Art of Growth, Quiet Power Strategy
I have often been teased for being brainy and intellectualizing personal problems. I tend to think more than feel. I rationalize more than empathize. I am INTP.
I have never gone so far as to try to hide my smarts but I certainly have often seen it as a weakness instead of a strength. Like it’s something to be managed instead of something to be exploited.
This week in Quiet Power Strategy™: The Program, our clients completed Quiet Power Inventories. These begin with understanding your Onlyness. Onlyness is a concept from Nilofer Merchant’s book, 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era, and she uses it to talk about the unique angle that each of us bring to the work that we do.
From my perspective, Onlyness also applies to brands–it’s a big part of where they draw their Quiet Power from. The most memorable brands get really good at using what makes them unique to deliver additional value to their customers. And this often means focusing on what has become a perceived weakness and turning it into a genuine asset.
Instead of hiding what could be the butt of jokes, great brands put it out in the open. They exploit it.
Merchant writes in a recent post:
Your brand is the exhaust created by the engine of your life. It is a by-product of what happens as you share what you are creating, and with whom you are creating.
So if your engine is running on something–no matter how quirky it might be–and that’s not a key piece of what you’re putting out into the world, what’s representing you, what’s acting as a channel for the value you’re creating, you’re missing a big opportunity.
Don’t try to engineer a brand. Reverse-engineer a brand (click to tweet!) that supports your unique way of creating value.
My brand leverages my habit of intellectualizing and rationalizing. It sets my brand apart from brands that leverage fun & glamor or spirituality & poeticism. But its these unique strengths that allow each of these brands to deliver more value than they would if they were traveling down the middle of the road. And they are each things that could be perceived as weaknesses if not blatantly built into the very core of each business.
There’s a perception that there are certain “right” ways to create a brand or build the persona of your business. Whether you’ve bought into an image that ultra-professional, glam, corporate, spiritual, new age, or quirky, if the image of your business doesn’t spring from what you’re bringing to the table through your business’s unique skills, strengths, and passions, the resulting disconnect can drain you dry. Financially and energetically.
Your Onlyness helps you build a business model that really works. It informs your sales copy, your company culture, and your sales process. But, bottom line, it helps you & your business do what it does best.
As I mentioned earlier, often that thing that businesses are trying to hide, manage, or battle is the key to infusing Onlyness into their brand, business model, and sales process. It’s the thing they assume is keeping them from doing more, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Stop fighting it, start leveraging it.
If you’ve be struggling with how to manage a certain aspect of your personality or something that your business doesn’t do as well as you think it should, what would happen if you decided to highlight it? Harness it?
If you have a particular weakness that’s been nagging you for awhile, my friend & client Bridget Pilloud does this for a living. She helped me recast my social anxiety as a strength–which I’ve sense incorporated into my work in a big way.
Art of Earning, Customer Perspective Process
People aren’t looking for your service (or your product, or your program). They’re looking for results.
Your customers want to change the way they feel. They want to adjust the way they act. They have goals, they have desires, they have dreams.
All too often, businesses position their offers around the “what” of what they’re offering instead of the “why” people would actually go looking for it in the first place. Further compounding this problem, is that business models are built around “whats” instead of “whys.”
Instead of considering the best ways to achieve the desired end result for you and your customer, many business owners build models that are based on how a particular service or product has always been delivered. There’s a status quo web design model, a status quo life coach model, a status quo jewelry model.
When was the last time status quo got you the results you wanted?
You can build a business model that is focused on results, different from the rest of the marketplace, and more effective for your customers. But to do that, you need to start by making sure your core product or service is positioned function-first.
Here are 3 easy ways to reposition your offers around why your customers are actually looking to buy in the first place.
1) Lead with value, not the name of your product or service.
Your product isn’t the selling point, so why make it your headline?
If your service helps people feel better about their bodies, lead with that. If your product helps make a brand more memorable, put that front & center. If your program, helps people feel more confident about the business decisions they make and, consequently make more money, make that the star.
2) Make good use of “before & after.”
Just because you’re not Extreme Makeover doesn’t mean your product can’t benefit from some before & after swagger.
It might be as simple as listing a feature that implies the “before,” as this Bang Buster headband from Lululemon does. Or it might involve turning your customers’ before into a bullet point list that exudes empathy and an equally empathetic list of bullets that describe the “after” your customers have in mind.
3) Use visuals that allow your customers to see themselves getting the results they want.
Great visual merchandising helps customers see themselves actually owning, using, and loving a product. That’s why you prefer flipping through an Ikea catalog to browsing Amazon. While this might be standard practice for physical products, it’s also extremely useful for services and programs.
Maybe you use beautiful photos of happy mamas. Or images of curvy bodies successfully practicing yoga.
Instead of just focusing on you, let your customers see themselves achieving the results they want.
Side note: Stocksy has become my go-to source of non-stocky stock images.
I mostly pointed to sales page examples in this post (click the links above to see the examples) but positioning must be woven through all parts of your business–from the Most Valued Customer you seek to engage to your brand identity to your regular email communication. Dive deeper into the businesses I highlighted here and you’ll see a results-centered culture at the heart of everything they do.
Remember, your product is important to you but it’s results your customers are after. Click to tweet. Make how life will be different–whether in big ways or small–the focus of how your engage your customers and you’re sure to get bigger, better results for yourself.
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You’re ready to lead your business instead of follow the jet stream. You’re ready for more confidence, more revenue, and a greater impact in the world. It’s time for 10ThousandFeet.
Work with me over the next 4 months to create a business model that serves you & your customers, a conversation that nourishes your goals, and a plan to leverage your skills, strengths, and passions. Registration is now open.
“The clarity I now have around the business I want to build, not just this year but over the next five, is a bigger, fancier diamond than I even imagined uncovering.”
— Laura Whitman, co-founder, Red Balloon Relations
Art of Growth, Business Brainstorm
Part of understanding the way your business works is understanding the costs associated with the way it generates revenue. For a low overhead business–most online or service-based businesses are–costs can be an afterthought.
How much does it cost to hop on Skype with a client? How much does it cost to produce an ebook or a teleclass? Beyond initial investments in design or tools, there is little monetary cost and almost none in terms of distribution or production.
But it’s a mistake to discount the softer costs of this work.
What are soft costs?
They’re the costs that can’t be measured in money. Soft costs could be felt in time, energy, or reputation.
Soft costs are the ones that eat away at your lifestyle, your relationships, and your personal satisfaction.
While the work you produce might be profitable financially, is it profitable energetically? Relationally? Temporally?
In 10ThousandFeet, we work to make sure each business is investing in creating products and services that are profitable across the board. We measure all the costs. We consider whether revenue streams are really worth the soft costs they demand.
Can you reduce the soft costs of your current revenue streams?
Soft costs often add up when a revenue stream demands you to exercise one of your (or your business’s) weaknesses instead of leveraging one of your strengths. That happens when you try to create a service that doesn’t fit the way you like to work or when you create a product that’s popular but not suited to your creation style.
Where are you losing profit to soft costs based on your business’s weaknesses or working style?
Soft costs also accrue when you make a decision that’s either out of integrity or out of alignment with your brand or big idea. It doesn’t even have to be a “bad” decision, it could just be unexpected or a little confusing for your customer base.
Where have you incurred soft costs due to decisions or directions you’ve taken in your business?
Sure, you want to optimize the bottom line just don’t forget the soft costs in your calculations.
Art of Growth, Customer Perspective Process, New Economy
Everyone wants more marketing (read: promotional) ideas. As a blogger and strategist, it would be far easier for me to get clicks (and dollars) if I focused on how to get your big idea in front of more eyeballs.
But more often than not, when I sit down with a client, promotion is not the problem. She’s doing all the “right” things but it’s making little impact on her bottom line. And more importantly, it’s not impacting the people she wants to serve. That’s a lot of effort to pour into something that’s not putting anything back in her financial or emotional bank accounts.
Instead of focusing on promotional techniques, we check into her business model.
- Is it set up to harness her strengths and the way her organization works best?
- Is it compatible with the way her Most Valued Clients want to be served?
- Does it address the whole customer and the way s/he naturally evolves?
- Does it take into account the ebb & flow of the conversation the business & its customers participate in?
So, stop for a moment and check in with me here: Is promotion the problem? Or do you need a better model?
Your business model is the way your business creates value (solutions for customers’ needs or desires), delivers value (how those solutions get into the hands of your customers), and exchange value (how your business receives value in return for the value your business provides). I’ve written before on how to quantify this for your own business and how to consider whether the model you’ve got actually works.
But I’d like to take this idea to another level and talk about “social business models.” As I see it, a social business model is one that not only demonstrates how your business creates, delivers, and exchanges value but does so in a way that is tailor-made to the strengths of you (or your organization) and your customer and leverages the way you naturally relate to each other to facilitate co-creation.
It’s not enough to build a model that “works” in terms of numbers. If your business model isn’t built in a way that works for you and your customer, you’ll expend an enormous amount of energy trying to achieve ill-conceived goals.
As Jonathan Fields recently put it in a post on “Upstream Alignment Metrics“–fancy phrase, important subject:
Does the product, business and mode of delivery that customers are telling you they value enough to pay you to create align with the fiber of your being, your sense of meaning, fulfillment, your maker’s modus operandi and ideal life?
There’s a better way.
When your business model works–when it’s social, you’ll be able to count on your own personal strengths and less on your ability to “power through.” You’ll spend less time spastically promoting your business and more time attracting the right people. You’ll have work days that flow instead of feeling like your potential each day is less-than-fulfilled.
But perhaps the best part is that when you develop a business model that is social, you gain an incredibly powerful new team member for your business: your customer. Instead of making decisions in a vacuum, you can weigh each decision against the point-of-view of your customer. You’ll know what products you need to develop and when, you’ll know better how to price them, and you’ll have a more holistic, integrated approach to the way you serve your customers.
Let’s all take a collective sigh of relief: you can stop searching for the killer promotional technique. You can stop worrying if you’re doing “marketing” right.
Instead, you can make your model work for you.
When your business model is social, it:
- Grows from the understanding of your customer as a living, breathing, evolving human being.
- Understands your market as a conversation in which you participate but don’t control.
- Puts the function of what you offer first, well before format or price-point.
- Allows you to work in a way that makes you feel most masterful and puts your customer at ease.
- Involves your customer, whether directly or indirectly, in all decisions.
Customers are evolving human beings.
Customers’ questions change. Their needs change. Their desires change. Some businesses solve this by providing high-end, bespoke services. Others develop broad product suites of specialized solutions. Still others develop a single product that incorporates feature add-ons until the cows come home.
Which speaks to your strengths? How do your customers like to be served?
Your target market is a target conversation.
Customers control the conversation, not businesses. Your model can have the flexibility to adapt to the conversation as it changes.
Where do your strengths line up with the current conversation? How can your customers guide its evolution?
People want holes, not drills.
At least that’s what David Ogilvy said, and I couldn’t agree more. Building your model function-first means that each product evolves from a perceived need (or set of needs) your customers have. Forget trying to build out your model to some previously established set of offers.
What kind of “holes” are your customers asking for? Which “holes” is your business uniquely equipped to make?
When you operate masterfully, your customers feel at ease.
Part of operating masterfully is knowing how your business operates best. Not every business specializes in customer service. Not every business values customized services. Not every business speaks to the masses and draws a crowd.
When do you feel most masterful? When do your customers feel most at ease?
Your customers can guide your every decision.
Most entrepreneurs don’t suffer from a lack of ideas or a misunderstanding of tactics. They have difficulty making decisions between a whole lot of things that seem really good. Customers can help you make better, more confident decisions.
Does your model have a system in place to consider the customer’s perspective? Are you listening?
Remember, promotion probably isn’t the problem. If your model isn’t working for you, your business won’t ever feel like it’s working to begin with. Today, stop and consider whether your business is set up to work to your strengths, make your customer feel at ease, and bring you both together to make things flow.
Art of Earning
While some businesses focus on catering to the luxury market, most businesses are looking to serve a broader market of incomes & lifestyles. Even when you’ve gotten crystal clear on who you’d most like to serve, that group can be diverse.
So it’s natural to want to offer a way to engage your work that’s “affordable.”
The thing about “affordable” is that it’s not actually related to price; it’s related to value.
Here’s what it takes for something to be affordable:
An affordable product must deliver considerably more value to the customer than the value she exchanges for it.
Of course, all of your products should fit that description. Michael Port, author of Book Yourself Solid Illustrated, uses a baseline of 20x–he prices his products in a way that he can guarantee a 2000% return on investment if implemented properly.
So the real danger in using the word “affordable”–even just in your own head–is that, I believe, it undermines your perception of the value you are already offering. Everything you create is affordable. Everything you offer delivers a significant return on investment in terms of money, convenience, fulfilled desires, time, etc…
That’s the very essence of affordability.
But that’s not what you mean when you make offering something “affordable,” is it?
So let’s stop using this word that doesn’t really mean what we think it means. Let’s remind ourselves that businesses are have a duty to create products that are affordable based on value and return on investment.
So what does your business need?
What your business needs is something accessible, something with a low barrier to entry, something that requires less trust on the part of your new customer. Those are the kind of products that help your potential customers turn into loyal customers, while creating a stream of revenue for your business at the same time.
Look more closely:
Accessibility
Often brands have their own language, their own energy. Does your business offer an initiation to this language? Do you offer a product that imbues that energy to new customers?
Doing business with a new brand can be intimidating to customers, especially when their hopes, dreams, or goals are on the line. When you offer an accessible product, you’re giving your prospects a way to ease into your business’s bigger offerings.
Low Barrier to Entry
Does your business offer a product that is easy to get? Something that’s on sale all the time? Something requires very little of your potential customer?
Products with a low barrier to entry allow new prospects to turn into new customers very quickly. They can often open the door to a more in depth sales conversation.
Lower Trust
You want to deliver big results for your customers. However, those big results often require a big leap of faith on behalf of your potential customers. Do you have a product that requires a little less trust? Promises an equally important but smaller outcome?
Products that produce concrete results and accomplish tasks that your customer are already seeking solutions for require much less trust than those that promise transformative change. Building trust in small steps prepares your customers to bigger steps with your business in the future.
Stop selling yourself short on the value of your products or services. Look for an opportunity to create a product that creates a path into your business that’s accessible, low barrier, and low trust.
