Seth Godin

I’m not a pack-rat, but I’ll admit a couple of bookshelves in the business section of my “library” are a bit overrun by books I’ve read, plan to read and some books I will probably never read. The other day Tom was doing some unsolicited (and unwanted) Spring cleaning and ran across a book given to me by the marketing guru Seth Godin. Tom looked at the cover and asked me “Vickie, what the #&%* is a meatball sundae?” He held the book up and I laughed because it does indeed have a photograph of a pretty unappealing meatball sundae (as well as a funny shot of Seth in a chef’s cap).

Still laughing I explained that, according to Seth, a meatball sundae is what results from a disconnect between your marketing and your message. In other words they are totally out of sync – you get a meatball sundae when you mix together two good ideas, like meatballs and sundaes, and the combination results in one bad idea. In my 27 years of managing Vickie Milazzo Institute, as well as teaching and certifying legal nurse consultants, I’ve seen a lot of meatball sundaes cross my desk. Some were my own (or at least my marketing department’s), others came from legal nurse consultants I was mentoring.

Here’s a great legal nurse consulting example. You’ve done your research on the Internet, browsed the attorney-prospect’s website pretty closely and are ready to send your first batch of marketing materials. Instead of positioning yourself properly and marketing to the attorney-prospect’s strengths and core business (personal injury cases), you send materials including and discussing medical malpractice cases; you also emphasize your experience in the ED without explaining its relevancy to the attorney. You just sent the attorney-prospect a meatball sundae, a perfect serving of a mix of bad ideas. Not only did you send the wrong materials to the attorney-prospect, you blew any chance of appearing to be savvy and sophisticated by sending him materials that won’t interest him from the beginning and will put him off from reading the rest of your promotional packet. So, no matter how appealing (and tasty) your promotional materials are, if the attorney-prospect doesn’t have the appetite for the meatball sundae you just served him, you’re not going to get his business.

As a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant you’ve been trained by the Institute not to send meatball sundaes to your attorney-prospects. We’ve taught you how to research attorneys, their practices and their firms to be sure you’re properly targeting your market. We’ve taught you positioning strategies that keep you in the mind of the attorney-prospect. We even mentor you on the proper responses for the interview questions you’re likely to be asked.

I can’t be there to stop you from stuffing a meatball sundae into an envelope and addressing it to an attorney-prospect or heading into the attorney-prospect’s office for an interview and dropping a meatball sundae on her desk during the interview. So I thought today is a good day to remind you to get out there, get cooking on your marketing and make sure you know what you’re serving to attorneys.

Personally, I prefer my meatballs with spaghetti and my sundaes with hot caramel.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share how you avoid sending attorneys meatball sundaes.

I just finished Eclipse, the third book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. My sister, Karen gave me the first book and got me started on the 4-part series. Reading Meyer’s books is like eating a bag of salty, hot, buttered (real butter) popcorn – once you start, you can’t put them down and often consume more than you should.

What’s funny though, is that about the same time I started the first book in the Twilight series, I was already reading Richard Russo’s incredible book Bridge of Sighs. The books are as different as their authors. I love reading Russo because his work is deep, rich, analytical, thought provoking and has some of the best character development in literature today. But I also love an author like Meyer whose books, arguably written for the female teenager, are swift, shallow and riveting all at the same time. While I appreciate and enjoy both authors, I’ve completed three of Meyer’s books and have yet to finish Russo’s. So should I be skipping Meyer for the more challenging Russo?

It’s arguable that reading of any kind improves one’s mind. We want to feed our minds a healthy diet, but a little mental junk food once in a while is actually a good thing. When I first met Tom I was only reading business books and serious literature. He brought me a frivolous book and said, “If you put yourself on a diet of nothing but turkey, rice and broccoli, you’ll soon lose your enthusiasm for eating.”

Whatever you choose to read, be sure to read every day. Feeding your mind a steady diet of nothing but TV in lieu of reading is like feeding a Kentucky Derby thoroughbred a diet of Lay’s Potato Chips and Cheetos^®. After a point, your mind will start to lose its edge and you’ll no longer be the competitive legal nurse consulting machine you once were. You’ve got to train that brain muscle, just like any other muscle in your body. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

In addition to the tchotske souvenirs from our global vacations and the family photos in our library at home, you can find a good mix of literature, philosophy, fiction, history and just plain old fun. On those shelves, my Harry Potter books reside comfortably with books by the Dali Llama, Bernard Fall, Sir Edmund Hillary, Alice Hoffman and Martin Cruz Smith. If you poked around you’d find science fiction in the form of a first printing of Frank Herbert’s magnificent Dune, a Bible illustrated by Salvodor Dali and a copy of Good Night Moon. Bill Gates, Seth Godin, Tim Ferriss and other gurus hang out in my home office. They seem to enjoy debating each other from a separate bookshelf of business, marketing, legal, medical and nursing books comfortably out of my sight.

In short, as much as I’d like to read Twilight from dusk to dawn to dusk, I need to read other things and so do you. It’s fun to read light fiction and it’s a great way to stimulate your learning muscles. Just mix it up a bit. Balance the Dennis Lehane with the Geoff Colvin and you’ll keep your mind in its best shape.

So yes, reading Twilight will make you smarter than not reading Twilight – as long as that’s not all you’re reading.

I’m off to start number four in the Twilight series and vow to finish Bridge of Sighs this week.

Success Is Inside!