Marketing Brain Trust
Author: Paul Lemberg

Rest assured that no matter how smart you are, you do not know
everything about marketing. You don't even know anything about
marketing your product! You can't figure everything out
yourself, or see all the angles, or provide every bit of
critical thinking.

The solution? Create a marketing brain trust.

Use the mastermind principle which says more brainpower brought
to bear on an issue means more ideas and greater insight. Gather
together a mixed bag of thoughtful, intelligent people who have
an interest in helping you create breakthroughs in your
enterprise.

Adding brains to the brain trust produces non-linear results.
Breakthrough results. Unreasonable results. Quantum Results.
Because of the interactions among several people's ideas
bouncing off each other, the increased thinking - effectiveness
can be multiplicative or even exponential.

Enroll people into your marketing brain trust. Find people who
have a vested interest in your success, or the success of your
business. You can't have a great brain trust unless people are
truly committed.

Your marketing brain trust can take different forms. If you
want it to be official (and tax deductible) call it your Board
of Advisors. Make it the board's job to help you pilot your
venture. You can even ask each advisor to be accountable for a
specific segment of information or knowledge, but their real
role and true benefit is to work as a group - to release the
mind synergy.

Meet periodically - monthly or quarterly - in person, or by
phone, video conference, the Internet, or some combination.
Check in with individual brain trust members between meetings.
Keep them up to date on your progress; let them know how you
are doing. You can pay your advisors an honorarium, or give
them options on future ownership.

A different approach is to form a marketing mastermind group.
This is less formal and less committed than a Board of
Advisors. Gather the mastermind members together periodically
and provide refreshments - dinner or perhaps just a case of
wine. (I find that red is better than white for masterminding.)
Entertain them while they ponder specific issues with you.

The job of the marketing mastermind is to bring alternate
perspectives, help you create ideas, and in general, think
things through in a way that looks different than you would
yourself.

Let your master-minders know topics in advance, and provide
them with appropriate backgrounders to get their creative
juices flowing. You may also ask them to suggest topics based
on what they already know about you.

Try to make this group diverse. Your mastermind members need
not be familiar with your particular business; in fact they
need not be business people at all. Get artists, scientists,
musicians, technologists, writers, humanitarians, hackers,
theologians, philosophers, and psychologists - all sorts of
creative thinkers, along with marketers, entrepreneurs and
executives, to complement those members familiar with your
specific business.

You should limit the size of your mastermind group to no more
than ten or twelve people, although you can get started with as
few as three or four. Really, any number is going to be an
increase over just you.

Lastly, create a simple Roster of Marketing Brains. This is the
network of friends, associates and acquaintance you can call on
who are expert thinkers in specific areas, and might have some
vested interest in seeing you succeed. Some of these people you
barter with, some do it because they think what you are up to is
cool and going to make a difference in the world, some of them
you pay as consultants. You may never gather all these people
together at once, but assemble them in ad-hoc groups to tackle
whatever issues are at hand.

These three marketing brain trust formats are not mutually
exclusive; you might have them all. After all, the when it
comes to creative minds, the more the merrier.

- Paul Lemberg

(c) Copyright Paul Lemberg. All rights reserved


About The Author: Business Coach http://paullemberg.com and
Strategist, Paul Lemberg is the President of Quantum Growth
Coaching, the world's only fully systemized business coaching
http://quantumgrowthcoaching.com program designed to create
More Profits and More Life™ for entrepreneurs.

Please use the HTML version of this article at:
http://www.isnare.com/html.php?id=41324