“That hobby you love could be a business,” headlines article in USA Today

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"That hobby you love could be a business.  but it takes  a a ton of work and a lot of help," headlines Lottie L. Joiner's special for USA Today, Monday July 17, 2011.

The focus was on a cosmetics hobby that grew into a small business at craft fairs, then into a much bigger business with nine stores and now products carried at Dillard's, Macy's and others.

Implicit was the need to be efffective at selling, not just at the early craft fairs, but even more so in attracting investors and partners.

Note that the link to USA Today's page also carries a link to a video on the same topic.

Go to USA Today article

“Older Americans fuel entrepreneurial boom” — says article in Smart Money

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"Faced with bruised nest eggs and high unemployment rates, older Americans—ever resourceful—are becoming entrepreneurs, " begins this Smart Money article by Anne Tergesen.

The core of the article is a Q and A with  Eric Ries, Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard Business School, focusing on his forthcoming book, The Lean Startup.

Here is one sample, making a point  that I think is very much on-target with what we speak of in this blog.  Notice how there are elements of making cold calls, using a consultative selling model to find prospects' real needs, and then crafting a brief, focused message making the case of how he can best fill those needs expresssed:

Q: What if you are offering a service, such as carpentry work, and you know there is a market. How can you go about testing whether your business will succeed?

A: I know someone who started a home interior design company. He knew that people would spend money on home refurnishing, but would they want to buy it from him? He spoke to prospective customers, to find out why it was that they wanted to remodel. It turned out that many potential customers in the place where he was based were women. He had the realization that they were not just buying home remodeling, but the sense of control a designer could create for them over their environments. He tried out tag lines for his business until he found a hit—which enabled him to market himself as offering something they could not get elsewhere. The tag line he chose was “unlike your husband, we listen.”

Link to that Smart Money article, "Older Americans fuel entrepreneurial boom."

Your elevator pitch— how-to from two sources

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The "Elevator Pitch," or "Elevator Speech," is not just a key tool in your selling activities, it's a must-have. Even if you never ride an elevator, you still need to be able to "net-out" who you are and what you or your product/service can do for prospects in a concise, intriguing way.

In this post, I'll be doing two things: First, citing an article bearing the Imprimatur of the Wall Street Journal on the need for a good elevator pitch. 

Second, I'll be including an excerpt from one of my own sales books on how to develop an effective, to-the-point elevator speech. 

(Actually, I don't really like either term, but they'll do until we come up with better.  "Pitch" implies a hard-sell pitch right there, whereas it should be more of a brief, intriguing answer to an implied question,"Who are you and what can you do to brighten my life?"  While"speech" implies standing and talking at the helpless, trapped subject. Beware.)

First, the article:  "Why you need an elevator pitch" — an article by Sarah Needleman a  couple of weeks ago in the Wall Street Journal blog section, "The Juggle"

 Go to article "Why you need an elevator pitch"

Bonus tip: be sure to read the comments, particularly one by Ruth Schimel, who raises an alternate approach: using that "elevator" time to ask questions that give you a better sense of who that person is, and what they may need that you can offer.  In a sense, this is a kind of precursor to a Consultative Selling approach.

Full disclosure: Ruth Schimel is a career consultant in, I believe, the Washington DC area,. If it's the same Ruth Schimel, we worked together for about five years: she as the very savvy contract coordinater for the US State Department on a series of management workshops I developed and presented. I'll be checking that out shortly.

Second, here's the excerpt from my book, How to  SELL FACE-TO-FACE: SURVIVAL GUIDE . . .  

which (thanks for asking!) you can order from Amazon in either the paper version or Kindle e-book.     Order via Amazon How to Sell Face-to-Face: Survival Guide

Here's that excerpt:

6.    In 30 seconds or less, how will I sum up the essence of what kind of needs my product or service fills?  In other words, who does it help, and how does it help?

    In sales jargon, this is The Elevator Pitch.  It’s the short, smart, pithy, intriguing response you’d make if  you’re riding the elevator at a convention, or standing around before a Movers and Shakers Luncheon,  and somebody asks what you do.

    But short, smart, pithy, intriguing responses don’t just happen: you need to invest time in advance thinking through and rehearsing so the words come out just right.

    The key is to focus on what your product (or service) does for customers— that is, what needs it fills—rather than on what it is.  Example:  suppose you’re asked that question of what you do.  Which of these responses do you find more powerful and compelling?

❏        “I design web-pages to meet the new HIWE standard.”

❏    “As a consultant, I help clients improve their internet marketing reach using new technologies just becoming available.”
 
    It may take time, and several early drafts, before you have the perfect  Elevator Speech,  so begin thinking about it early.  But don’t lock it into concrete too early.  Be open to what the marketplace tells you as you are making your early sales calls.

    You want to keep your options open so you can adapt to what opportunities open up,  yet you do need to be able to speak of one or a few areas in which your experience is relevant as a way of setting the context of what you are capable of.

    For example, you could say,
    “My experience has been in the general field of _____, and I'm adapting that expertise to  problem-solving  in related fields.”

    Or you could respond,
    “I'm basically a problem solver, working in the general area of _____.”

    If possible, immediately back up these general statements with a capsule summary of one or two relevant accomplishments: 
    “For a large manufacturing company, we  _____.  We anticipate offering those kinds of services to smaller firms in this area.”

“Prospecting by Telephone–Skills Self-Checklist” has been posted on SOLDLAB

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My article, "Prospecting by Telephone–Skills Self-Checklist", has been posted (with permission, of course) on SOLDLAB.  I've mentioned SOLD MAGAZINE here before— in fact, they reprinted a couple of my articles. SOLD MAGAZINE and SOLDLAB are "sister publications." (Sorry, don't know of an equivalent "gender-unspecific" term!)

In any case, SOLD MAGAZINE is a free on-line monthly magazine for sales professionals around the world. It's very impressively done, with clean, attractive layout, and practical how-to info by knowledgeable experts (in a humble tone, I'm referring to their other writers, of course!)

SOLDLABis a blog, updated daily or thereabouts, as blogs are.  Good stuff that's not in the main magazine.

Here's the link to my "Prospecting by Telephone–Skills Self-Checklist"   When you go there, you'll find how to subscribe to both SOLD MAGAZINE  and SOLDLAB:   Go to article

Sales Secrets–Developing Needs: Three ways of building the prospect’s awareness of needs My article is in the latest issue of SOLD MAGAZINE

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In the latest issue of SOLD MAGZINE you'll find my article, "Sales Secrets–Developing Needs: Three ways of building the prospect's awareness of needs."

I mentioned SOLD before, and I'm still very impressed:  excellent practical how-to content drawn from a variety of sales experts; top-notch layout and graphics (and I am a fanatic about the importance of layout, white space and ease of reading so you can focus on what's important and not have your eyes lost in a sea of print.)  SOLD is new, this is the third issue, but already is up to aboiut 70 useful pages, no fluff.

This issue and a continuing subscription are free.  Go for it!  Here's the link:

Download May issue of SOLD MAGAZINE

Why Self-Employed Consultants Fail — good advice from an article in BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK

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"Why Self-Employed Consultants Fail"  is an article of special interest in the current BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK:    Karen E Klein interviews Alan Weiss of the  Summit Consulting Group.

For starters, the article says that there are around 400,000 consultants in the United States; half working at it as a primary venture, the rest either as a second career, or as part-timers.

A couple of points to whet your interest:

1. Consulting is "really a marketing business. Even if you go into it with a great approach or methodology, that's not nearly sufficient."

2. "Don't arbitrarily use a methodology. Come in and find out what has to be improved. Use observed evidence and create something for that situation.

S"o many consultants have solutions searching for problems. They go in with their methodology and try to find a place to use it. Everybody's fond of telling you what they want: a two-day leadership conference, a person coached for a month. Your value-added is to ask what they want, and discover what they need. That's where you get higher fees."

Link to BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK article

Suckers are NOT born every minute. And we unhappy customers have looooong memories.

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How much more does it cost to find and develop a new customer than to keep an existing one?   The numbers vary, depending on who measured it, but probably five times is a reasonable estimate. 

Implication: your existing customers  will, very likely, come back for more. Even better, they may make referrals of others who then become customers, and who then refer more, and so on.

But things work the other way, too: if you antagonize a customer, you not only lose their business  now and in the future (and have to spend five times the effort to replace him), but you also may find that not only are there are there no referrals, but may even be a lot of negative referrals.

The existing customer you antagonize costs you a chain of prospects that you never know about. (Not to count those prospects who happen to talk to that one-satisfied customer who is satisfied no longer.)

But suppose you are arrogant and suicidal and want to go about turning off happy customers. What are the best methods?  We'll take for granted that they were happy because you did a good job for them first time— you showed up on time (or made delivery when promised), and so forth.

Partial checklist for turning happy customers into ones who'll never do business with you again:

1.  Don't show up on time. (Cable Guys are you listening?)

2.  Don't return calls.

3.   Don't follow through.

Case: Ed the Tile Man came to us highly recommended by people in an up-scale community nearby. Mr A referred him to Ms B and so on.  We took the advice. Ed came and did an estimate, and it sounded good. The work took several hours longer than he'd estimated, but he kept to his estimate.  And, before I go on, let me say that 99% of the job was perfect. An A, though not quite A+.

A couple of weeks later, some small problems developed and we called him. ("5 year warranty" written into the contract.)  No call back. Another call, same result.  Meanwhile, we began hearing that the people in the next community who'd recommended him were having the same experience. Ed the Friendly Tile Man has turned into Ed the Invisible Man.

Now we've all quit dropping calls into his answering unit; we all just wrote him off.  Well, not exactly: we've spread the word.  So now Ed has to move on to some place new and find another chain of new prospects, and so forth.

I'm not alone in this, I find.  Everyone knows Seth Godin, right?  He did a post a couple of days ago, "The $20,000 phone call" See the article in Seth Godin's blog on another aspect of this same issue: when a prospect makes that first call (perhaps with $20K opportunities in hand), and that first phone call is not answered, or answered by some snotty-voiced unhappy receptionist.  First impressions matter: and they may be the end of the story.

And another of my favorite bloggers, Jonathan Fields (like this humble blogger a lawyer who moved on to better things!), in his  post Business Strategy Fail: Save $300, Lose $20,000 also focuses on the little things that (a) turn off existing customers, and (b) project indifference to those who would be prospects, and (c) wouldn't take much effort or cost many dollars to fix, and make everybody happy.