“If I could only land this one huge client, I’d make it big!”
I hear it all the time, “forget the minnows… fish for that whale!”
And it did make sense in an industrialized-aged era. In the previous century, the marketing & sales efforts to attract one hundred clients paying $1,000 was usually significantly more than it was to hook one client paying $100,000.
But in the age of the internet – where information flows swiftly, and technology has helped smart businesses create virtual pipelines for promoting & delivering goods and services – this is no longer the case.
We now have the ability to use social media, websites, email, video and a host of other technologies to further our product’s reach and effectiveness.
As entrepreneurs living in the 21st century we have wonderful opportunities available to us. And over time, we will present specific scenarios and case studies in which you can apply technology into your business.
But technology is not the premise of this article… It’s about being happy.
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Dear Solopreneur,
Are you a one-man-band pretending your business is bigger than it truly is? It’s easy to do, you know, just change “I” to “we” in your sale scripts. Instantly, you have yourself a firm instead of a home office. Magic!
But you may be doing more harm than good.
What if your potential client or customer is looking for someone rolling solo? You may have scared them away. Or what if a company needed a 10-person shop to help them out and you would have never won the business alone? You and the prospect may have unnecessarily wasted valuable time discussing the project.
Ultimately, it’s best to be honest and up front, since it will only be a matter of time until the client realizes the you-not-us scheme. So as a rule of thumb going forward: be honest and set proper expectations. Call a spade a spade. It’s not We… it’s You.
Sincerely,
Brad
ps. As your business grows and you bring on one or more employees, you will experience a tremendous boost in motivation when you’re changing the content on your marketing collateral from I to We.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
~ Charles Darwin
If you had asked me a couple years ago what I thought I’d be doing professionally in 2011, I can guarantee you I would have been 100% wrong.
Being in business is filled with uncertainty and risk. But for those who change with the times – the visionaries if you will – they are much more likely to skirt the hazards. And continually create what others want.
Too often businesses that fail believe they cannot fail. Look at the Lehman Brothers. They got comfortable. And where are they now?
Or more often, businesses don’t hop on the bandwagon soon enough. Take Sears for instance. Besides their hardware section, what is Sears truly good for anymore? Their famous Wish Book? I’m not sure about you, but I do my clothing, jewelry and toy shopping elsewhere.
This isn’t a sudden trend or something that just started recently. Al Gore and his damn Internets aren’t to blame either. The world is rapidly changing. And has been since before the industrial age. Technology simply fuels this rapid change in people’s needs and desires.
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Technology is evolving at warp speed. Can you feel it? I can. It seems like a new technology is invented every second.
Technology can be an anxiety producing phenomenon if you don’t have a clear understanding how and why it’s important to you.
Some of us are unnecessarily afraid of technology. Many of us mistakenly get drunk on it. I’ve been on both sides of the spectrum.
There was a time I didn’t want to be an early adopter. Technology confused me and I was comfortable with my old system or method. There have been other times, more recently, that I’ve used technology just because…with no real intent or purpose. I got lost in the maze of playing with the latest, greatest gadget and completely destroyed any sense of productivity.
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Day in and day out, business owners, executives and sales teams struggle to compete for new business. Constantly approaching new companies and consumers begging for a sale.
To assist in the search, marketing departments continual craft witty messages to attract buyers. But more times than not, the sales staff will never sell anything to these folks.
Beaten and depressed, most sales people move onto the next target. The entire time thinking that they lost the sale to their competition down the street. Never realizing that more likely, the prospect never bought from the competitor either.
Finding Your True Competition
B2B Example Scenario: I spent some time after college working as an account manager for a technology reseller. And in the beginning, the sales process was a shaky one. I would find myself with a sinking feeling in my gut every time I heard, “we decided to go another route, but thank you.” It was heart breaking, to say the least.
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