Small Business Marketing Secrets: Look Like Sizzle, Be The Steak

You've heard marketing and advertising gurus quip, "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." Advertising initiatives best reach their target audience with benefits and the "wow" effect, not the value or features of their product or service. This may work well to get customers in the door. But once they're in, you better have some substance. How can you ensure you uphold the integrity of your business and still maintain the "Wow Effect"? It just takes well executed strategic steps for business AND personal development:

1. It's Already Done

Act like the goals you are working so diligently to achieve have already been reached. Walk with that confidence. Treat your leads like customers, your customers like guests in your home, and your staff like family. When you approach goals like a "done deal", you open up creativity reserves to think outside the box, access resources you didn't know you had and create opportunities for success previously unforeseen.

2. Get There From Here

It is not enough to act like you have arrived; you also get to devise a strategy map to get you there. Ask for your customers' input through surveys, polls, feedback forms. Pay customers' a visit, just to see how things are going. Send a birthday card, send flowers, and send an article clip that can prove useful to a client. Never miss an opportunity to create relationship. The best way to ensure you don't miss opportunities is to create a plan.

3. Who Cares?

Ensure that your work is fun and fulfilling for you and those who might work for or with you. Keep your duties aligned with your skills and interests, and invest in your own personal development. Volunteer in the community. Build a house for Habitat for Humanity. Run a marathon or half-marathon. Sponsor a scholarship with your local high school and recommend alliance partners or contractors to be part of the selection committee. It increases your visibility and theirs, and you both get to be a good corporate citizen. All for a good cause. Invest in yourself and in your community. Show you care.

4. Say What You Mean, and Mean What You Say

Address issues as they come up or as soon as appropriately possible. Sometimes we let things slide or leave things unsaid. This devalues what's important to you and insults the intelligence of the other person. Be open in your communication.

5. Create Win-Win Solutions

The belief of "looking out for number one" is so embedded in our collective consciousness that we have forgotten we are ALL #1 because we are all one. When you create win-win solutions, you not only generate good will among peers and supervisors, but you develop a reputation for fairness and professionalism. Everyone collaborates with a collaborator.

6. Acknowledge the Feedback

When customers take the time to write a scathing letter or make an irate phone call about horrific customer service or product quality, they are providing you with a valuable opportunity: Free feedback that you didn't ask for, didn't pay for, didn't market for or followed up on. It just fell on your lap. So thank your customer for being committed enough to your company to give you feedback on how you can improve your service. Give something away or at a steep discount. You have a choice: Swallow your pride, or dwindle your profits.

7. Go Back to Kindergarten

When you take lunch, take a walk to a park, eat leisurely, and come back to the privacy of your office for a quick 20 minute power nap. You'll feel refreshed and replenished. Don't have an office? Take a nap. Make it fun and, most importantly, nourishing.

8. Tie Up Loose Ends

Pay the parking ticket. Write that letter. Clean out your files. Make up with that client. Enroll in school. Back up your computer systems. Run the Clean Sweep Program on yourself, then the company (for more information, email us at monikah@ogandoassociates.com).

9. Give Yourself a Makeover

Lose the 15 pounds. Get that haircut. Buy fresh makeup. Reinvent your wardrobe. Give your car a paint job. Rearrange the furniture in your office or lobby. Give away old clothes. When you get in the habit of installing new practices and letting go of old ones that no longer serve you, you generate and circulate fresh energy.

10. Keep Your Commitments

When you say you are going to do something, do it, or else renegotiate another arrangement. Very few things are as difficult to earn back as your credibility and the trust of those who deal with you.

11. Play a Big Game

When setting your goals, ask yourself if you are stretching. Set your goals high enough to have to stretch for them. Make your growth systematic and strategic. If your goal is to call 20 leads this week, to close one sale, what would you have to do and believe about yourself to make it possible to call 50 and close three sales? If your goal is to go to dinner with your brother, just to reconnect, how about stepping it up and actually saying "I love you?" You know you are playing a big game when your first reaction is a big whine "I can't do that!" Yes, you can. Surprise yourself.

12. Be a Contribution

How can you make your customers' life more livable, your work more enjoyable, and your community more cohesive? Everyone wants to know, what's in it for me? When you focus out, you immediately speak their language and enroll them in playing yours. No one plays with you if they think you are not on their team. So join them. And they will join you.

Copyright 2004, Monikah J. Ogando, Ogando Associates, Inc.

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Monikah Ogando is a highly skilled facilitator and charismatic speaker. With workshop and platform experience, she continues to inspire her audience through her expertise in Business Development, leadership effectiveness, individual accountability and the values that guide excellence. Monikah believes that the new workplace, with shifting values and technology, calls for authentic leaders to partner with people in order to energize their hearts and enhance their performance.

Partnering with many industries, such as retail, communications, and online and financial services, her clients include Fortune 500 companies such as Charles Schwab and TNT Express Worldwide. She practices what she speaks: an entrepreneur, Monikah leads her own two companies, consulting firm Ogando Associates (http://www.ogandoassociates.com), and Exodus House Publishers and is a Team Member of Solo-E (http://www.Solo-E.com).

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