Welcome to the Dragon’s Blaze! This blog will discuss branding businesses and creating consumer experiences.
A relatively new, but greatly respected by me, female acquaintance of mine, Starla West, was honored with and interviewed for the Indy Top 50 Business Connector’s Award. True to her AUTHENTIC brand and professional expertise, she was a superb radio guest, creating credible audio. We are very fortunate to be hosting Starla as a speaker for our June 1, 2012 Business Strategy & Technology Forum, where she will be talking about the very subject of making business connections.
During her Biz Connector interview she spoke of being Socially Wealthy vs. Socially Poor, two concepts, which were definitely brief topics during our “we love sushi” lunch a few weeks back, much as the “I Gotta Guy Network” was a topic during our previous sandwich and cold soup lunch a few weeks earlier. The wonderful thing about new media content is how it can create discussion. Therefore, I agreed with 90% of her interview ideology and professional philosophy. Still, the dragons and I will be questioning at our next bread breaking regarding the old “quality vs. quantity” debate of being “Socially Wealthy” .
From listening to her audio last evening, I was inspired with query. Most folks in my field all probably receive more email blasts from “Socially Wealthy” people than regular colleagues. You know the emails, they all have clever subject titles and the same visual format, truncated sentences with far too many “carriage returns” making scrolling the email go on for days. Each one of these social media experts and sales gurus wants to “employ” us, if we will only fork over $1000-5000 or an amortize monthly rate for the honor. I also personally know a few other type, “Socially Wealthy” people. These can often be the “beautiful people” by the worlds standards, physically or financially. They walk into the room and all eyes are drawn to them or via pestilent persistence they demand attention with “personality”.
By humble observation, these people have ridiculous numbers of unmanageable online “connections”. (Friend to all, loyal to none.) Time management wise they obviously make time to create two-three new connections per day. Yet, cannot be bothered to answer professional phone calls, personal emails or private texts and tweets to anyone that genuinely knows them or has loyally supported them. The dragons could bear scars or share more personal painful and poetic, fair journalistic balanced experience of these of these folks, but that would be humbling as well as uncouth.
There are the other Socially Wealthy people who I would term the “financially secure”. 80% of their business comes from referral and community. They flaunt nothing. They walk their “Christianity” vs. talking about it. They down play their degrees and never call themselves Doctor, even when they hold multiple master’s degrees or professional PhD. They also don’t talk about how affluent, rich or successful they are. Truly life rich people who are financially secure are amongst some of the humblest of people I’ve ever met.
Therein lies the question I pose to readers. Is Social Equity quantity in terms of numbers of linked fans, fellows, friends and followers or should being “Socially Wealthy” really apply to “social value” in terms of how many professionals YOU have actually and intentionally helped acquire greater business skill, fiscal security or company revenue? And which do YOU think makes an individual “Socially Wealthy”? Your thoughts?
Everyday each person is allotted 24 hours. Assuming most of us sleep (or try) a reasonably healthy 6-10 hours, that leaves us with 14 hours for professional and personal responsibilities as well as the option to engage in educational or relational moments of time. For entrepreneurs, the low average work day is 8 hours within which we perform work for clients, manage marketing tactics and hunt customers.
My point is obviously to demonstrate the value of time. Time amongst the successful and those who truly wish to be successful can be the most powerful measurables in business. Many people go into business for the freedom of time, but not everyone controls time to ensure that freedom. Still, professionals often view time in terms of what I’m gaining from the time instead of looking at what we are being given in the time. You see anytime your time is spent with another person in time that individual is making an investment of relational time.
Strangely, human nature prevents evaluating or measuring time in terms of other people’s time expenditure or investment. When another individual invests beyond one hour of time focused solely on you or helping you, that is a statement that the individual values you or your goals. If the person invests multiples hours of time serving you, their valuation is clearly great. Being in business we must relate the time to business progression. Therefore, even when a business transaction has occurred to create that time together, it’s still an investment by the other individual. The greater number of hours the individual invests, the greater responsibility we have (regardless of payment) to ensure we are honoring that relational time investment. And when no money has changed hands, we need to understand how much greater the time invested in us by the individual is.
Therefore, not only is it important that we are intellectually and emotionally present during those moments of time-in with others, it’s important that we clearly understand how to measure the investment of someone else’s time. Sometimes the investment of one person’s time has greater value than the investment in a group of people expending time together. For example, often times individuals will go through my marketing course to discover a considerable waste of time in groups that provide no business expansion or referral return. Streamlining marketing may result in realizing the time “waste” in those groups. Five months later it can be shocking to learn via mutual associations that the individual is still attending the group which totally wastes their business time.
Another example is the individual who joins a bunch of groups for exposure marketing vs. simply developing a focused target. The individual runs around to many many groups to gain a few sales here an there. When were the individual to strategically align with an individual with a different marketing vision, they might make greater profit in far less time.
Something commonly overlooked when people are assessing brand or social equity is whether or not we appear to value time or the relational time of others. A colleague of mine refused to pay a modest sum to join one group, but has spent hundreds beyond that to join another. Yet, what s/he failed to realize was that the refusal to invest was not just an evaluation of the group it was a statement on the evaluation of the relationship that invited him to join that group. Another example is when a colleague believes they should earn your business merely by attending a group. The colleague may simply be waiting for an invitation to your office to be asked for the sale. You see a missed sale may come from the difference in how individual value the use of time. Thus, it challenges us to consider how does the prospect value time?
As we know that 50% of trust is lost when an individual is late to appointments, its not surprising to consider time valuation, when we fail to show up for someone else who has put their faith and trust in us for something important to them. We also loose trust when during meetings we are constantly checking our phone for emails or messages. Realizing that many of us have our watches now in our phones, its better to state the obvious that we need to check time. Another percentage of trust can be lost if we let business meetings run much beyond 1 hour or in opposition that we give the illusion we are making a real connection, but don’t clearly communicate our need to depart on time for something else. In either case we’ve accidentally abused the other person’s time or belief about our evaluation of time together.
Taking more than anticipated or making the individual feel that we did not actually desire to stay to talk longer leaves a negative impression. We make the other individual feel devalued in both cases. Another example is the individual who will gladly receive all kinds of free time from other professionals, but will not give five minutes return time to consider something important to the other person.
Today’s challenge is for you to reflect on how YOU have EXPENDED other people’s professional time. Reflect on how YOU think other professionals perceive YOUR use of their time. Do they see you investing equally to return the investment they’ve made in you? Do they think you flit about with no plan or purpose? Do they think that you value other people’s time above theirs? Do they feel dismissed by you after considerable time investment? Or could there be a perception or mis-perception about YOUR use of time that is impacting their ability or willingness to direct you business or referrals or employ you in profitable partnerships?
You see because at the end of life, people always want more time. Thus, we need to get that time is incredibly valuable and often the “greatest “gift” any other person can give us, no matter what their motivations behind the giving of time.
Networking is educational; it teaches us things about other people as well as a great deal about our self, when we reflect afterwards. When selling to targeted markets, a person doesn’t do much in the way of local networking circles or too many 1:1s. My general experience in 1:1s is that after asking a person one or two questions, they proceed to talk a considerable amount of time about themselves, if not the whole time. Even when you have an agenda of things you want to know, they can run their conversations all over, making it tough to interrupt and refocus to business. Or the individual rushes their answers to avoid verbosity, giving the impression that they don’t believe you are truly interested to know. In the end, they provide an inauthentic, business BS answer.
I don’t know about you, but as this isn’t my first business rodeo, I only ask questions to which I’m interested in knowing the answers. Never the less, in a short period of quality listening time, I can generally hear the challenges a person’s business. As a born problem solver, it’s very hard not to offer unsolicited advice, which generally folks don’t really want and won’t implement, even though its appropriate.
Anyway, today was the first time in about two or three years, where the person I met actually seemed to ask me questions about me. And not just the standard polite questions or BNI, Rainmaker 1:1 trained questions, but authentic questions with a desire for real answers.
Now I won’t say that I left the meeting feeling “good”, but I didn’t want to race back to the cave. Thus, I will say that I left the meeting feeling somewhat understood, but more importantly actually SEEN. Not seen in a way to put me in a category of others in my field or seen as who the person wanted me to be for them–to serve their use, goal or sales leads funnel.
But actually, the person was interested in knowing who I was on my own, irrelevant to their goals. So many phone calls or meetings I sit in knowing that my contacts, ideas, resourcefulness or forum is just a means to an ends for people. So many people just see others in comparison to themselves in an area or contrasts to other professionals they know. Or professionals use NLP to control their behavior with an intent to manipulate.
Since I create brands and speak on personal branding, I’ve felt like it’s my duty to remind members to constantly review how they are being seen by others. Yet, a great challenge for yourself today when you’re networking, calling, emailing, tweeting or meeting people is whether or not YOU actually take time to SEE who they are in a way that has nothing to do with YOUR business goals.
What are the individual’s gifts and who can YOU introduce them to help move them further on their paths to their dreams, irrelevant to YOUR hopes for the relationship? Thus, I challenge you to truly SEE people…
Selling to a very precise targeted market means limited attendance at local networking events. Factually, target demographics don’t attend local events. Being a data hound asking questions, assessing facts and coordinating non-biased journalist observations is a natural approach to attendance. From the lay social scientist viewpoint, the clarity reveals many entrepreneurs launching many bright ideas, hoping one will stick.
While there is definite productivity power to be found in implementation speed, often speedily implemented projects offer quick cash, but they don’t really result in stable income streams or true wealth development. People touted for success one month come back the next several communicating concern over survival. Additionally, sometimes the illusion of found “success” with such instant ideas adds unforeseen costs to service delivery, such as time and travel expenses or human capital or replacement staff, while one is absent.
Each month analytical operational observations note that professionals talk about stuff they implemented only to come back month after month with either the same churn and burn, financial worries or truth that the income stream subsided. All such things remind me of the tiny oak trees that I need to pull from a small square of dirt next to my office front door.
From elementary school science classes we learned that tree roots run deep and several times in length the height of the tree. Additionally, multiple roots are needed to ensure the trees balance and sway in the breeze without toppling, crushing whatever is nearby. Common sense says, typically large growing trees cannot be successfully planted in a 4×4 spot of dirt. Nor should they be planted close to a home because the roots can break water pipes, pull up concrete and cost a host of other expensive repairs, when proper arborical planning hasn’t been considered.
Business building is like the growing oak tree. You need to carefully consider the soil and location for YOUR roots. What is the foundation to your business, where are the roots planted and where are they headed as they naturally grow. This weeks challenge is to carefully look at your own business garden. Are you working a plan or just doing the same trial & error thing again and again and not gaining real ground or stability? Also, be wary of illusions from idea implementation. The only two things you should be focused on are increasing revenue and decrease time expense. We are almost a month shy of 6 months into the new year. When you’re not growing as strong or tall, you need to check the soil, investigate the roots, but ultimately evaluate the gardener. And sometimes hire a master gardener to help you figure out the problem.
In March, The Business Strategy & Technology Forum‘s very own Client Appreciation Expert, Polly Hulseman, presented at the forum, sharing with us sales stats about the vitality of staying connected with prospects. In April, cool consultant, Starla West wrote a great public blog post about her “I Gotta Guy Network”, which offered how easy it is to refer colleagues. Last week during a new dream building section of my level 1 mastermind class, the client mentioned a desire for a new home and I immediately said, “I know its early to bring that to fruition, but if you don’t have a realtor, I know an excellent one.”
Something we are all faced with everyday is not only the natural need of referrals, but also how to refer people. During my “Blaze YOUR Brand–Increasing YOUR Social Equity Value” presentation, I spoke of the 4 Ps of Refer-ability being Punctuality, Performance, Productivity and Ps & Qs that come from research of buyer pet peeves about purchasing. You’ll note that these pet peeves don’t talk about whether or not the person like the individuals communication style or personality. Nor did it touch on the number of social media fans or friends a person have.
This insight lets us know how to K.I.S.S (keep it simple silly) the referral. It’s not always about telling exactly detailed show and tell about what you received in partnership. It’s far better to speak in general business terms of services that typical businesses need. Provide general data percentages on increases in sales conversions, transactions, revenue, etc. This way you are not revealing confidential information such as dollar amounts that could damage either your posture or that of the referral. Due to market fluxuations and a myriad of other natural factors, avoid answering cost questions. What you paid yesterday, may not still be the price today. It’s also always important to remember that today’s referral could be tomorrows alliance or customer. Thus, present a positive brand by focusing on the caller’s NEEDS. While we can talk another day about helping qualify referrals, you want to be someone that people want to get referrals from. And that means you need to have your act together when people call.
A fast peak on any street corner in a populated community shows companies and organizations at work. Rarely, are these viable organizations run by a force of one persons. Big name companies may have been started with one person in a garage and some gear, but eventually the individual had to make alliances and profitable partnerships to acquire skills not already their own in which to grow ideas and ultimately their business.
The key to their success is the humble recognition that the individual DOES NOT hold all the answers to their business development challenges. Even in companies where there are teams of people, ability to grow often requires the hiring of additional team members or project based consultants due to an inability to accomplish certain things.
Something I constantly observe is how small business owners often can decrease their own ability to grow by gaining a little knowledge in an industry and then becoming instant experts in something they have either hired and outsourced or something that they should hire and outsource.
Usually what happens is enthusiasm for what they are doing or minor growth they are seeing from a plan or a few ideas causes them to take over areas they’ve outsourced. Other times, folks take risks, refusing to invest in common sense business practices such as investigating business insurance, seeking legal counsel or hiring a marketing strategist. Impatience to implement and make money will actually impede the main mission, which is to get and keep customers. Sure it’s YOUR business and you can do anything you want, but when you involve others in goals or projects, their “face” as the Japanese call it becomes involved as well.
Of course, we are not overlooking that sometimes technology or timing can impact plans or new information can come along to help you avoid rocks in the rapids for steering the boat, but it’s important to remember that YOUR brand is connected to others perception of you based on your ability to make a plan, work a plan and involve others in that plan. And just a note of definitions, if it’s not written down and you’ve not used a bench marked method, which exist in most industries, then it’s not really a plan. Beliefs and ideas in your head isn’t a plan either. Conversations and agreements with colleagues is a plan and has accountability to keep.
Today’s challenge is to reflect on your business relationships and check yourself as to whether or not you have documented your promises to others and whether or not your are keeping all your agreements to YOUR strategic partners or following the minutes or hours of paid or gratus advice given you. A key indicator as to how you are doing in partnering is directly related to your sales. When sales aren’t where you think they can be, it’s most likely because YOUR not listening to strategic suggestion.
Today’s Marketeers Mastermind sessions have me thinking about fuzzy logic. Something I find fascinating amongst entrepreneurs regardless of education or success level is a how easy it is to be distracted by social media and technology and other stuff that offers the illusion of work, but detract from our specialty and sales purpose and frankly isn’t really related to business development.
Often in weekly accountability meetings, professionals set loose Brimstone, the red dragon, in the early stages of a planning & implementation. Instead of doing the foundational work of business building, professionals want to play with gadgets and technology, which has nothing to do with securing a new sale, maintaining regular relationships or reaping referrals from past customers. Thus, people end up in churn and burn monetization modes of 1:1 conversations. Three, four & five months go by and little change of business occurs.
Sure learning new things are important, but the only thing you should be learning is your products, services and SALES skills. After all, when learning new gadgets or running here & there doing the same old 1:1 methods removes the responsibility of helping YOU target, find and convert new & old clients, then “Houston, we have a revenue problem.” Thus, today’s challenge is for you to look at your week’s schedule and omit all activities that are unrelated to serving or acquiring clients. The only other aspects of your professional schedule should be reading business books and studying CURRENT sales schtick, over and over and over again.
Everything else can be outsourced because only linear focus EARNS goals, everything else is just your own magical illusions and hocus pocus. Thus, this week’s challenge is to review your schedule and eliminate anything that is NOT relationship development related to tangible transactions OR helping others convert clients.
After speaking gig, savvy thinkers often email to ask me what’s the difference between BLAZING your Brand & FLAMING your Brand. The words sound incredibly similar and yet they can have very different meanings. As discussed during my presentation this week for 33 some people at the Linking Indiana event downtown Indy, business branding and personal branding are similar and yet different.
In both cases, the professional is deciding what one’s business is and determining within a reasonable degree of human frailty and imperfectness between conscious and unconscious action how to conduct represent the self during the process of “being your business”.
From the individual ego centric POV, people always believe they behave as consummate professionals. And yet, when we are brave enough to step outside ourselves, we have to ask how someone else interprets our walk. Those who BLAZE their brand have made conscious decision that in every moment they interact for their business, they are going to put their focus on how they can add value to the individual’ in front of them, in public or private circumstances, irrelevant to a personal transaction benefit. In contrast, those who FLAME their brand are only focused on a sale or the pat on the back for something they achieved, did for others or what they can gain monetarily and ultimately what they can get from the individual–whether the commodity be cash, connections or ideas. They show up only when its convenient to them instead of when its needed or requested by the other person.
The challenge I posed Tuesday evening while speaking was to simply take a look at each business relationship we have with customers, colleagues, employees, teammates, referral partners, new alliances and prospects to ask ourselves whether or not we really understand what is important to that individual?
You see in order to know how to add value to someone, you need to be able to say with true sincerity, not just business lingo of the day, “how are you”, “what can I do for you?”, “how can I help you?” Actually, ASK and listen, not assume you know. LEARN what would add the most value to the person that we can GIVE from our actual ‘arsenal of assistance’? If you really want to challenge yourself futher, think through WHAT has been the individual’s experience of each interaction our brand?
Sunday mornings begin a little different that most days. I sleep until 7:30…two hours later than normal…Whoo hoo! I turn an other-wise unused television on to engage my brain to find a touch of positive inspiration on the greater good of mankind. This morning a fascinating documentary on the three global approaches to belief held my attention for about15 minutes.
Then I stared at the now two Tae Bo DVDs I have from Netflix to determine, whether or not this aging body is loose enough to karate my way into muscular fitness without breaking something that’s already got me crunched from the professional act of sitting to advise and design, etc. This last part is all a part of my own internal “I’m going to” monologue.
What about you? Do you have an “I’m going to” self-dialog? These words are regularly expressed from from consulting clients. I hear “I’m going to” when I spontaneously meet past clients of Biz Plan Masterminds. Retained clients speak these words to me each week, as it’s my responsibility to say “chop, chop”, keeping them on calendar track with their stair steps plan to get revenue generating activity accomplished. And I too have my own white boarded “I’m going to talk”…like “I’m going to record that audio, create print and video invitations for my upcoming speaking event and list goes on for me as it does probably for you…
One of the troubles with “I’m going to” is that it’s mere intention. And it is met everyday by actions we must do to continue getting and keeping customers. Time isn’t always our ally as things take longer to do than we’d planned. And sometimes “I’m going to” faces the big scary wall of CHANGE. It means we must let go of something, buckle down to commit to something or engage in something new in order to change the situation in the direction we truly need to go.
It’s always sad hear about folks one has invested hundreds of hours in consulting only to hear through the grapevine they’re still attending groups and investing hours in non ROI stuff that assessing and planning proved needed to be eliminated and replaced with more targeted efforts. However, imperfection is a human condition, so I use these moments to remind myself of what more I could be accomplishing in mulah making activities.
Thus, today’s challenge is review your biz or marketing plan to MAKE A LIST of “I’m going to”. Please first include those things you’ve said to someone else cause what the Japanese call “face” or we now call personal brand is in that. Then make a list of those other things you’ve planned to accomplish for taking you to the next level. But REALLY make this coming week one that you knock out some of the “I’m going to”…stuff.
There funeral hall was virtually empty outside his family and the rest were social media messages held by unpaid interns holding cell phones of their employers sending their condolences…
Our recent business forum suggested android applications to help business people operate more efficiently. As a marketer I grow more and more concerned with communication trends observed by online and offline business professionals in our community. Business professionals use texting for conversations that should be held by telephone or conference call. Friends and followers misinterpret general business ideology postings or random thoughts as direct messages to them. In private settings, consulted clients speak of being dumped by friends through text or un-friended and un-followed by someone fairly important to their life, all over the misguided belief that a blog, post or tweet or series of postings that the same individually originally opted into in respect to the relationship has somehow now become specific to them as an individual.
In my opinion, this assumptive thinking that the other person’s professional or personal world revolves solely around the contact is often the killer of what would otherwise be high quality relationships. Have you ever had the situation where folks you haven’t spoken to in months respond to questions about “how are you?” with “same as you”. My word of caution, never interpret business building promotional efforts through social media postings as any commentary on YOUR life. You don’t know what someone is really thinking without asking them a SPECIFIC question. And people don’t know what YOU are thinking without being very clear about your subject or the reason why you are calling or telling them something specific and how it relates to them.
What prompted me to write about this was a networking event last night where a man interpreted another person’s selection of tables in relation to him, when in fact the person in question was just trying to figure out the most unobtrusive place to set his technology equipment. One guy assumed the situation was likened to teenage lunch room table selection of who one did or didn’t want to sit next to, when the other guy was just trying to assess preventive maintenance of choosing seating to ensure his equipment didn’t trip people or get damaged from folks so self-absorbed the wouldn’t see it. And he could get to it to operate it with ease… It’s all on perspective…ego-centric or others centric.
Thus, I guess my challenge to you today is really reflect on the quality of YOUR business relationships. In your networking, do you really have 11 people on whom you can totally rely, trust and create mutually beneficial accountability partnerships? And more importantly, while its important for you to stay on task for your own business, what are YOU doing if anything to help them achieve their goals?
