7 tips for entrepreneurs who are managing for the first time

By Sharon Lee

Becoming a manager can be both a positive and overwhelming experience—management is not easy and requires a broad range of skills that take tie to acquire such as communication, coaching and motivating. But everyone needs to start somewhere and there some important steps that can make the transition a bit smoother.

Many entrepreneurs find themselves becoming first-time managers when the company they founded begins expanding. In this blog post I’m going to provide some tips for new managers who want to start strong and thrive as employee count grows.

1. Lead by example
Through the good times and bad, who are people going to look to when they need inspiration or an example for how to act? The answer is simple: you. You are now the example that others need to follow. The values you demonstrate, the way you handle adversity and ambiguity and the way you persevere through the biggest challenges, is now considered the measuring stick for how others will act and behave.

You are going to need to be very mindful of your emotions and how you react in certain situations. You are going to need to slow down, be patient and develop an informed perspective, so you can lead in a way that people will admire and model.

2. Stay in the trenches
Now that you are a manager it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do the “dirty work” that helped your business succeed in the first place. It is an endearing quality that your direct reports will respect when you are willing to do any job at any time to help them move forward.

Keep an eye on things day-to-day and when there is an opportunity to jump in and help, grab the opportunity and run with it. At the end of the day the success of the business is what matters and a culture where anyone, including you, is willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish things is a culture that will thrive and endure.

3. Understand the importance of delegation
You are going to find early on that you want to be involved in everything your team is working on. The challenge here is that you cannot be everywhere at once. You need to create an environment where you are actively relying on others to help carry projects. You will still be informed, but you need to let others lead so they can grow their abilities and perspective.

When you need someone to step up and lead on your behalf, be clear on your expectations but also stress to them how important the opportunity is for them personally. When they know how important their role is they will feel even greater ownership towards ensuring an optimal outcome and their contributions will feel even more valuable.

4. Prioritize your one-on-one check-ins
Individual time with your direct reports is critical towards their success and overall career development. It is during this time that you need to keep an honest watch on priorities, metrics, and any questions that might be on their mind.

Set up the one-on-ones, so they happen at a regular and predictable cadence. Block the time on your calendar and do your best to respect this time.

5. Find a mentor
One of the first steps you should take is to find a mentor that you can go to when you have questions or need support. Find someone who has excelled at being the type of manager you want to be; ideally someone who has experience handling a diverse set of situations, so you can understand first-hand the pros and cons for handling certain situations certain ways.

Look outside your company, perhaps someone you worked with in a previous job, and find out if they are willing to provide guidance and feedback.

6. Be consistent
If you constantly flip-flop on decisions or how you make decisions, your team will start to lose trust in your ability to strategically lead. To be a consistent leader you need to be a patient leader. Take your time. Don’t respond to emails with irrational feedback. Don’t make a decision in the moment just because people are pushing you to do so. Find outlets that allow you to think through things. Write up emails and step away before you send them. This can be very hard for people at every level but sometimes the best thing you can do is just slow.

7. Know that relationships have changed
It’s not unusual for an entrepreneur to build a team with people who they have worked alongside in the past. Once you become their manager the relationship changes and you need to be transparent about that—you can never allow past relationships to cloud your business judgement.

You may need to set clear ground rules early on. But be as transparent as possible and if things feel weird, talk about it so you can collaborate on a solution.

Management is an important part of any business but it takes time to develop the skills you need to be effective at it.

Be patient with yourself and believe in yourself.

Your rewards will come in time…

9 secrets of successful video marketing campaigns

By Scott Mason

No other form of marketing can have the emotional impact of video.

Some business owners, however, consider video to be difficult to create: time-consuming and expensive. And they are sometimes disappointed with the amount of effort it takes to produce a video versus the amount of exposure and visibility that it actually receives.

In this blot post I’m going to provide 9 tips that will increase the probability of your video appearing high in a search engine list and being viewed by thousands of people.

  
1. Create compelling content

Before creating a video, think of what the online community will be interested in—making a video that is compelling to a niche audience will result in great organic growth. In my prior post I described seven different types of video (here's a link to that post: bit.ly/1VqdBMv). Think carefully about the one that will resonate best with your audience.

2. Optimize your content

Once your video has been completed think about what keywords you want your video to rank high for. Since Google owns YouTube, the search engine giant gives a lot of weight to videos posted on that property when compiling organic search lists.

3. Create a strong call-to-action

During the video editing process create a lower third graphic that is unobtrusive to the video content. Include the website URL that you’d like to promote as well as your logo and a phone number because this is ideal for driving traffic from the video to your company’s website.

Another good idea is to create an end screen for the video that has a call-to-action. This will be the last memory the viewer takes away from your video so give them a reason to visit your website!

4. Upload your video to YouTube

YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world—over one billion unique users view content on the site each month and more than six billion hours of video are watched every 30 days. Uploading your video to YouTube provide the possibility of content being seen by a huge global audience.

5. Share, share, share

Share your video across numerous blogs and social media channels. The more often your video is shared, the more visibility it will receive—as in link building, if your video is picked up on numerous websites, the search engines will view this content as more powerful which can improve your organic ranking for the video.

6. The more interaction, the better

The more “likes” you receive on your video and the more comments you obtain, the better. Just like a social media post, the more buzz that your video receives will result in greater exposure. For example, if a video receives 20+ combined comments and “Likes” and also generates over 100 views, the more likely there will be spike in YouTube and organic search results.

7. Add a transcript to your YouTube videos

Most people are not aware that you can upload a transcript on YouTube—creating a word document based off of what the subject featured in the video is saying. Since major keywords that you want to rank high for will likely be included in the script, this will provide SEO “juice” for your video.

(Click here to learn more about creating YouTube transcripts: bit.ly/1KnJDkF.)

8. Seek subscribers
The more subscribers you have, the easier it will be for you to gain publicity for a new video that has been recently uploaded. Did you know that when someone subscribes to your YouTube channel, your most recent video will appear on the homepage of their account—therefore, you can expose your content to wider audiences by subscribing to other channels that are interesting and actively participate in comment discussions.

9. Upload your videos to other networks

Although YouTube is certainly the best bet for obtaining online exposure for your video, properties such as DailyMotion, Vimeo and Break will also provide added exposure. (Sites like Vimeo cost money to sign-up for but, depending on your wants and needs for your video, it could very well be worth it.)

Okay, enough from me…

Now is a great time to get started with video marketing campaigns—with compelling content and good SEO exposure, this rich form of media will help you obtain more publicity. Happy story telling!

Good branding will accelerate your business’s growth

By Sharon Lee

A strong brand gives you an edge over your competitors.

Branding is not only about getting your prospects to select you over the competition, it is also about getting your prospects to see you as the sole provider of a solution to their problem.

Your brand is the sum total of many aspects of your business. Branding includes a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of these elements that identify products or services of a seller.

The objectives that good branding will achieve include:

• Clearly delivers the message
• Builds your credibility
• Emotionally connects your target prospects with your product and or service.
• Motivates the prospect to buy
• Creates user loyalty

To succeed in branding, you must understand the needs and wants of your prospects and customers. This achieved by integrating your brand strategy through your company at every point of public contact—think of branding as the expression of who you are as a company or organization and what you offer.

If your brand could speak, how would it complete the following statements:

• I am ________________
• I exist because ________________
• If you relate to who I am and why I exist you might like me, you can buy me and you can tell others about me

If you are effective in creating a good brand, it will live within the hearts and minds of prospects and customers. It is the sum total of their experiences and perceptions, some of which you can influence, and some that you cannot.

A strong brand is invaluable when you battle for customers every day. It's important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all, your brand is the source of a promise to your buyers.

 A brand is a foundational component of your marketing communications and one you do not want to be without. A brand is strategic and marketing is tactical and what you use to get your brand in front of consumers. That's why it carries a great deal of importance within a business or organization as well.

Your brand serves as a guide to understanding the purpose of business objectives. It enables you to align a marketing plan with those objectives and fulfill the overarching strategy.

The effectiveness of brand doesn't just happen before the purchase, but it's also about the life of the brand of the experience it provides to buyers. Did the product or service perform as expected? Was the quality as good as promised or better? How was the service experience? If you can get positive answers to these questions you've created a loyal customer.

And it’s important to realize that good branding not only creates loyal customers, but also loyal employees. It helps them understand the purpose of the organization or the business—a strong brand gives your team something to believe in, something to stand behind.

Defining and developing a brand takes expertise, care and effort…

9 simple rules for creating ads that work

By David Ronald

All businesses need promotion. After all, no matter how awesome your company’s product or service is, if you don’t advertise, nobody will know about it.

Advertising is a little bit of a black art. Some ads go are highly effective while others hurt more than help. It can take a bit of trial and error to create an advertisement that really works. Here are 9 simple tips that will increase the odds of your success.

1. Determine what will make you stand out—identify and evangelize the key things that will make your prospects pay attention to your company’s product or service. Show your potential customers why your business should be their number one choice and why they shouldn’t even consider your competitors. If you do this effectively, there is a good chance they won’t.

2. Use a headline that grabs viewers’ attention—people are exposed to multiple ads each day and can’t possibly read each one. This is why you have to make sure that your ad actually grabs and keeps their attention. Some headlines are newsworthy, such as in the release of a new service or product. Others have a very strong benefit. Most are specific, as opposed to general, in their facts.

3. Focus on benefits—explaining the features of your products or services is important, but articulating the benefits for the buyer is what it’s all about. After all, people are more interested in what they get from your services than what you do.

4. Make people an offer they can’t refuse—buyers love a bargain, so offer them a good one increases the probability of a sale. Once you come up with your irresistible offer, make sure that you advertise it proudly. When people see that you have something great to offer them, they will have a difficult time resisting it.

5. Make your offer as risk-free as possible—people are nervous about spending their money. And if people fear that they’re going to lose their money and regret their purchase, they are unlikely to purchase your product. But, if you remove these doubts, people are given an incentive to give your product or service a try. So it’s a great idea to offer a money-back guarantee.

6. Use testimonials—people trust other consumers and want to know what they have to say about a company. You can’t make people look for online reviews about your business, but you can give them the same peace of mind by adding a testimonial from a current client who is pleased with what you have to offer. Seeing that other buyers just like them are happy with your product can encourage potential customers to give you a try.

7. Include a call to action—don’t just inform your prospects about what your company has to offer; encourage them to take action. Tell them directly to click on your ad, order your product, pay for your service, etc. For example, your call to action can encourage people to email you for more information, to fill out a form to find out more about your services, to join your weekly or monthly email newsletter or purchase your product.

8. Create a sense of urgency—you don’t want to just plant a seed with your ad, you want people to move forward. Consider, for example, making an irresistible time-limited offer. Or bring in an upcoming season or event when your product will come in handy to make people buy now.

9. Complete contact information—your ad should include a link to your website for more information as part of the contact information. If your offer include an offer to download collateral, consider making that item gated (ie, the viewer has to provide their contact information before accessing it). Include a QR code if your advertisement is in hardcopy format.

Advertising is important and good advertising will help your company succeed.

Thanks for reading.

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Lean concepts can ensure your startup succeeds

By David Ronald

You may have had a great idea for a game-changing product and started your own business. And you may have launched your product and experienced some early success.

Before long, however, cracks began to appear and the numbers started heading in the wrong direction. Things aren’t working out quite the way you had expected.

Don’t panic. Many founders think that the first version of their product will also be the final one—in reality, however, significant refinement is almost always necessary.

Here are some suggestions for how you can use lean startup concepts, popularized by Eric Reis (http://theleanstartup.com/), to improve your business:

1. Use evidence to unlock success
Lean startup concepts move beyond favourable opinions and towards gathering valuable, usable evidence. Adopting it enables you truly observe the effects of a product, seeing it in action and recording exactly how it is received externally—it allows you to measure what works and what doesn’t. As many businesses are now adept with using analytical tools and measurement systems this shouldn’t be daunting. Think of lean as a scientific method, with change grounded in data from behavior, not whims.

2. Reprogram your attitude to failure
While I’m a fan of Ries, I also share the success story of inventor Dr Norm Larsen (http://www.wd40company.com/about/history/) to help others understand why we chose to go lean. Although he may not have realized it at the time, Larsen implemented a lean approach when he devised his most famous product: WD-40. Viewing his work as an experiment, he constantly adjusted and refined the product until satisfied, which is exactly what we do. You know why Larsen’s product is called WD-40? Because versions one to 39 all had failings.

We can learn a lot from Larsen’s persistence and approach. It shows how rethinking our attitude to failure can enable us to learn and adjust quickly, bringing us closer to success.

3. Climb aboard
The lean approach involves your entire company, not just management. For it to work, everyone needs to be invested. I’ve found that once staff are signed up and have a sense of ownership and involvement, they will work with you to achieve tangible goals. It’s all about empowerment; Team members will work towards collective success based on their individual performance, not distant corporate objectives.

I strive to create an environment where people aren’t scared to try new things or speak up when they feel adjustments should be made. This approach has helped me create a culture of collaboration and innovation, which has invigorated the company across all departments and levels.

4. Take a practical and philosophical approach
You may wonder how to maintain momentum when the business flourishes beyond the startup stage. Positive or negative, all business changes must be consistently addressed and managed. A key consideration of lean is that ultimately it’s a mindset. With the right care, attention and with the senior management team leading from the front, a lean culture can be maintained with scale and with confidence.

5. Take as much (or as little) from it as you want
Remember, when it comes to going lean you can be a fan without being fanatical. With the Ries model, we take from it what we need and tailor it to our business. Like all business approaches, nothing is set in stone. That’s the beauty of lean: It encourages constant analysis, adaptation and refinement.

It’s within the capabilities of your business to achieve success. If you value business or product development as a constant work in progress, the lean startup approach can give you the framework to help your business flourish.

Thanks for reading.

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5 secrets of successful word-of-mouth marketing campaigns

By David Ronald

Companies that achieve word-of-mouth success story typically don’t accomplish it by chance—they have, instead, thoughtfully planned and developed marketing campaigns intended to create buzz.

Examples of companies or organizations that have done a fabulous job with word-of-mouth marketing include Apple (who wasn’t talking about the new iPhone 6?) and the ALS Association (their Ice Bucket Challenge went viral in a matter of days).

(Click here to read our white paper on word-of-mouth marketing: http://bit.ly/1jAM2Ct.)

While all of these companies/organizations are completely different, they employed similar strategies in launching their campaigns.

To follow in their footsteps, your WOM (word-of-mouth) marketing should:

1. Be unique—in order for your campaign to be effective, irrespective of whether you’re offering a new product or service, it has to be unique. In the examples above, the companies offered something that no one before had ever offered. While you may not have the means to develop an entirely new unique product line, you do have the means to think about marketing that product in a way that is creative and engaging.

2. Send a message—just as important as being unique is sending a message that meets consumer needs. People don’t just love Apple because their products perform better – they love Apple because their products are trendy, user-friendly, and look awesome. When you purchase an Apple product, you’re saying, “I’m hip,” or “I’m technologically savvy,” (ie, the message that Apple sends to its customers is that an Apple product will make you cool). If you want people to talk about your product, then you need to create a message for buyers that is just as tempting.

3. Guide the conversation—the point of WOM marketing is that it focuses on one customer talking to another potential customer about your product. Remember, however, that when people talk, the talk isn’t always positive. If you want to improve your marketing strategy, you can take small steps to guide the conversation that people are having about your brand. For example, you can highlight and promote certain products or services in store, on your website, and on any of your social media sites. One word of advice that will help you to direct (or avoid) negative conversation is this—if you have any potentially bad PR that people may discover, you should get it out in the open sooner rather than later—honesty is key to WOM marketing success.

4. Broaden the buzz—if people are talking about your product, that’s great—your WOM marketing is well on its way to being effective. A few people, however, talking about your brand is not nearly enough to make your marketing as successful as it could be. Once people start talking, it’s your job to broaden the buzz by building communities on social media, reaching out to influencers, and sending out hints about business or product updates, news and other exciting ideas.

5. Not ignore basics—while you should certainly look to companies with successful WOM strategies for inspiration, ensure that you don’t forget about the most basic element of a marketing campaign: your customers—if you want your customers to love you and to talk about how much they love you, you have to exceed their expectations. And do so consistently. Offering great customer service, going out of your way to keep customers happy, and always putting the customer first is the most essential aspect of a WOM marketing campaign.

Great word-of-mouth marketing epitomizes all of the elements mentioned above and employ all of the strategies that other companies have used to be effective.

Thanks for reading.

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5 tips for becoming more successful at selling

By David Ronald

Selling is a tough business and every sales person needs a plethora of skills. But abandon any strategies that involve force-feeding prospects a product they don’t want and don’t need. As Dale Carnegie famously said, people don't want to be sold to—they want to feel as if they're buying.

Instead, as your prospect moves through the funnel, provide resources and guidance as they attempt to solve a complicated business problem. Always be helping.

(Click here to read our white paper on sales enablement: http://bit.ly/1Lbl1z7.)

Here are five things to keep in mind when you are selling:

1. Remember you're in the people business

Lots of sales people get caught up in what they are selling and forget that they're in the people business. Your customer wants to be treated personally. Getting attention and maintaining your prospects' interest is a huge problem today. But walk into any big-box outlet, restaurant or professional office and you might not even be acknowledged.

Before visiting clients it’s best to remind yourself that "This is a unique individual who deserves distinct treatment."

 2. Don't avoid things that are uncomfortable

The best sales people I have known are willing to throw themselves into harm’s way. So convinced of their offer, they are willing to get in front of the tough customers, ask the hard questions and go for the close. Doing the uncomfortable thing is where the top performers live.

Identify your toughest clients and call them first—and keep calling on them long after everyone else has given up. Once a month, make a list of your company's most difficult target customers and create an attack plan on how to get those accounts. As someone once told me, “You can't bring the big deals home without getting into the deep waters where the big fish swim.”

3. Focus on the results, not the effort

The sales game is not one of organizing, planning or meetings—it's about getting results. Sales people often spend time kidding themselves about doing busy work and don't get in front of customers who can buy their products.

Your success in selling is about getting results and that means getting your products into the hands of more customers. A great sales person knows how to get the customer's attention and present their product or service in a way that causes the customer to buy. Don’t confuse results with efforts. You don't try to get an appointment—you either get it or you don't.

4. Wow your prospects

Good sales people look for ways to inspire a prospect's emotional involvement and create the urgency to take ownership. When you wow a buyer you make a difference and cause them to want to hold onto that experience. You can take any product—even a boring one—and make an exciting pitch.

For example, someone selling glass doors in a hurricane zone could slap on both sides of the glass to demonstrate their construction quality doing so will get the customer's full attention and set you apart from the competition. Average doesn't pay in sales. Wow prospects with your knowledge and belief in the product.

5. Ask for the sale

This may seem very simple, but many sales people fail to ask for the sale. Ever. This is hard to believe, but it’s true. Regardless of your product, price or how professional you are, if you don't ask, you will only sell to those who are going to buy regardless.

Think about keeping a tally of every time you ask a prospect customer for their business. Use this to identify what approaches worked best.

Thanks for reading.

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