Irresistible Opportunities Are Built Not Discovered

A while back someone — Let’s call her Cindy — asked my advice about when to pursue what had become her business passion. We discussed ways that she could build a client base that would ensure her income to replace what she’s been used to collecting from the job that she would leaving.

Cindy had done a pile of right things to set a concrete foundation.

• She had spent a year using every minute of free time being a saturation learning. She got to know the business that is her passion. She watched the key people, read their blogs, and used the tools they recommended.
• She went to conferences and built a network that served her a support group for personal development, business advice, and current trends.
• She worked with pro bono clients and friends to build experience and to gain powerful personal information about what energized her and what she unique benefits she could bring to projects and problems that needed solving.

By the time I talked with Cindy about establishing her private practice all she needed was coaching in how to immediately attract clients who love her work. We identified, defined, and discussed this set of specifics:

• how her offer is a investable client opportunity
• how to frame her opportunity in terms of benefits — show how it meets a deep need or urgent desire
• the unique and powerful return on investment she offers
• how to negotiate from the client side of the table

About a week after our conversation, I got this email.

Liz!

I just landed my first client on retainer!

Sure, I’ve had other clients up until now but it has been a lot of BARTERING…and now I’m making the leap into accepting money.

This is awesome!

Thank you so much for your counseling by phone a couple of weeks ago.

It made my day.

I’ve put together a pilot program that I’m testing in Seattle next week. I want to help get good folks back to work. Click the title to see more information.

Liz Strauss: Authentically Attract Clients Who Love Your Work

If you’d like to bring something like it to your city, please contact me a lizsun2 @ gmail.com I’m not certain how long I can hold the prices quite that low, but I’m committed to doing the best I can.

I want to get more emails like that one.

Liz
Work with Liz

Talk to Me

Recently, working with a client, I was asked the question,

What will make a blog compelling to a user?

It’s a favorite question. Getting people to come and stay is what I do, and talking about it is almost as much fun. I might have said it in a slightly more corporate way, but what I answered was basically this.

Humanity is what’s compelling. We’re all hungry for a connection that makes us feel real.

Quality content, a real human being, the combination of three things: head, heart, and practical meaning in my life make a person feel that they are wholly alive.

People recognize the real deal. When they come, visitors figure out quickly whether they get to be who they really are, and if that’s okay with everyone there. When authenticity happens, they tell their own truth and feel valued for it.

When that happens, we give back — in attention, participation, and loyalty. When we’re invested, we don’t walk away.

That’s the heart of compelling.

A compelling blog is human in every way.

Liz Strauss
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RESPECT

You’re sitting in Customer Service, miles from your office. A fire is requiring your best PR efforts — you’re not trained for this — but you’re the one who best understands the information. You’re fielding questions and carefully wording answers, because leaders speak with concern that their message is understood.

You make it through. You’re exhausted when you return to “normally scheduled programming.” When you reach your desk, you find a deluge of voice mail and your inbox is overflowing. The easiest thing to do would be to imagine you are still over in Customer Service handling the PR accident you had been handling.

Then you think, well really you’ve never left customer service.

Your job is a customer service job as much as the one you were just doing.

Do you return phone calls when you get them?

Service is sticky.

Liz Strauss
Find out about working with Liz.

Staying Close to the People We Serve

When we developed an international strategy, I made an agreement with my boss about the kind of relationships I would forge with the publishing partners we would work with around the world. It involved three basic points.

• People at our own company would refer to the companies that we worked with as “partners,” not vendors, not licensees, not other publishers.
• We would adjust our process to meet theirs as well as we could.
• I would visit their companies at least once a year.

Could we have completed our business by not doing any or all of the three? Most certainly we might have. Other publishers did just that.

However, by keeping to these three “rules of conduct,” our company became the first partner of choice. We enjoyed special access to content, and we were the only company in the US that was given files rather than required to share the first print run of books with the smaller publisher to help their bottom line.

Because I visited the companies every year . . . I was also a person to them and a true relationship formed. That relationship, and the access it afforded us, allowed us to save $1000s and to control the timing of our inventory at every product launch.

Companies are buildings with people inside.

Liz Strauss
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What’s Usually Missing

Almost always when I speak with new product developers, they’ve done the thinking about what it is they’re trying to make. Most folks who are serious about bringing a product to market know that it has to be researched and “thought through thoroughly.”

They usually know:

• who has a similar offering
• how their offering is different
• what is a competitive price or package

These concerns are all of the head.

The product developers might even have a fairly detailed description of who will buy and use the product or maybe not. . . .

Folks making new product are less likely to be able to articulate.

• why the new customer will fall in love with the new product
• how that product will fit in that customer’s life
• What the customer might have to do or give up to incorporate the new product into his or her life.

I can truly admire the elegance of a product that I will never buy or use.

Those last three points are what makes the difference in whether I do.

Liz Strauss

Something in Every Job, Every Person

If you consider the people who truly light up a room, to a person they are always people who are quick to see value in others.

If you smile at such a person, she’ll smile back in a way that shares the smile and gives you all of the credit. You’ll hear a “Look at you!” or a “Wow! How you made my smile brighter!”

It’s about more than giving thanks.

Deep gratitude is understanding the contribution of another. It’s about valuing another person’s time and what they give. People who have true gratitude understand that the most generous givers often do so in ways that are hard to see.

And the most generous givers are grateful that they have something to give and someone to give to.

Look closely, people who are grateful for the value in others often have a large following.

Gratitude, true and deep, is irresistible, as it should be.

All good things given freely are sticky.

Liz Strauss

The Water Goes By, But the River Stays

A brand is a promise.

It’s like a river, we visit to relax; we might not say what brings us back. It could be the view, the quiet, the crystal clear water that moves by slow and deep. Yet we return with an expectation.

We come back to the river because we trust that those qualities we value will be fundamentally the same.

Small changes over time are often enjoyable. The trees may grow, flower, change color. The animals may come and go. The water moves by and slowly changes the terrain. Still we find the beautiful, peaceful place we came to enjoy.

It’s a familiar and consistent experience despite any subtle change.

A sticky brand is like that river.

A sticky brand changes subtly over time yet, the core values stay familiar — that customers trust in the experience goes without saying.

Without that core consistency, not only is a brand not sticky. It’s really not a brand. A brand is a promise we can rely on.

Liz Strauss

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Which Would You Trust?

You’re about to enter a contract with a new partner. The partner suggests that the contract might work one of two ways.

1. The prospective partner offers 15% of net receipts, which is defined as all product shipped out of inventory minus amortization of development, cost of samples, and marketing and fulfillment costs — including rental of warehouse space.
2. The prospective partner offers a flat 10% of retail price on every product that leaves the warehouse, except those given as samples.

The partner shows how the first will yield a higher return to you. Which do you choose?

In my experience when offering authors a publishing contract with a similar choice — a complex metric that will yield a higher return and a simple metric that will yield less — Almost all opt for the simple deal.

Simple is easy.

• It’s easy to understand.
• It’s easy to trust.
• It’s easy to judge its value.
• It’s easy to explain to others.
• It’s easy to verify that the promise is being kept.

That’s why simple is sticky. Sticky is simple.

Liz Strauss

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Write This Somewhere You’ll Never Forget It

Sometimes the more we talk, the further we get from the right answer.

We can tie ourselves up in details. We end up adding bells and whistles we think are cool — things that no customer ever asked for or ever wanted. Worse, we often do that when what’s the core of our offering is slightly broken. So, without knowing, we advertise that we’re not paying attention to our customers’ needs.

If we look at all variations on ways to attract potential busyers and convert leads into customers, every successful organic growth technique is really based in one of two strategies.

The ONLY Guaranteed Organic Growth Strategies

If you want more customers, you need to do one of two things. Doing both is even better.

• Give customers more products or services that they want.
• Give customers more opportunities to buy them.

Make it easy and fun for customers to interact with you, even when a problem arises, and you’ll be golden. Your company will be sticky — customers will be back and will tell their friends.

Whatever you’re doing is either making that happen or getting in the way. Can you tell the difference?

Liz Strauss

How to Get Folks Talking about You

The stickiest method of self-promotion is . . . generosity of spirit. . . . Promote everyone else, always.

The folks who do this well — Andy Sernovitz, Chris Brogan, Becky McCray – do it from a complete generosity of spirit. That’s important.

When these folks promote other people in their unselfconscious and generous ways, they create the best viral, word of mouth content — something to talk about that is simple to pass on, positive, ever-intriguing, and NEVER boring. Some examples, I might say about them:

Simple: Oh those three, they’re always shining the light on someone.

Positive: Never heard them say a bad word about anyone.

Ever-intriguing: It’s fun to watch who they will be talking about next.

NEVER boring: Let me tell you what Andy . . . Chris . . . Becky . . . said about ME!!!

How might a business use “generosity as a self-promotion” technique?

The business version would be to promote its loyal customers relentlessly. Promoting employees in the same way is also a great idea. “That company sure cares about people. They’re constantly beating the drum about what folks are doing.”

Of course, it has to be more than marketing. When it is, it’s darn popular.

Relationships are everyone’s business and business is relationships. It’s always about the people we work with.

Liz Strauss

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