Archive for July, 2006

Your business is like a blank canvas to your prospective customers. They want to know what you are about, where you came from, and where you are taking them. It is critical that you tell your customers an authentic and compelling story. Having a great product or service isn’t enough anymore. Your competitors have great facts and figures. They may have better prices, a better location, and even great employees… but they don’t have your story.

Your story is what sets you apart. The story is what makes your cup of coffee, your widget, or your service different. Tell a great story and customers will flock to you. Give them a book with blank pages and they will go elsewhere. A story is like a first run movie, it needs a compelling plot with interesting characters.

A good story starts at the beginning. It’s the “once upon a time” section. Where did you come from?… How did you get started?… Who helped you along?… As Marketer Patrick Hanlon explains in his book, “Primal Branding“, businesses need a “creation story.” He expounds…

If brands are a narrative, then the creation story is the beginning of the tale. All belief systems come with a story attached. Brands that start in the middle of their story are like walking into a movie that’s already started; you spend the next few minutes trying to figure out what’s going on. But consumers don’t take the time. They just keep walking.

Does your business have a creation story? Does your business bible start at Genesis or are there some pages missing? Think of some of the most popular businesses and you’ll usually find a story of ordinary people creating something new. It might be Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak building a rudimentary computer in a garage. Maybe Ray Kroc and the revolutionary McDonalds franchise comes to mind. How about Larry Page and Sergey Bren designing a new search engine called Google? Great stories start from the beginning.

Like a great speech, your business story must transition from the opening to the main story. Paint us a picture and bring in the characters. Let us know what makes your cup of coffee worth $3.00. Tell us about the jungles of South America where the aromatic coffee beans are grown. Bring in Juan Valdez and his passion to produce the best coffee in the world. Add the wind and the rain and put us in the middle of the story. Tell us about the aroma and let us know it’s good to the last drop. When we can see ourselves in your story you have created a passionate customer.

The better your story matches our worldview the more apt we are to buy your product. Find out who your customers are and craft the words and pictures to match. You can’t sell to everyone but you can tell compelling stories to groups of people with similar interests and tastes. If you are trying to sell meat to vegetarians you probably won’t get to far, but if you have a story about a better turnip or a fresher carrot, customers with this worldview will flock to your stores.

In his book, “All Marketers Are Liars,”  author Seth Godin  gives us some simple advice…

“Every consumer has a worldview that affects the product you want to sell. That worldview alters the way they interpret everything you say and do. Frame your story in terms of the worldview, and it will be heard.”

What’s in it for them?… is a great question to ask. When you can answer that question definitively, you can mold your stories to your customers interests and tie them in with their needs and wants.

Dorothy Leeds in her new book, “The 7 Powers of Questions“, notes that questions get people to open up…

Why do questions work? For one simple reason: Most people love to talk. Most of all, they love to talk about themselves, and they love to talk about the things that interest them.

The lesson here is to ask questions and draw your customers out. The better you know your customers the better your stories will be.

Good stories have names and places. They solve problems and make the world a better place. They overcome adversity and help us find happiness. Make your stories interesting, fresh, and compelling. Part of a great narrative is to add some drama. What happens if your customer, heaven forbid, buys your competitors product? What great experiences do they have when they buy your product? Contrast and comparison add to the plot.

On almost any good book, the back cover has reviews and testimonies from readers. The same goes for your business. Your existing customer’s stories, experiences, and reviews are a great way to build your word-of-mouth business. As compelling as your story may be, a customer’s story may carry more credibility and offer your prospective clients a different reason to do business with you. Use them frequently on your printed materials and your website and be sure to weave your customer’s stories into your own.

Finally… a great story must have a conclusion. More than an ending… a climax! The climax of a good story implores a response. It’s not enough for the audience to “soak it all in.” They need to be compelled to do something with it. Ask for the sale, and close the deal. Provide that revelation moment for your clients when the light bulb comes on and they decide to take you up on your offer. Bring them to that split second ah-ha when the decision is made.

An effective story has a payoff. It may be a sale or a word-of-mouth referral. It may be an emotional experience. It may challenge your customers to take action. A truly remarkable story may do all of the above.

Simply stated… Tell A Story, Make A Point!

Telling Your Story is the first of five items that join together to create business SPARK. Up next in our continuing series is Product Excellence.

As I have been studying different audio books as part of my MBA on the Run program I have tried to come up with a workable set of values for rating businesses. The concept is to come up with a set of standards that may point to business success. The ratings need to be universal, concise, and easy to remember.

I’ve come up with five things that I think cover the major bases and form an easy to remember acrostic.

• Story
• Product or service
• Atmosphere
• Routine
• Key Values

Over the next few days I’ll post about each one in detail. The general synopsis is that each business has a unique story to tell about its products or services. When you experience this business you find a unique atmosphere, including colors, icons, and style that set the mood or tone for business transactions. The routine is the process you take to buy the product or service. It is the journey you take to the front counter or maybe the online path to the website. Once you have done business with the company you will come away with key values. This is the one sentence tagline in your mind about the overall business experience.

To give you an idea of the concept we’ll use United Parcel Service as an example. The story starts in 1907 with 19 year old messenger boy, Jim Casey, in Seattle Washington. He saw the need for a personal delivery system and started a business using bicycles to deliver goods to the local businesses. This story has evolved from its humble beginnings as a service company to one that offers hundreds of products and services worldwide.

The atmosphere is instantly recognizable… Brown. The simple icon that says UPS on the side of the large brown delivery trucks says more than the name of the business. It says quick service by following the simple UPS routine. Drop off a package at one of their retail locations or call the company for a pickup. The routine is simple and straight forward. You can track the packages progress on the web and you know that it will get to its destination on time.

The one sentence key value that many people come away with is “fast and efficient.” This key value is what translates into word of mouth advertising and drives millions of customers to do business with them on a daily basis.

Five simple business concepts that define almost every business. Get them right and your business will flourish… miss the mark on one of them and risk mediocrity… miss more than one and risk extinction.

Up next: Telling Your Story

The most popular posts on this blog continue to be our Five Minute pages. Pick up some Avery business cards and download a MS Word template. Within minutes you’ll have a pocket organizer, diet planner, or even a desktop flowchart. The Walleteer format fits easily in pocket or purse and is very flexible. You can change the order, add or remove cards, and even display them on your desk with an easy to make display system.

Along with a new look and functionality of this blog we’ll have some new templates coming in the next few weeks with some interesting new features. Stay tuned. In the meantime I’ve found some interesting time savers around the blog-o-sphere today that I thought I would pass along.

Bert Webb has a great post over at Open Loops about the ever present problem of the wayward tie. Bert explains…

A professional appearance goes a long way in creating a positive image in business relationships.  One thing that has always bothered me is when someone’s tie doesn’t stay centered and drifts off to the side, up under the suit coat, or blows over the shoulder in a strong breeze.  Since tie pins and metal tie clasps are not in vogue, here is an easy way to create a tie stay that is invisible holds a tie down better than anything on the market.

Bert’s solution takes less than 5 minutes and the only cost is an old shirt. The solution entails…

Grab a shirt that is worn out and is ready for the trash.  Take a pair of scissors and cut off the thick strip of fabric in which the button holes are cut.  Finally, cut this strip into several shorter pieces, each containing two button holes, one near the top of the piece and one near the bottom of the piece.  You’re done.  Easy, huh?

Check out Bert’s blog for the complete solution. If you don’t feel like getting out the scissors, Tiedown offers a similar solution.

Dwayne Melancon has a solution to the heavy and awkward power adapters for your cell phone or other electronic gadgets. In his post today he explains…

My gadget freak bias means I carry a lot of chargers, cables, and similar accessories. I’ve found a few that have made a big difference for lightening my travel bag and I will start sharing some of my finds with you periodically, with a series of posts that I’ll call “Travel Light.” Today, I’d like to introduce you to Boxwave’s line of charging and synching cables for mobile devices.

Check out his blog for the lightweight solution.
 
And for a quick take on organizing your desk and life in just minutes, check out Rosa Say’s short post about Stamp & Shred.
Using just a Date Stamp and a Shredder you can reform your desktop habits to become more productive.

Why not take Five minutes today…

July starts a new fiscal year for us and it is a time of goal setting and a look into the future. This has been an exciting year so far and I want to say “Thank You”, to all of you who visit here regularly. This blog has woven its way through some different paths this year. We have explored goal setting and the process of creating new habits. We added downloadable resources with the addition of our Five Minute Solutions series and have explored new business books and even created our first podcast. Back in March we started up “MBA on the Run“, a blog about using audio books to complete a “Personal MBA” program. This new blog has found an interesting niche with a mix of  travel, small business entrepreneurship, and a comprehensive audio business learning program.

Behind the scenes I’ve been working on taking my public speaking skills to a new level by joining a speakers bureau. This has been a challenging, but fun experience and I have begun putting together a package of presentation materials and business resources. As part of this process I’ve realized that both blogs have become online resources for a diverse group of people and the current Wordpress format is lacking in a good organizational structure.

The standard blog posting format is great for online dialog but it doesn’t work particularly well for online assets as they disappear off of the front page after a short time. This makes it hard to reference different items and almost impossible to tie similar resources together. Over the last few weekends I’ve spent hours tweaking different Wordpress templates and trying some different hybrid approaches. Wordpress is a great blog engine and I think we have found some new organizational tools which will help us create more usable online resources down the road.

Here is a list of goals.

1. Have a quick loading CSS format utilizing 3 columns
2. Make sure it works in IE6, Firefox and Safari browsers
3. Size it to fit in the common 1024 resolution
4. Categorize online resources in the sidebars by subject
5. Create “At a Glance” pages for each resource area
6. Create a separate page for each resource
7. Organize related products in a easy to find product section

We are close to releasing the new site interfaces for both of our blogs. We have been testing different approaches and making sure that everything works as planned. This has been a real challenge with browser differences and the organizational structure of Wordpress. The good news is I’ve learned a tremendous amount about XHTML and CSS in the process.

Along the way some creative resources have come to light that have been helpful in helping us structure our work flow and helping to increase our productivity. A great online resource has been the accidental creative which offers a podcast, white board sessions, and general help for creative people.

Author Todd Henry has a great post about innovation that has helped keep this upgrade project alive… He writes…

The great thing is that you will never know whether you have peaked until you have lived your life. So for me this is inspirational, create everyday…be passionate…let your talent shine through and understand that no matter the age…you best work may well be waiting inside you, waiting for the right time to surprise the world.

Sometimes it’s so easy to get caught up in all of the problems and minute details of a project that we fail to look at the larger picture. Todd’s podcasts have helped me set aside a creative time each day and structure it in a way to minimize distractions. Turning off e-mail and minimizing web browsing have been a big help in actually producing usable outcomes.

Our new structure should be online in the near future. We have some exciting new resources and we look forward to sharing them with you.

Thanks to all of you for providing the inspiration to keep creating.

As I finished up the Audio Book, “The Wisdom of Crowds“, by James Surowiecki, I came away with some interesting observations. This book was an insightful read and some of the information presented went against common sense. Here are some of the highlights.

1. Crowd think can be useful for finding people and places. In my first post on the book I posed this question…

If you had to meet someone in New York on a specific day but had no way of contacting them, when and where would you meet?

The responses to this question were very interesting with most of the comments saying the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. In the book the majority of group think said Grand Central Station. This was an interesting anomaly and I went back to the book to find the original demographic that was questioned. It turns out that the original group was law students going to school in New York City. This makes sense as most law students would be very familiar with Grand Central Station whereas most of the readers of this blog do not live in New York and would not be familiar with their transit system.

The time chosen was a little more uniform with most people selecting 12 noon. The second most popular answer was 5pm. In the demographic of readers of this blog we would probably have a 40-50 percent chance of finding each other in New York on a given day. Given the size of New York State (over 47,000 square miles) and the fact there are 24 hours in a day this is pretty amazing

This study was based on a work by Thomas C Schelling. He suggests that in many situations, there are salient landmarks or “focal points” upon which peoples expectations converge. Schelling’s findings are important because it shows that people can find their way to the same place without a centralized direction and without talking with each other. These focal points are often referred to as “Schelling points.” These points suggest that peoples experiences of the world are often similar, which make coordination easier. Schelling is a nobel prize winning economist and has written extensively on subjects ranging from game theory to taxation policy.

When thinking of different “Schelling points” around the United States, some come to mind rather quickly. If you said Seattle, the Space Needle stands out, if you said St. Louis, the Arch comes to mind, and if you said Las Vegas, the Stratosphere would have to be near the top of the list.

It is very interesting to think of entire countries and what their “focal points” would be. How many of you would meet me at the Eiffel Tower in France at 12 noon? How about the Sydney Opera House in Australia… would you meet me at noon or some time in the evening? How about England, Germany or Japan… are there places that stick out in your mind that other people would think of?

This is a fascinating study and it would be very interesting to have a meetup of bloggers some place in the world on a given day and see how many would pick the same time and place.

2. In my second post from the book I posed this question…

Regis Philbin has just asked you a $2000 question on the show, “Who wants to be a Millionaire”.

Would it be best to…

• Listen to the Audience and take their advice
• Phone a friend and take their advice
• Reduce the answers from four to two and increase your odds by 50%

This was a very intriguing question to me. I would feel much more comfortable phoning a friend that I know and taking their advice. Asking the audience seems like a crap-shoot and reducing the odds is great but I still have to make a tough choice.

The actual show demographics are rather startling…

1. The studio audience picked the right answer 91% of the time
2. Phoning your friend resulted in the correct answer 65% of the time
3. Reducing the choices gave you a 50% chance

Group intelligence versus individual intelligence. While this game show study is not scientific it is very important especially if you have money on the line and it tends to go against common sense. And that is what “The Wisdom of Crowds” is all about.

Under certain circumstances the crowd can be brilliant.

Hmmmm… If we picked California where would we meet?

The Golden Gate Bridge
The Staples Center
Disneyland
The Embarcadero

Hmmmm….

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