Aspire » 2007 » December

Testimonials – Good vs. Bad and how to get them.

Shawn Kinkade — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 00:50:29 +0000

Not all testimonials are created equal. Done well and used the right way, a strong testimonial can be an absolute gold mine and drive tremendous sales to your business. Poor testimonials can be ineffective – or even turn people away.

“If they’re offering a bottle for free, it must be good!” – Jean from Springfield

“It was better than CATS, I’d go see it over and over again!” – Joe S.

Everybody’s run across a product that you suspect is sketchy anyway and a questionable testimonial is usually enough to confirm that you want to stay as far away from it as you can get.

There’s the bad testimonial:

They sound fake, contrived, stretched, made up, over the top, outrageous. Straightforward and sincere is difficult to make up and most people can tell when something doesn’t sound right. If you’re making stuff up, you’re not helping yourself. Even if you’re not making it up, if it sounds over the top, people aren’t likely to believe it.

“Prior to getting started with the Elite Team, I was a cable guy working horrible hours, now that I am a part of the Elite Team I made 19,000 my FIRST 2 weeks. This program is awesome!” Talk about making some real money!
-Jared McCart, Valparaiso, IN

The ineffective testimonial:

The testimonial is vague or too general. It’s nice that the product or company is great, but what did it do – exactly? Why was it was great? And most importantly, as a potential buyer how would it apply to me?

“Very useful site, attractive, easy to use.” (From BetterPhoto.com)

Basecamp is just awesome

“That’s all I have to say. Basecamp is just awesome. A special place in heaven will be reserved for you guys.”
-Anthony Howard, creative director

The compelling testimonial:

The best testimonials are those that are specific and focus on how the customer was better off, more effective, empowered, etc. by your product or service. The compelling testimonial is not focused on how great you or your company / product / service is.

Remember – with all marketing, it’s not what you or your product or service can do, it’s what your product or service does to solve your customer’s problems.

Basecamp has totally changed my business… I can’t think of any business that couldn’t benefit from using Basecamp

“Just a quick note to say that after just 3 days, Basecamp has totally changed my business. My clients have a visible confidence in their projects that was hard to perceive before and my time-management skills have improved significantly. A big thank you to all your hard work and persistance through the development process. Of course I use this for my graphic design and web development business, but I can’t think of any business that couldn’t benefit from using Basecamp.”
-Ben Potter, BPD Studios

In some cases they may not be ‘traditional’ testimonials – on Constant Contact they use Customer Examples and success stories that not only illustrate why and how they use the product, but what specific benefits they got out of it. See an example here: Constant Contact.

There’s a great article by the writers of Creating Passionate Users that was written last year on this topic – you can find that article here. Another good article from Grokdotcom that takes a similar focus can be found here.

How do I get Testimonials?

Finally now that you know what to look for, how do you get the right kind of feedback from your customers? I ran across this article from the NFIB (National Federation of Independent Businesses) that had some good suggestions both on what a good testimonial is and how to get them.

You may be fortunate enough to get unsolicited feedback, but that’s difficult to count on.

Essentially it boils down to asking for them. If you know a customer is pleased with your product or service, ask them for a testimonial. Not all of them will follow through, but you really only need 1 or 2 really good examples to get you started.

It might be worth your while to do a case study with 1 or 2 of your clients and have a 3rd party interview them to pull out the details and the background on how you’ve helped your customers. (Note – a 3rd party is recommended because customers are likely to be more open with someone else, if you have a good relationship with the customer it may not be needed).

It can be difficult to get great testimonials, but done right and used in the right context, they can be the single most compelling marketing for your business – they should definitely be a key point of marketing for a small business owner.

Do you have any stories about testimonials – any great ones you’d like to share here?

Shawn Kinkade www.aspirekc.com

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Happy Holidays!

Shawn Kinkade — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 20:33:32 +0000

Here’s to wishing you and your family all of the best during this holiday season!

May your family be happy, healthy and safe.

May your business be prosperous and fun.

Best wishes and looking forward to 2008.

Shawn Kinkade www.aspirekc.com

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8 keys to Business Success (or how to stand out in your field)

Shawn Kinkade — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 04:39:03 +0000

Photo by Hamed Saber

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about a workshop that I’m pulling together that will help small business owners build on their success. As you know, running a small business is really complicated.

There are a lot of hats involved. Marketing, Sales, Finance, Leadership – and that’s just the stuff you focus on in the morning!

So as I was working on the workshop idea, I found myself drifting all over the place in terms of the most important content and decided to pull together a summary of the key points.

1. Have a vision and goals.

What is it that you want to do? You have to be specific, you have to be descriptive – the vision should be inspiring (at a minimum inspiring to you, hopefully to your employees as well), the goals should be measurable and realistic.

Vision and goals supply the why and the what. Do you remember having do things when you were a kid and the reason was because your mom “said so”? If you were like most people – that probably didn’t result in your best efforts.

Compared that to being inspired – and the effort you get from that feeling.

2. Have a plan.

“A vision without a plan is just a dream. A plan without a vision is just drudgery. But a vision with a plan can change the world.”
~ An Old Proverb

The reality is that you need a lot of plans. You need a marketing plan that covers a year at a time. You need a financial plan that you can compare your progress to at least monthly. You need documented plans for how you’re going to deliver your product or service, how you’re going to respond to your customers, your prospects, people trying to sell you things.

Without plans, you’re winging it and that’s a scary place to be.

3. Be straightforward.

Keep things as simple as you can, both for your benefit and your customers. Not only will you get a better response overall, but your prospects will be able to self-select if they clearly understand what you’re offering.

Existing customers will appreciate an honest answer and a genuine effort to help them out. People like to do business with someone they know, like and Trust.

4. Deliver value!

This one is pretty obvious. If your customer isn’t getting the value they expected, then nothing else really matters. Delivering the end product or service that really benefits the customer (in the way they expect) has to be the focus.

However you should also be delivering value with everything you do.

If you’re networking with someone, help them out, go the extra mile to make an introduction, give a referral, help solve a problem. In the long run, you will get back much more than what you give.

On your website offer visitors valuable information or tools – you’re not giving away the store, you’re establishing credibility, you’re demonstrating character, you’re making a positive impact.

5. Track results.

You’ve got measurable goals and once you’re up and running you’ve got results that you should be tracking. It’s the only way to evaluate how your strategies are working.

Was that $1000 investment in the phone book worthwhile? How many calls or visits did you get? What was the cost per prospect? How does that cost compare to the cost per prospect for Google Ad words?

Figure out the top 3 – 5 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that really let you track the health of your business. There are financial metrics, operational metrics, sales metrics – the hard part sometimes is trimming it down to a manageable number.

6. Have fun.

If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing – at least at a high level, you shouldn’t be doing it. Life is too short to suffer through something as time consuming as a business that you don’t like.

On top of that, Fun is contagious. People (employees, customers, people that might be customers) like to be around people that are having fun.

I walked into a Fudge Shop this summer while I was on vacation to get something to drink. While I was there the staff kept up a continuous performance of different songs. Some of them were silly spoofs, some of them were obviously inside jokes about their co-workers and some of them were just songs they enjoyed singing. I ended up hanging out there almost 1/2 an hour – just because they were having fun.

7. Exceed expectations.

Say what you do and then do what you say, and then some!

If you tell me you have ‘Great Customer Service’, then you and your employees need to go the extra mile. Nothing will lose you a customer more quickly than not living up to your promises – and they will tell a lot of people they know what a bad experience it was.

Studies have shown that it can cost almost 6 times more to get a new customer than keep an existing one.

On the flip side, if you exceed expectations – if you surprise people in a ‘wow’ kind of way, you will get great word of mouth support. Look at the power Oprah has with the products she likes. People love to talk about the great new product / service / store that they found – and it really generates business.

8. Take a Break.

Finally – it’s all too easy to get caught up in the day to day firestorm that is your business. You’ve got to find a workable balance that allows you to decompress and get away on a regular basis. Your attitude, your creativity, your relationships and your health will all suffer if you can’t take a break.

Your business is a tool to get what you want out of life. If it has become an all consuming thing, then something is broken and you will hit a wall sooner rather than later. Take an extended walk. Plan a weekend away (and don’t bring your computer). Start making it a priority to carve out time for yourself.

——–

There are a lot of things you can work on to be more successful, but if you do a good job on this list, then you’re likely well on your way to business success.

What keys to success do you have? Share them here.

Shawn Kinkade www.aspirekc.comSimilar Posts:

Are you running an Incredible Machine?

Shawn Kinkade — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 18:35:53 +0000

Back in the early 90′s, there was a series of computer games called ‘The Incredible Machine“. The games were a series of intricate puzzles that required you to create complicated, off the wall Rube Goldberg machines to solve simple tasks.

The task could be as simple as getting a ball from one end of the screen to the other, but in the game you had to use the devices you had on hand to make that happen, rockets, treadmills, levers, springs, gravity – a big part of the fun was coming up with the most creative way to solve the problem.

Ultimately, for the harder puzzles, you ended up using a lot of trial and error to find a solution.

In fact the designers were very careful to simulate physics and natural laws in such a way that the results of any given action were repeatable.

Who wants to build a machine that only works sometimes?

How does this tie into small business? A big part of the challenge with a small business (or any business for that matter) is developing your processes and organizations in such a way that what you do is repeatable and doesn’t rely on chance, a winning personality or even a specific skill set for the outcome.

Have you ever heard of a business that had that ‘superstar’ performer that did stuff that nobody else could do? In small business environments, a lot of the time that superstar is the owner – which makes it really hard to expand the business (or take a vacation…see Are you stuck trading time for money?)

The same thing happens in a corporate environment, but generally it’s less of a risk or an impact because it’s really unusual that any 1 person could impact a sizable part of a company’s operations. However it happens all the time in a small business.

One way to minimize risk – and ultimately set yourself free, is to build your business into an Incredible Machine. Not in the sense of complicated contraptions to complete simple tasks (although sometimes it feels that way – payroll, accounting, creating your TPS Report…with a cover page).

No – building your Incredible Machine is about creating and documenting repeatable action plans that you need to run your business.

These action plans will cover everything from how you produce your product or service down to how your creating your marketing plan, tracking time and expenses and communicating vacation plans.

Obviously this is a big task – after all it is an Incredible Machine, but the good news is it can be done.

Q: How do you eat an Elephant?

A: One bite at a time.

Here’s a recommended approach for eating this elephant:

Create an overall outline of the areas that you need to cover with plans. Don’t worry about getting everything right, you’ll be adding and changing as you go along. I would suggest doing this online – maybe using a set of folders on a shared space to organize the areas (i.e. operations, marketing, hr, etc.).
Once you’ve got a structure in place, set up a monthly meeting and determine how large of a bite you want to take each month. My recommendation would be to shoot for 1 action plan documented every week – at the end of a year, you’ll have around 50 completed which should be a pretty big chunk of what you do.
At the monthly meeting you will review what got documented last month and decide what’s on the agenda for the current month. A lot of times this can be issue driven – use the act of detailing and documenting the process to resolve issues.
Obviously this isn’t just for the business owner – a better answer is to have managers and staff create the plans that fall into their areas and review them as a group. You don’t need to spend too much time reviewing or trying to perfect them – the real answer is to use them and have them updated / changed over time based on actually using the processes.
This process should tie into any existing operations manuals you have. If you’ve got some processes that are already well documented, then you’re ahead of the game.
As your staff brings you issues, you will be able to direct them to the action plans for resolutions. If there’s not an action plan in place, they’ll need to write one or if necessary they can update one that’s already there.

Remember, the goal is to build your machine in such a way that ultimately you as the business owner aren’t needed for day to day operations and everything will run just fine without you – whether it’s a weeklong vacation or a 3 month sabbatical.

When you’ve documented your business in this way, not only will you as the owner be able to free yourself up to focus on business growth strategies (or more time for yourself…) but you’ve also created a full-fledged operations manual that will increase the Sales Price / value of your business immensely once you get to the point of starting to think about an exit plan.

So, what’s your Incredible Machine look like? Now is the perfect time to start building your machine!

Shawn Kinkade www.aspirekc.com

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Thinking inside the Box…?

Shawn Kinkade — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 04:44:45 +0000

My friend Terry over at Powercore (nice new website by the way!) passed along a great article on Innovation. Apparently in Japan it’s not just the trains that are super crowded, it’s also the grocery stores. And in those crowded stores they don’t have room for watermelons…unless somehow…they can stack them!

So they developed square watermelons! As you can see, the solution wasn’t too hard once they accepted it was possible – simply grow the watermelon inside a square box. A very elegant solution to an unusual problem.

You can find the article (along with some more pictures) here – the author does a nice job writing up the story and makes some great points about innovating and improving your thought process. I especially liked this quote:

Get into the habit of asking yourself, “Is there a better way I could be doing this?” and you will find there often is.

Creativity is critical to business success, but all too often it’s assumed to only relevant to Marketing and PR components. Granted it’s great to have a creative marketing piece, but coming up with a creative solution to an expensive business process could drastically improve your business and your bottom line.

There’s some debate whether creativity is an innate trait or something you can learn, but my view is that although some people are gifted, everyone is capable of being creative.

A big part of learning and improving your creativity is being open to possibilities and challenging yourself for solutions – as mentioned above “Is there a better way I could be doing this?”.

In Doug Hall’s book Jump Start Your Business Brain, he outlines the 3 laws of Capitalist Creativity – how to come up with business ideas.

Explore Stimuli – feed your brain with multisensory stimuli that are both related and unrelated to your challenge.
Leverage Diversity – the greater the diversity of opinions and perspectives you gather, the more effective you will be in creating ideas that can truly grow your business.
Face Fears – Fear directly destroys your ability to create and craft new ideas.

He covers 4 good sized chapters with ideas and processes to leverage these 3 laws, but even without that background you can benefit from the concepts.

Explore Stimuli – it’s important to be aware and on the lookout for inspirations. One of the reasons I’m writing this blog is because it drives me to look for ideas to write about, to get exposed to new things, which in turn hopefully makes me more creative.

Leverage Diversity – this is why it’s critical to surround yourself with people that will challenge you. In the corporate world, you could always spot the executive that only had a team of ‘Yes’ people. They were never able to contribute any new ideas because they didn’t have any. This is where a Peer Group Advisory Board can be invaluable – you know, like BANG!

Face Fears – This is closely related to the power of positive thinking. If you get too wrapped up in the thought process that I have to come up with a new marketing idea or my business is going under, then you are well and truly up a creek. Easier said than done, but I definitely agree that a fearful approach will shut you down creatively.

What do you do to spark new ideas, improve what you’ve got or think outside the box (or perhaps inside the box as the Watermelon farmers did)? Share your ideas here!

Shawn Kinkade www.aspirekc.comSimilar Posts: