photo by jonrawlinson 

Inspiration is a funny thing.  You can’t touch it, you can’t always explain it or where it came from but it’s important to occasionally get it renewed.

As a small business owner, if you’re not inspired by something you are likely headed for a long and painful decline.  Unlike the corporate world or working for someone else, there’s really no where to hide.  The good news is that you only answer to yourself.  The bad news is that when you aren’t buying into it, no one else is either.

It’s difficult to do your best work, sometimes difficult to just get out of bed when you’re not inspired.

It’s difficult to display leadership, sell your product or service or deliver impressive results when you’re not inspired.

Where does your inspiration come from?

“In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.”                            Henry David Thoreau

I think Thoreau was onto something here – most people go into their business with a vision of how they want things to be, what they want to achieve and how that achievement will make them feel.

As a quick side note – that’s why it’s important to put your vision on paper and revisit it every now and then.

I had a chance over the weekend to become re-inspired by my vision of what I want to do with my business.

The Professional Business Coach Alliance (www.pbca.biz ) had their first annual meeting this past weekend and 55 Licensed, Professional Business Coaches (LPBC) from all over North America got together in Orlando to meet others, learn what’s working and what’s not and at least in my case, get inspired by the future.

I think the thing that impressed me the most over the weekend was the overall quality of the coaches in the Alliance.  Everyone in the room had an impressive resume and many of them are running very successful business coaching practices and helping a lot of businesses become bigger, better and more fun.

That’s my vision – continued learning, helping others reach their vision and making a positive difference (and enough money to keep the family happy…).  Not only do I think it’s a great vision – now I’ve met a bunch of people that are already making it happen that willing to help me get there.  That’s pretty inspiring.

What’s the inspiration for your business?  When’s the last time you gave it some thought or assessed where you are?  Share your thoughts here or if you’d like any help thinking it through, just give me a call.

Shawn Kinkade    www.aspirekc.com

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photo by PPDIGITAL 

Have you ever had a situation where you learned something and you thought you knew it – maybe you even passed it along to other people, and then you saw the same idea with a slight variation and it suddenly made a lot more sense?  Where it’s like suddenly getting hit with the Hammer of Clarity (catchy eh?  I just made that up…)

Yeah – me neither…! 

Actually that happened to me yesterday when I was reading the excellent eZine / Blog from Robert Middleton of Action Plan Marketing. 

Think back to the last networking event you went to – maybe it was a chamber meeting, or just some sort of after hours social event.

Did you happen to run into someone that just started rattling on about their business?  (The odds are pretty good that you did).  Did you start coming up with creative escape plans that involved Batman’s utility belt or a ninja smoke bomb?

The fact is that most people don’t want to be told about your business, at least not up front – they may get interested and want to ask questions, but the dynamic is very different than getting a sales pitch or a lecture.

What do you talk about at a networking event?

The right thing to do – and I’ve certainly mentioned this before, is to talk about the other person, ask questions…be interested.  The whole point of networking is to make a connection and get to a point where you know, like and trust someone and they know, like and trust you.

Which is great, but what do you do when someone asks you straight up:

What is it that you do?

It’s really a dangerous position.  Your immediate instinct is to tell them.  You want to dazzle them with your expertise, you know they would be a great candidate for your business or you’re like everyone else and you instinctively like to talk about yourself.

Don’t do it.

At least not a long winded explanation.  You can’t just blow off the question, but your best bet is to come back with a very brief, 1 sentence summary that gives them an idea but leaves a lot to the imagination.  You should also immediately (part of the same breath) follow-up with a question on their business or what they’ve already told you.

This might shift the focus totally back to them (which is great) or it might lead to them giving you a quick explanation for your question and coming back with – “That’s interesting (about what you do) tell me more about that?”

It’s still not the time to launch into sales pitch number 3 (or numbers 1 or 2 for that matter).  The best answer here is really what I picked up from the Action Plan Blog yesterday.

Robert’s post is about The Antidote to Pushy Marketing and he covers this scenario in the context of showing enthusiasm for what you do.  Here’s a quote that I thought was really telling:

And if they want to know more about how it works, I tell them a story of a client I worked with and the results they got. Again, nothing about me. Stories are great because people can see that if you helped someone else, maybe you can help them as well.

And you know what? When you talk about your business like that, people become interested. They want to know more.

The Hammer of Clarity ™ point for me was to consistently explain what I do in terms of my clients and use stories whenever possible…try not to use the word “I”. 

I know it’s probably not a huge revelation for you, but although I’ve known not to go on about what I do, I didn’t have a great framework for how to make the points once people were expressing interest.  It’s not a natural style and it’s clearly going to take some practice, but it feels like the right way to explain things.  I’m pretty excited to try it out!

So what stories do you tell about your customers?  I’d like to hear what you do…no really!

Shawn Kinkade  www.aspirekc.comSimilar Posts:

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photo by Nicholas_T 

I had the chance to see the movie “21″ last night and one of the central themes of the movie really stood out to me.  The main character is a super-smart kid from humble roots in Boston and is in desperate need of a full ride scholarship to Harvard Medical school (Harvard Med apparently costs about $300K for tuition and living expenses…).

The full ride scholarship is highly contested and in the end goes to the candidate that can dazzle the judges with their life experience story.  The problem our protagonist has is that he doesn’t really have any life experiences that are particularly dazzling, despite near perfect test scores and 3 years at MIT with a 4.0 GPA.

You’ll have to check out the movie to find out what happens, but it’s definitely worth watching, it’s entertaining and based on a true story.

What’s this got to do with business?

Part of the reason this struck a chord with me is that small business owners face a similar challenge all the time.

Granted it’s not quite as dramatic and probably doesn’t involve frequent trips to Vegas, but your business prospects are looking at you and your competition every day and trying to pick the company that stands out – who is dazzling?

In the movie, all of the scholarship candidates had great test scores, all of them had perfect GPAs, they all went to the right undergrad programs with good recommendation letters.  That was the baseline of what was expected.

It’s assumed that you have the basics, a website, professional presence, logo, that sort of thing (if not you should get that addressed first).

After that, there’s really 2 things you need to do at a high level.

1.  Decide what it is that makes you different – what is your unique strength?

2.  Come up with a way to share your story, get the word out and dazzle your prospects.

We’ll talk about how to develop or determine your differentiating point in a future post, but assuming you have a story to tell – how do you get that story across?

What’s holding you back about getting the word out?

This is an area where a lot of small businesses have a hard time.  Here are a few common issues I’ve seen regarding getting the word out.

1.  I’ve got a common business – nothing exciting about it, no one is going to care about my business.  (Coffee shops are pretty common, but Starbucks seems to have figured out how to be interesting).  There’s something that you do or that you can do that is interesting.

2. I’m in a regulated industry, I’m not allowed to do anything different or out of the ordinary.  There’s a great post on Small Business Trends about a niche service that supports blogging for lawyers:  On blogging for lawyers and other vertical markets.  Regulated professions certainly have more of a challenge, but the good news is that it doesn’t take much to stand out since most of the competition doesn’t challenge the status quo either.

3.  My business/industry is pretty complex, I can’t really summarize and get a message across because of that complexity.   At the end of the day, 99% of businesses are either solving someone’s problem/pain or providing something that delivers pleasure/satisfaction.  You might have to oversimplify, but your target market will likely understand what you can do…and at the end of the day they’re the only ones that really matter anyway.

How can you tell your story?

Here are a couple of suggestions that might help you get your story out there:

1.  Start blogging.  Use the blog to add value to your customers and to educate potential prospects.  Educate them on what you do and problems that can be solved (without selling) but more importantly, let them know who you really are, what you’re like – people do business with people they like, it’s as simple as that.

2.  Share testimonials, case studies and client stories on your web site or your blog.  The more you can paint a common picture of what the problem is, what your solution is and how it benefited your client, the better.

3.  Put together a video and get it hosted on Youtube – the link below is to my friend Matt Simpson’s blog.  It’s a post for a printing company in Montreal that uses a very funny approach to give you an understanding of what they do and how much they care (note – NSFW due to yelling profanities, but very funny).

Youtube – Pazzazz Printing 

What are other ways to get your story out – remember they aren’t likely to select you unless you can dazzle them with your story.  How are you dazzling your prospects?  I’d love to hear about it here.

Shawn Kinkade www.aspirekc.comSimilar Posts:

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Photo by Jpctalbot

Linked In has been around for a while now, but it appears to have hit a a tipping point recently with well over 20 Million people on the free online networking tool.

According to the statistics, over 47 thousand people were added to my network…just in the last day!  My network consists of my direct links and 2 levels below that (3 degrees of separation).

What does that mean?  It means that a tool that’s been useful so far is only going to become more useful and that pace is picking up.  It means that now is the time to jump on the bandwagon and start taking advantage of the opportunities.

Background on using Linked In

To start with, Linked In isn’t going to replace face to face networking.

What it can do is make that networking more effective and give you more ways to connect with people, let people understand who you are and what you’re doing and more ways to share your connections with others.

The good news is that using the tool doesn’t have to take a lot of time.  You should invest some quality time up front getting things set up, but after that it’s something you could just check every now and then and use when it makes sense.

Having said that, the usefulness is directly proportional to how many quality connections you have in your network (note – for most people it’s all about quality, there are some situations i.e. recruiters, where quantity is more important but that’s the exception in my opinion).  So investing some time in building your network is probably worthwhile.

Building your network doesn’t have to be difficult, start with people that you are already running into on a regular basis and build it from there.  5 or 6 people a week would get you 60+ in 3 months.

Getting Set Up

First, make sure you’ve got all of your email addresses added into your profile.

(go to Account & Settings – upper right hand corner of page on the navigation bar, from there click on Email Addresses).

This is important because your accountant is keyed by your email address and if someone invites you on an email address that’s not in the system (and you accept it without noticing) you will end up with multiple accounts.  The only way to fix multiple accounts (at least for now) is to have Linked In delete one of them and then manually combine whatever you lost.

Next – establish or fill in your profile.  The profile is the most important part of your account, it’s how people will find you, how they’ll understand who you are and what you do and it’s your chance to market yourself and your business.

Here are some quick ideas for filling out your profile:

• Add a picture (of you preferably) – it adds a lot of credibility and really helps people remember who you are.
• Treat this as a marketing piece – it should be factual and accurate, but just like your resume it should reflect you in a positive and professional way.
• Put enough history and background to be useful, but don’t put every last detail.  Summarize and focus on the best stuff.
• You’ve got up to 2000 characters for the summary, so use them if you need to.  This is a great place to make sure you cover your most important Keywords (for searchability) – although you’ve got to do that in a useful and readable way.
• Make sure that you’ve turned everything ‘on’ in your public profile.  The point is to let people know who you are and what you’re about. 

Last point on the setup – get some recommendations on your profile.  The best way to do this is to recommend people that you know, like and trust (and vice versa).  More than likely they will return the favor.

If you’re interested in more ideas and details – go to Aspire – Linked In and look for the link to download the Getting Started Guide or register for one of the Linked In workshops.

Are you on Linked In?  Introduce yourself and maybe we can get connected.

Shawn Kinkade www.aspirekc.com

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Have you ever been watching TV when you were really hungry?

The pizza ad with the impossibly good looking slices of gooey cheese and crispy crust, super piled high with great looking toppings.

The steak on the grill just that’s just about done, juices dripping down into the flames and the char marks in perfect stripes across the top.

The decadent chocolate dessert with ice cream and chocolate sauce drizzled on it.

I’ll admit, I have been swayed to try out certain restaurants and foods just because of the commercials (curse you Taco Bell…next time I’m saying no!!!).  Invariably they don’t live up to my expectations, but they do succeed in getting me to give them a try, which is really the point.

Is your marketing cheesy and gooey?

As a small business owner you’re more than likely not using a lot of TV ads to promote your business -and let’s face it, most products without cheese in them aren’t great candidates for that kind of advertising approach.

However the reason those ads are made is because the really big Madison Avenue type of marketing firms understand that people want to understand, to feel, the benefits of the product and if possible experience those benefits as much as possible before they’ll be ready to buy.

Are you illustrating your benefits to your customers?

Can they experience at least some of the great things you can do for them – for free, without pressure or hassle?

Here are some ideas that might work for you:

1. Experience a free trial – Chris at Math Monkey offers a free class because he knows that once kids get a chance to see how much fun they’ll have (and once parents learn how much the kids can learn) that the sales process is pretty easy.
2. Hands On evaluation – Stephen at Get Smarter Prep offers a free, graded practice test for the ACT or the SAT.  Stephen knows that this is the information most parents need to make an informed decision on whether their kids will benefit from the fantastic tutoring or prep they can get from his company.  In fact, there’s no point in trying to sell them until they know where they stand.
3. Free Up Front Audit – Maggie at Lee Associates and Steve at Leadership Advocates both offer no cost audits (of telecommunication costs and non-cash payment processing costs respectively).  The investment of doing that audit is well worth it because most of the time they will find opportunities to save their clients money…and they split those savings with them.  It’s a win-win.
4. Give away valuable information – Check out my free Guide to Getting Started on Linked In.  It’s a great resource that’s valuable, especially if you are just starting out on Linked In.  (If you’re not using it, you should be).  I’m happy to give that information away because I can keep building my list of connections to people that are interested in learning and doing more – which are great candidate for what I do at Aspire.

What other ideas can you think of to give away your experiences?  What do you do so that people can get to know you, know your product? 

I’d love to hear other ideas – share them here.

Shawn Kinkade  www.aspirekc.comSimilar Posts:

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