The Marketing Mix | official blog of the Marketing Mentor community

How to grow your business

Last week's Coffee Break conference call, "Moving out of the Bedroom -- Growing Your Business," was chock-full of information for anyone who's got too much work but isn't sure whether or how or when it's time to get help. We'll have the transcript and mp3 available soon in the Marketing Mentor Store, but in the meantime, here are some highlights from the conversation with Pam Bryan of FutureResultsNow.com and Peleg Top:

1. One main takeaway was the idea, shared by Pam, that sometimes, in order to grow your business, you may have to shrink it first. If you're too busy to get everything done, hiring someone doesn't necessarily mean you'll be less busy. You'll just be doing other tasks, including managing other people. Shrinking your business may also mean firing clients who are draining you or abusing you or whose projects simply aren't lucrative. Once you pull back, you'll be able to take a breather and see more clearly in which direction you want to grow. And the one thing you must have in place in order to grow is a marketing plan.

2. Next, you must realize that growing the business means managing other people, whether they are independent contractors, interns or administrative assistants. So if you don't want to manage other people, then don't grow your business. It helps to have some kind of management bone in your body and not be a control freak (or at least be willing to work on that) because no one you hire will do the tasks the way you would. Focus not on how they do what they do but on the quality of the end result. That's all that matters. And you must make peace with the fact that by bringing on help you will not maintain the level of hands-on work you've done until that point.

3. How do you train someone when you don't have time to breathe? Peleg had a great strategy and told the story about his first intern. After explaining to her that first time how to do what needed to be done, he also instructed her to document everything she was doing. When she left 8 months later, she left behind what was essentially an office manual for administrative tasks. That way, the next intern or employee could use that as a resource.

And the winner is.....

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath to find out which tagline we've chosen. So we won't make you wait any longer.

And the winner is...

Our current tagline: /teaching the art of marketing and self promotion./

You see, we don't want to rush into anything. So for the purpose of reprinting my business cards, we have decided not to make any changes to the Marketing Mentor tagline.

This is, in part, because of how many people prefer our current tagline to the other options we proposed.

The reality is, Marketing Mentor continues to evolve and we're very excited about all the ideas we have for expanding and growing the business, which was the impetus for a new tagline in the first place. But we still have lots of discussing to do before we determine where to focus. So all the feedback we got from all of you will be thrown in the pot for these bigger positioning questions. (Peleg assures me that the tagline will come easier after that.)

In the meantime, we will also be doing a revamp of our main web site, so we're open to any feedback you have on marketing-mentor.com.

We'd like to know:

• what works and what doesn't
• what's missing
• what would make you come back to the website on a regular basis?

Thoughts?

Taking the mystery out of your business

More votes for the tagline poll keep trickling in. Here's one I got today.

April C wrote, "All those taglines are good, but I like #3 and #4 the best. They seem to further define what #1 and #2 are saying, and leave no mystery about what you offer."

That made me realize an unexpected but very positive marketing side effect of this whole process. Each person who gave it enough thought to vote and/or propose their ideas took the time to get to know my business a little better, which is more than I could have asked for in this age of short, short attention spans. For these almost 250 people, there is a lot less mystery about what we offer. That's a good thing.

How can you create a dialogue between you and even a small subset of your market such that they understand your business a little bit better?

Those taglines, again:

1. Marketing Mentor: empowering creative businesspeople
2. Marketing Mentor: your business development partner
3. Marketing Mentor: teaching the art of marketing and self-promotion (current)
4. Marketing Mentor: build your business and your confidence
5. Marketing Mentor: accountability * motivation * how to

Expanding market, changing tagline?

I realize now I should have provided more context for our tagline poll. One reason we're doing this exercise is because Marketing Mentor is growing and changing once again. We have a strength in working with creative types and I personally love this market. But I see an opportunity to expand into other markets, especially into working with the staff members of small businesses, teaching staff members the "marketing mindset" because they often have the most significant contact with prospects and clients. If they don't understand the marketing value of the way they talk on the phone, try to understand the needs of the clients and even know how to upsell or cross sell, the business will suffer.

So a new offering we're working on for 2008 is a service that has yet to be named but will involve this training of small business staff. What do you think of this idea? Do you see a need for it?

Why our current tagline doesn't work

A lot of you liked our current tagline, "Teaching the art of marketing and self promotion," especially compared to what some of you called "dull" and "bland" and "corporate-sounding" alternatives. (We do appreciate your candor.)

But here's why it doesn't work:

1. It's "too "Ilise-based" -- in other words, it's all about me and what I do for you (teach you), rather than being about you and what you need and/or what you get. Basic stuff that I am constantly preaching. Duh!

This was a comment from Joe Beim, the Word Maven at the Success Academy, whose tagline is: We make your words more profitable! (And that, you can't copy!), and I agree with Joe. Even if our current tagline is descriptive and clear, it doesn't give you any benefit or, as Joe said, it "doesn't instill desire in the prospective client."

2. One of our tagline challenges (and this may be yours too) is that there is a difference between what prospects come looking for (and think they need) and what they get once we work together. Often what they get, in addition to the practical advice and hands-on coaching to build their business, is increased confidence in themselves and the whole business process. But if I'd asked them before we started whether that's what they were looking for, they wouldn't necessarily say yes. So if our tagline had been: #4 (building your business and your confidence, or the reverse, which was actually suggested by a few people), we may have missed them.

That's what the tagline needs to address: what they think they want and need. If we provide more than that, that's great. That's why our current tagline, while descriptive of what we do, doesn't work, or at least not well enough. It doesn't do everything a good tagline could.

I'm sure those aren't the only reasons. You probably have a few other ideas about why it doesn't work. Feel free to share them....

It takes a village to write a tagline

If 2 heads are better than one, then 225+ heads are incredible!

That's how many people took time out of their busy lives in the past week (if you were one, thank you so much!) to provide extremely useful feedback on our tagline ideas. Not only did you tell us what you liked, you also told us why you liked it and what you didn't like and why. Some of you didn't even vote on our options. Instead you sent us more than 60 brand new tagline ideas to consider.

This is an abundant meal for thought (and I thought we were going to make a decision last week so I could print new business cards. HA!). Now we have a 12-page document with your language -- the language of our market -- describing your needs (from your perspective) for our services. This is incredibly valuable to us. And beyond choosing a tagline, we plan to evolve the business based on this information.

Here are the actual results (to date) of the poll:

• 56 votes for Marketing Mentor: empowering creative businesspeople
• 39 votes for Marketing Mentor: your business development partner
• 35 votes for our current tagline: Marketing Mentor: teaching the art of marketing and self promotion.
• 30 votes for Marketing Mentor: build your business and your confidence
• 9 votes for Marketing Mentor: accountability * motivation * how to

So we have some thinking to do and we will keep you posted on what we decide.

And if you didn't get a chance to vote, it's not too late. Feel free to vote by commenting here on the blog.

Guest Post: How you can achieve exponential growth by capitalizing on change

B2B copywriter and marketing consultant Joan Damico has posted before on her experiences with marketing and self-promotion for the Marketing Mix. Today's story is a terrific illustration of the necessity of following through consistently, even when it seems pointless. Visit Joan's blog for more tips and insight.

Here's what happened to me. I was consulting with a company for about a year.  My contact left the company within two years.  Fortunately he gave me the name of his successor whom I remained in contact with. Then, that person left the company within a year, and I started calling on successor #2. Did I mention successor #2 wasn't very receptive to me?  Needless to say, it made for awkward phone calls--each one feeling like a "cold call" -- but I continued keeping in touch for the next two years and then that person left the company.  Through regular follow-up, I obtained the name of the next new person, successor #3, and within a month, that person contacted me with a writing project -- a major writing project.

Had I stopped calling when my primary contact left the company, I would have missed lucrative opportunities. Change in the corporate world is a constant.  Sometimes it works for you and sometimes against you, but the bottom line is this... maintains contact on a regular basis, especially when change is occurring.  You'll be amazed at how much opportunity change can bring.  As people move on to other companies, you have opportunity to obtain work from them at their new company plus opportunity to obtain work from the replacement at their former company. Now multiply this times 4 or 5 companies and it's easy to see how your business could grow exponentially.

Change can be a good thing.

Review: Assertiveness training is not just for shy folk

For those of you assertive types who have been waiting for an excuse to read Ilise's last book, Stop Pushing Me Around: A Workplace Guide for the Timid, Shy and Less Assertive, look no further than the great insights executive coach Kent Blumberg puts forth in a review on his blog:

I am far from shy.  (In fact I can sometimes be a bit too much for some people.)  And yet I found huge value in this book.  Each of us has shy moments, and those moments are what this book is for.

Exactly!

But as Kent also points out, that's not all this book has to offer. In addition to some great exercises that will help introverts (and help extroverts understand us), there's lots of good, smart "homework" that will make you a savvier self-promoter. Some highlights Kent points out:

• Many, if not most of you understand the need to craft a short "elevator speech" to explain to folks what it is that you do.  Ilise takes that concept and turbo-charges it, helping us craft ten different versions, each with its own use.  She shows us how to write a version Mom would understand, for example, and one for a stranger you see in the doctor's office.  Very cool ideas here (and some homework for me).

• Benun gives us templates to help us tell compelling stories about ourselves.  For example, she shows us how to construct the story of one of our top achievements.

If you want to read Kent's full review (and/or start a conversation about it on his blog), go here.

Any of you regular (or not so regular) readers want to chime in about what you got out of the book?

TextExpander: Maximum output at minimal effort

If you're like me, you're constantly looking at ways to automate stupid, repetitive tasks, or just generally make life more full of the things you love doing than the things you don't.

If you're Mac-based (and I know many of you are), go immediately to this site and download the demo of TextExpander, a piece of shareware that will trim hours off your writing and computer time, minute by tedious minute. I'd been looking for something that could:

1. Hold all of my email signatures for keystroke retrieval
2. Remove the tedious-ity of typing my very long brand name, communicatrix
3. Allow me to paste in text, oft-used HTML links (I'm in Flickr all. the. time), and even pictures automagically.

TextExpander is it. I've been using it for less one hour and I'm already weeping with happiness and wonder. And plunking down my credit card, to boot.

(So the non-Mac people don't miss out, do you geeky Windows types know of a similar fabu product for the PC? A search turned up FastFox, and Lifehacker's Adam Pash wrote some freeware that does it, too.)

via the consistently fabulous Merlin Mann/43Folders.com

Is there a wrong time to exchange cards?

I was talking with a client the other day about a networking event he attended recently. He mentioned that he had wanted to approach one of the speakers after the talk but didn't know what to say.

It is sometimes awkward to approach a speaker, especially when people are swarming around, wanting a moment's attention. That isn't always the best time to make an impression, but you can certainly plant a seed for later.

So I suggested that, after saying something like, "I really enjoyed your ideas," he could say, "Let’s exchange business cards.”

There was a moment of silence and I wasn't sure if he was still there.

Then he said, "Are you kidding? Why would he want to exchange business cards with me?"

Anyone else ever feel that way?