Understanding the Power and Utility of Social Media

Most companies fail when it comes to coupling social media to business development. These failures result in a lot of wasted energy and time, and a lot of chasing after worthless goals. The energy wasted could be so easily leveraged using  social media well. Let's figure this out a bit.

People go to social media for all kinds of reasons: for news, for local news, for entertainment, to see what their friends are up to, to look for funny, provocative and unusual information.

Businesses should go to social media to cross paths with new prospects. As business owners, we go here to drop attractants that relate in some way to our business services. We can attract friends and likes and shares when when we offer useful bits.

Too many businesses think like bosses. You can talk about anything you want with paid employees and they pay attention; probably not for the reasons you wish, but it is part of earning a paycheck. Make the boss feel good.

Too many businesses hire social media help using the same attitude. Social media creation types are there to make a buck putting up on social media what you want to see and hear. They are paid to make you happy. I am not. Therefore, this may feel like a face slap, but the people you are trying to attract and influence probably have the most fleeting interest in what strokes your ego. So why do we see so much of this type of content?

Reasons while social media failures occur so often might be in this list.
We love to make stuff up because we know what works.
Just too busy to stop and think about important stuff.
Creating content is an afterthought what with all the really urgent stuff to do.
We love being the boss and making stuff up. This is the HIPPO effect.

So what makes good sense when trying to use social media?
The great content that we share as blog posts or articles, fit into sharing on social media nicely. We also need a nice hook to get attention. We actually serve up useful information for our visitors. We give visitors an opportunity to use and share our genuinely important information. If the link does not relate to your core business, or if you think your role is to be share any funny thing, or talk about football or cats or dogs; you are diluting your utility. Facebook is full of entertainment. People do not come to you for entertainment. You just mess up your role and bore people. You need to concentrate on being in the cultivating new customers business.

Now grounded content can run over a gamut of creative tidbits. We are in the bonding business. We offer useful information, people get the answers they want, we earn trust, people ask us questions and ask us for estimates, and they become happy long term customers.

Here is a short list of useful topics that work well being shared on Facebook and social media. There are more; feel free to suggest a few. Oh, and I threw in some caveats, also.

• attractive bits relating to useful content around your specific service that you have published to your website. Facebook is not a reliable place to post original content. There is no reliable searching mechanism. This is called social media for a reason. 
• local events and community involvement by your people. There are interesting tools on Facebook to promote events. Document the events on your website. Share pictures  and links to Facebook. 
• Awards won and recognition earned by your people.
• great testimonials - this is a tricky place. Heap praise on the people who get mentioned. Humble bragging is not good. We are just red faced embarrassed at the profuse praise heaped on us... just shut up. People are  finding you annoying.  There are humble braggarts out there. Are you one of them?
• you can be creative but be real and do not just fill space.
• no gratuitous offerings of your brand logos. Why? might someone forget your brand? Just knock it off. You often see this when an agency has a box to check off as a post. 
• skip the empty reminders of important calendar events. I get newsletters from several companies' who email on Mother's day and the 4th of July and Christmas. My heart sings their praises for being so authentic and caring. That is Stu sarcasm. You can make these real, and make them personal. Talk about what your people are doing, maybe; but just the drab standard line and this is the only time anybody hears from you....  People know that software sends these out and the note was written 4 years ago. No points for priming the calendar. 

There is all kinds of space here for creativity and bonding to real people and we always link back to our website which is the hub of all our online activities. We must always be offering value. Now this is a wide ranging field. Just be real. Be there with real thought out additions to the dialog. Don't just fill space.

Your use of Facebook or any other social media tool must relate to how that tool is actually used for good purpose by the regulars and your posts must blend in with other useful information in that medium. We must not be interlopers shouting for attention.

We need to test and measure to see how we are doing. We talk about measuring metrics here.
Conversions are creating a link to useful content, say on your website around a subject that attracts attention.

Social Media 2.0
There are powerful ways to find influencers in social media that relate to the value you bring to the market place. You can friend them and win them over to common cause and combine your efforts to reach more people and create a win-win for both parties.

You can also collaborate in a group you build, but this is a big deal and will not be addressed here. You can also participate in other groups. But remember, work to add real value or you will be ignored and be worse off for trying. Be authentic.

We must be conscious of working to be useful.
This brings up a widespread issue in the publishing content world. The myriad forces which push towards mediocrity in content development. Leadership must refrain from making stuff up and doing the easy brain fart type of posting or allowing an agency to post hokum for you on a regular basis just to fill space. We must be conscious of being useful

Your content and your social media postings must relate to the buying cycle
You need to be strategic and you need to understand the multiple steps of a sales process and how to address each of these stages with your content.
You can work within any of these categories, and by being strategic you can create a matrices of content connection points that allow people to find a path to you and follow that path to giving you a call.
We are working in these categories. You might have some clearer verbiage here.

• capturing attention, 
• to creating the wish for more information
• to planting an idea in someone's head 
• to helping answer questions 
• to helping to solve objections and alleviate fears
• to setting your company apart from the competition
•  to cultivating a desire for the service, 
• to writing an estimate and closing the sale

Understanding buying cycles is important and we discuss several here. If you don't understand the buying cycle you can get your sales process out of order and miss sales.  If you don't understand the buying cycle, you could be missing a critical part of the market and have a weakness in your strategic implementation. The sales process is one step at a time, and you need to have a pretty good idea that there is time involved as people move through the buying process.

OK, so make sure you understand that there are no points won for the number of people who like you, or the number of posts you do. The value of social media is set by your ability to get shares and likes driving visitors back to your content on your website. Follow the stats. Follow the conversions. Improve by testing. Don't make stuff up.

Any other thoughts about social media?

Smart Business Strategy Finds Time and Space for Adaptability

Many different topics pop on when business owners are musing a wish list of skills they wished there people had, but adaptability is not generally one of them. In fact, adaptability could easily be a key factor in solving the constraints most businesses have, but usually solutions are seen as revolving around sweating more, and getting more done, and getting things done on time, and working faster and more productively... these do not fit so well when considering the virtues of adaptability.

Adaptability as a virtue revolves around change, and change is the antithesis of getting more done. But when technology is changing the world and how people buy stuff and how people discover what they want to buy and how people figure out what they need and what they want; doing things the same old way is only going to work so long.

Lessons to Learn from Evolution Survival of the Fittest is a concept from Charles Darwin we can all learn from. Charles said  animals evolved because of pressure on the species. It was not the strongest that survived, it was not the dominant species that survived, but the species  most adaptable to change.  What does this mean to you? If you are a small company growing, you can take heart that some of your big competitors are going to be quite happy to continue doing what has brought them success in the past, and not adapt well to the future; and you can grow and thrive by being smart and strategic.  If you are a dominant company now, I am hoping this note jars you out of complacency and helps you understand you cannot rest on your laurels but be developing your adapting skills

Understanding the virtues of keeping eyes open, being adaptable to change, paying attention on what is going on around you, being patient and bringing your team along to learn new skills and work at innovation, even if there is some failure; needs to be seen as a virtue. Time spent learning to adapt to new technologies, experimenting with new processes is a virtue, and a team of people used to taking time to be creative and innovative is a virtue.

This is vs the standard industrial thinking - centering activities around what works the best to get production done right now, and keeping the shoulder to the wheel and producing... this is the industrial mindset, keep doing more of what is working now and get those number up every quarter.

You may have discovered my ulterior motive, 
I want more businesses to understand the critical value of content creation and to find the space in the work schedule to facilitate it. But beyond my ulterior motive, nurturing the skill to be looking for ways to improve processes and taking the time to engage with change and be adaptable is a basic business strategy.

The problem is creativity takes effort and time and effort away from what makes money racks the lizard brain and time away from production costs real money. It is much easier to feel the cost of being adaptable that figuring out the intangible cost of staying put where you are.

Seth Godin is quite eloquent about the struggle between deciding to spend time being frustrated learning something new and just staying with the status quo.

The problem with evaluating the first fifteen minutes of frustration is that we easily forget about the 5,000 minutes of leverage that frustration earns us if we stick it out. 

This might be a good time to check out his point. Now he is speaking more to the individual artist or craftsman but it does not take genius to carry his point over to the entire team. The First 15 Minutes

The business environment right now is a good time for keeping one's eyes open as things change. You need to understand what is happening and the implications of those changes.

You need to understand what is attracting people and interconnections and figure out how to participate authentically there. You need to know who you want to talk to and figure out where they spend their time in social media. And you need to do it well. Useless and boring is as bad as not being there.

There is an art to using social media effectively. You have to understand where the people you want to meet, hang out and figure out how to contribute there with real value and make some new friends. You actually have to spend time and do some study to understand how any social media tool is used effectively or have someone you trust help you figure out how to use it effectively.

You also need time to discern well enough to miss the BS and innovate around Fundamentals, not be talked into the latest fad technology that will fade into the vapor. Innovation brought to you by sales people offering easy and effortless ways to do what you know takes effort, is BS.

The best example I see are creative ways to create worthless content. Lots of people are hired who turn brain farts into florid text, and rehash existing content online into new hash. Some even turn to other countries to find writing talent to create content. People are even working on content written by machines. Would not that makes things easy?

Optimizing technologies to aid the human hand, technologies to help with SEO and to sort keywords and phrases cannot turn worthless rehashed content into something useful. In the end, people have to read what you say and like it and respond. A back button is the ultimate exit from boring and useless.

you also need to be beware the fads in web design. That feature that everyone has. let me just pick on one in particular. I hate carousels. This new technology popped up a few years ago and most websites have this feature because it looks cool to the owner. I beat up on carousels here. 

Here is a really big deal. And I put it last because it was not about content creation. There are just the greatest software apps available today to help make all kinds of human activities easier. There are creat CRM systems for keeping track of prospects and customers and projects. There are great ways to communicate with the staff and staff with each other, to keep everyone on the same page at the same time, on whatever smart device they are using.

Such software takes the sweat of working with images, and creating content, and leaves the fun part; commenting and creating and telling stories.

Then the other side of the coin is learning to use the technology well. You probably know people who do not know how to use the power of their own word processor or their own spreadsheet and database engine. When you use a handy tool, like a hammer, you have reduced the handy tool to the level of a hammer and it probably functions poorly as a hammer. We talk about using software well here. 

And this gets back to Seth Godin theme above; do not let the little bit of work required to learn and leverage a sophisticated tool from helping you reap the added leverage of using the tool well.

Adaptability in the modern world is essential for survival. It is in the spirit of Daniel Boone who mosied into Kentucky paying attention to where he was going to stay out of trouble with the bears and stay out of trouble with the rightful property owners.

Smart business owners must learn to relax a little more and allow the space and time- i.e. slack to give people room to think, to innovate, to try new ideas.... we must become adaptable to change because change is coming and it is better to relish it and be near the front of the parade.

Being adaptable keeps you aware of the change in the winds and help you adjust to forces at work and keeps you on course.

OK, who has a thought here? What kind of experiences have you had that touch on the subject?

You need to Understand the Basic Buying cycle ehh Buying Cycles

If you don't understand the buying processes you encounter in your service niche, you do not understand or have an effective business development process.

Great marketers work at getting prospects into the buying cycle earlier and earlier and basically taking them off the market from all those bounders waiting around for a one night stand, or put more delicately, the quick sale.

The bounder mentality just does not stop to comprehend the steps towards a sale and basically begin their thinking at the time of the particular buyer is looking at reviews and figuring out who they are going to trust and buy from.

Now remember, this site is intended to help small service companies and manufacturers improve their business development and their sale processes. The greatest part of Internet advice you will ever see is oriented towards helping retail locations succeed and restaurants and every other location that caters to the whim of folks zooming around and enjoying shopping and catching a snack and perusing cool stuff... this is not you, and the majority of advice is tangential to what you need to do.

There are a lot of companies out there whose front page consists of promotional offers and "call now for service". Now, the front page is not critical to search unless all the site's information is on the front page, and not critical unless you are using online ads that dump people on the front page and this is a money robbing mistake.

These concentration on the quick sale is a misunderstanding of the buying cycle and the many different step that homeowners go through before they are ready to go shopping.

Web visitors first encounters with your content as they are searching for answers about something they are concerned about, or something they see in social media that touches on an inkling they have. It depends on the theme and the 100 different ways to draw attention to that theme that helps create a search connection between you content and their intent; and this is arranged by being high on the search page with Google.
What do I mean by theme? I mean a broad issue around which another 100 stories could be told which would relate back to the broader theme. Like indoor air quality or IAQ. We talk about dominating  critical themes elsewhere but here we are relating any particular theme to the buying cycle.

So someone is searching for reasons for a musty odor like composing vegetation in a bedroom. Now they are not interested in special offers, or "schedule your appointment today" they are looking for content that gives them a sense of what might be going on. Now content like this that is part of a story which relates the real life experience of a customer could easily be matched up by Google because of the quite specific terms. And they are not showing up on the front page; but a blog post that when prepared through a strategic content creation system is meeting this web visitor around their subject and matching their intent.

And here is the big win. When people find useful information they are appreciate. This phenomenon is called reciprocity and it is in our nature as humans. And so if your content is useful and you offer a hook that gets their attention and that matches well their next step in their buying cycle; well you are on your way to winning hearts and creating influence

The type of buyers most smart companies want are customers who are discerning, who want top quality and professional services more than they want the cheapest price. Quality workmanship and attention to the fundamentals of a repair and cheapest price do not really keep company because the cheapest price depends on corner cutting on the fundamentals.
Yes, you hear about cutting profit to the bare bones, and cutting down on expensive overhead... this is BS for cutting corners. Companies in for the long haul understand the cost of doing business and overhead and the cost of top quality workmanship and the fundamentals of repairs and, while they do sharpen their pencils around expenses they are not cutting corners to be the lowest price.

I did not mean to get on that riff on pricing there, but wanted to underline the utility of understanding the buying cycle and creating strategic content around the steps in the buying cycle. The web visitors you meet working the buying cycle well, are the discerning buyers so that you are giving your company the best chance to meet the discerning buyer you want; first.

And it is your web visitor to lose. But you don't lose them if you understand the next steps in the buying cycle and help them pass easily, even over a length of time to become your buyer and your lifelong customer.

Understanding the buying cycle and utilizing this knowledge to meet and win new customers is

• helping the chosen become aware, 
• helping the aware to better understand what is happening
• helping the chosen learn to discerning about the actions they need to take.
• give them useful information around which to make smart choices and avoid faux solutions.
• give them plenty of opportunity to explore your credentials
• give them plenty of opportunity to check you out and your team
• create your own unique systems to get them to connect to you, to stay in touch with useful information- social media? nurturing emails? a newsletter preferably a newsletter that you collaborate in... shared in email...

Understanding the buying cycle and thinking about strategic content marketing can help you win in the battle for the hearts and minds of your chosen web visitors, and you do this on a steady basis and you will have real problems on your hands. You will have to grow your company, and do more hiring, and train new managers... the small business owners work is never done.

Related Posts The Critical Role of Leadership in Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan Empowering People – Empowering Your Business How are you being Introduced to Future Customers?

All right so who has a point to add here? This is critical turf for business owners to be thinking about. Leave your thoughts below.

The Essential Role of Leadership in Establishing a Content Creation Process

There are all kinds of perceived obstacles and real roadblocks to instituting a smart strategic content creation strategy, and this is good news for the thoughtful leader.

• We need to know the roadblocks and the pitfalls to avoid failure. 
• We need to go understand the obstacles, both real and perceived, to assess reality. 
• We also need to understand the value of strategic content. We want return on investment. We will basically discuss the cost of creating strategic content and the value and then you can make your own decisions. 

It makes sense to get a true perspective on the value of useful content. Value created helps alleviate the anxiety of investing time and money and thinking. Great content and the useful leveraging of this content on the Internet, in social media, in online advertising, in newsletters, in nurturing email, off-line- is the big lever in the battle for business growth. Lets look at this value quite closely. 

There are many pitfalls you have to watch out for.
There are so many traps that let us create content that sucks. Useless content is easy, but it does take time, and it provides no useful results. Yet why is there so much useless content? We need to be clearly differentiating between the usual blah blah blah, the usual self promoting bilge and useful content that attracts the web visitors you would like to know better.

There are many obstacles that are just felt, that are just basically fear.
Creating a process for effective content creation can sound hard to do. It can feel like folly. There is this boogie man that keeps companies standing still when action is needed and the highest real risk is standing in place as the world changes how it buys stuff.

This is the problem of the lizard brain- the fight or flight response to any change from a ancient psyche that kept us safe when the dangers were real not imagined but, today keeps us standing on the virtual railroad tracks as technology changes the way we do business at at rapid pace.There is the tyranny of the daily urgent and unimportant that can displace the attention to the important but not urgent.

There is often an overbearing sense that everybody is busy now or that we need to concentrate on the tasks that make income right now.  A strategic content creation strategy that interlinks useful content is important, and is a good investment and needs to be engaged now as the way people buy, is changing. But even when this importance is understood, the daily urgencies intervene, and the usual rush to get something done, pushes for pragmatism right now. Leaders with vision cannot be satisfied with industrial thinking but can take the time, to find the space to fit in what is important.

There is actual disruption in creating a process to create useful content
 but this disruption of existing process is no different than say, moving from a paper working environment to a paperless environment. It takes a vision from leadership who understand the tremendous value of having shared docs and not having to depend on tracking and sorting and filing pieces of paper. Moving forward, requires a description of the process, and maybe even a procedure for dealing with issues which will arise. Right from the start we plan well to minimize possible disruption.

The actual changes are first led by the early adopters and then there are some laggards on the other end who take longer. And when all is said and done, there is a big gain in productivity and an improved ability to manage data and you are better able to care for customers.

Useful content requires a team and we lay out a rough outline for creating useful content here.

Leadership is responsible for the vision forward. Leadership must create the tenor, must create the safe environment for people to participate here, to share ideas, and move forward. And Leadership must not allow the daily urgent to interfere. Leadership must have the patience to let the team develop some new habits and acquire some new perspective. It is all good. Maybe you need to go back and review the section of actual value of content. This is the big tool with which to build and sustain business development.

Differentiating Between Useful and Useless Content

Useless content is rehashed content that is the same old blah blah blah shared from competitor to competitor. So much of it sounds like some boring grade school teacher reciting laundry lists of facts and caveats and advice in a monotone. If your content does not grab your visitor and wake them up and get their attention, it is useless.

Useless content can also be all about the company written with the expectation that the web visitor is dazzled and impressed with your glittering reputation and exciting  intonation of your company virtues and high levels of experience and expertise that you like to talk about.

Useless content is all the stuff on a website that gets between the web visitor and the information that they are actually look for. This often starts with the usual carousel of images that lets the web designer appear to have worked his fingers to the bone. Website owners love these too, because they get to show off what is important to them. Always remember that effective websites are customer centric, not there to stroke the ego. I really dislike carousels.

Useful content is not the usual rehashed blah blah blah but is useful. It is not the writing exercise of english majors writing sentences on subjects they actually know nothing about, but the stories of people engaged in solving problems and creating solutions for customers.

And talking louder does not make boring information any more useful. More volume does not make boring information more impactful. More social media microphones just makes more noise. Extra tweets just make you harder to avoid. . Therefore there is great power is speaking useful information in a still small voice and earning the right to speak as early in the coming conflagration as you can.

Compelling and useful content requires the participation of experts, of sales people, of people in the front office who are dealing with people, their questions, their misunderstandings, their concerns. We describe the only reliable means to get great content here.

We discuss the actual content creation process here. Here is how great content can be created.

So why does useful content happen so seldom? 

This is a critical question, because some of you are going to see the light and decide to step out and be remarkable and you cannot step out and be remarkable unless you can identify what is happening now. We work through the process of how useless content is created here. Maybe you need to look this over and see if anything in particular sounds familiar.

 We talk about antidotes to the industrial brain here.

This is a critical battle for leadership to win. Leadership must be engaged in a strategic content creation system to make content truly effective. It is not something to be left to vendors, or contractors, or the whims of whomever.

Useful content is the only kind of content worth having. Stop and think. Easy brainfart content is a waste of time and it perpetuates the same waste into the future.

Here are some related posts addressing issues surrounding useful content. Understanding the Role of Feedback in Creating Great Content Great Content Matches the Intent of the Web Visitor Strategic Content is Critically Important in Dollars and Cents

OK, who has a thought here? Who have I offended? Feel free to set me straight.

There is no more Worthless Website Feature than a Carousel

I consider the image carousel that is a common feature on most service company websites as the most intrusive website component interfering with the efforts of your web visitor to find the information that they are actually look for.

People come to your website with a particular intention. They usually have a question. This is the earliest stage of the buying cycle. And the first thing they see is a big carousel that fills they entire view port of their desktop; we won't even mention the small screen "whack a mole" effect as the screen starts exchanging out images.

People want an answer to their question. They do not want to sit through your slideshow to figure out if what you are so eager to show off has anything to do with their quest.

Now carousels are popular because the people who pay for websites are not actually using the website and are all excited to show off what they think is important. And the web designer gets to appear as if he has worked his fingers to the bone, by making something twinkly.

Carousels create all kinds of dismal effects for your website.

So a good share of web visitors hit the back button and return to the search engine where they figure the perfect answer is at the next click.  So, what is the result of this quick return to Google?

Well, google notes that their searcher did not get much help from your content and bounced back and the result  is that your page  is denigrated with google as useful to Google's clientele, and I guarantee Google cares about their users.

Now some of your web visitors are intrepid and so they find something promising to click on and the next page, looks exactly the same! Is the site broken? Oh, no they quickly figure  out that the carousel is still here filling the view port and they get to scroll down to actually find real information around the carousel.

The carousel  is a disaster and serves no useful purpose. 

You don't have to take my word as truth on carousels, here is another opinion. This is great. Jared W. Smith doesn't really like them either. http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/  He has his own set of reasons.

Is there a place for a carousel?

Maybe, if you are offering a smorgasbord of entertainment and your visitor is perusing your offerings.  If you are doing this, you are on the wrong website.

The purpose of this website is carrying on a dialogue with smart small business owners who are in a service business, or maybe you are a small manufacturer. None of you should be  or are in the entertainment business.

If people are coming to your site for information, to check you out from a referral, or figuring out if they can trust you, a carousel is a bit of hubris that stands in the way of your web visitor finding value on your site. You are expecting them to patiently wait while your carousel takes them on your flight of fancy rather than helping them with their quest.
And you are losing web visitors. And maybe your referrals are wandering off.

Content strategy is serious business. It helps you create new customers. When the strategy works. Bad design issues don't help.

Anybody want to defend carousels?

The Critical Role of Leadership in Creating a Strategic Marketing Plan

We are going to jump squarely to the role of Leadership in business development but first it needs to be said that there is no real separation like this in the real world. Every aspect of quality leadership bears on business development,

• the care and nurturing of the workforce, 
• finding slack to observe and be aware of the important and find time for the important
• planning for slack with the team, so they have time to fit in observation and sharing ideas for innovation, and intelligence gathering and having the energy and attention to care  for customers and not always be trying to catch up - we talk about the importance of slack here.

but this website theme relates to business development as a concentration. Therefore,

We must understand the fundamentals of a strategic online marketing presence.

First, you must realize how important having an effective online presence actually is in the 21st century. You must also realize how competitive this space is; although, if you use your head and have a strategic plan, vs. just being busy and playing with the constituent parts, the task is not as daunting.

It is essential to understand how important it is because an effective online plan takes time for planning and thought. It is so easy to fail towards easy but worthless content. We need to easily differentiate what is useful and what is useless.

Strategic thinking like this can run counter to our gut instinct and past experience where we feel we must focus attention on the immediate work that pays the bills. We need to stop and relax and use our wits. We really need to stop and be aware of the intangibles like opportunity cost.

Leadership is responsible to the vision and the plan for creating content. This is such an important issue that we treat the subject separately. 

Related Posts Strategic Content is Critically Important in Dollars and Cents Valuing Intangibles is Difficult but Essential How do we create compelling content? The Pictures on the Refrigerator door

Strategic Content Finds Space for Leadership to Explain What is Important to them.

Content allows us to underline the owner's and the company's core values and frame the company's attitude of why they are in business, and what is important to them. You can create and share your esprit de corp on your website. These core values can color every aspect of the business and reflects the core beliefs of the company; that is, the business owner.

Content must be understood as having a variety of strategic purposes. We cover various strategic purposes on this website. Content can be funny and entertaining, but we do not just add content for entertainment. We have serious work to do. The purpose of content must match the strategic interests of thoughtful leadership. 

You realize that your company is working to build a community of people who trust you and who buy from you and refer you to their friends. This cannot be bought but is built through sweat equity. It takes time and attention and careful thought and patience. This is a good space to understand intangible costs. 

You must understand the two key concepts of meeting new prospects online. This is 

1. connecting your strategic content to the search queries of your chosen customers. You are not working to capture a chosen theme by writing 100 posts on a given broad subject, but 100 posts that define and illustrate and introduce and deal with the chosen broad subject. I am being a bit abstract here, but this is a broad strategic overview.

2. understanding the power of attractants in social media to capture the attention of people passing by.

Understanding the buying cycle and the intent of web visitors during each part of the buying cycle. You must also understand that effective content must address actual aspects of the buying cycle and be nuanced so that our content matches the intent of our chosen web visitors.

And there is huge power by collaborating with chosen reliable professionals around subjects in common. I will elaborate on this subject more later, but it is rather strategic marketing 2.0 and content creation 2.0 and a bit early at this point to bring it up.

What is missing here? I know I have been a bit fast and loose here; but there are business owners out there who have a pretty good grasp of aspects of strategic marketing; but are missing other parts of the tool box completely. And it is so easy to be so busy as to not really see the changes coming. And the changes coming are good, if you are on the train; not so good if you are walking on the track.

Feel free to ask a question, if anything here is confusing.
Let just think of this as a draft list that we will return to later.
Feel free to add your thoughts here. 

Recognizing Fear and the Lizard Brain

We have these great big brains. I am always amazed at the accomplishments of people working inside their heads and creating wonders.

We also have these great big lizard brains. Our lizard brain protected us during the epochs when we were being chased as a food source. Today our lizard brain- for the most part, just stands in the way of creating change.

This is OK if we account for our lizard brain and understand its impact on decision making. Seth Godin speaks eloquently on the subject of decision making and the lizard brain. We need perspective and we need rational processes to make decision based on what we know and what we can infer from experience and testing. But too often we just let our gut feeling and our lizard brain stop us in our tracks.

Now why am I making a big fuss about the lizard brain?

Because the concept of giving employees more slack in not conventional thinking and is just the type of concept which gets the lizard brain stirred up.

The concept of putting energy into a strategic content creation system requires higher level thinking that must contrast costs in dollars out of the wallet now for nice ROI in the near future but gains that are much more intangible....  and not so urgent.... but really important. For a business owner to have an effective internal conversation on either of these subjects, plus many more; he or she certainly has to have the lizard brain in his cage.

If we don’t account for our Lizard brain- it is not serving us well. It just might be causing us to stand still when the really smart thing would be to move.

The lizard brain does not differentiate between perceived risk and actual risk. In fact, the lizard brain merely fears change.

Dealing with the Lizard Brain

You can get the lizard brain under control by understanding your nervous tension, and rationally studying what is bothering you. You are seeing amorphous risk which needs to be drawn out and understand and you need a determination of what kind of action step would be relatively risk free and also provide a step forward to where you want to be.

Taking action that is not just guesswork or precipitous; but on the boundary between experience, and the hinterlands of change; makes sense.

You just need an actual plan that takes the first step and the second step and the 3rd step and then work in an analysis of what is happening.

And you can also determine what is a failure point. We learn from mistakes if we pay attention. And then we are smarter when we start again.

Oh, and here is a thought. What was the most expensive mistake you have ever made? It just might be related to hanging on to old technology that no longer was paying off. Like the Yellow Pages... the lizard brain kept you there long after you should have cut your losses. I am sure that is not true; but if partially true, but maybe there is a lesson to learn here helping to define an issue with the lizard brain.

You can be discouraged by failure, or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes, make all you can. Because, remember that's where you'll find success - on the far side of failure. - IBM founder - Thomas J. Watson

Bold is more fun.... when you have the risk well managed, of course.
What are your thoughts here? Have you ever had to deal with a lizard brain?
I am a salesman. I am often muttering about lizard brains. :)

How Can We Create a Work Environment that fires people up?

It has been a few weeks, but Seth Godin had a great article called Fired up.
Who out there would not like there employees fired up. Seth related the experience of a couple colleagues reacting to his latest book Your Turn.

One person said, "After I finished it, I was all fired up, and I felt like quitting my job to go do something amazing."
The other one said, "That's funny. After I finished it, I was all fired up and I couldn't wait to come to work to do something amazing."

What people do at work and how enthusiastic they are about it is depends on several factors. Most are intrinsic right inside the person and you find these by doing a great job when hiring new people.

The other factor, of course, is leadership. It is possible to create a work environment, create an opportunity and depending on how you create a vision, and engage with people and provide quality feedback and all the qualities of great leadership, it is much more likely that people get fired up.

You can give people projects that allow creativity and tap peoples yearning to be significant and be a part of a common effort to create something special that has magic, that adds human dignity, that has a community and team component where people can engage and add energy and enthusiasm.

It just might nice to have something bigger to think and participate in that the role each employee plays in the daily industrial atmosphere of the standard work day.

Being part of a team that creates content that is useful to the community, that helps the community elude expensive problems, helps people understand how the company creates value, is a perfect project to get people fired up.

Of course, this is the example that comes to mind for me because this is what I really enjoy helping facilitate. There are many other worthy projects to undertake; creating a painstaking customer care loop where customers and prospects get timely care, is one.

Another is empowering your people to enjoy volunteering for community projects within your company's mission and purpose beyond just a branding or PR stunt; nothing has a greater impact on how your company sees itself that to show commitment and caring in the community and OBTW nothing creates better content that telling stories about your own team members doing and participating and playing...

Content creation as a team has so many ancillary dividends that enable wins all around.

• It can help clarify how your company creates value for team members. It works well to orient new team members. 
• It is something where you can exercise team building skills around collaboration.
• It helps to build an esprit de corp around which everyone can participate and be inspired. A great esprit de corp around a company is a great way to recruit great people who want to work with the best. 

Let's go back for one more pass at the comments from Seth Godin's original notes above. Your key people are critical to your success. They are not boundless sources of extra energy to fulfill your whims.

On occasion, managers fall back on the same key people in critical situations when extra effort is needed, and often take it for granted because key people get stuff done rather than complain- but but but Make sure you give them their due in authentic ways.

Make sure you give them the space they need to fulfill their intrinsic desires to excel and to set and achieve their goals, or great people can just get up and go...

We talk much more about personal motivation of employees elsewhere, but it is critical for leadership to be engaged in helping employees be an active participant in the success of growing the business. Each employee needs to be included in and feel a part of the core team responsible for success.

Fired up isn't something you can count on, but it's certainly possible to create a job, and create a work atmosphere, and treat people with respect and offer input and feedback and praise and trust that creates the atmosphere for firing people up.

You and your People Are What Make Your Company Unique

What makes your company unique in the marketplace. Once upon a time, there was lots of talk about creating a 'unique selling proposition" your USP. Well, in this world of the Internet and social media, any USP out there is going to be seen by your competitors and ameliorated before your USP has an influence on your market.

So how do we truly differentiate ourselves. We differentiate ourselves with a unique attitude about customer service or an expertise in the field and we build the reputation in the community by the actual interactions with customers and prospects and...

some of you might have seen this coming
creating content that tells the stories, that demonstrates a caring for customers, that answers real questions, that offers useful warnings,  or perspective, telling actual stories of helping people solve problems, , as well as being open and transparent with the web visitors meeting your people

but there is one more item to insure unique and useful content.

 To make these stories really effective; your people, are telling them or are a critical part of the story. These are your key people in the field or in the front office depending on the story and the theme.

Now, these people aren't going to be busy taking writing courses online- unless they want to; but they are going to be aware of the strategic plan and the vision involved. And they are going to participate in a system that takes a story line and develops the content along a strategic theme in the content plan. Creating useful content is easy and enjoyable but it does take a plan and vision. The vision is part of the role of leadership.

We have moved beyond the role of branding as we moved out of the mass media age into the connection marketing economy. Branding is still important for continuity and good style,but the future of good marketing will revolve around BONDING and not BRANDING.

In a connected world, your repeat customers are bonded to you mostly people to people. Your great office people who are  easy to work with, your great  talent in the field that did great work and were on time, and served them well. These personal experiences are what give meaning to the brand, not the cute cartoon character associated with your brand-unless he is a lizard with a Brit accent...

And BONDING is what will help capture the trust of the people who are just now meeting you. Keeping existing customer happy is extremely important, and much of the following information here pertains to staying  connected with existing  customers, but the issue we want to deal with here right now...

Bonding and being unique plays a key role in attracting new prospects that trust you. Useful content is essential but the people providing the content can make a huge contribution.
And we will elaborate on that but first we have to understand the power in introducing yourself as the business owner and introducing your key people as real assets that you are proud of. Your team is the greatest asset you have, and the value of that asset has been developed over the years.

There are multiple reasons seeing your people can make a huge difference for your company.

Your people show up and knock on people's doors. People are very sensitive about who knocks on their door. Many companies think they are reassuring potential customers by saying... in effect.... that all our employees are regularly drug tested. Powerful endorsement here, your employees are nameless but are not drug fiends.

What if instead you had detailed information about your key people. Had a collection of written compliments from testimonial letter with them. What if you talked about their expertise and their years of experience. What if you provided space to create a real picture of real people.

What have you just done by exemplifying your team?

Well, people visiting your site looking to see if you are the right company to hire, will be pleased to see real people that you trust on your pages. You have created unique separation between you and any competitor engaging in corporate speak.

When web viewers get a feeling for your team being happy and helpful people, they are more willing to call to ask questions and take that first positive step towards getting an estimate and hiring you.

You will also attract top talent into your organization because top people pay attention and see where good people are appreciated. Finding talent, especially in a skilled job classification, can be difficult. An ability to attract top talent is a real advantage.

And your own face, and history and your own story of how you got into this business, and a little fleshing out of personality and sense of values here makes for added confidence in your company. Every little edge counts.

Some people are scared to show off their people.

Now some people try to keep secret their people because they think they are protecting them from people out to hire away talent? Well, this makes no sense. If you are treating people well and paying them fairly, and praising them for great work, and offering a path to increased opportunity and advancement; the top talent will move on, They will be identified in the market and they will be tempted; there is nothing hidden in the age of social media- and so basically the opposite is true.

And some business owners try to remain obscure to protect themselves from sales people? Can this be true? You need a clear and easy policy to deal with sales people like me, and that is asking why are you pestering me? What value proposition are you trying to get me to consider? This is in email. If there is no interest, say so. So much time is spent trying to avoid a truthful conversation. Moving  on....

And your people are not only a focal point for special attractants in social media but also help create content that is an attractant as well as being the core to an effective content strategy.

Personal Branding and Bonding through your team members shouldnot be a stuffy formal process. 

Here is space for fun, and creativity and  you can actually let  people off the leash a bit. Within bounds and be ready to moderate what happens, but company uniqueness around people is based on quirks and dumb jokes, and foibles and flaws. These make for authentic humans not marketing manikins. 

The usual mix of standard acceptable descriptors are boring and bland. We need to let people show off their unique  qualities. Rock and roll singer, birder, community volunteer, marathoner or mud runner, with pictures and videos to flesh  out the impressions. Find the space and allow your people to shine. Not in the usual cliches, but in real authentic shades of nutty. 

And your people should be authors too. 

Attributing everything to admin is boring and not really playing it safe at all. You can always have an editorial and publishing policy and your writer,  editor, facilitator- can always be the background ghost writer. You just have to stop and configure the rules, and error on the light handed side. You know your people. You know they behave well and understand what you are trying to do. Let them earn space here by earning trust 

Yes, people and personalities are the ultimate tool to give your company a unique quality that helps make friends and influence buyers. Just relax and do it.

Who disagrees? Why? Let us know.
Who  has some experiences  to share here?
What other factors need to considered?
Are there some attributes or key points missed here? 

Valuing Intangibles is Difficult but Essential

Ever had a challenge evaluating intangibles?  I love the term “bean counters” It is so illustrative. Someone able to count beans, but having no breadth of understanding of the value of intangibles. 

A short story is probably inappropriate. Once for a short period, I worked for a large state agency as a contractor.  I watched as a money saving project moved forward to take personal printers out of staff offices and replace them with a couple networked printers.

The savings appeared substantial on the macro level but at the office level, staff members would have to get up from their desks, secure their offices and go find the paperwork at the networked printer. Then they could be standing around and finding their printed copies in a queue? These staff members were doing sensitive work with clients and were responsible for securing their offices. 

Now consider the intangible cost of disrupting human talent, vs, the savings of a percentage of a penny saved per copy with networked printers. You might conclude too, that someone had trouble evaluating intangibles, but the ace bean counters had the savings configured to a portion of a penny. It saved hundreds of thousands of dollars statewide... 

All right, lets get back on point here. On measuring intangibles, back in the good old days you could measure personal productivity by the widgets produced, the bricks laid, the number of screws inserted–. but not so much anymore.

I repeatedly try to emphasize the point here of the value of slack and the value of creating the space necessary to let key people contribute to content creation. 

Effective content on websites and in social media greatly enhances the bottom line, but the costs are much more tangible- a punch to the gut to many :) This is an aspect of the industrial mindset we talk about often; while the true value of quality content requires analytical analysis and tracking conversions that still is pretty much an intangible. 

Lets talk about the estimate creating process. 

Nothing is more expensive in the small business list of investments. But the industrial mindset impacts here again, and the inertia for positive change is stymied again, by the inability to resolve intangible costs.

Getting estimates completed quickly and effectively is essential. There is a well-honed procedure. But if you watch and listen, you see and hear the creaking of processes and procedures that do not work as well as they should.
Are the estimates getting out promptly or do other events conspire to stall estimate creation. 
Are we stopping to evaluate existing processes and figuring out how to improve them?
What is the cost of delayed delivery of estimates? 

There is a pull date on estimates. The longer the homeowner waits, unless carefully kept in the loop on complex estimates, the poorer the conversion rate. And I think we have all seen the cancellation of an estimate over waiting? OUCH!

But the issues with estimates get even more murky. 

• How well are we following up on estimates?
• How well are we tracking the opportunities disclosed in the notes in old estimates.
• Are we leveraging the best estimate writing on the sales team?
• Are the sales people learning from each other and constantly learning and improving?
• Are we taking the time to stop and learn from past mistakes?

What is the cost of a promise made to a prospect that is broken? All intangibles and all impact the bottom line in multiple ways. How many  issues like this put your front office team into damage control? What is the impact on them? All significant costs but all intangible. 

I hope your answers are a series of yeses which mean you have none of these issues; but there are great companies out there right now, that are 

• so busy with the existing processes 
• so head down and pushing forward to actually stop and see the process needs improving
• so caught up in trying to catch up that the fundamental issues are not addressed.

that they are perpetuating failing processes which are not dealt with decisively because of an industrial mindset and an inability to grasp and grapple with intangibles. There just seems like there is no time to slow down and innovate.

When you are trying something new, things go slower and things do not go was well and as smoothly because you are not practiced at it. The industrial mindset is causing major headaches. 

Too often conversations about creating change are happy musings around proposals written out by consultants :) with some added talk and promises of action, and then something urgent happens- maybe even a customer care issue generated by a fundamentally flawed process and the system resets to the status quo. 

Now, there are more factors at play here than just a lack of ability to understand and deal with intangible costs but this inability is a major part of the issue here. 

The less important things are easily measured. All the urgent interruptions have a big impact on the present because they are the customer calling, or the phone ringing with an urgency; but in the long run these single urgencies are not important, but too often displace the big important issues which impact costs and profit margins and productivity over the years. 

What other little toe stubbers slow down and impact human creativity and problem solving? Well, I know at least one more. Software is really helpful in the modern business office, but how many are using the technology to its fullest potential? 

But things seem to be going along OK, why take time for special training and the few hundred bucks from the wallet is like extracting teeth, quite painful. 

This is a great example of the pain of tangible cost but a basic amnesia to the continual cost of wasted human motion and the cost of messed up data that could be used effectively if the software was better understood, if the data was up to date, and if the data was organized properly. And these kinds of problems only accumulate because the data pile just keeps growing; even a data pile that is broken and useless; until it is done right.

Here is the finale point for a good chuckle here. We balance the books to the penny because we can and do because total order is necessary to understand the financials. But most companies have disordered data in databases that don't add up and the continual piling on of more data is like postponing balancing the books for a few days, a few years... costs big bucks that cannot be measured because such a loss is an intangible. 

Now,  this long diatribe either does not match at all your personal experience, or it matches in some way and not others, or you feel that you and I are members of a similar self-help group. 

We need to 

• stop and figure out the costs with continuing to do dumb stuff, 
• we need to figure out the costs to innovate and improve, and figure out what innovation will pay out for us. 
• We need to take the time to try new things because we know they are valuable and can reduce our huge opportunity costs.

What are we going to do about it?

This post exposes some of my favorite cows. Identify your own for sure. Who has some solutions to help us deal better with intangibles? Who has ideas for some formulations that can help us get a sense of the intangible costs and intangible returns on investment?

What are your thoughts here? Helpful ideas here could certainly make my life easier and reduce my stress :) Who was that nut who suggested that "in the land of the blind, the one eye man is king." He must have been thinking like a despot. 

Empowering People – Empowering Your Business

Competition and success in the 21st century will be won by those companies that best engage and motivate their employees. Now, most employers will sort of give a head bob for this, but there are a lot of myths and learned behaviors that stand in the way of empowered employees.

This is incredibly important. Employees are likely your largest expense. Productivity in the modern office is hard to measure. But by the best objective measurements, engaged employees are many times more productive than average.

Employees in low spirit can seem to move in slow motion. Top people who are not appreciated, not listened to, or not given the space to excel can and will jump ship and go elsewhere.

It is not like the good old days. Few people make widgets any more. It was always easy just to measure the pile of widgets to measure results.

Today, how might a dispirited and disengaged team member respond to a customer who needs help? What might a fully engaged and happy team member to differently in the same situation. And today a bad experience for a customer can take on a digital life in a bad review. Maybe we need to review the value of a life-time customer?

And there are so many things beyond just getting the work done that an engaged team member can do. They can easily make a contribution to the sales effort and to the content creation engine you need to build. LINK

Empowered employees make you more money.
Empowered employees are easier to manage.
Empowered employees think like business owners.
Empowered employees watch out for your interests.

People desire to feel significant. They long to be appreciated. They yearn to feel they play a significant role in the success of the company. In fact, everyone should play a significant role, or you are not getting a proper return on investment. Make sure you see the conversation on motivating people.

Enlightened Leaders engage and inspire everyone in their strategic role. Uninspired leadership is too busy reacting to events- too busy wondering what is happening.

Enlightened leadership can find a role fitting the strengths of everyone in the company in business development. They are not all sales people- we don’t want to scare everybody- but even the introvert nerds have expertise that inspires confidence. All we have to do is find a role that they enjoy. And everyone one on the team enjoys being significant to success. Here is a great quote for you.

Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control, but freedom is about what you can unleash  -Harriet Rubin

We have all kinds of strengths within our organizations. Technical nerds are good. Steady people to watch the details. People who like learning new things. People who are nurturers and relieve stress. People who are communicators and rainmakers. There is all kinds of strengths available through freelance talent. We can create mentoring systems within our team structures. Leadership is relaxed, understands that reducing stress and empowering people- is productive.

People need to be informed and involved in decisions that touch them, that touch how they work.

It is essential that enlightened leadership engage all employees in the success of the business- in a basic understanding of the financials- profit and loss, cash flow etc. People need to know what is required to create a profit. When they have an appreciation of the difficulty to build a successful business, and when they are able to grasp they have a significant role in business development, people will jump in with enthusiasm.

Too many employers, love to see employees busy, busy, busy. Unfortunately busy just might translate poorly to results achieved. We need to understand and honor the concept of slack time.

You must know what you want done and what is in your strategic interests. LINK
We must have critical measures to account results. Counting money does not really cut it. Counting money cannot help determine what is not working as well as it might. Counting money mostly enables making stuff up i.e. empowering HIPPOs LINK

It is also critical that you, yes you, do less and spend more time indulging in strategic thought. What could employees be doing that is more productive than what they are doing now?

How much time do you allow yourself for strategic thinking?
Do you ever say to yourself that you will do that in a couple months when things slow down and you will have more time?
Do you ever stop to consider how many items on your plate should be removed so you can have more slack time to think strategically?
What would it take to do this?

It costs serious money to not be thoughtful and strategic. It is big money that never shows up in the bookkeeping, but is covered under the concept of opportunity costs.

Oh, and you need to be thinking about the power of great content creation to increase the size of the community who trusts you and to make individual sales easier. Both of these are items that do not fit into the accounting system but are worth big bucks.

What Really Gets your Team Members Engaged with Your Business

Once upon a time is was easy to motivate people to work harder and accomplish more. It was mostly manual labor- stack more wood, sythe more acres of wheat, row more feet of corn... you could pay them more, just plain demand more work, and you could easily measure what gets done. Today engaging people in productive work and motivating them- well the human issues get much more complex and you just push people results can go sideways in so many ways...

So how do we motivate people?
there is really a lot of wrong headed information out there.

And this subject is of particular interest to me as someone who helps companies create content as a team effort; and, quite frankly, there is a lot of resistance to this idea because everyone is so busy doing the "important stuff". Let's deal with this objection in multiple posts- see the related box below...

Related Posts Slack is Good – Working Hard Just Might be Wasting Time Empowering People – Empowering Your Business How Do We Create Compelling Content?

but it does plainly take extra thought and energy, is it even possible or even fair to ask this of them? How would we motivate them?

There are a couple personal experiences I will relate here.
I have helped facilitate blog posts for an HVAC company. I would call up and interview salespeople and ask them to tell me a story about a particular sale they had participated in, what kinds of issues had been solved, (this story and the interview process would be prearranged and scheduled) and they would become quite emotional when they were able to talk to customers with issues and help them solve those issues, and have the customer pleased and thankful... The process of telling these stories was enjoyed. And the cathartic experience of telling stories served many purposes for that salesperson; a variety of intrinsic rewards beyond the financial rewards through the company. And it certainly made for powerful content useful to many other homeowners in similar situations.

And then there is the experience of the spontaneous appearance of project pictures  on the refrigerator :) ...  Make sure you see the story of the pics on the fridge...

Key people enjoy talking about triumphs- the solutions they create and the happy people they serve. They enjoy talking about the issues they deal with and the solutions they provide. When they are given the chance.

And then there are the scientific studies. And this  information is critical because it goes against common wisdom and learned experience from the age of simple tasks and manual labor.

Make sure you watch The RSA Animate version of Dan Pink presenting at TED  on the subject of Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

Human beings are quite complex and when the efforts we ask them to do are complex; well motivation and the emotional framework for what creates a drive to succeed, needs to be understood.

People desire to do something significant.
People desire to be a part of a community.
People desire to be engaged in a noble purpose.
People desire  to be competent and increase their skills and achieve mastery.

People want to do important things and when they achieve them they want to be appreciated. Your people yearn to feel they play a significant role in the success of the company.
So what do you think?
Does anyone have any thoughts to share here?
What kinds of experiences do we have to share here?

What is Strategic for Your Business?

You probably do not have do not take enough time to figure out what is strategic for your business. The world is getting more complex all the time, but at the same time better tools are provided to manage the complexity.

However, mere tools cannot create a peaceful zone for you to stop and think and grasp the significance to you and your business of the rapid change that has taken place and the rapid changes coming.

You need slack. I make a case that everyone needs more slack, which is rather counterintuitive to most business brains and business thinking; but I put great stock in  taking the time to be introspective, to value time to think, to respond to situations which arise rather than react. But I am wandering on point here...

You need to protect your slack time at all times. You need to get stuff off your plate and onto the plate of your team members that have earned your trust.

You need to be planning for business growth and the most critical factor in long term growth is to have people working with you who are talented and always improving their skills and their abilities to move up in your organization.

Now only you know what is unique in your company- your niche or niches, the type of projects your team excels at and the location or locations in the market where you best fit and so I leave it to you and your trusted team to formulate your strategy.

But protect the time to pursue your strategy. I have great clients who are smart and dedicated; but when the going gets rough and life is filled with distractions, the daily urgent and the weekly urgent gets in the way of the important and not urgent; and the strategic thinking turns more towards strategic yearnings. More gas and much less action.

Keeping your slack and staying focused on strategic issues saves an incredible amount of time rehashing and getting back up to speed. Quite frankly, I have clients who have lost millions in potential growth, because of the friction created by being distracted and waylaid along the path to strategic growth. You have to anticipate your constraints and have an action plan in place rather than hitting a wall after passing any number of warning lights.

You also need to improve your productivity and make more money with the great people you have, so that you can bring new people on, and so your people can have more slack so you can spend a little more money on innovation and doing things differently. Innovating and  creating change means you're less productive until new work habits  are formed. Innovation and change to improve profits and productivity is an investment now in future prosperity.

Therefore, increased productivity can be powered by great marketing that helps the right people find your company as a resource, better understand how your company works before you are ever called, and make the buying process more productive by making sales cycles shorter and conversions of estimates and proposals higher.

Now that is sort of a sales pitch for creating great content and that is the main contribution I do for companies, and it is a tremendously powerful tool to improve profitability in an age when people are doing  their own shopping online for even service companies now... but beyond my little impassioned speech there...

Make sure the sales process works as well as it can. So many companies do not take as full advantage of the estimate creating process as they can, and there is nothing more expensive in the company that to create estimates. Improving conversions of estimates is a huge lever for increasing productivity and profitability.

Now how much diversity in closing rates do you have across your sales team?  What can be learned from the leaders that can be used to make everyone more productive? What could your people do working together rather than being so competitive with each other, that could empower improved sales and improved service to customers.

This is the age of teams. What could your people working and sharing sales efforts do together that might make more sense than everyone on their own? Millennials are much more attuned to collaboration than us in the older generation. What can we learn here? What can we test? What can we fail at first and then learn from and improve? :)

So coming back to the main theme, find the slack to think through your best strategies and work out your plan for taking action. If you do not have slack and find the time to be and act with acumen, then the whole team suffers, and the business suffers and your profitability suffers.

Take care of yourself and rely on your team.

How Do We Create Compelling Content?

Compelling content is useful to the web visitor. They have come to your site with implicit intent and either you have served up something useful, or they are gone to find the answer somewhere else.

Compelling content that works for you serves your strategic purposes. Make sure you have a well thought out strategic purpose to your content before you do much content creation. LINK

So much good content can and should be created from the experiences in the field and on the phone. There is tremendous opportunity to be useful to your online community by sharing the ways you have served your prospects and customers.

Everyday technicians go out and solve issues with heating and air condition systems- for a specific example. Here is just one made up idea for a story. Imagine this experience told in 1st person perspective built from an actual experience from a technician in the field.

Cleaning out the air conditioner whose air intakes have been seriously clogged up with organic seed pods. The compressor was being strained by excessive heat build up, but the problem has been found and cleaned. There are any number of posts- specific in nature that can build on this experience and actually be useful to people ready to learn from other people's experiences and be proactive. This kind of content attracts the thinking customer who is looking for professionalism and quality and value vs. price. This is the client that forward thinking companies want.

Now this content requires input from the technician. This compelling story is more than a drab rendition of the importance to keeping equipment clean for maximum life of the unit. We can move from vacuous prose here to a story, an actual adventure of discovery and solution; illustrated with images or maybe even a video. The staid prose are boring. The actual play by play is compelling.

Now the technician is likely not the person to write the story, but a well-tuned publishing process allows the technician to relay his experiences and encourages him or her to take images and/or video and outlines a series of questions to help build the the story effectively. This process can be iterated with a variety of technology to help share the content and manage the pictures with the story. Whatever is needed can be applied; whatever technology best matches the proclivities of the key players.

Now this process can be repeated on a regular basis around the myriad of solutions that your experts offer.  With this effort, you are creating a broad bandwidth of content that creates vastly superior search engine optimization for the content. LINK Compelling content also provides the perfectl hooks to get attention when shared in social media.

Useful content captures attention. Useful content earns you trust.  People who trust you ask for help and hire you. Useful content gets shared by people because it is seen as possibly helpful to their friends. Useful content earns you trust from people who will refer you as a solution. Blah, blah, blah; we address the high value of great content here. LINK

Every team member can be involved in creating content. People enjoy being helpful to customers and many will enjoy telling stories. There will be those out front and others that follow along behind the early leaders. It always is smart for leadership to share a common vision of every member of the team being an integral part of the business success and make sure people have opportunities to grow and particulate and contribute.

This is a leadership issue, and leaders must understand and nurture their team members intrinsic wishes to be a key contributing member of the group; of being a trusted and important member of the team. Make sure you understand what actually motivates and inspires your key people. We go into detail here. LINK

Useful content revolves around the activities of any team member, we just need to be aware of the possibilities and make sure people understand we appreciate their efforts to help capture intelligence and publish useful information. This is an essential role for leadership.

Anybody who answers the phone, and talks to prospects and customers; hears critical information. What was being asked? What was of chief concern? Are their repeated requests for information that we need to address in content creation. Was a team member complimented? Are we hearing any objections or unrealistic expectations?

The subject of dealing with objections segues right into a conversation about supporting the sales process and sales managers. Content creation can deal with any number of objections with input directly from sales people and the sales manager. What better way to create useful content that help web visitors find perspective and answers and better understand how the work process from estimate to completed project works?

With the right processes  in place and with the vision of leadership compelling content can be created that touches directly on the strategic issues faced by your issues.

We go into great detail about the types of strategic issues which can be dealt with by content creation here. LINK

We talk about how important and valuable content is to profitability and productivity here. LINK

Who has a thought or an objection or a question here.
What has been left out? What issue has not been addressed?
What kinds of experiences have you had relating to creating content?

Would you like to have a conversation about creating content more effectively in your business? Feel free to reach out for a conversation.