The Trumark Index™ : Introduction

Understanding your true marketing personality can help you achieve your full potential and experience greater success and fulfillment in your work, says Bill Bishop, the creator of The TruMark Index™.

"The better you understand your real nature and inclinations, as it relates to business and marketing, the easier it is for you to take full advantage of your strengths, and minimize the negative aspects of your weaknesses," Bishop says. "It also helps you develop more powerful goals and craft effective marketing strategies more in keeping with your true personality."

The TruMark Index™ is a proprietary personality profile developed by Bishop and a team of advisors headed by Dr. Virginia McFarlane, a Toronto-based physician who specializes in psychotherapy. "We developed the index by combining my experience in business and marketing, with the advisory group's in-depth knowledge of human psychology," Bishop says. "Together, we developed a questionnaire, and a profiling methodology that gives entrepreneurs and business people tremendous insight into their personal inclinations, motivations, aspirations, communications style, and creative drive."

Based on the principles of polarity management, The TruMark Index™ helps you understand yourself within the parameters of five fundamental areas:

	1. Your Power Profile™: This category helps you determine if you project magnetic or dynamic energy. If you are magnetic, you are inclined to let the world come to you. If you are dynamic, you are proactive in engaging the world around you. Understanding whether you are naturally magnetic or dynamic can help you develop strategies that reinforce the positive, and minimize the negative, aspects of these two polarities.
	2. Your Relationship Approach™: Some individuals are connectors and some are networkers. A connector tends to bond with smaller groups of people on an intimate level, and a networker likes to get to know a lot of people on a less intimate level. Understanding if you are a connector or a networker can help you develop a business, and a customer base, which more closely matches your true relationship approach.
	3. Your Aspirational Vision™: Are you a gardener or an empire-builder? A gardener is motivated by creating a unique, finely-crafted enterprise, and an empire-builder is motivated by building a large highly-successful business. Understanding if you are truly a gardener, or an empire-builder, can help you focus on building the type of business you really want, and achieve a greater sense of happiness and fulfillment in your work.
	4. Your Creative Drive™: In this category, we look at whether you are a creator or a promoter. A creator is someone who is motivated by the creative process, and a promoter is someone who is motivated by the selling process. Understanding your creative drive will help you focus on the activities which will make you most happy, and also develop teams to support your best efforts.
	5. Your Communications Style™: Knowing if you are a scientist or a story-teller can help you communicate much more effectively in your business. A scientist communicates using a lot of supporting facts and figures. A story-teller enjoys telling real and fictional tales without providing supporting evidence and documentation. Understanding your position within this polarity can help you with both verbal and written communications.

"The TruMark Index™ helps you understand much better who you really are as a person," Bishop says. "In each category you will tend to lean towards one of the two polarities, or find yourself located between the two. Using your profile, you can then develop new habits and strategies which bring these polarities into balance."

"For example, I scored high as a magnetic person," Bishop says. "I like people and prospects to approach me first. I tend to market myself through books, articles, speeches, and by developing centers of influence who refer people to me. These are the marketing methods I prefer. However, I realized from my TruMark Profile™ that I sometimes need to be more dynamic, and reach out proactively to the world. In other words, I realized that I needed to become more balanced, and force myself sometimes to be more dynamic. Otherwise, I run the risk of isolating myself, and not meeting other magnetic people who might never introduce themselves to me."

"My business partner Curtis Verstraete, on the other hand, has a dynamic power profile. It is great that we have complementary inclinations, but Curtis realizes that sometimes he needs to project more magnetic energy. Otherwise, he might overwhelm or smother people with too much dynamism. By taking The TruMark Index™, Curtis has learned how to use both dynamic and magnetic energy when appropriate. It has helped him become a much more effective salesperson and coach to our clients."

"The TruMark Index™ is a great learning tool for individuals, but it is even more powerful when everyone on your team understands their true marketing personality."

The TruMark Index™ also helps you feel more comfortable about what you are doing on a day-to-day basis," Bishop says. "If you discover you are a gardener, then you won't feel guilty about not building an empire. If you are a story-teller, you can revel in your ability to tell engaging stories even if you don't have the facts to back them up. And if you are a creator, you don't have to feel guilty that you aren't a better salesperson. In other words, by taking The TruMark Index™, you give yourself permission to be who you truly are."

The TruMark Index™ has been used by entrepreneurs, business owners, marketing executives, and their teams, in many different industries. Each person has gained valuable insight into their own marketing personality. It has also helped them understand their co-workers much better as well. "The TruMark Index™ is a great learning tool for individuals, but it is even more powerful when everyone on your team understands their true marketing personality," Bishop says. "It helps you and your team-mates work together more smoothly, and allows you to use all of your human resources more efficiently."

The TruMark Index™ is also used as a key preparation tool for The Breakthrough Marketing Program™. By starting with this profile, we are able to more fully connect with our clients and help them develop marketing strategies and plans to take advantage of their true marketing personality.

If you would like to benefit from The Breakthrough Marketing Program™, email info@biginc.com to receive a free starter kit. The Breakthrough Marketing Starter Kit™ provides many ideas and tools you can use to more effectively attract high quality prospects, increase your profitability, and develop an enduring business model that thrives on change.

To determine your unique marketing personality profile, please complete The TruMark Index™ questionnaire online.