Joe Calloway quotes: the business brainiac’s best content.
“What is it that top performers do that any of us could do if we just chose to?”
“It’s not easy to succeed in business, but it’s not a mystery. I don’t believe there are any secrets to success. I think the ideas that work are right out there in the open for all of us. So it’s a matter of getting intentional about using those ideas and doing the hard work necessary to execute on those ideas.”
“If you can learn the difference between a distraction and an opportunity, that’s a big deal.”
“You can have what you think is the greatest idea in the world, and be very passionate about it, but if other people don’t want it, if they don’t see the need for it, then you’ve got a hobby, you don’t have a business.”
“Instead of telling people what they should do, I tell them to think about what they should stop doing.”
“Pick a lane and let it go. I encourage you to focus on a particular area of expertise and to let go of the other distractions that are holding you back.”
“Winners in business aren’t the ones who do the most things; the winners are the ones who do the most important things.”
“Over the years, little by little, I’ve learned that it makes me a lot of money over the long haul to stick with what I do best and let other people do what they do best.”
“As we simplify, we increase the likelihood of success.”
“In order to get to simplicity, you have to have focus.”
“Focus means clarity. Clarity means knowing what is most important.”
“Complication freezes you into uncertainty and inaction.”
“Getting focused is the path to simplicity, and simplicity is the path to success and fulfillment.”
“Successful people have the ability to make the complicated simple.”
“The potential problem with planning is that you can fall in love with the planning and never get to the doing. If you know your stuff, then you’ve planned enough to have the confidence to implement well. The goal of planning is implementing well. Thus, the plan is nothing; it’s all about being ready for what should happen next.”
“Learn early on what fits, what doesn’t fit. Warren Buffett once said, ‘Successful people say yes a lot. Extremely successful people say no to almost everything.’ What he meant by that was extremely successful people have developed clarity and focus around what matters most to them. They say no to other things.”
“I think it serves people really well to say ‘no’ more often, because it actually creates opportunity for the right things.”
“Follow your natural rhythm. If you tend to do your best work early in the morning, that’s when you should do priority work.”
“If people worked harder on improving the quality of the speech, the selling part would be much easier.”
“Don’t strive to be a leader in your category. Create a different category, and be the only one in it. Don’t copy. Create.”
“I’m all for being different and the most effective way to be different is to be better. Listen, if you want to be different, wear a funny hat, but that’s not necessarily going to get you more business. I will say this: being different could initially, short-term, drum up some business, but if you’re not better, that business is going to go away. The key? When you look at businesses that have been able to sustain success in the marketplace, it’s because they are better than their competition in some respect. I read one time a computer consulting company had this as kind of a motto. They said: ‘Buzzers and bells wear off. Quality never does.'”
“I don’t know what I’m selling until I know what they’re buying.”
“Do great work. Make a better product. Give better service.”
“Doing great work is the best marketing strategy you can have.”
“Our goal should always be to do that which creates value for our customers.”
“The single greatest competitive advantage out there is satisfied customers.”
“The key idea is this: the single biggest factor in your marketing, your sales, in the growth of your business, and I mean, the single biggest factor without question is the quality of the experience that you create for your customers. Whether it’s a good experience or a bad experience, now more than ever before, they’re going to talk about it.”
“The old number used to be—I heard it for years—a satisfied customer will tell four or five people. A dissatisfied customer will tell up to 20. You can change the math on that now because a satisfied customer may tell 1,000 people. A dissatisfied customer might tell 2,000 people, given the advent of social media, chat rooms, all of that. What people tend to do is they say how can I manipulate social media in my favor or in my defense and they’re missing the point. You don’t manipulate social media. You create an experience that causes positive word of mouth. That’s the key.”
“People aren’t really interested in what you say about yourself. People are interested in what other people say about you.”
“What drives business, to me, is what my customers say on social media. That’s my number one priority is doing the work that creates the positive word of mouth.”
“Here’s the formula that I think most people would agree with, which is… do people, meaning, if not most people, certainly lots of people… do people tend to go on social media and talk about the things in their lives quite naturally without you or me or anybody else prompting them to do so? The answer is yes. People go on social media and talk about what they like, what they don’t like, what was fun, what was awful. I think it used to be, in fairly recent history, that marketing consisted of, when it comes to the internet, ‘I need to get people to go on the internet and talk about me.’ You really don’t have to worry about that. They’re going to talk about you whether you like it or not. Let’s pull back to the source of their conversation, which is their experience.”
“I saw the greatest post. They said people used to buy the chutney, meaning a jam. People used to buy the chutney because it was in a cool bottle. Now they buy the chutney because they like the chutney. Meaning the wrapping doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s what’s inside because everybody’s saying this is great chutney! You should buy some! That’s why they buy it. Step number one is making better chutney.”
“I’d pour everything I’ve got into doing good work: 80% of my time and effort and energy goes into product quality and improvement. That is my marketing, because if I do good enough work, there’s no way I can keep people from talking about it, and that is what brings me more work.”
“Forbes magazine said positive word of mouth is without question the most powerful factor in buying decisions today. It is.”
“Do great work. If your work is really good, you won’t be able to keep people from saying good things about it.”
“It’s in my DNA now, because it’s such a natural part of doing business… for you to accomplish what you want, certainly for your business to succeed, you have to follow this rule. You’ve got to make sure the other guy wins. I don’t mean this in some ‘let’s all hold hands and sing kumbaya.’ No, folks, I’m saying this is the way the real world works. If you make someone lose, number one, to reference back to what we were just saying, making somebody lose that’ll go on the internet and tell everybody you made them lose. Not only that, they will stop giving you their money and they’ll take it somewhere else.”
“The people that I do business with, the companies that I am loyal to, are the ones that make sure that I win. It’s the simplest, most powerful, and often most misunderstood idea in the world. It’s not about being precious and nice, although it is a good thing to build up a back log of people who have positive feelings about you, but… I heard a friend of mine say once, ‘I feel like I’ve got reverse paranoia. I feel like everybody’s out to help me.’ If you play win-win, that’s what happens. Everybody ends up out to help you.”
“The only exception to win-win is there can be some short-term exceptions, but you know the thing is I’m perfectly willing to take a short-term loss, if it will get me a long-term win.”
“There’s times that I will give something to a customer and on that transaction, I may even lose money. Long-term, I’ve lucked into relationship. I’ve created an ongoing stream of income from that customer. Yeah, it really comes down to a matter of common sense.”
“If you want to do something to build your business, that’s a good place to be is this policy of immediate response. It’s one of the three things that are the absolute cores of the success of my business. Whatever success I’ve experienced, one of the three pillars has been decades of immediate response to people and it is priceless.”
“In business, if somebody says to me, ‘I’m not going to immediately respond to customers, I’ve got other things to do,’ my first question is, ‘Explain to me what you’re doing that is more important to your business than an immediate response to a customer?’ Honestly, I’m not saying stay up all night or don’t listen. I’m the first one that walks away from work to go be with my kids. My business doesn’t run me. I run my business. Part of my business is immediate response to customers.”
“You must execute with consistency. Do that, and you become magnetic.”
“Consistency of performance can be the most powerful differentiator of all.”
“Create a ‘let go of list.’ There is great wisdom and power in this idea, as you can’t accomplish the things you aspire to until you clear the space for them to happen.”
“The quality of your life is largely determined by the quality of your relationships.”
“Think about every person in the past three days that has made a favorable impression on you. What was the common factor?”
“When you say no to the wrong people, it opens up the space for the right people to come in.”
“If you hire the right people, you can totally turn them loose as long as they understand the direction that the business is going, you’ll be successful.”
“This is such a cliché, but it’s true: now more than ever, you gotta be flexible, you gotta be willing to change.”
“If I’m doing the exact same thing today that I was doing a year ago, then I am, to a certain extent, irrelevant because everything changes all the time. I have to try and stay one step ahead of that.”
“You have to change to stay relevant. You have to improve, you have to innovate. But you’ve always got to create value in the eyes of the customers, otherwise it won’t work.”
“For me, a startup business, as much as anything else, is an information-gathering process.”
“Information and ideas are everywhere, and if you’re not proactively going after them, then shame on you. It’s gonna hurt your business; it’s gonna hurt your career.”
“Eighty-one percent of U.S. online consumers’ purchase decisions are influenced by their friends’ social media posts.”
“I’m not a big fan of buzzers and bells to differentiate (anything that comes close to a gimmick) because those wear off.”
“New ideas really jazz me up. And people would prefer to hear relevant information.”
“From an early age I was into selling stuff. I mowed a million yards, I raked a trillion yards. I think part of that came from my dad… if there was something special that I wanted, he would say, ‘That’s great, how much money do you have saved up?'”
“I stumbled onto the speaking business after working as a trainer in the real estate industry. I attended my first NSA Convention in 1989… and determined that NSA was a place I needed to be. I greatly admire humorists and the skill of being funny on purpose. In fact, I recommend Jerry Seinfeld’s movie, Comedian, to my clients because the movie focuses not only on the craft of writing, but also on the principle of doing the necessary work to be really good.”
“I just am really good at paying attention. And that was my technique and my method, and I do it to this day. My job is to study the marketplace, and to look for individuals and organizations, businesses large and small, across the board, every kind of industry, and profession, any business you can imagine, and what I look for is quite simply this: who are the ones who are the market leaders who are successful and able to sustain that success?”
“In a few years, when you’re being interviewed about how fabulous your life is and how great your career is, and the interviewer says, ‘Was there a turning point for you?’ I want you to say that there was. ‘I remember I started thinking of what I needed to let go of. And everything changed.’”
“[His favorite quote] You have to work hard to get your thinking clean enough to make it simple, but it’s worth it in the end because once you get there you can move mountains (Steve Jobs).”
