In my last post, I mentioned that I had been to a live training earlier this month with Adam Urbanski called Overnight Authority. I learned so much there that I have several posts lined up and this is the next in the series.

One night of the workshop we had a bonus session that included a sales exercise. A big part of what I learned at the workshop is that sales is what makes a business. All the other things you do serve only to make sales possible and/or more likely. Sales is a real challenge to many solopreneurs because we love what we do and really want to help people. We’d do it for free if we could! But the truth is, without a sale you can’t help anyone. All of the greatness you have to offer is wasted if nobody buys it.

In the first part of the evening, we learned some of Adam’s techniques on consultative selling which is a way of conducting the sales process as a consultation not as a hard sell. Then, we did the next logical thing which is to pair up and try to sell each other something! Gulp. The thing was, this was not a role playing exercise this was for real! If you sold something, you had to deliver and the other person had to pay. There were also no requirement that what you sold had to be something you already offer or even something in your business.

What was hard for me is that when I have a one-on-one sales conversation I go in prepared. I’ve asked a few questions already and have looked at the person’s website. I also have all of my own material – prices, terms, etc in front of me for easy reference. In this conversation, I was totally unprepared! I have to say, I really didn’t want to do this exercise but I had already entrusted Adam with my time and investment so I trusted him here as well.

Here are 3 big lessons I learned from that exercise. Just for the record, I’ve already shared everything with the other people mentioned because it was a learning exercise.

1. If your prospect says you don’t understand don’t argue! When I was the prospect, my seller argued with me in this manner and all it did was make me dig in even further and argue back even harder. It completely shut off any possibility of us getting to an understanding. It felt condescending and frustrating, especially when the answer I got was way off base from what I wanted to communicate. At this point, my thinking is that if your prospect says you don’t understand, the only logical answer is something like “Can you help me to understand better?”
2. When you are selling, don’t be too attached to making a sale. I’ve heard several sales professionals say something like “Be committed to helping them make a decision, but not what that decision is.” This feels really good to me and I try to do it. When I was the seller, I felt close to making a sale at one point and got a little too over-eager and started spewing words out. When I was the prospect, I sensed this from my seller and it made me not want to buy anything that might be offered.
3. Finally, don’t be afraid to wing it! If someone is sitting in front of you with a problem that you can solve and they want to hire you, find a way to make it work. Lots of people in the room made sales that night of things that didn’t even exist when the exercise began. Create a package on the spot or do something unconventional. Don’t let a chance to serve someone else get away because you don’t have a package that fits.

What is your favorite piece of sales wisdom?  How did you learn it?  Tell me about it in the comments.

Last week, I attended a training given by Adam Urbanski called The Overnight Authority Live Event.  It was an intense, demanding 3 days but I learned a lot.  Not only were there strategies and tactics, but there was a lot of new ways of thinking presented which was the most helpful part for me.  By “new ways of thinking,” I don’t really mean mindset, which is also important, but a new way of looking at how you do business that is focused on accomplishing important things quickly.  I have lots more to share from the event and in fact have a few blog posts lined up already, but for today I’ll wet your appetite with just my top ten takeaways from the event:

1. Spend less time creating things to sell and more time selling them.
2. If something doesn’t work or sell well the first time around, instead of scrapping it and starting fresh, see if you can try again and tweak what you did.  This is a shift for me because although I live by “test and revise,” I think I’ve been too quick to say something didn’t work and needed to be scrapped.
3. Don’t be afraid to wing it. If there’s a customer in front of you that wants to buy something you don’t currently sell but can provide, find a way to make a deal.
4. Don’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t ask you’ll always get a “no,” if you ask you may get a yes or a no but the worst possible outcome is that they say no.
5. Don’t think first of cutting prices, think first of how to deliver more value so you can charge the price you want.
6. Having something for sale is useless unless people need it and know they need it.
7. Connect regularly with successful business owners and continue your own development.
8. If you refuse to stop you cannot fail.
9. There’s a lot of things that a lot of experts will tell you that you “have to” do. They are not always right.
10. Don’t let fear of looking stupid or fear of what other people might think stop you or even influence you.

What’s your favorite idea here?  How did you learn it?  Tell me about it in the comments.

One of my core business philosophies is to test and revise.  I try something I think will work, measure how well it works and revise my plan after that.  I did the same with a full year of local, in-person networking and decided it wasn’t worth it and I focused on the internet to build my business.

Another one of my core philosophies is to always be learning.  I tend to change my mind a lot because I’m dedicated to truth, not consistency.  What I’ve recently learned is that I didn’t network nearly as well as I thought I did.

During the course of my networking year, I met over 200 people (keeping track was part of my measurement process).  I sent every one a personalized follow up email, met a few for coffee and offered some of my free material to people who seemed interested.  I’m outgoing and curious, so conversation comes naturally to me and I read a lot of “how to network” articles.  I thought I was doing great because I was doing so much more than almost everyone I met.  Of the 200+ people I met, only a few followed up with me and only a few even acknowledged my personalized email.

At the end of that year, I decided that networking wasn’t worth it because although it was great fun it wasn’t generating business for me.  I only generated a small amount of business from my efforts, and when you consider that each of the 2-5 events per month I attended was about a 5 hour investment the math just didn’t work out.

Fast forward to this year, and what I’ve learned is that I didn’t have the right knowledge or strategy going into my networking efforts.  To fix this for myself and help you learn as well, I’ve asked sales and networking expert Don Talbert to teach networking skills for my community on a free teleseminar.  Don is the founder of the Centurion Group, and after he built his own successful business using networking he began to teach this skill to others.  I’ve had many interactions with him both in groups and one-on-one conversations and he really knows his stuff!  I’ve learned so much just getting ready for this call that I cannot wait to see what he teaches on the call!

If you’ve tried local networking but haven’t found success, please join me on this call – you’ll leave with strategies and tactics you can use right away.  As a bonus, he’ll also be sharing the best way to make sure you are the most disliked person in the room.  I’m a little nervous about this one – I hope I didn’t do whatever this is!

Reserve your spot here!

There’s a lot to do when you are a solopreneur whether you have outsourced help or not. Some of what we tackle is simple, task-oriented things but sometimes it’s a huge overwhelming project. I have a secret weapon that helps me immensely when I’m facing one of these giants.

One of the problems with big projects is that they can be overwhelming. When you are looking at your to-do list, it’s much easier to tackle a simple task such as “update Facebook page” than it is to do a big project such as “promote teleseminar.” What can happen is the simple tasks get done and day after day, the big project gets skipped because of the difference in perceived difficulty. There’s also a difference in the satisfaction level of the two items. You can tackle a small task really quickly and get the satisfaction of crossing it off your to-do list right away. With a big project, it might be weeks before you get to cross it off. It’s no wonder that we solopreneurs sometimes push important things to the bottom of the list.

Usually, though, it’s the big, overwhelming projects that move our business ahead. The difference between successful, “I see you everywhere” businesses and “barely there” businesses are those big projects and the ability to get them done.

So how do I make those big projects do-able and not so overwhelming?

My must-have tool is a checklist. I do one for every big project, and often more than one if the big project has several smaller projects within it. The key to a good project checklist is in the details. I make my checklists as detailed as I need them to be to keep me out of overwhelm in focused on the project. How easy is it to get off track when doing a large project? Without my checklist, which functions as my road map, I can easily fall into the trap of wasting 20 minutes following rabbit holes on the web when all I wanted to do was Google how to do something. Often on a big project, the steps to complete it are comprised of multiple small tasks, and without a checklist it’s easy to mix up the order (costing wasted time and effort) or get sidetracked and wonder “What was I doing when I got started on this?”

Even in a small project, there can be multiple steps and if for some reason I’m having trouble starting I know the best thing to do is to start by making a check list. If I still feel overwhelmed, then I know step 1 is too big and it needs to be broken down further. I especially need a lot of detail in my checklist if I’m trying to finish a project at night when I don’t think at my best.

Checklists are great for helping you with a complex project even if you only do it once, but where they really come in handy is when you do the same project two or more times. Create your checklist on your computer, and when you are ready to do that project again pull up your file and you’ll be starting way ahead of where you would have otherwise. Make it a point to refine your checklist with each use and before long you’ll have a sleek, streamlined process that will make any project easier.

Do you use checklists to help you complete big projects? If no, what do you do when you feel overwhelmed by a big project?

What is it about this one question that throws most of us for a loop? Why is it so hard to answer, and why does it cause such angst? It should be straightforward – simply tell someone in one sentence what you do – but rarely is it so easy. Part of the problem is that a lot of solopreneurs do a lot of different things for a lot of different people, and while there may be common threads, it’s hard to group it all under one phrase and convey the full breadth and depth of what we help people with. Most of us care so deeply about our work that to try to sum it up in one sentence feels like we’re negating the value of what we do.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on this because I was in a lively discussion on the topic last week and I thought most of what people suggested would not work for me if I heard it when I asked someone what they did.

The criteria used by most of the people in the discussion was whether or not the person you were talking to asked a follow up question after you answered “What do you do?” The follow up could be anything such as “How do you do that?” or “Who do your work with?”

This isn’t a bad start to evaluate how effective your one-sentence answer is, but it’s too simplistic. Yes, you want someone to be interested enough to ask for more information, but the fact that they ask a question doesn’t mean they are actually interested. Yes, I know that’s harsh but it’s true. It’s like when someone says “Guess who I saw today?” – I may or may not care depending on who says it and the setting, but since I want to be polite and not hurt people’s feelings, I’ll almost always respond appropriately by saying “Who?” My response is not an guarantee that I’m interested.

It’s the same with your one-sentence business description. Just because it invites a response or question doesn’t mean you hit the mark. There are at least a few different reasons that someone would respond in a socially appropriate manner, and not all of them mean the person is interested.

The discussion started with someone describing an answer he heard at a networking event and most of the comments agreed that this answer was one of the best. When asked what she did, this woman said “I help mature women to look as attractive as possible.” While I agree this is a great way to describe the benefit of working with her, it still doesn’t tell me what she DOES. If I heard this, my mind would be flipping through pictures trying to make a match – is she a make-up artist, stylist, hairdresser, skin care expert, plastic surgeon, Botox practitioner or something else?

A lot of people maintain both in this setting and in marketing copy that the benefit is what matters and that people don’t care how you get there. I would say that the benefit is the most important, but I can’t be the only one who thinks that how you deliver it is also really important. Why is it important to me? In this case, it will dictate how much time I invest in seeing if we should get to know each other better. If she is a plastic surgeon, there’s not a great fit for me because I don’t know anyone who has plans to get surgery and in my entire life nobody has ever asked me for information or a referral on this topic. It would actually be a disservice to her to take up her time when there are people in the room she’d be better off meeting. If she is a make-up artist who mixes her own chemical-free, cruelty-free cosmetics well then I’m interested because that’s something I’d consider using and I know a lot of people who would also be interested.

My follow up question would be something like “So, um, what do you actually do? Are you a make-up artist?” In my mind, I’d be thinking about how hard this person is making it on me to get the answer to a straightforward question. It would also put them way down on my list of people I’d consider referring business to. Do you communicate this vaguely with clients? Will people I send you have to work as hard as I did to get a question answered?

So, what’s the answer? My current thought is that it’s best to include what you DO along with the benefit you provide, such as “I’m a stylist who specializes in helping mature women look as attractive as possible.” That way, you give someone a full picture that includes everything they need to decide if they want to learn more. I know I’d appreciate being answered in this way!

PS – If you go to networking events or want to start going, check out this free training by Sales and Networking Expert Don Talbert just for my community. I’m looking forward to learning his “3 Strategies for Really Working a Networking Event to Create a Continuous Flow of Leads, Referrals and Business.” Check it out and sign up here: Networking training call

When I first started with my email newsletter, I took any unsubscribes I got personally. I would look at when they unsubscribed and try to see what I did “wrong.” I always work hard to bring value to people who have trusted me with their time and attention, so I didn’t like to see people unsubscribing. I assumed I did something to drive them away – that either I hadn’t set proper expectations or that I had not delivered something worthwhile.

Now, several years later, I feel differently about unsubscribes. I now know that it’s just part of business – people sign up, and sometimes a few slip away. People change over time, and maybe they’ve moved on from the solopreneur business that made them want to read my newsletter in the first place. Maybe they are deep into some business-expanding projects and don’t want to spend time reading anything new. Maybe the signed up to get to know what I teach and found it wasn’t a good fit for them. Whatever the reason, I now respect that choice and that the lost subscriber is doing what they think is best for their business. It doesn’t sting like it used to when I lose a subscriber. Now, when I lose a subscriber I have a similar feeling as when I bid a friend farewell on a new adventure when they move away from the area. I may wish them to stay, but I know they are moving on in their own best interest, and who can feel bad about that?

If you’re using email newsletter as part of your business and not getting at least a few unsubscribes from time to time, it may be time to step it up a notch. Of course, it’s not desirable to have lots of unsubscribes, and it you get a bunch at one time try to figure out what caused it.

Here’s a few thoughts on how you might increase your efforts and get to that sweet spot of getting just a few unsubscribes:

Are you making offers to purchase something? Your newsletter should include regular offers of things your readers may want to buy. Some people will unsubscribe if they think they are being “sold to” all the time, so don’t overdue it with the sales offers but be sure to make some offers. If someone is offended by appropriate sales offers, then they are probably not a good fit for your newsletter.

Are you targeting your readers tightly enough? If you try to be all things to all people, nobody will feel like you are speaking to them. The more you can hone in on who you are writing to, the more those people will feel connected to you and the more other people will drop away on their own accord.

Are you emailing at an appropriate frequency? The definition of “not enough” and “too much” vary greatly by writer and audience, but not having the right frequency for your situation may result in no unsubscribes or too many. If you rarely send an email, people may unsubscribe in large numbers because they forget who you are or they may never unsubscribe because there are so few emails. If you vastly overdo it, you’ll lose people in large numbers.

How do you feel about people unsubscribing? What number of unsubscribes do you think is the right number for you?

Just a quick announcement – I have a free call coming up this week and I’d love for you to join me.  Being great at the providing your product or service for customers is only half of what you need for a successful solopreneur business.  On this call, I’ll share the other half with you.  Click here to reserve your spot.

Sign up for the call on “The 5 Essential Skills for Solopreneur Success” here.

Do people ask you to do things in your business that you don’t like doing? If you provide services, are some of your services things you’d prefer not to do? Some business coaches might tell you to stop doing them, but until you’ve got a full roster of things you’d rather be doing it might be worth taking on work you don’t love as long as you can provide excellent work that keeps customers happy. Keep in mind that I’m only suggesting this as a short-term measure while you fill your business with work and clients you love.

I often see service providers in this situation – there is a service they don’t like providing or have no passion for, but people keep requesting and are willing to pay for it. It can be hard to find a way to start saying “no” when you’ve said yes to providing the service for a long time and people expect it.

I was working with someone who is a coach herself, and we were tackling this very issue. We were revising her menu of available services, and there was just one thing she absolutely hated doing but got asked to do all the time. In her case, this was not her main work but an add-on service that she neither advertised nor announced. It was just something people asked for so she started doing it even though it drained her.

This coach had hustled hard during her first few years in business, and as a result was at the next level in her business. She had several key referral partners and kept her practice as full as she wanted it. This dilemma was a symptom of a larger adjustment that needed to be made: it was time to get out of start-up hustle mode and into the business she dreamed of.

As we talked further, what came out is that while she disliked giving this particular kind of service, her clients loved it. What I suggested was this:

Don’t say “no,” say how much.

I other words, don’t deny people that want a premium service the chance to get it, just price it in a way that honors what a stretch it is for you to provide it. Putting a premium price on a product or service you don’t like providing accomplishes two things: it decreases the number of requests for this service and it compensates you for taking on something you find difficult to deliver. My client felt strange about this shift at first, and thought nobody would pay a price that she felt good about for this service. In the end though, she decided that it was okay if just a few people or even nobody purchased at the new price.

If you have an additional service that people love but that you don’t like providing, consider offering your customers a chance to buy that special service at a premium price rather than assuming that nobody would want it at that price. The results may surprise you.

How have you handled requests for services you don’t like offering? Tell me about it in the comments.

at the appropriate level of quality.

Gotcha, did I? The popular version of this saying is “Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” and for the life of me I cannot figure out how something so plainly false got to be so generally accepted as true. I could give you numerous examples from my personal life, and it applies to business as well.

There’s something about working on the internet, having a website, and posting things that everyone can see forever that compels us to try to do it perfectly. This is not only a huge time suck, but it’s also a disservice to the people who want to hear from you. They don’t want perfection, and you can’t deliver it anyway. No matter how great something is, it can always be better. I’ve found for myself and clients that most of what you do to run a business can be “good enough” with great results. I know people (not in my community) who delayed months even starting a business because their logo wasn’t perfect, or their website needed work or some other item wasn’t in it’s final form yet. As an entrepreneur, your website/logo/business cards/tagline/etc will always need work so don’t delay offering your unique gifts to the world getting them perfect. It’s an educated guess anyway until you start working in your business.

As solopreneurs, we are particularly vulnerable to this because the business is so closely related to ourself. This is a valid concern – you certainly don’t want to be putting junk out there with your name on it, but try to make an honest assessment of how good it needs to be to serve the people who need you. There’s often a direct correlation in how long you delay something and how close to perfect you try to get it. If your goal is to serve other though your work, you may be depriving them of something they want or need while you try to get it perfect.

I think, sometimes, there’s a temptation to procrastinate or hide behind getting things perfect. If a person can spend all day writing perfect tweets, then they’re “busy” and “working,” but don’t have to risk putting any real work out in the world.

The only place I encourage you to always do your best is in working directly with clients or in creating things to sell. These things should always get your best efforts.

How well do you do things? How do you decide? Are there things that aren’t worth doing well? Leave me a comment and tell me what you think.

I was talking to someone I know recently who is thinking of starting a solopreneur business. When I mentioned I could help with this, his replied that the only way he would take advice from me, or anyone, is to know exactly, in detail, how much money I had made in my business. His thinking was that if I had made X dollars then I have something that he could replicate.

There’s a few problems with this response. First, let me state that I admire anyone who checks out a coach or adviser before hiring them. It’s really important to make sure the person knows their field before you trust them. Anyone can appoint themselves guru, expert, etc. so title alone won’t tell you anything.

The first problem with this is personal boundaries. While I understand the logic of asking the question, I would not reveal something like this in detail. I think it’s great when business coaches share their successes in general terms like 6 figures or multiple 6 figures, but that’s as far as I would go. It simply feels icky to me to have to reveal so much personal data in order to win a client.

The second problem with this is that it ignores how long the person has been in business. If I had answered this question within the first 6 months of my business, the figure would not have been very impressive. That didn’t mean that I wasn’t already helping people. I had 10+ years in business in a variety of settings before I ever started my business, so from the onset I was able to offer something valuable.

The third problem is that there isn’t one business model to work from. Just because I have success with mine doesn’t mean someone else, in a different kind of business, could replicate it.

The fourth problem is the difference between revenue and profit. Revenue is all the money that comes into a business, where profit is what is left after paying expenses. If I said I made 1 Million dollars in revenue or sales, that sounds impressive but what if I spent 2 Million bringing that in? That’s pretty dismal.

The last problem using this to check out an adviser is that you have no way of knowing if the person is telling the truth. Anything can be fabricated, even tax returns or account data. The person who asked me this question already knows me well enough to know I wouldn’t lie, but how could you have this knowledge of someone you just met?

So, having established that asking for detailed personal financial information is not the way to evaluate an adviser the next question is what is the right way?

Here are some ideas to get you started:

Know enough about what you are seeking advice on to have a conversation about it. The same way you do your research on a new car before setting foot in the showroom, do your homework here as well. Learn what pitfalls to ask about, and learn some best practices so if you hear something different you know enough to ask about it.

Look for testimonials or ask for references. This is proof that they’ve already gotten results for people.

Look for long-term consistency such as a blog or newsletter. Almost anyone can look good in one conversation but to publish solid information over an extended period of time is a strong indicator that the person has a depth of knowledge and experience to share.

How do you check out someone you are thinking of hiring? Tell me about it in the comments.