Why Try To Get Out Of Your Box, When You Can Use What's In It?
There are the people for whom the responsibility is that if they see something, they say something.
Then there are the people for whom the responsibility is that if they see something, they lean in and fix it.
Of course, the choice is yours on which group you’re in.
(Regardless of any job title, the level of responsibility is yours to choose.)
Stay Positive & Which Will It Be?
Photo credit
I’m fairly certain I’ve gone on enough riffs about choosing the clients you want (seek out fewer, better clients rather than rely on more of the ones that might pay you, but also treat you poorly) and about choosing the donors you want (a thousand to contribute $1 or one person to contribute $1,000).
If you’re not doing B2B or nonprofit work, rather you’re running a B2C initiative, you also have the ability to choose your consumer.
How you price your product helps zero in on the audience you want.
The hours you remain open narrows on the audience you want.
How accessible you are (is your personal cell on your website?) sends a signal of the type of people that do business with you.
There’s a lot of design you can implement on the upfront to decide on your audience, but choosing an audience isn’t a set it and forget it system.
It requires you to be present, listen, and evaluate the type of people that are coming in and when and how.
And when it becomes people that you don’t want as you’re audience, it’s work to figure out what brought that audience to you and what you can do to correct it.
Likewise, choosing an audience requires you to focus in on the source of what drives the people you do want to find you – and then to double down on what drives more of them.
There’s no perfect map. No perfect answer. But there is a choice.
Stay Positive & Make Peace With Who Your Audience Is (Then Let It Guide Your Decisions)
Photo credit
Here are a few takeaways from having just managed roughly 32 projects in the last week across 15 different people and four different communication channels. I’ve tried breaking out the takeaways for whether you’re managing or executing.
Stay Positive & Happy Leading & Executing
Photo credit
There’s a reason why entrepreneurship and sales are talents and skills; something that can be improved, studied, and trained.
While there’s plenty of work to put in to get good at the upfront convincing, the marketing, the initial conversations – what sets a remarkable salesperson apart from a mediocre one is being able to note when a potential customer is on edge, rather than ready.
There are people that will certainly follow your buyer journey, but there are others who will somehow find themselves at the purchasing moment from a different path.
That path, might be one of necessity or exhaustion or complete and utter disappointment in the alternative they just tried last night and was ineffective. They’re going to be tired, a little defeated and emotional.
The problem, of course, is that it’s easy to view these people as convinced of your story, sold on what you’re offering and understanding of your value.
But the reality is these people aren’t. They’re on edge, rather than ready.
The tenured entrepreneurs and caring salespeople will see that even at the end of a buyers journey, different people need to be treated different.
And no surprise, it starts with listening, not selling.
Stay Positive & Make More Than Just A Sale
Photo credit
That’s what everything popular or successful is; they are outliers first.
The avant-garde. Adopted by only a few.
But a few is all you need.
A few to tell a few of their friends who tell a few of their friends until your idea is no longer an outlier.
Feeling like what you’re delivering is an outlier in your category isn’t always a sign of failure; it’s proof that you’ve started something.
Then the real work of continuing it sets in.
Stay Positive & A Few Is All You Need
The phrase is broken. There’s not a solution to your problem.
There are, however, solutions.
Multiple ways to solve. Multitude of ways to fix. Many ways into a solution.
That’s why something that works, doesn’t just work, it works to varying degrees.
Finding a solution a problem isn’t the hard part.
The hard part is finding the optimal solution.
And that starts with solving and then trying to solve better.
It helps if you write it down.
Stay Positive & Solve (Then Solve Better)
Photo credit
Showing up early once might earn you brownie points, but what changes culture is if you do it often.
Submitting your project early might allow for more time to discover minor bugs, but to prevent the same thing from happening, we have to submit early and often.
Early AND often.
Stay Positive & Once Is Not Enough
Photo credit
