5. Guerrilla Marketing Personality Traits Menu | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Guerrilla Marketers are both born guerrillas and made guerrillas. If they lack these traits, they work to develop them. While working with the marketing honchos of Fortune 500 companies and the marketing chiefs of new up-and-coming companies that want like crazy to be members of the Fortune 500.  I've noticed eight personality traits that these marketing geniuses possessed. And try as I may, I simply have not found an exception to this guerrilla observation. People who run successful marketing departments have every one of these eight characteristics.  I hope that you already have all eight of these personality traits,  or that you can at least develop the one or two that may be lacking. Otherwise, I urge you to turn the task of marketing over to somebody else because marketing is going to get you in trouble and the way you use marketing will get your company in trouble. Let's examine the eight right here and right now: 1. PATIENCE: I start with this trait because it's the most important by far. A study was conducted to see how many times you must penetrate a person's mind with your selling proposition before you convert that person from a state of total apathy to a state of purchase readiness. Amazingly, the researchers came up with an answer. It was nine. Your message must penetrate a mind nine times before that person will buy what you are selling. And that's the good news. The bad news is that for every three times you put out the word, your prospects are paying attention only two times.  So you market by advertising, emailing, telemarketing, signs, direct mail, anything -- and you put the word out three times and it penetrates your prospect's mind one time. What do you suppose happens? Nothing happens. Zilch. Okay, you put the word out six times, entering the mind of your prospect two times. What happens then?