The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated. –William James

Most people have one defining need that very rarely gets satisfied.  Many of us will move Heaven and Earth to satisfy this need.  This one attribute is the single most motivating factor that leads to success.  It is the need, the want, to feel important.  The person who can satisfy this need in others, the person who can sincerely make other people feel important, can be very influential and is typically regarded by others as a good leader. In fact, you can tell a lot about an individual by what makes him feel important.  My dad builds houses, and one of the most satisfying things to him is to complete a building and have others admire his work.  Al Capone got his feeling of being important from power and control.  Mother Teresa got her feeling of importance by helping the helpless.  There are usually two reasons why people do things.  The reason we tell others… and the real reason.  When we give money to charity, do we really do it to help others or do we do it because of the satisfaction we get from helping others.  We feel important because we feel like we made a difference in someone else’s life.

We you look around your office, you will see people from all walks of life who crave this feeling of importance.  If any one of those people all of the sudden stopped doing their job, it would cause a lot of challenges for your company.  Every single job that they do is important to the success of the company – to your success, because without them you couldn’t do your job effectively.

When was the last time that you told them how important they were to you?

One of my class members about ten years ago decided to use this principle with his sales assistant.  She was the assistant for five different salespeople, and her job was to put together marketing materials and, ultimately, their contracts when they sold a big deal.  During the class, this salesman decided that the work that this woman did for him was critical to him closing deals, so on his way into the office, he bought her a big container of popcorn and just put a sticky note on it saying how important she was to him and to his success.

When he gave it to her, she was shocked and surprised, but awfully grateful as well since he was the first person in years to treat her like an equal in the office.  When he came back to class the next week, he told us that she had taken the sticky note off the can and stuck it under the plastic protector that covered her desk so that she could see it every day.

I saw this man a couple of years later and asked him about the sales assistant.  He told me that she is still there and still doing a fabulous job.  He said, though, that she now has over a dozen of the sticky notes on her desk.  She keeps every one.

Great leaders use this aspect of human nature to make people feel important.  One way to be a great leader is to find some way every day to make the people around you feel important.

Team Building Principle #15: Acknowledge the Importance of Other People

When the economy is slow, company managers and leaders have to be very cautious with every expense. As a result, we will often put off hiring new employees until more certainty in the marketplace develops. Although natural efficiencies will develop in a downward economy, can team building activities help increase productivity so that we can avoid the expense of adding on new personnel? The answer to that question is… “Well… It depends…”

Don’t Confuse “Morale” with “Productivity”

Team Building is almost a generic term that is used for both “morale building” activities and “productivity building” activities interchangeable, but if you confuse the two activities, you can make some costly mistakes. Morale building activities can include anything from going out to a movie together to an office holiday party to entertainment style activities at annual meetings ans conventions. These activities provide a shared-experience that builds temporary camaraderie and provides a fun relief to the normal day-to-day rat-race. Productivity building activities are training events or innovations that help teams do more with less. Although people will often call both of these types of activities “Team Building”, the activities themselves get totally different results. Both are needed to create a team culture, but quite often, managers and leaders will schedule one type of activity hoping to get the needed result from the other type of activity and be sorely disappointed.

Although productivity will often improve (sometimes dramatically) when morale improves, an increase in morale doesn’t always cause a team to be more productive. For instance, if a manager came into the office and announced that the entire team would get the whole week off and still get paid, morale would skyrocket, but productivity would drop to zero for the week. Morale building activities like team outings and company parties are extremely important, but they can’t entirely replace productivity building events and activities.

Since the team atmosphere created by morale building activities can be temporary, you’ll want to schedule activities like this regularly so that the individual team members get to interact with each other in a more fun way to build camaraderie. Charity team building events at annual meetings or conventions can be a great way to insert a morale building activity. These team building functions are very economical, because the company can generate great public relations without increasing the cost of conducting a convention or annual meeting. For instance, most conventions are going to have some type of entertainment or at least a company outing of some kind. Many companies are replacing these activities with a charity bike build or a team scavenger hunt where team members build gift baskets for soldiers. The investment in each activity is fairly similar, but the results of the charity activities often provide impactful, lasting memories that build great camaraderie between team members.

Build Teams by Training Team Members Together

In addition to morale building activities, a team also needs to develop new skills in order to keep them productive. Many years ago, a mentor of mine told me that “You can’t build a team by training individuals, but you can build a team by training individuals together.” I didn’t really understand the power of this advice until I started my own business, but I understand it more and more as my company grows and grows. For instance, many big companies offer tuition assistance for higher level degrees for their employees, but what often happens is that a company will invest a ton of money into the development of an employee only to have the person leave the company and start working for a competitor. This happens because the individual employees is growing, but the team as a whole is stagnant.

Oddly enough, any skill development activities will work to build the team culture in an organization if the skills developed gives the team a competitive advantage in the marketplace. For instance, Apple decided to eliminate cash registers inside their Apple Stores and replace them with the ability for any employee in the store to be able to use their smartphones to ring-up items for purchases on their smartphones. Because Apple is doing something that no one else is doing, the employees who have been trained in this new technology feel like they are a part of an elite group that is different from other retail stores. Whether they are or not doesn’t really matter, because the team believe that they are ahead of the curve. Customers can find an Apple employee and within seconds create a purchase and have the receipt sent to the customer via email and be on their way. A dramatic increase in productivity and decrease in cost while creating more of a team atmosphere among employees.

“Soft-Skills” Team Building Training is Most Productive

The most effective team training to increase productivity comes from “soft-skills” training, though. While Hard-Skills are ones essential to doing individual jobs within a company — for example hard-skills for an engineer might be calculus and physics — soft-Skills are skills that improve productivity no matter what specific role that a person has within an organization. Soft-skills would include communication skills, presentation skills, the ability to persuade people, the ability to coach and mentor others, etc. If the engineer improves in any or all of these soft-skills, then he or she will likely improve their individual success as well as the overall success of the team.

When teams train together in these soft-skill areas, they automatically develop that same type of team culture that Apple developed with the technology change. Team members know that they are a part of a unique, elite group that is different from most organizations (because most organizations don’t train this way).

For example, a few years ago, I was hired by a commercial construction company to help them deliver high-level sales presentations better. Companies that build skyscrapers or have groups of construction projects often bid out these huge projects in one big contract, so they will often ask for huge proposals and have each qualified contractor come in and do a presentation to narrow down the field. The company that hired me was closing about one out of six of these presentations, but wanted to increase their numbers. So we conducted a series of presentation skills classes with the teams of presenters. Because they trained together, they developed a team culture that showed up when they conducted their presentations. Quite often, at the end of their presentations, the board members who were in the audience would say, “We chose this group because they just seemed to work very well together.” The team culture showed, because the individuals within the group had been trained in soft-skills together, so they saw themselves as having an advantage over other presenters (and they had one.)

Presentation skills, people skills, coaching, mentoring, and other soft-skills training can really help teams become more productive as long as the teams are going through the training as a team. I remember my college football coach telling us, “You don’t fight for records or awards, you fight for the guy who is next to you in the trenches.” When teams train together, they build a rapport that lasts.

Just wanted to let you know about one of my absolute favorite websites called www.selfgrowth.com. It has one of the most comprehensive libraries of motivational and self-help articles, videos, websites, and more, and it is a great place to spend a few minutes early in the morning before the work day. If you are a fan of the site, let me know by hitting the LIKE button above.

A survey by Accountemps indicates Managers spend an average of 18 percent of their time intervening in employee disputes. That is more than seven hours a week or nine weeks per year.   Past Accountemps studies from as far back as 1991 show very similar results.

These survey results show what it is important to be a Strong Boss.  Employees’ personal problems are messy and like a tidal wave of emotion can eat up a lot of time.  The touchy, feely folks at Accountemps offer five tips for minimizing personality conflicts.  I have added my own suggestions.

1.     Know when to step in. You don’t want to interject every time a minor issue arises, but you can’t afford to turn a blind eye to problems that jeopardize the group’s output… Steele says, “Punish all parties involved in the disruption.  This will keep employees from bothering you with their petty problems.”

2.     Don’t let one bad apple spoil the bunch. When friction is clearly stemming from the actions of a single individual, remind that person that the ability to collaborate and treat coworkers with respect is a requirement of the job.  Steele says, “Collaborate?!?  No, Elaborate your dissatisfaction with the employee twice and then fire the troublemaker.”

3.     Help employees get to know each other. Provide opportunities for your staff to interact in non-work activities, such as lunches or volunteer activities; familiarity can breed greater understanding.  Steele says, Oh please!  Strong Bosses don’t get involved in familiarity.  Remember familiarity breed’s contempt.  Keep your distance from employees and don’t waste time on socializing.

4.     Reward positive role models. Dole out praise, promotions and choice assignments to individuals who contribute to a supportive work environment. Recognizing staff for being team players sends a clear message that how they interact with others is as important as their job performance.  Steele says, “You can tell eggheads from Human Resources are involved with this suggestion.  Nothing is as important as job performance.  To suggest that being a team player is the same as being the top producer is just silly!

5. Make good hiring choices from the start. Hiring individuals with excellent interpersonal skills who are a good fit with your organization’s culture will reduce the potential for future conflicts.   Steele says, “It is a big mistake to look for interpersonal skills in hiring.  People like that talk too much and want to be happy.  I think you look for the best talent with the least interpersonal skills.  This way the new employee keeps their mouth shut, head down and focuses on the work in front of them.

Steele Steadiman is a Bosses’ Boss.  After a successful career in the business world, he is committed to showing weak leaders the path to control.  Steele is the author of “Squish Creativity Like a Bug.” He lectures and travels the world helping bring managers and leaders to his level.

Leadership, And Management Skills Are Not Coded Into Our DNA.  Do You Really Know How To Motivate Your Team?

Leadership and management skills are not coded into our DNA.  But you hear people say, “He or she is a born leader.”  Well….not really.  They may know less about their own team and what motivates it than they imagined.  Just ask managers what motivates workers and they will pop off a list that is topped by “recognition of good work.”  Sure that makes sense.  We all love praise.  But have you talked to your team about what truly motivates them?  Their answers may be very surprising, and certainly enlightening.

A research team at Harvard put diaries in the hands of employees.  What came back was a picture of the psychology of the employee and what motivates them.

§  Making progress at work

§  Figuring something out

§  Completion of difficult tasks

Think back to the last time your boss said, “Good work.”  What does that mean?  Did it feel good?  Or did it feel like a cursory observation?

A strength-centered compliment has a lot more motivational power.  “Ah, you figured it out!  Your intelligence and determination, is obvious by the way you made the details talk to get the answer.”  Now it feels like all of your hard work resulted in a higher level of appreciation, and more importantly, you know you accomplished something, figured it out.

A young Albert Einstein was always trying to figure things out.  Throwing a spit wad at another boy in front of the class produced a scientific “Aha…moment” for him.  He realized that gravity had a role in the speed of the spitball.  His teacher did not care what he learned or achieved, and rewarded him with expulsion.  A small acknowledgement of his discovery may have been worth a little behavior modification.

The Harvard study, part of the Breakthrough Ideas for 2010, offers fitting advice when an employee makes progress, a discovery, or solves a challenge.

“Negative events generally have a greater effect on people’s emotions, perceptions, and motivation than positive ones, and nothing is more demotivating than a setback—the most prominent type of event on knowledge workers’ worst days.”

Good management and skills must be fostered, practiced, practiced more, and used frequently.  If you want to work more effectively with your team, listen to them. There is nothing in DNA coding that makes any of us a natural leader, who motivates and leads well.  Your team has the answers to motivation.  So listen.

Around 200 independent insurance adjusters for E. A. Renfroe gathered in Savannah, Georgia for their annual meetings. One of the main concerns of the meeting was the topic of diversity and inclusion. The meeting kicked off with a key note address on the subject. The main concern of the keynote was not just defining the topic, but practical ways that diversity and inclusion can be integrated into the daily routines of the individuals. The acronym “RESPECT” was used to give pragmatic ideas on being inclusive in the diverse culture we live in. As adjusters go about their work they encounter various situations and a broad variety of individuals. To meet each person and situation with an attitude of respect is of the utmost importance. Respect begins with the “realization” that each person is in charge of themselves. So As I approach a door, or situation, I am in control of myself. That means I have choices to make on how I will act in any given situation.

The first choice I have to make is to act with “empathy” toward the person, or persons, I encounter. That means doing the best I can to relate and understand their particular situation. To act with empathy I must also be “self aware”. To be self aware means recognizing that my personal history, experience, previous choices, heredity, environment, etc., plays into how I relate to the situations. I must understand the personal filters that everything I do and see goes through. Those filters determine how I interpret understand and react in any given situation. So I need to be self aware of those filters and not let them lead me in an incorrect direction. Self Awareness then leads me to be patient; patient first with myself and then with the situation. I see things through my personal filters, so I must be patient with myself to understand and correct those filters. Then I must be patient with the situation so that I can respond correctly, not just react according to inclinations. This guides us to the second “e’ which is engagement. This means being fully engaged with the person in the moment. How can a person do this effectively? By developing good communication and listening skills. This is as easy as making sure you understand the other person, then making sure they understand you. It also means paying attention to what is said and expressed by the others before formulating a well thought out response.

The “c” stands for “cultural sensitivity”. Other people have different filters, so be aware and sensitive to what they might be. Try to understand how they have been influenced and recognize there filters may be very different than your own. Not that one is right and the other wrong, just that different people have different filters. Seek to see the situation from their perspective, through their filters. And then “think positively”. When entering a situation with respect in place you can move toward a situation where a positive outcome can come to pass. In fact, plan on it by being positive from the very approach. Don’t wait until the door opens to be positive, be positive when preparing. See very situation and circumstance as an opportunity to be the best person you can be; be the best influence you can be and make the best positive difference that can be made.

E.A. Renfroe choice of making diversity and inclusion a topic of importance of their meetings was a good and timely choice. Their adjusters can embrace to world they face with dignity and respect.

By Doug Staneart

Many small businesses pay thousands of dollars for pay-per-click ads for lead generation, and then, when the leads come in, blow it by waiting too long to follow up with them. When people look for information, products, or solutions on the internet, they want instant gratification. If they have to wait for you to send back an email or wait for a phone call from you, you’ve probably already lost them. If they have to wait for you to send them something in the postal mail, you never had a shot anyway.

The first time that I realized just how critical this was, I had been in business for a few years, and my company was a preferred vendor for a training website. Every day, people would visit this website, and because it was so comprehensive, it was very difficult to navigate. As a result, a lot of people would just fill out the form on the website requesting whatever type of training that they were looking for. As soon as someone filled out the form, it automatically got posted onto the secure side, so if you were one of these preferred businesses, you could login at any time and see what had been posted.

To help us all out, though, the owner of the website would send out a summary at the end of the day, so every evening about 8:00 PM or so, we’d all get an email with a list of all of the leads that came in that day.

I responded to hundreds of these leads without any success whatsoever. Then, one evening, there was a lead for a public speaking class in Dallas. (I owned a company that taught public speaking classes in 50 cities around the world, but we were based in Dallas.) I thought, “Oh, I got this one.” And I responded to it. The next morning, I called the person and introduced myself, and she was the most cold and distant prospect I think I have ever talked to. She just said, “We’ve already chosen someone else,” and hung up. I was totally confused.

So I thought about what I should do to try and close some of these leads, and I figured that I really needed to know what everyone else was doing. So I went onto the site and created a posting of my own. It was about 10:30 AM, and I put into the posting that I would only accept email proposals.

By 11:00 AM, I had already received three proposals. The first was just a generic email with a HUGE attachment that took quite a while to download. It was about 20 MB of brochures in eight separate attachments that I never really went through. The second was just a simple email saying, “If you still need help, call me.” (Okay it was a little more involved than that, but not much.) The third, though, was a beautiful, professional looking proposal. After glancing at it, I had pretty much decided that if I had really been buying a public speaking class, I would have hired that company.

By 3:00 PM, I had about 25 proposals.

By 6:30 PM, I had received almost 50 proposals.

By 8:00 PM, the time that I was typically receiving the summary email from the website, I had received over 72 proposals.

The next morning when I woke up, I had received 143 proposals. After the first 20 or so, I didn’t look at any of them – not even out of curiosity.

When new proposals kept coming in the morning (less than 24 hours since I posted the listing,) they just ticked me off. I was thinking, “What a loser! You’re number 150 on the list.” But remember, that less than 24 hours prior, I was consistently number 73 or 74 on the list every single night.

I met with my team that day to share what I found out. We made a commitment to be the first to respond to every request. We only had six people working for the company, but we decided to assign one person every day just to wait for the phone to ring, one person just to wait for individual email leads to come in, and another just to wait for corporate contract requests to come in.

Our goal was to call any email inquiry back in less than five minutes. The most common comment that we started getting when we made those phone calls was, “Wow! I just hit send. You guys are really fast.”

That year we went from a small half-million dollar company to almost one and a half million dollars. The next year we doubled sales again. The only thing that really changed was the speed at which we were following up with potential clients.

Typical Web Surfer

Typical web surfers will usually do something like this. They have a question and quickly do a Google search. They will scan the first page that pops up looking for a listing summary that most closely relates to what they are looking for. If they find one, they will click the link to see if an answer can be found.

Not finding the answer right away, they might fill out a web form requesting additional information.

Then they will go back to Google and look at the next listing. This one has an FAQ page, and they read a few of them and feel comfortable enough to fill out another form to get a second opinion.

Then they will go back to Google and look one more time. This time, the website has a blog with dozens of helpful articles and a few videos that look really nice. They now pick up the phone and end up getting a voicemail.

They might look at a few more listings, but most will not likely to fill out any more forms. No one wants to be bombarded with spam from a lot of websites, so they will probably be cautious about filling out more forms. They will probably only call additional listings from here on out and only if the website is very compelling.

So here is the big question…

Who is most likely to get the business?

If the owner of the third website had answered the phone instead of having the call go over to voicemail, then that person would have had a tremendous advantage over the other two companies. In fact, if the person replies to the voicemail right away, that owner still has an advantage.

In reality, the person who makes contact with the prospect first and builds rapport with the prospect is always in the driver’s seat.

However, if you respond to the email the next day, the person will answer the phone saying, “Huh? Who are you again?” The person typically forgets entirely that he/she requested the information in the first place.

If the person gets a brochure in the mail a week after sending the email, well… you get the picture.

Speed is your friend in online sales. If you can’t personally follow up on the requests, then hire someone. If you can’t hire someone, then at least invest in a good email follow up system.

Don’t make your good prospects wait for you.

Move quickly. Move nimbly. And make a ton of people happy and a ton of money in the process!

Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s Institute Entrepreneur Boot Camp author of the book Cultivating Customers, Small Business Lead Generation in a Digital Age. His small business seminars help entrepreneurs generate new customers and build small business infrastructure. Visit the Entrepreneur Boot Camp website for details about his programs.

By Doug Staneart

Closing the sale can be one of the trickiest parts of the selling process if you make a few mistakes. You’ve worked really hard to get tons of new people looking at your website and all of those great leads start flowing in. Now the most important part takes place. You have to turn those leads into sales. Unfortunately, this is the part at which most entrepreneurs fail miserably. Most small business owners have an expertise in their own industry, but they often don’t have a lot of first-hand experience in how to close the sale – especially when they are first starting out.

Below are some of the most common mistakes that entrepreneurs make in the follow up process that keep them from closing the sale. Avoid them, and you will increase your closing ratio dramatically and turn more leads into sales.

Mistake #1: Thinking that All of Your Leads are Ready to Buy Right Now

Remember that just because people who search you out have a challenge or a problem, doesn’t mean that they will be ready to buy right now. However, if you keep in touch with them, avoid pressuring them to buy, and continue to educate them, they will often come to you when they are ready to buy.

You or your sales team will want to provide information for potential clients that help them solve their problems, build a relationship with these potential clients, and follow up until they are able to make a buying decision. It is a process, and in every step of the process, the trust level between you and your potential client should grow.

Granted, though, if you are getting thousands of leads every month, it will be impossible to follow up in detail with every single lead forever. You will also need some type of automated follow up system so that no one falls through the cracks.

An email follow up system can save you a lot of time.

Mistake #2: Giving Up on Leads

Most professional salespeople give up on prospects before they turn into business. Most entrepreneurs have an even lower closing ratio, but if you change the way that you follow up with your potential clients, you can turn things around very quickly.

When an initial lead comes in, for instance, someone comes onto a website and requests information via a form on the website, most small business people will do one of these things.

Most entrepreneurs will likely email the prospect with tons of sales literature and follow up via email a dozen times or so, and then quit trying with a “that’s not a real prospect after all” mentality.

Others might make a phone call and leave a voicemail and just wait for the person to call back.

Others will call and leave a voicemail and wait. Then call back and leave another voicemail. Then call back and leave another voicemail. And when the client doesn’t call back, they quit trying with a “that’s not a real prospect after all” mentality.

A very few will send out an expensive sales kit to the client via FedEx and wait a week or two to call them again hoping that the sales kit closes the deal.

By the way, any of those techniques will work every once in a while, but none of them will close a high percentage of deals for you.

A better process is to create different tiers of potential leads.

The first tier might be what I call email address leads. These are people who got free information from you and gave you their email address in return. If all you have is their email address, then you only have one way to follow up with them. So create an email follow up system in your CRM that combines education (information that they need) with offers to buy stuff from you. You might want to start with something small and build on it. If you are using a CRM system with an automatic email follow up, your follow up is turn-key.

The second tier might be website form leads. This is where someone comes onto your website and fills out a form requesting information or a call back from you. These are much higher quality leads, so they deserve a phone call. They are more likely to close more quickly, so be persistent in getting them on the phone. Don’t just leave a voicemail and wait. Based on your conversation with them, you can determine whether you want to create more follow up calls with the person or just divert them over to your email follow up system.

Your highest tier might be call-in leads. Typically, when people call you, they want immediate results, so they will close much more quickly. Spend more time with these folks and follow up with them one-on-one for a longer period of time. Don’t quit on these leads.

Whatever system you decide to use, DON’T QUIT! They requested information from you for a reason. You can help them.

Mistake #3: Giving a Sales Pitch

Don’t deliver prospects a standardized sales pitch. Instead, find out why they requested information from you. Once they tell you their problem, oddly enough, they will assume that you can solve the problem.

Here are a few phrases that will be gold for you.

* Do you mind if I ask you a few questions so that I have a better idea of what we should be talking about?
* So why are you interested in (fill in the blank with whatever product or service you sell)?
* Has something happened recently that has moved this up on your priority list?

Those should help you get started on the right foot with your new prospect. The more that they talk, the more they will want to buy from you. Fight the urge to jump in when you see an opportunity to sell to them.

Example:

Business Owner: “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions so that I have a better idea of what we should be talking about?”

Prospect: “I guess so…”

Business Owner: “So why are you interested in getting some advertising specialties made for your company?”

Prospect: “Well, the company that we bought pens from last time increased their charge and then messed up our website on the pens. We had to send them back, and we didn’t have any for our big tradeshow.”

Business Owner: “Well let me tell why that won’t be a problem with our company…”

Arrggghh… That is a BIG mistake. Your prospect is now venting to you about how bad your competitor is. Don’t cut her off. Encourage her to tell you more instead. Try something like…

Business Owner: “Gosh, that sounds terrible. What do you think that cost you?”

After she vents a little more, ask another question like, “Is there anything else about your current vendor that you’d like to improve?” etc. etc.

Continue asking questions until you feel like you have a few challenges that she has experienced that you think that you can fix for her.

So if you really want to close the sale and not push those leads away, realize that many of the people who contact you are not necessarily buyers now, but will become buyers in the future if you build a relationship with them. Keep following up with your leads and get an email follow-up program to help you turn those leads into sales. And finally, don’t come rushing in with a sales pitch. Instead ask questions of your prospect that gets the person to tell you what the real problem is, then offer a solution. Do these three things and you’ll close the sale more often.

Small Businesses are always looking for new lead generation ideas, but many of the things that entrepreneurs do before they even make their first cold call or before they attend their first business card exchange practicaly ensure that they actually fail in the Lead Generation department.  Folks say that “Experience is the best teacher,” but that is really only about half right. In fact, “Someone ELSE’S experience is the best teacher,” because they have already made those mistakes. Learn from their mistakes, and you get to a higher level of success in a much faster time frame.

Below are The Top Ten Small Business Lead Generation Mistakes that Entrepreneurs Make (and How to Avoid Them).

Mistake #1: Hiding Your Company from the World. The internet is the great equalizer for small businesses, but you have to make it easy for people who are looking for your products or services to find you on the internet. Search engine optimization (making it easier for people to find your website through search engines like Google) should be your top priority as a small business owner.

Mistake #2: “I’m a Really Small Company” Website. Just like when a person hands you a business card with the rough edges from separating it at the perforation after it was printed at home, a cheap looking or homemade looking websites is a neon sign saying, “I’M A SMALL BUSINESS… Don’t trust me.”

Mistake #3: Creating a Confusing Perception in the Marketplace. This mistake made early in a business’ history can follow you for years. When we first start out, we’re trying to find any way that we can to generate revenue, so when times are tough in one product or service line, we dabble in others to make ends meet. People who see you promoting dissimilar product lines will wonder what exactly it is that you do.

Mistake #4: I Can Do It on My Own Mentality. We become entrepreneurs because we are experts in a specific industry, and we know that we can do it better than our competitors. However, we are never going to be experts in EVERYTHING, so it’s important to surround yourself with other experts in different industries. You can either contract work out through subcontracting or joint ventures, or you can create alliances with other companies who support you but don’t compete with you.

Mistake #5: Offering Something that the Market Doesn’t Want. You might have a great product or service that people actually want to buy, but if you are promoting that product or service to a marketplace that doesn’t want it, you’ll go broke. If you are networking with other entrepreneurs and your services are for prime contractors, you’ll just become very frustrated. Go find where people in your market gather, and promote your company there instead.

Mistake #6: Salesperson Fangs. This mistake is the absolute most annoying and will drive customers away in droves. It occurs when someone out of genuine interest or in some cases, just kindness asks a question about what the person does for a living, and in response, the person spends the next fifteen minutes talking about himself and how the listener really needs his product or service. Successful people tend to be pretty good listeners.

Mistake #7: Casting Your Pearls before Swine. Just so you know, I’m not calling your prospects swine. I’m just saying that most small business people spend way too much time with people who they think are prospects but who have absolutely no chance of ever buying something from them. In order to be a good prospect for you, the person needs to have the resources to buy from you and the authority to buy from you. Don’t spend a lot of time and effort building a reputation amongst people who aren’t in and will never be in your market. Find where your market gathers and build your reputation there.

Mistake #8: Giving a Pitch Instead of Solving a Problem. Most people walk into a meeting with a prospect or start a call with a prospect with a pitch in mind. So, before the prospect even indentifies a problem or a need that she has, the pitch starts and we verbally jumps all over the person with features and benefits about how great our product is. Remember that a successful entrepreneur is a one who solves problems for clients and customers, so spend less time talking about yourself and ask more questions about the prospect.

Mistake #9: No Follow Up (Web Visitors and Leads). This used to be a big problem with face-to-face meetings where an entrepreneur collects a business card from a prospect and then just doesn’t do anything with it, but in the digital age, website visitor follow ups are way more valuable and rarely capitalized on effectively. For instance, if you look at most website statistics, you’ll see a number of “page views” which is just the number of pages on your website that people have looked at in a given month. This number is almost always a BIG number, but then if you compare it with the number of people who actually request information from or buy from you, the latter is microscopic in comparison. More often than not, the big difference in numbers comes because we don’t make it easy for people to request information from or contact us.

Mistake #10: Slow Follow-Up. In face-to-face meetings, if you don’t follow up within 24 hours, your prospect will likely forget about most of your meeting because people are extremely busy. Website visitors are not as forgiving. If you don’t respond to them within a few minutes, they will forget about you. When we surf the internet looking for solutions to our problems, we want instant gratification. If we don’t get it, we just move on to the next site. Follow up quickly with your prospects, and you’ll increases sales dramatically.

If you solve just some of these challenges that many small businesses face, you’ll increase your income potential and your growth rate very quickly. This book was created to offer tangible, step-by-step processes and ideas to conquer these and other obstacles that you’ll likely face as you build your small business.

Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s Institute® and the creator of the Entrepreneur Boot Camp that helps small business owners grow their companies by sharing little-known secrets of successful entrepreneurs with new business owners. This article is one in a series of helpful small business lead generation tips, and you can read all of them for free on his Entrepreneur Boot Camp blog at http://www.leadersinstitutebootcamp.com/.

By Doug Staneart, The Entrepreneur Boot Camp

Small business lead generation using pay-per-click ads can be very challenging. In fact, paying for leads can either make you really rich or drive you out of business. Google makes a ton of money every year from pay-per-click ads. Most of the money that they make from these ads did not generate a single bit of additional revenue to the companies or entrepreneurs who purchased them. However, there are a few people out in the business world who pay a little bit of money to Google and generate millions of dollars in return. They don’t generate this type of income by accident. These entrepreneurs just have a better strategy than the ones who end up losing money on pay-per-click ads.

How to Lose Money in Pay-Per-Click Ads

The Uninformed Entrepreneur says, “I am not making money from my website because no one is coming to my website, so I will invest in pay-per-click ads and that will make me money.” No, that will cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars every week with very little, if any, return on your investment. Effective advertising leverages or magnifies the return that you are already getting from your current sales channels. If your website is not generating leads or business for you before you invest in advertising, then you will be magnifying a zero return. 300% of zero is still zero.

Most people use pay-per-click ads as the starting point, and when they do, they will almost always lose money. They are betting their business capital on an untested experiment. It would be like buying a thoroughbred and running down to the racetrack and betting a bunch of money on your horse’s first race. Yes, you would know your horse, but your horse is untested against other horses. However, if your horse wins his first three races, you might want to invest a little in his fourth one.

Your website is the same way. Develop your website to where you are generating leads and sales from those leads. Then, one you have a track record of success, invest in pay-per-click ads. Then you are betting on a sure thing.

How to Generate Lots of Revenue from Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Test. Then test some more. Then, once you have tested, test everything again.

The Informed Entrepreneur says, “I have finally got my business generating new leads from the internet, and now I want to leverage the success that I am currently getting.” Now you can make an informed budget for your pay-per-click advertising.

Here is a highly simplified example. If you are generating 10 leads per week from your website, and you are averaging closing one of those leads for $100 in revenue and $25 in profit, then you could only afford to pay $2.50 per lead to break even. Remember that just because someone clicks your pay-per-click link, does not mean that they will contact you and become a lead. If you have a fantastic website, you might be able to turn one out of every ten clicks into leads, so you could pay no more than $.25 per click to just break even. So pay-per-click won’t yet work for you yet. You would need to increase the revenue per customer, or the profit margin, or the closing ratio (or all three) to make pay-per-click more cost effective for you.

If you invest in an email follow up system and generate the same 10 leads per week, this time you might turn three of those leads into customers. Since you are now able to build a longer term relationship with your leads, you might be able to bundle a few of your products together and generate a higher revenue per sale and increase your average sale to $300. By doing all of this, your cost per lead goes down dramatically. Now for every sale you are generating $100 in profit. With three sales out of ten leads, you generate a total of $300 in profit. You can now afford to pay $30 per lead, so with the same ten clicks turning into one lead, you could afford to pay up to $3 for each click. If you can get quality clicks for just $1 each, you will triple your pay-per-click investment.

So forget the cold calls and spam, use your website to get more leads to call you, and then use pay-per-click to leverage your success, and you will generate great success through small business lead generation.

Writing Pay-Per-Click Ads that Lead to Sales

Once you have a great site and follow up system set up, now you can in some ads. Remember that the goal is NOT to get people to click your ad. The goal is to get people who will buy something from you to click your ad. For instance, if I put “One out of every 100 who click this link will get $1000,” I’d get a LOT of clicks. However, none of them would buy anything from me, so I’d just lose a lot of money. Or, if I am a local dentist in Frisco, Texas, and I place an ad that says, “Free Teeth Whitening Tips,” I’ll also get a lot of clicks, but very few sales. Most of the people who click will just want the free tips, and very few of them will be in my local neighborhood. A better ad would say something like, “Frisco, TX Dentist – Free teeth cleaning with your first whitening treatment.” If you don’t want to go to a dentist in Frisco, TX, you are less likely to click that link. People who do click the link are probably pretty good prospects for you.

You will always have numb-skulls who click your links even though they don’t need or want anything that you are promoting, but you’ll have fewer people click your paid-for links who are looking for something different than what you are offering.

So if you want to generate more leads for your small business using pay-per-click, make your website and follow up system solid first, then use effective ads to target the specific market who will buy your services.

Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s Institute® and the creator of the Entrepreneur Boot Camp that helps small business owners grow their companies by sharing little-known secrets of successful entrepreneurs with new business owners. This article is one in a series of helpful small business tips, and you can read all of them for free on his Entrepreneur Boot Camp blog at http://www.leadersinstitutebootcamp.com/.

By Doug Staneart, The Entrepreneur Boot Camp

Every small business is the proverbial Needle in the Haystack, so small business lead generation is critical to an entrepreneur’s survival and the growth of his/her small business. The thing that most entrepreneurs forget, though, is that it is a lot easier to turn a prospect or lead into a customer if the lead calls you versus when you call them. It cracks me up when I hear titles of articles, seminars, or books about how to “Make Effective Cold Calls” or how to “Warm Up Cold Calls”. In the past decade (through two recessions, mind you,) I’ve built a total of four multi-million dollar businesses from scratch, and none of that revenue was ever generated from any “cold call”. In fact, I’ve had over 405 of the Fortune 500 companies become clients, and they have all called or emailed my companies. They searched my companies out when they had a problem instead of us trying to find people within these companies that were facing the specific problems that we could solve. These are a few of the secrets that we have uncovered to help small businesses generate more leads (and more quality leads).

Cold Calls do not Work at All in a Digital Age

Cold calls, email spam, blast faxes, popup windows, forced “opt-in” subscribers and the like just don’t work in this digital age (I’m not sure any of them ever worked very well for very long). The ones that crack me up the most are the companies that send out blast email spam guaranteeing us that they can get our website to the top of Google in 48 hours. Seriously? Do you think that if they could actually do this that they would be wasting their time spamming millions of people trying to beg someone to buy their service? Last month, there were 165,000 people who went to Google and searched for the term “Google search optimization”. If they could get to the top of Google with just that one term, they would have about two million people potential leads coming to them every year. So why would they need to spam people? If you are so good at what you do, why are you spamming me? Why are you cold calling me? Why are you trying to force me to subscribe to your newsletter? The truth is that cold calling and spamming people shows desperation, not success.

Get Potential Leads to Call You to Turn more Leads into Customers

The internet is the great equalizer for small businesses. Big businesses have websites, but their bureaucracy forces them to move very slowly in implementing new technology and captivating on new opportunities. However, nimble small businesses can capitalize on these opportunities immediately. It is actually very easy to get to the top of a Google search result. It is very difficult, however, to stay there. In fact, it is a fulltime job. But it is a very lucrative fulltime job. Logically, this is why this is your most important goal for your small business. When someone has a question, where do they go for an answer now? In decades past, if you had a challenge or a question, you might ask a friend or coworker or if it was a really big problem, you might go to the library and search for an answer. Today, though, people go immediately to Google. The listings at the top of the first page have a lot more credibility than the ones on the second, third, or four-hundredth.

If your small business is listed at the top of the results when they enter their question, and then they click through to your website and get the answer to that question, your small business is now at the top of their short-list for solution providers. If they call you or email you, you automatically have about a 25% chance or so of turning that lead into a client. In contrast, if your small business is listed at the top of page two on Google, in order to have someone contact you, they will have already looked at listings from at least 10 other competitors. Most potential customers will not be that thorough, so you will generate fewer leads, and now, since you are competing with at least ten other competitors, your percentage of closing drops to below 10%.

Get Leads to Call You by Giving Away Something that They Need or Want

What is common knowledge to you is uncommon to most people. Remember that your expertise and knowledge is extremely valuable to people who are searching on Google for answers as in the previous example. So if you can help them answer the question – and really help them in the process – they are more likely to share with you their contact information. Once they do, you now know two things about them. First, you know that they have (or had) a specific problem that you can help them solve. Second, you know that they already know who you are and trust has started to develop from them that you are an expert in your industry.

What you give away doesn’t have to be costly, but it must be valuable. Costly means that it doesn’t have to cost you anything to give it away. For instance, if you have a lot of informational content on your blog, then you might ask people to register in order to conduct a search of your blog for specific topics. Or, you might give away a special report or access to a video or audio file with information that a prospect might need. For example, if you are a dentist, you might offer a video about how to teach a three-year-old to brush properly. Anyone who requests the free information will likely have a young child and be concerned about the child’s oral health. Whatever the gift, just make sure that your costs are low and the value of the item is high from the customer’s perspective.

So forget the cold calls and spam, use your website to get more leads to call you, and then use a high-valued free gift to encourage prospects to contact you, and you will generate great success through small business lead generation.

Doug Staneart is the founder of The Leader’s Institute® and the creator of the Entrepreneur Boot Camp that helps small business owners grow their companies by sharing little-known secrets of successful entrepreneurs with new business owners. This article is one in a series of helpful small business tips, and you can read all of them for free on his Entrepreneur Boot Camp blog at http://www.bootcampgifts.com.

“It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others.” — Alfred Adler

By Rick Highsmith (Steele Steadiman)

Change is dangerous. I devote an entire section of my book, “Squish Creativity Like a Bug,” to revealing the danger. But I failed to heed my own advice. You see for the last couple of years my adult son, Rocky, had wanted to take the Florida Motorcycle Safety Course. This is required by law to rent and/or ride a motorcycle. His Wife and Mother objected. In college I had owned and ridden a Honda 350. So this past Christmas I gave Rocky a gift certificate for the course. We took it together. It rained all day the last two days of our training. This was obviously a clear sign that we shouldn’t proceed. But I had completely forgotten about the wise words from my book.

We both passed the course and planned a trip along Crystal River on the west coast. The first date, April 26th, was washed out by another rainy day. Hello… what does it take to get my attention? Monday, May 3rd came and the sun was shining. Rocky and I roared of the driveway with anticipation and excitement. We were doing something different… a change from the routine! I wasn’t thinking like a Boss. I let silly ideas like adventure, relationships and exciting change cloud my thinking. Look at the smile on my face in this picture. What an idiot I was!

I used a vacation day, leaving a weak middle manager in charge. This way I was assured that no major decisions would be made in my absence. Now you might think I was considering all angles, as a strong Boss should. If you have come to that conclusion, you are missing the point. Look at the picture on the right. That’s me on a gurney in the emergency room with a totally wrecked right shoulder. The road we traveled was full of unknown curves. The final one was so tight I left the road and went down in someone’s front yard. The surgery left me with a steel plate and eight screws holding my shoulder together. I was unable to return to work until September 7th. For you non-bosses who lack math skills that is four months of painful physical therapy. Four months of sitting at home – away from the office. Four very long months of doing what I was told, taking my medicine, painful exercise, and not being the Boss.

During my extended absence the numnut I left in charge reorganized my department. He gave other middle managers authority to change procedures. He began holding “feedback” sessions with the employees. He even put in a suggestion box! Worse that putting up the stupid box, he actually read the suggestions!! And horror of horrors made changes based on employee input!!! Suddenly the employees began to feel listened to. They started to believe their opinions mattered. Creativity, initiative and innovation grew like poisonous weeds.

Upon my return, it took the entire month of September to get things back under control. Fortunately, when I resumed command and began undoing all the harm numnut had caused, he quit. Actually several employees left with him… good riddance! The remaining peons understood the folly that was engaged in during my absence. They quickly returned to focusing solely on the tasks in front of them. Initiative and creativity immediately decreased to acceptable levels.

The lesson I learned from this is where I started: “Tried and true is right for you.” The business world is full of dangerous, unknown curves. Veering off course has dire consequences. Don’t let family relationships or the false hope of excitement lure you off the path of a true Boss.

Rick Highsmith is a Florida Keynote Speaker and trainer who has audiences roaring in laughter as his alter-ego, Steele Steadiman, a boss’ boss. In addition to great articles and tips, Rick teaches great workshops listed on his website at http://www.leadersinstitute.com.

I found this funny post by Penelope Trunk. I had not heard of her before finding this, but she is one of my new heros. You’ll laugh out loud while taking her “non-scientific” quiz.

http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2008/04/29/will-you-get-promoted-take-the-test/

If you’ve ever wondered why you got passed up for that last promotion or wondered if you are in line for the next one, her article might help you uncover a blindspot.

Doug Staneart
CEO of The Leader’s Institute
http://www.leadersinstitute.com

Leadership Skills: You can be a Great Leader.  Until less than 250 years ago, if you wanted to be a great leader, you had to be born into the right class or family.  Today, though, anyone can be a great leader.  People who develop the appropriate leadership skills such as being able to think and speak with poise and self-confidence and being able motivate and inspire people, can become the go-to leader in your industry.  Here is a self-help video from Doug Staneart, CEO of The Leader’s Institute, is on location at The Forum in Rome, Italy talking about how when Ceasar Augustus walked the streets below, in order to be a great leader, you had to be born into the “ruling class”, but today, communication skills and self-confidence can help anyone be seen by others as a great leader.