Successful Blog

Are You Ready to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done?

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We’re Awfully Good at Debriefing Failures and Just Toasting Our Success

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It takes a team to achieve a major business initiative. The research, the trials, the final product, the sampling effort, the trade shows, the tests and metrics, the PR, marketing, and social media effort designed amplify the buzz all took people, time, money, resources invested where it counts.

And when that sort of investments fails, we’re all over it to figure out where it went wrong. We hold meetings to debrief our choices, our missteps, and errors like so many grains of broken glass ground down to sand. In the name of learning from our mistakes we own our loses like so many merit badges. Sometimes we beat the losing horse until it’s long past dead with a mantra never to forget or to repeat the mistakes we made again.

But when we win, we toast to our success and move ahead.
What if we put the same rigor to debriefing our success?

How to Claim the Right Things You’ve Done

We’re great about learning from our losses. We’re not so great a learning from our success. A quick look at Bloom’s taxonomy will show that what we often do when we debrief a losing situation is we work all of the way up from knowledge through evaluation of what didn’t work.

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Suppose we followed that toast to our success with an equally granular discussion of what worked with our success? It might look like this.

  • Knowledge – What it is we accomplished? What were the key parts that led to the success?
  • Comprehension – What do we know now about the project, the team, the customers that we didn’t know before?
  • Application – How can we use what we’ve learned from this success to build the next initiative like this one?
  • Analysis – How is this project similar and different from other projects we undertake?
  • Synthesis – What overall learnings can take forward from this success?
  • Evaluation – How as this win change what we understand about what we do as a business?

Raise that toast to your success. Then ask the six simple questions to claim what you’ve won.
The moments of reflection that bring you to the answers are the time you need to incorporate, internalize, and own what you’ve done — to move the “winning behavior” from a possibility into a natural response.

The evaluation of the win is the way to claim your rewards, to own them, and to leverage that learning from then on.
When you own your success, it shows every time you walk into a room. That’s how claiming rewards from success leverages itself into more success.

The good news is we can all go back — alone or with our teams — and claim our rewards for every success we’ve ever won.

Not everything we learn has to come from what we do wrong. Are you ready to learn from every right thing you’ve done?

Be irresistible.

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

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Be Irresistible: Want to Own Your Space? Own Up to Your Highest Standards!

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10-Point Plan in Action

What’s It Mean to Own It?

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Going back down to SxSW reminds me of a conversation I had with @copyblogger, Brian Clark at SxSW 2008. It was in the early hours. We were at a club and found a place where we could talk for a minute or two. We were talking about SOBCon and how it had grown. We were talking about how people were coming because of the people who were in the room who were coming because of the people who were in the room.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Brian doesn’t remember what he said that night, but I do.

He said: “You and Terry are doing something important.

I said: “i know.”

Then he said: “But you gotta OWN it! Because without it where would I be?”

I replied something flippant like: “Still running the stealth intelligence network of the universe?”

He ignored my attempt at humor and continued with: “You gotta OWN it seriously.”

That advice stayed with me. I told Terry about it.

“Gotta OWN it! We own it, don’t we?”

But for the next year that idea became a mantra, “I’m OWNING it.”
Now I know what that simple sentence means.

Want to Own Your Space? Own Up to Your Own Standards

A few months later, I was at SOBCon 2008 with Brian’s words ringing in my ears. The thought kept running through my mind, “What am I not owning here?”
And as I opened my eyes, I realized that, in an effort to be “easy to work with,” I’d been holding back my best. My job is the content design an execution and we’ve always delivered more, different, and better than the rest, but not as well as I was capable of delivering. I’d let speakers slide just a little, then felt they could’ve shined more for themselves and for the audience. I’d been nice to sponsors and let them be less engaging than they might.

I realized then and there that companies make that mistake all of the time. We lower our price, change our offer, compromise for a vendor. We don’t own what we’re doing, instead we give away what we own.

What we should be doing instead is building trust and proving we’re the best at doing what we do to attract the people who recognize excellence and want to work be in a space that we own.

Every teacher, saloonkeeper, consultant, great business of one or corporation has a responsibility to own our role as a leader, to set the standards of our business so that the people who are in it with us know why and how to reach their greatest potential and so that the business can thrive and grow.

Here’s what I learned about how to do that:

  • Have a vision that is huge, powerful, and worth working toward to building. No smaller vision is worth owning or asking people to take part in. No lesser quest will bring you to put your heart, mind, hands and soul behind it.
  • Set goals that are worth reaching. If you want commitment and high performance, give everyone something to go for that feels like a massive win when they achieve it.
  • Invite only the best to participate in what you’re doing. Own the potential of your investment in the people you ask to come along. Friends are fun to play with, but owning a business requires that you own the responsibility of giving folks a team that they want to work with and for.
  • Make the vision and the goals far bigger than you can control, but the outcome and your belief in it so inspiring that everyone is drawn to work in the same direction . That way people can bring their own best potential to the building, but be building one vision that you protect for them.
  • Be a model of your version of the standard of ethics and excellence. Then layout the challenge for everyone to bring their own version of how they might add value to same standard with their own talents in ways that show their own excellence.

Owning our role, our values, our standards and our value proposition makes it easier for everyone else to own their role with the same values, standards, and value proposition. Like a great bartender or a community manager, we keep the space safe for people to be extraordinary without fear that they will lose by winning.

Own it. Don’t telephone it in.
Make a space, a place where people can show you what their best is and feel that you’ll notice, celebrate it, and protect it.

Do that and they’ll think of your business as owning the space you’re in, because to them it will be better than home.

That’s irresistible.

How do what you do, hold it up to the highest standards, so that the people who work with and for you can know they are working with the best in the business?

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

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How to Turn Lurkers and Listeners into Advocates

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(Updated in 2020)

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

10-Point Plan in Action: Living Online and Off

The Cameras Are Always Rolling

Many years ago, I commuted from California to Boston for my job as VP of Product Development for a Publishing Company. I also took several international trips to work with other publishers that had me out of the office for weeks. The travel meant that I often attended executive meetings via teleconference. Basically I was at the office on the phone sitting in the middle of the table.

When I first started attending meetings this way I had no idea how powerful it was to be in lurking inside the telephone during those meetings. Then I started to notice as folks began talking, particularly when they became invested in a conversation, they would forget that I was listening. In essence I was the proverbial fly in the room — they couldn’t see or hear me so I wasn’t there.

But I was.
And I heard everything they said, how they said it, and often when I jumped back in the conversation, they were startled in their seats. My voice had more power than if I had been sitting across the table because they’d lost their sense of what I knew and what and I didn’t because I hadn’t been a visible part of their experience.

And from that unique position, I could often bring a perspective that the people in the room couldn’t see. We all came to value the idea of having an observer — a lurker / listener outside of the room.

Would Your Lurkers and Listeners Advocate for You?

I think about those meetings when I consider the number of people who follow me on Twitter and the number I actually talk to, the number of people who read my blog and the ones I actually see. I think of those listeners and lurkers even more when events happen online that get folks riled up and defending their position on an issue that has more than one side. During those events, it’s easy for us to forget the far larger number of people who follow the story, but hardly ever, maybe never, comment on what they see.

Their silence doesn’t mean they don’t have opinions of our behaviors and our thinking. Their silence doesn’t mean that they won’t remember if they meet us somewhere in another context one in which we might want their support or partnership.

Lurkers and listeners can be powerful advocates, great sources of referrals, and even become customers and clients if we remember them and serve their needs. They can also remember our worst behavior. Here are three things to remember about the Internet and the lurkers, three ways to keep lurkers and listeners on your radar so that they stick around and become your advocates.

  • The Internet is the World’s Largest Reality Show. It’s not good to forget that “cameras” are always on. Lurkers and listeners are in the audience watching and thinking about what they see. In the heat of a moment offline we might have the luxury of forgetting our manners or ranting away with emotion on someone else in a private setting. Not so here.
  • The Internet might move quickly but it archives everything. I can still find a huge row that occurred in 2005 on a blog that’s been deleted and point you to the bad behavior that took place that day. Everything we do is indexed somewhere. Some of it sits in places we can never reach or erase. Lurkers and listeners now and in the future can find and see it on a distant day. One of those watching might be yourself looking back at yourself in a few years.
  • On the Internet it gets easy to tell what you value. Listeners and lurkers can be potential clients. When we make a public mistake or when we react to one, it’s important remember that those silent watchers — the people who might be our next bosses, vendors, partners, or clients — have a better chance to figure out whether they want to work with us than any interview, meeting, presentation, or resume would ever afford them. They if we “forget” that folks are listening — when we rant about a customer on our blog or complain about a client — we don’t know when they leave us without giving us business, thinking they could be our next victim. If you make a huge mistake and try to sweep it under a rug, they won’t be trusting us ever.

A wise man once said behave as if everything you do is going to be published. That pretty much describes the Internet.

That idea can make us better at our business. It can bring us to always align our values with our customers’ values. It can move us to keep the people we serve at the center of everything we do.

On the other hand, it can be what kills us. If we have a fatal flaw, if we forget that people like to be treated like people, some will find a way of reminding us we’re serving only ourselves. And the lurkers and listeners who decide that we’re self-serving will unsubscribe, click away, and never say a word – to us. That doesn’t mean they don’t have opinions that they share other ways.

Loyalty is a relationship with all the people we serve, not just the one who sing our praises. Lurkers and listeners are watching and perhaps deciding whether they want a relationship with us. How do we make sure the lurkers and listeners stay clearly on our radar? What can we do to serve them better so that lurkers and listeners are advocates too?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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

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People Ask It All of the Time

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

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

Money Can’t Buy Love

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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:

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

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

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

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Who Likes to Be Pitched, Anyway?

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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

roger-clemens

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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