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Open Letter to Entrepreneurs: You Don’t Hold a Monopoly on the Right Answers

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

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You want a new Web site. You’re the boss and the company needs a new site. The existing one is home to static and dated talking points and lately you’ve begun to suspect that it is shouting at visitors and is thus, not developed with an evolving 2.0 culture in mind. There’s nothing, you conclude, social about. Your wife, mother-in-law and golf buddies all agree. You’re the boss and this is your mandate.

You want the thing redone and you want it redone now. Details are someone else’s problem. That’s what you pay the worker bees to do. You make the demand, they make it happen. You don’t care how; you just want the darn thing done and done well. You assign a small gaggle of your most qualified people to the task and they immediately spring into action. At the outset however, you make it clear that you want every phase of the project to pass through you before moving through each milestone. You’re Teddy Roosevelt. That’s just the way it is.

The talented group you’ve assembled begin doing all the heavy lifting as you expect it to be done. They do the research. They poll the best resources. They draft the Gantt charts and project time lines that denote, in graphically rich detail, the mile markers that will comprise the job’s lifespan. They have drawn up the wire frames, and the site map too. Nothing is left to guesswork. Your people got it right the first time. And you insist on being involved in every discussion.

The presentation

You call a meeting to review the team’s progress. The team sits down with you and proposes the solution as outlined in the project management materials and research data they’ve spent the previous week developing. The team is pumped. They know they nailed this thing and confidently cannot wait to see your reaction. Your project lead places the plan in front of you and you dig in, allowing her no opportunity to present. You give the proposal a flagrantly cursory look and are quickly ready to respond.

Here’s your appraisal:

The wire frames are bland and unsexy and the sitemap is nothing more than a confusing bunch of boxes with if statements peppered throughout.

Hmmm. The timeline calls for a 12-week project lifespan. 12 weeks, you exclaim, seems an excessive period of time to launch a new Web site. You have no prior experience launching Web sites, but that doesn’t stop you from being thoroughly convinced that you’re right to expect and demand it be done faster.

You don’t known what the terms, CMS, 301, 401 or Gantt all mean and that frustrates you. Instead of learning however, you use your entrepreneurial brawn to deliver a brief and condescending lecture to the lead on why spelling things out in plain English was not achieved and time, consequently, has been wasted. Your untrusted lead cautions you that these materials are internal project guides, intended for the technical eyes of the team and not necessarily a high level presentation meant for non-technical leadership. As the lead, you assure the boss that you’re trying to explain things in digestible terms, but the boss filibusters time and again and silences you’re every effort to simplify the conversation.

Intimidated further by your lead’s sensible rebuttals, you’re the big cheese you recall. So you dig your increasingly fragile heels in and quickly, loudly move on, even more confused now than you were before your initial objection to the amount of nerdy mumbo jumbo in the plan.

Suddenly it dawns on you.

Where’s the layout concept? “What’s this thing going to look like?”, you ask the team. The lead explains that this is a planning meeting and in the timeline spreadsheet, all of these milestones are addressed in their logical order. This frustrates you even more and you again explain to the team that you think 12 weeks is excessive and you now begin to suspect why. All this planning. All these spreadsheets (one in total, mind you). All these wire frames are giving you a headache. There’s no fun in any of this! You insist on seeing ‘something’ (a layout) within the week.

The team lead tries again to explain that designing the creative at this stage puts the sensible order of milestones grossly out of sequence and thus, hinders the team’s ability to get things right. You scoff and launch into a less-than succinct rant about how you built the company and how you met deadlines and adapted to ungodly pressures in far less time than this project asks for. The team tunes you out and, one by one, slowly begin to accept that you don’t give a darn about their expertise in designing and developing great Web sites. You don’t notice, of course, that your team has abandoned you, because you are too busy being certain that this situation is not unlike any other professional crisis you’ve experienced and in each of those, you were 100% in the right. You merely want to control every facet of the job and consequently grant no one beneath you the authority to succeed on terms unfamiliar to you.

10 Months Later…

The site was designed according to your project management sensibilities. It possesses all of the social channels you demanded it possess. It even went live ahead of that senseless 12 week calendar your former team lead recommended. Oh yeah, she quit like six months ago. If you had listened to her, you ponder, you might still be waiting for a site to go live. Your wife and golf buddies think it rocks and while you now have Twitter, Facebook and YouTube profiles, you have no qualified traffic hitting your pages and you’ve ultimately learned nothing from the exercise.

Two Years Later…

You’re broke and out of business. You’re getting older and you haven’t the fundamental computer savvy to impress interviewers. You have enormous debts and the culture that rewarded your business ideologies so many years earlier has now made you virtually unhirable. Humility sets in if you’re lucky and it is then, if you’re luckier, that it dawns on you that you don’t possess a monopoly on the right answers.

That’s when you learn to listen again.
Listening leads to life-long learning.
It’s your chance to start over.

—–

Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: bkang83

Thanks, Scott!

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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Are Blog Comments the new Mundane Commute?

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

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I’m concerned about the purity of the conversations undergone in blog comments. I’m concerned that many are not all that pure after all.

I’m finding that often blog commenting appears to be something akin to a bunch of people not-so gingerly exchanging business cards and PowerPoints and even worse, trite and banal ass-kissing.

Yawn.

What if hundreds of comments on a blog you love were actually nothing more than a mirage? The post was terrific, but the post’s comment mojo was less the result of the post’s quality and more the result of self-important opportunism and profiteering? What if the 100 comments can be reasonably likened to a pack of hyenas scrambling to snag a bite of the feast the author has laid out by virtue of her blog’s popularity? Popular blog, popular blogger, hmmm?

The New Commute

What if everyone put driving traffic via comments above any other engagement priority? What degree of coloring the commenting exercise with this agenda is too much degree? “It’s networking,” some of you may be saying to yourself. I get that. But what I asked was, what if everyone did this? That’s my concern. I mix for business purposes too. But what if we’re cheapening the commenting progression to such a degree that it’s becoming the new overcrowded commute we all try so hard each day to avoid? You know the one? We funnel like drones off the train and force ourselves through the turnstyles, up the stairs, out the doors, all to chase a little bit of money? What if blog comments were the new matrix, the new false reality devoid of any pure and true moments?

To some of you, perhaps I sound naive, or maybe even a bit of a whiner. I’m probably a little of both to tell the truth. Well look, I believe, pie in the sky or not, that the world is what we make it. And so it is with blog commenting.

A Challenge to Contributors

Draft a comment to a blog post you sincerely enjoyed reading. Launch your word processing software and dazzle us. Done? Super. Now do it again, this time imagining that you do not have an online identity. No Twitter, Facebook or YouTube accounts either. You have nothing you want to sell, teach or promote. You need nothing from me. Plain and simple: you enjoyed the post and wanted to add to the dialog. There is literally no gain for you outside that which is had by engaging others in a meaningful discussion.

Are the two drafts the same? Now that you’ve completed both versions, each with a different agenda motivating you, what observations can you make about your commenting habits?

What kind of observations have you made about the state of blog commenting in today’s blogosphere? I would love to hear your take.

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Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Maguis & David

Thanks, Scott!

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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How to Avoid Using PowerPoint in 5 Easy Steps

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

You’re losing business because your presentation sucks, not because your fee is too high or someone else is smarter, more creative or more accomplished. You’re going in scared that you won’t compete and that same fear drove your preparedness and your crappy presentation.

… I’ll explain in a minute, but for now, wanna see 200 photographs of my recent business trip to Indianapolis? It’s loaded with killer shots of the thoroughly unremarkable office building I worked from. No? OK. Well what about video of surgeons removing the deceased section of my sigmoid colon? No!? Man, you’re tough to please. Oh I got it! How about I talk to you for an hour about how awesome my six-year-old son is at soccer? …

Seriously. How many of you are remotely interested in any of these topics, let alone eager to view, watch or listen to me carry on about them for an hour?

Now to be fair, maybe if some of my readers work in Indianapolis, they may take an interest in my trip to their fine city. They may, for instance, want to know where I stayed, or if given the right time of year, had I taken the time to catch a Colts or Pacers game. Maybe some among you have also been diagnosed with chronic diverticulitis and like me, had to have abdominal surgery to remove a damaged part of your colon. I bet that segment would want to engage me, if only to relate their experiences to mine. Or possibly your child rocks on the soccer field too and you’re dying to ask what position my son plays, so that you can tell of your child scoring the winning goal as time expired.

So what I’m getting at is that if I’m not able to relate on a visceral level that reflects directly on what’s important to me personally, I’m not likely to care very much about what you want to share with me.

If we know this and somewhere deep down most of us do, why then would we care about your long-winded, one-way presentation? Or an over-detailed dominating PowerPoint presentation?

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These pitches, sadly often aren’t about the prospect at all. It’s about what you think of your ability to do a thing or even worse, all things. It is nothing more than what your prospect sees all the time from potential vendors: an overtly talkative brochure, peppered with gratuitous look-at-me platitudes. But what specifically is it doing apart from forcing people to pretend to be enthusiastic about you purely because they’re trapped in a room with you?

Reinvent the presentation experience

In which of your 100 slides do you get me emotional? I ask because that’s actually where I want your presentation to begin. Flip to that slide right now and please begin. I’m listening. Oh your presentation doesn’t have a slide that stirs me? Well in that case, here’s your hat, there’s the door and have a nice day.

Everyone has an unnecessarily verbose and egocentric PowerPoint. I know of no capabilities presentation that is ever justified in being as long as it is. The problem with most of them are that they’re authored by our fear of failure, not our ability to solve the audience’s problems. And so I challenge you to be the anti-presenter! Be the salesperson who goes in there and kills it because fear of:

* leaving something out
* not being good enough
* not getting money

did not color your pitch. If you’re not going to win the business, lose it because you suck, not because your awful presentation messed you up. Here’s five things I do on sales calls that have helped me not lose the business.

  1. Never bring a presentation to a sales pitch.

    I bring a business card and the team that will steer the project and that’s it. If I’m responding to an RFP, my response honors (to the letter) the RFP guidelines and requirements. Nothing unsolicited is ever included. I never voluntarily talk about business needs nor present business solutions that fall outside the prospect’s requirements or curiosities.

  2. Research your prospect.

    I focus on key players and read up (on and offline) on what is available on each stake holder. I research their successes and failures and because what I do is Web related, I look at the BBB information, along with sentiment surrounding the company’s social and emotional footprint.

    It’s important to memorize these fundamentals because the people you’re meeting with are sure to be emotionally invested in the outcome of the gig, as well as their business in general. Exhibiting a good degree of knowledge out the door will help them see you more as an ally, then a vendor.

  3. Shut up.

    This one’s tough, because I yap a lot. But yes, I do shut up. I close my mouth and listen to the prospect talk about themselves. This is always the best of all available opportunities to sell yourself too because this is precisely the stage in the sales process where the prospect shows you their cards. If they’re talking about their stuff, you can be assured that they’re going to get excited talking about it.

    This is where many perfectly qualified vendors lose the business and never understand why they did. As the prospect is talking about their stuff, the manner with which they exhibit enthusiasm may be foreign when compared to the way you get excited. Doesn’t mean they’re not pumped. So don’t just match their enthusiasm or overdo it. Rather, replicate it using the tone and mood they’re using to convey it. Again, guide them toward seeing you as an ally, not a money-grubbing vendor. Be similar to them, not dissimilar.

  4. Ask Questions.

    Ask them questions that force them to talk more about the stuff that gets them excited. Try, when possible, to limit your questions to only those that relate to the topics they are most passionate about. If you’ve been doing great listening, then you already know what turns them on. Taking this specific action has won me more business and gotten me more jobs than any other sales method I use. And for the love of all things holy, be patient. The longer you wait to add your own anecdotes, the more you’ve got them telling theirs. The more they’re busy telling theirs, the more they’ll want to hear yours when your chance comes. Prematurely grasping for the microphone, or worse, snagging it before it’s been handed to you will kill any momentum you’ve been building in the previous steps. simply put: if you see what got ’em hot and bothered, well hell, sex sells! Make ’em talk about it more. Well done. No go cash some checks.

  5. Relate to them.

    Suggestion #5 is last on purpose. Offering anecdotes and casual social banter in the earliest stages of a pitch is a stupid decision. Imagine we’re at a party and you and your friends are conversing about the NFL. You’re a club. A clan. All equally vetted by the other. Now imagine I walk up to your group, unknown to you all, and dive head-long into a rant about the NY Jets losing their season opener. What are the odds you’ll dig me?

    Relating to the client is really all you’ve been doing to this point, but you’ve been the guy or gal humbly listening, eventually asking questions as you and your friends talk about pro football. After I have demonstrated my interest in you and most importantly, on your terms, you may then be ready to hear my take on a Jets loss.

    The time to crack jokes and secure social common ground isn’t when you first sit down. I’ve seen this over and over. Sure you’re a cool dude or chick. Sure you can slay ’em, but earn your seat at that table. Earn the right to be casual.

How do you relate with your prospects? How do you sell customers? Do you use a presentation? Does it work? What separates you from the thousands that do use a capabilities presentation?

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Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Geetesh Bajaj

Thanks, Scott!

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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How to Defuse Customer Skepticism and Cynicism

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

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Want to eliminate the healthy skepticism your customers have of you and instead be seen as a trusted servant? Terrific. Here’s what you do: don’t give them cause to be skeptical. Trust me, they’re skeptical. Real skeptical. Mark Twain once said the wisest people are also the most cynical. That’s your target audience. Cynics – every last one of them. Don’t blame them either. It’s our fault they’re that way. Years of forcing ourselves on them has created doubters of most of our potential buyers. I’m the same way and if you’re smart, so are you. Frankly, I like being skeptical and cynical. Healthy doses of both arm me to buy smarter, shop carefully, invest intelligently – in life and in business. I can sniff out a phony and I don’t hang with them. Your prospects can sniff just the same. They’re diligently watching as much for the BSer as they are the best buy. [More…]

Being honest isn’t achieved in telling the truth alone. Being honest has an end point. Be truthful. There’s a difference between being honest and behaving truthfully. Let your actions, not merely your words, speak of your truthfulness. Truthful actions have no vanishing line. They just go on and on, resonating with your audience well after you’ve stopped yapping. Make your contribution to the networking landscape count to the skeptical buyer that’s questioning your motives. If your networking efforts are fraught with hurried, self-promoting drivel, think again before inserting yourself into the fray. If you know you’re being disingenuous and let’s face it, you do know, then what are the odds we know too? Here, let me help you with this one: the odds are extremely high.

Deputize yourself.

Do your part to clean up the sales noise found in networking and prospecting circles. On or offline, the rules are the same. Mean it! Make selfless contributions to talks, meetings and mixers. Shape and guide the conversation, not your latest opt-in initiatives. If you do this well, people will want to know what you do and what you sell and never because you forced it upon them using absurdly urgent sales tactics. Authenticity is a commodity in sales, your transparent attempt to bait me is not.

Patience, Patience, Patience

Proving to prospects that you’re not full of it takes time. After all, you’re starting out with people who suspect you’re motivated by your sales goals alone and believe nothing matters more to you. So the prospect is ready for you to strike fast – while the proverbial iron is hot. Etc, etc. Blah, blah, blah. Borrrrr-iiiiiing.

Business relationships, like those you share with your spouse, partner, brother or mother, require time to develop. This is not news to us. Yet often, I see salespeople and business owners go for the quick close and forgo the opportunity to build repeat business through authentic bonding rituals. Prove you’re interested by forgetting what you sell and instead, talk with your prospect, not at him or to him. Imagine the pleasure derived from business conversations had through conversing about stuff other than your business. Ironic, right? Try it. You’ll be surprised how effective a salesperson you become the moment you stop trying to sell your stuff. Again, ironic.

Have you ever pushed too much, too far, too fast? Maybe you got this right the first and every time. How do you dispel the myths that the sales process must include a pushy pitch?

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Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: Jody McNary Photography

Thanks, Scott!

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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How I Take the Focus Off Money Part II

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

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This is part two of a two-part series on how to get the client focused on the relationship, not the costs they incur working with you. In the first installment, I discussed how we can calm the fearful and financially strained Mom & Pop by offering them guarantees. Promising struggling small business owners that you’ll share the risk is one of the best ways to demonstrate your investment in doing the job right, not just collecting some quick cash. In part two below, I turn our attentions toward specifically how we can discuss money so that money is no longer discussed. Sounds like a riddle, but I assure you it’s not. So let’s get started.

I understand that the guarantee is among the best ways to return the risk the customer takes in hiring you and I love the idea of shouldering the burden of proof. But that is only one reason I make guarantees. The other is that I want to help. I really do and nothing says so louder than making promises that remove financial risks and potential losses from the bargaining table. See, I’m not preoccupied with the money part of the sales progression and it’s made all the difference. Yes, I need money too, but I only want it from people who were happy with the way I earned it. Everything else feels like stealing. I want to be paid because we agree that I nailed the thing. The fees I’m asking are the reward I’ve earned for adding value to your business endeavors. If my earnings aren’t my reward for doing great work, well then again it just ends up feeling like I got away with something.

The relationship is the reward.

When a customer asks me, ‘Scott, what do you think?’ or ‘Scott, which direction should we head?’ I get pumped. I mean I get crazy excited. Now we’re building something before we’ve even begun building the thing you want built. We’re building that relationship baby! Killer! When you put things in my hands, you’re telling me that you want me to prove it now, earn your trust, your confidence and oh yeah, that’s the reward!

Allay their fears.

If your clients are anything like mine, they’re asking for your expertise because they don’t possess it themselves. Ever been frightened by something you did not understand? OK then. That’s how your prospects often feel: scared. They’re afraid you’re going to trick them, cheat them, screw them. My pitches are often attended by prospects concerned about wasting money on me and I’m equally concerned that I won’t form the beginnings of a trusting bond if we keep discussing money. Consequently, when this happens I attack the topic by promising to give them back their money if they’re unhappy with the results I’ve produce. Simple right? It works almost every time too. Worried about spending your money on me? Super! I’ll give it back if you’re not happy with how I earned it. Next topic. And off we go.
Defuse with candor.

When the elephant in the room is money, seize the opportunity to demonstrate with meaning how confident you are that your customer made a smart decision choosing you. Don’t allow the customer to dangle their cost fears in front of you as if your fees are a stumbling block they’re justified in bring up. Assuming your fees are sensible to begin with, they’re not a just cause to kill the deal at all. Take back control of the room by offering an out that relieves them of the very risk they’re making such a contentious talking point. Assume the risk and you can return your collective attention to what really matters, getting that relationship a’ budding. Oh yeah! That’s the stuff!

How do you help your nervous clients work with you to grow the relationship? How do you relax them when they liken you to a drill-wielding dentist hovering over them like an opportunistic vulture?

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This is the second in a two-part series.

Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: dryhead

Thanks, Scott!

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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How I Take the Focus Off Money

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A Guest Post by Scott P. Dailey

photo credit: RambergMediaImages

My portfolio is comprised largely of passionate, cash-hungry small shops, boutiques, niches and nonprofits. I do work with big companies now and again too, but they’re the exception to the rule and thus, I won’t be spending time talking about them in this post. No, this post is for the small consultancy that’s servicing the small, proud brick and mortar.

OK, so here it is: I guarantee my work. If I’m designing your Web site layout for instance, I take a 50% deposit that sits in escrow until you approve the layout and the balance you cough up once you’re 100% satisfied with the finished result. With Web design, my contracts call for me to create at least two unique layouts, put them both under your nose and get your approval of one of the two. I even offer you several complimentary rounds of change before requesting your approval. If you don’t approve, you get your money back. If you want to abandon the project before providing approval, you get your money back. I guarantee you’re going to love your new layout and if you don’t, I give back your money. If I’m writing copy for you, I refund your deposit if you don’t like my copy. And if your unhappy with the content of your first monthly SEO/social media report or feel I have fallen short on a promise, I refund your money – period.

My customers are very careful how they spend money on their business. Not so oddly, those deep in the black are even thriftier than those sucking wind. In the red or the black, my customers get sticker shock easily. I know this. So, where I may not always be willing to remove the stunned disbelief from their faces with a crazy discount, I do try to allay their spending remorse by making simple guarantees that protect their investment in me.

I don’t want your money that badly.

If you don’t think I’ve earned it, then I refund it. The relationship is the ultimate prize, not you paying this month’s electric bill.

How do you shift the client’s focus from money to forging a bond with you? How do you prove your customers won’t regret hiring you?

—–
This is the first in a two-part series.

Scott P. Dailey is a Web designer, copywriter and network administrator. Recently Scott launched ( http://scottpdailey.com ), his social media blog that makes connections between social networking etiquette and the prevailing human social habits that drive on and offline business engagement patterns. You can connect with Scott via Twitter at @scottpdailey.

Creative Commons License photo credit: RambergMediaImages

Thanks, Scott!

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

Successful-Blog is a proud affiliate of

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