Image by Jam Adams via Flickr

Last week I attended Inc’s Newpreneuer event and was blessed to hear Tom Searcy speak. The theme of the presentation was to hunt for big sales. He talked about his own techniques and how any entrepreneuer can apply it to their own sales strategy. The part I remember most is when he alluded to poker and how one of the best poker techniques also transcends into the best sales techniques.

In poker, it takes 90% skill, and 10% luck.

The same thing holds true in Sales. A lot of the time you will hear complaints about how someone else got the sale because they’re prettier, in the right place the right time, or they knew the right people. Sometimes this is true but usually the 90% skill is what brought them to that point or helped them close the deal. They may have used a connection to get in contact with the decision maker, but it took effort and time to make the meetings and convince them to say yes in the end.

The 90% skill comes from numerous factors, but one important one is knowing when to fold.

Most poker players fold anywhere from 80% to 90% of their hands. Tom mentioned that knowing when to call it quits on sales (toxic prospects – those who say keep saying later, next week, etc, black-hole potentials – “can you change the colors?” “what if we wanted less? would that change the price?”.) will save you time to spend on the good leads. When you fold bad hands, it will let you have the chips to play the better hands. In poker you want to play your pocket pairs and your Ace Kings. When you fold the bad hands, it ensures that you will have more than enough chips to play with when you finally get dealt the good cards. You have to figure out what type of potentials equal to the big pots so that you make sure you spend more time with them.

My Pocket Sevens and playing them right.

In Poker, starting with a pocket pair is a wonderful way to start. When you have middle pair though it takes a little more work to win the pot. You want to play against as few players as possible going into the pot, so you usually raise the stakes a little to scare away some people. With my prospect client, I laid out the best deal I could up front when pitching them. I told them everything they wanted to know, educated them on the product, and helped them develop a package that fit their needs and budget. The prospect was looking at my company and one other. Now I just had to hope that their hole cards aren’t that good, or he only has two high cards, maybe King-Queen off suit. The next step in poker, is to watch the flop. All of a sudden there’s all high cards and my pocket sevens don’t seem that hot anymore. The prospect came back saying this other company offered similar services but for a much cheaper price. The other player raised on the flop seeing he had the better hand. This is where I have to decide to fold, or call hoping that he is either bluffing or I can catch another seven on the turn. I ultimately chose to fold.

In Sales, the price card is one of the biggest cards prospects like to play. You have to decide if you want to play along or cut your losses. Sometimes it makes sense to play along and others, even when you play you might not win in the end. The best skill to learn is knowing when to fold. Once you’ve mastered this, you’ll pick your battles better, and land the better deals.

One of our favorite clients, Cookies for Kids’ Cancer, just received the greatest news: Joan Cusack has signed on as the charity’s spokesperson. This plus Glad’s partnership has propelled Cookies for Kids’ Cancer to higher levels. We want to congratulate them for the wonderful announcement.

P.S. Their cookies are delicious and make great holiday gifts!

Design

• 50 Incredible Examples of HDR Photography: HDR is amazing and, at times, weird. I’d like to see a whole movie like this.
• HDR Tutorial: Now that you’ve seen HDR photography, have a shot at it via Photoshop. It isn’t true HDR, but, still an awesome effect.

Development

• 40+ Desert Island Web Development Tools: Some nice portable applications to keep programming and designing
• Google Invites Everyone to Catch It’s Real Time Wave: Mmmm… Google… You wonderful, masterful, beings.

Business & Freelance

• 33 Highly Useful Presentation Tools: With these you may be able to pull off a much better presentation
• Four Freelancing Mistakes You Don’t Need To Make: Some good, basic tips to follow. Give it a read.
• Crafting A Killer About Page: The about page is very important. It gets people to know you and more interested in your work.

Nerdy Geeky Entertaining

• Spell Your Way to Victory in Scribblenauts: Whooo! I can’t wait to try out this game. Very innovative and looks very fun. Even if the puzzle is too much you get to let out your frustrations in the game. No more freaking out and breaking random objects! Yay!
• Fold Your Own Sky King Paper Airplane: Why are you reading this and not making a epic paper plane?

Absolute Fail

• Man’s Facebook Status Given Book Deal: There is nothing else to say…
• Lady Gaga Totally Looks like Slim Jim: What sort of performance was that? She’s so weird. Check out the look-a-likes though, fun stuff.

Design

• NotePods: Notepads that look like iPhones. Kinda fun.
• Blue Retro Grunge Text Effect and Icons: I think they used my couch as a texture… Creepy.

Development

• Ultimate IE6 Cheat Sheet: How to Fix 25+ Bugs: Oh, IE, you fickle bastard… How unloved by programmers and designers alike.
• Complete Guide to CSS Font Stacks:This one is a bit design and development. A great article (with articles within) about Font Stacks: dos and don’ts, myths and legends, good and bads.

Business & Freelance

• America’s Most Promising Start-Ups: Profiling Start-Ups Around The U.S.: This was fun and interesting to go through. Some of these businesses are very intuitive, some are straight-forward. What they have done is quite amazing, and, for some, how quickly it’s been done is surprising.
• The Kinds of Employees You Want to Hire: Do you want Forrest Gump or a motivational employee? This article dives deeper into the area of who you should, or should want to, hire.

Nerdy Geeky Entertaining

• Aion is Live!: The long-awaited Aion is finally up and ready to go! I’ve got a few friends playing…AKA I need new friends. I am now accepting applications. Just state your name and hobbies. I’m not that picky.
• Man Spends 2 Years Building Dalek out of 480,000 matches: He was bet to do this as a challenge…by his wife… Yeah, dude, she just wanted you out of her hair. I wonder what was bet…

Absolute Fail

• Costume Fail: It’s not Halloween yet, but this is an amazing costume (for your dog)
• Costume Win: And another one for your cat. Yay!
• And for my favorite image in quite a long time…….
  

Design

• Create an Intense Movie Poster: This would be fun to do. It is a pretty long and in-depth tutorial, but the end result is great.
• 66 Vectors for Green Website Design: We have been doing quite a few designs for green companies lately. Some inspiration is always nice when creating new logos and web site designs. Here are some nice inspiring vectors.

Development

• Get Ready for HTML 5: I keep adding links to HTML 5 articles. It’s here! It’s <style=”clear:both;”> Get used to it!

Business & Freelance

• SEO for MSN: This is a very true article. Most people do their SEO work around Google, for good reasons, but, there are still millions of people using other engines that do their indexing differently.
• Why Revamp Your Brand Design: Some great reasons why to, and why it helps. Remember, we at Border7 offer Logo Deisgn, Business Design, and more!

Nerdy Geeky Entertaining

• Star Wars: The Old Republic: The new Star Wars MMO coming out. Are you as excited as us? I hope so!
• Major MMO Publishers Sued For Patent Infringement: It is a sad world when you can make a killing by constant meaningless lawsuits.
• Iron Man 2: Whoo! This is going to be amazing. Why isn’t it here today!? There’s some nice movie stills that you can check out for now.

Absolute Fail

• Melting Ice Caps Expose Hundreds of Secret Lairs : My favorite is how fast the ice melted within a week.
• Suspect Asks Victim for Date, Cops Say : Hmm… Just smart, or desperate, or so clever we can’t even imagine!

• Horizontal Navigation Menus: Trends, Patterns, and Best Practices: A good look at what to do and what not to do. This post also brings about some nice design points and also points of organization and structure.
• Swiss table slices into portable workstations: It’s the simple but interesting things in life that still amaze me. How come this hasn’t been thought of before? Much like: turning your dinner table into portable sections for T.V. Dinners. Woot!

Development

• Search Engine Optimization 101: This is definitely worth the read through. We here at Border7 are getting more and more into SEO and love finding articles like this.
• Detect Which Browsers Are Visiting Your Site: Ah, yes, how wonderful life would be if all browsers would just display everything identically. Until then, here’s some ways to see who’s visiting with what browser.

Business & Freelance

• How to Write an Effective To Do List: Where would we be without organization? Somewhere running in circles within the depths of chaos… To-Do: Write a To-Do List.
• What a Blog Can Do For Your Small Business: Blogging isn’t just for pre-teens who want to complain about how Luke left them for Shannon then totally went with Delilah to Homecoming! That’s what Shannon gets! Steal my Luke like that…

Nerdy Geeky Entertaining

• AMD’s New Eyefinity: Sexy. You all know it’s true! Getting 6 monitors to run smoothly off one card? I can’t wait!
• How to Build a Kick-Ass MAME Arcade Cabinet from an Old PC: Something for the true gamers out there. The few and far between, you know who you are. Those who still say,”It’s a secret to everybody” (no kids, not the WoW quest)

Absolute Fail

• 23 Tasteless Street and Store Signs: Some are Total Fails while others stand out to be Absolute Wins
• Area Man To Hangout At McDonaldas: I hate their breakfast, so I can relate to this story. I feel for Mr. Turnbee…
• Special Fail From Border7: While out on a field trip to Target, some of the Border7 team spotted this upon the freeway. We sure hope that this was an employee just transferring some trailers, but, we love to believe that it’s just someone who couldn’t handle such a large truck.
  

  U-Haul Fail

We here at Border7 would also like to give our condolences to those who were directly affected by 9/11/01. Even if all of America can not all agree upon the happenings, why it occurred, or what to do after, there is one thing we can all agree upon: We will never forget.

• If Famous Graphic Artists Were Web Designers…: Some interesting work here for both art and web design. I’d really suggest giving this a look. It may inspire you a bit, too.
• 8:00 A Typography Project: This is clever. It would really get those designer/imaginative juices flowing right when you start your day.

Development

• Learn 3 Excellent JavaScript Libraries at Once: A very nice tutorial on JS and some AJAX. Simple and wonderfully done.
• Backgrounds in CSS: Everything You Need To Know: Good information that is laid out very simply. Also, there is some good information about CSS 3 and the changes it has with backgrounds.
• Code Snippets: This is a very cool little guide. For those times when you just cant think…it happens a lot to me, at least.

Business & Freelance

• Hexagon.CC: A more social and “legit” BitTorent? Quite a business to undertake with all the scaremongering and talking down of P2P.
• How to Discount (If You Insist): A nice article on how to, when to, and why give discounts.
• How to Give a Lousy Presentation: This is humorous, and true. We have all seen it before as well. I have to say I love the type-writter text decoration in PowerPoint. Some nice sound effects for each letter coming in, ooooh yeah! That’s how I win them over!

Nerdy Geeky Entertaining

• Happy Birthday Google Chrome: Aw… They grow up so fast! One year and 7.37% of people using it? Way to go Google!
• The Beatles: Rock Band: Now, if you’ve read some of the other FTW Fridays, you’ll know I’m more of a Guitar Hero player. This seems interesting. I like the multiple singing, it makes it more and more of a party game. Though, it is hard for me to get people to sing as is…….
• Sony’s 3D Television: I’m not into this whole 3D stuff. Not until it is like .hack// or The Matrix, that is.

Absolute Fail

• Photoshop Fail: Impressing the ladies, one fail at a time.
• Juxtaposition Fail: Way to go Nestle, or Northridge Liquor Store, not sure who.
• Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids: I think my mom does this to me. Uh-oh… I have some photos to delete!

They are going to be showcased tonight on E!’s Daily 10. As you can see they have Catt Sadler on the front page showing some amazing clothes.

Hello! For all you vector lovers, here’s a freebie! Full vector file (.ai) of some of the dinosaurs and cavemen characters we use in our site and materials! Do what you like with them! Put them in a funny scene, have a pokedino battle, send them off to college.. oh they grow up so fast! *sniffle

Click here to download file…

Design

• Mastering Custom Brushes: I’ve recently become addicted to making my own Photoshop brushes, but I haven’t tried this method.
• Quick Tip: Preparing Line Drawings for Coloring in Photoshop: If any of you are artists out there, here is a nice simple tutorial.
• The Design Inspiration: A good showcase of everything design; images, web sites, patterns, logos, fonts, etc…

Development

• Building Web Pages With HTML 5: I’m excited about the new DOCTYPE. Is it nerdy I get goosebumps just thinking about it? <!DOCTYPE html> Oooh! Sexy…
• CSS Prism by Ryan Berg: This is an interesting tool. Reads all of the color hashes from your CSS files and allows you to play around the spectrum to maybe get a new look for your site.
• Typekit: We will soon be able to embed and link to fonts, this will make things so much easier and entertaining. Now, comes Typekit. They are going to be a typeface hosting service which will provide vetted fonts which you can add into your website’s CSS”

Business & Freelancing

• Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips: More on Viral Marketing and how Twitter can help grow your business.
• The Man Behind the Memes: I never understood all of the references before now.

Nerdy Geeky Entertaining

• Addiction Therapists Signing Up to World of Warcraft: This just makes all of us gamers look bad…
• Games That Design Themselves: With how fast AI is developing, this isn’t too surprising.

Absolute Fail

• An Urn That Looks Like Your Head: The title says it all.
• Cake Wreks: This makes me laugh and want cake.