Attracting Attention To Your Business

Thank you!

If generating new marketing ideas is difficult for you, here is a way you can learn from and capitalize on the creativity of other business owners.

I am always recommending to my marketing introvert clients that they keep their eyes open to see what other business owners are using as marketing techniques.  The ideas don’t need to DIRECTLY apply to your buiness, the question is “How can I apply this idea to MY business and make it work?”

Here’s an attraction getting tip:  On Pearl Street the stores are small and cheek-by-jowl.  Many are starting to use inexpensive banners and signs to help make their window displays stand out.  What caught my eye on this banner was THANK YOU, BOULDER!  For what, I wondered?  I stepped closer:  “Best Gift Shop 2008!”  the sign said.  My attention was caught by the smaller print and I stepped closer again.  Then you see that they were actually the “Runner Up“ in the competition, not first place!  But by then, you are close enough to see the wonderful things in their window.

So here’s something we can learn from this business owner:  Think about ONE thing you can announce about yourself or your buisness this week and do it!  Use something really attention grabbing in the title and use some smaller print to draw people in.  Now more than ever it is important to keep your name in front of your potential customers and clients!

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Strategic Partners

One of the best things a Marketing Introvert can do is to very carefully choose a half dozen good strategic partners.  Because marketing is hard for you, it is a great idea to set up relationships with people who are willing to send clients your way.  Here are three tips for choosing strategic partners:

1. Who do you know who “knows everybody?”  Think about people who are active in the Chamber of Commerce.  Serve as the President of a networking or business organization.  Seem to have a golden rolodex and can hook anyone up with someone else.  These people LOVE to network.  Approach them and ask for 10 minutes of their time to tell you about their business and let you tell them about yours.
2. Think about who has the same target clients that you do but are not in competition with you.  One of the best strategic partnerships I have ever seen was in a leads group where 11 of the members all provided services to home owners:  realtor, mortgage person, carpenter, roofer, carpet installation, handyperson, professional organizer, housecleaner, electrician, plumber and landscaper.  When one of them found a new client they were frequently able to give that person a referral to one of their strategic partners.
3. Check membership directories.  If there is an organization you belong to that puts out a list of its new members every month, be sure to go through with a highlighter and mark the new businesses that might cross your target clients’ path.  Here’s a tip:  new members often get swamped with calls from other businesses welcoming them in.  Wait a month before you call them and stand apart.

Remember, return the referral favor if you can.  If you can’t, be sure you generously thank people who send business your way and/or find other ways to help them and their business.  Start your own “golden rolodex!”

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The “B” word

I rarely find myself at a total loss with any of my clients but I got caught off guard by one of them not so long ago!  We were talking about her reluctance to market and she almost whispered, “I just can’t bring myself to use the “B” word about myself.”

“The “B” word?” I thought ( …and I bet your mind and mine jumped to the same first guess!) but the word that first came to my mind seemed particularly inappropriate in the case of this polite, friendly, middle-class woman who wanted to start a professional organizing business of her own.  “Which “B” word?” I asked cautiously.

“Business person,” she replied, as if the words left a bad taste in her mouth.  “I am totally happy seeing myself as a Professional Organizer but I just can’t picture myself as a business person.”

Hearing this admission, I felt myself back on solid ground.  You might be surprised at how many small business owners I come across who are comfortable thinking of themselves as practitioners of a particular profession… but feel totally uncomfortable thinking of themselves as business owners, marketing professionals, or sales persons.    Usually this is because these roles have activities associated with them that my potential clients don’t feel comfortable doing.

Sometimes, however, there is a sense of guilt or shame attached to the concept “business person.”  One of my recent clients came from a family who had all been service professionals for generations… doctors, nurses, lawyers.  She herself was a social worker.  For her, the “M” word, was a hard one… “Money.”  For twenty years, her services to her clients had been paid for by a non-profit organization.  She had never had to think about how much time she spent with her clients.  They got as much of her attention as they needed – she wasn’t paid by the hour.  The idea of asking someone to pay her for her time was appalling to her.

If you are like either of these two business people and have strong feelings of aversion to some aspect of business you cannot “avoid and still stay in business” here are a six tips for addressing the problem:

1. First you have to recognize that your feelings are acquired and not “Reality-with-a-capital R.”  How can you tell?  Because if EVERYONE on the planet felt as you do there would BE no businesses.  Clearly business is happening all around you and by good people!  So the problem is INSIDE you, not outside.  This is very good news because if a problem is “yours” there is a much better chance that you can actually do something about it!
2. This still may not make you feelany better.  The second step is to just give a little thought to where you picked up this belief, attitude or feeling.  Did it come from your family?  Did something happen to you in the past?  Did you pick it up in response to some cultural archetype?  (For example, many people have strong, negative associations for the word “sales person” but don’t think twice about the fact that they meet good, helpful, informative sales people all the time – many more, in fact, than the few “sales alligators” they may come across.)  If you can identify WHERE you picked up this limiting belief, it may help you in starting to unravel it.
3. Here is another eye-opener:  Get a piece of paper and fold it in half lengthwise.  On the left list all the good things that will happen if you change this belief to it’s opposite.  On the right list all the bad things you believe will happen.  Take a really good and careful look at the negative side.  Are all those things really true?  I once had a client who strongly believed that he would lose the respect of all his friends if he really did sales for his business.  As a result he had become so obscure in his efforts to talk about his product that very few people even knew what he was talking about, much less that he was sounding them out to gauge their interest in buying.  Four weeks after our first sessions, with a professional sales dialogue under his belt and new marketing activities up and running, he had changed his mind.  His friends showed a great deal of admiration for his courage at starting his own business and were delighted to hear about his success.  Much to his surprise, they even expressed a little envy!
4. Have the courage to check your belief out with a few trusted business colleagues.  I bet you are going to find other people who felt reluctant at first to do marketing and sales, or had trouble really embracing the fact that they were now business people.  Realizing that you are not the only one who has felt this way can help a lot.  And, in addition, you may come across someone who shares a good tip with you about how to overcome your fear.
5. Try this sentence on for size, “If I have to do xyz (marketing, networking, sales, whatever you dread!) for my business then I am going to find some good way to enjoy doing it, and I’m going to get good at it!”  What comes up for you when you say that aloud?  Do you immediately know what your first steps should be?
6. Finally, (and of course I WOULD mention this being who I am) get some help if you need it.  It can be really hard being a sole-proprietor and working on changing your own unconscious, negative beliefs or work to overcome the things that hold you back in your business. Sometimes a little focused help with a business consultant can move you through this problem more quickly than you can do it on your own.

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The Eagle and the Mouse

There is a native American metaphor for two different types of people which I often find apply to business owners.  One is “Eagle People” and the other is “Mouse People.” 

Eagle People like to fly up where they can see around them for 100’s of miles.  They are always seeing new things on the horizon which they are aware extends 365 degrees around them at all times.  They get really excited about possibilities.  Eagle People are great entrepreneurs, full of great ideas.  Eagle People are often an inspiration to themselves and others.

Mouse People are detail oriented.  They know every single blade of grass around their front door.  They can negotiate a tangle of complications and can be counted on to take care of every detail from day to day.  Mouse People are great administrators of their business – they can wear many hats and switch back and forth easily.  They know how to focus and get things done.  If you ever want a great business partner who will do whatever needs to be done to make your business a success… pick a Mouse!

The challenge for Eagle People is that they love new ideas so much that they can get bored with knuckling down to make things happen.  They can get five great new ideas in a week and totally forget that they set something else in motion the week before. 

I have a client right now who is almost all “Eagle.”  She has SOOO many good ideas. She is working on three books, taking college classes, teaching an adult class at her church every week, running a women’s group AND being a great wife and a mother to three middle school age children.  Her challenge is that she will enthusiastically say “yes” to almost any request for her time and she really struggles to get into her office every day for her scheduled writing time.  It seems so plebian to sit down to work.  At least once a week she changes her mind about which book she should focus on.  We are working on getting her “Mouse” side stronger because otherwise her great ideas and her tremendous gifts will never make it out into the world!

The challenge for Mouse People is that they get too caught up with the day-to-day and sometimes get in a rut.  Because it is hard for them to think into the future they can miss opportunities.  They don’t see a ‘wave’ coming and find it hard to be on the cutting edge of things.  They sometimes get so wrapped up with what is right on their desk and their immediate “to do list” that they can’t see the big picture about their business. 

I have a client who is a definitive “Mouse.”  One week when I was working with him, he set out to create a demo CD for his personal history business.  The demo was supposed to be no more than 5 minutes long.  I was absolutely startled the next week when he came back and told me he had put in 90 hours and was only half way through listening to every minute of every interview he had ever done to be sure he got the very best snippets for his demo.  He wasn’t even close to going out marketing with a demo CD!

If you are a marketing introvert be careful that your Eagle or Mouse tendencies don’t go to an extreme.  They need to be in balance!  Remember that if you are a true Marketing Introvert you may unconsciously gravitate to the Eagle or Mouse activities which are most comfortable to you… and will keep you so occupied that you forget to go marketing!

Oh that scary world out there!  :  )

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Tendencies to Procrastinate!

It is beautifully bright and cool here in Boulder this morning.  A week or so ago we plunged out of summer and into Fall.  This close to the mountains we could literally have snow at any time but for the moment everything is unseasonably lush and green. 

What does this have to do with Marketing 4 Introverts?  When you dread doing marketing and sales it is easy to distract yourself with any attractive thing that passes along. Although I have come a long way from the panic I used to feel at the beginning of marketing days when I distracted myself with anything I could think of (laundry, dishes, The DaVinci Code, straightening my desk…) rather than sit down to my desk and get to work, I still have to catch myself when I decide to spend 20 minutes looking for zucchini and cucumbers in the garden instead of going to my desk as planned.  I try to be at my desk by 8:00.  Today I wasn’t here until 9:15.  Those tall spiky umbrella-like leaves hiding treasures in the cool, wet dampness of the morning were too enticing this morning!

But I also have some strong goals for this week that need to get done.  If you find yourself in a similar position here’s two things I find helpful:  The first is to create a TO DO list every evening.  I have mine in front of me right now ready to guide me through today’s schedule which will now need to be modified just a bit due to the zucchini detour this morning.  The second is to be willing to “make up the time” during the day.  Balancing time is an important aspect of being your own boss.  For those of us who add a dash of marketing avoidance to our detours we have to be careful because you don’t want the detours to become such a strong habit that you really have to fight with yourself all day long!

In the good life we should be able to have zucchinis and marketing both!  :  )

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Why the picture across the top?

Often marketing done by Marketing Introverts is creative but not very effective… as in the case of the person who left their business card on top of the post on a bridge near my house.  The beautiful leaves, the bright colors, the crystal, all caught my attention but how many people did this marketing strategy reach?

Truthfully, I don’t know if the person who left their card is a true Marketing Introvert – someone who would rather do very, very passive forms of marketing but it is possible!   On the other hand, the card may have fallen out their pocket, or out of a client’s pocket, and an”artist” put it on the post.

In any case, the thing that made me think this would be a good picture for the blog is that a true marketing introvert would hope that this unusual marketing strategy, which doesn’t require him or her to be there when the potential client sees the card, will work… and someone will see the card… and become a client.

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Being a Marketing Introvert is “Only” a Behavior Pattern

In my last blog I wrote: “The GOOD NEWS is that (as a Marketing Introvert) you created this situation and these feelings… and you can undo them. Being a “marketing introvert” is not “who you are.” It is a behavior and feeling pattern you created because something about being out in the world, in this way, scares you.”

I’d like to talk about this a little more!

Some of you know that I was a psychotherapist before I decided to become a business consultant and business skills trainer. In my years of psychotherapy training we spent considerable time studying something called “Character Organization.” Personally, I think everyone would benefit from knowing how we human beings put ourselves together. Each of us creates a “Character Style” consisting of our most basic beliefs, attitudes, ways of thinking and feeling, and behavior patterns.

There are six commonly recognized character patterns which emerge as we decide as small children what life is like. Our beliefs about life and other people arise from our repetitive experiences. These patterns become crystalized very early in life and we develop strategies for coping with situations that are less than ideal. These form a background for the way we habitually think, act, anticipate, respond and feel.

Here are the six key existential questions we all resolve for ourselves very early in life:

1. Am I safe and am I welcome here? Do others affirm my right to be alive? Or is life a pretty risky, unpredictable, dangerous business?
2. Is there enough to go around of what I need in life? Can I relax knowing my needs are going to be met? Or, if no one is going to take care of me, do I have to do everything all by myself? Or, do I have to become weak before people will help me?
3. Is it okay for me to be different than other people? Is my uniqueness celebrated? Do I have a right to have my own opinions and preferences? Or do I have to think, feel and act exactly the way others think, feel and act in order to be accepted and loved?
4. Can I make my own choices or are all my choices forced upon me? Can I have a will of my own? Or does it feel as if I am beaten down until I have to do what others want? Is life always hard?
5. Can I both win and fail as a natural part of life? Or do I have to always be “the golden child” and fulfill other’s ideas of who I am?
6. Am I as valued for who I am as for what I can do? Or does only what I accomplish count?

Under ideal conditions, a person comes into this life and gets satisfactory experiences concerning these existential questions. They feel welcomed into their family, loved, and the world seems “safe enough.” There is enough to go around and they trust that they are going to be taken care of in life. Others enjoy their unique personality and we get the idea that it is okay to be like other people, and it is okay to be different. We get to make (age appropriate) choices and our decisions and preferences are respected. We don’t have to live out someone else’s dream for us and are loved for who we are. We are encouraged to do our best but if we are not THE best that is okay too. We are as loved for who we are as for what we can accomplish in life.

Suffice it to say that most of us find that our first living environment didn’t support ALL of these developmental stages “perfectly” and we come to have certain beliefs about other people and about life that, once set, tend to be accepted as “Reality with a Capital R” and are no longer examined and questioned. When this happens, underlying character organization can affect affect our ability to be Marketing Professionals. For example:

1. If you don’t feel essentially “welcome” in life it can be very hard to walk into a room of strangers at a networking event and feel that you have a legitimate right to be there.
2. If you experience others as not essentially being “safe” or “predictable,” or you have to “know” people before you feel comfortable with them, it is hard to walk up to a stranger and stick out your hand.
3. If you never felt liked and wanted as a child, you may have learned to stand back until you get cues that approaching is acceptable. Marketing is all about moving straight forward and meeting strangers.
4. If you decided it was better to never stand out in a crowd, it will be very hard for you to stand up and say your 30 Second Commercial in front of a big group.
5. If your experience was that there was never enough to go around, you are likely to see every other business owner as a competitor and that there are not enough clients to go around. It will be very hard for you to form strategic partnerships.
6. If you think life is very unpredictable, strategic planning is going to be very hard for you and if you keep shifting yourself and your offering around to try to find solid ground to stand on, others will become unsure of what, exactly, you are selling.
7. Also, you may believe that a down economy means there is less and less opportunity for you or no opportunity at all.
8. If your family emphasized everybody doing the same things, feeling and thinking the same way, it will be very hard for you to stand out as a sole proprietor. What were you thinking? It isn’t okay to do something all by yourself! It isn’t safe!
9. If you felt continuously forced as a child, you may have developed such a strong sense of resistance to things you don’t want to do that it may become virtually impossible for you to do anything that initially makes you uncomfortable. You may feel that you have to protect yourself, constantly, from others because you feel criticized or pressured by them. In the business world you can’t simultaneously protect yourself from others and be the kind of person others want to buy from.
10. If your family only gave you praise and encouragement for “winning,” you are going to have a very hard time facing all the rejection that comes your way in the natural course of looking for clients. Not everybody is going to say yes. Not everybody wants your product or service. When someone says “no” it isn’t always about “you.”
11. It may be that you have come to expect that everything “should” come easily to you. You just expect this because of your past experiences as a child. It may make you angry when life and people don’t treat you the way you expect to be treated; or you may have become the type of person who will abandon anything that you have to work for.
12. If you always had to be “perfect” right out of the gate, it will be very hard for you start from scratch in learning the business skills. They have to be learned; 99% of people aren’t just born knowing how to do sales. If you get all your self esteem from the ability to meet your goals quickly, you may become panicked when you start doing sales and are not immediately successful.

We all develop ways of avoiding situations that remind us uncomfortably of situations we couldn’t negotiate-to-our-liking when we were young. Marketing and sales activities will generally get these things “right in our face.” I have a friend who is a PhD Clinical Psychologist who for years studied and worked with cutting-edge, big-name, psychotherapy practitioners, trainers, and personal growth professionals. Yet he once told me “I have learned more about myself by starting my own business from scratch than I did in all of my years of meditation and self-awareness training.”

When we start our own business, we don’t leave ourselves out of the equation. We bring “ourselves” into our business. If we have developed coping strategies for life long ago based on beliefs that certain ways of being were dangerous, these same coping strategies will now become barriers to our approaching the world openly, in friendliness, to sell our products and services.

But again, I have to repeat, the good news is that we, ourselves, put these character organizations in place and they are NOT “who we are” at the core of our being. If you are a Marketing Introvert now, you don’t have to remain one.

There is a Sufi saying that goes “One who has created a lock, has also created the key.” We CAN change the feelings that hold us back from becoming great business people because we created the feelings in the first place. This is good news!

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What does it feel like to be a Marketing Introvert?

Often the dread of marketing and sales activities comes as a surprise to people. Many of my clients tell me they never expected they would have such strong feelings when they started their business. Those who are service professionals (helping and healing professionals, lawyers, etc.) have often done very well in their extensive training programs including presentations and speaking up in class. Product providers are so excited about their product they don’t anticipate they will have problems talking about it. Some even did sales for other companies and didn’t expect doing sales for their own company would be a different situation… but it is.

“I’m a very friendly person,” one client told me, “I can speak to anybody about anything, but when it comes to talking about my business my throat closes up and my mind becomes a blank.”

Some people are afraid when someone asks about their business that this is their one and only chance to make a good impression. The fear of saying the wrong thing or not doing it “right” chokes them up. Others question whether they are qualified enough. They communicate their doubt about themselves to everyone they meet. This is like doing marketing with a big “I’m afraid I’m not the right person for you” sign across your forehead. Others don’t want to see themselves as business people. They feel like a fish-out-of-water in business groups. Some report to me that they feel so “out of their body” that the event takes on the quality of a nightmare.

My own favorite symptom, which took me a considerable amount of time to get over, (but I did!) was the fear of calling people on the phone to see if they were interested in my programs. I even struggled to call people who had already expressed interested and had invited me to call them! On mornings that I planned to do calling I would wake up in a panic attack which felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. NOT a good way to begin a business day!

Here are descriptions Marketing Introvert clients have given me of how they feel:

• I suddenly feel as if I am walking through cold molasses and it takes soooo much effort to move forward
• It feels as if my very life is being threatened and all my senses get heightened. Things become unnaturally sharp and over-stimulating. This is accompanied by a “foot on the gas” and “foot on the brake” feeling with alternate waves of thought crashing through my head: “I HAVE TO do this! I DON’T have my rent for next month!” combined with “I CAN’T do this! I HATE doing this! I DON’T WANT TO do this!”
• My palms are sweaty. My mouth is dry. I have a lump in my throat.
• I can’t think. No words come to mind. My mind is a blank.
• I don’t feel “like myself.” It feels as if I am trying to be someone I’m not.
• I am drowning, swimming through this aweful situation and the horizon never gets any closer.
• My resistance level gets so high it becomes like a wall that looms ever higher the more I try to force myself toward marketing situations. It is like being pulled in the opposite direction by a magnet.

A Marketing Introvert can also have milder symptoms like:

• I just don’t feel like doing marketing today, I’ll do it tomorrow (except tomorrow you feel the same way and make the same choice.)
• I get fuzzy or cloudy when I try to think. “I can’t seem to think straight when I try to do marketing.”
• I make myself so busy there is never enough time to do marketing. (This person didn’t have many billable hours so she kept busy working “on” her business – building a better website, writing new materials for her classes, writing articles that she didn’t ever submit anywhere, spending hour and hours working on her portfolio, etc.)
• Thinking “If you could just hire the right person they could do marketing and sales FOR me.” (Usually people think “If only I could find someone who will work on commission!)

There are lots of ways being a Marketing Introvert can manifest and there are as many reasons for it as there are people who feel it. The bottom line is that your feelings keep you from doing marketing and sales and that is adversely affecting your business.

The GOOD NEWS is that YOU created this situation and these feelings… and you can undo them. Being a “marketing introvert” is not “who you are.” It is a behavior and feeling pattern you created because something about being out in the world, in this way, scares you. It is possible to make another choice about how you feel and you can learn a new way to be out in the world; (REALLY!) especially if you get a big reward for doing so – like having the job you love, no boss but yourself, and lots of adoring clients.

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The Five Essential Skills You Need to Find Clients

Some of you who have read my previous blogs must be wondering what I think are the essential business skills a Marketing Introvert needs to master. Here they are in a nutshell.

1. Strategic Planning
2. Business Communication
3. Marketing
4. Sales
5. Organization and Time Management

If you want specifics, see the list below. This list can look overwhelming to a true Marketing Introvert but if these essentials are put in place marketing will move forward much more smoothly and easily. For someone who isn’t crazy about doing marketing and sales in the first place, this is crucial! By mastering these, you will spend less time marketing and be more effective!

1. Create a (sufficiently detailed) vision of what kind of business you want in the future
2. Set goals (daily, weekly, monthly, etc)
3. Make firm decisions on the revenue sources you will offer and your pricing
4. Learn how to talk about prices easily to anyone
5. Identify your ideal clients and why they spend money on your type of product or service
6. Develop a marketing message based on #5
7. Learn the psychology of business communication
8. Develop a brief but attention-grabbing way to answer the question “What do you do?”
9. Learn how to network effectively with other business owners
10. Create a 10 minute presentation on your business
11. Develop several talks if public speaking will help you get in front of your target clients. Learn the secret to getting permission for you to call interested people after the talk BEFORE they leave the room.
12. Design 3 to 5 marketing strategies you will use on an ongoing basis that will get you directly in front of your ideal clients or people who will refer them to you.
13. Research and use methods of getting attention for your business on the internet
14. Create a structured way of speaking with potential clients (doing sales)
15. Understand what sales techniques work and which don’t
16. Be organized in your office so you don’t waste your precious time
17. Create an “ideal” work day template for yourself and stick to it as best you are able. Again this will save you up to 8 hours a week in lost or wasted time.
18. Be good at time management for your business since, especially if you are a sole proprietor and do everything from provide the service/oversee manufacture of the product to being the Bookkeeper, VP of Marketing, VP of Sales, Filing Clerk, and the Janitor.
19. Regularly assess your business progress and make navigational changes to your work plan.
20. Be able to work with yourself to continue becoming a more savvy, effective business person

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Welcome to the Marketing 4 Introverts blog!

The reason I am starting this blog is because I want to talk about ways to make marketing and sales easier for small business owners. Five years ago, as part of my consulting and business skills training practice, I started doing talks and classes called “Marketing 4 Introverts.” I found over and over that as soon as I used the term, “Marketing Introvert,” heads would be nodding all over the room. 

 

Who is a Marketing Introvert? Here’s my definition:

• Marketing Introverts have generally found work they love and are highly motivated to be self employed. They are often intelligent, friendly, creative, passionate people who do great work with their clients or offer a great product. Many tell me that they can talk easily to just about anyone about just about anything… EXCEPT their business. The defining characteristic of a Marketing Introvert is a dread or fear of doing marketing and sales. Because of this, people who are Marketing Introverts are generally not doing enough business activities to keep their business financially strong and stable. Life as a small business owner has gone from the dream of getting paid to do work you love to a daily struggle with worry over your financial situation with a deep undercurrent of fear running underneath.   

   

   

  The good news I have for “Marketing Introverts” is that this does not have to be a fatal condition. By learning certain essential business skills (which are NOT rocket science) and learning how to work with your strengths as a “introvert” (someone who is strongly rooted in an ability to stay in touch with his or her own thoughts, feelings, responses, ability to keenly observe and respond to the surrounding world) in business situations you can do marketing and sales just as well as anyone else, sometimes better! In fact, you don’t have to become either a “Sales Extrovert” or an Extrovert at all. Instead you can use who you really are to become a “Marketing, Sales and Business Professional.” There is more than enough solid ground in that to create a financially successful business.
  

 

It can be done. In this blog, I want to talk about these things.

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