Monthly Archives: May 2022

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Get the Most Out of Your Meetings

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The ability to run a good meeting signals to others that you are a competent professional and a good leader. An on-point, crisply presented meeting that has the right agenda, invites the right people and results in a list of actionable items, will confer to you great respect, if not admiration. Your meeting facilitation skills can help you win a client, a promotion, or a raise.

Is the meeting necessary?

Before you reserve meeting space and plan the agenda, ask yourself a big question—-might the information or result you’d like to obtain be accessed by way of, say, a 15 minute phone call or a couple of emails? In other words, before you call a meeting, remember that meetings are expensive; they cost time and money. If your objective can be met through e-mail, videoconference call, or even a one-on-one discussion, skip the meeting altogether and conserve valuable resources.

If holding a meeting emerges as the most effective way to share or obtain important information or provide a forum for a group discussion and consensus decision-making then by all means schedule a time, choose a format or place (virtual, in-person, or hybrid), plan an agenda and round up the stakeholders and decision-makers.

Determine objectives

A clear objective will set the tone for the meeting and determine its agenda. The desired outcome(s) should be specific and measurable. If you’re expecting attendees to brainstorm their way to a solution or course of action, ask them to arrive with a list of ideas.

Schedule strategically

Schedule meetings for a day and time when those you want to be in the room are most likely to attend. In most cases, scheduling Monday morning or Friday afternoon meetings is inadvisable. You want meeting participants to be fully present and not overwhelmed with the work week or daydreaming about weekend plans. I’ve learned that it’s helpful to contact the most influential participants on your proposed attendees list and confirm their availability for a potential meeting dates and times.

Invite decision-makers.

The most effective meetings involve stakeholders to ensure that:

1). The decisions made will be accepted and not challenged or voided.

2). Decisions can be made immediately and they’ll be implemented.

As noted above, confirm a couple of potential dates and times to ensure the presence of heavy- hitters who have the power to green-light. If a key decision-maker is unavailable, ask a subordinate to attend. Ideally, this person will be able to speak for their supervisor, and–at the very least–take notes and report back.

Prioritize agenda

To ensure that high priority objectives are met are fully discussed, address the most important issues first. That way, if someone needs to step away or leave the meeting early, you’ll still have accomplished that which is most urgent or time- sensitive.

Stick to the agenda.

The agenda is a roadmap that keeps everyone on topic, guides and maintains the meeting’s pace and flow and in that way enables the full examination and assessments that facilitates good decision-making. It helps it to adjourn on time, with the desired results in hand.

Furthermore, the agenda discourages off-topic conversations that sabotage the attainment of meeting objectives and participants’ time. If an unanticipated topic surfaces and is deemed relevant, the meeting convener should politely but firmly interrupt the conversation and suggest that since the matter is important it deserves another forum, which can be arranged. Alternatively, the topic can taken up at the conclusion of the meeting after the agenda items have been discussed.

Wrap up, follow-up

At the end of the meeting, the meeting convener should remind participants of any decisions and deadlines and clarify any follow-up action required. All meeting participants should understand exactly what is expected of them. Schedule any follow-up meetings immediately. Send meeting minutes to all participants and to stakeholders and decision-makers who were unable to attend (but you’d like to keep them apprised of important actions and decisions).

Thanks for reading,

Kim

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What the Elevator Pitch Must Do in 2022  

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Yet another pandemic-era reboot that everyone who earns a living would be wise to make is how you introduce your professional self to prospective clients, a potential new employer, or your colleagues and peers. In-person meetings and events are reappearing and your clients are returning to the office, maybe reluctantly and just a couple of days a week. There are advantages to getting back into the swing of things, but your face2face interaction skills may have become a little rusty from lack of use.

I recently attended a virtual meeting of about 15 people and since we didn’t really know each other, we were asked to introduce ourselves and say a little something about our professional background and current role—- in other words, everyone gave an Elevator Pitch. Most of us were a little flabby because that muscle hadn’t been flexed in many months.

But hitting the restart button and expecting your 2-fer Elevator Pitch/ self-introduction to slide off your tongue the way it did in January 2020 is magical thinking. Navigating life and business in the New Normal requires a skill set update.

Remember that the purpose of an Elevator Pitch is to facilitate the growth of your network and your business. In a good Elevator Pitch, you persuasively communicate your value proposition and help prospects understand what you can do for them. A well- worded pitch will express the purpose and usefulness of your business and make clear what sets it apart from alternatives offered by competitors.

Craft your Elevator Pitch to:

1). Capture the attention of prospects and entice them to devote valuable time to listening to you tell them why your product or service might interest them.

2). Help prospects see a possible role for your product or service in their organization.

The prospect

In-depth and continuously updated knowledge of your target customer groups is a given, so you’ll know who you’re selling to. What do you offer that they might need and value? How can your product or service help them to either achieve objectives or solve/ avoid problems? What might your prospects find worrisome in 2022 and how have they managed that challenge so far?

Taking a few moments to think about these questions will help steer your pitch in the right direction and lead to what you’d like prospects to remember about you and your business. The goal is to make your pitch powerful yet succinct, clearly articulating why prospective customers should choose you.

Your value

What are the unique attributes and selling points of your product or service? Understanding the value you deliver will bring to the forefront talking points that prospects want to hear. Keep your customers, competencies and your competitors in mind as you develop your value proposition. Your task is to recognize and articulate what differentiates your company and how you are uniquely positioned to more effectively, quickly, or inexpensively solve problems and help customers achieve objectives, as compared to the competition.

BTW, your main competitor is inertia. Doing nothing is a popular “solution” because it’s easy and people think they’re saving money. Can your pitch motivate listeners to become customers? Assess the response your pitch receives from different customer groups and make adjustments where necessary.

How you say it

Experts recommend that you limit your Elevator Pitch to about 30 seconds and 75 words. Ideally, your little story will be clear, concise and compelling. Fine tune the wording to ensure that you express your company’s (and your own) unique value proposition in uncomplicated language that resonates. The ideal pitch will also be adaptable and easily made longer or shorter to fit different contexts.

Do it well and you’ll make a memorable first impression on a potential client (or new employer). A good Elevator Pitch in your back pocket makes it easier to start conversations off on the right foot, with the ultimate goal of discovering or creating opportunities. The process needed to create your pitch will take not only time, but also face2face experiences before you get it the way you need it.

In 2022 and beyond, all sales and marketing messages must be digestible in mere seconds if you intend to hold a listener’s attention. Clearly and concisely roll out a maximum of three or four selling points known to intrigue prospective customers and become persuasive and memorable takeaways.

  • What you do

Identify the need for your product. Encourage your listener to become interested in your products and services. Show that there is demand for what you provide.

  • For whom you do it

Describe your product-market fit with a powerful sound-bite that sums up in a sentence or two the customers you usually work with and why they do business with you.

  • The value delivered

The listener is more likely to trust your solution when it’s presented as an easy-to-picture remedy that gets the job done. After you establish the need, briefly explain how or why your solution works, based on real-life examples.

When and where to pitch

To more consistently recognize circumstances when it would be appropriate to present your elevator pitch, train yourself to be hyper-aware of your surroundings and the people you meet. Opportunities to deliver your Elevator Pitch don’t always occur where and when we might expect. Do not overlook casual settings as places to meet and interact with potential customers or employers. A wedding you attend, a running group or book club you join, a summer holiday barbecue, or chatting in line at the grocery store can lead to a door-opening, satisfying or lucrative discovery.

Follow-up

Conclude your Elevator Pitch with a call-to-action when the listener shows an active interest in the use and outcomes of your products or services. Ask for a card and offer yours, so that everyone’s website and social media sites can be viewed. Better still, offer to send the link to a newsletter, podcast, blog post or other source that addresses the topic or questions that were raised. You’re looking to establish legitimacy and expertise, build a relationship that leads to trust and rake in some billable hours.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Associated Press President John F. Kennedy visited Tirana, Albania while on a state visit to Europe June 23 – July 2, 1963.

Professional Development , , , , Leave a comment

The Story of Your Presentation

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Human beings love a good story. Almost any topic will do. If the teller of the story communicates well, s/he will find an attentive audience, eager to be informed or entertained, shocked, surprised, moved by sentimental emotion and perhaps stirred to action. Our attraction to stories fuels our appetite for movies, plays and television shows.

Throughout history our leaders—kings, generals, politicians— have often been masterful storytellers. Thousands of years after the lives of game-changing leaders such as the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar and the Athenian statesman Pericles, we are still in awe of their bold, insightful and inspiring speeches. In fact, we consider exceptional public speaking ability—-storytelling—-to be a sign of capable leadership and a brand-enhancing skill. The ability to tell a story well, if only simply, is a proficiency that Freelancers and business leaders would be wise to develop.

The secret to becoming an effective public speaker is understanding the subtle but profound differences between delivering a presentation and telling a story. Maintaining awareness of those distinctions as you prepare to address your audience will help you connect with them and make them inclined to feel that your talk was relevant and memorable. Your audience may even be inspired to take action (if that is your purpose). Almost anyone can give a presentation but the most effective communicators are also storytellers and that’s what we’ll learn to do today.

Stories humanize and energize

Bullet points and logic are how you present facts and give a recognizable beginning, middle and end timeline arc to a presentation. A story is a connected series of events told in words and/or pictures. A story has a theme, attention-grabbing moments, a challenge, heroes, villains and a resolution. The content of a presentation, no matter how ably delivered is, sadly, often forgotten. The memory of a good story, however, can be long-lasting.

To be blunt, most business presentations are torture and we all know it. They rely heavily on slides filled with bullet points and numbers that make our eyes glaze over. The presenter reads the slides. The effect is brain-numbing.

The problem is that business executives don’t get that delivering a presentation is not only public speaking, but also a performance. A truly skilled speaker is also a storyteller and is not shy about looking to the entertainment world to level up public speaking skills.

To inject meaning and energy into your presentation, you must reveal to the audience its underlying message—-the story—-that the bullet points and numbers exist to communicate. In many cases, the story behind those terse statements you’ve bulleted (ouch!) and the intimidating Excel spreadsheet of numbers you copy/pasted to create your slides can be translated into a story that your audience wants to hear in three or four sentences, tops.

Telling that story is worth the effort. Telling the story is why you’ve been invited to speak. No one needs you to read slides to them, we can do that on our own. To become a first class public speaker, focus on crafting and communicating the story behind the slides, in words and pictures.

Every picture sells the story

Researchers have found that listeners typically remember about 10% of the points made in a talk if the information is presented with words alone but when images accompany words, listeners will retain 65% of the information. Therefore, including a selection of images to visually communicate pivotal aspects of your story is a must-do.

Directors of the television, plays and movies that we watch first read the script to find the story line they’ll tell. Next, they identify action and other key scenes and then they literally sketch those scenes on paper, mount them onto what are called storyboards and document the scenes they plan to show in the performance. You can do something similar as you prepare for your next talk. Public speaking pros who know there is a story to tell make sure to think through the elements of their content and put together an engrossing narrative to communicate that story.

  • Review the information that is necessary to share with the audience.
  • Decide what information should be included on the slides, as a bare bones framework of the story.
  • Choose images — graphs, charts, other images—- that visually communicate the story.
  • Write story notes, the narrative that will become your script, to link and integrate the three components of your talk. Edit well and get very familiar with your talking points.

Practice makes perfect

Most business execs merely page through their slides and pass it off as a presentation rehearsal. It’s common and I’ve often done it, but it’s not enough. Real storytellers rehearse out loud. They practice vocal delivery and experiment to find the right tone of voice, figure out the timing of pauses and modulate the pace of their speech, all to perfect the delivery and power of their story. They want the audience at the edge of their seats, anticipating what will happen next. Block out three days and devote at least two hours a day to rehearsing.

Finally, public speaking pros who appreciate the difference between a rote presentation and a riveting story will also conduct a walk-through rehearsal at the venue and will rehearse while using the delivery platform of their talk. If you’ll stand in front of an audience, rehearse standing up and anticipate your approach to audience eye contact. If you’ll deliver the talk virtually, rehearse sitting down and figure out how to position your device and the lighting. Public speaking stars are usually made and not born!

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Kenneth Branagh (center) as Henry V (September 16, 1386 – August 31, 1422, monarch of England 1413-1422). Branagh directed and starred in the 1989 film based on the Shakespeare play written circa 1599.

Uncategorized Leave a comment

Build the Best Sales Funnel

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Shall we start with the most obvious question—- what is a sales funnel and why do you need one? Also known as the marketing funnel, it is the process a business uses to make its products, services and even the entity itself known to and trusted by potential customers. The purpose of the sales/ marketing funnel is to generate sales. To that end, the funnel process is built on a strategy designed to convert browsers into buyers.

The funnel can operate simultaneously on your website and social media platforms. It’s seeded with relevant and tempting information known as content that beckons to site browsers and convincingly demonstrates the efficacy and dependability of your organization and its products and services.

The content offered should become increasingly more specific and compelling so that browsers, who as they linger may be considered legitimate prospects, can deepen their understanding of your products and services. Content presented in the sales funnel should illustrate how your product or service can deliver solutions and help users (customers) achieve objectives. Using inbound and outbound marketing techniques will help you to more quickly build an efficient and successful sales funnel that delivers paying customers, the lifeblood of a business.

Inbound marketing

Reaching out to prospects and customers by creating and disseminating content they will likely value and trust is the purpose of inbound marketing. The strategy employs blog posts, social media posts, infographics, e-books, case studies, webinars, email updates and other information that will attract, educate and persuade prospects to take a chance on you. When inbound marketing functions well, your company will become visible to those interested in the topics the content addresses and some will be persuaded to investigate your products and/or services further and ultimately become customers.

Inbound marketing centers largely around prospects who’ve self-selected, opted-in, and for that reason the ROI is much higher than outbound marketing ROI. Inbound marketing tactics are usually either no-cost or low-cost to launch and maintain. The biggest cost of developing inbound marketing content is your time (and it’s worth money!).

The downside of inbound marketing is that it often operates at a snail’s pace. It can take months or years to build a robust email list of viable prospects who have the money and motive to do business with you and/ or make referrals. But you can grow your prospect outreach much faster when you pair inbound marketing with outbound marketing tactics.

Outbound marketing

Outbound marketing reaches out to the general public. It’s unsolicited, not highly targeted. Advertising of all types, cold calling and telemarketing, cold email campaigns (maybe you bought a list?), pay-per-click ads and public relations (earned media) that might result in quotes of yours or an article that you’ve written being published.

Winning or receiving a nomination for an award presented by a business or professional association, speaking or conducting a skills development workshop at a business or professional association, or becoming a sponsor of a popular local charity are also potentially effective public relations moves that often serve as components of an outbound marketing strategy. Writing a (probably self-published) book is another excellent outbound marketing tactic, one that confers great credibility.

OK. So now that you understand the recipe you can bake your (funnel!) cake. See directions below.

TOFU: Top of Funnel

  • Purpose: Name recognition

Social media posts, PR earned media

  • Purpose: Educate

Blog posts, infographics, newsletter, your published articles

Winning or receiving a nomination for a business award, teaching a class in your field of expertise at a college or business incubator, speaking engagements

MOFU: Middle of Funnel

  • Purpose: Evaluate

Podcast, webinar (i.e. videos), e-book

At this stage, collect a name and email address to facilitate follow-up, know who’s checking you out and build your email list.

BOFU: Bottom of Funnel

  • Purpose: Action/ decision

Customer testimonials, case studies, your book

Here’s the money shot. You’ve got a fish on the line and you want to reel it in. Time is money. Depending on what you’re selling, you might cross the finish line by offering a short free trial (maybe 7-14 days), a discount (maybe 10%), a free premium post-sale service upgrade for a couple of months—- what customer hot buttons can you speak to? A really good case study can also be helpful at this stage, to help the prospect envision more realistically how the product or service will deliver immediate and sustained benefits. A phone or video call is in order and a face2face meeting is even better. You’re ready to seal the deal!

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Brock Clay March 23, 2022 funnel cloud over Moscow, MS

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Course Correction: Tacking Through Headwinds

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When you decide to become a Freelance consultant or business owner, your mission is to build and launch a successful and sustainable entity. To that end, there will be Important Things you must do very well and a corresponding list of Big Mistakes you must avoid and summarily correct if you fall into the trap. Our old friend the SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats) reminds us that when leading a venture there’s always something to analyze, fix, capitalize on, or avoid. Below is a list of usual suspects that can tank a business. Be on guard!

Failure to understand the customer

Apologies for hammering this topic in nearly every post, but it’s impossible to overstate the fact. If you plan to become self-employed or open a business (and you must make a plan, even if it’s an outline scrawled on a cocktail napkin), you must be assured that you:

1). Have an accurate description and understanding of the customer segments you expect to buy from you and

2). Verify that your choice of prospective customers has a need, if not compelling reasons, to buy your product or service at a volume that will sustain your venture. In short, you’ll need a critical mass of paying customers.

Failure to research the marketplace

First thing you do is research the chosen industry and confirm that your sector is on an upward slope because under no circumstances do you want to enter a shrinking market. Also, search for announcements of new products and services that will soon be released, to verify that a competitor will not make your product or service obsolete. Furthermore, search for updates that may reveal potential new customer groups for you, or shifting demand for current products and services. In other words, customer loyalty can wax or wane, new iterations and uses of what’s available can develop and nothing is static and forever.

Failure to choose a good business model

Create your roadmap for customer acquisition and achieving profitability. Included in your assessment will be how you’ll source, create and bring your goods or services to customers. Decide also the payment methods you’ll accept and when payment will be made (billing after the product or service has been delivered to the customer or payment when the goods are ordered?).

Failure to develop a coherent marketing strategy

It will be tremendously helpful to create a multi-prong marketing strategy in which you’ll outline basic promotional goals for what you’re selling—-sales/marketing funnel, newsletter, blog, social media, branding, PR, website messages. All paths must travel in the same direction. All elements , text and images, must advance and support the same story.

Failure to create an effective customer acquisition and retention strategy

Identifying the customer groups that you’ve confirmed are a natural fit for your products and services is only half the story (sorry!). You then need a plan to reach out to them— that’s what your marketing and brand appeal exist to do. The value of your products and services, plus the efficiency of how you deliver to the customer, along with your diligent quality control, customer service and post-sale support impact customer retention and referrals.

Failure to anticipate required cash-flow

Posts on March 15 and April 19 addressed pricing and cash-flow, as regular readers will recall. The objective is to lay the groundwork for generating sufficient revenue to pay expenses, pay employees, pay yourself and reinvest in the business. Timing is everything and money must be available when you need it most. If there are gaps, corrective action should be taken immediately.

If invoicing is how you generate revenue, take steps to invoice on time. Insert on every invoice a polite phrase to indicate that payment is due upon its receipt. Give yourself an infusion of cash by asking for 15-20 % up front on projects where you anticipate billing $1000 or more. Worse case scenario, you’ll have to take an under-the radar unglamorous part-time job or get lucky and score an adjunct teaching gig at a local college or business incubator (BTW, I’ve done all of the above).

Failure to price appropriately

Pricing is an integral component of the marketing strategy but it often gets treated as an afterthought. Your revenue projections will underperform if you don’t price appropriately. Prices must support profitability as well as be perceived as reasonable to prospective customers. They must reflect your brand, whether luxury/premium, mid-market or discount. Think carefully about the message that your prices send to prospective customers.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: On the rocks, aftermath of a nor’easter at Lewis Wharf in Boston Harbor, October 17, 2019