Job [and Client] Hunting ala Liz

April 23, 2006 by Liz

Gosh You Look Great

You have your act totally together. You know how to answer every question. You can explain how to capitalize on your strengths and how you make your weaknesses irrelevant. You can explain your biggest challenge and how you handled it with finesse and outstanding interpersonal skills. Your resume is a personal branding brochure and an inviting picture of who you are. You can see yourself as a leader and explain what your best traits are in simple, clear sound bytes. Your personal branding BIG IDEA shines through your eyes, your words, and everything you do. You are cool.

That doesn’t change the fact that job [and client] hunting is stressful. Even if you didn’t put your pants on backwards. [Read more…]

Critical Skill 4: Part 1-Process Models

April 20, 2006 by Liz

Don’t Fear the Process

I was at a company where the core competencies were the highest I’ve ever seen. In three seconds, we could strategize where to sit in a meeting to make it more productive. We could layout a trade booth to maximize traffic flow and product exposure, leaving room for fun and improvization. We knew where we stood in the market and against our past performance on a minute-by-minute basis. We ate the low-hanging fruit for breakfast, and shot down our competition at lunch. We were good.

This day there was an executive strategy meeting — like we needed one. As you might guess, there was a new guy in charge, and HE needed one. My usual Pollyanna attitude didn’t have room for this interruption. There was real work that needed to get done. I resented this pretend work that was getting in the way.

“If he asks us to spell strategy, I’m out of there,” I said to another VP on the way in. It was worse than I thought. He flipped a chart and started talking about SWOT — Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats — which, by the way, is analysis not strategy. We needed that even less. [Read more…]

Blogging Your Neighborhood

April 17, 2006 by Liz

Just because you can do it, it doesn’t mean that you should.

Your Neighborhood Niche

The Internet affords us the ability to blog for business all over the world. Just because we CAN do that, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we SHOULD. As commerce moves to the Internet, all advice points to thinking smaller. People no longer want one-size-fits-all. We should be casting a smaller net into a smaller pond. Niche-brand marketing is what I call it — doing one thing better and more efficiently than anyone else.

Writers are always told, Write what you know.

Customers You Know

Where do you know better than your own neighborhood? The people are the customers you know best. You’re one of them. You live in their world. You go where they go. You have the same problems they have. You know the language and the culture. You even know a lot of the people by name.

Mike Sigers at Simplenomics has a great post today on the many ways that bloggers can make money working with businesses without leaving their own neighborhoods.

You are a customer to your neighbors. Why not have them as your customers as well?

The first advantage of blogging your neighborhood is that your customers have a real world address. What other advantages are working for you when you choose to blog your neighborhood, rather than to blog the world?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Just Say YES!

April 15, 2006 by Liz

Unless There’s a Really Good Reason Not to

When someone asks for a favor, just say yes. Most favors don’t take as long as thinking up a reason to turn them down would. Doing one feels better than turning one down does. You might be surprised at the ways that the favor comes back to you. I was reminded of that twice just this week with a lovely gesture and a clever response to a request for a critique. Take a look, if you have the time. I’d love for them to get them your comments.

There’s no rule that says you can’t run a business and have a heart. In fact, I look for a heart in the people I do business with.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Customer Think: IÃ¢â¬â¢m Not a Kid, IÃ¢â¬â¢m a Person
Customer Think: Saying Things without Talking
5 Sure-Fire Ways to Break the Promise of Your Brand

Customer Think: Saying Things without Talking

April 13, 2006 by Liz

Everything’s Equal or Is It?

You’ve just sold your car. Now you have a nice chunk of cash to start a new account until you need to use it. You head down to the bank where you have your accounts, and by some weird alignment of stars TWO account managers have time for you right away. This bank must be going through some sort of customer service training, you think, because both look up and say, “How may I help you?” They’re sitting right next to each other in identical, bank office-type cubicles. Both are dressed in the typical, bank office-type blue suits.

The only ways you have to tell them apart are their nameplates–Ms. Chase on the left and Ms. Fargo on the right–and the way they look at you as you try to decide which one you would like to spend the 15-20 minutes going over your accounts.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

You’re the customer, who gets your new business?

Saying Things Without Talking

So much of what we say to each other is communicated without a single word. Researcher vary on how much of a message is carried nonverbally, but they place the low end of the range at 65%. The sad part is we’re often not aware when we’re the ones communicating and too aware when we’re the ones being communicated to.

In a Brand You and Me situation, smiling a lot seems to be a good idea. Smiling releases chemicals in the brain that actually can raise your spirits, especially when you like the person you share a smile with. If that person smiles back, things get better than ever.

The moral seems to be. the more we care about customers and show them we do, the better we feel and the better they will too. Now that’s business promotion that should get us all smiling.

I like smiling. It makes me feel like I’m the nice one.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Customer Think: I’m Not a Kid, I’m a Person

April 12, 2006 by Liz

Grouping People Doesn’t Work

Each year when my son started school with a new teacher, I would wait about three weeks. Then I would make an appointment to see her. I would bring along a few cool books I had carefully selected for her classroom as a gift. I gave her the three weeks because I wanted my son’s teacher to have a chance to get to know this rare and brilliant child on his own–we needed a common place to speak from. I brought the books because I wanted my child to move from being a “boy in class” to being a person–a child with a name, whose mother knows about books and cares about him.

I did those things because I was a teacher once. I know how easy it is to think of those faces as “the kids in my class,” not as individual people. Teachers are human beings and when you’re faced with 20-30 small people to get to know, it doesn’t happen very fast. The sad news is that extreme cases get center stage. Think of the names you remember from your early school days–they’re the extremes: the kids who were really smart, really bad, or really good friends with you. The rest become a blur. We’re human we make groups and unfortunately, we like to group people too.

Grouping people doesn’t work for getting to know them as individuals.

My son taught me that when he was all of three. I said, “Hey kid, let’s go.”
He stopped cold in his tracks, looked at me, and said, “I’m not a kid. I’m a people.”

We Have Relationships with People

We don’t have relationships with customers, or with users, or with eyeballs. We have relationships with people. It may sound like semantics, but it’s more than that. How we use words points to how we think and how we value ideas. If we think customer first and then person, we’re thinking backwards. Humanity wins out every time. Take care of the person and the personal relationship, and the work will take care of itself. Try it. It’s true. When we show people that we value them, they hardly ever let us down.

The reason that humanity wins is because real customer relationships are built around customer needs and desires. Needs and desires are individual human things, packed with individual human quirks and nuances. Sure there are patterns in any human group. You can even pile those patterns into demographics if you want. Stay at that level, and you’ll be skating on the surface where there’s only information and no heart.

I can’t begin to know my customers, if I don’t know what’s in their hearts.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

Customers, visitors, and readers are people, not users, traffic, stats, or any other word that steals their humanity and steals our own humanity as well. It’s brand YOU and ME–together. My three-year-old customer-son was right to set me straight when he said, “I’m a people, not a kid.”

Who doesn’t want to walk into a restaurant where everybody knows your name? Who wouldn’t rather work with someone who knows who you are and cares about the things you care about? Who hasn’t had the experience of being treated like less than a person by a clerk, a doctor, or a boss? Didn’t that make you want to say, “Hey, I’m a person I have a name.”?

Do something small today to show a reader, a customer, or a visitor–someone who’s just met you–that you know that he or she is a person of value. See what happens. Then see how many times today people treat you–a customer–in that same personal way.

A business that values me as a person has my business and my brand loyalty from minute one. By week three, they’ll have the business of all my friends as well. There is no better promotion than valuing customers as the people that they are.

–ME “Liz” Strauss