Liz, Author at Successful Blog Page

The Riskiest Question We Ask When Introducing Our Business and a Much Better Approach

March 7, 2011 by Liz

People Ask It All of the Time

We meet on Twitter or on my blog. Perhaps you came up to talk after I spoke at a conference or a mutual friend said that we should meet and talk. We have a lot in common and a lot of expertise that supports each other. We both think the other is smart. So we decide to sit down to talk more.

Things are going great. So we begin to introduce ourselves and our businesses to each other.

I ask about what you’re doing. You tell me more. We’re getting somewhere that looks like we could find a way to build something together that might move our businesses forward. Then one of us asks what appears to be a simple question that people ask often and the other one starts to buy out.

The question — one that people ask all of the time — might surprise you because on the surface it sounds smart, other-centered, and on target. But, it’s not because of how it shifts the burden of thinking and how it changes my perception of who the person who asks it.

The question?

How can I help you?

What’s wrong with that?

When we ask How can I help you? here’s what happens. We throw the burden of thinking (and the evaluation of our fit) to the other person. The person we’re talking to has to stop to consider within their entire realm of possible jobs, tasks, and future dreams,…

where he or she might be able to use some help.
who we are, what our skills are, how they might fit the culture and brand of what he or she has planned.
whether he or she might be able to manage putting those two together in the context of what’s already going on.

That’s a huge amount of thinking, considering, and evaluating to answer even to someone we know really well. The risk is huge that the answer will be wrong — that the person answering will misjudge our skills (too high, too low) or not think of the perfect fit for what we have to offer. Inside that situation is also the risk that the person will be uncomfortable at being unable to give a quick answer and the chance that he or she will wonder why we already don’t know.

Why take those risks at all?

A Much Better Approach

For almost a year now, I’ve reserved the How can I help? solely for situations in which people are outlining specific problems that fall into my area of expertise. And even then I try to avoid it, reaching instead for Would it help your situation if I offered a way to … ? I find that opens the discussion to more concrete exploration of where my skills fit the person’s business goals.

And when it’s a conversation that’s with a new business acquaintance rather than leading with How can I help? which is really about me. I turn the conversation to them by asking

What are your goals for the next two quarters? What are you hoping to achieve to move your business forward?

Then I listen and as I listen I ask more questions about vision of those positive outcomes.

So, would that look like a new product? a growth in awareness? a larger community? a more functional website?

And I listen more until I can clearly see their goal, their vision. Then I can also see how I might use my skills to help them achieve it, how we might align our goals to build something together that benefits us both.

A leader is someone who wants to build something he or she can’t build alone.

Do you see how a new approach to introducing your business can help your business and their business grow?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Thanks to Week 280 SOBs

March 5, 2011 by Liz

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Be Irresistible: Grow with the Community Who Loves to Tell Your Best Story

March 1, 2011 by Liz

10-Point Plan in Action: The Off-site meeting

Money Can’t Buy Love

At a recent corporate team-building meeting, I experienced a speaker’s dream of a setup. The company VP who spoke before me discussed a tactic used by the competition — how they secretly pay people to talk about them from speaker platforms and in the press.

That simple shocking story made my opening statement easy. I repeated the competition’s tactic, then I quoted Paul McCartney …

I don’t care too much for money. Money can’t buy me love.

The company in the room already had a core community of enthusiasts who are fiercely loyal fans.

We talked about how love beats money and these six steps that will get people who love you together into a community and talking about you:

Build your network before you need it.
Share that story about you that connects people.
Let them tell it the way they want to. Leave lots of room for positive mutation. People feel ownership when they contribute.
Make it easy, fun, and meaningful to share the message with friends.
Make it so that folks feel proud, important, part of something they do together.
Reward and celebrate your heroes who share what you do.

I used this presentation to organize my thoughts around those ideas.

Whos talking about you

View more presentations from Liz Strauss

We discussed how great marketing and growing businesses are a balance of

leadership and loyalty — leaders learn from our heroes, align our goals with our advocates, and attract loyal fans with by valuing them.
customer and company — great businesses value both customers and company. They know that without the company customers won’t be served and without customers the company can’t survive.

Today, I’m talking to another already irresistible organization about the same six steps and the underlying values inside their value proposition.

Great businesses are about one community — employees, vendors, partners, clients, customers — looking in the same direction, working together to build something no one person can build alone. Communities like that grow companies that serve customers who love them. Those customers bring their trust and their energy and are quick to share your best stories with their friends.

That’s how we get to be the first trusted source — a stand alone value that can’t be copied or replaced.

This week I met with the corporation that held the off-site. We began planning the strategy for making it even easier, faster, and more meaningful — irresistible — for the existing community to meet online, offline and even at the company. We’ll be showing them how they can share ideas, swap strategies, and invite their best friends to join them. We’ll be extending an unending invitation to become a bigger part of the living story of how a company and it’s customers grow together and thrive.

What’s your best story — the one that customers are already telling about you?
How easy are making for your heroes to meet each other and pass it on?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Pitches Are for Baseball: The Essential Difference Between a Pitch and an Offer

February 28, 2011 by Liz

Who Likes to Be Pitched, Anyway?

Every it’s unceasing, email pitches from people who don’t know me. If you’re a blogger who has any following, I think you’re aware of what I’m talking about. If you’re just starting, you’ll be there soon. Some of them are ludicrous and amazing. I’m thinking of the one that was filled with baby bottles, squeeze toys and pacifiers — three things never mentioned on this blog in its five year history.

A pitch like that doesn’t gain any points, doesn’t open the door for more possibilities. In fact it just makes the person pitching appear to be

lazy
inexperienced
paid by the piece not the results
works quantity over quality
is not in a position to get such things in his or her own inbox regularly.

I bet you might have a few other ideas about people sending “pitches” to you.

Pitches Are for Baseball

The problem with a “pitch” is that it sets up the scenario of a pitch.

In baseball, a pitch is the act of throwing a baseball toward home plate to start a play. — Wikipedia

Think about that. A pitch starts the play, which means that other people have to be in the game. If Roger Clemens, one of the best pitchers in American baseball, winds up and throws a baseball in a field of cows can we call that a valid pitch?

My guess is that Roger Clemens never threw a major league pitch without knowing who he was pitching to and what sort of pitch it would be. His job was to get to the win.

My guess is that Roger Clemens approaches business in an entirely different way.

Offers Build Business

In baseball, the pitcher’s role is singular and focused. He throws something in such a way that another person needs to respnd – to catch it or hit it back. The pitcher’s job is to move that ball in such a way that it helps his team win the game. Helping the guy at bat hit out of the park would be counter to his role, his goal, and his objective as the pitcher of a great baseball team. That sort of thinking seems to have invaded the way people pitch ideas and it’s counter-productive to building business.

Business has one compelling difference.

Great businesses WANT the people they’re pitching — clients, partners, employees –to hit it out of the park every time.

So rather than thinking in terms of a pitch, why not think in terms of an offer? Here’s how changing a pitch to an offer makes it more powerful, more compelling, and more likely to succeed.

An offer makes us think about the people we’re about to approach. The pitcher faces a “batter” from another team. The pitcher can’t pick the next batter. A business person can choose will receive the next offer.
An offer helps us realize that we don’t have to present the same deal to every person we meet. A great pitcher changes up his pitch to match the batter and the conditions of the game. Great business people take that one step further. They decide who gets their best offer by also thinking about what a future relationship might mean.
An offer keeps us aware that the people approach can accept or reject what we have to say. The pitcher’s job is to get the batter to swing even at the most undesirable pitch. A great business person finds a way to make an offer that aligns the goals so that both teams come out ahead.

A business wants a relationship that leads to a deal. The best deals grow everyone’s business. The worst pitches ignore that simple principle.

I’m sure you can think of other ways that thinking offer gets us to a better approach to a deal than thinking pitch ever could.

Make me an offer. Persuade me how it works for me while it’s helping you. You’ll get my attention far faster than you might expect.

BTW, I wrote the person who pitched the pacifiers a quick note to say that my son graduate college in 2007.

What do you think is the essential difference between a pitch and an offer?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Thanks to Week 279 SOBs

February 26, 2011 by Liz

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Want to become an SOB?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

5 Critical Questions for Your High Performing Team of Volunteers or Employees

February 22, 2011 by Liz

10-Point Plan: A High Performance Team

Keeping the Focus Is Fun

Whether we work for huge enterprise or help build the economy from your home, leaders know that we can only do so much on our own. To build a business that thrives, we need to rely on employees, partners, vendors, volunteers, and customer who pitch in to help us grow. It takes a team, a community to build anything that resembles a business. A great team can build a great business.

Anyone who’s assembled a great team knows that when you get the right people on the bus you make amazing things happen. And if you’ve been part of a team like that you probably also know that money isn’t what moves a team to greatness. As Peter Drucker realized, “money is a disincentive.” People notice when there’s not enough and it brings them down, but more doesn’t improve their performance in any predictable wya.

Those right people on the bus work for less money when they can do more …
more of the things that work,
more of the things they do well,
more of the things that get more done well,
more of the things that put meaning into what they do.

Those right people on the bus work for less money when they can do less …
less of the things that don’t work,
less of the things that they don’t do well.
less of the things that get in the way of great work — the meaningless work-like, useless,
out-of-date, without purpose, policy-driven, time-wasting, relationship-breaking, stupid tasks — in other words, things that make work rather than get work done.

Getting the right team going in the right direction is challenge in time when time is at a premium. It takes more than just telling everyone “Do what you do well. Delegate to others what they do better. And don’t do what we don’t need to do.” Still, if we can get that kind of focus and momentum going, we’re well on our way to business that is responsive to customers, highly performing, and structurally sound.

Nothing beats reflection, checking in regularly as benchmark test to be sure we’re moving in the right direction. Here are five questions you, your team, and your business should be asking and answering at least once a week.

What is the goal? What are we trying to do or say this week?
What is the strategy that drives us? Where do we want to be by the end of the week?
What’s missing from the team? Have we got the right people doing the right things? Do we have too much of one skill set and not enough of another? Do we need to rearrange things?
What’s right / wrong with the process / structure / culture? Who needs resources, room, or support to do their best work? Who’s doing the wrong work?
What rewards are ours to claim? How can we leverage them? Do we define, measure, and reward the outcomes we seek?

People, teams, and businesses can get off track in big leaps, but we usually lose our way incrementally by losing focus while doing what worked in the past. If you use the five questions to keep challenging your direction, you’ll find that the team soon will see every decision strategically.

How do you keep the focus to grow the high-performance business you want?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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