Author: Ethan Theo

Abe WalkingBear Sanchez is an International Speaker / Trainer / Consultant on the subject of cash flow / sales enhancement and business knowledge organization and use. Founder and President of www.armg-usa.com, WalkingBear has authored hundreds of business articles, has worked with numerous companies in a wide range of industries since 1982 and has spoken at many venues including the Shakespeare Globe Theater in London.

Categories
Work Life

3 Strategies to Work Positive in a Tragedy

As I left our home and drove around the mountain, fog enveloped me quickly. Unexpectedly. There was no sign of fog when I pulled out of our garage.

The business environment changes that quickly, also, particularly with what influences our customers’ and clients’ lives.

For example, the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. This tragedy suddenly dominates our conversations, news media, buying habits, and prayers. It fogs our perception.

So how do you do business when tragedy fogs over your business?

Here are 3 Strategies to Work Positive in a Tragedy.

Headlights On

I turned on my headlights that foggy morning to see and be seen, but not on bright as that blinds me from the reflection back.

Since the tragedy is on your customers’ minds, be seen as acknowledging it. Speak into their conversations. Organize an after-hours prayer vigil. Invite them to join you in giving to a foundation to provide relief. As you do business out of this “Receive” core practice, you evidence more of your Work Positive lifestyle.

Avoid the “bright lights”—“I’m not going to the movies”—as they reflect back and heighten anxiety. Your conversation is a step-down transformer, giving clients an activity that helps.

Slow Down

I slowed down my car that foggy morning to lengthen my reaction time to other vehicles…and give them more time, too.

For the weeks following a tragedy like the Aurora shooting, you may notice your customers slowing down their buying decisions. Of course, your cash flow needs feeding and it will get it as you continue to Work Positive. For now, understanding your business’ long-term relationships with clients is paramount. Urgency building, money back guarantees, and other buying enhancing benefits are still in place so work them.

Just know that when tragedy dominates our conversations, our buying decision process slows down. Fear trickles in. Life-and-death issues move upfront. Be patient and understanding with your customers. Slow down for now.

Stay Off the Road

Perhaps I should have checked the local news that foggy morning to stay off of the road for a bit until it cleared. But I avoid media news in the mornings.

I hope as a Work Positive business person you stay off the road of morning media news. It is by design a negative influence.

Limit your media exposure especially in times of tragedy. Be informed, yet know that your business succeeds as you “Perceive,” i.e., focus on the positive and filter out the negative. Your negative filter clogs quickly in a 24/7 news cycle of repetitive sound bites and trivialized points of view. Access “pull media” like websites and exclude “push media” like TV/radio. Exercise your editorial license as a consumer of information. Stay off the road until it clears.

Tragedies like the Aurora shooting affect us all. Use these 3 strategies to build your customer relationships while the fog clears so you Work Positive in this negative world.

About the Author:

Dr. Joey Faucette is the #1 Amazon best-selling author of Work Positive in a Negative World (Entrepreneur Press), coach, and speaker who help professionals discover success in the silver lining of their business and achieve their dreams. Discover more at www.ListentoLife.org/speaking.

Categories
Starting Up

Why Your Start-Up Isn’t Thriving?

That wonderful product concept was your brilliant idea. It was so amazing and awesome; you decided to go for it and become an entrepreneur and launch a start-up. But it not going as you expected. It’s much harder than you anticipated, everything seems to be progressing more slowly, and maybe it seems as though it’s not moving forward at all. Now, you are starting to second guess your decisions, wondering whether your next attempt at making the product a success will yield the results you so desire.

So where did you go wrong? You know your dream is achievable. There are plenty of proof points of success business everywhere you look. But how? You are not alone. Every entrepreneur feels this way at some point. It’s a test of your convictions.

Often the reason most entrepreneurs don’t survive is a mindset and perspective issue. Let’s go back and look at how most entrepreneurs get started, and then I’ll show you how those that succeed do it.

Conventional wisdom tells the entrepreneur to start with a business plan and then execute it. This is the beginning of their downfall because it cements in the entrepreneur’s mind the notion that they’ve done the research and the result is they’ve determined the recipe, a definitive path to success. However, most business plans are filled with guesses, unfounded estimates, and wishful thinking. In fact, there is so little fact and information based upon direct experience with the market and customers that most business plans are nothing more than fairy tales. They should start with “Once upon a time”. And like any fairy tale, the entrepreneur expects the end to be “And they lived happily ever after”.

Statistics on business failures show that this isn’t what happens.

In the U.S., more than 600,000 new businesses start each year and more than half will close within 5 years. This is true of businesses in other countries as well. The venture capitalists are admired by many throughout the world. They have brought us Amazon, eBay, Google, and Facebook. Their goal for start-ups is to ‘go big’ by going IPO. Yet, in the past 10 years, 30,000 start-ups were funded and only 2% of their companies have reached that goal, most failed. Collectively, the venture capitalists have conducted an industry wide business experiment. Most of these new businesses had business plans, most failed. So why do entrepreneurs continue to follow the same process to the same end? This extremely high failure rate is the result of a system that isn’t working.

The entrepreneur has missed a step. It’s the experimental start-up phase. This is where the entrepreneur designs and conducts a series of business experiments in order to discover the right product and business model. It’s when the product or service concept meets its business. How does the entrepreneur do this? They start with a concept plan that outlines what they intend to do and why, and they include all the assumptions and unknowns about the business. Unlike the traditional business plan, here the entrepreneur acknowledges the holes, assumptions, and issues. Next, the entrepreneur couples the concept plan with a strategy for conducting business experiments. This orchestrated and systematic process allows the entrepreneur to develop proof of concept of the business. Only then is the entrepreneur in a position to write a solid business plan, one based upon experience and facts.

Why is thinking of your start-up as experimental so effective? It sets the mindset that what the entrepreneur is doing right now may fail – and most likely will. It’s okay for this experiment to fail because there will be another and maybe even more. Eventually enough knowledge and information is gathered to create the experiment that will succeed.

Contrast this to the approach of starting with a business plan; entrepreneurs feel the start-up has to work as outlined in the plan. Entrepreneurs hire employees and get them to execute the plan – after all, an employee want a sense of security and admitting you don’t know what you are doing, doesn’t instill confidence. The entrepreneur may have found outside funding, in which case, the investors don’t want to hear that they are experimenting with their money, that the entrepreneur doesn’t have it right yet. So the entrepreneur seals their fate and the business plan is executed to failure.

About the Author

Cynthia Kocialski is the founder of three start-ups and helps entrepreneurs transform their ideas into new businesses. Cynthia is the author of Startup from the Ground Up and Out of the Classroom Lessons in Success. Cynthia writes regularly at Start-up Entrepreneurs’ Blog. and provides in her video series information on how to create a Concept Plan.

Categories
Planning & Management

Are the 5 Classic Traits of Effective Leaders All There Is To It?

One of the classic schools of thought on the subject of leadership holds that leadership – whether in business, politics, or other areas of society – consists of a collection of traits. These traits can be cultivated by anyone who wishes to become a better leader.

To show you just how long this school of thought has been around, I’d like to share a quote with you from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War:

Leadership is a matter of intelligence, trustworthiness, humaneness, courage, and discipline…reliance on intelligence alone results in rebelliousness. Exercise of humaneness alone results in weakness. Fixation on trust results in folly. Dependence on the strength of courage results in violence. Excessive discipline and sternness in command result in cruelty. When one has all five virtues together, each appropriate to its function, then one can be a leader.

The quote is an eloquent statement of what I think of as the trait theories of leadership. Trait theories are an attempt to discover and describe the immutable skills of leadership, and the essential aspects of leadership that all leaders possess.

Interested in this approach? There’s a whole lot of research on the subject (if you’re interested, I’ve included a bibliography at the end of this article). Here’s the upshot, though: after extensive research on people generally considered effective leaders, experts in this field agree that a consistent relationship exists between leadership and the following traits:

1.         Intelligence

2.         Adjustment (ability to adjust to changing circumstances)

3.         Extraversion (as opposed to introversion)

4.         Conscientiousness

5.         Openness to new experiences

6.         General self-efficacy (belief in one’s own competence)

In these traits, many will recognize a “classic” leadership style that many entrepreneurs, public figures and experts aspire to. And yet, there’s a problem with this type of research, which is this: it tells us that leaders have these traits, but it does not explain how these traits contribute to leadership, or why some people with these traits are not leaders.

For this reason, I tend to think of the trait theory of leadership as a “one size fits all” approach. They’re popular because they simplify a complex and elusive concept. However, by focusing on that which is common across all leaders, they necessarily exclude important aspects of leadership that vary from leader to leader and may, in fact, have more significance than those traits that are held in common.

As Stephen J. Zaccaro noted in the January 2007 issue of American Psychologist, trait theories still:

1. Focus on a small set of individual attributes such as Big Five personality traits, neglecting key issues like cognitive abilities, motives, values, social skills, expertise, and problem-solving skills

2. Fail to consider patterns or integrations of multiple attributes

3. Do not distinguish between those leadership attributes that are generally fixed and those that are shaped by, and bound to, the situation at hand

4. Do not consider how fixed character traits account for the diverse range of behaviors that effective leadership calls for

One danger with this kind of simplistic approach to leadership is the conclusion that if you simply develop the necessary traits, your leadership abilities will emerge (in my experience as a coach, this simply isn’t true). Another danger is focusing on these widely agreed-on leadership traits as selection criteria in filling employment positions.

Why?

Because these traits are drawn from a popular definition based on only the most obvious forms of leadership, such as those exhibited by heads-of-state, senior executives in business, and the military. From our perspective, this not only ignores the diversity that exists across different forms of leadership, it devalues forms of leadership that are less obvious and more subtle, but equally as effective.

About the Author:

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping coaches, coaching clients and entrepreneurs . She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

 

 

Categories
Online Business

5 Ways for a Website to Provide Customer Service

Contributed by Longhorn Leads

When you think of customer service, websites rarely come to mind. Instead you probably envision smiling faces and helpful staff guiding customers through the buying experience or handling a question or concern for an existing customer. However, the world is changing, and many consumers want a new kind of customer service; they want one that is accessible to them night and day, without having to talk to or interact with anyone in person. That is where the website can actually enhance customer service experience. Here are 5 examples:

1. Product information. Consumers are more shopping savvy than ever, and do much of their purchasing online. This is largely because they want to shop around and research their purchases before actually committing to them without the annoyance of sales people pushing them to buy. Providing detailed product information on the site is the key to appealing to this type of consumer. Websites that provide extensive product information give customers first-rate service by letting them research the products in their own time and manner, whether it is on their smart phone or while on a conference call at work.

2. Access to account information. Instead of waiting on hold to ask a question regarding an account, many consumers prefer to be able to look up their information on their own. The best customer service is often to actually let them serve themselves. Having billing statements and payment options available on a website allows these busy consumers to keep abreast of where their account is at on their own schedule. Make sure to offer ways for them to update their profile, which will save them the hassle of calling in just to change an address or phone number when they move.

3. Live chat. A great way to combine traditional customer service with the web savvy consumer is to offer live chat on a website. Live chat services allow the customer to browse on their time, but still ask questions as they arise and receive instant feedback from a live representative. This allows the customer to multi-task without being tethered to a phone line, but also allows specific questions to be answered immediately.

4. FAQ’s. Frequently asked questions and their answers are another way to give the customer what they want, right at their fingertips. All industries have common questions about their service or products that can be summed up in a convenient guide on a website. A great example of this is the IRS. As hard as it may be to get an actual IRS agent on the phone, the IRS website gives a huge amount of information to people through their FAQ section for all kinds of tax concerns.

5. Provide personal incentives. Websites can be used to provide personal offers and incentives to consumers. Whether it is a first time customer or a returning shopper, websites can track preferences and offer suggestions based on the consumers purchasing habits. This allows a shopping experience that is geared toward the consumer’s individual wants and needs. Using the website interface to give the consumer better products or services, or to receive better discounts, leads to customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Although there are many industries that still require a face-to-face interaction, or at least a phone-to-phone conversation, many companies can enhance their customer service by having an interactive website for their customers. With more and more data being sent online and less actual conversations transpiring, it makes sense that even customer service should move onto the worldwide web. Ultimately, customer service is about providing the customer with what they need and want, so if what they want is online access and information, give it to them!

Categories
Communication Skills

3 Strategies to Positively Listen to Your Customers

Daily someone sends something to us that promises to get our message out there and insure we are heard above the competition for our customers’ attention.

It reminds me of trying to quiet my two-year-old daughter’s department store tantrums by yelling. The only attention I received was louder cries and suspicious glares of child abuse.

Are you abusing your customers by yelling your company’s features at them?

Instead positively listen to your customers. Yes, it’s counterintuitive, but it grows your bottom line and that’s what you want, right?

Here are 3 Strategies to Positively Listen to Your Customers:

Physically Listen

My two-year-old daughter wanted my attention while I read the paper. After repeating, “Daddy, I want to tell you something” three times, she smashed the paper. I leapt from my chair to stare at her. Her reply was, “Daddy, I want you to listen to me with your eyes.”

What do your customers have to smash to get your attention?

Our customers want someone to physically listen. Sure, they’ll use live chat, but somebody better be there to pay attention and respond accurately, i.e., listen with their eyes.

Want to get your message out there? Put yourself in a position to physically listen to your customers whether it’s across a counter or a Twitter DM. You build an openness to communicate as you do.

Mentally Listen

There’s a great line in the movie, Pulp Fiction: “Are you really listening or just waiting to talk?”

You know when you’re on the phone and the person is multi-tasking. You can hear them typing an email or a text. An awkward pause when you ask a question.

You also pick up on the relative unimportance of what you’re saying when they start talking about themselves or their business features.

Your customers can, too.

Listen for how they say what they say. The excitement of a rapid speech pattern. The frustration in their tone of voice. Their hesitation in knowing what to ask.

Yes, you’re in business to make money so the conversation is about your profitability. Remember who gives you that money.

Listen and mentally focus on the customer. Make it about them. You build awareness as you do.

Emotionally Listen

So you’re physically positioned and mentally focused to listen. When it’s your turn, how do you respond?

By launching into a features-driven monologue about how great your business is? That’s like trying to have sex on the first date. Good for one night only and leads to buyer’s remorse.

The path to perpetual profitability for your business is paved with asking questions like, “What do you mean by ___?” and statements like, “Tell me more about ___.” Such open-ended invitations prompt your customers to reveal more, thereby building trust.

Trust is the ultimate currency of exchange. It’s more than transactional. It’s transformational.

As you respond with emotionally-engaged listening, you discover their desires and problems. Then offer your product or service as a benefit that complements it.

Your customers accept your offering and return with their family and friends.

Why?

Because you positively listen.

About the Author: 

Dr. Joey Faucette is the #1 Amazon best-selling author of Work Positive in a Negative World (Entrepreneur Press), coach, and speaker who help professionals discover success in the silver lining of their business and achieve their dreams. Discover more at www.ListentoLife.org/speaking.