how to – Page 9 – Michele Christensen

How to schedule your day for flexibility and productivity

In my last post, I talked about how to keep your personal life from getting in the way of your business success. This post is about how to schedule your day to accommodate both business and personal tasks while being flexible and productive.

First, it’s important to commit to a practice of scheduling your day, so let me explain some of the benefits. You’ll be able to get a clear view of what you did and did not get done in a day and adjust your next day accordingly. You’ll be able to look at a bird’s eye view of the 16 or so waking hours you have available and decide how to use them based on your current priorities. If you don’t already have it, you’ll get a sense of when is a good time of day for different activities. You’ll keep activities that tend to expand, like social media marketing, down to an appropriate amount of time. You’ll be able to prioritize the few things that you really need to get done.

I do this as part of my end-of-day routine when things are fresh in my mind. For some reason, having my day laid out before I wake up lets me hit the ground running. If I’m feeling bad about something I didn’t get done, I can put it on my schedule for the next day and let it go for the night. Of course I give in to temptation and skip my scheduling sometimes, and I always pay the price the next day.

You can put your schedule wherever it suits you – paper, spreadsheet, day planner, etc. I like to use a spreadsheet with one line per activity with start and end times. I would not recommend your main calendar – this is far more detailed than would fit on most calendars.

I always start my day with the same things. I’m best in the morning, so those first few hours are set aside for high-priority projects, and that means whatever is most important to be working on will get some uninterrupted high-quality time before anything else can get in the way. Consider putting in some time on high-priority work even before you check email or other messages.

Next, add in the “big rocks,” i.e. those big things you have to work around like appointments, meals, errands, fitness, etc.

Designate some time for personal tasks and for miscellaneous business tasks and handling email, messages, mail, etc.

Schedule in your breaks with a start and end time. Taking breaks is critical to being productive, but you do need to set an end time or it’s too easy to waste a lot of time.

Just like the first few hours of the day are set, so should the last few. Give yourself some time to wrap up your day, schedule the next day, do any before bed tasks, and finally some time to relax so you are in low gear when it’s time to go to bed.

Sounds great, right, except for inevitable last-minute things that pop up? The irony is that having a schedule helps you to be more flexible. You have a plan to deviate from. You know what you are giving up (or have to make up) if you say yes to something new. Being your own boss means that not only do you make your schedule, but you can change it too.

How do you schedule your day? Does it help you to be more flexible? Tell me about it in the comments.

3 Tips for Keeping Your Personal Tasks from Ruining Your Business

One of the best things about working from home is that you can take care of chores and personal tasks whenever you want, even while you are working. One of the worst things about working from home is that you can can take care of chores and personal tasks whenever you want, even while you are working. 🙂

Having no clear boundaries between work and personal tasks can mean that the two tend to blur, and this can be great until it begins to cause problems. Sometimes it gets really hard to leave personal tasks undone and focus on the business. After all, if you are home all day why isn’t the house perfect, the papers filed, the fridge stocked, the mail sorted, the calls made, etc.?

I’ve found that if I don’t watch it, that my personal tasks can start to erode away valuable time spent on my business which can be detrimental. I’ve found a few ways to keep the personal tasks from expanding too much, and so I have 3 tips for you that will help keep those annoying personal tasks at bay so you can focus on your business.

Create systems for things that pile up and nag you. For me, the worst offender is the mail. For an unknown reason, we get huge amounts of mail that needs to be dealt with. I did all the recommended steps to cut down on the mail, and still it regularly piled up. What I finally did was designate the first 15 minutes of every day to deal with the mail. Finally, this has gotten the accumulation down and keeps in check over the long haul. If your nagging, piled up task is laundry then find a way to fix it – designate a day, do a load every morning, send it out or go to a laundromat for a big session monthly. If it’s yard work, do some every day to wake up when the afternoon lull hits, hire someone to do it, or take an afternoon every other week. The point is, create some system for whatever your worst offender is so that it doesn’t nag you anymore.
Designate time to crank out personal chores. Trying to do chores in small bits of time leftover from other activities often doesn’t work. You need time to get into something and finish it. If you only have 2 minutes, that rules out most tasks you could even thing about doing because it’s not enough time. If you start with half an hour, that’s enough time to not only start but finish many household tasks. I set aside some time right after lunch every day and just crank through the top few pressing things I need to do.
Find your mental and physical productivity times. When are you at your best mentally? How about physically? Schedule tasks in a way that takes advantage of these times. If you’re a night owl, can you arrange you schedule to get some turbo-charged time late at night? If you have loads of energy for physical tasks in the morning, use that time to get them done.

I used to think that having a successful work-at-home business was only about being a good business person. Now I know you have to manage your personal life well too.

How do you keep your personal life from ruining your business? Share your tips in the comments.

What people buy

If you’re a sales expert, this will probably be review for you. I’m going through a training right now, and the whole idea of what people actually buy has been covered a lot. I’ve heard a lot of this before, but as with a lot of educational material it sinks in differently the second time around so I have some new ideas.

Features vs. Benefits

This was a really eye-opening concept to me the first time I heard it, and I continue to deepen my understanding of this idea. Features are facts and data about the product or service, e.g. “This laptop weighs 1 pound.” The benefit would be something like “Light enough to carry around all day without fatigue.” See the difference? I don’t care exactly what it weighs, but I do care that I can carry it around. Here’s another example: “This car has a turning radius that is 20% smaller than other cars in it’s class.” The benefit could be something like “Able to squeeze into tight parking spaces passed over by other cars.” Car stats bore me, but I live in LA so being able to have more parking spaces available is a huge benefit for me.

Delivery

Now that you understand the difference between features and benefits, it’s important to talk about how you deliver those benefits. If your benefit is a reduction in body fat, how do you deliver that result? Is it a one-on-one fitness training program? Is it a food delivery service? A boot camp? A supervised diet? There’s lots of ways to deliver this benefit.

The trap is that it’s easy to talk about delivery and so we tend to focus on that instead of what people will get out of what you are delivering. It’s easy and concrete to talk about 6 sessions, an e-book or a box of printed material. We are also familiar with how we do what we do so it feels comfortable talking about it. It’s also a way to duck out on having to share what results people get from working with you.

A lot of sales experts say that people don’t care at all about how the result is delivered and that they care about the results you can get for them. I agree to some extent with this idea, but I differ in the degree. People do care about how you deliver, just not as much as they care about the results. I think it’s too black-and-white to say they don’t care. Some people hate the telephone, some people don’t want to travel and some people like to read their information. Other people may want premium level one-on-one service.

What people buy

So what do people actually buy?

Primarily it’s the benefit or result, but in order for them to actually buy it has to be delivered in a way they find appealing or at least acceptable. Don’t fall in the trap of talking too much about how you deliver, but don’t ignore delivery either.

What’s the benefit of one of your products or services? How do you deliver that benefit? Tell me about it in the comments.

Get creative in meeting your customer’s needs

In my last two posts (here and here), I shared some of what I learned at the Overnight Authority event with Adam Urbanski earlier this month. Today’s post is an expansion on one big thing I learned during a sales exercise we did in the workshop.

One of the points that was made during the introduction of the exercise was that our goal was to make a sale. This was a real sales situation, and even though it was an exercise we were obligated to deliver what we sold and pay for what we purchased during the exercise. We could sell anything we could offer that the other person wanted to buy. That opened up all sorts of possibilities such as selling something that you had never sold before, selling something you created on the spot, or selling something completely unrelated to your business. That was really the first lesson of that exercise – if you can help someone or provide something they need and they want to buy it, find a way to deliver it! Don’t let formalities get in your way.

There was no way to get prepared for this exercise, so I didn’t have any of my usual materials in front of me. I was forced to get creative in offering something for sale since I didn’t have any of my packages or products listed in front of me. I listened to my prospect describe her problems and then created something on the spot that I could deliver that I thought would solve her problem. In a way, it was better that I didn’t have my own materials to work from because I was forced to listen and create something that fit rather than try to fit the customer into my pre-defined pacakges.

People really took this and ran with it. One person offered a package that was turned down by her prospect, and she then offered one tip for $25 which was accepted by the happy customer. Another person created a package for her prospect that was something she could do but had never thought to offer in her business because it wasn’t part of her main work. I offered something that I had been thinking about for a while but couldn’t quite put together until I was under fire to do it.

The really big takeaway for me was that yes, it’s great to offer a range of products and services in pre-set packages but it’s also great to wing it when you have the chance to make a sale outside of those packages. Don’t let the fact that they don’t fit a pre-set offering cause a customer you could help slip away. It’s a disservice to you and to the customer.

Aside from just generally thinking differently about creating things to offer for sale, one way I’m going to implement this idea is to be more proactive at offering to create a custom package for someone who I want to work with. If they want to work with me and the issue is simply that I don’t offer a service package that appeals to them, I’m going to ask them “What kind of package would work for you?” and see if we can make it happen.

How can you be more creative at finding ways to offer what your customer wants? Have you ever created an offer on the spot? How did it work? Tell me about it in the comments.

How to Ditch the Overwhelm!

I’ve got something new to share with you!

You know how entrepreneurs spend a lot of their time feeling overwhelmed? By nature, entrepreneurs love ideas. We can come up with them in our sleep – and often do! Most of us have more ideas than we could get to in a lifetime. So what’s the problem?

Well, entrepreneurs also commonly suffer from “bright, shiny object syndrome,” or the tendency to get bored with something before it’s done and jump to the next thing that we’re sure will make us a smashing success.

What happens when an abundance of ideas and bright, shiny object syndrome collide? Lots of things – low income, scattered focus, dissatisfaction with the business, and perhaps the biggest problem:

Overwhelm!

Overwhelm happens when we have too many things going at once and there’s not only more than we can do but more than we can even keep on top of. It’s like a business treadmill – you are running harder and harder but not getting anywhere. It’s impossible to figure out what to work on and you aren’t making the money you want.

The good news is that there is a quick fix! I can help you Ditch the Overwhelm, get focused and get moving toward making profit quickly with a step by step plan.

We’ll work together to figure out what’s the best thing for you to do right now and create a step by step action plan so you know how to move forward. At the end of our short time together, you’ll be clear about what to do first, how to do it and how it will lead to profit.

Sound great? Click here for details, and I hope to help you Ditch the Overwhelm soon!

PS – This program is only available until the end of May, so if you’re interested check it out today.

Sales lessons from a hard exercise

In my last post, I mentioned that I had been to a live training earlier this month with Adam Urbanski called Overnight Authority. I learned so much there that I have several posts lined up and this is the next in the series.

One night of the workshop we had a bonus session that included a sales exercise. A big part of what I learned at the workshop is that sales is what makes a business. All the other things you do serve only to make sales possible and/or more likely. Sales is a real challenge to many solopreneurs because we love what we do and really want to help people. We’d do it for free if we could! But the truth is, without a sale you can’t help anyone. All of the greatness you have to offer is wasted if nobody buys it.

In the first part of the evening, we learned some of Adam’s techniques on consultative selling which is a way of conducting the sales process as a consultation not as a hard sell. Then, we did the next logical thing which is to pair up and try to sell each other something! Gulp. The thing was, this was not a role playing exercise this was for real! If you sold something, you had to deliver and the other person had to pay. There were also no requirement that what you sold had to be something you already offer or even something in your business.

What was hard for me is that when I have a one-on-one sales conversation I go in prepared. I’ve asked a few questions already and have looked at the person’s website. I also have all of my own material – prices, terms, etc in front of me for easy reference. In this conversation, I was totally unprepared! I have to say, I really didn’t want to do this exercise but I had already entrusted Adam with my time and investment so I trusted him here as well.

Here are 3 big lessons I learned from that exercise. Just for the record, I’ve already shared everything with the other people mentioned because it was a learning exercise.

If your prospect says you don’t understand don’t argue! When I was the prospect, my seller argued with me in this manner and all it did was make me dig in even further and argue back even harder. It completely shut off any possibility of us getting to an understanding. It felt condescending and frustrating, especially when the answer I got was way off base from what I wanted to communicate. At this point, my thinking is that if your prospect says you don’t understand, the only logical answer is something like “Can you help me to understand better?”
When you are selling, don’t be too attached to making a sale. I’ve heard several sales professionals say something like “Be committed to helping them make a decision, but not what that decision is.” This feels really good to me and I try to do it. When I was the seller, I felt close to making a sale at one point and got a little too over-eager and started spewing words out. When I was the prospect, I sensed this from my seller and it made me not want to buy anything that might be offered.
Finally, don’t be afraid to wing it! If someone is sitting in front of you with a problem that you can solve and they want to hire you, find a way to make it work. Lots of people in the room made sales that night of things that didn’t even exist when the exercise began. Create a package on the spot or do something unconventional. Don’t let a chance to serve someone else get away because you don’t have a package that fits.

What is your favorite piece of sales wisdom? How did you learn it? Tell me about it in the comments.

How to use local networking to build your business

(Update: The live call is over, but the recording is available at the links below. Click the link to grab your free recording!)

One of my core business philosophies is to test and revise. I try something I think will work, measure how well it works and revise my plan after that. I did the same with a full year of local, in-person networking and decided it wasn’t worth it and I focused on the internet to build my business.

Another one of my core philosophies is to always be learning. I tend to change my mind a lot because I’m dedicated to truth, not consistency. What I’ve recently learned is that I didn’t network nearly as well as I thought I did.

During the course of my networking year, I met over 200 people (keeping track was part of my measurement process). I sent every one a personalized follow up email, met a few for coffee and offered some of my free material to people who seemed interested. I’m outgoing and curious, so conversation comes naturally to me and I read a lot of “how to network” articles. I thought I was doing great because I was doing so much more than almost everyone I met. Of the 200+ people I met, only a few followed up with me and only a few even acknowledged my personalized email.

At the end of that year, I decided that networking wasn’t worth it because although it was great fun it wasn’t generating business for me. I only generated a small amount of business from my efforts, and when you consider that each of the 2-5 events per month I attended was about a 5 hour investment the math just didn’t work out.

Fast forward to this year, and what I’ve learned is that I didn’t have the right knowledge or strategy going into my networking efforts. To fix this for myself and help you learn as well, I’ve asked sales and networking expert Don Talbert to teach networking skills for my community on a free teleseminar. Don is the founder of the Centurion Group, and after he built his own successful business using networking he began to teach this skill to others. I’ve had many interactions with him both in groups and one-on-one conversations and he really knows his stuff! I’ve learned so much just getting ready for this call that I cannot wait to see what he teaches on the call!

If you’ve tried local networking but haven’t found success, please join me on this call – you’ll leave with strategies and tactics you can use right away. As a bonus, he’ll also be sharing the best way to make sure you are the most disliked person in the room. I’m a little nervous about this one – I hope I didn’t do whatever this is!

Reserve your spot here!

A simple tool to help you get the big projects done

There’s a lot to do when you are a solopreneur whether you have outsourced help or not. Some of what we tackle is simple, task-oriented things but sometimes it’s a huge overwhelming project. I have a secret weapon that helps me immensely when I’m facing one of these giants.

One of the problems with big projects is that they can be overwhelming. When you are looking at your to-do list, it’s much easier to tackle a simple task such as “update Facebook page” than it is to do a big project such as “promote teleseminar.” What can happen is the simple tasks get done and day after day, the big project gets skipped because of the difference in perceived difficulty. There’s also a difference in the satisfaction level of the two items. You can tackle a small task really quickly and get the satisfaction of crossing it off your to-do list right away. With a big project, it might be weeks before you get to cross it off. It’s no wonder that we solopreneurs sometimes push important things to the bottom of the list.

Usually, though, it’s the big, overwhelming projects that move our business ahead. The difference between successful, “I see you everywhere” businesses and “barely there” businesses are those big projects and the ability to get them done.

So how do I make those big projects do-able and not so overwhelming?

My must-have tool is a checklist. I do one for every big project, and often more than one if the big project has several smaller projects within it. The key to a good project checklist is in the details. I make my checklists as detailed as I need them to be to keep me out of overwhelm in focused on the project. How easy is it to get off track when doing a large project? Without my checklist, which functions as my road map, I can easily fall into the trap of wasting 20 minutes following rabbit holes on the web when all I wanted to do was Google how to do something. Often on a big project, the steps to complete it are comprised of multiple small tasks, and without a checklist it’s easy to mix up the order (costing wasted time and effort) or get sidetracked and wonder “What was I doing when I got started on this?”

Even in a small project, there can be multiple steps and if for some reason I’m having trouble starting I know the best thing to do is to start by making a check list. If I still feel overwhelmed, then I know step 1 is too big and it needs to be broken down further. I especially need a lot of detail in my checklist if I’m trying to finish a project at night when I don’t think at my best.

Checklists are great for helping you with a complex project even if you only do it once, but where they really come in handy is when you do the same project two or more times. Create your checklist on your computer, and when you are ready to do that project again pull up your file and you’ll be starting way ahead of where you would have otherwise. Make it a point to refine your checklist with each use and before long you’ll have a sleek, streamlined process that will make any project easier.

Do you use checklists to help you complete big projects? If no, what do you do when you feel overwhelmed by a big project?

“What do you do?”

What is it about this one question that throws most of us for a loop? Why is it so hard to answer, and why does it cause such angst? It should be straightforward – simply tell someone in one sentence what you do – but rarely is it so easy. Part of the problem is that a lot of solopreneurs do a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and while there may be common threads, it’s hard to group it all under one phrase and convey the full breadth and depth of what we help people with. Most of us care so deeply about our work that to try to sum it up in one sentence feels like we’re negating the value of what we do.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on this because I was in a lively discussion on the topic last week and I thought most of what people suggested would not work for me if I heard it when I asked someone what they did.

The criteria used by most of the people in the discussion was whether or not the person you were talking to asked a follow up question after you answered “What do you do?” The follow up could be anything such as “How do you do that?” or “Who do your work with?”

This isn’t a bad start to evaluate how effective your one-sentence answer is, but it’s too simplistic. Yes, you want someone to be interested enough to ask for more information, but the fact that they ask a question doesn’t mean they are actually interested. Yes, I know that’s harsh but it’s true. It’s like when someone says “Guess who I saw today?” – I may or may not care depending on who says it and the setting, but since I want to be polite and not hurt people’s feelings, I’ll almost always respond appropriately by saying “Who?” My response is not an guarantee that I’m interested.

It’s the same with your one-sentence business description. Just because it invites a response or question doesn’t mean you hit the mark. There are at least a few different reasons that someone would respond in a socially appropriate manner, and not all of them mean the person is interested.

The discussion started with someone describing an answer he heard at a networking event and most of the comments agreed that this answer was one of the best. When asked what she did, this woman said “I help mature women to look as attractive as possible.” While I agree this is a great way to describe the benefit of working with her, it still doesn’t tell me what she DOES. If I heard this, my mind would be flipping through pictures trying to make a match – is she a make-up artist, stylist, hairdresser, skin care expert, plastic surgeon, Botox practitioner or something else?

A lot of people maintain both in this setting and in marketing that the benefit is what matters and that people don’t care how you get there. I would say that the benefit is the most important, but I can’t be the only one who thinks that how you deliver it is also really important. Why is it important to me? In this case, it will dictate how much time I invest in seeing if we should get to know each other better. If she is a plastic surgeon, there’s not a great fit for me because I don’t know anyone who has plans to get surgery and in my entire life nobody has ever asked me for information or a referral on this topic. It would actually be a disservice to her to take up her time when there are people in the room she’d be better off meeting. If she is a make-up artist who mixes her own chemical-free, cruelty-free cosmetics well then I’m interested because that’s something I’d consider using and I know a lot of people who would also be interested.

My follow up question would be something like “So, um, what do you actually do? Are you a make-up artist?” In my mind, I’d be thinking about how hard this person is making it on me to get the answer to a straightforward question. It would also put them way down on my list of people I’d consider referring business to. Do you communicate this vaguely with clients? Will people I send you have to work as hard as I did to get a question answered?

So, what’s the answer? My current thought is that it’s best to include what you DO along with the benefit you provide, such as “I’m a stylist who specializes in helping mature women look as attractive as possible.” That way, you give someone a full picture that includes everything they need to decide if they want to learn more. I know I’d appreciate being answered in this way!

PS – If you go to networking events or want to start going, check out this free training by Sales and Networking Expert Don Talbert did just for my community: “3 Strategies for Really Working a Networking Event to Create a Continuous Flow of Leads, Referrals and Business.” Grab the audio here: Networking training call

Why it’s good to get some unsubscribes on your newsletter

When I first started with my email newsletter, I took any unsubscribes I got personally. I would look at when they unsubscribed and try to see what I did “wrong.” I always work hard to bring value to people who have trusted me with their time and attention, so I didn’t like to see people unsubscribing. I assumed I did something to drive them away – that either I hadn’t set proper expectations or that I had not delivered something worthwhile.

Now, several years later, I feel differently about unsubscribes. I now know that it’s just part of business – people sign up, and sometimes a few slip away. People change over time, and maybe they’ve moved on from the solopreneur business that made them want to read my newsletter in the first place. Maybe they are deep into some business-expanding projects and don’t want to spend time reading anything new. Maybe the signed up to get to know what I teach and found it wasn’t a good fit for them. Whatever the reason, I now respect that choice and that the lost subscriber is doing what they think is best for their business. It doesn’t sting like it used to when I lose a subscriber. Now, when I lose a subscriber I have a similar feeling as when I bid a friend farewell on a new adventure when they move away from the area. I may wish them to stay, but I know they are moving on in their own best interest, and who can feel bad about that?

If you’re using email newsletter as part of your business and not getting at least a few unsubscribes from time to time, it may be time to step it up a notch. Of course, it’s not desirable to have lots of unsubscribes, and it you get a bunch at one time try to figure out what caused it.

Here’s a few thoughts on how you might increase your efforts and get to that sweet spot of getting just a few unsubscribes:

Are you making offers to purchase something? Your newsletter should include regular offers of things your readers may want to buy. Some people will unsubscribe if they think they are being “sold to” all the time, so don’t overdue it with the sales offers but be sure to make some offers. If someone is offended by appropriate sales offers, then they are probably not a good fit for your newsletter.

Are you targeting your readers tightly enough? If you try to be all things to all people, nobody will feel like you are speaking to them. The more you can hone in on who you are writing to, the more those people will feel connected to you and the more other people will drop away on their own accord.

Are you emailing at an appropriate frequency? The definition of “not enough” and “too much” vary greatly by writer and audience, but not having the right frequency for your situation may result in no unsubscribes or too many. If you rarely send an email, people may unsubscribe in large numbers because they forget who you are or they may never unsubscribe because there are so few emails. If you vastly overdo it, you’ll lose people in large numbers.

How do you feel about people unsubscribing? What number of unsubscribes do you think is the right number for you?