marketing – Page 6 – Michele Christensen

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.

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!

“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?

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.

How to get people to respond to your calls to action

As solopreneurs, we are often asking people to take action in some way. The most obvious way is to make a purchase, but there are other things we want people

How solopreneurs can encourage responses to a call to action — How solopreneurs can create a compelling call to action

to do such as enter an email, download a report, answer a question or take a survey. How do you get people to respond to a non-sales call to action?

First, make it obvious what you want them to do and why they should do it. I cringe when I see someone I’ve never heard of saying “Like my Facebook page.” They got the first part right – it’s very clear what they want. But why would I do that? If I’ve never heard of the person why would I waste even a few seconds checking their page out without more information? A better choice might be something like “Like my Facebook page for daily tips on training your rescue dog.” Now I know what they offer on the page and can make a quick decision as to whether it’s for me. The only exception to this would be celebrities, sports figures, politicians, etc who are innately interesting to their fans.

Second, make it easy. People don’t have the time or attention span to read complex instructions on your calls to action. What you are asking them to do should be easy – click a button, enter an email, fill out a survey, etc. The most difficult request I’ve seen was someone asking for 5 questions to be submitted via Twitter direct message. The person was gathering information, so other than helping him or her there was no incentive to the reader. They didn’t ask for only 1 question, they wanted 5. Twitter direct messages are one of the more inconvenient way to submit questions as well. If you’re asking for help or feedback, make it really easy for people to jump in and do it.

Third, offer a thank you for their help. Don’t make it too enticing or you may get people doing what you ask just for the reward. If you are trying to survey your market, this might skew the results or you might get people just slopping their way through whatever you ask for just to get the reward. For ideas, you could offer a free downloadable product or one of my favorites, offer to mention them in a tweet. I was thrilled to complete a survey for someone who offered to thank you in a tweet to her tens of thousands of Twitter followers.

Don’t be afraid to ask people to help you or to do something. Just make it obvious, easy and rewarding for them to do so.

Have you ever had a successful call to action? What made it a success?

Contact management for Solopreneurs

Michele Christensen explains how solopreneurs can manage contacts for free — Solopreneurs need a way to collect and organize their contacts

As a solopreneur, your contacts are a very valuable business asset. By contacts, I mean all the people you know and have relevance to your business such as customers, prospects, networking contacts, colleagues and opt-in subscribers to your newsletter. Some of these groups should be handled by specific software such as a newsletter service for your subscribers and a shopping cart or subscriber list for your customers. But what about all the rest of the people you meet? You probably have hundreds of people you’ve met at networking events, trade shows, live training events and just being out and about, but what do you do with them?

For starters, DO NOT add them to your newsletter without their permission. It’s possibly illegal under the SPAM laws, makes you look bad and generally annoys people.

You do need a way to keep track of these people though. You may need to make a referral for a client of yours and you don’t want to be searching scattered piles of business cards trying to remember where and when you met that one guy who might do what that customer needs. You also may want to occasionally touch base with this network of people you’ve worked hard to connect with. Otherwise, they’ll forget about you and you’ll never even have a chance of being the go-to person when they need what you offer. You may need a service yourself, and want to hire that really great person you met if only you could remember who it was.

There are lots of free and paid CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools, but you may not need one. I’m a fan of using simple, free tools as long as they suit your needs. Unless you have specific requirements that indicate otherwise, I recommend Google contacts. It’s what I use and I’ve been in business for 3+ years. Here’s some of what I love:

It’s free and syncs with my Google email account, which I use to manage all the email that comes to my domain-specific email address
It works great with my Android phone
It’s simple to use, and you can add any fields you need
There is a generous notes section where you can write freeform notes to help you remember someone, e.g. “Talked with her at the bar at the September networking event. We both have rescue mutts and like kayaking.”
Your entire contacts database is searchable so if all you can remember is that they had the word “Yellow” in their business name you can search on that
When you are ready to upgrade to a different contact management or CRM tool, your entire contact database can be exported into several formats with just a few clicks, or add on one of the free or paid tools available

Should solopreneurs say yes to every opportunity?

Strategy helps solopreneurs choose events wisely — Think strategically when choosing which events to attend for your solopreneur business

I was with a friend over the weekend, and she mentioned an event that she was going to and thought I’d be interested in attending as well. She had told me about it a few years ago and I checked it out and decided it wasn’t for me at this time. When I told her so, she was absolutely stunned! Here she was, presenting me with what seemed like a golden opportunity and I was turning it down. Her thinking was that my business must be at capacity or otherwise I’d be going, but that wasn’t my reason.

The reason I wasn’t going comes down to the #1 thing business owners must have to succeed: strategy. Strategy is everything in a business. It means that everything you do is intentional and has a purpose that contributes to your success. For live events, strategy doesn’t mean going to any and every event that is open to you and hoping that it will help. Strategy means having a specific aim in mind for attending events, and a specific type of person you want to meet. To show how having a strategy guides decision making, I’ll tell you why I turned this event down.

For my business strategy, if I’m going to an event to meet potential clients then the event audience should have some correlation to what I do. There should be something about the event that attracts people who have or want their own solopreneur business. The event my friend invited me to was more or less a random assortment of the public. There was no attraction specifically for the people I feel most called to serve, solopreneurs.

The second factor that led to my decision is that this event required 5 to 8 hours on a Saturday plus prep time. This is a massive chunk of time to spend in an untargeted manner. There was also no guarantee you’d actually get any time in front of anyone. The event is run in a very free-form manner, and people may or may not enter your room when you give a talk and they can come and go as they please during the talk. This isn’t conducive to sharing anything of value with anyone.

The final factor to consider is that I live in the Los Angeles area, and there are dozens of events every week. I haven’t even begun to attend all the events I could that would possibly have people interested in what I do. Until I’ve made a considerable showing at those events, it simply doesn’t make sense to go to an event filled with random people.

It’s easy to pulled off course if you don’t have pre-set goals and strategy. Having those in mind helps guide your decisions and give you something to measure your success.

Have you set your goals for the year and your strategy for achieving them? Tell me about it in the comments – I’d love to hear how strategy helps you or if it doesn’t. If you don’t have a strategy yet, let’s talk and start setting one up. Click here to schedule a call with me.

Solopreneurs, what’s your theme for 2012?

Solopreneur business owners can focus on one theme for the year — What's your theme for your solopreneur business in 2012?

What is next year about for your solopreneur business?

Like many successful solopreneurs I know, I choose a theme for each year. Some people pick an inspiring word like growth, action, or fearlessness. I’ve been choosing one big, overarching area that needs improvement for my big project of the year. In 2011, my theme was “expand my online business.” Before this effort, I had a website that functioned as more of an online brochure and newsletter sign up. I was getting one-on-one clients and group gigs mainly via personal connections. Beginning in 2010, I began to learn how to use the internet to promote my business. By the time 2011 rolled around, I was ready to get to work.

It’s been a great year and I’m really happy with the results. I’ve got a full website that functions well, my online presence is fleshed out and ready for more, and I’m finishing my first information product that will be sold from my website. Mission accomplished!

Even though I help others improve their business, I regularly get help too! Nobody can be as successful by themselves as they can with the guidance of a coach or mentor. Expanding my online presence was something I definitely wanted help with and I used two main sources for that help.

The first person I got help from was Kathleen Gage in the form of her 1-year Street Smarts Marketing VIP Club. You get one lesson a week covering just about everything you need to know about online marketing, and the lessons build on each other. At $27 per month, it’s very affordable and the value is great. If you’re interested, here is the link: Street Smarts VIP Club.

The other person I got help from is Alicia Forest. I first purchased her “21 Easy and Essential Steps to Online Success” in the spring. This is like a handbook for setting up the online part of your business. I had so much success with that program that I attended her live event the “Online Business Breakthrough Workshop.” This was an inspiring, motivating, action-oriented 3-day workshop where we learned in-depth strategies to building an online business. By the way, I’m an affiliate for both Kathleen and Alicia since I love their work so much.

2012 is the year of my signature system. I first sketched out my unique signature system at the Online Business Breakthrough Workshop in the fall. Since then, I’ve added lots of details as they come to me, but this year the goal will be to write all the text and have it for sale. Once that happens, I’ll probably add some more products and programs that use my signature system. If you’re curious, my signature system lays out the steps to set up a successful solopreneur business, i.e. to take what you know and make a profitable business with it.

If you’re not familiar with the idea of a signature system, it’s a way to package the knowledge you use with every client. Some of what you do is unique to each individual, but if you give it some thought, you’ll probably find that you say and do some of the same things with each person you work with. It was really enlightening to discover those steps in my work. Now when I’m working with someone, I can often see more clearly what they are missing in their business.

If you haven’t already done it, why not pick a them for 2012? I’d love to help you with this – click here to schedule a Quickcall with me. If you have a them for 2012, share it in the comments.

Your site has 3 seconds to grab new visitors

You have 3 seconds for your website visitors to know if your solopreneur business is for them — Your solopreneur business site has 3 seconds to convince new visitors to stay

I was at a training recently and the instructor was reviewing the websites of some of the people in the room. One rule that kept coming up is that you have 3 seconds to grab a new visitor. When someone comes on to your site, you have about 3 seconds to tell them what your site is about, what it does and for whom it is intended. If it’s a fit, you have a chance of keeping them on your site and if not they’ll leave. If they don’t know, you’ve lost them even if they are a perfect client for you.

It’s definitely challenge to create a website that grabs people, even your perfect clients or customers. That’s true even if your purpose is clearly stated, but if you don’t clearly state your purpose, your chances have gone from “challenging” to “zero” because you’ve lost them.

3 seconds. Wow. That’s fast. Here’s some of what we learned:

A bold headline featured prominently will make your purpose more clear
Be clear about what your site does – is it for sales, information, sharing, connecting or something else? Consider it from the perspective of your visitor – why should they stay?
Mention in the headline something to tell your visitor whether this site is for them – examples might include moms, vegetarians or golfers. A person knows immediately if they are in or out of that group
Don’t try to be everything to everyone. You’ll end up reaching nobody. If you’re specific, you’ll at least have a chance of reaching the people you want to.
Test your site on people – give them a quick glance and ask them what the site is about. This was very informative! You’d be surprised at how different something can seem to different people.

I think all of these ideas are really helpful in making your site an irresistible beacon to those people you most want to reach but the testing takes the cake. In our group, we did testing by having a few people provide their first impression on each site. The range of answers and interpretations was really eye-opening. One word or phrase can mean something totally different than you intend. For example, one site we looked at had nothing to do with dating but had the word “match” in the headline. That one word would have caused me to leave the site even though the actual subject was interesting to me because it sounds like a dating site and I’m married. You can easily test for yourself – just ask people what they think. Remember to consider whether they are your target market or not though.

Keep this in mind when you design or update your site. I know I’m going to look at my site soon and see if I pass the 3-second test everywhere!