strategy – Page 6 – Michele Christensen

What are you saying no to?

I see a lot of attention being paid to the idea of saying yes to opportunities that come you way. A lot of people see this as a path to success with ease – watch for opportunities to come you way and then take them. I agree with this to a point – jump right in when the opportunity is right! What about when the opportunity isn’t a good fit? Should you still accept a chance to do something simply because it showed up without you working for it?

Business opportunities are everywhere, and some show up because you worked for them and some show up without any effort by you. There’s more to do in your business than you could ever possibly get done, so by necessity you will have to turn down some projects you may want to do. Given the imbalance of the how much discretionary time a business owner has and how many things they could be doing, they will have to turn down a lot in the course of their business life.

In these discarded opportunities lies one of the keys to success – choose very carefully what you will and will not do. It’s really important to say yes and jump into the right projects, but it’s equally important to say no and move on from the wrong projects.

Your time and energy are finite, and you can only get to a finite number of projects in your business. Starting too many or having too many going at once is a surefire way to get none of them done, have them take too long or have the quality suffer. You’d be better off picking a few and completing them at a level of quality that your customers will appreciate. Partially done, poorly done or abandoned projects never made anyone’s bottom line grow!

Throughout your business life, you’ll be bombarded with things you want to create, products you want to sell, content you want to write and more. If you’re like many entrepreneurs, you can think of more ideas in a day than you can do in a year. That means that you’ll only ever be able to actually complete a very small portion of all those projects. The bad news is that those numbers can feel really disappointing. The good news is that you can cherry pick only the best ones to implement. Keep an inventory of all those great ideas and things you want to do and when it comes time to add something new to your work, pick the best and leave the mediocrity behind.

Guest Blog post on Karen May Dy’s Social Media Marketing blog

Here’s a post I wrote for Karen May Dy’s Social Media Marketing blog on strategy, business and social media. I’d love to know what you think about it!

Do Nothing Without a Strategy

How to stay on track

Someone asked me a question recently, and I thought it was such a great one that I decided to answer it here. I was at a training, and when I mentioned that I coached entrepreneurs, the person I was talking to asked me “How do you keep them on track? Entrepreneurs, myself included, are always changing gears.”

It’s a great question because he’s right – entrepreneurs are naturally drawn to new ideas and possibilities – bright, shiny objects anyone? Enthusiasm for new ideas is one of an entrepreneur’s greatest gifts and also one of the greatest challenges. Nobody goes into business with the desire to be bored.

Let me share a little of my philosophy first – I don’t “keep” people on track, because that implies force or power and I don’t believe entrepreneurs want or need that. Entrepreneurs are naturally motivated and love results, so guidance and perspective are better tools than force for entrepreneurs.

What I do is help business owners get clear on what they want to accomplish and how to get there. As they move forward, we tackle roadblocks together. When the inevitable “next big thing” pops up, I remind them of where they said they wanted to go and we assess if this new thing fits into that goal. If it does, we figure out how to fit it into the current plan. If it doesn’t, we talk about whether or not the original goal still fits. The beauty of running your own business is that you get to decide what the goals are and when to change them.

A word of caution – if you change your goals too often, you may end up never reaching them. I think this is one of the biggest hurdles entrepreneurs face – being able to stay with something after it gets boring but before it produces results. Most new projects go through the “darkest before the dawn” phase where the newness has worn off and finishing the project becomes a slog through tedium to get to the finish line. This is the worst time to give up – when completion is just around the corner.

This is a great example of how strategy and planning in a business pay off. If you start with a goal and a plan to get there, you have a criteria against which to weigh any potential new ideas. If the new idea fits, then use it. If it doesn’t, you have the option of changing your goal or your plan but do it intentionally and not because you got bored.

Penny-wise and dollar-foolish

Have you ever heard this expression: “penny-wise and dollar-foolish?” It describes being wise with small amounts of money but foolish with big amounts. I heard a story recently that reminded me how easy it is to fall into this not only for solopreneurs but for big companies as well.

A friend of mine was traveling with his girlfriend and two dogs. They arrived at night at a big, chain hotel and took a room for the night. They didn’t know the hotel allowed dogs and so the dogs slept in the car (it was safe, near their room and the temperature was fine). The next day, as they were browsing the web to find a hotel for the next night, they found that the hotel they were in did in fact allow dogs so they let the dogs in for about 5 minutes before getting a call from management.

The concern of management was that while the hotel did take dogs, my friends were in a room that was not part of the hotel where dogs were allowed and they had not paid the pet deposit upon checking in. Sounds reasonable so far, right? The problem was that the management took a combative and accusatory tone from the beginning. They insisted my friends tried to bilk them and had broken the rules on purpose. The management also insisted upon a penalty fine of hundreds of dollars instead of just the $40 or so it would cost to deep clean the hotel room. My friends offered to allow an inspection and offered to pay for the deep clean. The hotel refused and wouldn’t even come to the room to look. My friends paid the penalty, resumed their trip and have told a lot of people about this experience.

Here is a perfect example of penny-wise and dollar-foolish. The hotel management staff were so intent on getting the few-hundred dollar penalty that they lost not only all future business from my friends but also that of the many people they told. Had they been gracious and just took enough money to make sure they weren’t out of pocket, my friends and all of their dog-loving friends would now be fans of this hotel.

There’s loads of other ways to be penny-wise and dollar-foolish. Do you alienate customers and lose big sales over small money? Do you buy the cheapest version of products or services and end up wasting precious hours because of it? As an solopreneur, it could kill your business to think this way. Always consider all the costs of your decisions and put much more emphasis on dollars instead of pennies.

Have you ever caught yourself being penny-wise and dollar-foolish? How did you fix it? Share your experience 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.

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.

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.