Seth Godin released Linchpin a couple weeks ago, and it's a fantastic book. I received an advance copy a few months ago, and received a second copy in the mail earlier this week from Seth, with a request to pass it along.

I've done that, and want to pass along my first copy as well. I bought myself a Kindle version, so this first book is still brand-new.

If you want this free, brand-new copy of Linchpin, all you have to do is help me spread Seth's message. Retweet this post about being indispensable including my hashtag (@heinzmarketing) between now and midnight tomorrow (Wednesday, Feb 17) Pacific time. I'll then randomly select a number between one and however many retweets we have, and the random-numbered retweet gets the book.

It's a question not just of what you do that nobody else does, but of what results you enable - for your team, your business, your clients, your family, your friends, your professional network - that makes you irreplaceable. And highly valuable.

It's not always in what you do, but sometimes in the way you do it. The speed with which you get things done. The approach you take, the focus on results, the obsession with benefits to those around you.

And it's not just about you. Your team, your product, your company all can be indispensable. Indispensability is scarcity plus value, which puts you in high demand at a premium price.

Being indispensable has many angles, manifestations and benefits. What are yours?

To learn more about being indispensable, read Seth Godin's new book Linchpin.

The right buyers for your product or service need what you’re selling.  You represent a link between where they are today and where they want to be moving forward.  They want to buy from you.

This applies, of course, to buyers that are not only qualified, but are ready to buy.  The vast majority of qualified buyers just aren’t there yet.  According to a recent MarketingSherpa report, as little as 15 percent of sales leads are both qualified and ready to buy.

Smart sales organizations take a “selling vs simmering” approach to their prospective customers.  If the prospect is in an active buying cycle, they’re ready to work with sales.  The role of sales, in this context, isn’t to sell as much as help the buyer buy what they already need.

Simmering is quite different.  Simmering takes a qualified buyer that doesn’t have an immediate need, and ensures that when they are ready to buy, the decision of whom to buy from is essentially already made.  That means staying in touch on a regular basis, but purposefully not selling.

This takes patience, and discipline.  When your sales manager is breathing down your neck to close more business this quarter, it’s tempting to reach down to some of the prospects that are simmering and push them into a sale.  But those prospects aren’t ready to buy, and pushing them to move more quickly will not only decrease your conversion rates and waste your time, but will also put off the customer such that they may seek products or services (when they’re ready to buy) from someone else.

Your best chance at getting the maximum sales output and conversion rate from the prospects in your pipeline is to know who’s ready to buy now, and who needs more simmering.

There’s a project or opportunity in front of you.  You have two choices.

On one hand, you can just do it.  Have a bias for action, get something together, put it out there, see what works.  Don’t worry about making it perfect, just figure out – quickly – whether it’s worth spending more time on, or shutting down and moving on.

On the other hand, you can take your time.  Do a SWOT analysis, assess the risks, make sure your initial market test is well thought-out, well designed and measured accurately.  This takes time, inherently makes you think about risk, and that risk analysis will shut down the majority of opportunities before they see the light of day.

So which approach is best?  Do you have a bias for action, or does risk analysis/paralysis help you focus on more successful projects from the get-go?

There’s probably no single, right answer for everybody.  There’s also no reason you can’t have different approaches for different types of projects, or different parts of your business.

But I will say this.  No matter how much research, analysis or risk assessment you do, you still have no idea how the market will react to something until you put it out there.

Maybe 10-20 years ago, PR was more about the relationships you had with the right press.  Reporters and their publications were the gatekeeper to getting your story heard, and PR professionals were the gatekeeper to those gatekeepers.  But even then, relationships were only as good (and ultimately as successful) as the story you had to offer.

Today, story matters more than ever.  Yes, a good relationship with press helps you break through the clutter and get a few extra minutes to pitch your story.  But a good story stands on its own.

Plus, you don’t have to rely on a finite set of traditional media outlets to give your story a voice to the masses.  Today, you can publish on your own.  Self-publishing won’t have the audience others have, but that’s not the point.  Share that story in a public forum, that both press and your direct customers/prospects/constituents can read, and a good story can get legs, find unique angles through other storytellers and redistributors, and be shared with countless others. 

Traditional PR was about telling the story of the company in question.  Press releases touted what a company recently accomplished.  Those are stories, but not very interesting stories.

But it’s more than just shifting focus from relationships to good stories.

The stories that get noticed and retold today are about others.  They’re about the impact you have on your customers, their industry, and the people they work with in turn.

Tom Peters wrote recently that people don’t care about your story.  They care about their own story.  Your job, he said, was to become a primary character in your customer’s story.

So if PR today is about the story, and the best stories are about the impact you can have on others, how does that change the storytelling your organization is doing today?  What do you say, where do you say it, and what do you want people who read or hear that story do next?

Who are the customers you go to every time with new product ideas, to see how they react?

What is the market at the very core of what you do - what you sell, what you provide, what you enable?

Who are the people, companies or groups who first saw your product or service, and immediately understood what it was for?  Immediately understood how to use it, and how to benefit from it, with little to no explanation, training or discussion needed?

Those customers are at the tip of your spear.  They represent your primary entry into the market.

When you're just getting started, that's who you focus on.  It's who you build for, count on for feedback, good and bad, and who have the passion and endurance to stick by you as you improve, iterate and mature.

And no matter how big you get, no matter how much you expand to new markets, new products, new extensions - you can't lose focus on these early adopters.  Their guidance and support will lead you longer and higher than you may think.

Hat tip to Howard and TA for talking about this recently.