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Influencing Decisions – Part 2: 4 Things to Let Someone Know Before You Ask

April 23, 2012 by Liz

IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions

Not Everyone Has the Context You Do

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A few days ago I got another phone call from a person I met several months ago. He said his name and then said,
I’m launching a new product and I’m wondering if you’d like to see a demo.

“What?” was all that I could think of to say.

When he’d called, I’d been knee deep in writing a proposal. I was well into the context of the strategy I was developing and that strategy had no connection to the name or the random question that had just interrupted it.

After an uncomfortable few minutes of asking questions of my own, I managed to find out who the person was and why he was calling me — he wanted to enlist my help. After all, we were connected.

The disconnect in this “connected” thinking is that I can’t help everyone with whom I have a conversation, much as I might be inclined to be the helpful one. My life, my family, my friends, and my landlord demand their own part and parcel of my time. So I can’t stop my own goals to pursue others’ quests just because they ask.

No one can.

It’s hard enough for any one of us to determine where to lend our support to the most noble of quests within the time we have in our lives.

If you’ve got a quest that needs support, help yourself and the people you might ask by being able to tell us the information we might need to make that decision before you ask.

4 Things to Tell Before You Ask

  1. Lead with relationship and context. Let me know who you are. Your ask or offer will get turned down if it’s bigger than the trust in the relationship. Set the context for your conversation by establishing what that relationship is and why that trust exists. How do I know you? Why are you an expert at what you’re about share?
  2. Be clear on what you have. Let me know what your quest is. Tell me what exactly you’re talking about. be able to say it in 25 words or less. If you still need paragraphs of detail, you don’t know what it is.
  3. Connect your me to your quest. Let me know why you’re asking ME and not every turnip that that falls off the truck. Tell me why you’re asking me — why you believe my expertise will be a valued contribution to your success. That will pique my interest in your quest. If you’re asking everyone, you haven’t considered what any one person might offer and that anyone can do what you ask.
  4. Make helping easy, fast, and meaningful. Let me know how little I have to do to help. the facts. Don’t tell me about your disappointments. Think of what I might expect the product to be and then make sure I know if something in that definition is missing.

Anyone with more than one friend has to find a way to decide which friends to help and when. When you move beyond close connections, it sure helps if the “friends” asking lets us know that they’ve thought enough about their quest to start with trust.

Asking isn’t easy. Saying “no,” isn’t either. But time is the only resource no one has enough of.

Take the time to understand and prepare for the four points above and you’ll save time because you’ll contacting the right people with the information that they need to answer faster with a yes.

How do you make sure you’re ready to ask?

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Inside-Out Thinking, management, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, decisions, influence, LinkedIn, management

Influencing Decisions Part 1: 4 Things to Know Before You Propose an Idea

April 16, 2012 by Liz

IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Influencing Decisions

Be Prepared to Influence the Results

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The CEO was a great thinker. He made his decisions on the facts. As I watched him in meetings as people presented ideas with their best efforts to win him over, I learned a lot about what influences the decision making process.

One of the most important things I learned was what I should know to hedge my bets.

Influence is built on trustworthiness and connection.
To achieve those and meet our goals, it’s important to finely focus on the roads that will take us to our goal and the ways of inviting people to join us that move their mission forward as well.

4 Things to Know to Move Forward Before the Abyss of Next Steps

Whether we work for a huge corporation or sit at a desk in our living room, we can’t be successful without tapping into the influence of others who can help us make our ideas and our projects become real. Yet, we all also know the experience of leaving a meeting or ending a phone only to find that the decision we wanted fell off the table into an abyss called “Next Steps.”

Knowing a few things before we go into those meetings can influence the results significantly by building foundational trust in our competence and connecting our goals to how those we want to help will benefit.

    1. Know your short term purpose. Who are you and what are you building? Too often, we enter a meeting, write a blog post or email, or walk into a meeting without a specific and thoughtful goal in mind. Why are you there? Are you trying to rally support for a new idea? Do you want to change a plan in progress? Are you exploring ways to work together? Are you after funding to research the idea? Will you share something new you’ve discovered? What do you want to be true when the conversation ends?

    2. Know how this project will make the answer you want clear. Know how you’re going to make the project happen. Ask yourself before you meet, “What would be next if the answer is yes.?” Sketch out a plan of action and reasonable estimates for the costs and the resources needed to execute that plan. Do the thinking so that they don’t have to. Present a simple plan that can stand on its own.

    3. Know how your plan will bring relevant and positive results faster and easier. Establish context that makes your goal relevant to the audience you want to enlist. Why are you pursuing this goal and why would the audience want to align their goals with yours? Are you informing a large audience or a small one? How deeply do they need to know the details? ?How will you connect what you want to happen to what already is? How will the proposed project fit into what they’re already doing? How can you make your proposal mission critical to THEIR goals?

    4. Know how your experience will add value and mitigate risk. How will you establish your knowledge base as an expert? If possible, tie the proposed idea or project to something you’ve succeed at in the past. If you can’t, know what you’d expect based on your experience and be able to explain why you’re confident that together you can make this innovative approach a success. Research similar ventures. Be prepared to speak to one or two you know well.

Ideas are fun, but they’re not the genius that builds an economy. For no matter how ideas — genius or not — that get set on the “business table,” it’s the ones founded on solid thinking, realistic plans, and influential support from the right sources that develop into the next awesome technology or killer app we own.

If we do the strategic thinking and develop credible plans before we propose the idea, attracting the influential support of the right people is faster, easier, and more meaningful. In fact it could be said to be irresistible.

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: management, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, decisions, ideas, influence, LinkedIn, support

Influence and Intimacy: 5 Solid Ways a Key Customer Strategy Grows Business Faster

April 10, 2012 by Liz

IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Strategic Foundation

Let Everyone Build for Every Customer

When I took the job at the small publisher, it had been losing over 10% in revenues ($millions) every year for the past three years. It was a dream job, I would get to conceive and drive the strategy that would turn the company around and build a customer base of fiercely loyal fans. For them, it was a moment of truth, the company had recently downsized by more than 50%. For me, it was an “Ok, big shot moment. Let’s see what you’ve learned from all that experience.”

I read all of the current product. Over the years, every product had somehow come to be defined by the same 5 buzz words and were for the same customer group — defined as all teachers inside and outside the classroom. I realigned and differentiated it so that teachers could choose the product that best suited their classroom situation.

Then I chose the first new product we would publish and it raised some alerts. The 20 manuscripts I had selected were from an Australian publisher. They were written at a 7-year-old reading level, but were far too racy for 7-year-olds in American schools.

The Founder of the company said, “These books are … um … a little irreverent.”
The President of the company said, “Yes, I’d describe them as irreverent too.”
I said, “And that’s exactly why we’re going to publish them.”

They said things like

  • Parents of second-grade kids would go ballastic if 7-year-old brought these home.
  • Second-grade kids will never understand these.
  • Second-grade teachers will never buy these.
  • States will never fund these.

I replied something like

Every publisher is building books for every kid. And they’re not intimately close to any of them.
We’re going to publish these books for the 13-year-old boys reading at a 7-year-old level.

And so Second-Chance Reading was born.

5 Solid Ways a Key-Customer Strategy Grows a Business Faster

The situation was clear. The investors were unhappy at the downward moving growth curve. A turnaround was imperative for survival. We needed to grow the business quickly and meaningfully. The strategy was simple. Get clearly-defined product to market that would attract a fiercely loyal key customer group.

By identifying teachers of severely vulnerable students — 13-year-old boys reading seriously below level — as a key customer group, we were taking advantage of these 3 solid ways to grow a company faster, easier, and more meaningfully.

  1. Focus is attractive: You can build a website and an offer that shows you know your key customer deeply. If you serve everyone, you serve no one well. I want a company that wants me as a customers. When I walk into a hotel or a restaurant or visit a website, I know immediately if it was designed with people like me mind. Trying to build a location or a website that appeals to everyone flattens the attraction. Teachers, gamers, and CEOs don’t share expectations or sensitivities. Focusing clearly on the key group you will serve means that when they arrive they’ll see immediately that you “get” them intimately.
  2. Intimacy leads to expertise: You get to know the problems. A teacher, a farmer, and a CEO have problems in common. However, those problems play out on different fields with different rules. When you focus on a clear key customer group, such as all teachers of 7th graders who read below level, you see the same problems across similar situations. You get to know the issues and what triggers them deeply. You develop strategies that serve the customer more meaningfully because you’re intimate with their needs, desires, and restrictions.
  3. A clarified group: Your impact is spread more quickly. If you work with one teacher, one farmer, and one CEO, your impact is diluted by the simple fact that teachers, gamers, and CEOs rarely talk business to each other. Three teachers of 7th-grade students who read below level are much more relational. They’re much more likely to trade techniques, offer support, and share success stories. They’ll tell their friends about you.
  4. Simple shareability: You are easier to share. Whether it’s a networking room at the Four Seasons in NYC or conversation on Twitter, a key customer strategy keeps you top of mind, much like a key word keeps you top of Google. If you are well-known for one thing, much like Oprah is known for being a talk show host, the minute someone mentions that one thing in conversation, I think of you and your product or service.
  5. Thoughtful extendability: You can build out infrastructure and customer base simultaneously. Having a key customer focus grounds a strategy that allows you to build a solid foundation. From that foundation, you can move out to people who know the first key customers — their friends, partners, vendors and other relations. The marketing effort it takes to extend to these new groups — for example: 8th grade teachers of students reading below level, parents of 7th grade students reading below level, teachers of 7th and 8th grade students who need reading practice — is less costly and less risk than developing a fully-new market and your reputation precedes you. Your business can project when to enter the market and what the return will be on investment.

Whether your business is a corporation or a sole proprietorship, a key customer strategy keeps the most loyal of your fans close, limits risk, and raises your visibility to grow your business faster, easier, and more meaningfully than any simple campaign might.

Campaigns make sales.
Relationships build businesses.
Deep relationships are irresistible.

What are you doing to build a stronger key customer strategy for your business?

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, customer intimacy, influence, LinkedIn

Influence: 7 Keys to a Trust Network that Will Grow Your Business

April 9, 2012 by Liz

IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: A Trust Network

The Strongest Networks Thrive on Trust and the Truth

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Last September, a man I admire and respect gave me what is possibly the highest compliment of my business life. We were speaking of filters and sharing information, when he said …

Even those who see the world differently, trust you to tell them the truth.

Good news, bad news, exciting developments, dire warnings — Data is simply information.

Information is nothing if we can’t trust it.

Without information we trust, we can’t move without risk.

7 Keys to Trust that Will Establish Your Business, Your Brand and Your Reputation

One of my most popular interactive presentations is called “Who’s Telling Your Story?” It outlines a clear strategy to enlist and inspire a deeply active community of fiercely loyal fans who spread your story and protect your brand. The first key point in that presentation is to know your story and to build your network before you need it.

But not all networks are equal. The network that builds a business, a brand and a reputation is connected by deep trust and consistent behavior.

That trust network is not simply a contact list, a customer base, or even a team of people who love the company and it’s customers. That trust network is people who tell our best true story, move to action when we ask, and protect us from threats. A network like that doesn’t happen by happy accident. It takes deep commitment, consistent trustworthy behavior, and relentless focus.

Here are the 7 Keys that attract the people who will join your truest trust network and bring their fiercely loyal friends.

  1. Identify and hold true your deal-breaker values — the qualities that define you.
  2. Communicate your goals and intentions. Let people know the why behind the what you’re doing.
  3. Make and keep promises and commitments to yourself, your team, and your larger community.
  4. Anticipate needs. Don’t assume others’ needs are what yours would be.
  5. Be aware if you offer treat people differently and know why you do. Those of us who care know, do you?
  6. Own your actions and their impact. Apologize quickly, well, and concisely for bad judgment, bad behavior, and bad math.
  7. Tell the truth … as gently or as firmly as the people and situation suggests you should.

Think of your best bosses, your best teachers, the best team you ever were on, your best friends and coworkers, how many of these seven did / do they have? How much better would they have been / be, if your answer was all seven?

To build a community network that brings you information you can trust, do all 7 for the people who love you now and the word will get out faster, easier, and more meaningfully than any story you might tell.

Start by doing the first with a vengeance. Then get moving on the second. As you do them, notice how the way you see your business changes and the they way people respond. Move sure and slowly. Keep all 7 Keys in the decisions you make and notice how your decisions become more focused and how those decisions attract people you trust.

The value of information is in how much you trust the source.
The essence of influence is trust.

A reputation of trustworthiness is a barrier to entry that’s hard to cross.
A trust network of people who share that trust and act on it — employees, volunteers, vendors, partners, customers, shareholders, advisors, friends, family — amps that barrier up exponentially to irresistible.

How will your own trust network that will grow your business and your brand?
Get started.

Be irresistible.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Business Life, Community, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, Community, influence, LinkedIn, network, reputation

Influence: Don’t Take My Point of View

March 20, 2012 by Liz

Speaking Louder Doesn’t Make Them Right

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Once I thought oter people had a better view of the world than I ever could …

It was as if he were a prince with insight beyond my own and for a moment I believed in his view of the world.

He always thought that only mountains could be beautiful. I heard him proclaim it. Yes, proclaim is exactly what he did when he spoke of them. He found his own thoughts worthy of public decree. He’d announce that flat lands had their use, but then ask what possible beauty could a man proud as he ever find in a place with flat air?

No matter the metaphor I couldn’t convey the lovely feeling and the wide open space of the grassland without trees only blue skies above it. The green is so green and blue so blue, that the clouds must show off for fear of being thought to be boring.

So today when I enjoy the open flat lands. I might lay back in the grass that is wide as the world with a sky that goes on forever. I watch the clouds dance and think of the adventures and of the characters we might have imagined when we were children.

I laze on the grass, enjoying, breathing in every minute. I drink the gratitude for a world that is like this. I’m particularly glad I had the good sense to quit dating that proclaiming brat before college was over.

No one guy’s view is better, further, or more beautiful than my own.

Don’t take my point of view … stop, stand, see what you love about your own.

Then share it.

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: Personal Branding, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, influence, LinkedIn, point of view

Begged, Borrowed, or Stolen … The Economics of Influence

February 21, 2012 by Liz

Asking for Influence Gets You Something Else

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Earlier this month I received a string of private, direct messages (DMs) on Twitter from someone who has never sent me a public or private via Twitter or other social network. She’s never sent me an email. I’m pretty sure she’s never commented on my blog or my Instagram photos. She’s not a shareholder on Empire Avenue. As far as I recall, we’ve not met me at a conference or had a conversation on the telephone. Our sole relationship is that she is a human being with a Twitter account who chose to follow me whom I chose to follow back because she has an interesting Twitter bio.

The first direct message asked me if I could “get out the vote” because she wanted to win some prize being given to the person who got the most votes. I don’t know anything about her beyond her Twitter bio. How could I ask my friends to “get out the vote”? The choice seemed simple choose for my friends and my network — by not asking them to invest time — or choose for someone I don’t know.

That’s when it got interesting. The string of messages that came next thanked me for my help and asked me for help again. One in the mix — most likely meant to explain the behavior said, “she was crazy for the prize,” but she’d be happy to get noticed even if she couldn’t “take it home.”

The experience reminded me of a wave of similar requests that flooded my Twitter account during the run of the Fast Company Influencer Project in 2010 and a blog post I wrote about influence back then. What follows with some further explanation is what still applies now.

Recently Jason Pollock commented on Twitter about the Fast Company Influencer Project Project @Jason_Pollack said, I signed up for the “influence project” but quickly realized those at the top were just being very spammy to be there.

Robert Scoble replied with some true words of wisdom … @Scobleizer said, “Seems to me @Jason_Pollock that people with real influence never have to point it out or beg for it.”

They have a point.

Begged, Borrowed, or Stolen … The Economics of Influence

People rich with influence understand it as a currency. True and lasting influence — like true and lasting wealth — is earned through investment of time and resources. But it’s also a way of thinking and valuing what we do and the people we do it with. But influence, unlike monetary currency, cannot be begged, borrowed, or stolen. It can only be earned.

When a stranger asks me to “get out the vote,” she’s begging to borrow my influence as if it’s a limitless commodity that I’m at liberty to share. Were I so frivolous as to offer my network so freely to people I don’t know, I’d soon find that I’d spent what influence I had foolishly by not valuing the people who had valued my word. Or to paraphrase the axiom …

A fool and her influence are soon parted. Here are four ways to use the economics of influence to build influence of your own.

The difference between begging and building influence is the difference between giving to get and investing wisely.

  • The exchange rate. In economics, influence would be a local currency. It’s value is only worth what your network agrees that it might be. The ideal is that you might take a single contact to move people to action. Contests that require millions of votes to choose a winner are an example of hyperinflation.

    Power up your network. Be willing to work to prove your value.

    How can you connect with the people who most represent what you value?

  • The production costs. Producing influence takes resources — spent in building quality relationships, systems to maintain them, content to keep connected with them, and ways to grow those relationships. True influence grows from aligning our goals with others.

    Share your influence as an equal partner.

    How can others be better because you helped?

  • Specialization. People rich with influence have integrated their passions and skills into their sphere of influence. They choose their networks on values and ethics and by doing so have established an automatic barrier to entry.

    Know and value what has drawn you to each and all of your contacts.

    How do you describe your network?

  • Scarcity: Supply and Demand. If oak leaves were currency. They would only be valuable where oak trees don’t grow. People who have influence choose and feel no need to showcase their influence bank account. Their generosity is from a place of strength. They promote what they value in others, not what they hope will return.

    Value your word and the power it has.

    How do you know what not to influence?

When we know the value of our influence, we can invest it wisely in people who invest back. We don’t give our value promiscuously to every person who asks. Influence is earned. It’s given as a trust and kept by those who understand its value. It can’t be begged, borrowed or stolen, and in like manner, it can’t be bought or sold.

Who influences you simply by the way he or she influences others?

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

Buy the Insider’s Guide to Online Conversation.

Filed Under: management, Marketing /Sales / Social Media, Successful Blog Tagged With: bc, influence, LinkedIn, promotion

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