Posts Tagged ‘Customers’

The year is almost over. Just like everyone else, I can’t believe how fast it went.

Instead of looking forward to 2010 (there will be plenty of time to do that in January), I’m going to reflect on what I learned this year. I invite you to do the same.

What I Learned This Year

It’s hard to resist the pull to look forward into the new year when the end of December rolls around. I’m going to resist anyway, and spend a little time thinking and remembering what I learned this year. Here’s a partial list:

1. It is possible to travel too much, even if your travel takes you to the Bay Area in California, which, except for the traffic, is God’s Country.
2. Publishing a book is a lot harder than I thought. But now that I’ve done it, I can see how I’ll publish the next one.
3. I love writing with real fountain pens. I don’t care if I stain my fingers with ink.
4. I love love love helping people figure out who their right clients and what their right work looks like. I especially love helping people figure out how to combine a disparate set of skills into a real business.
5. It’s okay, and possible to be very successful, as a business person who loves the work (as opposed to being a business person who loves business itself). I always thought every business person should want to create a big company with lots of employees, and having one of those big companies with lots of employees was the only measure of success. Not true.
6. Marketing my business is probably the single most successful way to come up against Resistance (see this book for an explanation of resistance). It brings up all the crap: I’m not good enough, this work is so easy, who would pay me to do it for them, I might succeed and THEN WHAT? Etc. That is the main reason we don’t market.
7. The second reason people don’t market is that it’s not as fun as doing the real work. This doesn’t have to be true, but most people believe it anyway.
8. I do a lot better when I shift my thinking from “I failed” to “The marketplace is giving me feedback about my service that I need to heed.”
9. There is an underlying order to things. I do best when I try to listen to that, and respond to it with what it’s calling for.

Now that I know these things, here’s what I’m going to do:

1. Leave Friday open to do my marketing for the week. Blog and send newsletters because I like to write.
2. Call the other customers I haven’t surveyed yet this year, and get more “marketplace feedback.” I have enjoyed getting the feedback I’ve gotten thus far; I’m going to institute a way to get it more regularly.
3. Buy all the bottled ink at Office Max in case they stop carrying it altogether.
4. Be honest about how much I like working with people who love their work, and who want to figure out how to delegate everything else so they can do their amazing work that they love.
5. Set aside time to listen to what is being called for now.

What’s different in December 2009 as compared to January 2009? What have you learned? What will you do with this knowledge?

Tags: Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Relationships

Anyone who’s written and published a book (or has even thought about it), knows the terror of wondering, “Will anyone like it? Will anyone buy it? Will anyone use it?”

Perhaps I’ve been hanging out in Northern California too much (the land of the woo woo), but I think I actually had some psychic influence over the fact that it took six rounds and 45 days to get an error-free proof of my book from the printer (a process that should have taken two weeks, max).

I was really afraid for the book to come out. I wanted the people who bought it to use it, and to receive tangible benefit from it. Specifically, I wanted them to earn more money by working through the exercises in the book.

As any reader of the Aesop Fables (or your mother) can tell you—you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. In other words, I can’t guarantee anything. Even if 100,000 people bought the book (which would be very cool), I couldn’t guarantee that one of them would read it, or do the work, or earn more money in their businesses as a result.

I can only provide the water. You have to do the drinking.

I experienced a raft of pain while working in some of my previous businesses, mostly centered around not earning enough money. It was awful. I want to save the rest of the world from experiencing that level of agony. That’s why I was so worried about my book coming out.  What if my book doesn’t save all the other people in the world feeling the same pain about their work?

Coincidentally, my raft of pain happened to be the perfect amount, at the perfect time, to get me to change; to sell my IT business and to go into coaching and writing. If there had been less pain, I might still be talking to people about computer network support.

Pain was (and is) my friend.

And although I hope my book does alleviate a lot of pain for all of you out there who are passionate about your work and your businesses, but aren’t earning enough money, the truth is, you might need to be in the pain you’re in to motivate you to change.

And if you are ready to change, you have to do the drinking. It’s up to you. Not me.

I did my part to provide part of the water for all you thirsty small business owners. The rest is your responsibility.

Here’s my question to you: are you standing at the water, but not drinking? Go to your favorite coffee shop and set aside 15 minutes to look around at your life. Are you in pain about something that has a solution? Has someone or something lead you to the water? Are you standing in it up to your knees, or armpits?

What can you do to go ahead and drink?

Tags: Customers, Fear, Pain, Publishing a Book

The theme for this week’s blog post (I know, it’s already Friday- I had to think a lot about this first), is marketing.

Revolutionary Idea

What if you picked a marketing activity you enjoyed doing?

What might that activity be?

Luckily for us, the Internet has expotentiallyexpanded our marketing choices. You can blog, tweet, have a Facebook fan page for your business, arrange in-person groups via MeetUp, write articles showcasing your knowledge, link with other business contacts on LinkedIn … but where’s an overworked business owner supposed to jam all this activity into our already over-scheduled days?

A Different Way to Think About This Problem

Instead of fretting about which kind of marketing to do, take one step back and come at the question from the opposite direction.

Since marketing in its purest form is nothing more complicated than communication between your business and your clients and prospects, ask yourself: how do your clients want you to talk to them?

Better yet, ask your clients.

Comments I’d love to read:

1. You talked to your clients and here’s what they said.

2. You talked to your clients and here’s what you’re doing as a result.

Tags: Customers, Marketing, Relationships, Social Networking, Success

I spent last week in Guerneville, CA, assisting at a leadership retreat.

The group spent most of the week practicing what is called Level 3 listening, which is defined as “…a global range of listening: hearing that picks up emotion, body language, the environment itself.” (See the book Co-Active Coaching by Whitworth, et. al. for a longer explanation.) Sometimes Level 3 listening is described as “feeling the energy,” or “environmental listening.”

I came back from the retreat realizing that the most successful businesses, whether they are cognizant of it or not,  skillfully listen to the Level 3. In other words, they’re good at listening to what their customers want, and good at providing it. Beyond this, they’re good at listening to what customers want that they don’t even have the words to articulate yet, and providing that, too.

If this all seems too abstract, let me give you an example of  a business that is great at listening to the Level 3: Apple.

Apple is actually so good at it that they somehow realized people would want to have a device that allowed them to carry their music around in their pockets, and download additional music, song by song, whenever they wanted, before anyone had actually invented such a thing. Thus something we’d not seen before; i-Tunes and the i-Pod, were born.

And not to bash them any more than everyone else already has, but General Motors is a great example of a company that hasn’t been tuned into the Level 3 at all.

I don’t think it takes a psychic guru to listen to the Level 3. I think there are some concrete ways for us regular folk to do it; and the way to start is to go out and talk to your customers.

I’m doing that right now. I’m asking people about the problems they’re having in their businesses; what they need help with that I’m not currently providing; and I’m getting lots of information. I’ve also noticed that the Level 3 is speaking to me; I’m frustrated by the fact that I’m not providing some services that I want to do, but was unsure if people wanted them. Turns out they do.

What do your clients want? What is the Level 3 trying to tell you?

Tags: Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Relationships