When we "grow up" in the business world, we are taught the importance of hitting goals within a timeline:

Close the sale this week!

Call 25 new prospects!

Get a yes today!

And yet this is a very masculine approach to business. I'm not talking gender here, but rather energy. Masculine energy in the workplace looks like:

• Go-go-go
• Work 60+ hours, regardless of need
• Push to close the deal
• Be aggressive

But as we see more of a spiritual approach to business, we are also seeing the feminine aspect come in, which often involves:
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• Waiting to respond
• Allowing
• Listening to intuition
• Using compassion

It's when we allow this feminine aspect in that we invite flow in.

What is flow in business?

When you try to force something, how often do you actually achieve what you wanted? Maybe you're trying to close a deal. The potential client hasn't given you an answer. So you call her.

And email her.

And tweet her.

As a result, she never responds and you lose the sale. What might have happened if you just allowed things to take their natural course? Maybe she didn't respond because she was ill. Maybe she just takes longer to make a decision. In that case, you forcing the issue will not convince her to buy your product.

Sales experts try to convince us that if you let a lead get cold, you'll never make the sale. That's a masculine point of view. Certainly, follow up. But then back off. Realize that you likely aren't the center of this potential customer's world, and by bugging them too much, you may lose the opportunity.

Yes, it takes a shift to move from that assertive/aggressive approach to sales we've all been taught to simply sitting back and waiting, but in my mind, the latter is a better way to succeed in business.

When things don't go according to plan

If you have a business plan, I invite you to take it out and look at it. Depending on the last time you updated it, the goals you have in your plan may no longer align with where your business is.

And that's okay.

Businesses are living, breathing entities. They are meant to change and adapt to their surroundings (how many of us had to adapt because of the pandemic? Show of hands?). A business plan should be only a loose guide for where you want to take your business in the immediate future. It should be updated to reflect where you currently are. You might need to change your target audience, the products you offer, your price point, or your marketing plan.

I've learned the hard way not to expect things to go according to plan. Clients abruptly end contracts. Project scopes shift and creep. Clients pay late. Rather than get bent out of shape that things aren't going the way you expected them to, just let go of expectations and go with the flow in business.

To go with the flow, see the big picture

When I used to lose a client, my mind would immediately go into panic mode, thinking about the loss of income. That no longer happens because time and again, I have seen that gap in income replaced by an even bigger client.

It's often hard to see beyond the moment you're in, especially if you have no idea how the problem will be rectified. Just remember: this is temporary, and there's a reason for everything. You may have had a client leave to make room for an even bigger and better one a few months down the road.

Just try to be present and know that good things are coming.

An exercise for allowing the flow

If you're Type A, the idea of going with the flow in business probably is stressing you out. You have trouble letting go of expectations. Let me ask you: what good does having those expectations do if they always fall short?

Humor me by trying out this meditation and visualization.

Get comfortable and close your eyes. Take three deep breaths.

Envision a stream, with water flowing in one direction. Simply observe the water for a while.

Now imagine the issue that is bothering you. If it's a demanding client, see that person. If it's a stack of unpaid bills, see the bills. Whatever the thing is, see it flowing down the stream away from you.

Let it drift away.

You might even snicker a little to see your demanding client flailing as he flows down the stream. Humor is healing.

Now see something positive replacing that first stressful thing you sent away. See clients you love working with. See piles of money. This you can envision flowing toward you from upstream. See yourself standing in the water, accepting this gift. Feel gratitude for the gift.

Take three more breaths. Open your eyes.

You can do this visualization any time you feel blocked or stressed by a situation. You might even write down what you see so you can look back to see how you overcame those obstacles later.



Source: https://www.allbusiness.com

There is a right way and a wrong way to solve a sales problem. Do it the right way, and you keep your customer; do it the wrong way, and you may not only lose a customer, but you might lose other business as well.

Here is the best way to solve a sales problem and keep your customers.

First, the wrong way to solve a sales problem

If you're hoping that prospects or customers won't notice when there's a problem, or that you can ignore a problem, think again. The truth is that problems usually don't just go away. There’s a big difference between waiting for something good to come out of a situation and ignoring something bad that needs to be corrected.

Also, responding slowly and without a sense of urgency to solve a serious problem can be just as bad as ignoring it. It's likely that customers will get angry when they realize you could have acted and solved their problem sooner.

The right way to solve a sales problem

Connect with your customer in the best way possible

To solve a sales problem, you will want to contact your customer directly. The best ways to connect are by phone or face-to-face; the worst way is by email. Email presents many barriers to effective communication. Your email message could be misconstrued so that you come off as lacking empathy or cause a misunderstanding that leaves people thinking a problem is worse than it is. Meeting with your customer in person is one of your most effective options; however, a face-to-face meeting is not always realistic. Your next best option is to get on the phone.

Over the phone, customers can hear your voice and tone, and you can use your listening skills to figure out how they are feeling or thinking. Louder volume or an increased speaking pace might be a sign of anger. A pause before answering could mean they are processing your message or not understanding what you’re saying. Make sure the person understands what you are saying; misunderstandings only make a sales problem more complex.

Apologize and acknowledge the problem

Offer an apology for mistakes, and in your apology state what you know to be the problem and include how it happened.

Here’s an example: You sent a proposal with a quote to a prospect and you realize the quote is wrong. In your apology, explain to your prospect that you made a mistake because you failed to include some costs, and be as specific about what the additional costs are. Whatever you do, don’t blame someone else, even if that’s the case. You are responsible for the work you send to prospects and customers. You missed the error in the first place—you are now responsible.

Come up with some options for what you can do to rectify the problem. You might decide to honor the original quote that you offered, but could ask if your prospect is willing to accept it for a shorter period of time. Consider all your options and then present the three (if you have more than three) best ones. Realize that a prospect or customer may still be unhappy with the options you offer and end the relationship—be prepared for the worst. However, I have found that many customers will accept mistakes if there’s a sincere apology and the alternatives are reasonable.

Deal with your sales problems

Malcolm Forbes once said, “If you have a job without aggravation then you don’t have a job.” In sales, you will have aggravation. The key is learning how to deal with sales problems, and keep your job and customers.



Source: https://www.allbusiness.com

During the late summer of 2007, Lin-Manuel Miranda, the award-winning composer, lyricist, and actor, wanted something to read while vacationing in Mexico. He picked up Ron Chernow’s biography Alexander Hamilton. Most people wouldn’t think of a historical biography as a beach read, but Miranda credits his father, political advisor Luis A. Miranda, for his interest in history and politics.

As Miranda was reading Hamilton’s biography, he was already conceiving the Founding Fathers as hip-hop artists.

A polymath, Miranda is an expert in several domains and is able to connect knowledge and ideas from different fields, creatively relating the seemingly unrelated. Polymaths are Renaissance thinkers of sorts, creative thinkers who expand disciplines and, in turn, our thinking about each discipline.

You’re probably thinking, Miranda is in the arts, so of course he’s creative. Well, then think of Reed Hastings (CEO, Netflix), Jo Ann Jenkins (CEO, AARP), Steve Jobs (former CEO, Apple), Dr. Katalin Kariko (messenger RNA biology pioneer), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web), and you’ll see that creative thinking serves us all.

Building creative habits can lead to worthwhile ideas and innovation. Like building any good habit—for instance, a daily commitment to eating more vegetables and moving more and sitting less—building creative habits is a practice.

Here are some creative habits to build that are as revitalizing as consuming kale and broccoli (and for some, perhaps, a lot more enjoyable!)

How to become more creative

1. Practice extreme curiosity

Being curious opens your mind to new knowledge and to questions that might unlock idea-producing insights or gaps.

Curiosity compels you to learn all you can about your discipline and to keep learning about it. After all, to become an expert at something, you must keep learning and practicing. Curiosity also compels people to learn about different subjects. Just think of Miranda picking up the biography of Alexander Hamilton to read while on vacation.

Curiosity is a form of information-seeking to gain understanding and improve cognition—thinking processes by which you accumulate knowledge that can help you recognize, perceive, and conceive ideas.

As Albert Einstein said, “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

2. Be hyper observant

Get into the practice of noticing things seen, heard, and felt.

Think of observational humorists, such as Alonzo Bodden, Michelle Buteau, and Negin Farsad, who actively observe and point out the unnoticed or prosaic daily occurrences with which their audiences are familiar but now see in a new humorous light.

If you’re thinking these humorists also are in creative professions, then think of how observant George de Mestral was about noticing the burs from a plant sticking to his pants, which led to his idea for Velcro.

3. Try seeing through a new lens

We each have our own perspective, our own view of the world shaped by our education, experiences, communities, families, and friend groups. This personal perspective is the lens through which we see the world and ourselves in it. Multiple-perspective thinking allows you to mentally walk in others’ shoes, to look at a situation, an idea, a life lived, or an event from the viewpoints of people who are different from you, who have had different experiences. That shift in perspective adds a fuller dimension to your thinking.

Whether it’s seeing a goal or issue from your teammates’ perspectives or ensuring any team is diverse and inclusive—which should always be the case—seeing through a different lens ensures greater creative outcomes.

4. Change up the channel of communication

When Eric Yuan and his girlfriend were attending different universities in China, they were separated by a 10-hour train ride. That experience gave rise to Yuan’s idea to incorporate video into user-friendly telephone-based conferencing systems. Yuan is the founder of Zoom, the San Jose, California-based communications platform that reported revenue of $4.1 billion at the end of its last fiscal year.

In another example, after seeing Deaf West Theatre’s Spring Awakening cast perform at the Tony Awards, indie artist Ingrid Michaelson teamed up with Deaf West Theatre to perform an American Sign Language (ASL) version of “Hell No” in a music video.

“We were honored that Ingrid was moved enough by our production of Spring Awakening to invite us to collaborate with her,” Deaf West artistic director DJ Kurs told EW.com. “Our mission is to bridge the divide between the hearing and deaf worlds, and our collaboration is a significant step towards this goal. Our company is always exploring the synergy between ASL and music, and we’re thrilled that our work is being seen by a new audience.”

Reclamation through a different lens creates a new experience for an audience. Ingrid Michaelson’s original “Hell No” Official Music Video was constructed with Snapchat filters.

5. Ask, what if...?
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What if? It is a wonderous question that invites you to speculate, to imagine. Any probing question—“If only . . .” and “I wonder . . .”—works to seed ideas, foster a creative mindset, determine goals, and in turn, raise other questions. These types of questions foster imaginative and unconventional avenues of thought. On his website, author Neil Gaiman advises, “You get ideas when you ask yourself simple questions. The most important of the questions is just, What if . . . ?”

While you're having your morning coffee or tea, pose one of the following questions to stimulate your creative thinking:

• What if...? What if you could become invisible at will? What if you had a digital twin who stored all of your memories?
  
• If only... This is not about regrets but about imagining possibilities outside of one's lived experience. If only I could rewind time. If only my car could run on olive oil.
  
• I wonder... I wonder if we could reuse refuse for energy? I wonder how we can store energy in recyclable materials?

Asking what-if questions pushes you to imagine or create, inviting you to speculate beyond your own experience, to wonder what something might be like "if . . ." It provides the freedom to talk about something you want to happen or be true, speculating on a possibility beyond your own experience.

Asking pointedly-inquiring questions stimulates curiosity and one’s imagination, potentially sparking the creative or innovative ideas that all disciplines demand.

Reap the rewards of building creative habits

Like the good habits of healthy eating and regular exercise, the rewards of building creative habits will become readily apparent.

Miranda wanted something to read on vacation; being curious about U.S. history, he chose Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton. And you see how his career turned out.



Source: ​https://www.allbusiness.com/

I've said it before, and I'll never stop saying it, marketing is a collaborative effort between the agency and the client.

When something doesn't go exactly the way we want it to, it's easy to point fingers at external factors. We are not usually inclined to admit that we ourselves may be responsible for the undesirable outcome. Business owners — like myself and the dentists I work with — can have a lot of pride and don't always like to think that they may be the reason opportunities are not turning into customers (or patients in our case), and so they typically only focus on the source (i.e., the leads or opportunities) rather than reflect on their own internal processes.

I know this because I have witnessed it and have done it myself in the past. As a marketing agency, my company's entire purpose is to generate opportunities for the dental practices we serve to capture new business, and to a large extent, we are responsible for the types of opportunities that the practices receive. However, are we to blame when those opportunities don't convert into new patients? Maybe, but also, maybe not.

Collaboration is key

Marketing agencies get blamed often for producing low-quality leads, and the same is true with a highly specialized agency like mine that works only with dental practices. In theory, however, the quality of the leads we produce for a practice mostly depends on how specific the parameters are for those leads, and that is information we get from the practice itself. Naturally, the more precisely we can define the types of leads they want to attract, the higher our chances of being able to target that demographic within the area. That doesn't mean that every single lead generated will be perfect, but many of them will be, or close to it.

I've said it before, and I'll never stop saying it: Marketing is a collaborative effort between the agency and the client. The more you can work together and develop a synergy, the better the outcome will be. Dr. David Pearce, a highly respected New York dentist who has worked with my agency and now works consulting with practices on this very topic, agrees with me. In a recent article, he wrote, "The better the dentist is at understanding the marketing company, and vice versa, the more they can help each other." He knows that to get the leads the practice wants, they need to work with the marketing agency to help them understand the practice's needs.

Now, of course, some businesses might find it difficult to define their ideal customer or lead, and that is perfectly understandable, especially if you've never taken the time to really break it down. But that is also where a marketing agency can be a great asset. Marketing professionals are experts at drilling down to get answers. The more a business owner is willing to participate in that process, the better leads they will receive and the less "weeding out" they will have to do to get bad ones out of the mix.

Put your process to the test

What about when you're getting a good number of leads, but those leads are not turning into customers? Is the marketing agency to blame then? If those leads don't meet the quality parameters that you established with the agency, then the agency bears some responsibility. However, if those leads are consistently good quality, meaning that they check most if not all of the boxes, then you may need to look internally to understand the disconnect.

Let's take an example from my experience marketing to dental practices. Say a dentist has gotten 100 good leads from a marketing agency, but only 15 of those leads converted (i.e., became patients that followed through with treatment). That is decidedly a low number. But is it because the leads are not good enough, or is it because there is some sort of breakdown in the practice's sales process? Again, this is where the marketing agency can be an excellent partner. If the dentist is willing to let the marketing agency scrutinize the sales process from start to finish, it can identify any weaknesses that could be keeping leads from turning into patients.

Dr. Pearce explained this in his article as well, adding, "While the marketing company cannot make the necessary changes, the best marketing companies have internal mechanisms to help each of their clients improve this process." So, while the marketing agency may not be to blame for the low conversion rate, they can still help increase that rate to a more acceptable number, as long as the dentist is willing to work with them.

That said, in my experience, quality leads do not always turn into quality patients right away. You can contact them and get them to book their first appointment, but that is not where the work should end. As Dr. Pearce says, "Quality patients don't just walk into the office saying, 'Doctor, where have you been all my life?' The best dentists have a system that meets each new patient where they are in their journey to saying yes to optimal dentistry. From this starting point, the team will nurture and grow the patient's understanding and value of optimal dental care." The same holds true for any type of business. Luckily, if a business owner is not used to thinking about leads and customers in this way, they have help. The marketing agency can work with them to identify areas of opportunity and convert more leads into long-term, quality customers.

Rely on your partner, but also do your part

If sales and marketing don't come naturally to you or your team, then finding a good agency to partner with will make a big difference. However, for such a partnership to work, you must be open to the possibilities and ready to change how you approach and handle leads. Be sure to ask your marketing partner if they offer sales training or resources to improve your sales approach. Sometimes, they will at least have some materials you can use and distribute to your staff with some tips on how to handle incoming leads.

My company offers resources on how to properly handle new, interested leads to teach the office staff how to properly handle phone calls and form submissions from all digital marketing efforts. You can also ask your marketing company to record phone calls to further give you insight into how your incoming calls are being handled. This is a good way to provide concrete examples of what is going well and where your sales process may need improvement. In short, the more you make yourself and your staff available, the more productive your partnership will be.

It is also imperative that you be honest with your marketing partner. It's not enough to just express your satisfaction or displeasure with the service. If you want to really capitalize on the partnership, give details. Take notes, and tell your marketing agency what exactly you are not pleased with and why. Provide real examples of what you see is not working to your expectations, especially when the relationship is new. When you give detailed feedback, your marketing partner is better able to fine-tune and target campaigns to suit your specific needs, and you will generate more quality leads together.

Once things are humming along and you have found the "sweet spot," be careful not to get complacent. It is easy to fall back into old habits when things are going well, and then your results start to nosedive. To avoid this, request that your marketing partner check in periodically (if they do not do that already) for a status report. These periodic calls will help you and your partner keep your marketing strategies top of mind, plus they are a good time to talk about what is working and what is not. Meeting regularly keeps your marketing partner informed and keeps you and your staff accountable.

So, who is to blame when leads don't work out? The business or the marketing agency? In my experience, it's never entirely anyone's fault, and also playing the blame game just doesn't get you anywhere. Pointing the finger at the marketing agency for not generating quality leads or the business for dropping the ball with its sales process does not resolve anything. Real progress happens when the marketing agency and the business come together as partners to get better results.



Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com