C.J. Hayden's Blog, page 3

Rejection: It’s Not About You

One of the most persistent barriers to success for self-employed professionals is fear of rejection. Sometimes this fear is quite conscious. You know that you are avoiding marketing and sales because you’re afraid your prospects will say no.

Other times the fear is lurking in the background, making an impact you’re not always aware of. You may find yourself procrastinating about making a phone call or setting up a sales appointment, and blame it on laziness or poor time management. Or you may avoid following up because you “don’t want to bug people.” Or perhaps it feels pushy to ask directly for a sale.

Or maybe it just seems easier to spend time posting to Facebook or Twitter, or spend money buying pay-per-click ads, than it does to have a one-to-one conversation with a prospect who has expressed interest in your services.

But what this subtle resistance to direct contact with your prospects usually indicates is that you are — consciously or unconsciously — avoiding situations where you might be told no.

There is no question that it can be confronting to ask someone to hire you. The possibility of being rejected may bring up every ounce of psychological baggage you are hauling around with you from the past. You may remember being chosen last for volleyball games, or told not to tag along with your older siblings, or excluded from a clique at school.

You may not even be aware these old memories of rejection are being triggered. You just notice how hard it is to make calls or go to networking events or follow up on leads, and you do something else instead.

But the reality is that if you don’t turn around and face your fear of rejection, it’s eventually going to bite you in the butt. It’s going to keep you from making contacts you need to make, cause you to walk away from sales you could have closed, and force you into choosing easier — but much less effective — ways to get clients.

Here is where to begin. You must recognize that rejection is not about you. When a prospect decides not to do business with you, it’s a commercial transaction. Your prospect is deciding whether or not to spend his own or his employer’s money on purchasing a certain service. His choice has nothing whatsoever to do with your worth as a person, or even your abilities as a professional.

The number of factors that go into your prospect’s decision are innumerable. And frequently, what you are told about why she doesn’t want to hire you isn’t the full story. Even when it sounds like it’s about you, it really isn’t.

When a prospect says she thinks you are too expensive, what she actually means is that she’s choosing to spend that money on something else, or that she values low price over high quality, or that she never meant to act in the first place because she doesn’t have an appropriate budget. None of this is about you.

A prospect who tells you that he found someone else more qualified simply means that there’s another person in your market who happens to have experience more relevant than your own, or that the other person hired a better copywriter, or that your prospect thinks qualifications on paper mean more than real-world experience. Also not about you.

If you’re told that the competition has better references, it means that they were referred by someone the prospect knows personally, or they worked for a big name the prospect recognizes, or the prospect got lazy after checking their references and never called yours. Not about you.

And most of the time what prospects tell you doesn’t even sound like it’s about you. They say, “not now,” “let me think about it,” or “I’m not ready.” Certainly none of that is about you.

Of course it’s disappointing to lose a sale, but the real problem is when you allow the possibility of a disappointment to stop you from seeking sales at all.

If you miss the bus occasionally, do you stop taking the bus to work? If you sometimes lose at cards, do you refuse to play any more? If you have a less-than-enjoyable first date with someone, do you give up dating forever?

No. You recognize that it would be unreasonable to expect the bus to always arrive on your schedule, or to win at cards every time you play, or for every first date to turn into marriage.

Then why should you allow the possibility of hearing someone say no stop you from making phone calls, or following up on leads, or setting up meetings to discuss working together?

The next time a prospect tells you she doesn’t want to hire you right now or he prefers to work with someone else, don’t allow yourself to translate that refusal to do business into a personal rejection. Prospects who say no are not suggesting there is something wrong with you. They aren’t even talking about you; they are talking about themselves.

Instead, hear a no as what it truly is: a business decision based on a current set of circumstances that exist in the life, career, or workplace of your prospects. It’s about their time, their money, their needs, their preferences, their priorities. It’s not about you at all.

In Marketing and Sales, It Pays to Listen

We talk quite a bit in sales and marketing about, well, talking. We examine how to get our message across, what to say to potential clients, how to present our businesses, etc. But sometimes, listening can be considerably more productive than talking. Here are five ways you just might be able to get more clients by listening.

1. Listen for what prospects want. This is the most obvious kind of useful listening, but it’s often the most overlooked. Consider the life coach who tries to sell fulfillment to a prospect who is seeking security, the graphic designer who insists on selling an identity package to a prospect whose budget only extends to business cards, or the real estate agent who keeps presenting single-family homes to a prospect who wants a condo.

Of course you should ask prospects about their needs, then propose the best solution for their problems. But this must be the best solution for them, not just the best for you. Once you land a new client, there can be many opportunities to sell them additional products and services. By then they will trust you and be more open to your suggestions. But when you are first trying to close the sale, you’ll have much more success if you sell them what they are already looking for.

2. Listen to how prospects respond to your marketing messages. Learning how your communications are perceived by the recipient is crucial to making them more effective. Your prospects are often quite different people than you are yourself. So a message that appeals to you may not have the same impact on your desired clients.

Think about the writer who introduces herself as a “communications consultant” because that’s the label she and her colleagues prefer. If listeners respond by asking for help with their public speaking, she needs a new label that prospects will better understand. Or the chiropractor who says he delivers “optimal health,” but discovers that prospects with back pain don’t grasp that this includes pain relief. He needs to use language his prospects can connect with.

3. Listen for buying signals. When you’re focused on presenting your business, it’s easy to miss cues that prospects have already heard you and are considering your offer. Questions like “how much will that add up to,” “have you done this for other clients like me,” or “how long will this take” are all signals that your prospect is seriously considering working with you.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking these expressions of interest are objections to moving forward. If you treat them as objections and keep trying to convince your prospect why you’re the best, you could lose the sale. Instead, answer the question factually, then check in with your prospect for his reaction. For example, “The total would be $25,000. Is that in your budget?” Or, “I could have this completed by June 15. Would that date work for you?”

4. Listen for leads to new business. Stop tuning out comments by prospects, clients, and networking contacts that don’t seem to apply to you, and listen carefully instead. There could be gold in those offhand remarks.

When a prospect says she doesn’t have time to meet with you, find out what else she’s working on that you might offer help with. If a client complains that an upcoming conference is delaying the project you’re working on, ask if you could be one of the speakers. A networking contact’s gossipy story about office politics could transform from boring to fascinating when you recognize the changes he is describing at his company might mean business for you.

5. Listen to sales and marketing success stories. When you’re finding marketing to be somewhat of a struggle, it’s often easier to engage with others’ complaints than with their successes. But success stories can often do more to help you than commiserating about failures.

The next time friends or colleagues tell you that business is going well, listen carefully to what they’ve been doing. Get curious about what led to their success. What marketing approaches have they been using? How do they talk about their business? Where have they been networking? What helps them close their sales? You’ll hear many valuable clues for how you might build your own business.

So don’t think sales and marketing is all about talking. If you start lending an ear to what your prospects, clients, and colleagues have to say, you may discover all sorts of ways that it pays better to listen.

Optimism: The Secret to Successful Selling

Why is it that some people seem to be naturals at selling, while others struggle to close every sale or even fail completely in a role that requires them to sell? In 1982, psychologist Martin Seligman, PhD, set out to answer that question for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Seligman had been studying optimism and pessimism in the laboratory for almost 20 years when Met Life heard about his research. Could Seligman help them learn how to hire more effective salespeople, they asked?

As it turned out, he could. In a series of studies for Met Life that analyzed the relationship between successful selling and the personality of the salesperson, Seligman confirmed in the field what his laboratory research had predicted — optimists make more sales than pessimists. They are more persistent in the face of rejection, more likely to stay energized without any encouragement, and less likely to give up when things don’t go well.

How Optimistic Are You?

Seligman developed a simple questionnaire to measure a person’s relative level of optimism vs. pessimism, which is still in use today. You can take a modified version of his test online. (Look under Engagement Questionnaires for the Optimism Test; free registration is required.) A more detailed questionnaire that further explains your results is in Seligman’s book Learned Optimism. If you’ve always thought of yourself as an optimist, you may be surprised at some of the pessimistic tendencies this test can uncover.

So what if you discover that according to Seligman’s rating scale, you are more pessimistic than optimistic? Are you then doomed to poor sales forever, or worse, should you leave your profession if sales is part of the job?

Luckily, no. What Seligman’s research discovered was that it is possible to turn pessimists into optimists. Using a step-by-step process, in study after study, he has helped thousands of people increase their level of optimism, thereby increasing their success at work and in life. According to Seligman, it’s all about changing what he calls your “explanatory style.”

When a pessimistic thinker fails to close a sale, he tells himself, “I’m no good at selling,” or “No one wants to buy from me,” or “I’ll never be able to sell anything.” When an optimist loses a sale, she says, “That customer wasn’t ready to take action,” or “The competition won this one but there’s plenty of other fish in the sea,” or “It wasn’t the right time for such a major expense.”

Pessimists explain negative events as being personal, pervasive, and permanent, while optimists explain them as having causes that are external, specific, and temporary. And these explanations drive their behavior.

If you tell yourself that lost sales are all your fault, that no one wants to do business with you, and that you’ll never be able to sell, it’s frequently a self-fulfilling prophecy. You literally talk yourself out of trying to sell any more. But if your explanation points to the customer’s choices rather than your own skills, names the specific situation instead of a universal condition, and identifies each incident as a one-time occurrence rather than a recurring event, you’ll be ready to try again within the hour.

Turning Pessimism into Optimism

Seligman uses an ABCDE model to help people turn their pessimism into optimism. It works like this:

1. Identify the pessimistic beliefs you currently hold about the causes of adversity, and the consequences of these beliefs. For example —

[A]dversity: You made 30 follow-up calls and got no appointments.

[B]elief: You think, “I’m not getting anywhere. This is stupid. It’s a total waste of effort.”

[C]onsequence: You feel frustrated and angry and don’t make any more calls.

2. Dispute these negative beliefs with evidence to the contrary, alternative explanations, or by questioning their implications or usefulness. For example —

[D]isputation: You tell yourself: “It was only one day and only 30 calls. Everyone has difficulty with sales calls, and days like this are going to happen from time to time. It was a learning experience — I got to practice my presentation. Tomorrow I’ll get better results.”

3. Observe the re-energization that occurs as you succeed at disputing your pessimistic explanations. For example —

[E]nergization: You realize, “I still feel a little frustrated, but not nearly as much, and I no longer feel so angry. I believe I WILL do better tomorrow.”

4. Externalize this internal conversation — bring your thoughts out into the open where they can be dealt with. Start by writing down the ABCDE of each situation that provokes pessimism. Then role play the disputation process with a trusted friend, colleague, or coach, and observe what happens.

Optimism Can Be Learned

Perhaps Seligman’s process seems too simple to work. In fact, the most difficult part can be sticking with it. As with changing any long-standing habit, re-training yourself to give optimistic explanations instead of pessimistic ones can take considerable time and dedication. In Learned Optimism, Seligman gives detailed instructions and examples for working with the ABCDE process over time.

But the payoff could be dramatic. Imagine how much difference it could make to your life and your business if you not only started to sell more, but you also became more optimistic about your future and less likely to feel depressed when setbacks occur. Seligman’s research shows that optimists not only have more success in their careers, but lead longer and healthier lives. And unlike many self-help prescriptions, Seligman’s process has been proven by clinical studies to alleviate depression, decrease anxiety, and accelerate achievement at school and work.

So why not give it a try? All you have to lose is a bit of time and a litany of negative thoughts you’re probably more than ready to get rid of anyway.

Want More Clients? Just Say No!

Much of the popular wisdom about how to succeed as an independent professional seems to center around saying yes. You’ll hear that you’re supposed to market yourself constantly in as many different ways as possible, network with everyone you can find, and take as many clients as possible in order to increase your earnings. The implication is that you should say yes to every opportunity.

But it hasn’t been my experience that pursuing all opportunities is the true path to success. In fact, my own success increased dramatically when I started saying no more often. Saying yes to everything is like opening too many windows on your computer. Eventually you run out of resources and you crash. When you say yes to every suggestion, request, or invitation, you are letting other people’s agendas drive your business. Saying no can put you in charge instead.

Here are six examples of situations where you may want to consider saying no.

1. New clients who don’t fit into your niche.

When business is scarce, it’s tempting to take anything you can get. For a one-time or short-term project, working with a client outside your target market or specialty may not harm you. But making a practice of taking any business that shows up will get in the way of establishing your reputation and referral base.

These “outsider” clients won’t lead to the targeted referrals or testimonials that will build your business. And they can take a lot more energy to serve, because you may need to learn on the job, scramble to assemble needed resources, or do work you simply don’t enjoy much. Sticking to your niche, on the other hand, will lead to more business of the kind you really want to have.

2. Networking with people who have no connection to your niche.

Your networking time is precious. Say no to attending events that will attract few people from your target market, or to meeting with people whose niche has no relation to yours.

Just because someone invites you to a meeting or coffee doesn’t mean you have to go. Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty more invitations to choose from in the future. Plus, you should be spending some time making your own invitations to folks solidly within your niche, who will be much more likely to bring you business.

3. Clients who take more effort to pursue than their business is worth.

Watch out for prospects who want to meet with you multiple times, see several proposals, or require a detailed response to a complex RFP before agreeing to work with you. Even when you ultimately land the contract, it may cost you far too much unpaid time. And clients who are so demanding before they hire you may be even worse to actually work for.

4. People and organizations who ask for your time but do nothing for you.

Serving as a volunteer in order to give back to your community is a worthwhile activity in itself. But volunteering your time with the primary intent to market your business only pays off when the recipients of your largesse provide the promotional consideration they promised.

Beware of offers like online communities who award you a slot as an “expert” required to provide answers to questions, original articles, and downloadable tools for free, but can’t deliver the traffic they promised. Or community organizations who ask you to serve in your professional capacity pro bono, but never so much as acknowledge you in their newsletter.

5. Ads, promotional schemes, and exhibit space that don’t fit your budget.

The moment you hang out your shingle as a business owner, you become a prime target for people selling print and online ad space, directory listings, search engine optimization, social media management, and trade show exhibits. Their offers may be appealing, especially if you’re feeling a bit desperate for business. But for the average independent professional, these approaches rarely pay back the required investment.

Consider this — if these promotional avenues were as good as the offers say, would they really need to have an army of commissioned salespeople pushing them on you? Before enrolling in any paid promotional scheme, compare its total cost to the value of closed sales you could conservatively expect to gain as a result. Make your own estimates; don’t just accept what the salesperson says. Then say no to any offer that may cost you more than it brings in.

6. Flavor-of-the-month marketing approaches.

Every time you turn around, it seems that someone has a new marketing idea for you. If you’re not seeing immediate results from what you’re already doing, it may be appealing to try something new. But keep in mind that every marketing strategy takes consistency and persistence to pay off.

When you drop what you’re doing to try something new, you may lose out on both the benefit of what you were doing before and the new approach you’re trying now, because you’ll have given neither of them the attention and longevity they truly require.

Here’s the bottom line. If you’ve ever felt like you were being pulled in a million different directions by the requirements of marketing your business, the solution may be right in front of you. Just say no to invitations, offers, and demands that serve the needs of other people better than they do your own.

Crafting a Self-Introduction That Gets Noticed

Self-introduction. Elevator speech. Ten-second introduction. Thirty-second commercial. Whatever you call it, you need one to be an effective marketer, salesperson, or even jobseeker. Here are six tips to creating one that produces the results you are seeking.

There’s a difference between a 10-second introduction (self-introduction) and a 30-second commercial (elevator speech). By my definition, the 10-second intro is a concise summary of what you do that can be used when you shake someone’s hand, stand up to introduce yourself briefly to a group, or call someone on the phone. In the formula I use for composing intros – the benefits oriented introduction — it contains just one key benefit to get people’s attention, plus a simple title or label for what you do. (There’s more about this below.)

 

A 30-second commercial, on the other hand, shares more about what you do, who you do it for, the products and services you offer, and/or your competitive advantage. You might use this when leaving your first voice mail message with a prospect or referral source, introducing yourself as a speaker, at a leads or networking group where this longer format is expected, or to lead off a sales presentation.

I find it useful for most entrepreneurs and salespeople to have both forms of introduction handy.

Your introduction should be composed with generating referrals in mind, not just on attracting any clients who might be present. It’s more important in my view to have an intro that a 12-year-old could understand and repeat than to have one that pinpoints your specialty to someone in the know. You are statistically much more likely to be speaking to a potential referral source than a prospective client at any particular moment.

 

Even better is to have two 10-second intros in your pocket — one that you use when you don’t know who you’re speaking to, and one that you use when speaking to someone who you already know understands your specialty.

In the benefits-oriented introduction formula, you lead with a key benefit and statement of who your clients are, then provide a label or title that identifies your profession. If your listener won’t have a chance to ask you questions about what you do immediately after hearing your intro, including all three pieces of information will help people remember and “file” you appropriately, whether it’s to refer you a client or hire you themselves.

Here are some examples:

“My name is Peter Marconi and I provide Chicago financial services firms with persuasive tools for winning new clients. I’m a marketing communications consultant.”

“I’m Carmen Sanchez, and I help working mothers take practical steps toward living a more fulfilling and balanced life. I’m a life coach.”

“I’m Fred Patel, and I deliver talented, high-caliber professionals to fill essential positions at information technology companies nationwide. I’m an executive recruiter.”

Keep in mind that your introduction will not always be used in interactive situations. If you are shaking someone’s hand or speaking with them live on the phone, you can use an intro that is intended to provoke curiosity or questions. But if you are using your intro to stand up and introduce yourself to a group (networking meeting, leads group, etc.), or to begin a letter, email, or voice mail message, it’s more effective to develop an intro that gives the listener a category to “file” you under.

 

For an example of how this works, imagine you are currently in the market for someone to create a logo and business cards for you. Person A leaves you a voice mail message that says, “My name is Angela and I help people like you get more clients. Please call me.” Person B leaves you a message that says, “My name is Sam and I help small businesses get noticed. I’m a graphic designer.”

My bet is that even though neither of them mentioned logos or business cards specifically, you would be likely to call Sam back and not Angela. I would also bet that if you heard both Angela and Sam introduce themselves at a networking group, and you had no need for their services but the next day someone asked you to recommend someone to create their new business card, you might remember Sam from his intro, but wouldn’t think of Angela.

This type of mental “filing” by category is how most people’s brains work. If you’re crafting an intro for use in this type of one-way communication, I’d recommend including your own filing label.

In the benefits-oriented format, you state a key benefit of your services (and if possible, your target market) before naming your profession. There are two reasons for including a benefit like this and for saying it first. The first purpose is to position you in the minds of your listeners as you would like to be positioned, before they make up their own minds about you. If you simply say you are a graphic designer, business attorney, or communications consultant, without giving your listeners any other details, they categorize you as they please. But if you also name a benefit you provide your clients, they can determine much more about whether they or someone they know might be able to use you.

 

The second reason is to make your introduction memorable. This is why you might choose to make your benefit sound almost like a tagline. If you go to a networking event and meet three different accountants there, you are much more likely to remember the one who said something clever or relevant than the others who simply told you what they do for a living. Years ago, I would regularly run into an accountant at local events who always introduced herself this way: “My name is Cathy Cheung, and I love taxes! I’m a CPA. Call me at tax time, and I’ll help you save money.” I probably haven’t seen Cathy in 15 years now, but I still remember her.

Whatever you choose to say should sound and feel authentic when coming from you. If you are a naturally enthusiastic, high energy, or humorous person, superlatives and catchy phrases can be quite appropriate. If you are understated, conservative, or serious, your introduction should reflect that instead.

 

There’s a whole spectrum of personalities between those two extremes, of course. My point is that there’s no one right “flavor” for an intro that suits every one. If your introduction authentically represents who and how you are, and it turns some people off, those people probably aren’t good clients for you. To me, the authenticity is more important than pleasing all possible listeners. If you feel comfortable saying it, and it attracts the kind of clients you want, then you’ve found the right formula.

Why You Shouldn’t Do What the Gurus Do

It’s only natural to emulate successful people. You’d like to copy their success, so it seems it would make sense to copy their approach to sales and marketing. But modeling your marketing after the gurus in your field may not get you where they are.

Simply put, the present situation of these successful people may be entirely different from your own. They typically have plenty of money to spend, staff to help, a large in-house mailing list, widespread name recognition, a suite of products and services to offer, and many years of completed work to draw from. If you don’t have all this in your business, trying to copy their marketing and sales approach may be a recipe for failure rather than success.

Here are five ways that doing what the gurus do can lead you astray.

1. Relying on email, website traffic, and social media to promote your business.

With a high-traffic website, a large email list, and a substantial social media following, a guru may need nothing more than to make an offer on his website, send some emails to his list, and make some social media posts to land plenty of new clients. But if your website gets few visitors and your mailing list and social media audience are small, you’ll need to find other ways to attract and reach out to prospects. Personal networking, phone calls, public speaking, or other high-contact activities will need to be part of your marketing mix. Email, web copy, and social media presence alone aren’t going to do the trick.

2. Counting on your reputation and personal charisma to convince people to do business with you.

When new prospects make contact with a guru, they’re usually already familiar with her work. They arrive pre-disposed to do business, and rarely ask about her background or even question her rates. She, in turn, expects most prospects to turn into clients, and speaks to them with confidence and authority. She spends little, if any, time persuading them she’s the right person for the job.

When new prospects make contact with you, regardless of who initiates the conversation, they may know very little about you. You will need to build their trust in your ability to help, provide evidence that you have the skills and experience they need, and convince them you are worth the price you are asking. A winning personality may not be enough to land the sale, especially when your prospects must justify their buying decisions to a boss or a spouse.

3. Promoting your own free workshops, teleclasses, or webinars instead of guest speaking for others.

Gurus frequently offer no-charge live or virtual programs to convert prospects to paying clients. With a large email list, it costs almost nothing to promote these. But most of the people who attend will be those already on the guru’s list. Trying to do this without an existing prospect list will almost always fail. You’ll have to expend far too much effort just to attract an adequate number of participants. And they’ll still be only prospects; you’ll still have to convince them to spend money with you.

A much more effective strategy for an entrepreneur without a substantial prospect list is to offer yourself as a speaker to professional meetings, conferences, and teleclass or webinar series sponsored by others. That way, the sponsor promotes the program and provides the audience, and you get a host of new prospects to sell to without all the effort.

4. Spending unbudgeted amounts on promotional opportunities.

You’ll often see gurus as paid sponsors for events or initiatives, advertising on websites or in publications, or exhibiting at trade shows or conferences. They can afford this relatively expensive type of promotion because their higher income allows a higher advertising budget, and because they have multiple products and services to sell. And, what you may not know is that gurus often receive benefits like these at no cost in return for speaking or promoting the event or publication to their list.

When someone offers you a paid promotional opportunity like this, do the math before saying yes. Divide the cost of participating by the number of new prospects you expect to attract as a result. Is that cost per person a reasonable amount for you to pay? Remember, too, that these will only be prospects, not clients. You’ll still need to convince them to buy before you can earn back what you spent.

5. Maintaining multiple websites, ezines, blogs, or social networking profiles with different themes.

Gurus have paid staff, multiple products and services to sell (and earn income from), and a large body of existing work to repurpose for ezine articles, blog and social media posts, etc. If you have one part-time assistant or none at all, a short list of products and services to offer, and must create most of your material from scratch, you will be hard-pressed to manage just ONE website, plus ONE ezine, plus ONE blog, plus ONE Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Google+/YouTube identity, even with all on the same theme.

The typical guru became a guru because he established a name for himself doing one recognizable thing. Only after building a successful business and reputation did he have the resources available to branch out to multiple brands and market niches simultaneously. If he tried to do this before becoming successful, you probably never heard about those ventures, because they didn’t survive.

The essential message underlying all these examples is this. Copying what successful people do after they have already achieved success will not necessarily help you become successful in the first place. Their present situation is not yours. If you want to become a guru yourself, you may need to copy what the gurus did before they ever achieved guruhood.