Art of Earning
I’ve long been a proponent of charging more, earning more, and feeling good about it. I’ve asked countless entrepreneurs to consider the value of their skills in a New Economy market where those skills are highly prized.
But there’s one thing that nags me about where this conversation inevitably goes.
When service providers, makers, and microbusiness owners of all ilk become empowered to consider pricing on a new level, they say, “I’m going to charge what I’m worth.”
There are two serious problems with this mantra:
1) You are priceless. Your work is not.
There’s really no way to quantify what “you’re worth” because you can’t measure the value of your precious life. However, skills, products, and services are quantifiable. There’s a going rate. And there is also the ability to raise or lower the going rate depending on how you position those skills, products, or services.
2) You’ve forgotten the customer.
There is no value without the customer. How much is doctor worth without patients? How much is a house worth if no one will buy it? How much is a company worth if the investors all bail? What you make or offer has no value until a customer is willing to purchase it.
Dave Gray states it plainly in The Connected Company: “A company can’t create value on its own: value is only created through exchange. The customer must participate in defining and determining that value.”
So how can you address this in practical terms?
Understand the whole market.
There’s no one set price for a cup of coffee. Go to a gas station and pay 69 cents. Go to a fast food joint and pay a buck. Go to Starbucks and pay $2. Go to Blue Bottle in San Francisco and pay $7.
Your market is likely the same. You know you’re not at the bottom of the barrel and you have no interest in being there. But have you explored the rest of the market? Do you know what the top-of-the-line looks like and how much it costs? Once you do, back track and complete your understanding of the whole market.
Determine what influences price.
Price goes well beyond materials, overhead, and labor. It goes well beyond experience and skills. Those are just factors that contribute to understanding a sustainable price from the business’s point-of-view. But many other factors influence price from a customers’ point-of-view.
What the product means to them, what results the service promises, and how your customers perceive your business in relation to the rest of your industry all contribute to what you can (and should) charge. The style of your website, the way your images are merchandised, the testimonials you provide (and the way they’re written), and your sales process give your customers a distinct impression of what your product or service is worth.
Adjust as necessary to make the price you want to charge match what your customers want to pay.
There may be many factors currently influencing the price you can charge that have consequences you don’t like. It might be hard–even unpleasant or expensive–to change them. It might involve better packaging, a shinier website, or more training. But it could also be as “simple” as introducing your work to a new group of customers or changing the way you talk about what you do.
Take full inventory of the factors currently influencing your price, both from your business’s perspective and from your customers’ perspective. Determine which factors you can change to create a better result for your business. Create an action plan to do just that.
And stop telling people you’re going to charge what you’re worth… Click to tweet.
Art of Growth
I just arrived home from 4 days in San Francisco where I was teaching a workshop for creativeLIVE. I spent 3 full days guiding nearly 10,000 people through the underlying strategy behind guiding your business from your customers’ perspective, pricing your work for maximum growth and sustainability, and selling more. It’s been the best experience of my working life to date!
While I offered many practical and actionable ideas, I spent more time–as per usual–offering the why and what for than you’ll find in most business training online.
The reason is that I find way too many business owners getting bogged down in “supposed to’s” and “shoulds.” They’re drowning in all the easy-as-1-2-3’s that are out there masquerading as good business advice.
Knowing the why behind ideas and tactics means that you can make the best decision for what’s right for your business.
You feel less overwhelmed, less bogged down, and you end up asking less “How can I fit this in?” questions. You have better tools to organize your work, make decisions, and prioritize initiatives. That puts you in the position of CEO more often than mail room clerk.
You see, there are 3 kinds of work. And you as a business owner need to be constantly working to do less of two of those kinds of work.
First, there’s work that gets immediate results. It might be delivering the service you provide or creating the product you sell. It could be writing on your blog or updating product descriptions. It could be ordering supplies or promoting your work.
Second, there’s work that should be done by someone else. This varies depending on your business and your strengths within that business. It could be fiddling with your website, sending out emails, or scheduling clients. It could be writing copy or creating advertisements. It could be shipping packages or bookkeeping.
Third, there’s the work that contributes to long-term growth. Often this is work that requires your expertise but that isn’t the hands-on work that you sell. It’s systems work. It’s process work. It’s relationship-building. It’s working on the vision (and the byproducts of it).
You probably do a lot of the first and second kind of work. You are constantly after immediate results (they feel good, right?) because immediate results are better than no results. And you do a lot of work that you really have no business doing because you have chosen not to invest the time or money in having someone else do it.
That means that the work that contributes to long-term growth gets the short shrift. When you don’t work towards the future, you leave yourself in the hamster wheel of constant hustling. Sound familiar?
…while you’re doing it, doing it, doing it, there’s something much more important that isn’t getting done. And it’s the work you’re not doing, the strategic work, the entrepreneurial work, that will lead your business forward, that will give you the life you’ve not yet known.
– Michael E Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited
If you’re beginning to lose faith in the dream of having a business that takes care of you (instead of you taking care of it) and really becoming the Chief Executive of your enterprise, then it’s probably because you find yourself doing so much of the first two categories of work. When that type of work is disproportionate to the results you see, frustration is the natural byproduct.
When you exercise your responsibility to long-term growth work, even if you’re not seeing immediate results, you can better weather the ups and downs of entrepreneurship. If a particular idea doesn’t work out, you have the systems or relationships in place to get you through. Or you have the comfort of knowing your next idea or opportunity is already in the works.
If you’re ready to do more long-term growth work and less of the rest, you need to schedule it. Put it on the calendar. Honor it like it was a client appointment or a project deadline. This is the work that will keep your business in business – respect it.
Once you’ve got that kind of work on the calendar, make sure that you’re creating systems that reduce the amount of other work you’re doing. Use your scheduled time to create a training or on-boarding process for an assistant or business manager. Also use that time to plan for new products or services that require less effort or active time from you. Plan to shift your business model to one that leverages your time & talents.
Bottom line: how would you spend your time if doing work that contributed to long-term business growth was your primary responsibility?
‘Cause it is. Tell me in the comments.
–PS–
For the last year, I’ve been nurturing a community of business owners in Kick Start Labs. Membership has been closed for 6 months now but the doors are about to open for new members again soon. Members get access to all the business training I’ve created to date plus monthly Q&A calls with me, and more. Keep your eyes out for when membership is open again.
Art of Growth, Quiet Power Strategy
I have often been teased for being brainy and intellectualizing personal problems. I tend to think more than feel. I rationalize more than empathize. I am INTP.
I have never gone so far as to try to hide my smarts but I certainly have often seen it as a weakness instead of a strength. Like it’s something to be managed instead of something to be exploited.
This week in Quiet Power Strategy™: The Program, our clients completed Quiet Power Inventories. These begin with understanding your Onlyness. Onlyness is a concept from Nilofer Merchant’s book, 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era, and she uses it to talk about the unique angle that each of us bring to the work that we do.
From my perspective, Onlyness also applies to brands–it’s a big part of where they draw their Quiet Power from. The most memorable brands get really good at using what makes them unique to deliver additional value to their customers. And this often means focusing on what has become a perceived weakness and turning it into a genuine asset.
Instead of hiding what could be the butt of jokes, great brands put it out in the open. They exploit it.
Merchant writes in a recent post:
Your brand is the exhaust created by the engine of your life. It is a by-product of what happens as you share what you are creating, and with whom you are creating.
So if your engine is running on something–no matter how quirky it might be–and that’s not a key piece of what you’re putting out into the world, what’s representing you, what’s acting as a channel for the value you’re creating, you’re missing a big opportunity.
Don’t try to engineer a brand. Reverse-engineer a brand (click to tweet!) that supports your unique way of creating value.
My brand leverages my habit of intellectualizing and rationalizing. It sets my brand apart from brands that leverage fun & glamor or spirituality & poeticism. But its these unique strengths that allow each of these brands to deliver more value than they would if they were traveling down the middle of the road. And they are each things that could be perceived as weaknesses if not blatantly built into the very core of each business.
There’s a perception that there are certain “right” ways to create a brand or build the persona of your business. Whether you’ve bought into an image that ultra-professional, glam, corporate, spiritual, new age, or quirky, if the image of your business doesn’t spring from what you’re bringing to the table through your business’s unique skills, strengths, and passions, the resulting disconnect can drain you dry. Financially and energetically.
Your Onlyness helps you build a business model that really works. It informs your sales copy, your company culture, and your sales process. But, bottom line, it helps you & your business do what it does best.
As I mentioned earlier, often that thing that businesses are trying to hide, manage, or battle is the key to infusing Onlyness into their brand, business model, and sales process. It’s the thing they assume is keeping them from doing more, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Stop fighting it, start leveraging it.
If you’ve be struggling with how to manage a certain aspect of your personality or something that your business doesn’t do as well as you think it should, what would happen if you decided to highlight it? Harness it?
If you have a particular weakness that’s been nagging you for awhile, my friend & client Bridget Pilloud does this for a living. She helped me recast my social anxiety as a strength–which I’ve sense incorporated into my work in a big way.
Customer Perspective Process
“Pain points” are a key way we get people to pay attention to us as marketers. But when was the last time you spent time or energy developing “pleasure points?”
Pain points serve a purpose. They allow us as product designers to focus on needs and opportunities. They allow us as marketers to grab a prospect’s attention. They allow us as leaders & visionaries to show we can empathize with our prospect’s current situation.
Pain points have often been used to manipulate or shame. But they don’t have to be. And your marketing, sales, and product development will suffer if you don’t spend time identifying and communicating that you understand your customers’ pain points.
Pleasure points, on the other hand, are an underutilized reversal of the this old standby. Sure, you see plenty of “Make More Money,” “10lbs Thinner,” and “More Inner Peace Now” sprinkled around. But is this really painting the picture of pleasure that your prospects are looking for?
Pleasure points are a key way to get attention from your Most Valued Customers, especially in the You Economy, especially in a “saturated” market. And we’re all in the You Economy and most of us are in saturated markets. So how do you pin down your customers’ most important pleasure points?
Often, I ask my clients, “What does that look like?” or “What does that mean for your customer?”
Pleasure points are all about painting the full picture of success. Click to tweet! When you’re 10lbs thinner, you might get to shop at a trendier store for clothes that are a different size. When you’ve got more inner peace, it might look like a cleaner house or a less frazzled schedule.
But it’s also about searching for the deeper meaning of success. When you’re 10lbs thinner, you might be more inclined rekindle the fire in your romance or go looking for romance in the first place. It might mean that you spend less time at the doctor’s and more time in the great outdoors.
Just as Danielle LaPorte talks about using core desires as metrics of success, we can use pleasure points to name those desires, paint a vivid picture of them, and dive further into what those desires mean for our prospects so that we can help them create the “success” they’re after through using our product or service.
The key here is specificity. You’re not aiming to paint a Rothko. You want to aim for something more like photorealism. You must get clear on your customers’ core desires, the unique circumstances those lead to, and what deeper meaning those circumstances hold for your customer.
Art of Growth
Every day I hear about failed launches or sales droughts and I want to help. But, most often, these “failures” are the result of lax lead generation and capture.
The biggest misstep I see in microbusiness is making email list-building a secondary priority. There is nothing more crucial to the success of your business than a list of engaged, qualified, and interested prospects.
This is true whether your business is based on a customized services or whether your business is offering more leveraged solutions through programs or applications. It’s true whether you’re creating work on a commission basis or whether your products are sold to wholesale clients.
Unless you have a multimillion dollar advertising budget, you need to prioritize getting email addresses from great prospects.
Every business needs a prospect list and the best (and most trustworthy) prospect list you have at your disposal is the list of people who have deigned to give you their email addresses.
List building is important because sales is a numbers game.
Let’s do the math:
I recently completed a launch of a high-end group coaching program. I offered it first to a group of 130 on an interest list and then opened it to my main list, which at the time was approximately 5600 subscribers strong.
We registered 3 from the original interest list. That’s a 2.3% conversion rate on the list. Pretty good.
The other 12 registrations came from the main list. That’s a .2% conversion rate. While it looks abysmal, it’s actually pretty good, too.
The interest list averaged over a 50% open rate on the promotional emails. That’s pretty par for the course when it comes to people who opt in to learn about something specific. Since the change in Gmail inboxes, I’ve been averaging approximately a 29% open rate for emails to my general list.
Think about that. On the best performing email to the interest list, 88 people learned the program was open and 62 people click through to the offer. An offer like this isn’t likely to get better than a 1% conversion rate. That means I could expect about .6 people to register based on the interest group alone!
For the main list, the main direct sales email had a 30% open rate and a 4.1% click thru rate. That means 232 people saw the offer that day. So I could expect another 2.3 registrations.
Great, I’m up to almost 3 whole people!
In the end, we had 15 registrations on this program. We generated about $40,000 in revenue. So, clearly, I had more than almost 3. But the point is simply: with a list of 5,600 prospects, an engaged readership, and solid conversion, I just filled this program. I’m incredibly pleased with the results and the position we’ll be in when the program launches again in February.
But it could have gone very differently.
For another example, when I launched The Art of Growth in January, my announcement email received just over a 40% open rate and a click rate of almost 11%. That means that, from my list, 537 people saw the offer that day. I sold 48 copies on the first day and 134 total over the next 3 weeks. That was a 2.6% conversion rate based on the list size. Though, that also included social media traffic.
You will likely find people who have rocked 100 conversions on a 1,000 person list. Or filled their client roster with a list of 200. And that’s fantastic. But if you’re looking for the ease & scalability of a solid launch, I think you need to count on a different numbers game.
You should figure on 40% open rate, a 10% click rate, and a 2% conversion rate on your offer for an engaged email list. Which means to get 20 sales, you need to drive 1,000 views of the offer, over the course of several emails from a list of several thousand. And, frankly, that’s optimistic.
For a lower priced, highly targeted offer, you might get a better conversion rate. For a higher priced offer, you’ll need more.
These are the kinds of numbers I use with clients to help them set sales goals. But it’s more important to set list-building goals before the sales cycle starts. If you really want to get 20 sales, how many people do you have to have on your list? 500? 1000? More?
I know, this all might be very depressing to those who are just starting out, those who feel like list-building is akin to dental work, and those who just feel like it should be working by now.
I get it. But please don’t be depressed, take action. Re-prioritize. Set goals. And do it now. Don’t wait any longer or pretend you can half-ass this. Because you can’t.
Now, what I’m not saying is that everyone needs to build a 10,000 or 50,000 subscriber list. On the contrary, I believe you need to build a list that is appropriate to the type of business you run.
If you run a business focused on volume, where selling more means making more money and working less, you need to grow as big of a list as possible that is also focused, engaged, and ready to buy.
But if you run a business that is geared to 1:1 service, customized solutions, or commissioned work, you need to grow a list that supports one sale at a time, understanding that your kind of clients don’t necessarily jump when you “launch.” You’ll use your list to nurture leads and keep them warm until both of you are ready to work together.
Either way, a constant focus in any business is lead generation, ahem, list-building. Click to tweet!
And when I mentioned to Stephanie that I was working on this post, she asked me to address the question of “stalled” list growth. I think this is something every business will encounter. Things are going along swimmingly, maybe you’ve let success lull you into a dream world where everything is just “easy” now… and then you realize you don’t have any prospects. And your list is no bigger than the last time you made an offer.
So how do you jump-start your list growth? How do you attract new leads after a fallow period?
Of course, these answers work for jump-starting the start of a list, as well.
1) Attract the right people.
Consider the direction you’re taking your business. Are you looking for more of the same? (The answer may be “yes, please!” It’s not a trick question.) Are you moving from 1:1 services to scaled offers? Are you looking to shift the perception of your brand? Focus on a product you’ve been working on? Honing in on a new market segment?
Trust me, you don’t want anyone & everyone on your list. Even if your goal is scale, it just doesn’t make sense. Having the “wrong” people on your list skews your data, undermines your understanding of what your customers need from your business, and misdirects your marketing. Yes, the “wrong” people will unsubscribe. But if you’re too busy trying to please them, the “right” people will unsubscribe first.
If you’re using an incentive to attract prospects to your list, make sure that incentive is something people who want (and need) to pay for your services actually want. Taking that idea quite literally, I updated my own email list incentive 2 months ago to The Perspective Map. It’s actually the tool that my clients & I use most often, with the greatest impact, in our work together. Since I want more of the same clients, offering this tool as an optin incentive makes a lot of sense.
Since I introduced The Perspective Map as my incentive in July, I’ve added over 650 subscribers to my list. I know those people are the right people because the landing page for the Map is designed with their specific problems, specific goals, and specific perspective in mind. It’s kind of the point of the whole thing, really…
That means that when I re-launched my coaching program last month, I knew that 650 had not seen that offer. In addition to people who had been considering it from May, I could count on a certain percentage of new people being interested. The Perspective Map was designed to make the most impact on business owners who were right for this offer, too.
2) Get focused.
At this point, I hope you can see just how important list-building is to your business. Even if your goal isn’t volume, if instead you’re aiming for a steady stream of leads for more 1:1 or specialized services, list-building ensures that you can spend less time and energy on sales.
So is the focus of your website building your list? Do you have a way to focus traffic from interviews, media appearances, and in-person gigs onto your list? Is your call-to-action focused on the story that is growing your business?
No, I didn’t think so.
It takes surprisingly little to redirect the focus of your activities onto list-building. You just need to make the intention to do so.
Start by creating a landing page for your optin form. This is a page that’s one & only focus is getting people on your list. Whether you’re espousing the benefits of receiving your weekly emails or sharing what your prospects will learn in your free optin incentive, this page is designed to “sell” your list. It’s like a sales page where the only cost is an email address.
Therefore, it has a similar format. In a recent podcast with Derek Halpern, Mike Del Ponte shared a great framework for any sales letter. You can use this as a cheat sheet for creating this kind of page. He breaks it down into 4 P’s: Promise, Picture, Proof, Pitch.
Check out my email list landing page and you’ll see this basic framework in action. The Promise is in the headline; I suggest that you really can know exactly what your customers are thinking. I describe the Picture from both the before and the after side of things through a series of bullet points. I offer the proof that this is my “go-to tool,” that my work has been featured in a number of high-profile publications, and that a very satisfied customer had something super nice to say about it. And finally, the Pitch is the call-to-action in the optin form.
But I don’t stop at the landing page, the main “action area” of my website is a graphic that advertises my list. All of my bios have been rewritten to direct people here. And it’s the first thing I talk about when I get a chance to tell people where to find more of my ideas when I do an interview.
You might need to refocus the main action of your site on list-building by moving your optin form from the footer to the header or creating a feature area between your logo and the main content. But there is almost no good reason why making a big play for a prospects email address isn’t the best thing you can do.
3) Pay for leads.
Who pays for advertising in the age of social media?
I do.
I’m busy. I don’t like to work all day. I haven’t had the itch to do much in terms of guest posting, telesummits, or even networking lately. So I’ve been driving traffic to my email list landing page through paid advertising.
In the past, I’ve advertised (always free incentives, never paid products) on blogs that fit the audience I’m aiming to attract. But lately, I’ve been buying advertising at Facebook. First, to build up my new Facebook page (I’m late to the party). And second, to gain exposure for my email list incentive.
A hearty portion of the 650 subscribers I’ve added in the last eight weeks has been through this paid campaign.
There’s little point in paying for leads if you don’t have “Attract the right people,” and “Get focused,” down first. But once you do, paying for leads can free up your time, boost your list growth, and bring in the kind of prospects you need to keep your revenue streams humming.
It should also be noted that advertising and social media can work hand in hand. By making sure my optin incentive speaks to my Most Valued Customer and that it’s free training they’re going to want to talk about, I ensure a bigger return on investment through word-of-mouth. I also work in social sharing (like Click to Tweet) to the product page for my incentive.
Bonus: 4) Stick to one thing.
One of the best things you can do for keeping that list growing, getting people to talk about it, and continuing to get open & click rates that drive sales is to stick with one thing per email.
Often, marketers try to jam too much stuff into each email. That decreases the frequency with which they’re willing to send emails, de-incentivizes them toward list-building, and reduces the relative value of each email to their readers. That’s a recipe for disaster, my friends.
When my clients and students switch to one-thing-per-email, they are more excited about emailing their prospects, more focused on building their list, and their readers are happier with each email. And that’s a recipe for success.
As you might have noticed if you’re a subscriber, I send out each & every one of my blog posts as the main focus of the vast majority of my emails. Most of the time it’s the full text of the article and sometimes it’s a teaser or special intro with a link to the article. But the focus is always the article.
I often add a promotional block beneath the article for a workshop, a teleseminar, a program, or a product. I think of those as “reminders,” not the core of my sales process.
When I’m ready to really sell something, I send out a dedicated email.
As an aside, another problem I see with “failed” launches is that the business owner never sent dedicated sales emails to their prospects. You can’t expect to sell if no one knows you have something for sale.
What will you do today?
I trust I’ve made the case for making list-building one of your chief priorities. It’s time to stop saying it’s on your list and time to start doing something about it.
What will you do today to jumpstart your list growth? Tell me in the comments.
