Four Things Customers Want From Small Businesses
April 16, 2009
There are few small business owners today who would argue that the way we are transacting business isn’t changing. The list of profound and deep changes is long – here are just a few:
- Growth is coming from small business owners, solo professionals, and entrepreneurs rather than from giant conglomerate industries.
- Consumers are linked together via Internet and willingly share their happiness or discontent with a product or service they purchased.
- Almost half of consumers will go to the Internet to read reviews before purchase.
- Consumers are weary of policies that are inflexible, cold, and always to the benefit of the seller.
There are four key components of successful small businesses and solo professional in today’s marketplace, and these are:
- Transparency
- Authenticity
- Responsibility
- Reputation.
Transparency means that your customers want to know and understand how you do business, staight up, no hidden fees, no half-truths. What you sell and how you sell it need to be completely open and above-board. Some people, including Michael Port, whose newest book The Think Big Manifesto is a great primer for entrepreneurs and business onwers, call this radical transparency.
Authenticity has to do with honesty and being exactly what you say you are. If you design landscapes for residential properties you are honest about what you can do, what you can’t do, and what your experience and training is in landscape design. You’re the real deal.
Responsibility means being accountable for your actions with your customers. Promising one thing and delivering another doesn’t happen. Not meeting a deadline doesn’t happen. Mistakes are owned up to quickly and remedied quickly. You don’t pass the buck to someone else. This characteristic can get your business a long way, for the average consumer does not believe that large businesses are responsible much at all. Demonstrating responsibility will automatically attract business your way.
Reputation is the golden egg for a small business owner. Your customers want to know, like, and trust you before they do busines with you. They will have heard about you, for good or for ill, and it will stick. You can build a reputation over time and you can destroy it quickly. Given a choice between two equally attractive purchases, consumers will give the business with the better reputation the edge.
Think about your own business and how you would score on these four keys. These characteristics are critical for small businesses, keys to your surviving and thriving.
(C) Sue Painter
Business Lessons from The Fog of War
April 11, 2009
Robert McNamara wrote The Fog of War to document his history as Secretary of Defense (USA) during the Vietnam era. He set out a set of “lessons” about war that also beautifully apply to how we as business owners work with those we view as “competition.” I’m a fan of collaboration, and after studying McNamara’s lessions, I think he is, too. Here is his list. See how many useful busness ideas YOU can gain from McNamara’s wisdom.
- Empathize with your “enemy” (get into their skin, understand them).
- Rationality will not save the day.
- There’s something beyond one’s self.
- Maximize efficiency (proportionality should be a guideline in “war”).
- Think about killing and conflict – do we want this in today’s world?
- Get the data.
- Belief and seeing are often BOTH wrong.
- Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning.
- In order to do good, you may have to resort to evil.
- Never say never.
- You can’t change human nature.
Some of these tenets are, to me, hard to swallow. But on the other hand they give me a lot of room for thought about what it means to stand for something strongly, yet be flexible and open to seeing the chance for change. I believe that at least some of McNamara’s lessons serve entrepreneurs and small business owners. See if you can work with these in ways that helps your own business to thrive.
(c) Sue Painter
Make Your Online Presentations Memorable – Part Two
April 6, 2009
Here’s the second half of yesterday’s blog post about how to keep your online presentations (webinars, video conferencing) interesting and remembered. Yesterday’s key points were to use anticipation, visuals, and participation. But there’s more! Visuals work best when they require the participant to think rather than simply view. Here are a few ways to incorporate “thinking” visuals:
- Use a high definition, very richly colored graphic or photo with only one word of text. Let the visual be a trigger for the rest of what you want to present at that time.
- Use an interactive game, such as flipping over matching cards.
- Use a visual to ask a question, and get participant input via voice or chat function on screen.
The point is, visuals can be used to engage rather than simply illustrate, and that makes your presentation much more memorable.
Voice is always key in presentations, but in an online venue it is even more vital. Why? People can’t see your non-verbal communication (even in video conferencing it is often unclear or missed). Vary your voice, adding emphasis and emotion. A monotone voice which is reading long lines of text off a slide is the worst – people will tune you out and have no recall of what you said.
Finally, people will stay tuned in to you when the closure they anticipate doesn’t come. I used it at the end of yesterday’s blog post, the “to be continued” today. This is called the Zeigarnick effect, after a market researcher who first noticed that people will faithfully tune in to things that have no closure – soap operas, for instance. Today, we see mini-dramas as brief advertising pieces that tell a story but have no closure. People wait for the next advertisement to see what happens as the story line develops. That’s the Zeigarnick effect!
Remember to lead with a memorable opening line that invokes feeling, engage people with rich visuals and interaction, use your most interesting voice, and keep people guessing just a bit. All these will help your webinair meet its objective to engage postential customers. Try it out in your next online presentation, and stay tuned to see what happens!
Make Your Online Presentations Memorable
April 5, 2009
The new way to market without going on the road is to offer online presentations to prospects. It’s attractive from a cost saving perspective. But since you are not present physically, you can easily lose your audience’s attention – and you’re not there to catch body language that says “I’m bored and I’m not buying.” In fact, in one recent survey, 65% of participants in online presentations admitted to multi-tasking while attending.
Soooooooo……how to capture and keep attention in online presentations made in Webinairs should be a topic of high interest. Here are some tips and techniques to get your presentation attended and remembered.
- You’ve got about 20 seconds at the very begining to engage your audience. Don’t start off by introducing yourself with a big bio, citing everything you’ve done since getting out of high school. In fact, don’t focus on yourself at all. Here’s the mantra. “This presentation is not about me, it is about my audience and what will benefit them.” If you keep them captured they will find out who you are, and then you can point out your sterling credentials. Meanwhile, mum’s the word.
- Our brains remember what comes FIRST, anything after that, not so much. So get your very best key point out there in a memorable way that invokes feelings. And do it in the first 20 seconds of your talk.
- Create anticipation from the get-go. Promise a reward at the end, or have your audience guess something in the first moments that you reveal at the end. News stations do this with their “teasers” all the time. Take note, and do the same thing. People will respond to anticipation, it will grab and hold their attention. Killers of anticipation include long introductory bios, text-laden Powerpoint presentations, information about your company, and a flat or monotone voice.
- Use visuals that create incongruity (a weight lifter whose arms are on backwards, for instance). Our brains get caught up in the incongruity, holding our attention while we try to resolve it. You can also use surprising facts to create interest.
- Participation is key. Ask a question at the very beginning to get people involved and hold their attention. Participation makes your presentation much more memorable and keeps people listening and involved. The interaction gives the audience a chance to interact with you, and helps create the “know, like, trust” factor that is critical to successful marketing.
Tomorrow, I’ll give you the rest of my tips for making online presentations memorable. You’ll learn about the Zeigarnick Effect, and see how I’ve used it here. 
(c) Sue Painter