Have you ever found yourself listening to one of those infomercials and being truly captivated by the message even though in your head you might have thought, “This is so hokey.  They’re really embellishing how difficult it is to clean with a regular mop?”  Just as that thought pops into your head, they make several practical points and you find yourself pulling out your credit card to buy it.  Afterward, you’re really excited and can’t wait to receive your new product.  Why did that happen?  They focused on the struggles that you identified with and, more importantly, showed you how their product or systematic approach was the solution to your problems.

Many business owners try to sell their services when they should be focusing on the solution or results the customer will receive by working with them.  After all, we all like solutions that make life easier, right?  Instead of trying to sell your services, focus on your signature system that helps your target market achieve their results.

What is a signature system?  A signature system is a step-by-step model that makes your process easily understood.  You will become known for your system, helping draw in your target market.  When you speak, demonstrate, or write about your signature system:

• Your prospects can more readily understand what you do, making it easier for them to work with you;
• You develop trust because you provide a well thought-out solution to their problems;
• You create a higher perceived value with your system because you can provide a shortcut for them; and
• You increase your brand awareness.

You create massive momentum because you construct a foundation of content that you can then develop into multiple income streams and signature speaking topics.  You become known in your target market circles and clients are drawn to you like crazy because your system just made their life a lot easier.

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Would you like to use Lisa’s High-Content Article above on your own website or Ezine?
Please do so, but add the following attribution:

Lisa Mininni is a Best Selling Author and President of Excellerate Associates – home of The Entrepreneurial Edge System^TM a national program showing small business owners how their clients find them, choose them, and buy from them. 

To receive your FREE eBook, Get Ready, Get Set, Go! 3 Steps to Jump Start Your Start-Up and receive weekly high-content articles on how to grow your business quickly, visit http://www.freebusinessplanformat.com

Hello All!

In case you missed last week’s note, it’s your chance to grow your network and attend a FREE information-rich training session on how to Seal the Deal 98% of the Time.  

The Networking Event of the Year is happening on Friday, March 4 in Canton, Michigan.  This event is on a first-come, first-served basis so it’s important that you register right away to reserve your spot – especially since space is limited for the training session.  Over 10,000 professionals are receiving an invitation so spaces will go fast.

I invited some incredible sponsors for this event including:  Referral Institute, Marketing Monsoon, Local Business Network, and Ion Strategic Partners.  You’ll want to check out how they can help you grow your business, too.

At this event, I’m excited to present Seal the Deal 98% of the Time, showing small business owners:

• How Behavioral Styles Impact Successfully Closing a Sale
• 4 Keys to Unlock Your 98% Conversion Rate
• Approaches to Use When Networking and Converting a Prospect to a Client
• How to Recognize a Person’s Hardwiring Based on Behavioral Cues – What They Say and How They Say It 

Imagine – learning how to close deals masterfully AND authentically.  Remember, you want to register early. 

Enjoy this week’s high-content article below!  Until next time…

  Create a great life,

Lisa Mininni

Now, for this week’s high content blog post:

4 Tips to Keep Your Commitments for Good

Have you ever made a commitment that didn’t stick?  Perhaps you resolved to begin a new exercise regime but stopped it after week one.  You may have even resolved to draw in more clients, but didn’t invest in yourself to learn about the latest marketing or networking techniques.  Maybe you even resolved to consciously live in harmony with your business and personal goals, but slid back into the same old way of doing things.

When you fail to keep commitments, your brain looks for a cause such as, “I don’t have enough time to exercise.”  “I got such a great deal on that cruise but I don’t have any left over to spend on my personal development or my business.”  Failing to meet commitments causes a ripple effect and can damage your reputation and your relationships.

When you start using these excuses, stop yourself.  Apply these tips and techniques to keep your commitments:

1. Write Down Your Commitments.  The biggest failure in meeting commitments is often the “I forgot” or “it slipped my mind.”  We’re all human, it happens.  However, it’s less likely to happen when you write down your commitments.  Writing them down helps you to gauge the resources you need and when you can realistically meet them.  Use technology to help you by adding them to your electronic calendar as an appointment.  When you set an appointment, it tends to get done.

2. Manage Your Time and Energy.  Instead of saying “I don’t have time,” ask yourself, “what do I need to do or to have in order to meet that commitment?”  The solution is often found in simply shifting the way you work:

• Identify Resources to Help You.  As a small business owner, doing everything yourself is not practical or wise.  Tapping into professional assistance, like CPAs or organizers, are often helpful resources to free up valuable time and energy.
• Set Boundaries.  If you have a home-based business and family is calling during your work day, you may have to share with them that a better time to call is after 5 p.m. when the work day is complete.  Before you know it, you created efficiencies and focus in your work day because you eliminated unnecessary interruptions.
• Cluster Your Appointments.  Instead of having calls with your clients sprinkled throughout your week, identify certain days of the week and cluster your client meetings.  Perhaps you designate Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. for your client meetings.  This allows you to focus exclusively on your clients rather than having to continuously switch from topic to topic.
• Systematize.  If you have a business where you need to immediately respond to your customer, determine ways you can automate your processes through automated messages.  Systematizing your internal business operations helps you to serve your customer base more efficiently and create space in your schedule so that you can work on other areas of your business.
• Take Small Steps to Get Big Results.  Many business owners want to take huge leaps but the power is often in a series of small steps.  When business owners set off to include article marketing in their Marketing Mix, they have a tendency to write very long articles.  In a few weeks, they are wondering why they are procrastinating.  Writing smaller articles can be just the answer to making a new article marketing initiative work and meeting your commitment.

3. Tack on Additional Meeting Time.  Most people make the mistake of setting a time for a meeting, but not additional time to complete the list of to-do items from that meeting.  Tack on additional time following the meeting to complete your task list.  The extra time helps you to complete your list, keep your energy up, and efficiently fulfill your commitments.

4. Invest in Yourself.  According to Tim Green, President of Referral Institute of Michigan, “if people truly wanted to be successful they would put 10% of their annual income into developing themselves. But many people say that they can’t afford it.  Let’s put this in the right context.  You’re driving down the road and suddenly your engine completely stops.  Would you be able to find the necessary funds?  Well, if you don’t have a car, you can’t get to appointments, right?  That’s how you should look at your own personal development.  Just like a car’s engine, you have to invest in the maintenance of you.  It’s a crucial investment for your life.”  If growing your business is a commitment, then develop a plan to invest in yourself and your business. 

By paying attention to your commitments and developing healthy habits, you will become known as a person of integrity.  You will orchestrate a carefully designed harmony with the world around you and notice how easy it is to create dramatic results.

Hello!

I have some exciting events coming up and I hope to see you at one of them – one is a live event and one a virtual event.

The first one is Networking Event of the Year.

It’s your chance to network and attend a training session on how to seal the deal more effectively.  It’s happening Friday, March 4 in Canton, Michigan.  The sponsors for this event include  Referral Institute, Marketing Monsoon, Local Business Network, and Ion Strategic Partners.  

At this event, I’m thrilled to present Seal the Deal 98% of the Time, showing small business owners:

·     How behavioral styles impact successfully closing a sale

·     4 keys to unlock your 98% Conversion Rate

·     Approaches to use when networking and converting prospect to client

·     How to recognize a person’s hardwiring based on behavioral cues – what they say and how they say it 

If you are in the area and are going to join us for it, you might want to register early.  Announcements are going out to over 10,000 people and there are only 65 more spots available for the presentation portion. 

Enjoy the events and this week’s high-content article below!  Until next time…

  Create a great life,

Lisa Mininni

And for this week’s high-content article….

Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting in a meeting and you look down at your cell phone to discover that several people just signed up for a workshop you’re hosting four weeks from today.  Each person that signed up immediately received an automated message from you with details on the workshop and automatically directed them to a page with downloads to the course materials and additional information.   At the same time, your social media status was updated and your weekly electronic newsletter complete with information-rich content is sent to your list of 5,000 prospects and customers.  A few minutes later, you receive another notification that you just made over $900 effortlessly because someone purchased your audio product from your online store and the customer got access to the product immediately.

After you get out of your meeting where you just sealed another deal, you receive another notification that someone wants to set up an introductory meeting and hire you to help them.  You look down at your business blueprint and realize you’ve just exceeded this month’s objective and know exactly the next steps you need to take to meet next month’s targets.

Does that sound like something out of a sci-fi movie?  Not if you’re taking a systems approach to profitability it isn’t.  Systems thinking is a process of understanding how things influence or fit together within a whole rather than in isolation.

The mistake a lot of small business owners make is that they set up their business in uncoordinated pieces.  They take out ads that cost thousands of dollars without one customer coming from it, spend time marketing in places that won’t get them in front of their ideal clients, then wonder why they aren’t creating momentum and results.  These activities are often done in isolation without a real strategy with how it affects the whole business. 

One small business owner had many of the pieces working in her business but her process of securing the client wasn’t working.  In some areas, she was ahead of many small business owners because she had a lead generation system that brought in prospects on a regular basis and automatically surveyed them so she knew exactly the products and services they were seeking.  This is where her system broke down.  While prospects were signing up for a strategy session, she was not enrolling her prospects into clients.  She would meet with people over and over, give away a lot of her knowledge for free, invest a lot of time in a strategy session, only to have the person walk away with her ideas and not sign up. 

When she looked at her business as a whole system, she realized that there were gaps.  While she had part of a sales funnel, it was not complete.  She was not pre-qualifying her clients forcing her to spend a lot of time educating prospects about her services and even more time answering the same questions over and over.  This lack of a system to pre-qualify and pre-educate her prospects also put her in a position where she felt like she was selling her services rather than reversing the sales cycle and having her clients select her.  She also offered only one choice for her clients to work with her.  This resulted in the “yes OR no-and-go” option.  It wasn’t an option at all rather it only gave people she talked with only one choice – either work with her at a certain price point or go away resulting in lost revenue.

Once she set up her systems in a certain order, got clear on her ideal client, created targeted marketing messages and inserted those messages in her systems, she began to pre-qualify her prospects.  She invested her energy with interested prospects ready to buy rather than those just shopping around. 

She also looked at the options or choices she offered to prospects.  When she offered more choices to her pre-qualified prospects, these ready buyers signed up with her.  When she learned the behavioral types and observed how people needed to receive their information, she delivered the choices in the way they wanted to receive it resulting in her enrolling her new client authentically and consistently.  In one month, she closed business not 50% of the time but over 98% of the time. 

Interested in closing up the gaps in your business?  Start with these steps:

• Identify a specific period of time and identify all of your marketing, networking and advertising during that timeframe.  Assess your return on investment for those activities.

• Draft the step-by-step process your clients take to do business with you.  Where are they hearing about you?  When they find you, is the first step to doing business clear to them?  Do you see any gaps between your marketing activities and the process your clients are taking to do business with you?  Do you know where you can find your clients in large numbers?

• Outline what part of the process is breaking down.  Is it at the beginning (having them find you or closing the sale) in the middle (when you’re working with them) or having them return for more?

Once you look at the entire business and become aware of the gaps, make it a priority to close the gaps.  Set specific objectives outlining what specifically needs to be improved.  Prioritize those areas of improvement and assess alternatives.  Involve others and invest in yourself and your business to close the gaps.  Continuously assess your outcomes to determine if the systems or process improvements need to be updated or modified.

When you take a step back and look at your entire business, you can start to fill in how all of the systems and activities fit in.  With a systems approach, you will also notice how much easier it is to achieve new levels of income and outcomes for your small business.  You’ll begin to increase efficiencies and effectiveness making growing your dream business a reality. 

If identifying your ideal niche, having a well-oiled lead generation system, or closing the sale 98% of the time is not a reality for you yet, then how about changing that right now?  My own step-by-step system is available to you in an easy to implement process.  The Entrepreneurial Edge System^TM includes everything you need to know to identify your ideal client, bring in leads to fill your small business, and seal the deal authentically and consistently no matter how long you have been in business.  The scripts, systems, tools, shortcuts, templates and examples are given to you.  You work on one of the systems, and when you complete it, you move on to the next one.  That is why my clients have gotten such great results and create massive momentum from it.  Don’t miss out on your chance to attend The Entrepreneurial Edge System^TM at http://www.entrepreneurialedgesystem.com.