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Please Don’t Ask Before You Say Hello and Another 9 Don’ts

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Lead with Relationships

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Again this week, I got an email from someone who doesn’t know me, who wanted to engage my network in her cause. This post is about that one email exchange that exemplified too many don’ts in my inbox.

I’m a person, not a network. And my network is made up friends and colleagues I respect. I value them. I treasure them. I trust them. I know I can’t replace them. I don’t give, share, or sell their attention to people I don’t know. So please …

1. Don’t Ask for Things Before We Know Each Other

Any person who takes the shortest while to follow me online knows that I’m a giver and I love to support my friends. Any person who takes a second longer also knows that

I want a relationship not a one-link stand.

What that means is that I want to get to know you before I recommend you or share what you do with my friends.

2. Don’t Ask for My Network

I’m writing because I’ve identified you as someone who is part of a networking empire that is basically unstoppable, and a major online influencer when it comes to what people are thinking and feeling and doing.

Translation: I want to use your network because my own isn’t big enough to reach my goal.

In itself that’s not a bad strategy to ask a friend to reach out to her network. But the relationship — the friendship and the trust — needs to be there first. This someone saw me as a channel of distribution, not a person. She wasn’t really looking at aligning our goals.

3. Don’t Assume Your Mission Is My Mission

The next five paragraphs were about her, her mission, and why her mission is important to her. Aside from describing their philosophy and stating that I lived it, the mission itself wasn’t very clear. Neither was why I should invest in it.

4. Don’t Lie by Omission

I got curious to find out more about the cause or the product that this mission was all about. It’s a retail and lifestyle brand of apparel. Funny how that never got mentioned in the first or the emails that followed.

5. Don’t Act Like I Work for You

Why have I gotten in touch with you today? Because I believe you embody my mission and can help others do the same.

Tweet the following message ….
Post the following message on Facebook …
Share the following message with your readers …

Again, I might do plenty for a friend, but without that relationship, calling me to action so directly was telling me to open my network to someone I’ve never met.

6. Don’t Ask Me to Cross the FTC

Doesn’t telling me what to tweet or post break the FTC rules?

7. Don’t Offer Me Favors

My lack of response might have signaled that I was busy or that I had a lack of interest. But apparently it did not. Soon I got a follow up repeating a shorter version of the same message above the original.

Did you get it? Do you have any questions for me?
I’m working to develop a huge wave of enthusiasm … hope I can count on your support. And since I know favors go both ways, in return for your support I’d like to offer you a limited edition … t-shirt…
or maybe something else? Networking or entrepreneurial support?

8. Don’t Assume I Have Nothing Better to Do

Let’s talk, and find out more about how we can help each other. Please let me know your thoughts ASAP …

Your urgency isn’t my urgency. I have my own work.

9. Don’t Shout Louder After a “No, Thank You.”

I replied as graciously as I might. My exact reply was …

I got your message. You have a lovely message that you want to share. Your energy is admirable. I can see your passion for what you’re doing. I wish you the best of luck with it.

Unfortunately, my family, my clients, and current projects are all I can keep up with. It wouldn’t be fair to them to take on another project.

Thanks for asking,
Liz

I might have expected that would be the end, but it wasn’t.

The reply read:

Hi Liz,

I understand and thank you for your reply.

The real reason I’m connecting with you is because YOU (as an individual), appear to fit [our] profile and seem like someone who’d want to be a part of something great, in its infancy stages – by doing something little to help spread the word and enthusiasm.

Even if just via your personal Facebook account or something – is there any way you’d be willing to help me out?

There’s a free [deleted description] T-shirt in it if you are… :o)

Best to you with your business endeavors as well…

Two more emails followed in which I was commended for my “due diligence” in having checked out the emailer and set straight in that she had built her huge network from being positive and sincere with people who showed immediate enthusiasm for her cause.

I didn’t know that I had done that.

It was never mentioned that the “cause” was the philosophy behind a retail apparel brand.

These are only the don’ts from one email exchange with one person.

Do you have other don’ts that belong on this list?

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

These are only the don’ts from one email exchange with one person.

Do you have other don’ts that belong on this list?

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

What Soundbyte Do People Use to Describe YOU?

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cooltext443809602_strategy

The importance of a professional personal identity isn’t hard to explain. We all want to let business contacts see us as high caliber individuals with strong positive qualities and competence. A strong professional personal identity can differentiate and position us an irresistibly attractive asset when we want to work with a most prestigious team.

But a great professional identity more than clever packaging. It’s more than a 30-second pitch on who we are. To set our personal potential into action takes self-awareness, reflection, information, conversation, consideration, reorganization, and a vision that we can translate into action.

By identifying personal and professional brand synergies, aligning your personal brand goals to your professional pursuits you can have your cake and eat it too. By identifying opportunities that serve both your personal and professional brand objectives, you can effectively multitask, utilizing the professional support and resources at your disposal while building your own brand. Dan Schawbel

It takes work to identify, understand, define, and articulate the unique value that is your personal value proposition. But it’s worth it to get the right words, the right values, and the right talents and skills to talk about when we talk about ourselves in a business context.

It’s harder yet to take that down to a shareable sound-byte that’s clear, concise, and dead on true.

What Soundbyte Do People Use to Describe YOU?

Call Tony. He can fix anything.
That Vanessa, she’s so sweet.
If you want it organized, accurate, and complete, Anne’s the one.
Ryan’s a problem solver. He’ll have this figured out in a matter of minutes.
David will give you the shirt off his back. Don’t take it. He never forgets that he gave it.

Those soundbytes, mini-descriptions, might be accurate, or they might be legend. The point is that the people talking believe and share them. The people they’re describing have communicated those traits strongly over time.

What do people share about you when you’re not around? Being able to articulate and highlight your value can define and even change what folks share with each other about who you are.

You probably have a sense of your strengths and some of your weaknesses. It’s hard to get through school and get a job without having a sense of what they might be. But few of us actually take some time to pinpoint what they are. Take the time to determine your most outstanding assets–your highest proficiencies, your core competencies. Ask yourself these questions to gather the relevant data.

  1. What am I often asked to teach others?
  2. What responsibilities are often delegated to me?
  3. What kinds of meetings and tasks am I asked to lead?
  4. What special skills and competencies do I have that others rely on?
  5. What parts of my job description would be hardest to fill?
  6. What traits make me a valuable and unique member of the team?
  7. What work isn’t work at all?

Spend serious time reflecting on each question. Reflection is how we understand what we know. You might think about one question for set time or for a few minutes at different points in a day. As you get ideas and remember things, take notes. Write down what comes to mind. When you’ve got notes on all seven, roll up what you have gathered into one single big idea — the short bio that we hear people use all of the time — something like …

Liz can articulate what could make any product irresistible and how to turn any problem into a win.

Make your big idea a statement of your unique value in ways that others can see it, can believe in it, and can share it easily.

What is the sentence that people should be saying about you?

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

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

Irresistible Value Proposition … Won’t You Always Wonder What Might Have Been?

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The Proposition of the Old Spice Super Bowl Man

blockquote>Designers of the former type loved the theater of their demos. They loved an audience. They loved performing. Designers of the latter kind of demo preferred participants to spectators. They wanted to watch people having fun with their inventions instead of putting on a show. Their demos weren’t props — they were playgrounds. — Let Your Customers Persuade Themselves

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Both can work. Yet both depend on how well the features of the product are communicated in the demonstrations. These days allowing people to interact can have limitations … such as getting the people and the product into the same real time space.

Either way, could bring a customer to find what we’re selling is remarkable and worth purchasing. But neither will necessarily about the irresistible value proposition … that we, our brand, or our product knocks all competition out of the field.

For that to be so, we need to add one further idea that this ad from Old Spice does beautifully.

The message is in every frame:

  • he gets it — seamless, flawless work.
  • he sees you need — heart.
  • and you’ll have getting things done with him.

Did you notice how it doesn’t seem self-promotional or pitchy? Despite the humorous over-stating of his abilities. Imagine just walking into meeting and talking about who you are, what you brand and your products do that the others can’t. When we are fully expressed in our message it looks like that.

Simply stated it sounds like … “Work with all of the rest, they aren’t me.”

Look at them. Look at me.
Look at them. Look at me.
Won’t you always wonder what might have been, if you choose other than me?

A true value proposition sets you apart from the rest of the world.

And delivers on that promise consistently.

What’s your irresistible value proposition?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Want help with your value proposition? !!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Register Now!! for sobcon-vmc

When we want to get a customer interested in ourselves, our brand, or our products … common wisdom has been that we can sell them — give them a demo and tell them — or we can let them sell themselves, give them a problem and let them use the product to solve it.

Is Your Promise Irresistibly Attractive to Your Customers?

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As business moves on line, less and less of what is offered is “one size fits all.” Customers like you and me have developed a taste for what helps us express our individuality. The more a business or a blog seems to “look and feel” like me, the more likely I am to stick around and explore.

What does that mean to an online business now?

Build a Promise on Values

We are a fascinating species. When we don’t know where to go, we’ll go where everyone else goes. But give me a valuable reason to come to you, and you’ve made a customer –- a reader -– possibly a friend forever.

It’s likely that our customers will look a lot like ourselves. People gravitate to people who think as they do. In fact, we think people who think as we do are smart, and those who don’t are difficult uninformed or unable to “keep up.” Naturally our best customers will share our values too.

What we value is what we’ll fight for, what we’ll put our head, heart, and time on the line for.

Build a promise core on values to attract customers who love your business as much as you do.

  • Define one or two core values for your business. Call them your value service niche. Make it your place to stand. Saving time with a smile could be one. Worrying your work into art could work. Play to your strengths and passions. Do what you value better than anyone else.
  • Find out everything about the customers who value that too. Fall in love with every one of them. Figure out how to crawl into their skin and see what they think, feel, and experience. Know their dreams and their wishes. Find their needs and desires. Learn to predict what they’re not saying.
  • Define your your work through your customers’ world view. Design everything they see to look like them. Choose your words to sounds like they do. State what you stand for in promise of a few words.
  • Write that promise everywhere your customers look.
  • Deliver on it every time they meet you.
  • Use that promise to test every decision, every product and service your business offers.

Core values define what you and your customers put above everything else. When they’re aligned and out loud, they are our voice and an irresistibly attractive message.

What core values do you share with your most loyal customers?

You’re only a stranger once.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Buy the ebook. Learn the art of online conversation.

Know What You Do Well, Get More Business, Have More Fun!

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Head, Heart, Purpose in One Direction

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One of the best parts of this SxSW conference was going into it fully aware of what I do well — my value proposition. The “what do you do?” question wasn’t hanging over my head when I met someone new. I could just talk in the same I talk to friends.

Every “hello” allowed me a chance to find about the person before me. I got to hear about their life and ask about their goals. An event like SxSW offers so many people who are doing exciting things. When it came time to speak of what I do — rather than flail for something sensible to say — I could relate what I do to what I had just heard.

How fun is that?!!

I noticed that the folks at the parties who know what they do well are the ones who have the engaging conversation. I also noticed that folks who want to work with me need to know what I do so that they can.

If you don’t know what you do well, start now to figure it out.

  • Look over your past successes.
  • See what they have in common.
  • Make a list of 3-5 traits or skills that define your best work.
  • Write a sentence that explains how those 3-5 traits come together.
  • Learn it by heart

Want an example? Mine is in the sidebar under the button that says, “Work with Liz!”

In order to work with you, I have to know, What do you do well?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!! SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!