Article Contributed by Michele DeKinder-Smith
Launching a product can mean lots of things to a business. It can mean branching out and snagging a new buyer in a different market. It can also mean creating residual income for a service-based business. And it may be just the thing needed to turn a struggling business into a cash cow. This article examines things three of the five specific types of female entrepreneurs (also known as “Janes”) should keep in mind as they plan for (and launch) new products.
Go Jane Go
She is passionate about her work, and has no problem marketing and selling herself, so she has plenty of clients—but she’s struggling to keep up with demand. She may be a classic overachiever, taking on volunteer opportunities as well, because she’s eager to make an impact on the world and may really struggle saying “no”. Because she wants to “say yes” to so many opportunities, she may even be in denial about how many hours she actually works during the course of a week. During the worst of times, Go Jane Go may tend to run herself ragged or feel guilty about all the things on her “to do list” that aren’t getting done quickly enough to satisfy her exacting demands.
If you’re the Go Jane Go type, you should think long and hard before deciding to develop a new product or service right now. Yes, you may have come up with something truly innovative that will help the market you serve. But remember that not everything needs to be done at once. Sometimes, when you have a great idea, you don’t need to say “no” – but you DO need to say “not right now”.
Create a special file for yourself to house all your fantastic ideas. Before allowing yourself to put another item on the “active projects” list, first require of yourself the discipline to make room for it! This is especially important if you are feeling like your plate is too full already.
When you truly feel ready to commit to the new product or service launch, several things can make it easier for you to experience success without frustration:
1. Find something you are doing now that you can remove from your list or delegate to someone else. This will give you time to work on the new project. Alternatively, hire someone (even part-time, virtually) to design and implement the new product for you, under your direction.
2. Estimate how many hours of your personal time the new project will take. Then triple your estimate. (As a Go Jane Go, you’re excellent at what you do–but you may not realize just how much effort you’re putting into tasks. To preserve your sanity, you need to give yourself plenty of cushion for the inevitable unexpected events.)
3. Don’t just put it on your list–actually put each step on your calendar. This way, you are assured of reasonable timelines, rather than falling behind and feeling like you have to do a major crunch at the end.
Merry Jane
This entrepreneur is usually building a part-time or “flexible time” business that gives her a creative outlet (whether she’s an ad agency consultant or an artist) that she can manage within specific constraints around her schedule. She may have a day job, or need to be fully present for family or other pursuits. She realizes she could make more money by working longer hours, but she’s happy with the tradeoff she has made because her business gives her tremendous freedom to work how and when she wants, around her other commitments.
As a Merry Jane, when you come up with a new product or service idea that you are considering launching for your business, you want to make sure it really makes the most of your time. Before you begin, make sure you put in a step to research your market’s interest in the product first. A simple way to do this is to reach out to some of your current customers today to find out if they are interested in the overall business idea. Using your blog, you can ask provocative questions about the topic and see if it generates response. You can also send out a quick survey or even call some of your most trusted customers on the phone. Choose the method based on the size and type of customers you have.
By putting this step in place, you can feel confident the new idea is worth the investment of your time to develop. And, by reaching out to your customers first, you will likely gather information that will help you refine and strengthen the idea even further, ensuring yourself a successful launch.
Accidental Jane
She is a successful, confident business owner who never actually set out to start a business. Instead, she may have decided to start a business due to frustration with her job or a layoff and decided to use her business and personal contacts to strike out on her own. Or, she may have created something that served her own unmet needs and later found other customers with the same need, giving birth to a business. Accidental Jane enjoys what she does and is creating a satisfactory level of income.
If you’re an Accidental Jane, you love where your business is right now, so you may feel uncertain about whether to launch your new product idea or not. The key to making this decision lies in visualizing the various scenarios that could play out if you did decide to launch it. By creating a “pros and cons” list for each of the scenarios, you can determine which path is most likely to create results you desire. Below are some probing questions to ask yourself about your new product idea before taking the additional steps to create it:
* Will doing this be something I really enjoy? Will it give me “job satisfaction”?
* How much time will it take to create this new product the right way? Am I willing to add that many more hours to my plate? Are there things I can give up to make room for it, without diminishing my income or happiness?
* What if this new product really takes off? If there’s more demand that I can serve right now, what will I do? Will I feel comfortable hiring people to help me? Will I feel comfortable letting go of other work I’m doing today to make room for it? If it really took off, how would it change the financials of my business and how I spend my time?
* If this new product doesn’t work out, how will I feel? Will I be willing to invest additional time required to fix it or market it to make sure it works? Will I feel like a failure or do I see this as an important opportunity for personal growth, even if it fails?
Since Accidental Jane is generally happy with the way things are right now, using these questions as filters to determine whether or not to launch a new product will help her make sure she doesn’t “accidentally” create results that take away some of her joy or income.
Even though all three Janes– Go Jane Go, Merry Jane and Accidental Jane– have distinct ways of doing business, each can benefit from the launch of successful new products and services. The key to doing so lies in appreciating herself and her own business needs, and pursuing new opportunities in a way that will really serve the life she wants to live.
About the Author:
Michele DeKinder-Smith is the founder of Jane out of the Box, an online resource dedicated to the women entrepreneur community. Discover more incredibly useful information for running a small business by taking the FREE Jane Types Assessment at Jane out of the Box. Offering networking and marketing opportunities, key resources and mentorship from successful women in business, Jane Out of the Box is online at www.janeoutofthebox.com.
Author: Pamela Swift
As you may have seen, Denise Wakeman and I are running a social media usage survey to help define what people most want to know about social media. We’ve gotten over 200 responses so far (and please feel free to add yours, if you wish!)
The results are interesting so far, with one of the biggest complaints being how much time social media takes. Even more than that, people are wondering how to monetize their social media efforts. And this combination of factors got me thinking.
What appears to be happening is that people are investing lots of time on the social networks, but not enough time using social media as a content sharing and distribution mechanism. Most of all, people want a process and system for using social media more efficiently, and for seeing more returns from it.
In the interest of saving you some time, and increasing your social media efficiency, I have 5 tips to help:
1) Schedule regular time for social media. I’m fond of saying that social media is a time suck. This means that, without boundaries on your time, chatting on Facebook or tweeting on Twitter can take up your entire day. This will have negative impact on your business. So, instead, schedule time to attend to social media each day, and resist the urge to network all day long, especially if you don’t have a clear and definite business outcome in mind. I tend to schedule an hour in the morning to connect with my social networks, and I have one of my assistants handle all the daily friending back, following back, processes, reducing my time commitment and letting me focus on conversations and connections.
2) Let technology do the heavy lifting. You can be more social media efficient if you use technology to help you. One example would be to set up content distribution and syndication processes. (Denise & I will be sharing tips and ideas for this in the near future.) Another way is to use software programs to help streamline your efforts. I like and use Tweetdeck, for example, which lets me monitor Twitter, Facebook, and now, recently, LinkedIn. No matter what you need, there is probably a piece of software that can help you do it faster or better.
3) Reduce the noise. There are just three main things you need to focus on in social media. The first is gaining attention. The second is making connections. And the third is being consistent. You can do this without any technology at all. It’s fine to be interested in new gadgets and new advances in technology (and I confess, I’m a girl geek at times)- but don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed and forget the basics of marketing. You must be noticed, make connections, and show up regularly.
4) Repurpose, repurpose, repurpose. The better you are at repurposing your content, the easier your social media marketing will be. Aim to get at least 10 uses out of every blog post, every interview, every video you make. Stay in touch with what your target audience needs, and provide it for them faster, and easier, and quicker than anyone else. Seek to create dialogues and conversations around your content. You’ll learn what people most want to know, and you’ll always have good ideas for new content to create.
5) Tie your social media efforts to your business goals and optimize for them. What this means is that you need to have an idea of what you want social media to DO for you. Do you want to become the household name in XYZ industry? Do you want to get 10000 people on your email database? Do you want to be picked up by major media as an authority or expert? Like any other business arena, you have to know what you want to achieve and lay out a strategy to achieve it. And then you need to do the work. If you’re spending a lot of time in social media, but not feeling like you’re getting enough return, I would suggest that maybe you want to step back and reassess your goals. Don’t take part in social media waiting to see what will happen. Have an idea of what you want to create, and use the social media tools to create it. The clearer your objectives, the faster you’ll reach them, helping balance out your time and return on investment.
Social networking is not the only facet of social media you should be paying attention to. Use the social media sites to build your platform, drive your brand, and send visitors to your website. These kinds of results are trackable and monetizable.
Dr. Rachna Jain is Chief Social Marketer at The Mindshare Corporation. Rachna works with speakers, consultants, authors, and small business owners to develop and execute effective social media marketing strategies. Her proprietary persuasive social media process (sm) focuses on building influence, credibility and visibility online. This translates into greater recognition, increased website traffic, faster lead generation, a shorter sales cycle, and more opportunity for her expert clientele. She blogs regularly at The Mindshare Blog
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BIZNESS! Newsletter Issue 94
Successful Business Marketing: What Does Your Marketing Archetype Say About You?
When it comes to business marketing, most people brainstorm a billion different tag lines then wonder why none of them sound or feel like “the one.”
The problem is all that brainstorming isn’t every effective because it’s relying on the wrong information to start with. Crafting a tag line—or any of your marketing copy such as sales letters, email promos, flyers and titles—first starts with understanding your unique style and personality. The best way is to know your “Marketing Archetype.”….
Continued in BIZNESS! Newsletter Issue 94 >>>
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Continue reading these top stories in the BIZNESS! Newsletter >>>
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– Opportunity Knocks, Jane Answers
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Continue reading these top stories in the BIZNESS! Newsletter >>>
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Google search is going to start looking different in the next few months, as Google has signed a deal with Twitter.com to start indexing tweets.
Similarly, Microsoft has signed deals with Facebook and Twitter to start indexing updates in the search engine Bing.com.
These changes mean your wisdom won’t be shared just with those in your immediate tweetstream or newsfeed, but could, perhaps, be listed in the search engines and archived for the world at large.
These moves are good for those of you focused on providing unique content and topic relevant tweets – you will have more ways to be found and noticed.
The downside of this process may be two-fold, though. First, your tweets may not remain indexed as long, so your ranking won’t stay constant. The reason I think this is because the rate of tweeting is so high, and newer tweets will always be considered fresher (and therefore potentially more relevant) than older ones. So any ranking you get may not last that long.
The second downside would be for content that is repeated or duplicate- likely only 1 tweeter will get credit, so this may drive down the number of retweets. Some would say this is a good thing, especially for content like quotes, or #follow friday, but we’ll have to see how this shakes out.
In order to benefit from this new search engine capability, focus on providing good strong content (I know I said this already, but it bears repeating), and try to phrase your tweets uniquely. In the beginning, at least while the algorithm is being worked out, I imagine that unique languaging will be initially counted as unique content. Later on, we may see a shift in this as content and context is also considered. (Kind of like latent semantic indexing for tweets.)
It will be interesting to see if adding tweets to the search engines will improve user experience, or will be seen as just that much more noise.
Dr. Rachna Jain is Chief Social Marketer at The Mindshare Corporation. Rachna works with speakers, consultants, authors, and small business owners to develop and execute effective social media marketing strategies. Her proprietary persuasive social media process (sm) focuses on building influence, credibility and visibility online. This translates into greater recognition, increased website traffic, faster lead generation, a shorter sales cycle, and more opportunity for her expert clientele. She blogs regularly at The Mindshare Blog
Article Contributed by Mark Hunter
It’s always rewarding to close a sale and immediately have the new client sign the documents to secure the sale. No matter how many years in the business, this always feels good. We all have stories about new customers who have “fallen into our lap” and bought quickly. For some reason, we can’t seem to forget the great rush that occurs from these new clients. I’m here to say that as good as the rush might be when we allow a sale to occur too quickly, we wind up leaving money on the table.
When beginning to talk with a new customer, the salesperson and the customer invariably have the intent of doing so with a specific product in mind. It may be any number of products you sell. The initial interest expressed by the customer always guides the discussion. Once the discussion turns to a specific product, the customer’s focus becomes even more closed to any other products. The real danger comes when the customer agrees to buy. At that moment, the customer feels the process is over, and their mind moves to something else, usually something totally unrelated to your business or products.
To avoid a situation like this, the salesperson needs to ask the necessary exploratory questions early to determine the customer’s other needs. By asking exploratory questions early, you are able to assess which additional products may interest the customer. If you wait to ask these types of questions until after the initial sale is complete, you will always be behind. This is the whole principle of not closing too quickly. You need and want enough time to explore and determine all of the customer’s needs.
What are exploratory questions? Exploratory questions generally are open-ended questions that get the customer talking. Questions may include asking the customer about their job and the types of benefits they receive in the job. A question of this nature is non-threatening and is likely to start a conversation in which the customer shares about the dynamics of their work, particularly the level of security they do or don’t have in their position. When a salesperson can get the customer talking and, more importantly, talking about items about which they do not feel secure, the greater the likelihood the salesperson can identify additional products that will alleviate some of the customer’s pain.
Whether in a face-to-face meeting or over the phone, the salesperson must take the time to engage the customer early on. The key with the early questions is to not blatantly ask, “What other products or services would you be interested in?” Asking a new customer this type of a question before a relationship has been established runs the risk of alienating the prospect. Plain and simple, they will view you as a “hard-sell salesperson.”
Engage the customer in a non-threatening manner and that customer will be more likely to share information without throwing up defensive barriers. Keep your exploratory questions short and simple, so that that the customer can do most of the talking. Customers are much more willing to share key information in short segments rather than long drawn-out responses that more-complicated questions dictate.
Due to the wide number of issues the typical customer faces today, it is a privilege to be a salesperson in today’s economy. When you are able to assist a customer with multiple solutions, the customer feels at ease, and you have truly done your job. Building a solid relationship instead of going for the quick close just makes good sense when you are striving to build a long-term sales career. Begin today to incorporate exploratory questions into your sales process as a way of engaging the customer.
About the Author
Mark Hunter, “The Sales Hunter,” is a sales expert who speaks to thousands each year on how to increase their sales profitability. For more information, to receive a free weekly email sales tip, or to read his Sales Motivation Blog, visit www.TheSalesHunter.com.