selling

Today's blog is actually a podcast — a 16-minute extract from a presentation I recently made on getting the most out of your sales and sales organization. In this section, I share my 10 rules for working tradeshows, and why each rule has an impact on your success.

The Rules

Here's the short list of rules. Listen to the podcast to hear the reasons for them and what you gain by following them:

1. Always prepare for a tradeshow by researching your top prospects in the event you see them.

2. Never sit in the booth.

3. You're not selling shoes.

4. Take scheduled breaks from the booth.

5. Hire a booth buddy.

6. Never eat in the booth.

7. Capture every possible lead - that's what the tradeshow is for.

8. Keep alcohol and late nights to a bare minimum.

9. Make each subsequent day better than the day before.

10. Never ever close up shop early.

Transcript Below

Check Out Another Episode Here

Transcript

[00:00:01.020]
I recently spoke at a conference for senior sales executives and sales managers, and I was talking in general about trade shows and some of you guys have already watched my presentation or read my blog on how to get your ROIC from trade shows. But this next section, which I pulled from the speech recording, is about my rules for working trade shows, and I haven't really shared that on my blog before. The sound quality is a little bit tinny because it was a large room without professional recording equipment.

[00:00:34.200]
But I think you'll get the gist and I hope it's useful for you as so many of you prepare to go work some really big trade shows in the next few weeks. I often talk with my clients about preparing for trade shows and. Being very productive and getting their return on investment from trade shows, it's sort of a joke now that people will say, well, OK, it sounds like you have some rules for trade shows and what are they? So I thought I'd just take a moment to share Australia's rules for working a trade show and explain the thinking behind them.

[00:01:10.040]
For 20 years, I did run businesses that were present at multiple trade shows every year, and I thought it was very important that I be on the floor selling and experiencing the trade show and the customer interactions because I don't think you can run a business without really knowing what the customers want, what they talk about it, that whole experience of selling to them directly. So here are my rules of trade shows. The first rule is be prepared with your prospecting list before you ever go to the show.

[00:01:38.580]
If you show up at a trade show and you don't know which customers you're specifically looking for or hoping we'll stop by if you haven't done some research on those customers so that you can talk with them intelligently about their business, if and when they do show up, then you're not prepared to be at the trade show. Now, of course, if you can get meetings with people, that's easier to prepare for because you know who is going to be coming in at what time.

[00:02:05.070]
And you do your research and you're all prepared. But trade shows are easy and you often can't get meetings. And that means you're going to be doing a certain amount of customer research on spec, on the hope or the prayer that they will actually come by your booth. But if you have high value targets and you are prepared with information about them when they show up to your booth unexpectedly, how impressive is that? So the first rule of trade shows is before you ever go to the trade show, have a full dossier on the customers that you hope to sell to and be prepared to have an intelligent conversation with them if they arrive at your booth.

[00:02:45.180]
The second rule of trade shows is nobody sits at a trade show. In fact, at most of the companies I've run, we didn't even allow for any chairs to be in the booth except for chairs that were available for customers. And there are two reasons for this. The first is if you're sitting down and then you suddenly jump up when a customer walks by in order to catch their attention. That is very intimidating. The customer suddenly feels as if you want something from them.

[00:03:12.600]
And even though they're at a trade show to buy, there's this human tendency that kicks in. It says, you don't sell to me, don't sell to me. So if you're sitting down and then stand up at the approach of a customer, that's usually bad energy, it'll send the customer running. On the other hand, if you're sitting down and you say sitting down with a customer walks by, that's dismissive. It's like I'm comfortable and I'm just sitting here and I'm doing my own thing and so I'm not here for you.

[00:03:42.000]
So sitting down in the customer approaches doesn't work and jumping up with a customer doesn't work. So what works when the customer walks up that you're standing all ready and you're prepared to make eye contact with them and smile at them and invite them to engage with you? The second reason there's no sitting down at trade shows is because trade shows are exhausting, and when you're standing all day, it's exhausting. But something really bad happens in terms of energy. When you sit down at a trade show, all of the energy that you have left, which may not be very much, drains out through your rear end and into the chair.

[00:04:18.510]
And the next thing you know, it's very hard to stand back up. If you want to keep your energy up at a trade show, the best thing you can do is stay on your feet and keep moving and keep engaging and save the butt draining energy moment for the end of the day when there are no more customers to engage with. This brings us to my third rule about trade shows, which is you're not selling shoes, so don't wear shoes for the attention.

[00:04:46.150]
They get you lots and lots.

[00:04:48.820]
This is particularly a women thing because men are pretty good about buying shoes that feel good and they're expected to wear shoes that feel good. The shoes that feel good actually look good for men. For women, it's a little more challenging. But I can't tell you how many women I know find that their ability to think and communicate and negotiate and keep high energy at a trade show is severely damaged by the fact that they're wearing shoes that will not support being on your feet all day long.

[00:05:17.740]
And there's a certain amount of pressure to wear beautiful shoes with your beautiful clothing look beautiful. But again, you're not there to sell shoes and you're not there to look beautiful. You're there to be intelligent and engaging and to sell. So wear shoes that are designed to be stood up all day long. The good news is for women, there are a lot more shoes that do a good job of that today while still being quite attractive. They're not going to be as beautiful as the shoes that you spend a fortune on at Neiman Marcus, but they are great shoes that will allow you to be an effective human being while being on your feet for 10 hours a day for three, four, five and six days in a row.

[00:06:00.400]
That's my third rule of trade shows. By fourth rule of trade shows is take breaks from the booth, but I say that with a caveat because I know a lot of particularly young entrepreneurs, young designers, they tend to go work trade shows by themselves. And this is very difficult to do. And I'll talk about that in my fifth role. But in my fourth role, it's get breaks from the booth and try to do it just the way we would encourage hourly employees to work.

[00:06:30.740]
15 minutes in the morning, half hour for lunch, 15 minutes in the afternoon. In fact, if you walk away from the booth and you sit down and you know you've got 15 minutes to do it. It doesn't have the same bizarre energy effect that it does if you sit down in a chair that's already at your booth and you don't want to stand back up again. You've walked away from the booth psychologically. You know, you have to go back to the booth.

[00:06:54.760]
And for some reason, sitting down is not as hard on energy. Maintenance is also good to clear your head. You walk away, you get some water, you eat some lunch. That relates to rule six, which is no eating in the booth. So all for is get away from the booth three times a day, half hour for lunch, 15 minutes of the morning, 15 minutes of the afternoon. So what's rule five that facilitates this?

[00:07:22.180]
Get a booth, buddy. A booth buddy is a really important that you may not know if you have staff or if you've got a bunch of coworkers, then you're going to be booth buddies to each other and you're going to make sure that each of you get your breaks in your lunches. You're going to be thoughtful about it, because that's the only way to keep the energy high for the customers all day long. But if you're by yourself and what you want to do is work with other exhibitors at that show who are also by themselves.

[00:07:47.730]
And together, you hire a booth buddy and that booth buddy is somebody that moves around and covers the different booths. You do a little math, you figure out how many booth to Booth Buddy can cover and still get their own 15 minute break, morning and afternoon and a half hour lunch. But a booth buddy helps you maintain your energy and your effectiveness by giving you the breaks. And you can afford the booth, buddy, by sharing them with other solo exhibitors of a six.

[00:08:19.350]
No eating in the booth. First of all, it's bad for your digestion, your scarfing food down to your customers. Second of all, it's bad for your presentation. I don't know anyone who has a brand that says we chew in other people's faces. It's just not part of anybody's brand statements. You've got to eat away from the booth, which reinforces that you need a booth, buddy, and you need to take those breaks. But nobody eats the booth other than a breath mint.

[00:08:43.710]
I don't even like dove in a booth because you just keep chewing it. And Victor, terrible presentation. My seventh rule of trade shows is that you're there to get leads. Yes, of course. You should be setting appointments before you go and meeting with customers as much as you can and be prepared for sales pitches. But a very, very, very important part about trade shows is connecting with people that you didn't even know existed and becoming a presence to people that you knew existed but they didn't know you existed.

[00:09:14.550]
And so the seventh rule is about collecting every customer's information that comes by your books. If there is a scanner opportunity at the trade show to scan badges as they come by, it's worth investing in. If there's not a scanner opportunity, make sure you're doing something to collect everybody's business card. Even if they tell you that they're almost out of business cards, they only have one left. Take a picture of it, take a picture of their patch. If the show will allow you to do so, do something in the booth that allows you to entice people to leave a business card like a give away.

[00:09:50.610]
But your job at the trade show is to collect every possible you can collect, because following up on those leads is what's going to help you get your ROIC from the trade show after the show is over. So that's the seventh rule of trade shows. Collect, collect, collect the leads.

[00:10:08.670]
The eighth rule of trade shows is always an a popular one with my employees when we were exhibiting, which is you're not on vacation, you're there to sell and that early nights, very low alcohol intake, get to bed, get rested. You're spending a fortune to be at that trade show. You're spending a fortune in cash. You're spending a fortune on energy. You're spending time that you could be spending doing something else that is a huge investment. You could probably get away with going out night one with all your friends that you haven't seen since the last version of that trade show.

[00:10:42.240]
And you stay out late. You drink too much to get up in the morning and you're fine. But day two, you're not going to be as productive as day one. Guess what? You're not as productive day to is your day one anyway because you're tired from day one when you add to a trade show and it's inherent, exhausting nature, late nights and alcohol and every subsequent day you are less of a professional. You are less successful than before the day before.

[00:11:07.920]
So the eighth rule of trade shows is absolutely do not drink too much, do not stay out till late, do get to bed and be fresh for the next day.

[00:11:21.870]
The ninth rule of trade is to make sure you're doing some things better each day than you did the day before, and this means that you have to end each day with a reflection on what worked, what did, what you could do better, and you start the subsequent day with improvements that you have planned. So that's good night. Rule of trade shows get better every day. And now for my last 10 through live trade shows, never, never, never pack up, close your booth before the day has closed or before the show has closed.

[00:11:59.020]
Nothing drives me crazy here than to see a group of people pack up and leave their booth at the end of the day, 20 minutes before the show's closed, because they're in a hurry to get ahead of all the other people that are heading to the vault or to the restaurants or wherever they think they're heading off to. And it's absolutely crushing to me to see somebody pack up a booth and say the shows closes on the last day at three o'clock and they start packing up their booth to the customer that you've been waiting for.

[00:12:28.480]
The customer that can pay for the whole event could be the one that shows up at six o'clock when you packed up and left at five forty or who shows up in the last 10 minutes of the show on the very last day. You're there to sell. You're there to make money. And to be unavailable for that to happen is just leaving money on the table. In addition, it makes a terrible brand statement. What it says to people walking by is we're lazy, we take shortcuts, we're in a hurry.

[00:13:02.200]
Some things more important to us than being here for you. And you never want your friend to say that I don't care what your brand is, it doesn't include telling people you're lazy and that you take shortcuts. So those are my 10 rules of trade shows. And they might be a little stiff for most people, but I have found that they help make trade show value increase in every place that I've ever. Rule number one. Be prepared before you go to the show with all your customer information, particularly for the top prospect you'd like to sell to number two sitting in the booth.

[00:13:39.040]
Number three, it's not about the shoes, it's about the sales. Number four, make sure you take breaks from the booth to maintain your energy. Number five, get a buddy. Even if that means sharing the expense of your booth. Buddy with other people, work the show. No. Six, no eating in the booth for seven. It's all about the prospect. Make sure that you're capturing every lead you can capture. Number eight, you're not on vacation.

[00:14:08.480]
You spend money to be there and you expect to make money by being there. So get your rest. Don't drink too much and make sure that you have energy for the following day. Number nine, make sure you do some things better each day than you did the day before by reviewing each day and making plans for the new day and continuously improving your trade, your presence. And for Ted. Never close up early. That at the end of the day, not at the end of the show.

[00:14:39.380]
Work up to the very last moment of the show time so that you're always conveying to customers that you are professionals, that you are there for them, that there's nothing more important to you than your obligations at that show. And also because you don't want to miss that opportunity for the perfect customer to walk in your booth with you shut down or left early. I hope that by applying these rules, you can have a better trade show experience and make more money from your trade shows because for Pete's sake, trade shows are difficult.

[00:15:12.600]
Why would you go to the effort of a trade show if it was to produce as much financial return as possible for all that work? I wish I could have captured the Q&A from that event, because people have their own rules for working trade shows, and I'm curious if you have your own rules for working trade shows as well. Anyway, this has been a podcast from the works blog by me, Andrea Hill. And thanks for hanging with me for a few minutes.

[00:15:41.670]
Have a great day.

For most of grade school and middle school, my granddaughter was homeschooled. . . at my house. Each morning her mom dropped her off before she went to work, and Aubrey and would I head to our shared office. Most days she jumped on her computer, loged into her curriculum (she is enrolled in an international online school), and knocked out her lessons. Some days though, she just couldn't get into it. And most of the time when that happened, it’s not that she wasn't motivated to do her lesson. It’s that she couldn't relate to it.

Sales motivation is not something that can be delegated like a task or taught like a lesson. We can try to motivate others by focusing on outcomes (carrots and sticks), but ultimately, the only type of motivation with staying power is self-motivation. Self-motivation happens when the desire to learn or achieve comes from a deep interest in or attachment to the work.

One aspect of marketing that manufacturers and designers should pay much closer attention to is retail sales training. That’s right, sales training—at least at your level—must be part of your marketing program. If you sell to retailers, you are entrusting much of your business success to the marketing, merchandising, and sales skills of each retail store. Ultimately, your sales fate lies in the hands of sales representatives you may never have met and who may or may not ever purchase fine or designer jewelry. What motivates them to sell your jewelry, and not just show it if a customer appears interested? You need to cultivate in them a deep interest in and attachment to your work.

Your sales training can be delivered in person, on your website, in printed materials, or as a video. Most companies doing a good job of sales training use a combination of these. So don’t get fixated on whether you are shooting a video or buying airfare. At least, not yet. To begin, create an outline of the information you can share that will stimulate salesperson interest in and passion for your work.

1.  Start with your people. We don’t establish relationships with things—not even with jewelry things. We establish relationships with people. So share information about your company and the people who work there. Share photos of your workspace, introduce your employees, and paint a picture of what it’s like to work in your workshop. Stories are your best, most powerful tool for evoking a feeling of attachment. Help the people selling your jewelry feel part of your organization.

2.  Move on to consumers. Next, share some stories about consumers who have purchased your jewelry. Talk about why they collect your work and what drew them to your work in the first place. Share a few customer tales that can convey the humor, sentimentality, ethos, or charm of your brand. By helping salespeople picture the ultimate consumer of your work, you will help them envision their own customers as buyers of your work. What we can imagine we can do, so stir the imagination.

3.  Now talk about the jewelry. Retail sales experience runs the gamut from brand-new-to-jewelry to 40 years in jewelry sales, and you must appeal to all of them. Describe your designs in terms of design aesthetic, what motivates you to create the designs, how you may have evolved to this point in your design aesthetic, and the materials you work in. Talk about any particularly meaningful, unusual, or important elements of your design in terms of why you chose them and what those elements mean as part of your brand.

When merchandising your line, consider whether or not the elements of your line sheet create any sort of connection for the salesperson. I love it when designers name their jewelry. There’s so much more emotional connection to a ring that’s named “Serendipity” compared to a ring that’s named DT-104. At the very least, name your collections, and explain the thoughts behind your naming.

4.  Share your selling experience. You’ve been out there selling your line at trunk shows, trade shows, chair-side visits with editors, and cocktail parties. You have a pretty good idea of sales techniques that work. Share them! Give the retail salesperson some tools to put in her toolbox in the form of anecdotes and approaches that work for you or for your salespeople.

5. Get to the salespeople. This part can be tough. For every store owner that immediately shares everything he learns from a salesperson or designer, there’s another who takes the box of candy home and forgets to pass along the line sheets. But it’s in your interests to get to the salespeople, so figure out a way. Some good methods include:

• Offer to provide in-person training. For an appropriately-sized order, this can be well worth your expenditure.
• Produce a booklet. Think “booklet” more than brochure or pamphlet. You need to entertain and entice the sales staff. As long as you’re telling stories, deliver them in a form that feels like a story-vehicle.
• Produce a video. Put the video on your website, send e-mail links to store managers and sales staff, or burn DVDs and send them via mail.

Now you just have to get to the salespeople. If you’re not traveling to the store, you’re sending something. Ask the store manager or owner for a list of salespeoples’ names and, if available, e-mail addresses. Send your training information with a personal note and perhaps a small gift (something as simple as a tiny box of chocolates or a $5 Starbucks card) to thank them for their time. This won’t be possible with all retailers, because some retail storeowners just won’t let you have access to their sales staff. But for those who do, you can establish a bond of increasing familiarity, interest, and mutual benefit.

When my granddaughter couldn't get into her lessons, we went into story mode. That’s was my role as a learning coach — to come up with the right stories at the right times to reignite her motivation. That’s your job too.

One of the most difficult things to accept about sales is that it's a numbers game. It can make us feel insignificant and faceless to think that it's not who we are or what we have to offer, but only how many times we call on people that determines our success.

But that's not what it's really about. When I (or any sales educator) says, "Sales is a numbers game," here's what we mean:

• Information Overload: We are inundated with advertising, promotion, and demands for our attention nearly everywhere we turn - from our televisions to our computers and out on the street through SMS and billboards - we receive way more input than we can possibly digest or  recall.
• The Numbers Game: If you can expect 3 out of every 100 prospects to respond, then won't you feel better with 800 prospects in play, where you have the potential to hit 24?

To be successful in today's market - consumer direct or business-to-business  - you have to become visible, then become memorable, before you can achieve meaningful contact. This takes time and therefore patience. If you increase the number of prospects with whom you are communicating, you will shorten the time, but the dynamics are still the same.

Here's a child's poem that I love to share that expresses the essence of this practice. I have no idea who wrote it. It's something that I remember from my own childhood.

"They may not need me but they might.
I'll keep my hands just in sight.
A smile as small as mine might be
precisely their necessity."

When sales don't happen, it's tempting to lose confidence and let negative ideas take hold. Don't let that happen to you! Just recite this poem and keep on working. If you want to  change something, take a look at how many prospects you have in play, and how often you engage them. Chances are, your shortcomings aren't related to what you have to offer or how people perceive you as a person or company. Most likely you're not "just in sight" for enough potential prospects.

In the 1980s I cut my Direct Marketing teeth under the tutelage of Hank Johnson and Katie Muldoon, two of the giants of the catalog world. My previous business experience had been entertainment booking and promotion. Marketing in the entertainment world in those days was a rather blunt instrument. It just wasn’t difficult to get someone to a Heart or Prince concert, or to a major Hollywood preview. What I understood about marketing was wining and dining and printing billboards.

We were starting a catalog that sold videos to consumers at a time when consumers didn’t purchase video unless it was a Jane Fonda workout.  Blockbuster still had less than five stores, there was a video rental store on nearly every corner, and people waited in line on Friday afternoons to rent their weekend entertainment and return it by Sunday.

My primary responsibility was merchandising, and as it turned out, I had a lot to learn.

Early on a salesman came asking for me with a suitcase full of samples. He didn’t have an appointment and I didn’t know who he was, so I asked the receptionist to send him away with instructions to call for an appointment. We were one day away from a major print deadline and I was buried in final proofs.

The next thing I knew, my boss came through my office door with the salesman in tow. My boss proceeded to lecture me on the fact that if Lillian Vernon could sit on the back of a donkey cart traveling through China in 1972* to build the world’s most successful direct merchant, I could sure as hell take an uninvited salesperson in and see what he had to say.

Later, after making it through the sales call in spite of my shame and fury, I went to my boss. I was pretty tweaked. He’d embarrassed me. So I asked him, “How am I supposed to get anything done if I have to receive every salesperson who decides to drop by without an appointment?”

To which he replied, “How do you expect to be a successful merchant if you don’t live and breathe with the one goal of finding the most interesting, most relevant, most desirable products for your customers? Nothing else we do matters if we don’t get the products right!”

I had made the mistake of thinking that I knew how to merchandise movies and music just because I knew the output of the movie and music studios better than almost anyone. But understanding a product category – even loving a product category - is not the same as merchandising a product category. Eventually I would learn that being an expert on a product is primarily about the self. Being a merchant is about the customer; her wants, her needs, her expectations, and all the other things in the market that are vying for her attention.

So I became a student of Lillian Vernon. How she analyzed everything she offered for sale and the types of women who bought from her. How she honed her offering over time to thoughtfully satisfy needs her customers didn’t even know they had. How she was always scouting for something her clients hadn’t seen before and could get excited about. How she never sat on products that didn’t sell, but cut her losses and moved on quickly so as not to waste time on merchandise that was diminishing her brand and wasting precious catalog space. How she carefully managed the balance between evergreen products and new products so as never to become stale. How she established powerful relationships with vendors based on mutual trust and respect to ensure she always saw the most exciting products first. Lillian Vernon knew that the only way to keep her customers was to make sure they were excited just thinking about receiving a new catalog in the mail each month.

A recent commenter on one of my blogs noted that many of the companies today cannot change because of their fixed structures. Never mind that failure to change is the same as failure to survive. If a company is passionate about its merchandising; if a company is constantly taking the temperature of its customers and analyzing customer behavior; if a company is always testing new ideas, ditching the weak ones and building on the strong ones, that company can’t help but change. Outstanding merchandising is one of the pillars of business success.

Even Campbell’s Soup has had to constantly change throughout the years to reflect changing consumer tastes and expectations. If a product category as basic as soup must change to stay relevant, how much more important is the constant search for relevance to a company that sells non-essential goods?

Today the company Lillian Vernon has changed hands several times and is no longer what it once was. But Lillian Vernon the merchant, the intrepid explorer for products that would delight her customers and make her money, is still a strong role model for me. I hope she can inspire you too.

*I was never able to verify that Lillian Vernon ever rode a donkey cart in China, though she was one of the first business people to do trade there after Nixon's historic visit.

[00:00:04.210]
Selling is a challenging profession. In fact, it can be downright hard and nothing I can teach you will make the act of selling easier because selling is the process of encouraging someone to give away their hard earned money in exchange for a good or service. If the person really needs that good or service and has no viable alternatives, then selling can be relatively easy. But if the person has many options or hasn't a clearly defined need or doesn't know whom to trust, then selling takes time and patience and persistence.

[00:00:43.810]
It requires a thick skin and a resilient personality because the salesperson here is know far more often than she hears. Yes. We can't make the process of selling easier or simpler because so much human motivation is involved on both sides, but we can look for ways to motivate ourselves and make the role more rewarding. How? By investing in the personal development that will make us more successful by becoming more holistic and big picture in our approach so we can focus on the overall success instead of the smaller nose and maybe lasers.

[00:01:19.630]
In my experience, the most rewarding and empowering thing one can do is to focus on becoming a more successful person from the inside out. So that's what this training is all about. We're going to discuss the traits that are known to be contributors to success as a salesperson and in fact, to success in general. First, I'll quickly introduce myself, I'm the owner of HIll Management Group, and we have several brands that serve small business owners in strategy, marketing services, professional development and news and information.

[00:01:55.960]
I did spend most of my career as a fix it specialist for ailing companies, and I've been the president and or CEO for companies ranging in the forty five million per year to 600 million per year revenue ranges, including companies like Rio Grand in the jewelry industry, and Fulcrum Direct, which had several catalogs in the apparel industry. And over the years I've developed a lot of strategies that facilitate growth and profitability. In 2007, I left my last corporate post and I formed my own company because I wanted to take what I'd learned over the years and bring it to small business owners so they could compete more effectively in our increasingly boundaryless world.

[00:02:38.650]
Successful salespeople have been studied extensively and we can confidently draw certain conclusions about their personality and behavioral traits, personality is the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character. And behavior is the way in which one acts or conducts oneself toward others. While we can't always choose to be extroverted if our nature is to be introverted, there are many personality traits that we can cultivate over time. When it comes to behaviors, all of our behaviors are chosen and they can be turned into habits with practice.

[00:03:19.250]
So there are two components to being a successful salesperson and really being any kind of successful person. The first component is to cultivate the personality aspects that will help us to be successful. In most cases, these personality attributes determine success regardless of profession. The second component is to consistently choose those behaviors that are most likely to help you succeed. One of the biggest barriers to confidence and self motivation is not knowing what we need to do to get from where we are now to where we want to be.

[00:03:55.670]
So this training is intended to give you the roadmap of personal development, necessary to be a successful salesperson. You can pursue success systematically and effectively if you know what you must do. Let's evaluate first the personality traits of successful salespeople, I've grouped them into five groups with the most fundamental group success orientation at its center. To be a successful salesperson, you must cultivate the following traits. The first is success orientation, which means an internal drive to accomplish goals and stay attentive to those goals.

[00:04:37.570]
Drive and tenacity, which is about the persistence you need, persistence for the purpose of succeeding at whatever you've set out to achieve. Responsibility and accountability, which is about taking responsibility for everything in one's life and never succumbing to blame or to victimhood. Positivity and enthusiasm. And people skills, including listening to others, having an active interest in others and a genuine desire to help others. So let's break each of these down. A person with success orientation is internally driven to accomplish goals and can stay attentive to their goals, these focused individuals are more demanding of themselves than other people are of them, and they are very self-motivated.

[00:05:28.750]
They are able to organize themselves and they recognize what they need to do in order to achieve their goals. So they don't just set the goals, they actually make their personal roadmaps for achieving each goal in a salesperson.

[00:05:42.320]
Success orientation produces the best results when it is balanced with empathy. And we'll talk more about empathy and one of the slides coming up. When you balance success, orientation with empathy, you see a person who listens and identifies with the customer while keeping focused on their goals, someone who's able to translate their personal goals into solutions for the customer to achieve a win win. So what are the traits of a success oriented person? Well, they're focused. They're confident.

[00:06:14.210]
They're goal oriented, very eager to exceed expectations and patient without being complacent. So what you can do and this is true of the next five slides, a simple personal assessment, ask yourself, do I set goals for myself? Articulate my goals clearly and assign time like timelines to them, take responsibility for my own guidance and direction, possessed self-discipline and conscientiousness. Accept direction and guidance from my mentors and managers and take a long view of success. You were probably able to say yes to several of these, if not all of them, but if there's any one or two or whatever the number is of questions in this personal assessment to which you said no or sometimes or not very often, put it on a separate list right now, because this will become the list of personal development attributes that you want to work on.

[00:07:19.110]
Drive and tenacity are similar to optimism in that all these traits require persistence, but drive is specifically persistence for the purpose of succeeding and above all, winning. It's all about competitiveness when a person just hangs in there sweating and pushing and clenching their fists. This gridding appetite to succeed at his or her goal. That's when you see a powerful drive. These types of people are very self-motivated and self starters with clear ideas about what they want to achieve. A tenacious person is not afraid of hard work and they're not afraid of losing.

[00:07:58.890]
They believe that everything happens, that happens, whether it's negative or positive, can be used to improve themselves and to do even better in the future. Tenacious people do not believe that they are fragile. They believe that they are strong and that they'll ultimately succeed. And they devote energy and enthusiasm to the experience itself and not just to the ultimate rewards or conclusions. So what are the traits of a person with drive and tenacity? Well, they're disciplined, they're diligent about following up.

[00:08:29.020]
They're slow to become discouraged and they're excited about the hunt. So, again, you can do your personal assessment, ask yourself, do I enjoy competing? Do I constantly look for ways to measure myself against my peers? Do I possess leadership qualities? Do I assert my influence effectively? Do I want to win? And do I enjoy taking risks and learning from mistakes? Once again, anything that you don't have a resounding yes for. Put it on your developmentalist.

[00:09:06.810]
A person with a strong sense of responsibility does not place blame on other people when placed in difficult situations, we refer to this type of person as an agent. Agents get things done, and when obstacles arise, they accept any errors or omissions or stumbles that have occurred as their own. They own them. He or she does not get defensive. He doesn't try to blame the situation on circumstances or on other people. You would never hear an accountable person say, well, it's not my fault that consumer confidence declined because of the economy tanking.

[00:09:43.800]
They don't accept outside restrictions as a reason for not achieving. So the traits of a responsible and accountable person is that this is a person who is completely responsible for their own life and success, and they take responsibility for motivating themselves. They don't wait for others to motivate them. They look for better ways of doing things and they're very dedicated to personal growth. So here's your personal assessment. Do I possess an appropriate sense of urgency about getting my work done?

[00:10:15.490]
Do I feel responsible for all my results, good and bad? Do I anticipate consequences and evaluate alternatives before acting? Do I never make excuses? Do I take action when needed? And do I accept valid criticisms and suggestions for performance improvement with grace? Add your less fans are nose to your personal development list and then we'll move on. A salesperson with a healthy amount of optimism can be described as someone who is slow to learn helplessness, I just love that phrase, slow to learn helplessness.

[00:10:56.300]
This person has persistence, a trait that is critical in the sales world because of the frequency of rejections that salespeople experience in the face of failure. Some people throw their hands up in the air and resign themselves to the disappointment because they feel helpless to to change the situation. The optimistic person, however, sees themselves as being more resilient. They recognize that a customer refusal is not a rejection of them personally, but of the opportunity that they offered salespeople who possess a large amount of optimism like themselves.

[00:11:32.060]
And when they encounter failure, of course, they're disappointed, but it doesn't destroy their positive view of themselves. They consider themselves still in the running and able to turn the situation around. They believe that they can make things better by using a different approach or by trying again. So the traits of this person are that they're optimistic that they are more likely to look on the positive side than the negative side of every situation. They're enthusiastic and they're energetic.

[00:12:00.530]
So here's your personal assessment. Do I take initiative? Do I focus on opportunities and solutions rather than rejections and failures? Do I refuse to allow rejection on one call to affect my positivity on the next call? Do I persist in presenting my offer in spite of possible rejection? And do I view each rejection as the beginning of the next possibility? One of the things to keep in mind is that humans evolved from beings, they had to protect themselves constantly.

[00:12:35.770]
And so our brains are wired to focus much more on the negative than the positive. You know, if you were an early human and you were spend all your time looking at how beautiful the sky was and how soft the grass was and how cute your kids were, you might not notice that a lion was coming up behind you. So our brains are wired to focus on the negative. But just like we've grown out of appendixes, we've kind of grown out of that wiring, too.

[00:13:00.430]
You need to train your brain to look at the positive side of things because otherwise all you'll focus on is the negatives and lots of positives are happening. And finally, people skills, people skills involve understanding ourselves and moderating our responses to others, talking effectively, listening effectively, empathizing accurately, building relationships of trust and respect, and always seeking productive interactions with others. Of all the people skills, empathy is the most important to develop. Empathy is the ability to identify with customers, to feel what they're feeling, and to let your customers know that you respect them.

[00:13:46.010]
Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy involves feeling a certain loyalty to another individual. Empathy is more than just understanding their concerns from an objective standpoint. When you have true empathy for someone, you can gain their trust and establish rapport with them because you're actually able to see the situation from their point of view and. Relate to the way they feel about it. Empathy allows the salesperson to read customers to show concern and to clearly demonstrate their interest in providing a proper solution to the customer.

[00:14:24.820]
The second most important people skill and probably the most underrated of the people skills is listening. Excellent salespeople listen more than they speak. They ask open ended questions and they work really hard to gain an understanding of the customer's needs and then find and offer a solution. Great salespeople always ask their questions why they want something done, not just what they want done. So the traits of someone with excellent people skills is that they are truly interested in potential clients in their businesses and in their needs.

[00:14:59.770]
They're good listeners. They're good at putting thoughts and ideas clearly into words in the way that the other person can understand, and they're interested in achieving balanced and mutually satisfying outcomes. So here's your personal assessment. Do I listen more than I speak? Do I identify other people's feelings and frustrations objectively, even if I don't personally agree with them? Can I establish rapport easily? Can I put people at ease? Do I build relationships of trust and respect?

[00:15:32.480]
Do I look for win wins? And do I have a genuine desire to help others? So these are the personality traits of the most successful salespeople and really the most successful people. Remember that you may be born with certain personality aspects that are hard wired and such as the ones I mentioned before, introversion and extroversion. But most personality traits can be cultivated when you're conscious about who you want to be and what you want to achieve. So now that we've talked about the personality traits, let's talk about the behavioral traits of successful people, this is the whole list right here.

[00:16:09.490]
This is the list that shows up again and again and again in very successful sales people. So first they set their goals. They don't wait to be given goals by someone else. They set them. They own them. They monitor them. They're very goal driven. They don't think in terms of individual sales. They think in terms of building a business. They're always focused on the big picture. They ask high value questions, the questions that get a customer to start talking about their real needs and real desires and real experience.

[00:16:45.000]
They're very persistent. They know how to balance the persistence, but not become a pest, and for that we go back to the personnel or the personal skills, the people skills and the empathy. The more empathy you have, the better you'll be at recognizing when you're about to cross from being persistent to pest. They present the value of their product or service relative to their customers needs, so the customer is always seeing the value from their own perspective.

[00:17:16.870]
They keep in touch with their customers, they show personal interest, they engage at a level beyond just selling. They use their current clients to help them find new clients because your best client references are going to help you really leverage your growth. They always under promise and over deliver, and that doesn't mean making bloated commitments that are just way longer than you think so that you can always come in under the delivery, because if you tell someone it's going to take six weeks and they think it should only take four, you've left them disappointed until you deliver it in four.

[00:17:52.630]
So you have to make rational commitments and still come in early or lower or fast or whatever it is, but always under promise and over deliver the network, network, network. They invest in relationships and in their community and the community of buyers. Whatever it is, they find a way to build relationships within that network. They never see failed sales attempts as failures, but as investments in the overall process. And they never give up on unsold clients.

[00:18:30.780]
The most motivating thing I can think of is to know that I am completely in control of my own success. Nobody can hold me back. Nobody can keep me down. There will always be temporary setbacks and even big disappointments. But I can rise above them. When you pursue development of these personality traits and choose these specific behaviors, you will become more successful every single day. Selling is hard work, but it can have huge rewards, both monetarily and professionally.

[00:19:01.800]
This is true of most things in life, if you think about it, and it's really important to remember that it's not like selling is hard for you and it's easy for everybody else. Don't think for a minute that other sales people have it easier than you. The only real difference between successful salespeople and unsuccessful ones is the things you've learned today in this training. Thank you for joining me, and this has been another StrategyWerx training experience, I hope you will look for opportunities to watch or read or engage in our other training experiences, many of them free, a lot of them paid at strategywerx, dotcom and at YouTube.

[00:19:44.690]
Dotcom slash businesswerx.

This blog post is one in a series of eight articles that explore the most important characteristics of better leaders. These articles are linked to a Prezi visual presentation, which you can view here.

Be the Chief Customer Finder

If you think about it, the words Chief Executive Officer don't have a lot of practical meaning. But tell people you're the Chief Customer Finder, and they'll understand your role in an instant!

Unless you're a born salesperson, chances are good that sales are the first thing you were delighted to give up - maybe even with your first hire. You don't have to be the primary salesperson to be a better leader, but you do have to maintain a primary role in the finding and serving of customers.

What does this mean? To begin with, it means that you put emphasis on finding and training the best salespeople for your organization. You maintain close communication with them, and let them know their insight is vital to the growth and well-being of the company. You support them, motivate them, and take their advocacy for their customers very, very seriously.

It's a funny thing about that. Salespeople often suffer from shoot-the-messenger syndrome. After all, who is most likely to rub the shortcomings of your beloved company in your nose? The customers. And who are those customers entrusting with that information? Your sales people. Don't shoot the messenger!

Seek Personal Contact with Customers and Potential Customers

Look for opportunities to spend time with your customers - even if you're not directly involved in serving them. Take them out for a meal, or to an entertainment event, or just call them on the phone to ask "how are we doing?" Your customers will tell you things about your company (and possibly your competitors!) that they wouldn't think to tell your staff.

Help Integrate Sales and Marketing

Sales and Marketing are two of the most co-dependent departments of any company, yet the larger a company gets, the more likely the two departments are to be at odds with one another. Be the integrator of the two departments. Help them understand each other and their interdependence.  Keeping communication open and flowing (and competition between them to the merest whisper) between Sales and Marketing is one of the most important things you can do to ensure the right things happen to find new customers.

And, OK, Keep Selling

You don't have to be the primary salesperson for your company, but you never get to stop selling.  After all, if you can't target the right customer, listen to his needs, and tell the story of how you can meet those needs in a compelling way, how can you expect more from the rest of your organization?  Always keep your sales skills sharp and effective, because becoming a better leader means taking the lead on representing your organization's compelling benefit and attributes.

I hope you're enjoying this series on becoming a Better Leader! Stay tuned for the next installment in a day or two.

We all know that responsive is good. Responsive means your spouse is happier than most spouses. Responsive means that your teenager is capable of doing what you ask of him. Responsive means the drugs are working.  Responsive is good.

Especially when  it comes to websites.

In February 2015 Google announced that it would change its search algorithm to give extra points to websites that proved to be mobile friendly.  What does that mean? A mobile friendly site is a site that:

1. Does not use Flash or other software that does not work well on mobile devices
2. Uses text that can be read without zooming
3. Sizes the content on the screen so users don't have to scroll horizontally or vertically to see it
4. Places links far enough apart so the correct link can be easily tapped - even with large fingers (or provides an automatic zoom feature to bring the link up for verification).

Google's Day of Mobile Readiness came and went on April 21, 2015, and guess what? Companies that previously enjoyed high search engine visibility - but which did not update their sites to be responsive - have dropped precipitously since that time.

Perhaps you figured you had other, more pressing business concerns to invest in. Perhaps you hate spending money on marketing. Perhaps your previous experience with website design left you with a bad taste in your mouth. But none of that matters, because mobile website traffic is growing at 3.5% per month across all sectors and industries, and mobile search will surpass desktop searches this year. So even if Google hadn't changed their search algorithm in April, consumers and B-to-B customers are already voting with their smartphones.

When is the last time you even looked at your website from your smartphone or tablet? If you have to scroll, pinch & pull, or squint to view your website, it's not mobile friendly. But don't take my word for it - take Google's. They've produced a Mobile Friendly Test that you can use for free. Just visit this site, enter your domain name, and watch the analyzer do its work. Go ahead and test it now.

If your website came back with a "mobile friendly" result, congratulations! Keep up the good work of keeping up with change on the internet. If you received a "not ready" result, it's time to make some changes.

There are essentially three different ways to make your website mobile responsive. The first (and oldest) approach is to offer a mobile version of your website, perhaps with the domain type of .mobi. This isn't a great option. It creates double-work for you and your staff, and it means that your SEO results get diluted across two domains. If your website provider suggests this, tell him no. The only person who will make more money doing this is him.

The next approach is something called Dynamic Serving. Think of it as a device sniffer. Someone calls up your website, the Dynamic Services sniff out what device is being used, and delivers the correct version. This approach tends to have a high error rate, and with devices changing constantly, it must be updated all the time. Like the previous option, tell your development partner no. This approach ultimately has a high cost-of-ownership.

The one approach you should use is a Responsive Design for your website. Responsive Design means you create and maintain one website. How does it work? Well, picture your website as a grid - which is how most websites are programmed. Here is an example of a grid from a website:

 Until fairly recently, these grids were always static, which means that the elements were in a fixed position to one another.  If you view a static grid website from a mobile phone, you will have to scroll to the right if you want to go from the logo to the header content.

In a responsive website, the grid elements are flexible. On a desktop, the grid elements will appear as in the drawing. On a smartphone, the elements will shuffle and become a vertical stack. You can even decide that some elements will only be visible when viewed from a desktop or tablet, and create specific alternative elements that show only on mobile phones.

If your site isn't mobile ready, it's critical that you invest in updating it as soon as possible. It is next-to-impossible to compete in the current business climate without a good website, and consumers increasingly disregard businesses that are falling behind on the digital marketing front. Until you do, Google will penalize you in their search, though you can earn your search position back once you update your site. And don't think this is just affecting you in Google. The only way a search engine makes money is if the people using it believe they get good search results. Being sent off to a website that offers a bad user experience reflects poorly on the search engine, so all the search engines - Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc. - are highly aware of the fact that mobile search is where consumers are driving the internet.

If your site is built on a hosted engine like Shopify or Etsy, you are already covered. If you have a stand-alone site, move away from custom website design if you can. Using a website platform that is constantly being updated (think WordPress, Joomla, or Magento) is a far superior approach that will keep you up-to-date and save you money in the near and long-term.

Modernizing your website may seem daunting, but it's a good thing. A responsive website will better meet the needs of your customers, which means you will ultimately experience more foot traffic, website sales, and loyalty. Sure, the Mobile Bandwagon may have just passed you by, but with a bit of an effort you can catch up again.

Most business owners approach their P&L (profit & loss statement, often called operating statement) as a zero sum game. They want to know where they can trim spending to have more money left at the end of the month.

I call this the getting-blood-from-a-stone approach. Because for most small business owners, there just isn't enough cash to begin with, and moving the money around isn't going to change much.

I evaluate as many as 10 P&Ls each week for small business owners desperate for different results. And 95 times out of 100 my primary advice is, "Sell more," which is not what people want to hear.

A big part of the problem with increasing sales is that most business owners don't really understand what selling is. So let's start with what it is not:

• Selling is not PR or a press kit.
• Selling is not a Facebook page that posts pictures of new products and comments or discussion about them.
• Selling is not a Twitter feed
• Selling is not an national ad - not even if you spent $80,000 for the placement.
• Selling is not training

All those things are important, and they certainly support the selling function, but they have their own purposes to fulfill. Selling is the process of understanding what a customer needs, then helping her see a solution to her needs through something you can provide. A good sales effort tells the customer what to decide, because most people (and therefore most buyers) have a hard time making decisions.

One of my favorite examples of good selling without a salesperson present comes home once each year with school-age children. It's the school pictures order form. The bulk of that promotional device shows you how to buy.

• Package A has two 8"X10"s, four 5"X7"s, eight over-sized wallets, and 16 mini-wallets
• Package B has one 8"X10", three 5"X7"s, eight over-sized wallets, and 8 mini-wallets.
• After describing the remaining packages C through F, there is a list of the "add-on" items you can buy to increase your number of 8"X10"s, 5"X7"s, other sizes, CD disks with digital images, etc.

If you have ever experienced an end consumer or potential dealer saying they love your product but then walking away, you have seen what happens when someone can make the decision that they want to buy but can't progress to the decisions of what to buy or how to buy.  The buyer often doesn't understand himself why he is walking away - he may think he's making sure there isn't something better out there, he may think he needs to 'think about it', he may think he needs to consult his cash-flow, but all of that is short-hand for the underlying problem that he doesn't know how to make a decision he feels good about.

That's why Facebook, Twitter, PR kits, and training sessions are not selling. Selling is the thing that will tell the customer how to make a decision he feels good about. Selling is interactive, selling tailors itself to the needs of each potential customer, selling makes solutions obvious and achievable.

It's time for you to remove yourself from the zero sum game of cost-cutting and austerity. Instead, sit down and re-imagine what selling should be for your products (or services) and your target customers.

Then get out there and sell. It's 95% sure to solve the cash problems you face.

One of the challenges with relying on email marketing is that so many people hate receiving email. When you consider just how much SPAM is flying around these days, it’s not hard to understand why. Most of us work hard to keep our email communications interesting and relevant, and we watch our mail frequency. But even the most careful email senders ran into difficulty sending email during the months of October – December, 2021.

This is because the email services have implemented “rate-limiting policies.” You can expect email delivery and open rates to go down and bounce rates to go up. Here’s what we know so far:

The Big 5 Are All Experimenting with Rate-Limiting

• Yahoo
• AOL
• Google
• Microsoft
• Apple

They have decided to rate-limit all mass marketing emails from ANY large sender of mass emails:

• Constant Contact
• Active Campaign
• Keap/Infusionsoft
• Salesforce
• Mailchimp
• Klaviyo
• Etc.

Why Are They Rate-Limiting?

They want to reduce and prevent spam and mass-marketing emails coming into their systems. Email limiting used to be based on blacklists, wherein a domain could be blacklisted for sending too much unsolicited or SPAM email. The new rate-limiting policies are not based on blacklists. Instead, this was a decision made by the Big 5 companies themselves. It’s not just bad actors being limited anymore.

Yahoo was the first to implement rate-limiting. If you sent an email in the early autumn of 2021 and suddenly saw a bounce rate of 31% or higher, this was the reason why. Yahoo was pleased with the massive reduction in mass-marketing and spam emails, and now the other companies are copying their rate-limiting policy. As of the end of December, bounce rates were generally down to the 13% range, but that’s still very high compared with the 2% - 5% bounce rates that were the norm before these new policies were implemented.

So How Many Email Can You Send?

Single emails will almost certainly be allowed through without rate-limiting. But any email broadcast is at risk. It all depends on how the individual companies' receiving policies are set, and so far at least, the Big 5 aren’t publishing those policies.

If you’re a WerxMarketing customer, you’ve already been transitioning to more and more drip-style email, and that’s a good thing. Using marketing automation to send targeted messages to specific customers enjoys higher response rates overall, tends to have experience better response rates, and will not trigger the email system receiving policies the same way that broadcasts do.

Broadcast Time Spread

Yahoo has shared some details of their rate-limiting policy. At Yahoo, mass-marketing emails sent from from one marketing account (Constant Contact or Keap for example) attached to your domain will be watched over a 12 hour period by Yahoo. If you send two broadcasts within 12 hours, they will be counted cumulatively, and will be rate-limited. The watch time frames for other email services are still unknown.

How This Affects Your Marketing

Depending on the policy of each company, this could mean significant delay in the delivery of your email, or even non-delivery in some cases.

Here’s how we think it will work (“think,” because nobody is sharing their policy. This is based on monitoring email sends and what little information we can glean through online research). It appears that a high percentage of emails sent through broadcasts will be “soft bounced,” which means they aren’t turned off for future email campaigns in your marketing system, but that the recipient will not receive the email for that particular broadcast.

It’s also possible that an entire broadcast could be blocked by the receiving mail server. In that case, the receiving mail server may request the sending mail server to send the (broadcast) emails again. This would likely be handled entirely at the server level, and could lead to delays in your email delivery. In these cases, the email services are interested in determining if the sending mail server was a mass spam source, and the assumption is that if it is, they most likely will not try sending again. On the other hand, a legitimate mail server will try sending again (up to a certain number of times / over a certain time period). So on the second send attempt the email may get through. Getting through still doesn’t mean the email won’t be classified as junk/bulk but at least the client will receive the email somewhere.

As mentioned above, so far only Yahoo has been willing to communicate with the marketing services about what is going on and why. Apple has always had a strict delivery limitation on mass emails, so we may not notice much change to Apple recipients. Microsoft is currently implementing the rate limiting in a light way but will almost certainly implement more fully soon based on what we’ve learned from people in conversation with them. Google also appears to be implementing a similar rate-limiting policy, which is consistent with their migration toward more privacy and less spam in general on the internet.

What Can You Do?

Here are a few ideas that may work, based on the limited information we have so far.

1. Strongly encourage all your email recipients to whitelist your domain. There’s no guarantee that this will help, but it certainly can’t hurt.
2. Look into making your email more constant, less broadcast-y, by using drip and automation techniques. This has other marketing benefits as well, but it does require campaign planning and list clean-up and management to implement.
3. You could try timing broadcasts to be sent 12-24 hours ahead of when they will need to be received. If you’re good about sending messages to be delivered during the “most likely to be opened window,” this will feel like a step backward. But getting delivered at a less-than-optimal time is better than not getting delivered at all (or late).
4. Review your data to see how much delivery delay is made by each of the Big 5 providers, which will help you determine the lead times needed for broadcasts. Ask for feedback from cooperative customers with some test sends. Some deliveries will go through without rate-limiting and some will be rate-limited, and there’s no way to anticipate or know which condition you are sending email into.
5. Final sale, webinar reminders, and other timely messages may not be effective. This is another area to test and monitor. Consider using text messaging for time-sensitive messaging. Or consider having an alternate service just to send time-sensitive emails.
6. Ask your domain/IT support to increase the strictness of our domain DNS SPF record. Most SPF records are set to “loose” by default. Apple apparently likes to see strict settings on domain email related records regardless of whether an email was sent as part of a broadcast or individually.
7. Ask your marketing service (Constant Contact, MailChimp, Keap, etc.) about their list and email collection policies. If your emails are sent by a service that mass distributes a lot of SPAM email for other customers due to loose policies, rate-limiting policies that punish your marketing service will hurt you too, no matter how careful you are with your lists.

This isn’t the best news. 2021 saw an increase in the cost of reaching customers through advertising, and now email efficacy is going down. But this is the nature of digital marketing. The various service providers and technologies keep evolving, and we must stay on top of the changes and make smart evolutionary changes of our own.

The good news is that customers are happier when they receive less SPAM, and they’re happiest when they receive email that is interesting, relevant, warm, witty, and feels very personal. If you work toward delivering on those characteristics, you’re likely to stay out of the rate-limiting filters too. So let’s focus on doing better marketing, and everybody wins.

Update 5/6/2015 - you can now download an update of this article and a 24-page tradeshow planner free when you sign up for our email list.

I’ve worked a lot of trade shows. Until 2007, I exhibited at 3-4 major trade events per year for 30 years, most of them for at least a week each. I’ve worked trade shows in the apparel, electronics, publishing, video, and jewelry industries. Since 2007 I’ve worked just as many trade shows, but it’s been on the other side of the exhibit – walking aisles, watching exhibitors, and finding new sources. All that time, measured in foot-years, has given me important insights about what to expect from and how to work a trade show. I teach these concepts a few times a year in seminars, but here are a few of the main take-aways for those of you frantically preparing for the next event.

Is there a Return on Investment for Trade Shows?

Yes, but to be successful you need to understand what trade shows are good at.

Tradeshows are good at providing exhibitors with qualified leads. That is the trade show’s most important function.

The second most important function of trade shows is to create a personal connection between a company and its qualified leads. This personal connection provides a more tangible foundation for marketing and sales follow-up.

The third most important function of trade shows is on-site sales.

That third bullet may surprise you. Most exhibitors measure their trade-show success by at-show sales. Some of you remember to add on immediately-after-the-show sales as a success metric. But trade shows aren’t always a great place to engage in the sales cycle – particularly if your sales cycle requires a certain amount of trust-building, which takes time.

Remember that the primary goal of buyers at trade shows is to take in as much information as they possibly can in a condensed time-frame. The larger the show, the greater the pressure to keep moving. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make appointments and sit down and write orders. It just means that there is even more value to be had at trade shows if you know how to work them. Here are 10 important pointers for how to get even more out of your trade show experience.

1. Set lead goals and daily targets. You probably already set sales goals, so I don’t need to tell you that. But have you set lead goals? Have you identified how many new potential customers you want to make even brief contact with, contact sufficient to yield their contact information for future marketing efforts? Head into every trade show with a lead goal. Make it a contest among your staff and award a prize to the person who captures the most qualified leads. Have a tracking system in place, and measure your lead-collecting success each day relative to your goal.
   
   
2. Be more focused in your pre-show and at-show promotions. Many companies offer a small gift to everyone who comes by their booth. Consider shifting some of that budget to a special gift available only to your most valuable prospects and buyers. Let them know that you have a gift for them, tell them what it is, and make sure they know they must visit your booth to receive it. Even if you only spend a few minutes with each customer and prospect on your high-value list, those few minutes will reinforce your face, your brand image, and your relationship in that person’s mind.
   
   
3. Be specific in your information gathering. Do you know which customer information helps you most when trying to sell to them later? If you don’t, think about it now! If you’ve taken my strategy course you already know about the Critical Customer Questions that matter to your brand. If you don’t, here’s a quick exercise: Identify the characteristics that are common among your top 20% performing customers. Are they in particular geographic zones? Do they serve particular types of customers? Do they share similar needs? Once you identify those characteristics, frame questions around them. These are the questions you should slip into conversation with your trade show visitors. This will help you separate the cool leads from the hot ones. 
   
   
4. Be interested! Start by asking questions rather than immediately showing your product. Draw customers in by showing interest in them. Not only will you have a greater impact on your visitors, but you will also be able to quickly identify those who are not viable leads.
   
   
5. Be interesting! Unlike other marketing media, trade shows offer you a face-to-face experience with prospects. Learn to use this to your advantage! Consider offering demonstrations, experiences, stories, or other captivating elements that will engage the senses and draw your prospects in. Standing there and smiling is lovely, but rarely sufficient.
   
   
6. Work on your trade show skills. The most successful lead-gatherers at trade shows are the most sophisticated sales people. This doesn’t happen by accident – it takes practice. Prepare in advance the types of open-ended questions most likely to engage a walk-by or to keep a visitor in conversation for a few moments longer. Commit your line details and your prices to memory (make sure your show staff is equally trained). Role-playing builds muscle memory, and you want even your fist hour to be productive. Practice your trade show sales technique with a friend before the show to hit the ground running. Trade show success requires that you be able to gather information quickly and effectively, so do your trade show training.
   
   
7. Master Trade Show Graphics. I walk several jewelry shows each year and every booth features pictures of . . . wait for it . . . jewelry. Well, yes, of course you sell jewelry. You’re at a jewelry show. While some jewelry is clearly more differentiated than others, product pictures alone are insufficient to draw trade show attention. Trade show attendees are notorious for glazing over quickly. Make sure your trade show graphics include a few critical bullet points of information, or a question, or a statement; anything that quickly and clearly spells out your differentiation. Use your booth space as a marketing vehicle, not as a decoration.
   
   
8. Manage your image. Standing, smiling, out front when possible, greeting, and gathering are important trade show behaviors. In all my years of working trade shows from inside the booth I had one rule: No booth staff sits. Ever. Is it difficult? Yes, it’s definitely difficult. Is it worth it? Yes, for both the booth staff and the customers. Trade show days are long and even physically painful. If you have ever sat down at 2:30 in the afternoon – with three-and-a-half hours to go before the end of the day – you know that your energy crashes the moment you sit. This means the rest of the day is even more painful for you, and you lose energetic engagement with the customers during those last hours. You probably spent a lot of money to be at that show. Don’t sit down 20 feet from the finish line.
   
   
9. Have a data plan. You need tools – either at the booth or at your office – for managing the data you gather. Think about them ahead of time. Customer ran out of business cards? Snap a picture of their last one. Snap a picture of a badge and compare it later to the attendee report the show provides. Even better, snap these images in Evernote, where you can also add notes about your conversation or observations. Best – make voice notes in Evernote throughout the day. It’s faster than typing, you can keep your eyes out on the attendees, you’ll have less risk of forgetting an important insight, and you’ll have a treasure-trove of valuable data to mine when you return to your office.
   
   
10. Analyze your leads every night. Do this before you head out for dinner and drinks. Why? Because by tomorrow morning you’ll have forgotten all those conversations. It’s best to do this throughout the day – making notes about people you spoke with, their answers to your questions, and your observations about the interaction. But in addition to real-time note taking (and sometimes we know that’s just impossible), go over your lists of leads each evening and make any additional notes you can remember. You won’t remember everything, but you’ll have a lot better data than if you skipped this step.

When you return home from your trade event, begin the follow-up activity immediately. Sort your leads into ‘hot’, ‘warm’, and ‘cold’ categories. Schedule time in the next week to call the hot leads. Put the cold leads into your marketing database for some priming before you try pursuing those sales more actively.

If you follow these steps, you’ll see your RTS metric (return-on-trade-show) increase dramatically. And that’s good, because after aging eight or nine foot-years in a single week, you deserve the success.

One of the most important tasks of a marketer is to take the company's secret sauce - its special blend of products, services, and personality - and find the customers to whom it matters most. This is the work of marketing relevance. And we have better tools than ever to do this work with social media, email marketing, and website analysis.

Which is how I found the modern world's newest form of rejection. The Unsubscribe.

That unsubscribe is a killer, isn't it? Rejection-in-an-email. I used to catch my breath a little bit every time it happened to me. But that's when I realized that the unsubscriber is doing me a favor. He (or she) is giving me notice that he doesn't find my product, service, message, or method of reaching him to be relevant. He is opting out. And rather than seeing it as a rejection, I now recognize it for what it really is: the opportunity to not waste my precious resources talking to the wrong people.

The unsubscriber is an honest soul. He doesn't want something, and he tells you so. How many people receive email after email from a company and simply delete it without reading it? The company is left with the impression that they have an interested, albeit slow-to-engage, person on the marketing list. The unsubscriber says "stop including me in your thinking! My habits and responses (or lack thereof) have absolutely nothing to teach you about your messages, products and services!"

Now I don't let it get to me when someone unsubscribes. I send them a silent thank you and continue building my marketing lists, searching for those who find my business's secret sauce an irresistible addition to their business diet. The search for marketing relevance is filled with unsubscribes and SPAM complaints (really? Like, I just met you at a trade show, you gave me your business card and told me to let you know when we were offering another class, I send you an email to let you know the schedule, and you make a SPAM complaint??). But that's OK. Because once those people are off the bus, I can focus my time and energy on the ones who stay on board for the ride.

Selling is hard. So hard, that unless you know some facts about it, you might just think you're terrible at it! It may be comforting to you to know that the struggles in selling are real and universal. The good news? Once you understand these facts about the sales cycle, your confidence will increase and so will your selling success.   To see a full-size version of the infographic, click here.

* Update 2022: This article was written in 2014, and while the information in the following post is still completely valid, one significant thing has changed. The emergence of frictionless, in-app purchasing on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest and TikTok has made social media channels an extension of website offerings in a much more seamless way. The sale of under $500 items is much more likely to be successful because of the higher likelihood of the purchaser being willing to make an instant purchasing decision (and therefore, the lower the price the higher the close rate). But even luxury goods are experiencing higher sales on social channels than ever before. It's still a numbers game. It's definitely expensive to compete, because paid advertising for social catalogs is almost a requirement at this point. But to say selling on social channels is unlikely, as was true in 2014, is no longer true today.

Social Media Sales are Secondary. Prospecting and Awareness Building are Primary

Sure, in the beginning there was tremendous excitement about how social media would level the playing field for small businesses. It was free, and it was the answer to small business sales.

Only it wasn't. And it isn't.

So when I see quotes that speak to analyzing the success of your social media efforts based on the number of sales, I cringe.  Because the implication that social selling is somehow less expensive or easier than traditional media, is simply incorrect.

Social Media Should be Analyzed like Display Advertising

What is exciting about social media is that if you throw a lot of elbow grease at it, you can create a very large social media following. On Twitter, this means at least 10,000 followers and on Facebook this means at least 5,000 followers. Those aren't goals - those are minimum standards necessary to compete.

Before social media, only large companies could afford to run display advertising in consumer magazines and commercials on television with sufficient coverage to create genuine consumer awareness. But no company ever claimed that it knew how many sales were driven directly by its Super Bowl commercial. Why? Because advertising isn't measured in that manner (see this article in AdAge about the way Super Bowl ads are measured and thought about).

Then Why Advertise?

It is fairly common for companies to complain that they can never tell if their advertising is working. As a result, many small business owners refuse to advertise. This is unfortunate, because the failure to advertise equates to a failure to go fishing for new customers - which is called prospecting.  One way or the other, all businesses must look for new customers.

We do know that companies and products with higher visibility and industry/consumer awareness have higher sales. This is one of the longest studied and benchmarked aspects of the advertising/marketing industries over many decades. Social media appears to have a similar effect as display advertising in magazines and on TV - it makes a brand or a product more familiar, so people are more likely to buy when an offer occurs. But just as when an advertiser runs an ad on TV the phones don't automatically start ringing, when you add a buy link on Facebook the clicks don't necessarily happen either. So what do we measure?

• We monitor relative increase in consumer awareness to the relative increases in sales.
• We measure the number of new prospects per week.
• We measure the effectiveness of sales efforts to those prospects by measuring:
  • Percentage of quality prospects
  • Average number of contacts required to convert prospects to customers
  • Time lapse between acquiring prospects and converting them

If your prospecting efforts improve when using Social Media, then Social Media is working for you. These are just the metrics for monitoring prospecting success on Social Media. There are many other metrics for analyzing Social Media success, but that's a different article.

*Update 2022: We can measure the direct purchasing behaviors of social sales, from demographics to transaction details.

Creating Emotional Connection

Social Media has a secondary benefit which has a cousin in the display advertising world. First, think about how feel-good commercials make you feel about a brand. When Coca-Cola sings about inclusiveness, when the Ford spokesman acts like your next-door neighbor, when Flo at Progressive Insurance makes us laugh, we develop warm feelings for the brand.  This is a very specific advertising method designed to improve consumer brand engagement through an emotional connection.

Social media has an even more tangible engagement effect, because you can improve brand engagement with an emotional connection built on actual, authentic engagement. It requires commitment, but it works.

It's About the Sales Cycle, not the Sale

Remember how the Sales Cycle works?

1. Prospecting: Get prospects' attention, capture leads, establish your credibility as a brand.
2. Cultivating: Bond with your prospects, sort the more interested and likely from the less interested and likely, and create desire for your products.
3. Servicing: Close the sale, service customers, and deepen customer relationships
4. Rinse, Repeat (you will likely lose 14% of your customers each year, so this process never ends).

Just as it can take many weeks or even months for a display advertising campaign to pay off in actual awareness, so does it take many months and even years for a Social Media strategy to pay off in actual awareness. Luckily for small business owners, the economics of organic (unpaid) social media are easier on the budget.

So remember: You don't have to do every social media channel or paid social ads. But you must market and promote and seek new prospects on a constant basis, and the economics of prospecting on Social Media are fairly advantageous for small business. If you do decide to use paid social media as part of your advertising and marketing strategy, don't think you can measure its effectiveness solely based on direct sales. That will lead to disappointment and discontinuation of a medium that - if you're using it correctly - is providing important - and measurable - benefits for the entire sales cycle.

You know the saying No Pain, No Gain, but here's a little different way to look at it.  I have been reviewing/refining 2014 sales & marketing strategy for several clients yesterday and today, and the pain or gain aspect of market planning is really resonating with me right now.

One thing we understand about selling (and therefore, marketing) is that every purchase someone makes is either to eliminate a pain or to create a gain. If you can resonate with the potential buyers' emotions associated with either eliminating pain or experiencing gain  (or both) you can use that in your marketing messages, images, and strategies.

The way to figure out what pain you can eliminate is to ask. Just ask your customers for the list of things they are frustrated with relative to what you have to sell. Then figure out a way to express what you have to sell as a solution to a pain.

The gain aspect can be a bit more challenging to define. For many purchases, the gain is simply that it makes the buyer feel better. Savvy marketers dig in and try to understand why and how the product makes them feel better. They also look for ways to make the experience of buying the product feel like a gain - not just the purchased item itself. When selling business-to-business the gain is often outside the actual product. The gain may be in the services, brand cache, terms, or other support you can provide.

What pain are you alleviating, or what gain are you providing, with the product you sell? Think about it for your business!

It's not what you sell . . . it's how you sell it

This question came to our StrategyWerx Facebook page this week:

I opened my business a year ago and I'm really proud of my work. I have done everything myself - website, marketing - but I know something is missing and I don't know what? I know my business is growing but I want more and faster but I don't have the budget. I need like a little advice.

Hey – I love getting paid for advice, but before you spend any consulting dollars, let’s make sure you have covered all your basics.

This small business owner asking this question is in the service industry, and the advice offered here is suitable for any small business with a physical presence in a community. If your business has a local retail component and a wholesale component, much of the advice will apply as well. So let’s get started!

Your Goals

Make sure you have set a clear goal for three things:

• Total revenue
• Total customers
• Revenue per customer

One or two of these three goals is insufficient. In order to reach your revenue goal (which is typically the only goal new business owners set), you'll need to manage two metrics carefully: the number of new customers you acquire and the amount of revenue you are generating from each customer.

Once you have set these three goals, break them down by month for the next 12 months. Then by week! Why? Because monitoring monthly lets too much time go by. What you want to do is measure your progress on each goal on a daily and weekly basis. Start each morning focused on how many new customers you plan to acquire that day and how many sales you plan to make each day.

Special note here to service providers. You probably think in terms of orders, which leads to waiting for the phone to ring. Don’t wait! Check in with customers to see if they need your service. Make sure you are thinking in terms of selling and not just in terms of taking orders – it will transform your business!

Your Promotion

You must set aside time and dollars to promote your new business. Here’s a checklist of things to do and media to consider:

• Create your ads. That’s right – start this process before you contract with any advertiser or print a single postcard. Too often small business owners find an opportunity to run an ad, and they just slap something together to meet the deadline. Great promotion starts with great messages and graphics. Here’s your to-do list:

Work with an advertising professional (unless you are one). This person will help you create messages and images that effectively convey your brand and product or service offering.

Create two or three strong messages. Do all at the same time. Each message should be an excellent representation of your brand and value proposition. What does that mean? It means that when someone reads any one of your messages, they will say, “Yes! I know what they do and how they apply to me!”

Using those two or three messages, create an ad for each. Your goal is for the ads to look like a set, like a grouping that goes together. Colors, graphics, and voice should be entirely consistent. Think of a stylish person dressed up in three different outfits. Most people don’t go from grunge to preppy to faddish – they maintain a certain look even though the outfits themselves change. Your ads must too.

Once you have three ads that you are thrilled with, have them prepared in two different formats – a square format and a rectangular format. This will give you layout direction, because layouts can change dramatically when you change the geometry of an ad.

Finally, and this is very important, get the original art files that were used to create those ads. You paid for their creation, and you need all the original art. It will likely be in an Adobe AI or PSD format. Don’t settle for a “picture” of your ad (like a JPG, TIFF, or PNG). Get the artwork. Why? Because in some cases you can get layout assistance from the media you are advertising in, and sending them a copy of the art file is the best way to do it. Or at some point you may want to work with a different graphic designer, and you don’t want to pay them to start from scratch. Always ask for your original art files.

• Business Card. Your business card is a marketing device, and you should hand one to every person you encounter who is a reasonable target for your business (or who serves/knows reasonable targets of your business). Think of your business card as a mini-postcard. Make sure one side has your contact information – including an email address and website (and forget the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. email address! Your email address needs to be personal in order to be effective. Nobody wants to send email to a generic recipient). The other side should be one of your messages – clear, visually appealing, and immediately motivating.

• • Local Newspaper. Yes, people still read the newspaper, and advertising rates in most markets are extremely reasonable. The trick is to place an ad that’s large enough to be noticeable on the page, in a section of the paper that’s most likely to be read. If your paper has a local news or arts & entertainment section, these tend to get good readership because that information is not as readily available on the web, and their insertion rates tend to be a bit lower than the main section.

• • Fliers. Put fliers everywhere you think your target customers may be shopping or visiting. Of course, fliers require permission from local governments or from private property owners, so take care of the details. Then, think about what you have to offer. Want to flier cars in a grocery store parking lot? Ask the grocery store if they will give permission in exchange for you putting their sale fliers in your packages or at your store in exchange. A less-annoying option for slightly more expense is a little car-handle door hanger. Of course, there’s no guarantee that some angry guy with a Mercedes won’t throw a fit, but don’t let that objection keep you from doing a legitimate flier program. Fliers have a very high ROI, so make sure your activity is legitimate and go take a walk.

• • Postcards. Postcards are terrific for both mailing and handing out. I generally prefer postcards to brochures. People are very likely to read a postcard – particularly if it’s visually interesting and professionally printed. A brochure often gets dropped in a purse, only to be retrieved later with the crumpled tissues and gum wrappers. Your goal is to get that postcard back out of the purse and onto the desk, refrigerator, handed to the secretary, or saved in the menu drawer of your recipient.

• • Social Media. Do not put your entire promotional fate in the hands of social media. You do need to use social media, but you don’t need to use every channel, nor do you use them all the same way. Social Media is a big topic. If you want to explore it in greater depth, I offer a video called “Change the Way You Think about Social Media.” 

• • Radio. Radio is still a terrific medium that is affordable in most markets. Even better, radio tends to be pretty targeted. Work with a media specialist in your market to determine the best station or mix of stations for your desired customers. Most radio stations will offer you assistance with writing your spot. Show them your advertising and core messages and work together to create something compelling.

• • Yelp. If you haven’t already, claim or add your business on Yelp (https://biz.yelp.com). Ask your customers to please go and review you on Yelp. Yes, we’ve all read articles about bad experiences with bad reviews, but Yelp has a huge following and the news stories about negative reviews are overblown. Consumers have grown to trust Yelp, so get out there, earn your great reviews and start winning some new customers.

• • Website: Make sure your website is up-to-date, professional, and filled with the kind of information that helps you gain trust: local public relations reports, testimonials from happy customers, specific information about who you are and where you are located. A website is an absolute necessity today, and customers judge you by the quality of your presentation. Are you thinking, “but I’m a retail store! They just need to come in anyway!” No matter. Today’s consumer wants to research you first on the web. Your website is now your first, most important impression, so manage it. Make sure you have an email opt-in prominently featured on your website! Because . . .

• • Email Marketing. Email marketing continues to offer one of the highest ROIs in advertising and promotion. Yes, there’s a lot of SPAM out there, but there are also many legitimate, thoughtful business owners sending out information via email that is both wanted by and read by their target audience. Set up a database for managing customer contact information (or better yet, a CRM for managing all your customer data), and use email thoughtfully and effectively to build your business.

• • Network network network! Join the local chamber of commerce, join a women/Latino/African Americans/under 40/or other special-interest-in-business group, a professional group, or a community service club. Get out there and meet people. Yes, it’s time-consuming, but the best way to become known locally is to get to know other business owners and community leaders. (Entrepreneur Magazine offers great advice for business networking in this article - http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/58210) .

• • Collaborative Marketing. Consider other businesses in your area that serve the customers you serve. Approach business owners and, when you find one that is receptive, brainstorm ways to promote each-other’s business – it’s a win/win.

• • Referral Incentives. Don’t just hope for referrals – motivate them! This calls for its own special handout (a postcard is good . . .) with details about what you offer when you get a referral. Offer a discount, points, or a small gift – just make it clear and compelling, and make the rewards immediate.

Did you notice that I said to reward when you get a referral - not just when you make a sale? You want to generate as many prospects as you can in order to eventually close new customers. 

• • Billboard Advertising. Billboards can be very effective – particularly for those who come up with an interesting and memorable message that can be absorbed while driving past at 60 mph.

• • Car Magnets. Yes, I’m serious. For any business category but luxury (where this would backfire, pardon the pun), a promotion on your car tells a story everywhere you drive. Make sure your message can be absorbed in about 1 second though – because that’s all the time you may have!

• • Phone Calls. Don’t be afraid to jump on that phone and promote your business! Nobody likes getting cold calls – and I don’t personally think they’re very effective unless you have a target audience of millions and a response rate of 1% will be meaningful. But call interested prospects and touch base with your customers. A phone call is one of the most personal ways to reach out and sell.

Now here’s the tricky part: You need to be doing (nearly) all these things, all the time. The process of building business awareness is slow, and you must layer on as many impressions as you can in as many places as your target customers are likely to see or hear them.Once you’re doing a bang-up job of promoting your business in these ways, you can consider other things, such as:

Google Ad Words

Starting a Blog

Creating a Groupon

Participating in a trade show

Or even . . . hiring a consultant

The majority of small business failures come down to a lack of sales related to lack of exposure. When people tell me they want to start a business, the first thing I ask is “what’s your sales and marketing plan?” They’re surprised, because they expect me to ask “what are you going to sell?”

Hey. We live in a world where Pet Rocks were once a phenomena. It’s not really about what you sell. It’s all about how you sell it.

Chatty Challenged

A long time ago I had a neighbor named Nancy, and she had a daughter named Rebecca. Rebecca was a lovely girl; 12 years old, bright, funny, and sincere. She was also an only child, and had been raised by smitten parents who believed that everything Rebecca said was publication-worthy. One evening I hosted a dinner party and invited my neighbors, including Rebecca. The evening was a disaster.

Rebecca dominated the entire dinner with her 12-year-old conversation. Her parents had no skills (or interest, apparently) for redirecting her, and Rebecca was so unaccustomed to being redirected that the gentle clues the rest of the party gave her went unnoticed.

I knew better than to point out to Nancy her daughter's faux pas, because that wasn't the sort of thing Nancy wanted to hear. But a few days later, as I sipped a cup of coffee and read the paper at our corner coffee shop, Rebecca came in on her way home from school. She came over to my table, sat down, and said, almost immediately, "I talked too much at your house the other night didn't I?" Her question was so sincere and her anxiety was real, so I decided to give her the honesty she was seeking. "Yes," I said, "I'm afraid you did Rebecca." Her eyes welled up with tears and she said, "I knew it. I said something to my mom and she said I was fine. But I felt like I was talking too much."

"Why did you feel the need to talk so much?" I asked her. She wasn't quite sure herself, but as she reviewed that night it was clear that she felt she was somehow supposed to be talking, and then once she started she couldn't stop.

How this Relates to Sales Skills

I have observed this same dynamic repeatedly when watching business people try to pitch something. Whether they are sales professionals pitching their products or a business owner pitching his business to investors,  sometimes they get started talking and they just can't stop. The people being pitched start giving subtle cues; looking down at their paper or hands instead of at the speaker, or starting to look over the shoulder of the speaker, or looking uncomfortable or as if they are becoming impatient. Those cues often (way too often) go unheeded. A cycle of desperation sets in, as the pitcher tries ever harder to get a response, and the pitchee tries to make it all stop.

If you are squirming in your chair feeling the familiarity of this scene, you're not alone. Now let's talk about how to make sure it never happens to you (again).

When you approach someone to make a sale, the typical response will be for the recipient of your pitch to sit back and listen to what you have to say. They may only give you 90 seconds, but during those 90 seconds they want you to do the work. This puts huge pressure on the seller to say the right things, in the right way, and in the right order. This pressure causes a specific flavor of fight-or-flight to set in; it's called talk-or-clam-up. Neither of those instinctual reactions will get you where you want to go.

Every successful sale starts with a conversation, and every successful sales person starts with questions. Questions like:

• What are you trying to accomplish?
• What are your strategic objectives?
• What interested you enough to take this meeting with me in the first place?
• Is there a specific business need you think I may be able to help you with?
• If you could solve a business problem right now related to (whatever it is you sell), what would that problem be?

These questions and questions like them are conversation starters. Once the conversation is rolling, your curiosity should lead you to the other questions that need to be asked. Is it starting to sound like the person being sold to should do more of the talking than the person doing the selling? Well, you're right - that's precisely what is supposed to happen!

The more genuinely interested you are in the person to whom you wish to sell, the more lively and informative the conversation will be for both of you. It is conversations like these that lead to sales - not pitches.

The next time Rebecca came over to dinner (and I made sure it was sooner rather than later), she practiced the skills we had discussed at the coffee shop. She politely asked questions when it was appropriate for her to do so, and she listened carefully to the responses and the conversation that ensued. As she hugged me goodnight she whispered in my ear, "That was SO much more fun! Thank you!"

The next time you feel pressured - compelled - to talk, take that as a cue. Stop. Take a deep breath. Then summon all your curiosity about and interest in the person with whom you are speaking. Ask a question. Ask another. Engage them. You will be far more likely to make the sale. And it will be SO much more fun.

The failure rate for small business is over 70% in the first five years of operaiton. Asking a few important questions at the outset - or even when you realize your business isn't thriving - can help you turn the corner instead of turning out the lights.

[00:00:02.390]
I'm at the Coral Ridge Mall in Iowa City, Iowa. I've been studying the Helzberg jewelry store here. They're doing something better than almost every other retail store in the country. And we wanted to understand it, but that's a topic for another day. What I wanted to share is how busy this mall is. Today is a Tuesday. And since the mall opened at 10 a.m., it's been busy traffic throughout the mall in stores, people shopping and buying. I spend a lot of time in malls and the majority of them are dead or dying.

[00:00:34.070]
This mall has a good location, sure, but good location doesn't guarantee a good mall. If you look behind me, you'll see that's an ice skating rink and that rink is filled with people skating for fun, but also ice skating lessons. There's a children's museum here and fun activities scattered throughout the mall, all things that make it an entertaining place to be. I don't think retail has quite figured out what it wants to be in the 21st century yet.

[00:01:01.790]
But I do know it's about experiences. This mall is creating experiences and therefore it's creating traffic. In fact, all businesses today are about experiences, customers for every type of business in to B or B to C just to have so many choices. And when prices are relatively stable across the board and quality is quite high across the board, then the only differentiator is experience. I'm not talking about service services expected. I'm talking about experiences, things that make life more interesting, more fun or more valuable.

[00:01:38.240]
As I talk to you now, I'm watching grandparents walking into the mall with small children. This is a place to go. How can you make your business a place to go and experience to have in ways that are relevant to your business, the staff in the hills? Because I've been working and are so passionate about jewelry at the store, it's fun. They study and listen to fun podcasts and read the latest blogs about jewelry. They're all taking classes or otherwise studying and then they're sharing those stories and all that enthusiasm with their customers.

[00:02:11.360]
That's an experience I didn't see a coffeemaker or offers of wine in the store. The experience they're offering is the richest jewelry buying and selling experience possible. The experience this mall is offering is the experience of a place to go and things to do, which include shopping. So that's what I wanted to share with you today. What relevant, meaningful experiences are you offering? Do you understand your own brand enough to offer experiences that are consistent with expanding your brand?

[00:02:43.850]
Because that's what it takes to be successful today. And when you're creating those experiences, you won't just be making more money. You'll also be having more fun.

I mean, I teach selling skills to sales people in a broad range of businesses, and one of the things I teach is that there are four buyer types: the Gain buyer, the Pain buyer, the Complacent Buyer, and the Overconfident Buyer. The Gain and Pain buyers have a clear need. The Complacent Buyer doesn’t have a need, but she’s easy, she just says, “no thanks, not right now.” But the Overconfident Buyer?

Seriously, I know better than this. I spend a lot of time selling.

The Overconfident Buyer is the one you have to watch out for. She’s the one with something to prove. She wants you to know that, whatever it is you’re selling, she already knows how to do it better, faster, and cheaper than you could ever provide it. She has a desperate need to enter any door that even hints at an opportunity to express her superiority.

So when I received an email last night from someone who had received a recent eblast from us, an email that simply read, “Oh really. You know me? How?” I should have known. But I’ve been called Pollyanna for good reason. So I told her where we had met, and that she had given me a business card.

In three subsequent emails she challenged me on what I was offering, how I was charging for it, and whether or not I knew how to do what I was selling. I told myself she was just abrupt. I told myself she has a real need, but she isn’t good at asking for help. I told myself . . . Oh. She’s cray-cray.

The Overconfident Buyer usually has a real need, but her personal dysfunction is such that she is incapable of acknowledging it. So the moment help is on the horizon, she chases it off. The important lesson for you, dear seller, is that you can’t do a damn thing for her. So don’t be like me! End it before it even gets started.

Here are a few clues that you are dealing with an Overconfident Buyer:

1. She is argumentative instead of engaged. She is not listening to you; she’s figuring out what she’s going to say next.
2. She quickly redirects the conversation to things she has done, particularly if she has experience in what you are selling.
3. If she talks about her needs, she does so in terms of how nobody can or will be able to help her.
4. She criticizes your work. Honestly, there’s no reason for a buyer to do that. “No thank you” will suffice.

When you encounter the overconfident buyer, exit quickly. Utter a sweet and sincere-sounding, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I don’t want to waste your time with something that isn’t for you!” and turn your attention to some other pressing issue.

The funny thing is that when the overconfident buyer’s pain becomes too great to ignore, she will almost always come back for help. You may not want to help her, but hey – that’s your prerogative.

Sometimes I listen to parents complain bitterly about things their toddlers – or teenagers – are doing; things which are totally age-appropriate. If you’re like me, you think to yourself, “as long as you're a parent, you would have a better time if you learned about the developmental stages of children.”

I had a friend who once decided to ride his bike from Albuquerque to Santa Fe – a 65-mile trip. Half way through his journey – and in the middle of nowhere – his bike broke down and he didn’t know how to fix it. If you’re just riding your bike around the neighborhood, you can get away with not knowing any repair skills. But if you’re going to start making long treks in sparsely populated areas, you need to learn how to fix your bike and own the proper tools.

There are probably many things you wouldn’t do without learning a lot about them and practicing first: true wilderness camping without survival skills, throwing a huge self-cooked dinner party without cooking skills, sailing a boat in the ocean without navigational and boating skills.

Are you running a small business without small business success skills? If you are, it’s going to cost you.

As a small business – or even a micro-business – owner, you must do all the things the CEO of any company does; decide what to sell and how to sell it, whether and when to hire help, manage customer service, operations, and finances, make decisions. Even if you don’t have formal investors, you are managing a huge investment – your own. Your investment is the time you spend, the money you put in, and the profits you roll back in. You are responsible for all the same things as any CEO, but without the qualified support staff to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.

I was the CEO/President of several corporations over the past 30 years, from a $2million/year marketing agency to a $100million+ jewelry company and a $600million+ apparel company, and now I own a multi-brand consulting agency. The skills I needed between the $2 million level and the $600+million level were remarkably similar. I didn’t need to “be” an accountant, but I had to know how to discuss finances intelligently with my accountants. I didn’t need to “be” a production manager, but I needed to understand what my production managers were doing and how to help them be more successful. I didn’t need to “be” the computer network manager, but I needed to be competent enough to weigh the suggestions my network managers made and make good decisions.

When I first took over the apparel company, I realized that my accounting skills were lacking to do the analysis at that level. Did I go back to school to become an accountant? Absolutely not. But I did go take a class called “Financial Management for Non-Financial Managers” offered at a local community college. That, plus a lot of attention and practice, turned me into a strong financial manager capable of not driving my accounting staff crazy, and more importantly, of being the CEO my company deserved. Every year of my career I have added more business skills to my portfolio, and I continue to do so today. You must do this too.

You probably already know how to make and/or acquire the products and services you sell. This is the starting point for most entrepreneurs. But there are several business skills you must cultivate in order to ensure the survival and profitability of your company. These small business success skills include:

• Basic understanding of financials and financial management. You don’t need to become an accountant (in fact, paying a good accountant is one of the most important things any small business owner can do). But you must understand your role in financial matters, how to work with your accountant, and how to steer your company in the right direction.
• How to not just make a strategic business plan, but use it for ongoing business development and improvement.
• How to express your business strategy as a Brand, and how to imbue your whole organization – from product idea to post-sales satisfaction – with Brand elements that stick with customers and keep them coming back for more.
• How to hire, train, discipline, fire, and motivate employees. Even if you have only one employee, you need these skills. Otherwise, you risk paying someone to work for you without getting the full value of that pay.
• How to set up the necessary business systems to manage your customers, sales, inventory, marketing, operations, and accounting. By systems I don’t necessarily mean expensive computer software – the solutions can be anything from KanBan cards to computers. But you need to know which systems you need and how to set them up.
• How to manage your inventory to ensure high service levels, solid margins, happy customers, and no excess taxes. Inventory is about way more than just buying goods and making them. You must understand the role inventory plays in your company, and how to manage that role carefully.
• How to create and manage a sales and marketing plan.
• How to set up sales and customer service programs that drive volume and profits, whether you’re selling to business clients, through retail stores, or directly to end consumers (or any combination thereof).
• How to not only create and sell products, but manage product and product line profitability.
• How to prospect for new customers –from finding new potential sources for sales to keeping them interested, and learning how long it takes to convert a prospect to a loyal customer.
• How to decide which operations to keep in-house, which to outsource, and how to manage both types.

Being a business owner is a big task, and I’m not going to pretend that list is a quick or easy thing to master. But if you start learning these skills right away and keep picking them off one-by-one, you’ll become a better CEO from the moment you start . . . and the time is going to go by either way.

This is a link to a chart of these skills. It is structured as a pledge; a pledge to yourself to pursue and cultivate the skills you need to succeed. I encourage you to print it out, post it in a highly (and daily) visible spot, and check each one off as you tackle it. And here’s to you, on the road to becoming a highly competent – and vastly more satisfied – CEO.

I’m not a consumer jewelry blogger, but this is something I wish every consumer jewelry buyer would know. It’s about how (great it is) to buy designer jewelry.

When you buy designer jewelry, your jewelry has a back story

Nearly every piece of jewelry I own came from a designer. As I write this blog, I am wearing raw diamond floret earrings and a raw diamond tennis bracelet from Todd Reed, a ring from Bree Richey on my left hand, a ring from Elizabeth Garvin and another from Jennifer Dawes on my right hand. I have lovely little button earrings from Robin and Remy Rotenier. I nearly always wear a bracelet from Walt Adler and another from a craftsman in Mexico whose name I have long forgotten but whose face I will always remember. My favorite brooch is a mokume-gane gem from Jim Binnion and Steve Midgett (yep! both of them).  Someday I will own a heart pendant from Rhyme & Reason. Something from Mark Schneider’s color collection. A mother's cuff from Erica Courtney. A Padparadscha anything from Omi Prive. Anything from Suzy Landa (preferably green or purple), hoop earrings from Pamela Froman, something nouveau vintage from Just Jules, Diana Widman’s Night Sky pendant, and a piece from ZAIKEN’s Throwing Stones collection.  (I have not received compensation from any of these designers for mention in this blog).

What don’t I own? A single white diamond ring. No diamond studs. I don’t own any Cartier or Tiffanys. I don't buy jewelry for the sparkle, the status, the vault value, or even the fashion. I love the sculptural quality of jewelry, the gemstones (all of them), the art. In this way, I am representative of the type of women who buy designer jewelry – or women who would buy designer jewelry if they knew what was available to them. There are many of us.

'Art' and 'Decorations' are Different Buying Experiences

Buying designer jewelry is not, should not be, like buying generic jewelry. What is generic jewelry? Any piece of fine jewelry that was designed for mass appeal. Does saying it’s generic mean it’s not beautiful? Not at all. I can see the beauty in a perfectly manicured lawn, even if it is similar to the other perfectly manicured lawns down the same stretch of manicured road. I just don’t want that for my own yard. My yard was designed, layer upon delicious layer, to make a statement (entirely different blog here – but you get my point). Does this make me a better customer or a more desirable customer for jewelry? Not at all. But it does make me - and women like me - a different kind of customer, and one that is not currently very well served.

Buying designer jewelry is about buying art you get to wear. What do you do when you buy art? You look for something that speaks to you. You look for something that pulls a feeling out of you that you weren’t feeling before you looked at it. You look for art that you know you’ll be happy to sit and stare at for hours and years on end. You don’t buy art to match the paint and furniture in the room – for the right piece of art you design the room around it. Good art grows old with you.

Great art doesn’t have to be expensive. Would I be giddy with excitement to own an original Rothco? Absolutely. But there is a painting in my living room painted by an artist named James R Gros. He is not famous and the painting cost me less than $200. But it’s one of the most expressive pieces I own. I never get tired of studying it, and everyone who visits our home at some point wants to talk about it.

Too many people do not know the joy of seeking and acquiring art – which is not a money thing, it’s an awareness thing. You can teach a child to buy meaningful art on her allowance.

So when I look for jewelry, I want it to have artistic merit. I want it to have been conceived of and created as part of a thought process about beauty, and craftsmanship, and precious materials. I want to know that whenever I wear it, I will see it, and when I see it, it will mean something to me.

That’s the first thing I wish every consumer knew about designer jewelry. That it’s buying art. When you take a person by the hand and show them the sheer delight and wonder of buying art, the experience can be transformative. I want consumers to have that experience with designer jewelry.

There's Another Opportunity Beyond Custom

 The other thing I wish consumers knew about buying designer jewelry is the difference between buying custom/bespoke and buying a designer commission. If a consumer has an idea for a piece of jewelry he wants to make, and he primarily needs a pair of hands to help him execute it; or if he wants a design that is very traditional but using some of his own elements, that’s what I refer to as custom or bespoke. There's no criticism in this – it's an essential service and can be a terrific experience. But that’s not the same as buying designer commissioned jewelry.

Just as you wouldn’t go to Klimt, hand him a photograph, and tell him to paint your portrait precisely as seen in the photo, I personally wouldn’t go to a jewelry designer and tell him what to make. A big part of the value of buying jewelry from a designer is the designer’s point of view. It's not that the customer has no input. Most designers who will do individual pieces have a discussion or series of discussions with the client first. They talk about gemstones, which ones the client likes most, and why. They ask about how the client wears jewelry, why they wear it, and how it makes them feel. As a client myself, I have loved those conversations. But once you find a jewelry designer who clearly has beautiful images in his head and the ability to turn those ideas into real objects, much of the joy in wearing the finished piece is turning the designer loose and seeing how that designer transforms your conversations about intangible things into a physical work of art.

Of course, not everyone who calls himself a designer is actually a designer. There is ample room for argument here, but generally someone who is truly a designer will have a clear point of view, a body of work that expresses that point of view, and a recognizable evolution in their thought process over time.

I have this imaginary scene in my head where a consumer walks into ABC Jewelry Store with her grandmother’s rings and says, “I’d like to turn these diamonds and rubies into something I can wear and love.” And the jeweler, who is very talented at the bench, asks “Do you know what you want?” The consumer says, “No, I really don’t, but I appreciate beauty, and I want something that is a bit unusual but which will keep me visually engaged for the next 30 years.”

And the jeweler thinks, “I’m really good at making jewelry – the best – but I don’t have an artistic point of view and what I make is pretty traditional looking. Since this consumer doesn’t want to direct this effort and she wants something different, perhaps I’ll teach her how to buy art!” Then he says to his new customer, “Let’s have some fun. I’m going to introduce you to some different types of designer jewelry – designers who will also do commission work. We’re going to see what you like and learn a bit together. Then, let’s pick someone for you to work with, and let them create a piece of art just for you, something that you will always treasure and be proud of.”

Shoot, I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Is this experience for everyone? Of course not. But for some, the right guidance from the beginning would turn buying designer jewelry into an obsession for them, something to look forward to once a year, or once every few years.

So these are the things I wish consumers knew. I wish more people were able to have the ultimate experience of buying designer jewelry. Because my new ring designed by Jennifer Dawes just arrived today. I’m utterly conscious that I'm wearing it. It brought tears to my eyes when I opened it. And I know that if more consumers felt like I do right now after acquiring a new piece of jewelry, they’d want fine jewelry more often.

Nobody walks into a Walmart and thinks she is in Target. She may be looking for the same brand of paper towel or hair color, but she knows which mass merchant's store she's in the second those sliding doors glide open. You might think this is about layout and lighting (and it is), but mostly it's about Merchandise Point of View.

If you were blindfolded and led into a Yonkers, deep between the clothing racks, once you took off the blindfold you may not know immediately where you were, but you would definitely know that you weren't in Neiman Marcus.  The two department stores have a very different Merchandise Point of View.

Both Radio Shack and Best Buy sell computer cables, but despite certain product similarities, the Merchandise Point of View is decidedly different.

Behind every successful retailer is a clearly defined Merchandise Point of View. Struggling retailers may struggle for many reasons, but nearly all of them have failed to define their Merchandising Point of View.

So what is a Merchandising Point of View?

Your Merchandising Point of View is your declaration of identity to the world of consumers, it is what your store is all about, it screams come in if you like these things and move along if you value those other things because that's just not what we're into here. A Merchandising Point of View both includes and excludes - because you don't need every customer to be successful. You just need the right customers.

The Merchandising Point of View often starts with what the owner of the retail store loves and values, but if it doesn't expand quickly to determine which customers those things matter to and whether or not there are enough of those customers, the  Merchandise Point of View is not sustainable.

Strong merchants (retailers) define their best customers - they know what their customers wear, how their customers spend their time, how their customers spend their money, how they align themselves within society, and what matters to them. Strong retailers know how to keep their customers engaged, and they do this with many elements, including excellent sales staff, desirable environment, promotion and marketing. But the most powerful way to keep customers engaged is to keep bringing them new and interesting products that appeal to them. The best way to do this is through a crystal clear Merchandise Point of View.

So how do you develop a Merchandise Point of View? You ask and answer these questions:

1. Which customers do we want?
2. Which types of products matter to the customers we want?
3. How do I want my customers to feel when they walk into my store?
4. Which adjectives do I want customers to associate with my store?
5. What is the unique story or experience of our store, and how do we express it - through words, colors, lighting, communications, customer relationships, design features . . .

Once you ask and answer those questions, you can select merchandise that not only fits with but also advances your store's unique story. This marriage of merchandise, experience, and physical (or graphical) space is the Merchandise Point of View, and like all marriages, it requires constant nurturing and attention to blossom and to be sustained.

What's your Merchandise Point of View? If you can't answer this question, it's time to get cracking! The profession of retailing changes daily, and you can't afford to get even one step behind.

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but when it comes to buying, we're just not (oh - and wait until I address reason versus emotions in business decision-making, though that's another article entirely).

Consumers - female and male - buy based on emotion. No matter how many statistics and facts they line up on the way to making a buying decision, that data collection effort tends to  be done in the service of making the decision they want to make. 

But you already know that trust and connection are essential to closing sales. Now make sure that you are also speaking to emotions from the beginning of the process - including the merchandise you choose to offer and the messages you convey to browsers and shoppers - long before the customer lands in the store or the products land in the cart. Be sure you are selling to feelings.

In this month's article for InStore Magazine, I wrote about how the anxiety and disruption of 2020 will influence the shopping emotions of 2021. Read the article to see how the themes of comfort, tradition, and responsibility are the themes to merchandise and market to in the year to come.