Why, I asked, didn’t they use the name of their business?

What are professionals with a thriving practice doing with an email address that doesn’t reflect the name of their business? What looks more professional to you—DrSmith@DrSmithDental.com or DrSmith@aol.com? A real business has a real email address, simple as that, if you want to be taken seriously, respected for what you do.

Why are so many business people unwittingly advertising for Google, Yahoo, Verizon and the lot?

Check out the emails you receive, maybe even your own email. I’m betting that more than 60% of the messages you receive have a service provider address rather than your business address. And the odds are with me that your email is guilty of the same sin.

Why do so many continue to let Gmail, Yahoo, Bell South, ATT and all the other service providers co-opt your email with their identity and be an unwitting pawn in their little advertising scheme? It takes just a few simple steps to change your email address to that of your business.

How about we agree that all of you will make this change right now?

While the steps to change your email address to your business name are simple, they do differ just a little from provider to provider. My goal is to simply point you in the right direction.

First, if you don’t have your company name purchased as a domain name, go buy it now from www.directnic.com or a similar service. Next we want to create your customized email address using your registered business name.

If you’re using a service like Yahoo, they offer a feature that enables you to create your customized business email address right on their site. Then when you send messages from their service, your messages automatically go out under DrSmith@DrSmithDental.com, not yahoo.com. Same is true for Google and most of the service providers.

If you’d prefer to have your emails delivered to an email client like Outlook, then you have to take a few other steps to get your new email address to operate with your software. You need to get a bit of information from your service provider, including the address of the incoming and outgoing email servers that you’ll use. Then open your email client…let’s say it’s Outlook…click on Tools, Account Settings and New. Answer the questions you’re asked and then click “Test Account Setting” to make sure your setup is correct.

That’s just about all it takes to make your business look professional. Now the only business that is represented in your emails is yours.

Let’s make this a crusade. Go change your email address right now. Tell your business associates to do the same thing. Rise up and put down your accidental participation in one of the biggest free advertising programs the Earth has ever seen.

Go forth and do great things,

Martha Hanlon & Chris Williams

The den of BIG companies.

I realized that most of the companies we deal with every day, read about in the media, or learn about in school are companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. They have an ongoing cash flow and a proven business model.

Because this is the way we’ve always seen business done—so few entrepreneurs truly get the public spotlight–it’s easy to imagine that the only way to run a business is to imitate the big guys. Of course, this isn’t true.

Just as playing a table tennis match is very different from playing Wimbledon tennis, bootstrapping your business is a world apart from running IBM. You need to understand the differences, and you need to understand how you can use your size to your advantage.

Big guys succeed because they capitalize on:

1. Distribution
2. Access to capital
3. Brand equity
4. Customer relationships
5. Great employees

Do you have a chance to succeed playing by any of these rules?

Nope.

Not if you try to compete head to head in these five areas. Not if you try to be just like a big company, but smaller. If you try to steal the giant’s lunch, you’ll be the giant’s lunch.

You have to go where the other guys can’t. Take advantage of what you have that they don’t.

Many bootstrappers miss this lesson.

Why? Because they fall in love with an idea, not a business.

Yet there are exciting things you can do. If you insist that those fabulous five will make your business, follow these rules:

1. Distribution—never start by selling your products in major stores. Start with the small guys, prove your value, reduce your risk and then think about the big ones.
2. Access to capital—don’t pick a business in which access to money is an important element. Even your Mom will grow tired of you asking. Start within your budget.
3. Brand equity—position yourself against the brand leader. They don’t do everything well. They often don’t do anything well…they’re just BIG.
4. Customer relationships—get a little piece of business as a test. Then sell to someone else and someone else and someone else who you love and will love you back.
5. Great employees—lots of people who would prefer a great adventure, flextime, a caring boss, convenient location or a chance to grown without bureaucracy. And they don’t have to be employees. Focus on what you offer that the big guys don’t. They’re not that fun to work for anyhow, remember?

You have plenty of things that the big guys don’t, things that can give you tremendous advantages in launching a new business or growing this one. Put those assets forward to your best advantage.

Go forth and do great things,

Martha Hanlon and Chris Williams

More people would give up sex before they’d give up coffee.

That’s not me making something up—it’s from a book about Starbucks. This little tidbit aside, I think Starbucks has a few things to show all of us about marketing because if you’d rather have coffee than sex, their marketing’s pretty darn good.

Namely, people pay for value. We stand in line and delightfully lay down at least $4.05 every time we stroll into Starbucks. Yet we pay $4.34 for an ENTIRE MEAL at a fast food place. Why is a burger, fries and soda worth only $.29 cents more than a cup of Sbucks?

Value.

Look at that cup of coffee the next time it’s in your hands. Starbucks spends a lot of time telling you what special beans they are. Hand-picked from some exotic place. Properly aged and stored to maintain its pristine taste and aroma. Made just for us when we pony up to the barrista.

Value.

We hold in our hand something that only Starbucks can bring us. And they tell us that. They are quite busy creating the perception of what their value is…because if they don’t tell us, we’ll make it up ourselves. And most of the time we’d be wrong.

Your job is to create the perceived value of your products and services by creating the context in which we understand what it will do for us, its worth.

We are happy to pay for Starbucks without so much as thinking twice about the price. If Mickie D’s worked half as hard to create value in their meal, I’m betting we’d be more than happy to pay way more for that, too. But the value they are selling us is FAST FOOD and that’s just not worth as much as a finely created, custom-made pick-me-up-like-nothing-else-can cup of coffee.

Are you selling Starbucks or Mickie D’s? Are you taking on the responsibility of defining your value or leaving it up to your customers?

Convey your value and your price ceases to matter much. Show your value—don’t just tell me about it—and you’ll see the end of “you cost too much.” No one but no one does it better than you. But are you sharing that with your clients? Or are they supposed to be figuring it out for themselves?

Show your value and you can set your price, up your profits and have people waiting in line for 10 ounces of what you got.

Go forth and do great things,

Martha Hanlon and Chris Williams

Dogs, like kids, are the best sales people. We can learn a lot from them.

And, she’s trained a sales staff. She has team. Chili has taught the puppy her sales technique. Frankly, when I look back, every dog knows how to ask for what they want. Dogs are the best sales people on the planet—right up there with kids.

Finally realizing I was in the presence of a sales genius, I started watching Chili very closely. Here’s what I learned from her.

• Sometimes…most of the time…you will ask for the “sale” more than once. Sometimes the customer doesn’t realize right away how much saying “yes” is the right answer.
• Warming up the customer prior to selling them anything, particularly when it’s genuine attention, turns a stranger into a friend into a customer into a loyal customer. Chili and Jasper sit in my lap and lick my face to show their genuine interest in me. You don’t have to go that far.
• When you are meeting your Ideal Customer in person, eye contact is a good thing. It’s engaging and personal.
• Sometimes “no” doesn’t mean no. It means “no, not now.” It’s your job to return and ask again.
• She has a very short term memory. When I say “no, not now” she has no sense of rejection. It isn’t about her. She’s confident when she returns to ask again.
• She’s effectively taught the rest of her “sales staff”—Jasper in this case—in her methodology and often achieves “sales” through his efforts. And she gets a commission on his sales.

If you have a dog, you know what I mean. They, like kids, are highly effective sales people. They carry no sense they are pestering us when they ask. They have no qualms about returning, again and again, to engage us. They are patient in their efforts.

They usually make the sale, don’t they?

I encourage you to watch your dog, and adopt some of their techniques. Imagine if you were as successful in your sales efforts as they are.

You can be, of course. It’s just practice.

Go forth and do great things,

Martha Hanlon and Chris Williams

The answers are discouraging.

Most people either don’t have enough (or any) visitors, or they are attracting the wrong type of visitor—the person who isn’t their Ideal Customer. So few are taking any action—opting-in, buying or calling.

Then some knucklehead comes along and says “I can get you on the first page of Google!” Tantalized by the idea of massive Internet exposure, website visitors and customers, they plop down good money to some random search engine optimization (SEO) person. We hope this isn’t you.

But that’s not how people…particularly those ready to seriously buy…use search to find companies like yours.

The secret isn’t being on the first page of Google.

Warm and hot buyers use the Internet in a very particular way to find companies like yours. The first page of Google certainly helps, but that’s not the only thing in the equation.

If you have a website—if you use the Web to attract Ideal Customers—you must know this equation. Why wouldn’t you? When you know the equation, you’ll change your website results forever.

If you aren’t on this call and you have a website, what the heck??? When was the last time anyone told you they could get the right people to your website and that knowledge wasn’t going to cost you anything?

Okay…that’s a better response.

Go forth and do great things,

Martha Hanlon and Chris Williams

Day and time marked on the calendar. It was like I crossed over. Black became white. Left
turned right. Brussels sprouts grow into chocolate. Really, it was that distinct.

After 1x years of working in product management for Corporate America managing services
worth billions of dollars, I had moved into a position in a small, boutique public relations agency,
working with the CEOs of venture-backed start-ups. That’s when the lightning bolt burned my
hair. I’m not selling widgets anymore. I’m selling me!

Why am I sharing this personal moment with you?

Being an entrepreneur requires an entirely different mindset, a completely different energy.

Your customers crave that energy. They can feel it, and it brings them in to your business…or
pushes them away.

Your drive and determination are built on that energy. It’s the tank you access when you’re
having a tough day or week, when things don’t go according to the plan, when everything seems
harder than it should.

You are the product your customers buy, no matter what’s on your menu. You are the energy
they crave, desire, buy.

So what’s your energy like these days? What are you feeling? What are you projecting? Where
and how do fill your energy tank?

Here’s what I know—every leader, every successful person, every successful business has an
energy source, a place or person they go to to refill their tank.

Who or what is your “go-to” energy source?

What energy are you projecting to your customers?

It doesn’t matter what your product or service is, it’s all about you. To me that’s the biggest
mind-blowing difference between sitting at your cubicle in Corporate America and running a
company from your desk with your bunny slippers on.

You make the difference. I’m not a prophet, but I know this—the energy required of an
entrepreneur is different.

Go forth and do great things,

Martha Hanlon and Chris Williams
Wide Awake Marketing

]]> http://www.wideawakemarketing.com/being-in-business-for-myself-is-tiring/feed/ 0 http://www.wideawakemarketing.com/jay-conrad-levinson-says-you-dont-need-no-stinkin-money-to-attract-customers/ http://www.wideawakemarketing.com/jay-conrad-levinson-says-you-dont-need-no-stinkin-money-to-attract-customers/#comments Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:40:58 +0000 admin http://www.wideawakemarketing.com/?p=772 Jay Conrad Levinson—the guy who turned marketing on its ear by showing small business precisely how to attract customers with little-to-no money, the Father of Guerrilla Marketing— has some wisdom for all of us.

I just picked his seminal book up again. Look at the just some of the insight he shares: