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Archive for August, 2011
The Second Question You Should Ask In Beginning Your Experience Process Tuesday, August 30th, 2011
Depending on the product or service that your business offers, the time that it takes to close a sale can vary. You have to have a process that take clients through your experience in a way that is intuitive and easy to follow. The second question in your process sets the tone for the rest of your process.
The second question to ask in your experience process is what’s the first step that your clients must take to engage in your offering. The first question? The first question is, where do you ultimately want your clients to go?
There are a couple of mistakes that businesses make with regards to getting an audience engaged in their offering from the start.
The first problem is that if their product or service is new or changing the rules of what’s been done before, it may not be easily understood right off the bat. The key is getting people to understand your business in as simple a way possible.
Problem number two is having a tendency to jump the gun with our potential clients. If we have a client even look at our business we turn into Night at the Roxbury and we are all up on them before they have a chance to breath. Slow down a little bit. Let the relationship develop.
The best solution for getting your audience engaged in your loop is to create an entry product that people must consume before they do anything else. The step must be easy to take and must engage your audience to take further action. This is the way that you present the second question of taking the first step.
Take problem number one mentioned above. We work with a financial advocacy firm called The Freedom FastTrack. Their message is counterintuitive to the traditional financial planning model of investing in a 401k. Here’s a video they created to help people understand the vision of their business. They illustrate the problem that their audience is facing and demonstrate how they can help.
Your initial product can be free like the video above or it can be a lower priced item. If you are looking to reduce friction, I would suggest a free product to get people engaged and make sure the product is good. Free does not equal mediocre.
Your initial product can answer the second question in your experience process in a number of different formats. DVDs, Audios, an e-mail campaign or a membership. You can offer hard copies of your product or keep it all in digital format.
Hopefully you have been thinking about what product or service can serve as the gateway to further sales in your business. Take some time and jot down some ideas right now. Figure out where you want to take your audience and then determine the best way to answer the second question in your client experience process.
How To Make Confrontation Positive Thursday, August 4th, 2011
Confrontation Is A Critical Management Piece
Most business owners have a hard time with figuring out the nuances of employee management. Confrontation is especially difficult. We wait too long to confront, when we do confront we take an adversarial position and then we wonder why we don’t have a good relationship with our employees.
Today’s business tip deals with the 3 steps you must take to properly confront employees of your business.
Systematizing Your Client Experience Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011
A typical entrepreneur has a million different things coming at them at any given time. Because of all the different balls you have to juggle and the limited amount of time with which to juggle them, it can be difficult to make time to work on your business. Your client’s experience is one of those areas that get pushed to the back of our minds.
One of the reasons juggling tasks can be overwhelming is due to the proliferation of online communication tools that we have coming at us on a daily basis. The proliferation of e-mail through smart phones, social media, etc may have you thinking that technology is more of a curse than a blessing. What if you could turn this curse into a system that delivers the type of client experience that sets your business apart from the rest?
Technology has made delivering the right client experience easier than ever. I won’t get into all of the specifics of total experience design, you can read more about experience design here. What I will do is give you a few handy online tools for automating aspects of the client experience that your business is trying to deliver.
My list consists of the most common areas where I see business owners being inconsistent or working too hard with their experience delivery.
Doing What You Say You Are Going To Do- Clients won’t have a great experience with your company if you can’t deliver on the promises that your business offers. For small businesses, this starts with the business owner. A simple tool for helping business owners remember things is Evernote.
Keeping Your Clients In The Loop- There are a lot of tools to help with this but a simple and inexpensive tool is AWeber. Aweber is an e-mail service that helps you manage your e-mail database and allows you to send messages to these lists. When it comes to keeping your clients informed and educating them, this is as easy as it gets. I still see business owners keeping their lists on a spreadsheet and sending out e-mails manually.
Managing Projects- Getting your team on the same page and getting projects completed on time can be challenging. We created a project management system called Akomplish for this very reason. Now we can share projects with team members, sync activities with our calendars and have a daily snapshot of what needs to be done.
Those are three of the biggest areas that business owners seem to struggle with when it comes to delivering a client experience. The great news is that there are tools to help you automate what you are doing as you interact with clients and create the experience.
How have you overcome challenges with delivering your client experience?