Archives for February 2014
Lessons from My Secret Mentor
When I was in my mid-20s, I was the rock star manager of a retail store in the heart of Oklahoma that regularly did $10 million a year in sales and had 86 employees. Known throughout the larger company as someone who got things done, I considered myself invincible and really started to grow a significant ego. But there was one person who kept me grounded. His name was Ben Ruby, I affectionately called him Obi-Wan under my breath. I just didn’t get this geezer.
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The dreaded boss who’s always right
Ben was my district manager, an Ivy Leaguer from rural Pennsylvania who always seemed to stop by my store at the worst possible time. We would be in the middle of a rush or some other crisis, and all of a sudden I would see Ben walk in. “Great,” I would think. “Now I have this to deal with.” I grew extremely frustrated over time and began to despise the fact he was always looking over my shoulder.
A rising star who thought he knew it all
First, let me take a step back and explain my position within the company at the time. I was an up-and-coming manager who already had a reputation for turning defunct stores completely around. I had achieved much success just a few years into my young career and was convinced I didn’t need a micro-manager. If Ben would just let me do my job, I would be even more effective than I already was. But he simply refused to do that.
Chopping down the ego
Ben never failed to take me down a peg. We battled constantly and seemed to disagree over almost everything. When referring to my rise in the company, he would say things like, “Be careful of the bridges you burn climbing the ladder — you may have to cross them on the way back 
down.” And when we would reach a major sales milestone at the store, he would want to know immediately what my next goal was.
But I was also perplexed by the responsibilities he gave me. I was his only manager he allowed to do his own line item budget. Just as I improved the Norman store he wanted me to open a new one in Baton Rouge. At the age of 27 this seemed like a mixed message.
The best manager I ever had
I now realize that Ben visiting my store, adding pressure, pushing me for more when I least expected it was no coincidence. He knew he had a great, yet cocky, manager on his staff who he needed to keep in line. By continuing to challenge me, he ensured I didn’t become complacent in my work. As much as I believed I hated him, I also truly respected him and wanted him to approve of the job I was doing.
Advice that has served me well for decades
A good three decades later and despite the fact that I haven’t seen him for years, I now realize Ben was a major influence on my career. In hindsight his wisdom for business decisions was second to none.
Some pieces of advice I’ve used over and over as I’ve worked with countless companies across a wide range of industries. “There’s no place for emotion in a business decision,” he would say — and it’s very true. When making tough decisions, you must be calm, focused and rational, using only the facts to arrive at a sound conclusion. “You’re only as good as your weakest employee”, he would regularly say. “What drives your staff away from work is what makes them excel at work.” And of course my favorite, “If you lead a team correctly, you’ll never fire anyone. They’ll know this isn’t for them before you take that action.”
Those, and many other insights from Ben, has been a cornerstone of my professional career.
What type of manager are you?
If you manage others, there’s a delicate balance you must strike between keeping people motivated and letting them know that you care and are there to help them succeed. For me, Ben was the one person in my life who did both with precision, helping me achieve new heights both within that company and in the endeavors I would take on in the years to come.
Thomas von Ahn – Chief Elephant Slayer – Viral Solutions LLC
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
Tips for Adding a Sense of Community to Your Facebook Page
As a business owner, running a social media page often means creating promotions, talking about your latest products and services, and sharing your most recent blog posts. While these are indeed important tasks, they should be balanced with other forms of engagement. After all, social sites are social. You and your customers share common interests, making social media pages the perfect opportunity for building a community.
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Use these tips to add a sense of community to your Facebook business page:
Use polls – Polls are a great way to find out what your followers care about. Not only can individuals share their two cents by participating in a poll, instant poll results show them where they stand compared to others. Your polls can be serious, fun, on-topic, or off-topic (though they should have something to do with your niche). Facebook’s internal polling feature has mysteriously disappeared, making it necessary to use a Facebook app or third-party polling tool such as PollDaddy.
Adopt a charity – Does your business support a charity? Make a point of sharing the charities you support. You could even run a promotion where a portion of the proceeds will go to the charity. When your adopted charity has big news or a heart-warming story to share, share it with 
your fans. When you volunteer at one of the charity’s local events, take and post photos. Make sure to pick a charity that is relevant to your community and not controversial.
Allow others to post to your wall – Though it may feel as if you’re giving up some control or inviting spammers to the party, allowing others to post photos, updates, and videos to your page encourages a sense of community. Most people will not abuse this option, and you can easily remove offending posts should they occur.
Tag people in photos – When sharing photos of events you’ve participated in, tag the other people in the photos. Your photos will then appear on their walls where their followers can view them, too. Obviously, no one wants to be tagged in an unflattering photo or be publicly outed as a drunken party animal, so make sure the photos you tag are both flattering and professional.
Provide opportunities for your followers to share their expertise – Ask probing questions to your community and let your followers shine. Everyone likes the opportunity to show off their knowledge or wit, so provide opportunities. Depending on the nature of your business, you could do this in a lighthearted way by posting a photo and prompting followers to add a caption. Open-ended questions such as “How would you handle this situation…?” prompt explanatory responses rather than a yes or no answer.
These tips are designed to prompt your followers to engage with your Facebook page and feel a part of a broader community.
What have we missed? Share your ideas with us in the comments section below.
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
Plain vs. Rich Pins on Pinterest
We’ve talked about adding Pin It buttons to your website as a means of enticing Pinterest users to pin images from your website. This is a great way to get exposure on Pinterest as well as divert traffic back to your website. However, did you know that you can set up your images so that when they’re pinned on Pinterest they automatically display information such as pricing and inventory levels right on Pinterest. In order to do this, you’ll need to use “Rich Pins.”
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What are Rich Pins?
Rich pins are available for products, movies, articles, places, and recipes. Assuming you sell products, consider creating “rich” product pins. By creating rich pins instead of just adding a Pin It button, when Pinterest users pin your images, dynamic information appears on your pins. If you change your prices, for example, your rich pins should reflect those changes. In contrast, if a user pinned a product and mentioned the item’s price in the description field or a comment, that information would remain in place unless the user changes it.
Rich pins give you greater control over some of the details associated with your products, recipes, or movie images. In addition, they have a direct link to the referenced image’s page. For example, a rich pin of one of your products will link directly to that product’s page whereas a regular pin would link to your home page.
How to Get Rich Pins
In order to start using rich pins, you’ll need to head over to the developers section of Pinterest and read the documentation. Here’s the link: http://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/
Implementing rich pin functionality on your website does require adding markup code to your site. You can use either oEmbed or Semantic Markup. You’ll also need to use the “rich pins validator” to validate your site after you’ve added the markup code to it. The validator is found in the Pinterest for Developers section. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as copying and pasting an embed code. In fact, you’ll also need to get Pinterest’s approval before your rich pins begin appearing as rich pins.
How to Opt Out of Rich Pins
While implementing rich pins and encouraging pinning are beneficial for many website owners, some may prefer to opt out of rich pins or pinning in general. Do ensure that your pages do not render as rich pins, add this line to the HTML head section of your webpages:
<meta name=”pinterest-rich-pin” content=”false” />
Prefer to restrict all pinning? Use the “nopin” tag which is:
<meta name=”pinterest” content=”nopin” />
If you want greater control over the images on your site that end up on Pinterest, rich pins are worth considering. For those who prefer not to let people pin their images, the tags mentioned above can prevent them from doing so.
To learn more about Rich Pins, visit business.pinterest.com/rich-pins.
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
Get more action from your advertising – connect with emotions
Do you wonder if your marketing is bringing you as many clicks, calls or customers as it should be? Experts use five time-tested tactics, and they will work for your business, too. We’ve talked about the first two tactics already. You can catch up on my first installment about knowing your customer and the second about writing winning headlines.
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Engage emotions to drive decisions.
People do things for one of two reasons: either to avoid pain, or to seek pleasure; to get rid of a problem, or to get ahead. These emotions are behind everything we do. As one great marketing pundit puts it ‘Emotions drive the train.’
Although customers might want to know a lot about you and what you offer, they’ll never get to that stage if they don’t believe you understand their pain, or recognize their aspirations. This is equally true for selling to professionals and other businesses as for consumers.
What does this mean for your marketing? You tell your audience you can solve their problem or help them achieve their goal first, before anything else. If you’re a restaurant, maybe you feature your romantic dining experience for customers who want an intimate dinner date. If you own a fitness studio, maybe you lead by promising that customers can look better and feel better in as little as one month. You do this before you talk about how long you’ve been in business or any other facts that are needed only after a prospect is interested in what you offer.
Present yourself from the customer’s viewpoint. In one case the appeal is to romance; in the other it is to avoiding looking and feeling out of shape. The possible approaches are limited only by your creativity. Avoid starting out the conversation by talking about your business and how well respected or established you are. Save it for later.
Use your customer research.
The first rule of effective marketing is to know your customer. Again, you can catch up on my first installment about knowing your customer.
Think about the different ways you can either help someone solve a problem, or help them towards their innermost desire. Those ideas will form the core of your most effective campaigns. Feature them on your web page, print ads, emails and everywhere. 
by Christine Kelly – CEO & Queen Bee – Viral Solutions LLC
Prior to joining Viral Solutions, Christine held executive leadership roles at some of the largest small business consulting firms in the USA. Her experience includes leading direct reports of over 130 remote sales agents who generated $38mm in annual revenue. She obtained her Marketing degree from British Columbia Institute of Technology. Bring her C-Suite experience to your small business. Although our company is virtual, and we can work with you wherever you are located, she is located in Denver, Colorado and owns a second home in Vancouver, BC Canada.
Customers used to skip my ads, but not any more
A headline is a front door to your business. Whether it is for your web page, print ad, or any other contact, your headline is your best chance to make prospects identify, linger, and read on for more. In this second installment of my series “Marketing tactics that will increase your business,” I reveal how you can make your headlines irresistible.
Winning headlines. Make it all about your customer.
The first key is to write from your customer’s self-interest. Before they will listen to anything else you have to say, your customers first must see that you’
ve got something they need or want. No one is ready to hear all about you yet – not until they’ve decided you may have what they want.
One way to do this is to put one or two benefits right up in your headline: Lose ten pounds in thirty days. Instead of The new MX81A Starjet printer has 500 mb onboard storage and prints 500wpm (talks about the product) say One fast printer serves three dozen workers (shows benefits the customer will see). Another tactic is to inform readers your message is about their pain or problem: Sleepless and tired? Say ‘Goodnight’ to insomnia.
Either way, write so your ideal customer immediately knows this is where they need to be. By highlighting benefits or writing to your customer’s pain or desires you can do this.
Customer research (catch up with my first installment about knowing your customer) is key. The possible approaches are limited only by your creativity. Once you have an approach, follow through with strong copy by employing the four U’s.
Use the U’s. A great copywriter has defined four U’s that make headlines grab readers. Make your headlines Urgent, Unique, Ultra-specific and Useful:
- Urgent – Can you give a reason for your audience to act now? Think “Limited time offer,” or “Discount for early registration.”
- Unique – You want to stand out, so don’t say the same thing as everyone else.
- Ultra-specific – Are the homes in your new subdivision just reliable, or are they “Termite free and earthquake safe?”
- Useful – Put strong benefits at the fore. “No one has lower prices, we guarantee it” is a classic example.
You won’t be able to get all these into a single headline. But see if you can rate your headline high on at least three of the four points.
Test, test, test. With email, direct mail and web landing pages it is possible to test headlines to see which gets the highest response before launching a complete campaign. Spend time on testing, research and creative thinking. Or let pro do it for you. Call me if want to invest but don’t have the time to spend on this.
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by Christine Kelly – CEO & Queen Bee – Viral Solutions LLC
Prior to joining Viral Solutions, Christine held executive leadership roles at some of the largest small business consulting firms in the USA. Her experience includes leading direct reports of over 130 remote sales agents who generated $38mm in annual revenue. She obtained her Marketing degree from British Columbia Institute of Technology. Bring her C-Suite experience to your small business. Although our company is virtual, and we can work with you wherever you are located, she is located in Denver, Colorado and owns a second home in Vancouver, BC Canada.