Jumpstart Your Business

Are social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn being overhyped? Are all the social media pundits sending today’s business down a dark and dangerous alley?

If you are a large or medium enterprises you typically have the resource to devote to finding out the relevance of a social media focus on your overall marketing strategy. The million dollar questions for the small business are: “Is it really worth my time?” “Can I afford to be doing this now?”

Concrete Ears

photo credit: peter pearson

To really understand your market and get to know what pain your favorite customers are suffering and what their concerns are, you need to be actively engaged in conversations with them. Conversation has two sides to it – talking and listening and the latter is what allows us to gain information. The difference between hearing and listening should not be confused.

Steve Strauss posted this in his column in USA Today. One of the points he makes is to never stop prospecting:
There are three types of customers
1. New customers
2. Existing customers
3. Exiting customers
To remain in business, you must keep these three balls rotating: New customers become existing customers, existing customers change habits, and exiting customers leave, so new customers must be always located.
Never stop prospecting. Never stop hustling and proposing. Don’t stop marketing.
And don’t rest on your laurels.
For the complete article please see 4 sure-fire ways to lose business

As an entrepreneur, you wear two important hats: management and leadership. You put on the management hat as you run the day-to-day business operations. The leadership hat you don as you set the vision and the mission of the organization and take it along the path established by your strategic plan. The challenge today is the meaning of strategic.

My friend P. Griffith Lindell way back in 2007 left this comment to one of my posts:

Leaders learn that it is easy to “think like a loser” when leaders get all caught-up in themselves.

Why we do what we do says more about our character than what we do. Our motivations are often hidden, sometimes even from us.

Leadership that is self-centered is limiting. In Success Built to Last, the authors suggest that leadership that succeeds over time is attributable to the strength of the cause they pursue: “Enduringly successful people serve the cause–and they are lifted up by its power.”

John Kotter observed in his article What Leaders Really Do, “Well-led businesses tend to recognize and reward people who successfully develop leaders.”

Now there’s a cause. Find and control the motivations that are just about you. Feed and nurture the motivations that are about developing your team.

Leading is about others.

My thanks to Karen L Fink for forwarding this video clip to me. It does say it all!

Do you ever stop to consider the language that we use to describe our relationships with our customers. The target customer. Our hunter sales people. Shotgun marketing. Farming the installed base. Rifle shot marketing. In every one of these instances, either the customer is a target or we reduce him/her to a cow or a hen to consistently produce milk or eggs.

photo credit: Losttrekker

No wonder the customer has rebelled. And it is about time that we realize that the bullets are headed our way but no longer as arrows to a target but bullets of information either blasted out by customers as shotgun pellets or as rifle shots of information targeted directly at us, the enterprise.

The customer is no longer the target, we the enterprise are. We need to stop thinking of the customer as the target.

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The sale is not the only way for you to interact with your customers, says Mike Moran of Search Engine Guide. You need to remember about the rest of the buying cycle and not the last click that comes about from the search. Too many people have gotten the idea that search marketing is great for sales, but have forgotten everything else about search marketing, and maybe marketing in general.

To really benefit from your customer searches, your site must be search engine optimized with the right search terms in your content. This only happens if you truly understand the language your customer uses to describe your product and you can only discover this if you listen closely to your customer.

For the full story check out: Stop Selling Your Products!

“Flying by the seat of your pants”, so to speak, is very exciting but is not a recommended way to run your business. Just remember that almost 90% of start ups never see a second year all because their owners never filed a “flight plan”. To prevent a small business from running sluggishly, the owner needs to invest in a business plan. Here are 10 good reasons for that stinking business plan:

photo credit: David Boyle in DC
1. Help you understand who your target market is and what customer problem you are trying to solve.

Take the recently announced Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Initiative — a $500 million initiative that will unlock the growth and job creation potential of 10,000 small businesses across the United States through greater access to business education, mentors and networks, and financial capital.

photo credit: markwgallagher

It is based on the broadly held view of leading experts that a combination of education, capital and support services best addresses the barriers to growth for small businesses. 10,000 Small Businesses will be guided by an Advisory Council co-chaired by CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein, Warren Buffett, and Dr. Michael Porter of Harvard Business School.

In today’s social media world, we have finally realized that we need to understand our customers and part of that process involves holding conversations with the customer. Holding a conversation implies two things: talking and listening. Since we are trying to gain information about the customer’s status and needs, it would appear that we should be listening more than talking. So how do we listen effectively to a customer? Here are some keys tips to improve your listening ability:
1. Pay attention – If you really want to be a good listener, you pay attention to the person speaking. Use non-verbal cues like a smile, eye contact or a nod of the head to let the speaker know that he/she is being heard.