mindset – Page 5 – Michele Christensen

People to avoid

I was out socially during a recent weekend, and found myself talking business with some people that I didn’t know well. One of them was a very negative, naysayer, “can’t be done” kind of guy. He was the kind of person who feels like nothing in his life is in his control – whatever happens in his life happens to him not ever because of anything he did.

Because I’m so passionate and excited about my business and I love the people I work with, I got very excited to be able to talk business with new people. The more I described all the good things that come from my business, the more negative he got.

He also had a way of thinking that is like nails on a chalkboard to me – he made up his mind before having any data, and no amount of evidence to the contrary would sway him.

Later, I realized I wasted a lot of energy trying to share my excitement with him. He’s negative and has no sense of being responsible for his own life. He has no interest in learning new things or expanding what he knows of the world. In short, he was a fool in this respect and I wasted my time, energy and enthusiasm on him.

I can’t go back and get a do-ever on this one, but I resolved right then and there to be done with having this kind of conversation with this kind of person. It left me drained and frustrated, and left him no more informed than he had been before.

Sometimes, when you have a mission you want to share it with the world. I know it takes almost nothing to get me talking about work. The thing is, not all conversations serve us or the person we are talking to. In this case, neither of us got anything out of it.

Your time and energy are precious resources and the source of all you business success. Use these resources well even when you are not working. They are very limited, and you can’t get them back. Don’t waste any time or energy on any activity that doesn’t provide a return of some sort. The next time I feel myself being frustrated instead of feeling connected in a conversation I’ll stop the interaction.

What kind of people drain you? How do you know when to leave a conversation? What kind of limits do you set in this area?

Do you have a business or just a product or service?

Do you have a business or just a product or service? What’s the difference?

I have this conversation often with people in one form or another. One of the biggest misconceptions about starting a business is that all you have to do is be great at making your product or delivering your service and you will have a profitable business. If you’ve had your business for more than a few months, you already know this isn’t true. Granted, having a great product or service is probably the single most important part of having a successful business but it is far from the only part. Since I began my business, I’ve changed how I describe what I do because I began to realize that most non-business owners don’t know that there is a lot to do to build a business that has nothing to do with the product or service you offer.

A business is an organization or structure dedicated to selling one or more products or services. A product or service is what a business sells.

Example: A person could be a dog walker, and offer only that service to whomever happens to find them. In contrast, a person could have an entire business built around the basic service of walking dogs. They could have business cards, a brochure and website. They have various packages and payment options. They could promote by speaking, exhibiting at events and by posting on social media.

A business has lots of parts that work together. There are people, areas of knowledge, equipment, physical places, and intangibles like brands or expertise. Early economists called these factors of production, which consisted of land, labor, capital and entrepreneurship.

A business has processes and ways of doing things.

Example: How are new customers signed up? How are customers billed? How are the finances monitored?

A business has various roles people play, even if the roles are all played by one person in a solopreneur business.

Example: In the dog walking business, there is the person or people who actually walk the dogs, the person who does the scheduling, the person who books the appointments, the person who handles paperwork and bookkeeping and the person who promotes the service.

A business engages in promotion and marketing in order to sell the product(s) or service(s) it provides. Part of this promtion is educating customers so they can decide if they want to buy.

A business has proprietary knowledge about how it does things that distinguish it from other businesses that sell the same things. If this is relevant to customers, the business must make sure customers know about it.

Example: I saw an ad recently for a guy who takes small groups of dogs on hikes into nearby nature areas. Technically, he is a “dog walker,” since his basic service is picking the dogs up and getting them out of the house for an outing, but his way of doing it is very different than the typical dog walker and his marketing materials show this difference clearly.

Which do you have: a business or just a product or service? If you see yourself as having just a product or service but want to move up to a full-fledged business, contact me for more information.

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.

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.

My top ten takeaways from The Overnight Authority Live Event

Last week, I attended a training given by Adam Urbanski called The Overnight Authority Live Event. It was an intense, demanding 3 days but I learned a lot. Not only were there strategies and tactics, but there was a lot of new ways of thinking presented which was the most helpful part for me. By “new ways of thinking,” I don’t really mean mindset, which is also important, but a new way of looking at how you do business that is focused on accomplishing important things quickly. I have lots more to share from the event and in fact have a few blog posts lined up already, but for today I’ll wet your appetite with just my top ten takeaways from the event:

Spend less time creating things to sell and more time selling them.
If something doesn’t work or sell well the first time around, instead of scrapping it and starting fresh, see if you can try again and tweak what you did. This is a shift for me because although I live by “test and revise,” I think I’ve been too quick to say something didn’t work and needed to be scrapped.
Don’t be afraid to wing it. If there’s a customer in front of you that wants to buy something you don’t currently sell but can provide, find a way to make a deal.
Don’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t ask you’ll always get a “no,” if you ask you may get a yes or a no but the worst possible outcome is that they say no.
Don’t think first of cutting prices, think first of how to deliver more value so you can charge the price you want.
Having something for sale is useless unless people need it and know they need it.
Connect regularly with successful business owners and continue your own development.
If you refuse to stop you cannot fail.
There’s a lot of things that a lot of experts will tell you that you “have to” do. They are not always right.
Don’t let fear of looking stupid or fear of what other people might think stop you or even influence you.

What’s your favorite idea here? How did you learn it? Tell me about it in the comments.

“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

What to say instead of “no”

Do people ask you to do things in your business that you don’t like doing? If you provide services, are some of your services things you’d prefer not to do? Some business coaches might tell you to stop doing them, but until you’ve got a full roster of things you’d rather be doing it might be worth taking on work you don’t love as long as you can provide excellent work that keeps customers happy. Keep in mind that I’m only suggesting this as a short-term measure while you fill your business with work and clients you love.

I often see service providers in this situation – there is a service they don’t like providing or have no passion for, but people keep requesting and are willing to pay for it. It can be hard to find a way to start saying “no” when you’ve said yes to providing the service for a long time and people expect it.

I was working with someone who is a coach herself, and we were tackling this very issue. We were revising her menu of available services, and there was just one thing she absolutely hated doing but got asked to do all the time. In her case, this was not her main work but an add-on service that she neither advertised nor announced. It was just something people asked for so she started doing it even though it drained her.

This coach had hustled hard during her first few years in business, and as a result was at the next level in her business. She had several key referral partners and kept her practice as full as she wanted it. This dilemma was a symptom of a larger adjustment that needed to be made: it was time to get out of start-up hustle mode and into the business she dreamed of.

As we talked further, what came out is that while she disliked giving this particular kind of service, her clients loved it. What I suggested was this:

Don’t say “no,” say how much.

I other words, don’t deny people that want a premium service the chance to get it, just price it in a way that honors what a stretch it is for you to provide it. Putting a premium price on a product or service you don’t like providing accomplishes two things: it decreases the number of requests for this service and it compensates you for taking on something you find difficult to deliver. My client felt strange about this shift at first, and thought nobody would pay a price that she felt good about for this service. In the end though, she decided that it was okay if just a few people or even nobody purchased at the new price.

If you have an additional service that people love but that you don’t like providing, consider offering your customers a chance to buy that special service at a premium price rather than assuming that nobody would want it at that price. The results may surprise you.

How have you handled requests for services you don’t like offering? Tell me about it in the comments.

Anything worth doing is worth doing…..

at the appropriate level of quality.

Gotcha, did I? The popular version of this saying is “Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” and for the life of me I cannot figure out how something so plainly false got to be so generally accepted as true. I could give you numerous examples from my personal life, and it applies to business as well.

There’s something about working on the internet, having a website, and posting things that everyone can see forever that compels us to try to do it perfectly. This is not only a huge time suck, but it’s also a disservice to the people who want to hear from you. They don’t want perfection, and you can’t deliver it anyway. No matter how great something is, it can always be better. I’ve found for myself and clients that most of what you do to run a business can be “good enough” with great results. I know people (not in my community) who delayed months even starting a business because their logo wasn’t perfect, or their website needed work or some other item wasn’t in it’s final form yet. As an entrepreneur, your website/logo/business cards/tagline/etc will always need work so don’t delay offering your unique gifts to the world getting them perfect. It’s an educated guess anyway until you start working in your business.

As solopreneurs, we are particularly vulnerable to this because the business is so closely related to ourself. This is a valid concern – you certainly don’t want to be putting junk out there with your name on it, but try to make an honest assessment of how good it needs to be to serve the people who need you. There’s often a direct correlation in how long you delay something and how close to perfect you try to get it. If your goal is to serve others though your work, you may be depriving them of something they want or need while you try to get it perfect.

I think, sometimes, there’s a temptation to procrastinate or hide behind getting things perfect. If a person can spend all day writing perfect tweets, then they’re “busy” and “working,” but don’t have to risk putting any real work out in the world.

The only place I encourage you to always do your best is in working directly with clients or in creating things to sell. These things should always get your best efforts.

How well do you do things? How do you decide? Are there things that aren’t worth doing well? Leave me a comment and tell me what you think.

How to evaluate an adviser you may hire

I was talking to someone I know recently who is thinking of starting a solopreneur business. When I mentioned I could help with this, his replied that the only way he would take advice from me, or anyone, is to know exactly, in detail, how much money I had made in my business. His thinking was that if I had made X dollars then I have something that he could replicate.

There’s a few problems with this response. First, let me state that I admire anyone who checks out a coach or adviser before hiring them. It’s really important to make sure the person knows their field before you trust them. Anyone can appoint themselves guru, expert, etc. so title alone won’t tell you anything.

The first problem with this is personal boundaries. While I understand the logic of asking the question, I would not reveal something like this in detail. I think it’s great when business coaches share their successes in general terms like 6 figures or multiple 6 figures, but that’s as far as I would go. It simply feels icky to me to have to reveal so much personal data in order to win a client.

The second problem with this is that it ignores how long the person has been in business. If I had answered this question within the first 6 months of my business, the figure would not have been very impressive. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t already helping people. I had 10+ years in business in a variety of settings before I ever started my business, so from the onset I was able to offer something valuable.

The third problem is that there isn’t one business model to work from. Just because I have success with mine doesn’t mean someone else, in a different kind of business, could replicate it.

The fourth problem is the difference between revenue and profit. Revenue is all the money that comes into a business, where profit is what is left after paying expenses. If I said I made 1 Million dollars in revenue or sales, that sounds impressive but what if I spent 2 Million bringing that in? That’s pretty dismal.

The last problem using this to check out an adviser is that you have no way of knowing if the person is telling the truth. Anything can be fabricated, even tax returns or account data. The person who asked me this question already knows me well enough to know I wouldn’t lie, but how could you have this knowledge of someone you just met?

So, having established that asking for detailed personal financial information is not the way to evaluate an adviser the next question is what is the right way?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Know enough about what you are seeking advice on to have a conversation about it. The same way you do your research on a new car before setting foot in the showroom, do your homework here as well. Learn what pitfalls to ask about, and learn some best practices so if you hear something different you know enough to ask about it.

Look for testimonials or ask for references. This is proof that they’ve already gotten results for people.

Look for long-term consistency such as a blog or newsletter. Almost anyone can look good in one conversation but to publish solid information over an extended period of time is a strong indicator that the person has a depth of knowledge and experience to share.

How do you check out someone you are thinking of hiring? Tell me about it in the comments.

Be productive in spite of the experts

Image of mail in the sunrise — Email in the morning

I admit it, I’m a productivity junkie! I devour information on the subject – books, magazines, newsletters, blogs, etc. – I want it all. Apparently, I’m not alone – there’s a running joke in the productivity communities I frequent about procrastinating by studying how to be more productive.

I’m also a big fan of the scientific method and use it in my daily life all the time. I’ll read about something interesting, test it and decide if it works for me. My personal productivity and time and task management are no different. I’ve got an ever-changing system to keep it all together.

One of the rules I hear most often from experts on productivity is that nobody should check email first thing in the morning. The idea behind this is that it is reactionary – you open your email and start handling whatever is there regardless of how it fits into your business success plan. Once you get into your email, it can be hard to get out. By the time you get to the bottom, more messages have arrived. “Just a peek” turns into hours. A quick question and response leads to a live chat. These long email firestomping sessions rarely lead to anything profitable and they take you out of the driver’s seat for your day. I’m sure you’ve experienced being sidetracked by email – I know I have.

Many experts say you should start your day with something other than email. That something could be an activity you decided on yesterday, your current profit-making project, whatever you find most difficult, what your morning energy level dictates or any other intentionally-chosen project you decide on. It makes a lot of sense, given how easy it is to get sucked into the email rabbit hole. However, this is one area where I don’t follow the experts’ advice

I have a list of things I do first thing every day and email is one of them. I love getting my daily business “housekeeping” out of the way and having a clean slate going into whatever I do next. I like having an empty inbox going into my day so I can spot any urgent messages more easily. It’s great to know that at least once a day, my email inbox is at zero messages and I’m no more than one work session away from zero again.

I think one of the reasons this works for me is that I have a process for handling my email and a specific end point which is an empty inbox. Once I process all the messages that I had as of a certain time, I’m done until tomorrow except for urgent messages.

So what’s the point of my telling you this? First, by all means read what experts have to say but then test and assess for yourself. What works for most people may not work for you. Second, I wanted to give you an alternative to what you might read elsewhere about handling your email.

How do you handle email? When in the day do you look at your inbox? Do you ever buck the advice of experts in this area or others? Tell me about it in the comments.