Archive for December, 2008

A client and I were talking this morning about the retreat she’s planning in March.  We were working on why someone would want to go to a retreat.  She and I are both retreat junkies-”Retreat, sure, I’ll come.  Where is it?”

So to us, a retreat is a benefit.  I conjure up relaxing on a beach or in front of a roaring fire, sipping hot chocolate or pineapple juice and contemplating my place in the universe.  In other words, when someone says they’re having a retreat, I make up my own benefits.

But for normal people, a retreat isn’t a benefit.  It’s a feature.  Just like a fast engine in a car, or a laptop with a long battery life, or a house in the right school district.  If you’re really a fan, you translate the feature of “fast engine in car” to benefits like: “I can drive really fast, I’ll look cool, I’ll accelerate away from the stoplights faster than anyone else.”

If you’re a hardware geek, you make up your own benefits for “laptop with long battery life” to be:  “I can work longer on the plane, I can work longer in other places (outdoors?) where there’s no power.”  A family will translate “house in good school district” to: “kids will get a better education, be surrounded by other families and kids who care about education, they’ll get into better colleges.”

But most people need help translating features into benefits. The more in love you are with your product or service, the harder it is to remember that what you view as a Benefit!!! your clients may view as a feature.   You have to help them see the benefits that are intuitively obvious (to you).

See how my client, Deb Roffe, and I did on her retreat flyer.

Tags: Benefits, Features, Marketing

I subscribe to the Wall St. Journal.  It’s tough to find good economic news in there, especially for corporate America.  Fear vibrates from every page. 

But there are always people in every economy who make money.  There was an article  in the NY Times 2 weeks ago called “When Fear Takes Over Our Brains,” written by a neuroscientist, Dr. Gregory Burns, talking about what to do instead of letting fear take over. 

Dr. Burns says that when fear is active in the brain, exploratory activity and risk-taking are turned off.  Turned off!  I don’t want to walk around in a fog of fear, the risk-taking part of my brain paralyzed, and not even notice it.

He says the antidote to that is to stay away from fear-mongering people, and don’t monger fear yourself.  And after I do that, he advises me to innovate.  Find new opportunities.  Figure out new things to do in my business.  He says “…right now there are incredible opportunities to do something differently.  Yes, they’re risky, and some will fail.  But while others wait for the storm to pass, I’m busy expanding into new areas.”

I want to be one of those business people who make money in any economy.  Even more, I want to keep innovating.  Focusing on innovation is so much more fun, challenging, and such a better use of my time than sitting around watching the stock market plunge.  Blogging and Twitter are new for me.  Writing another book.  I know there’s much more I can do.

Tags: Fear, Innovation

New article in the Wall Street Journal today about creating conversations with your clients.  Their three tips: give customers a reason to talk to you, resist the temptation to sell, sell, sell, and don’t control.

Tags: Social Networking, Web 2.0

This is my first official blog post on my new site.  Nobody cares that this is a first for me (except you, my darling friends who know me).  The fact that it’s my first post isn’t important.  What is important is that I’m starting it, and that I will be consistent.

I’m writing a book called “You Hate To Market, And What To Do About It.”  I got interested in this subject through coaching a lot of small business owners.  With one voice, they all say they hate to market.  The reason for this is most people think marketing is either cold calling people who will cuss you out and hang up on you; or it involves going to large networking events where you know no one, and trying to talk people into buying things from you.

You can market like this if you want, but there are a lot of other ways to do it that are much more effective.  I’m going to blog about this over the next weeks and months as I do more research and see what people are doing.

The moral of the story today is that if you look at marketing as if it is a conversation with people (your beloved customers), it takes the pressure off.  A friend of mine calls her marketing “visiting.”   The difference with “visiting” is that you talk to people with them in mind; their needs, what’s important to them.  You don’t go visit someone to cram a message down their throats (usually :>).  The other part of visiting is that for it to be meaningful, you need to do it fairly frequently.

What kind of conversation can you start up with your customers today?  I’m going to blog and post some tweets on Twitter (more about that in later blogs).

Tags: Consistency, Marketing, Success