“Keep It Simple, Stupid!”

Has your business gotten unnecessarily complicated? Are you trying too hard to sell too much? Are your sales presentations starting to look like the product of NASA scientists? Are prospects walking away with their thumbs in their mouths, and answering “DUH!” when you ask them questions?

     Maybe your presentation needs a labotomy? Maybe your business needs one?

     It might make you feel better to know that reaching a point of overkill complication is a fairly routine happening for many businesses…old as well as new!

     We all have a tendancy to overlook or forget that most of what launched us into business in the first place was having the knowledge edge and awareness that others really didn’t have what we did have, about the basic product or service or idea we started with (or they would have started the business instead of us, right?).

     We sometimes easily and quickly lose sight of the fact that most, if not all, of the customers we sell our products and services to are not as tuned in to our product and service details as we are. Dentists advertising mucusal blade inserts are only being understood by other dentists. Patients want to know that they can eat an apple again. Are you speaking your customer’s language? 

     Unless you’re selling something like fiber optics to fiber optics buyers, odds are overwhelming that most of our customers do not understand the technical terms, industry jargon, formulas, ingredients, manufacturing or developmental details that we often take for granted. You can’t just toss off terms without explaining them. The trick is to be aware of when you’re losing customer comprehension.

     Rather than a full-scale labotomy, however, maybe we need only to take a page from many Caribbean beach bars, and simply initiate an “attitude adjustment.” Step back from the words and expressions you’ve been using, and look toward developing a fresh attitude…a fresh perspective.

     Pretend when you explain your product or service features and benefits that you are explaining the details to your Grandmother! Or to someone from a foreign country who doesn’t speak or understand much English! Or to someone from another planet! (Really! How would you communicate the highlights or values of your business if you didn’t have the benefit of comparable education or language, or universe?)

     Rewrite your script! If you’re having trouble with this, because you’re not a writer or haven’t the time, consider an outside service. Find a writing professional who demonstrates the capability of translating and simplifying technical language into persuasive layman’s terms that reflect your business personality…and your market and community posture.

     If you can’t find someone you’re happy with, contact me via email Hal@TheWriterWorks.com with “Blog KISS” in the subject line, and a sentence that describes the nature of your business and what you need as a result from outside writing services.

If I can help, I’ll give you a plan; if I can’t, I’ll point you in the right direction. No fees for inquiries. 

Good Night and God Bless You!  halalpiar     

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When the chips are down,

entrepreneurs switch to pretzels

     When a consumer product manufacturer or service provider needs to dig up more business–even in such a mainstream media created economic vacuum as we’re presently being sucked deeper and deeper into– there are literally endless resources spelling out a myriad of strategic avenues and approaches…not to mention equally endless tactical options, methods, and techniques.

     But let’s say you have a B2B business. You provide services to the product manufacturers and service providers. Maybe you’re a customer service training organization or a building custodial service or a website design and maintenance business. Where do you go?

     The big guys are choking. They’ve wiped out training budgets, they’re cutting back building cleaning frequency, and they’re making do with their internal IT people to keep their websites functionable.

     How do you get these corporate giants to stand still long enough to consider adding or extending your services when they are in this budget-slashing frame of mind? How do you tell a company that’s laying off employees that they need customer service training now more than ever because the best source of business is existing and past business, and they’d better step up those relationships? 

     The big product and service guyscan make it nearly impossible for the little B2B guys to survive. Ah, but that’s where entrepreneurial spirit rises to the top. When the chips are down, entrepreneurs switch to pretzels. And guess what? Entrepreneurial hi-tech-anchored businesses are not only breaking the communications barrier, they are pulling entire legions of small B2B businesses along with them…not very unlike the makings of the industrial revolution.

     So once again, it is small business to the rescue, even as big business is being rewarded with government trillions for having screwed up the marketplace beyond recognition, and then for having sidestepped the wiser path of bankruptcy

…wiser because it would have forced more efficient operations and more effective products and services

…wiser because it would have spared us all ten more years’ worth of beating our collective brains in, to raise the taxes and repay the debts that are being used now to feather union beds in return for their political support. 

     What a sad and sick commentary on society that we’ve come to this. How fortunate we all are that the entrepreneurial spirit does still live, and will ultimately bring us a return to respectability, assuming the White House doesn’t continue paying off political promises with our hard-earned tax dollars. But it’s what we must all want. We elected zero business experience.

Good Night and God Bless You!  

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As communication continues

to experience convulsively

explosive change, so do the

methodologies we use to sell.

     Playwrite Arthur Miller clearly had something else in mind at the time he wrote and titled his classic Death of a Salesman, but there could never be a more apropos expression for what’s happening today, right this very minute, that is about to forever extinguish the “sales process” as we have known it since the day anyone reading this was born. 

     What, for example, does it suggest to you that even as recent as a year ago, effective sales communication was commonly reported to consist of as much as 87% nonverbal ingredients–gestures, posture, tone of voice, appearance, eye contact, active listening, etc.– and today major companies are talking about the sales process in terms of “digital body language”?

     Except for those salespeople who haven’t caught up (or, on) yet (and you surely know who they are and where they breed), business is at the crossroads of revolutionary change, and savvy salespeople spurred on by the blinding speed of technological advances are quick on the heels of entrepreneurs worldwide in leading the way.

     With entrepreneurial base-camp entrenchments established, salespeople will be muscling their way up the mountainside and serving the rest of society and the business world as the catalysts of change who will ultimately shake our depressed economy back into place. But this will only happen if those engaged in sales careers are able to fully grasp the dynamics of what’s going on around them.

     Entrepreneurs are spirited innovators who start enterprises, and who find the fuel and who get the engines fired up, and who get that initial forward thrust to happen (which is probably the most monumentally difficult and underrated task in all of business), but it is the world’s salespeople who who are responsible for revenues and growth and profits more than any other entity.

     Ah, but therein lies the potential problem. Salespeople who don’t see what’s happening, who don’t jump at the chance to instantly and dramatically shift into higher gear, who think they can keep doing the same old things in the same old ways, will fall by the wayside and die. And there won’t be any mercy rules!

The bottom line for salespeople:

• You must adjust your mindset to become more of a marketer and less of a sales representative.
• You must provide prospects/customers with new buying process experiences that are anchored by product/service/idea and market knowledge.

         You must rely more heavily on proving performance with demonstration and testing and sampling.

• You must increase your focus on benefits and ways of integrating purchases with existing products/services/ideas.
• You must spend more energy sitting on the same side of the prospect/customer’s problem-solving table and working as a partner instead of as a representative.

HIGH TRUST/credibility, proven performance and database marketing are now the three kings of sales! Are you making it happen, or is it happening to you? 

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Good Night and God Bless You! 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!    

I Am So Happy To See Your

Smiling Faces (and avatars!)

Thank you all my Twitter friends, and welcome to my daily business, personal and professional growth blog. I look forward to more of your visits and comments. Have a wonderful week ahead! Hal

Good Night and God Bless You!  halalpiar     

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VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED!

     Imagine coming here for a business meeting from a small town in another country. You’re just starting to learn English. Your host picks you up at Newark Airport and–intent on getting you to her office in “The Big Apple”–heads for the New Jersey Turnpike and the Lincoln Tunnel into midtown Manhattan. Great Guggamuggah! Talk about culture shock!

     You’ve struggled with deciphering the difference between driving on the parkway and parking in the driveway. You read signs: “CASH” and “NO CASH.” You get cash at this little booth? No, it must mean you give cash. Then why go to “CASH” and pay if you can go to “NO CASH” and act broke and get by for free?

     “EXIT” or “NO EXIT” or “EXIT ONLY” present intriguing options. Then, just to screw up your brain, is “LAST EXIT BEFORE TOLL” (so why not take it to avoid having to choose between “CASH” and “NO CASH”?). Aah, then there’s the whole question about whether “U TURN” or “NO U TURN” that’s just past the “CASH” “NO CASH.” 

     I mean, why would U turn and have to pay again and why would U not be allowed to turn (especially if U needed to re-turn to the little booth to use the bathroom or something)? And wouldn’t your curiosity be aroused in 90-degree July weather about “BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROADWAY”?

     This doesn’t even compare to the questions the signs raise about your head.

     Uh, “CURVES AHEAD” and “STOP AHEAD” are puzzling, but you start to wonder about what kinds of animalistic creatures would urge you to “BRAKE AHEAD.” Then you see “JUGHANDLE AHEAD”…whew! And the radio blames traffic on “RUBBERNECKERS”???

     Standing still next to the “KEEP MOVING” sign in the middle of the tunnel, your host tells you how many hundred feet you are under the Hudson River and then notes how old the tunnel is and that it periodically springs a leak or two but that you’d probably only have to be there awhile. YUGZOWIE!

     So you finally get to the office. The 35th floor reception room with 4-inch thick buzzer entry glass doors next to the elevator has 6 plastic potted palms complete with strategically located yellowing leaves, a plastic-looking gum-chewing receptionist with spike heels, a 6-inch skirt and a plastic tube and a half’s worth of lipstick plastered between her nose and her chin.

     The coffee table sports three ragged copies of PEOPLE magazine from 1997, a National Geographic with the cover missing, and a few odd pages (aren’t they all?) of last week’s New York Times. The carpet has a large stain that resembles a Law & Order murder scene without chalk lines.

     There are dozens of moving black things breeding in the overhead fluorescents. Something piped out of ceiling speakers that resembles music is playing under the static. The coffee maker in the corner looks and smells like it’s been cooking for two days.

     Are you ready for your return flight yet?

     The business road to reception is filled with stuff we all take for granted. We’re used to rushing through this crummy airport route filled with confusion and traffic congestion. We’re used to rushing into office buildings and through disgusting and completely inhospitable reception areas every day without ever stopping to take inventory of what it must look like to a first time visitor.

     We KNOW there are no second first impressions, but we get ourselves in the mindset of thinking no one notices or cares about these things. They do and they do!

     When you take a customer, client, patient, prospect, associate, vendor, employee, friend or relative into your community and work environment , be sensitive to what that person is experiencing (especially someone from out of town!) and take the trouble to clean up the act before that individual’s arrival. Please note the word “before.” Thank you.   

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Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

 Networking Is Selling.

Belt-tightening times require business, organization and professional practice people to get more done with less. But you already know that. Let’s zero in on something you don’t know (or have thus far chosen to not admit by owning up to the fact that…

No matter what your job is–whether you work with a church, a healthcare facility, a bank, the government, an educational or nonprofit institution, a trucking company, a restaurant, professional sports team, senior housing development–no matter WHAT your job is: YOU ARE IN SALES!

Got that? Okay. Next:

The secret of sales, marketing, advertising and public relations news releases and events is embodied in the acronym AIDAS, which stands for attract ATTENTION, create INTEREST, stimulate DESIRE, bring about ACTION and ensure SATISFACTION. 

[Hey, you’re doing fine out there, all you doctors and plumbers and camp directors and computer techies, chicken pluckers and grocery store checkers. Stay with this another minute.]

In years past, traditional salespeople who are out selling for a living have usually had the luxury of field houses full of expensive support tools and programs designed to drive prospects to their feet. You’ll find these eyeball-to-eyeball presenters hovering about abundantly in retail settings and trade and professional shows.

You’ll also find that these same folks are discovering with almost the same swiftness and embarrassed sense of loss one might experience with suddenly having his or her pants pulled down, that businesses and organizations are now and have been rapidly withdrawing budget support for advertising,  promotion and merchandising.

Therefore (Aha!) ingenuity must rise for salespeople to survive. And where do they turn? To networking of course, to the very most commonly understood and used sales promotional vehicle that all the non-salespeople have been using to sell themselves and their services and ideas for centuries . . .

Networking. Networking is a fancy term for meeting and greeting and staying in touch and asking for referrals. But guess what? If you don’t apply the AIDAS acronym to your networking efforts, even as a floor sweeper, you’re not likely to survive the mainstream media’s economic rumor mongering that’s sucking the life out of our families, friends, neighbors, and communities.

     So, before you go on stage each day, clean up your act, pull back your shoulders, take a deep breath, tell your mirror image that you are the greatest performer in the job that you do, that ever lived, and that you are going to sail through the day making good things happen at every turn.

     Then recite to yourself that you will attract ATTENTION, create INTEREST, stimulate DESIRE, bring about ACTION, and ensure SATISFACTION with every task and every person you encounter. Do that and you’ve got my 100% money-back guarantee (oh, right, this was all free!) that you will astound yourself. You WILL astound yourself! And that’s a good thing. 

                                             

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Hal@Businessworks.US

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone! 

 Business Braindrain.

The following is an old statement that has NOW meaning and NOW applications . . . meaning and applications that rise from the simmering political pot of socialistic “share the wealth” thinking that the White House has been manipulating into a front and center position on the world  stage. What’s your business opinion? . . . 

“You cannot legislate the poor

into freedom by legislating

the wealthy out of freedom.

What one person receives

without working for,

another person must work for

without receiving.

The government cannot give

to anybody anything that

the government does not first

take from somebody else.

When half of the people

get the idea that they

do not have to work

because the other half is

going to take care of them,

and when the other half

gets the idea that it does

no good to work because

somebody else is going

to get what they work for,

that my dear friend,

is about the end of any nation.”

—PASTOR/DR. ADRIAN ROGERS (1931-2005)
                             

A pretty heady (and eerily timely) statement we should all be tuned into as we watch and listen to the daily ticking of America’s economic destruction countdown clock.

I am really interested in your thoughts about this quote. Please leave me a comment or call or email me.    

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Hal@Businessworks.US   302.933.0116

  Open Doors Open Minds 

 Thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

  Make today a GREAT day for someone! 

Who Woulda Thunk It?

I’ve been running across so many situations lately I could only categorize as unlikely business bets that I’m wondering about this economy spawning an epidemic of them, and whether I might indeed indulge the sensibilities of visitors to this blog with periodic excursions into business unliklihood. What say you?

     First, though seemingly unlikely on the surface, is the speculative category of business that I’ll simply label as a “SHORE BET” because it goes like this: You can be sure (shore?) that all the weeping and gnashing of business owner, manager and entrepreneur teeth (alotta gnashing, right!) is taking place inland. Inland? What’s that supposed to mean?

     Businesses located on coastlines— oceans, bays, lakes, rivers –are more insulated from economic downturns I am told repeatedly by coastal business owners. What? Are you sober? You have research? No. I have instincts and experience. I have ears that listen to business owners and operators who have weathered some tough financial storms.

     An increasing number of (perhaps wishful, but) confident-sounding people are of the conviction that businesses that depend on waterfront industries and (especially) tourism, are actually gathering strength in anticipation of the further collapse of inland business cousins.

     They say that when people have fewer dollars to part with for vacations, they don’t cancel vacations, they travel closer to home, and they look for self-sufficient environments where thay can pay all-inclusive fees that include meals and other amenities. They look for areas that provide inexpensive assorted entertainment and amusement choices and full range food and beverage options.

     Naturally, I think about where I live in coastal Delaware, and the magnificent seashore here that is beginning to host more and more vacationers (and year-long weekenders) from NY, NJ, PA, VA, MD, and NC than ever before. It’s almost like our coastline has been quietly waiting to be discovered by nearby state travelers who are finding vacation rewards so abundant that they wonder why they ever headed for all those crowded Florida destinations to start with.

NEXT, is baseball mud!

     As long as we have baseball, we’ll have baseball mud…highly specialized “Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud” that has been helping professional baseball pitchers get a better grip on the ball…that comes from a special secret location in a hidden New Jersey swamp!

     Now, talk about an unlikely business bet! Imagine Mr. Blackburne coming to you for startup capital in 1938.

     “Well, I got me this magic mud that professional baseball leagues will be buying from me for over 70 years. They’re going to age it for a month and a half. We’re going to sell them three-pound vats, two for each team in the majors, and that’ll hold them a full season…”

     “Yeah, right, mud, uhuh, sure, okay, well I’m not sure that’s such a good investment, Mr. B…”

     The amazing part is it’s true! And the company is highly successful. [Who woulda thunk it?]

Good Night and God Bless You!  halalpiar     

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PR IS NOT

A SERIES OF STUNTS!

     If your goal is to attract attention to your business or brand, go stand on your head in traffic and eat watermelon, but don’t believe for even one minute that Public Relations is the answer. PR is not a series of stunts.

     Businesses that insist on misusing PR as a tool to take them on a promotional binge from one event to the next will soon lose enough credibility to cost them press release coverage at times when it counts most, and will end up hanging around, hands in pockets watching their blog sites go down the tubes, probably pulling their websites down along with them since search engine rankings are very much a function of blog activity.

     Why do PR-abusive companies create this downward spiral to start with? Because the public (whether it’s industrial trade, clients, patients, other professionals, or John Q. off the street) isn’t stupid. And media writers and editors, even less so…when careers are on the line, there’s a whole lot less tolerance of artificially-inflated newsworthiness tossed to the wind by overzealous organizations that are too preoccupied with day-to-day sales survival tactics to appreciate the need for strategic planning.    

     Effective PR is all about building SOLID relationships with the news media by consistently demonstrating the value of what it is that your product or service does and the value of whom you are in your industry, profession, and community.

     Why does the relationship need to be so emphatically “solid”? PR is a trade-off. For you to get free promotional mentions and news release and photo coverage (that, incidentally, research shows to be ten times more credible than paid advertising messages), you must be willing to perform at the whimsy of the editors and writers who decide on whether or not to accept what you provide them with.

     They will always be much more receptivity to what you provide when what you provide is professionally written and executed and followed-up on. My guess is that 80% of effective PR is follow-up. Ah, but that is what builds relationships, right?  

     And, by the way, effective PR will boost your branding efforts far beyond advertising for usually a fraction of the costs associated with advertising. A recent study finds this is particularly true for businesses connected with engaging and complicated product manufacturing and marketing processes.

     In fields like financial services, automobiles and consumer electronics, almost 30% of brand value is associated with solid PR performances that result in increased brand name mentions in print, broadcast and electronic news media. 

     What this means is that in economic downturns like the one we’re experiencing, it is wise to boost  your PR efforts and reduce your advertising expenditures. But that’s not to imply a straight exchange.

     It is to say that your PR efforts need to be professional, and your advertising needs to be more focused and more contiguous with your media relations efforts. There’s some delicate balancing and juggling acts involved, but you’re already a pro at that or you wouldn’t have your own business to start with, right?  

 Good Night and God Bless You!  halalpiar     

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SPIT: Rarely the object of

attention in a tender love story

     If we laugh out loud the first time we see a child’s bib block lettering proclaim “SPIT HAPPENS,” it may be because those of us with little kids in our lives know it does.  Or perhaps the humor surfaces as our minds flash unwittingly to the bumper stickers (with the adult version of the saying) and know instinctively for it to be true grit more often than not.  Isn’t it, after all, simply the unsophisticated, Americanized version of C’est La Vié?

     Spit.  We do it in disgust.  We do it in relief.  We watch baseball players do it on TV 14,397 times every game.  Boxers have their own buckets.  Spit conjures up thoughts of adrenaline, mucus, repulsion and sinusitis.  Sometimes we miss the spittoon, the gutter, the car window (yucht!) and end up with it on our sleeves, the fronts of our shirts, the tops of our shoes, rivuleting uncontrollably down our cleavages or hunkering down somewhere deep inside the thickest of our beards.

     Spit is swapped and mopped, and comes in all shapes and colors and levels of viscosity (yucht again!).  Then there’s the specialized version of spit we all know as flem.  Flem—having once been front and center in the embryonic form of a booger that got sniffed back—usually originates as a kind of loose stalagtite structure hanging mercilessly from the back recesses of the nasal passages. 

     Flem can be lumpy, smooth, or intricately woven into kiwi and mustard colored strands, occasionally available in nasty deep brown globs.  The thickest and most projectile-worthy of these is probably preceded by a throat ravaging clearance effort that sounds like a lot of little haagggt, haagggt, haagggt noises—or one death-rattling H-A-A-A-A-A-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-G-T !!!

     Tough guys spit from atop their horses, tanks, and tractors.  Adolescent boys (and some adolescent-minded men!) will dry themselves up by having distance and closest-to-the-wall contests.  But many of the winners move onward and upward to the higher challenge of launching their spittle from rooftops, movie balconies, and prime bridge locations over passing cars, boats, and trains … and unwary pedestrians.  Tomboys and other masculine females use it to draw their lines in the sand, and don’t dare step past the bubbly little puddle!

Anyway, one thing’s certain: spit has rarely been the object of attention in a tender love story. Until now. 

Stay on this site and just click here for (in the words of the immortal Paul Harvey) the rest of the story (just a few very short paragraphs!) :

http://halalpiar.com/?page_id=30  

Good Night and God Bless You!  halalpiar     

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