Selling by teaching and demonstrating
Earlier today I published a guest article Stop Selling and Start Teaching!. In the article, Jessica Swanson tells of her experience with the hard sell in a brick-and-mortar store. She shows clearly how off-putting “the sell” can be and advocates using an educational/informational approach in your online business, to build trust and confidence.
Jessica’s article reminded me of my Dad. He was a “born salesman.” He was one of those guys who could sell anything. He could extract your eye teeth and sell them back to you. And get you to agree he had done you a favor. He did it all by informing, explaining and demonstrating. In his retirement years, he became a crafter. He made tole-painted decor objects and sold them at craft fairs. I occasionally got to see him work his sales craft on customers. He would pick up an object the customer was inspecting and just start talking about it. With great enthusiasm, he would tell 
the tale of how it was made, what materials went into it, and even the history of the particular pattern or the history of tole-painting. He never asked someone to buy something. He just talked to them casually, while showing great love for his creation. Not only did the immediate customer buy the product, but also bystanders who overheard would often buy the same item or other items. He usually drew small crowds just curious to hear his stories. And when he ran out of product, he took orders to make and deliver the sold-out items. He actually build a fan-base of customers who would look for his booth at the craft fairs, buy from him again and again and phone him to make custom gifts to give.
Think about it. What can you do to connect so powerfully with your prospective customers or clients on line? How can you show them the value of your product or service? How can you create for them a demonstration of your commitment to, enthusiasm for and expertise in your field of endeavor? And for those who operate only on line: how can you show your interest in and concern for your customer or client even though you never connect with them face to face?
Turning down business and beating overwhelm
Yesterday, I published one of my own articles about the reasons for turning down new business: Turn Them Down, Don’t Let Them Down. I encourage you to avoid one of the biggest mistakes any organization can make, but one that is most common to solo entrepreneurs. Don’t take on work that you can’t reasonably handle.
Sure, there are a lot of jobs that will strain you or even force you into hiring temporary help to manage. Everyone gets that occasionally. But some work just isn’t worth it. Some work isn’t humanly possible to complete in the contracted time line. Some isn’t possible to do to the exact specifications of the contract. Some is from folks who are impossible to please. You must be able to differentiate the jobs you can do from the jobs that are just too much. If you don’t, you’ll let your client or customer down, you might not get paid, you’ll develop a bad reputation and you’ll ultimately lose business — not only from the disappointed client/customer, but from others. Read the article.
As a related follow-up, I also published a guest article today, How to Get Rid of the Entrepreneurial Overwhelm…for GOOD!, which has a few suggestions for avoiding the ways entrepreneurs find to feel overwhelmed by the distractions of possible work opportunities and marketing ploys. With all the advice on line about how to market, especially the rage for “social marketing,” it’s easy to lose the focus you need to make your product or service better and keep up with the business you already have. And then there is all the advice on how to turn your one current product into a line of fifty products, with little or no effort and create a fortune in multiple streams of income. Not. Don’t get distracted.
Time shift happens
Yesterday’s guest article for Superperformance.com was Can You Really Make Up For Lost Time? by Bryan Beckstead. His theme is that the use of time is valuable and the opportunity for getting the planned work done is not fully replaceable. He argues that shifting one day’s lost work to another day displaces at least some, if not most of the second day’s work, which then must be shifted to yet another day.
He’s right, if you assume that all the work being shifted is something that has to be done, that it has to be done all on the same day and that you have to do it all yourself, as originally planned and without help. In the context of today’s “lean” organizations (large and small) that assumption often holds. So, in that context, it is very, very difficult to make up for lost time.
Yet, interruptions, distractions and emergencies happen. You can cope with them by giving yourself as flexible a schedule as possible, acknowledging that they occur. And while Beckstead is writing primarily about wasting time and spelling out the consequences of doing it, the consequences are the same whether you waste your own time or others waste it for you. They are the same if you have a sick day. They are the same if your boss can’t make a conference and sends you in his place. They are the same if you actually have too much work to do in one day.
All of that means that you need to find ways to deal with it effectively when your plan or schedule for your time/task has failed in any way. Regardless of what happened or who caused it.
1. First ask yourself if there are to-do’s that don’t actually have to be done, either from the lost work schedule or from the current one to which you are shifting. If so, cut them. This is essential because most people over-schedule, and most add items that would be nice, but are unneeded.
2. Re-examine the work schedule for inefficiencies. Are you doing things in the right order? At the right time? If you re-ordered your schedule, would you be able to get some items done faster and therefore fit more work into the time? Do all the things on your schedule have to be done on that particular day. Look at the whole week. When else can you do what needs to be done?
3. Get help. Even if you have wasted time and you are responsible for the debacle, the work still needs doing. If you can’t fit it in the time available, get someone else to help you with it. Remember, the help doesn’t have to be with any particular work, you can get someone to help you with work that doesn’t require your expertise so that you can do the work only you can do. This is particularly important to note for people like solo entrepreneurs who tend to try to do everything for themselves. For example, if you are a painter, you can get someone to, say, answer phones and return calls while you go paint a house. Or you could trade work with a friend at the office. I know a woman whose friend, Betty, helped her finish a report that had to be in by Friday, and on Saturday, she went to Betty’s house and pre-cooked and froze the week’s meals for the family to return the favor.
It’s best if you don’t waste your own time and have to pay for it, but when you lose time, it is difficult, not a tragedy. Shift happens. Be ready for it and know what to do. You may not be able to get the time back, but you can always find a way to get the work done.
Superperformance — The Intellectual Property Theft
Here’s a quote from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: “It is just as wrong to steal intellectual property as it is to break into a home, steal a car, or rob a bank. ”
The problem with intellectual property theft is that it is not afforded the same kind of protection as burglary or the theft of cars or money. If someone steals other kinds of property from you, a government agency such as the police or FBI will arrest and prosecute them. If someone steals your intellectual property, you may have to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars suing them to make them stop. Large corporations can afford to do that. Individuals and small businesses are out of luck.
Superperformance, the idea behind and the name of my website, is a trademark. It’s been a trademark since 1997 in common law and is currently registered as a Federal trademark. By law, in the field of organizational and individual performance improvement, no one else may write and publish about superperformance in print or digital media. (Yes, that means books as well.) No one else may offer seminars, workshops or consultations on the theme of superperformance. And no one may encourage others to do so or aid others in doing so.
Don’t be fooled by others claiming my rights. Superperformance is my intellectual property. I have not granted anyone else permission to use the term in any media or any services. If you find others using it, other than for the purposes of referring to me or my website, those folks are violating my intellectual property rights.
Don’t help them steal what I have worked long years for: my property and reputation.
The Hype
I just published a guest article Making Money on the Internet — Forget all the Hype — You Have to Work at This by Kathleen Gage. I’m always glad to see article authors who call the hype sellers on their bull hockey. While I don’t want to go off on a rant, I do resent the number of article authors and marketers who promise instant gratification–not to mention pots of money — by using their system to start a website.
Wow, you can put up a website in 10 minutes and start selling today! Sure. Uh-huh. You can fill that website with original and unique content via PLR and content spinners. Yeah. That really works — not.
(Now, I haven’t tried all of the PLR available nor all of the content spinner systems, so I can only talk about my experience in testing them. Pardon my skepticism, but to me it seemed on the face of it that they couldn’t work. Nevertheless, before I came down on the idea, I actually did the research. And, no, I won’t name the products or sites I tested. I will say, however, that I did not shell out any cash to check out the “premium” membership PLR sites. Who knows? Maybe there’s something in them. I’m just not taking the chance just in order to write a couple of articles or posts. I did test both free and non-membership pay for PLR products and found neither worthwhile. Take a free trial, and see for yourself if you think anyone would be interested in a site filled with the “content” some of these methods produce.)
Oh, you can actually do those promised things. It’s just that your site probably will have poor quality, have little recognition by search engines, and sell nothing, or almost nothing. And, no, having a bunch of low-quality, non-productive sites is not the road to multiple-streams of income.
You have to put as much work into a commercial website as a brick-and-mortar business. Sometimes more. At least in your own community you have friends and family to start the word of mouth marketing for your business. On the internet, nobody knows you. Unless, of course, you are a celebrity. Are you? Otherwise you’ve got to work for it.
Great video on critical thinking
The YouTube video below is an excellent presentation of the purpose, value and process of critical thinking. No amount of training or education can take the place of the ability to evaluate circumstances, analyze problems and think through solutions. It doesn’t matter if you are trying to get ahead in your company, building a team to complete a project or training your sole employee for your small business: you need to know how to think critically and teach your employees to do the same. Here’s a 5 minute introduction.
Contacts sports
Today I published an article from a guest author about the connection between making a good impression on one individual you meet and the meaning of that connection to a much larger group. (How to Meet 300 People in 30 Seconds, by Cynthia W. Lett.) It gave me a few more thoughts to expand on, a bit.
One of the first things I learned about networking and self-promotion was that the average person knows about 250 people well enough for them to be invited to his funeral. That figure came from a “rule of thumb” estimate made by funeral directors. The point was that every contact you make is a potential connection to about 250 others. And, of course, that’s the whole idea behind LinkedIn, Facebook and other networking sites.
Yet, do you ever stop to think about how important it is to make a good impression on each and every one of your contacts. Every time. New or old, your contacts will pass on their impressions of you to their own contacts. That works socially and in business. If you have a dispute with a colleague, your dispute — and your colleague’s interpretations of it — may be throughout the company grapevine, or even spreading on line, in a matter of minutes. If you do a good deed for a friend, a hundred people may know about it twenty minutes later. If you get drunk at a company party, someone with a camera phone may record it and post it to their blog in five minutes flat.
After all the time you spend trying to build your network, you definitely want good news spread throughout your contacts’ networks. Watch your appearance and behavior in person, on the phone, in mail and email, in public and on line. If you’ve got publicity, you’ve got a public following. Anyone and everyone has become the paparazzi.
Just a reminder (service)
Do you use some reminder service like rememberthemilk.com? There are several excellent ones, and if you don’t use Firefox, they’ll do a good job for you.
However, I’ve just discovered an add-on for Firefox that does the job of keeping your to-dos and reminders/alarms constantly available on your browser. No calendar program needed. Very handy. It’s called ReminderFox and you can find it https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1191/. You can receive alarms in your browser and by email. You can even create “quick alarms” that remind you to do something a short time later, such as “it’s 4:00 p.m. — call your manager about the report.”
It’s set by default to reside in the right corner of the status bar at the bottom of the browser window. Just click on it and a fairly sophisticated reminder and to-do program window pops open. It’s very easy and intuitive, but there’s lots of user info and training available on the developer’s Firefox page (here). And it is free, but the developers would be most grateful for a small donation.
Thinking about thinking
I just published an article by Kevin Dwyer on Leadership and Thinking. I’m always glad to see articles and books that stand up for the value of using reason and intellect to guide solid business decisions and actions.
I’ve seen so many people who have the heartfelt belief that leadership is only about action. The seem to think that they’ve paid their “thinking dues” and by virtue of experience and intuition they know the right action. They have arrived at their leadership positions either by promotions through rank or by natural charm and persuasion. They don’t want to hear the thinking or reasoning behind the advice they’re given, they just want to trust their underlings — or consultants — to do the hard work of research and come up with a plan that sounds good. They want to stand out in front and “lead” their people to fabulous profits, or crushing the competition or whatever glorious end they have in mind. If it goes well, they get the credit. If it goes badly, it’s the fault of everyone else. Who advised them badly.
Hello — you can’t outsource thinking.
New Blog Update
As you may notice for a few days, I’m upgrading my Wordpress version and updating my blog design. Please excuse my dust.