends to connect” and you accept.
12. Beware of trolls – certain groups have trolls that enjoy baiting, denigrating, criticizing and generally making a**holes of themselves. Do not engage and when it happens to you, flag it up to group owners.
13. Do not download your first level contacts on LinkedIn and Spam them, unless you want them to hate you and disconnect. 
14. Also please read this LinkedIn thread with informed comment on Spamming your first level contacts inside LinkedIn
15. Finally, download this How to Use Social Media to Find New Leads Guide from HubSpot

I have been in LinkedIn Jail for over a year as I made the mistake of auto publishing into many groups when this feature was first release on HubSpot.

Very few groups allow me to publish my stuff (even if its fantastic) without it going into a moderation queue - from which it never leaves… unless I contact the group owner and ask them to publish it, which is a pain.

I'm writing this blog because I want to update you on my current activity and share some very exciting news.

I have recently joined new Silicon Valley software company WittyParrot, as VP Marketing.

The new WittyParrot Website went live on the new HubSpot Enterprise COS last week... a great product!

Our HubSpot partnership and consulting business focusing on inbound marketing and sales and marketing messaging alignment will continue, delivering messaging alignment projects using the WittyParrot platform.

You have to see a short demo video of WittyParrot to understand what WittyParrot is and what it does, as it's quite disruptive.

WittyParrot has exciting potential for physically aligning marketing and sales messaging and to help companies speak with one voice. 

• WittyParrot helps you collaboratively capture and maintain your Buyer Persona and Value Proposition in a Messaging Architecture hosted in WittyParrot.
• WittyParrot enables marketers and sales enablement teams to share messaging chunks of any size or type and enrich it in sales ready messaging.
• Crucially, WittyParrot enables salespeople to find the content they need in a couple of clicks and to simply drag and drop it into their application, email, or document to use it.
• It has potential to free-up an hour a day of marketers and salespeople's time spent searching for and editing information to use in email and customer communication.
• WittyParrot protects and amplifies the brand message as everyone shares and uses the same underlying messaging chunks.
• It provides salespeople the supporting information they need for inbound sales to respond to inbound marketing leads in real-time and to enable responsive follow-up, so their emails will get read and acted on.

Download the eBook Building Highly Responsive Sales Teams

Please connect with me on LinkedIN and join our LinkedIn Responsive Sales Enablement group.
 

Lately I have changed my strategy in responding to inbound leads, where a contact exchanges their contact details in return for an offer of an eBook, Whitepaper or Webinar on my Website.

I now make best efforts to respond to an inbound leads inside 5 minutes of receiving it. So far I have been able to reach 80% of contacts directly on the phone if I call within the first 10 minutes. I'm having at least an order of magnitude more constructive conversations with prospective customers than using my prior approach.

I wrote two blogs on this subject in the past week: -
The Quick and the Dead: Why Responsiveness Matters in Sales featured on the HubSpot Website.
The other, Responsiveness and the Dawn of a New Era in Sales Enablement featured on the WittyParrot site.

If you are interested in your team speaking with more leads to initiate more conversations and to improve the number of qualified leads in your pipeline, then I recommend reading both articles.

In the meantime you may find our Building Highly Responsive Sales Teams  eBook of value.

 

When I was a boy growing up in South Australia, I distinctly remember the day the news broke that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. I remember it because after I heard the news I began to cry. 

I was 11 years old and to this day I don't know why I cried. I knew nothing of American politics and I had only seen scant television clips of the President on one of the 3 stations on the TV, that broadcast from 4.30PM till station close at 11PM. I knew he was a great man however and admired by Australians and my school teachers.

When Steve Jobs announced that he was resigning from Apple in August 2011, I knew the end was near for the great man and I felt a lump in my throat. The day after his death, I was walking in Pebble Beach and I met a neighbor. We stopped chatted for a few minutes and Steve Jobs death came up in conversation and we both started crying. Steve Jobs was a great man, whether you liked him or not.

I never met Jobs, but I knew about Apple, having owned a Mac a couple of years after they were introduced. Stories of his unusual behavior were already legend in Silicon Valley when I moved here with Sun MicroSystems in 1991. Sun Microsystems kept close tabs on what Jobs was doing with NeXT as the Sun UNIX workstation began it's meteoric rise.  

I listened to the Walter Isaacson Steve Jobs biography over a couple of weeks on my commutes to the WittyParrot office in Bay Area, (I am an investor in and advisor to WittyParrot, a new Silicon Valley Software company) and was riveted by the story and the storytelling skill of Isaacson.  

When I arrived at the office I would share the latest insights I had gleaned from listening to the Jobs story with the design team at WittyParrot and I sent several emails with condensed insights and suggestions on the design and out-of-box experience.  

For entrepreneurs, designers and engineers, the Steve Jobs biography is a case study in the importance of thinking outside-the-box, simplicity and elegance in design, and execution.  

From the numerous true anecdotes throughout the book, it is clear that Jobs was a tyrannical leader, ripping subordinates to shreds and firing people summarily. He did however build a team of “A” players who were extremely loyal and believed in the Jobs Apple mission… which was to change the world.  

His reality distortion field influenced and inspired others to do what was previously thought impossible. He would look subordinates in the eye with an unblinking stare and exclaim “this is shit” on being show work or programing that was less than breathtaking, to see if they believed it was less then their best.  

Steve Jobs changed our lives in the same way Edison did a hundred years earlier. He was inventor like Edison, with more than three hundred patents in his name and like Edison, he was a visionary. Jobs obsession with creating technology products that incorporated art in their design gave us products that redefined the look and feel of consumer electronics and computer retailing.  

Every reader of this article has been touched by the experience of using Apple products. It’s worth recalling the breakthrough products that Jobs and Apple gave us, here are a few that changed the World:-

• Apple-2 one of the first mass produced personal computers.
• Apple Lisa and Macintosh, Mac - the computer for the rest of us, which heralded a new era of computing and introduced the GUI, the mouse and beautiful fonts
• iPod, - a thousand songs in your pocket
• iTunes – a new spin on music
• iPhone – The Internet in your pocket
• iPad – "The iPad is…”
• Apple Stores– the most profitable stores on the planet
• The App Store - More than a thousand apps. One simple new way to get them
• Pixar Animation – Toy Story and many others.

Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography is a riveting account of a life fully lived and of a great man who changed the World and is a “must read” for anyone in the technology business. 

While this story is not strictly about business travel, it's very relevant to business travellers and I thought it worth sharing.

My wife and I had been undecided as whether to attend a winetasting in Santa Barbara, CA. this weekend and made a late decision to go. At the last minute,  accommodation options in Santa Barbara were very limited and we made a booking for Saturday evening through the Extended Stay America hotel website direct on Thursday.  

My wife received email confirmation of the booking on her cellphone on the dates she had booked, but she did not open the email on her desktop email system that indicated that the hotel was booked for Thursday-Friday. Neither did she check to see if there was a booking confirmation number on her cellphone email  

After a 4 hour drive and afternoon of wine tasting, we were looking forward to a restful stay at our hotel a few miles from the winetasting venue. The first inkling that there could be a problem was when we got to the hotel desk and heard the clerk advising a couple that there was no availability and that everything in Santa Barbara was sold out.  

Our turn at the desk came and I got that sinking feeling when the clerk began questioning us to the possible names the booking was made under and asked if we had a reservation number. My wife opened her cellphone email and found the booking for Saturday evening, but there was no confirmation number. On her desktop email, the booking was confirmed for Thursday and Friday on the day she made the booking. Clearly there was a problem with the booking.  

At this point we have two options, either get mad at the clerk and vent our frustration and demand that they solve the problem on the spot, or call the hotel company and get mad at them and demand that they solve the problem while we fume on the phone, threatening never to use their services again and slagging them off on social media. 

The other alternative is to shrug your shoulders and say bummer, - and begin to create options for yourself to solve the problem that don’t involve you becoming enraged and upsetting others.
 
While my wife was on the phone with Extended Stay, I chose the latter and asked the clerk for a Wi-Fi password and began looking at alternatives. After a few minutes we found a hotel 30 minutes up the road we had already traveled and made a snap booking as there were very few available options remaining.

We spent the night in a Motel-6, not our first choice for accommodation, but it was the last room within a 30 minute drive. We had a good night’s sleep in a room that was clean, where the beds firm, but comfortable and we got a $10 discount on the room… whoopee!  

This morning in one of our favorite breakfast places, Andersen’s in Santa Barbara, we had another encounter that we have all seen played-out badly in restaurants.

We arrived at the restaurant at 10AM, were served coffee and juice and our orders taken. The food was taking a long time coming and a clue that there might be a problem was when the people sitting next to us, who came 10 minutes after us, were served their breakfast. Bummer

I inquired as to the whereabouts of our breakfast and the hostess gave us a curt “this is Sunday morning” reply. Fair enough I thought, it’s a busy place and the food is worth waiting for. However it was now 10.45 and still no food. A few minutes later our curt hostess came back to our table and apologized that our order in fact had gotten lost. Bummer
Meanwhile the people next to us were paying their bill.

I was getting a little impatient and could easily have made a scene, passed a rude comment and stormed off; but that would only upset me, the staff and immediate patrons and we would still be 30 minutes away from breakfast. Finally the food arrived at 11AM and we were advised that everything would be complimentary. Whoopee.  

Our curt hostess asked if we liked champagne and returned with two glasses… the Sun was over the yardarm somewhere. Whoopee.    

I reflected on this experience and recall a humorous talk I had heard from Tim Gard five years earlier at the Professional Speakers Association annual conference in London.  

He spoke about the highs and lows of business travel and the potential for things to go wrong – often and right occasionally. The point of his talk was that things will go wrong, it’s how we react to them that sets the tone for the remainder of the encounter or trip. His advice, when things go wrong – shrug your shoulders, say bummer and move on. When things go right, click your heels, say whoopee and be grateful for the break. Tim was no doubt influenced by Viktor Frankl.
 
Viktor Frankl wrote in “Man’s Search for Meaning” that human beings are the only species with the freedom to choose how they will react in any situation through the exercise of our free will. Life will present many challenges, but our power to shape our response to the challenges determines our attitude and ultimately shapes our experience. His insights came from his experience in surviving the Dachau concentration camps in WW2, when all those that he loved, save for his sister, perished.  

Summary and Take-aways:

1. Always check to ensure your booking is for the correct dates and that you have a reservation number when you receive email confirmation of an Internet travel or accommodation booking.
2. In business travel and in life things will go wrong, it’s how we react to them that sets the tone for the rest of the event.
3. If things go wrong – say "bummer" and begin to create options to solve the problem instead of getting mad.
4. If things go right and you get that room upgrade or last seat in business-class, click your heels, do a little dance and say "Whoopee"!
5. If you haven’t yet read Man’s Search for Meaning, it could be time you did.

Responsive Sales Enablement 

The Inbound Marketing model pioneered by HubSpot has been proven by nearly 10,000 companies to efficiently lower the cost of acquiring new customers. The next logical steps in this evolution, articulated by HubSpot CTO and co-founder Dharmesh Shah at the recent #Inbound13 event in Boston, are Inbound Sales and Inbound Service.

The idea of flipping the sales model of calling cold, or even warm prospect lists on its head, to real-time engagement, while or within a few minutes of prospects visiting your Website or opening your email is a smart approach to facilitating buyers who start their journey as an inbound lead.  

Think about it, would you rather be contacted by a vendor salesperson to ask if you need help, two days after your visit to their Website, when you are in the middle of something else - or within 10 minutes of being on their Website? 
I would rather get that call while it’s still fresh in my mind… whether I decide to take action or not.

 

Context

Context is required for a meaningful conversation with prospective customers, based on their buyer's progress in the IMPACT buying cycle. The HubSpot Contacts system provides excellent context to facilitate this conversation in the form of prior behavior and precise details of interactions. 

Responsive Sales Enablement

A responsive sales enablement system is required to quickly provide salespeople with the information they need to have a meaningful conversation with a prospect when they receive a  Signal that a contact is on their Website or has opened an email. The ability to follow-up the conversation immediately with an email with links and resources the buyer can use, while the conversation is still fresh in the buyer’s mind is an under-developed opportunity in most companies.

What is WittyParrot? 

WittyParrot is a responsive sales enablement platform.
WittyParrot helps you find, assemble, share and track digital information and makes it available in a widget that sits on your computer desktop, tablet or phone, whether you are on-line or off-line. 

WittyParrot is like iTunes for information. It enables you to quickly find and share content by simply dragging and dropping it into the target application, email tool or document. And like iTunes it keeps track of what gets used and what's relevant in your context.  

In a couple of clicks, you can find, drag content chunks from the widget into email, letters, documents, and web pages.  This solves a universal problem – consistent communication.

Through a unique combination of sales and marketing messaging alignment, inbound marketing tools, real-time Signals, and sales enablement support, facilitated by WittyParrot, this vision has become a reality. (Full disclosure, I am an investor in and marketing adviser to WittyParrot).  



Having an always-on, searchable desktop Widget, populated with most-used sales enablement material provides the context that salespeople need to have relevant conversations with prospective buyers and to immediately follow-up the call with a relevant note and resources. 

WittyParrot enables salespeople to instantly access appropriate stories and other supporting material (scripts, presentations, pdf’s, buyer personas, capabilities, website links, videos, pricing) from a Desktop Widget and drag and drop them onto the desktop for use in phone conversations, or into email, Word docs, or PowerPoint presentations for follow-up. 

We are working with a number of innovative technology companies to prove the Inbound Sales/ Responsive Sales Enablement concept and while it's too early to declare victory, early results are promising and interest from enablement professionals and thought leaders in marketing is very high.

Advanced Marketing Concepts is now delivering responsive sales engagement solutions for our B2B clients. We create the aligned sales and marketing messaging within WittyParrot and share the atomized messaging elements, content creation templates and sales ready messaging to sales, marketing and enablement teams. WittyParrot is an enabling technology to make sales and marketing alignment a reality 

Opt-in to keep abreast of this responsive sales enablement thread, find out more about WittyParrot and get early access to WittyParrot product.

Hubspot’s Inbound13 in Boston from 19-22 Oct. was the 4 ^th and best HubSpot User group and partner event I have attended and a milestone event for HubSpot.  

With 5300+ confirmed attendees, more than 1300 partners and outstanding keynotes, HubSpot made a very strong impression that they have arrived as a corporation to be reckoned with.

Beyond Inbound Marketing

Co-founder, Dharmesh Shah indicated a broader future for HubSpot beyond the traditional Inbound Marketing theme. The customer HubSpot seeks to serve wants inbound everything, not just Inbound Marketing and they want to be delighted with the experience of interacting with your company. While this wasn't a product announcement, Inbound Marketing, Inbound Sales and Inbound Customer Support make up the new  end-to-end, human-focused experience.... watch this space.

The HubSpot Methodology

HubSpot’s progress in the past 12 months

Co-founder Brian Halligan reviewed the achievments for the prior year.

• R&D investment up 58% YOY,
• 300 major product enhancements including custom lead-scoring, email A/B testing, iPhone and Android Apps, Social Publisher, Custom Reporting App. Product quality better, UI better
• Doubled investment in support. Av. support wait time 1 minute.
• 600 HubSpot employees
• 2 acquisitions in Chime and PrepWork  for IP and people for bottom of funnel developments
• 10,000 customers in just 6 years – and Brian still calls HubSpot a start-up.

Major product announcements:

• New Content Optimization System (code for CMS), this is the first of a new wave of CMS’ that will offer contextual personalization based on buying cycle maturity and responsive design to optimally render on any device.
• Social Inbox, a very powerful way to pull the needles out of the social media hay and to give context to the communication.
• Signals, a product incubated inside HubSpot that runs independent of HubSpot, to provide near real-time alerting. Signals is a freemium product that enables users to be notified when the email is opened, when a link is clicked, or when a lead or customer visits your Website. You can download Signals and start using it in a minute or two and prove its value.

Social Inbox

Context is a core theme for Hubspot's offering; today’s social media apps are all hay and no needles. Very early adopters of social media tools, reimagined how they work to match the modern buying experience.

• Easy to use, Brian demoed it. Listening for HubSpot on Twitter, lines next to pictures indicate context, prospect, lead, customer
• Create a stream – Who do you want to listen to? – Reuse lists in Contacts app.
• What do you want to listen for? “Inbound marketing” or “HubSpot”
• How would you like to be notified? Email, email digest, login to app?
• Awesome new social media stream, - orange stripes are leads… drill in and get additional context, who is rep, what contact record looks like. Get context, forward tweet to rep (who has context) to respond.
• Runs on iPhone.. Droid in a few months.
• Social Inbox created on top of Contacts - contacts is core to all HubSpot new apps.
• Set up list of leads per rep, keywords mentioned, get alert!

The Content Optimization System

Wildly competitive content management industry… no context. Then and Now.
Visitors keep getting the same experience regardless of #visits or status. Applies to 99.99% of Websites.

• Websites can't tell difference from complete stranger or customer or where you came from iPhone or computer (13% of HubSpot visitors from Mobile)
• Re-imagined for modern buying experience, optimized for where they are in buying cycle and what device they come from.
• CMS turns your brochure into a Website, COS turns your Website into your best sales rep
• Helps marketers accomplish the mission of thinking about the visitor as a human.
• Conversion rates much better for COS vs. static CMS - others in the market will follow HubSpot's lead.
• Demoed personalized landing page with context to give 3 different experiences for first time visitor, lead, customer.
• Demonstrated responsive design and difference between mobile and desktop versions of blog
• Complaints from designers in past with difficulty of designing on old CMS – (agreed)
• New COS, designers will love it,
• Context creates the inbound experience.

  Signals

• Big gap in sales technology available and what’s needed.
• Most technology built in 1990’s – how to enable reps to have context when context wasn’t even an afterthought in designing those tools .
• Dramatic power shift in sales - salespeople are now facilitators in the buyers journey, little control.
• Sales process – a problem for sales - lack context and ability to keep up - in sync.
• Signals was developed as Startup inside a HubSpot. HubSpot bought 2 companies this year to infuse context into sales.
• Signals lives inside other apps. HubSpots’ existing technology for lead revisits can take 20-30 minutes to deliver lead revisit notification into a browser. Signals does it in a minute. (Works in Outlook on Windows, not on Mac, works in SFDC and Gmail) Rep gets notified when the email is opened, notified when link is clicked, notified when a lead or customer visits the Website. When a salesperson picks up phone to call a prospect, know so much, more context, then ever.
• Don’t need anything to make it work, go to getsignals.com. Call to Action: Get sales and service set up on Signals. Basic version for email $0, SFDC and HubSpot $10/mo. 

HubSpot Partner Program Highlights

Exciting changes for Hubspot partners building on the success of the existing partner program that leads to 18% higher customer retention.

• HubSpot partner strategists will work with Partners to help move prospects through the buying process.
• Content to help generate leads has been expanded and enhanced for easier partner co-branding to drive more inbound lead conversions.
• Co-marketing with HubSpot and editorial support for partner featured articles on HubSpot main blog and social media to increase reach. 
• Shared landing pages on HubSpot main Website for registered leads to leverage HubSpot content and landing pages for nurturing for middle and bottom of funnel prospects. 
• Automatic lead registration connectors for HubSpot leads and synchronization with HubSpot to enable tighter collaboration for partners who install the software.
  
  

I recently d ownloaded Seth Godin's “The Icarus Deception” on Audible as my work habits have changed and I have a couple of 90 minute commutes every week. I consider it a real plus in the audio version that Seth reads it himself. 

Seth Godin is a visionary with a powerful message for anyone who will listen. 

I had the privilege of working closely with author Corey Sommers as a consultant for two years until Whiteboard Selling was sold to Corporate Visions in late 2012. This review of the book Whiteboard Selling - Empowering Sales through Visuals, by Corey Sommers and David Jenkins is an insider’s perspective.  

I Wish I Had This Book 2 Years Earlier

I wish I had this book when I started working with WhiteboardSelling in December 2010, as it would have accelerated my learning curve. 

I met serial entrepreneur, Rajesh Setty about two months ago as a result of an introduction from a friend. I went into the first meeting with Raj cold, having been referred in the morning and meeting in the afternoon and we hit it off straight away. After 30 minutes of intense conversation, I felt like I had know Raj for years. In that meeting, Rajesh demonstrated his new product to me, and after we were one minute into the demonstration, I had an Ah-ha moment and Rajesh had an OEM partner in me - I could use the technology he and his co-founder had developed to solve a messaging development problem I was working on.

I'm Upbeat about Upbeat

During our second meeting, he gave me a copy of a little yellow covered book, which he wrote in 2009, called " Upbeat: Cultivating the Right Attitude to Thrive in Tough Times". 

Prior to our the second meeting I checked out Rajesh's  personal Web page and read his extraordinary story.

If you haven't seen the movie " Slumdog Millionaire", it's a wonderful story about the experience of an Indian boy who escapes the desperate poverty and circumstance of being born in the slums of Bombay. His story is told through his travels and his life is enriched by his experiences (good and bad), where he acquires a general knowledge well beyond his station that he ultimately uses to complete the journey of a hero and win a million dollars TV show quiz game formatted on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". That is fiction, but it's a good story.

Rajesh Setty writes fiction and he writes a good story. His own story is a worthy and compelling read. Rajesh had read several hundred books by the time he was 9 years old, when he decided to try his hand at writing his own book. I know people who have read hundreds of books in their first 10 years, but I don't know anyone who wrote their first book at 9 years of age and despite 150 rejection letters, finally got it published at age 13.

Rajesh has written dozens more since in both a serious business tone, as well many fiction books in the crime mystery genre, however the fiction works were written in India and have not been translated into English.

A Small, But Powerful Gift

When Rajesh gave me his little book, I thanked him, put it in my bag and opened it in bed that night for a quick read before going sleep. That quick read turned into an hour and a monologue with my wife, punctuated with quotes, exclamations and references to particular insights and points of brilliance.

I have reread it twice since and feel compelled to write this review. Even though this book was written and published in 2009, as a shot in the arm for the general population feeling shell-shocked and helpless in the recession, 
timeless and relevant now, as it was then.

"Upbeat" is a slim volume of 90 pages, you should be able to read it in an hour or so, but don't let size fool you, it's packed with practical wisdom from someone who is in the field and current, an entrepreneur taking risks in the arena and relishing the spoils and disappointments that life brings. If you've read Viktor Frankl and like Seth Godin's writing and thinking, you'll like what Rajesh has to say. 

Rajesh suggests "For those of you who are thinking about doing something and you have been sitting on the sidelines, here is my $0.02 - if you want to grow at breathtaking speed and become someone that you will be proud of, the marketplace and the World has provided an opportunity again. Get off the wall and jump in." 

The book is about personal growth and the daily decisions and attitudes that we take that determine our short and long term future. Broken into 5 main chapters; The Trap, The Discipline, The Network, The Strategy and The Actions, each section has subsection headings like; The Daily Conversations, I Need a Shortcut, Be Accountable to Yourself, You Better Get "Better" Help, and Spend Less and Spend More.

The nuggets of wisdom in these paragraphs can only come from reading widely and playing the game at the highest level and they inspire you to think hard about some of the choices you make every day.

Rajesh writes, "I Need a ShortCut, - The paradox in life is that shortcuts always take longer and or/cost more - though it has not prevented people from trying them all the time." How true this is… in our popular American culture, we are taught winning is everything - no prizes for second, (what happened to being in the arena and playing the game with a straight bat?).


This distorted thinking creates a "do whatever it takes" approach to winning. What comes from this thinking is an inevitable fork in the road; the hard way or the shortcut – one of my former hero's Lance Armstrong is our current poster-boy for the short-cut....who's next - everyone's favorite runner?

Rajesh Setty's little yellow book "Upbeat" is a timeless tonic for anyone interested in playing the game (of life) at a higher level than they are currently and is highly recommended.  You can order it here.