Successful Blog

An Engagement Checklist for Successful Business

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A Guest Post by
Shawn Hessinger

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As the experts and this blog often state, you’re only a stranger once. You’re a stranger up until the moment you extend your hand and introduce yourself. From there, you begin the process of becoming an acquaintance, and eventually, a friend. And social media has taught us that’s where we want to be. People don’t want to do business with logos anymore. Perhaps they never did. They want to do business with people they know, people in their network. To get in their network, you start by saying hello. You engage.

I know. In recent months you’ve no doubt heard the term ‘engagement’ more times than you can recall. Every social media expert wants to lecture you on its importance. But what does it all mean? As a marketing professional, a blogger, an entrepreneur – what types of customer engagement should you be worrying about, and how can you be sure you’re doing enough to not just stop being a stranger, but to start becoming a friend?

Below you’ll find a quick checklist to help you pinpoint opportunities and create new customer touch points.

Are you creating content?

Creating content on a consistent basis is one of the most powerful ways to engage your audience. It gives them something to engage with, while also showing your interest in getting to know them. The simple fact that you’ve penned that blog post, created that resource, or published that newsletter tells your audience you want to be part of the conversation, and you want to create a different type of relationship with them. Your post is your offering to a more intimate conversation. How you choose to create content is up to you. Whether you start a WordPress blog, a Tumblr account or create videos over at YouTube, is your choice. What matters is that you create content. That you give your customers (and potential customers) something to introduce them to your brand, and that shows them what you believe in. The first step of engaging is bringing something to the party.

Are you sharing other content?

Creating good content on your own site is only the first step in becoming part of your community and building awareness for your brand. The second step requires realizing that it’s not all about you and doing your part to lift up the people around you. You do this by sharing other people’s content and promoting their brand. For example, I act as the community manager at BizSugar, a social network focused around connecting small business owners and promoting their content. It’s a place where bloggers, entrepreneurs and others go to lift up other people, and the results of those interactions have been pretty fantastic. Engaging with others doesn’t always mean you go in talking about yourself. Sometimes it means talking about them. In fact, ideally, that’s what it means more often than not.

Some other ways to promote others?

  • Share links to your network on services like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.
  • Recommend or submit great content to social networks like Sphinn (http://sphinn.com/) or BizSugar.
  • Bookmark their posts at places like StumbleUpon or Mixx .
  • Create new content that promotes theirs, perhaps in the form of a YouTube video or a follow-up blog post.

Again, the medium you choose to use isn’t what’s important. It’s that you’re taking time to connect with your community in a way that is welcomed and shows it’s not all about you.

…Are you sharing it on your own site?

All the social media gurus will tell you that a great way to build your personal brand is through guest posting on other people’s blogs to leverage their audience. But what about your own site? Do you accept guest posts, or is it all you, all the time? This blog and Liz Strauss is a great example of a place that does engagement really well. Liz engages with her community by opening her home to them when appropriate, and creating a new level of trust between herself, her audience, and her guest authors. It’s a relationship where everyone benefits, and it’s a powerful form of engagement.

Are you networking online?

Another important way to engage with your community is to go where the action is and talk to people. What are the popular blogs in your niche that house the industry’s most important conversations? Identify them and get involved. What industry-specific social networks does your audience gravitate to? If you find they’re members of Third Tribe , then you might want to become part of that community and establish yourself as a trusted resource. If they’re active in certain Twitter chats, then you may want to block off time to participate in those. You can’t do a good job engaging your audience if you never leave your front porch.

Are you creating a presence offline?

What? You didn’t think you just had to engage online, did you? Don’t forget to also reach out to customers in the real world. That means creating engagement touch points in-store, joining your local chamber of commerce, starting a local Meetup, and partnering with local vendors. This is a great way to strengthen relationships you’ve made online, and to really get to know them as people.

The evolution of social media into marketing has changed the way brands must interact with customers. It’s no longer good enough to offer a great product; now you must offer a great brand experience as well. And that experience starts with that first introduction, when a company extends its hand to engage with a larger community. It’s when they stop being a stranger, and begin on the path to becoming a friend.

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Shawn Hessinger is Blogger & Chief Moderator at BizSugar
bizsugar You can find her on Twitter as @bizsugar

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

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How to Get Bean Counters and Kumbayers Serving Both the Company and the Customers

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Adeolu Eletu on Unsplash

10-Point Plan – Align Values with Value Proposition

The Clean and the Unpredictable

The core of any great business is the business model that drives it. A company without a viable, thriving business model — a process which consistently yields a growing profit — is a hobby not a business. The mathematics of the process — the return on investments — has to justify the decisions and directions of the business. Human relationships — intelligent, trust bonds with employees, customers, vendors, partners — are vital to the true and ethical execution of those decisions.

Mathematics and numbers are a comfort. They add up to clear, clean, predictable answers. We can reach the solution to a mathematical problem with the right algorithm, good data, and a trusty calculator. People are not so comfortable. Their behavior can be unintelligible, messy, and unpredictable. To reach the solution to a people problem requires experience, leadership, and gray matter decision making.

In any business, some employees are drawn to the bottom line clarity of the mathematics – the bottom line, the sales figures, the profit and loss statement. Other employees are taken with the less tangible, but equally important, human relationships – customer service, product experience, community building.

Some folks call the two groups the Bean Counters and the Kumbayers. Both terms discount that group’s value. In great businesses, every employee belongs to both groups. In not so great businesses, employees haven’t yet discovered the strength of getting those two groups together.

See the Values in the Value Proposition

So how do we get the bean counters and the kumbayers to come together?
The two groups aren’t so far apart if you consider their best intentions. One group wants to protect and grow the company; the other group wants to protect and grow the customer base. Without a company, neither group would be here. Without customers, the company wouldn’t be here either.

Serving the company serves customers and serving customers serves the company.

No business can thrive if every employee isn’t doing both. What if every employee could align customer values with the company’s value proposition. Here’s how to bring the two groups together.

  • Bring together a dozen leaders who represent both bean counters and kumbayers. Seat them at mixed team tables of four. Point out that: It’s no secret that our strengths are also our weaknesses. It’s human nature to be drawn to and value what we’re good at and to discount or overlook what isn’t our strong suit. Truth is, we think people who think as we do are smart and those that think differently are … well … either not so smart or being difficult.
  • As a group define the company’s reason for being in business. Write it large on a flip chart or white board. Ask them to record it at their tables.
  • Tell the teams, each individual has five minutes to write three words to represent the highest values their job role brings to executing that value proposition. Explain that they should focus on what they uniquely bring to their job role that adds value to the organization.
  • After five minutes, have the teams share their words and explain them to each other. Suggest that people listen for what others do of value that they themselves would never want to or could never do well.
  • Ask each team to choose rewrite the value proposition including three values words that represent the entire table. Explain that the new values proposition should reflect a focus on both growing the company and customer relationships.
  • Have the teams share and defend their new values-based value proposition. Challenge them to give examples of how their value proposition in action — decisions they might make — would support both growth of the company and customer relationships.

People who think differently than we do often care about things important to the business that don’t draw our personal interest. A discussion of company and customer goals can lead both groups to value every kind of contribution. Seeing how passionately one person cares about the profitability to maintain a stable business unit while another cares about totally satisfied customers opens the door to dialogue about how one can’t happen without the other. When that light goes on, people start to get interested in what they used to find difficult and the organization can develop and grow exponentially.

How do you get the bean counters and the kumbayers to serve both the company and customers?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

7 Steps Get the Best Leadership Thinking from Your Team

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10-Point Plan: Teaching Leaders to Think

“I Don’t Pay You Think” Doesn’t Work Anymore

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For years we marketed one-size-fits-all solutions, it worked to grow the numbers higher and higher by allowing companies and corporations to focus on how to give us more for less. We had access to more products at lower prices because of it.

And in that one-size-fits-all environment, it’s fairly certain that at least once in your career you heard a manager say the famous words, “I don’t pay you to think.” In fact the system relied upon carefully controlled decisions … only a few people were allowed “to think.”

Rogue thinking upset the carefully constructed system of industrial production that made the whole thing work. Even customer conversations were perfected down to scripts so that no maverick thought could undermine the “perfected” process of handling relationships.

Except customers never did find those scripts the making of a perfect relationship and now as customers have ways of connecting with each other, they’re letting us know that they’re spending their attention, time, and money with companies and corporations who build one-of-a-kind things, offer customized and personalized service, and develop true and loyal relationships.

What 20th century company or corporation was designed to manage that?

7 Steps Get the Best Leadership Thinking from Your Team

It’s been decades of businesses that have preached the mantra “I don’t teach you to think.” Leadership reaches out to build together what can’t be build alone. Ironically, it gets stronger when everyone thinks.

How does a leader build a team that leaves behind black-and-white safety of scripted relationships to the gray decision making that actually serves customers and the company? Without the right environment, support, and commitment in place it’s likely to be a mess of good intentions that foul up things.

Here are 7 steps to building a thinking, influential leadership team.

  1. Trust your team. It goes without saying that if you picked the right team, they’ll do the right job. If after reflection, you find that trust isn’t going to come. It’s time to change your own thinking about the people you want on your team.
  2. Start with a small crew. A change in management style cannot be made via a toggle switch or a pendulum swing. Rather than announcing new “rules of behavior.” Enlist a small crew who has already shown they understand both customers and what drives the business.
  3. Agree on the definition of a good result. Strategy always begins with knowing where we want to go. Set a goal. Define what a successful completion of that goal would be.
  4. Let the crew plan how to get from here to success on that one thing. You’ve agreed on the outcome and you’ve chosen the right crew. Let them show you their most efficient process for achieving it. Let them work out the details without you.
  5. Review the plan by asking questions. Have a short meeting for the crew to show you what they’re going to do. Limit yourself to questions rather than advice. You now have the benefit of being outside the thinking and so you can test it for holes and hidden assumptions — something you couldn’t do when you were part of building the plan. You can learn from the new ideas they bring to it.
  6. Stay out of their way as they execute. Ask them to keep you apprised via status updates and meetings, but stay in question so that you can be tester of the thinking rather than the only thinker in the room. When people look to you for an answer, answer with, “You have more information, than I, what seems the most appropriate action to you? Why do you think so?”
  7. Celebrate Success and Value What You Learn Every status meeting take a moment to celebrate successes. Invite the crew to do the same with you. Also take time to highlight and value new things, surprises, and misfires that teach what not to do.

The days of “i don’t pay you to think” are thankfully long over. True leaders are people who don’t want to do all of the thinking. Leaders are people who want to build something innovative, elegant, and useful that they can’t build alone.

Care-filled thinking, well-thought action, and thoughtful response has become the gold standard of business growth, innovation, and loyalty relationships. When everyone is thinking, the customer and the company become a community and the business thrives. Thinking is the new ROI.

The way and the level at which we value our teams’ thinking is directly proportional to the value of the thinking they return.

How do you get the best thinking from your team?

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

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Influence: How to Persuade Anyone In Business to Do What You Want

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by You X Ventures on Unsplash

10-Point Plan: Train Self-Managing Teams with an Outstanding Bias Toward Quality

Communication Through Persuasion

The best executive team I was ever a part of was 8 people who knew their jobs — none of us were experts in the jobs of the others but the team worked highly efficiently with sincere commitment and we followed a principle we called the “Persuade Me” form of leadership. It looked something like this …

I may not know anything about the new phone system you want to introduce into the building, but I’m an intelligent, thinking person, who knows how to make a good decision. So, persuade me that this is the right one.

No matter the question, the problem, or the innovation that was put before us. We sat ready to listen to the reasoning that would move us to understand why we should champion its cause.

How to Get Anyone In Business to Do Whatever You Want

Whether we’re a consultant, a freelancers, an entry level employee a C-Suite executive, the work we do has to move something forward for us it to benefit us and our customers. Sometimes that means getting the people who work alongside us and the people who sign our paychecks to take our advice as to what needs to be done.

If you want to get people do what you want, it’s matter of persuasion. Whether you’re looking to move a huge organization or get someone to sponsor a small event or project you’re planning, persuasion is the key to positive action. Persuasion is a strategy that requires these steps.

  • Know your audience. It’s hard to persuade someone you’ve never met and know nothing about. Understand what moves them and what worries them. Get inside their needs, wants, and desires.
  • Ask about their short-term goals and restate what you’re hearing as you listen. As people tell you what they’re trying to accomplish, clarify your understanding by restating what they’re saying in your own words. So if I’m hearing you right that means you want to … Define scenarios that might achieve what they’re shooting to make happen.
  • Ask about possible obstacles to their goals. Let them keep talking until you fully understand what they’re facing and truly want to help them get where they want to go. Learn about their process and how decisions are made. Find out who needs to be “sold” for a new idea to be adopted.
  • Suggest that you might help them by aligning their goals with your own. Offer your idea, project, or plan in the context of how it will benefit them. Point to the goal and the possible obstacles they’ve mentioned, then show how your suggestion will remove the obstacles and move them toward their goal.
  • Explain how your plan, project, or idea works for them. Focus on the benefits not what you love, but what makes sense to their situation. Champion those benefits with all of the passion that drew you to idea or project from the start.
  • Ask how you might make the two work together even better. Suggest that they discuss how well the idea might work over time with their coworkers, how it might need to be changed, and whether it needs outside input. Allow them to add or remove content or pieces. Do we need to make it smaller or larger to get the right kind of attention? Do we need to bring anyone else to keep things going?
  • Build a strategy on how to introduce them to the larger group. Discuss how easily you and they might be able to persuade peers and paycheck signers to participate. Step back and let them own the process while you talk. Should we offer training? a meeting? Shall we propose a proof of concept to demonstrate and measure the validity and success?

Those who best navigate a business culture are those who know that persuasion works better than confrontation. It’s important to stand for your values and to champion your expertise, but the presentation can be softer than an all on debate.

People like to be in on the thinking and to know that what we’re proposing benefits everyone, not just the person proposing it. So whether it’s a ReTweet, a budget cut, a new product idea, or a complete renovation of the operation, it works best if we reach out knowing that the folks we’re speaking to are

“intelligent, thinking people, who may not know anything about the intricacies of what we’re proposing, but who knows how to make a good decision.” So the job is to persuade them with facts, logic, and humanity that what we’re doing is something they want to be doing too.

How do you persuade your clients, customers, bosses, employees, vendors, and volunteers that what you what is worth doing?

READ the Whole 10-Point Plan Series: On the Successful Series Page.

Be Irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Thanks to Week 270 SOBs

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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.

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cassieboorn
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kirktaylor
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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.

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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

Listening for the Meaning

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Present Meaning

We spend so much time talking
about listening
that sometimes it seems that we don’t hear
the simplest sounds filled with meaning.

The sounds of cars on pavement
may not be the sounds of sleigh bells ringing
but they are the sounds of people moving.
Coming and going, spending time to reach a destination.

Do you listen for the people who could be coming to you?

The sounds of wrapping paper tearing
might not be the sounds of hearts opening
and exchanging joy, love, trust, and giving,
but inside the minds of those who tear away the ribbons
hearts are beating, memories are being forged and formed.

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Children are laughing, posing, playing and participating in the ways that only children do.

Do you listen for the good thoughts and feelings that people
say with their eyes, their hands, their time in bringing themselves to you?

Listening for meaning is an act of being present.
How lovely to just be present, listening to what it means to be with you.

May all your presents be meaningful, deep, and true.

Thank you for the meaning you’ve given to what I do.

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

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