Simply Business Coaching

Check out 2009 August | Anthony Robbins Blog

I want you to take a look at: 2009 August | Anthony Robbins Blog. There are two great videos on this page, both of which focus on the mindset needed for success.

If you believe you can't, you won't. Watch these videos to find out how to turn those negative beliefs around.

Grab a coffee (or drink of your choice), enjoy and be inspired!

What you focus on is key to your success

This may seem like a case of the blindingly obvious – but it’s surprising how many business owners spend their time focusing on the wrong things.  They spend hundreds of hours and lots of money studying hard to hone their skills and gain new accreditations. 

Coaches, trainers, therapists and other service professionals do this a lot.  After all, they reason, “My clients will want to work with me because I’m highly qualified.”

Back when I was a newly accredited coach, I was so convinced I needed to get more qualifications that I didn’t really think about how I was going to get clients.  It took a while for me to realise they weren’t going to beat a path to my door, or even know I existed, unless I told them about my business. 

Once I started focusing on marketing, I discovered that clients don’t really care how many letters you have after your name.  All they’re interested in are the results you can help them to get. 

What you really need to focus on is getting really good at marketing!  Unless you know where to find new clients, what to do to get them, and keep on doing what you need to, you won’t have a business – and all your qualifications will count for very little at the job centre.

Even when you have a full client list, don’t stop marketing!  Spend a total of a day each week focusing on getting more business to ensure the appointments in your diary don’t dry up.

Are you being a Lone Ranger?

When there’s only you in your business, finding out if that new idea you just had is as great as you think it is can pose a bit of a problem.  Who do you ask?  Friends and family are likely to be biased in your favour, or they may not fully understand what it is you need to know.

Asking your networking buddies is another possibility, but often you don’t want your idea ‘out there’ before you’re ready to launch it properly – you certainly don’t want someone else pinching it!

This is where joining a Mastermind group can be a good solution.  You’re with a small group of your peers, you all agree to keep discussions confidential, and you probably get the greatest feedback available anywhere!

Not only that, belonging to a Mastermind group will help you move forward on your idea because of the regular meetings or calls, the other members will provide support and encouragement, as well as suggestions for when you get stuck.  You can tap into years of precious business experience and find out what worked for others before taking action yourself.

Of course, you do need to be prepared to take your turn at helping out your fellow group members.  But even that can still be a rich source of inspiration for your own business, as well as being very satisfying on a personal level.

My own Mastermind groups provide all the above, with the added bonus of mentoring from me!  The next group starts on 24 September and runs for 6 weeks.

If you have an idea for your business, get it off the ground quickly by joining us (more details here).

Who are your VIPs?

The other day I was trying to get through to my new email service provider on the phone as there was an irritating problem which I didn’t understand and couldn't fix myself.  I like to think I’m reasonably intelligent but some of this ‘technical’ stuff has me running scared in case I break something!

I should add that this same supplier has been my domain registrar of choice for quite a few years, and I’ve always found them helpful and friendly, so they were my obvious choice when I needed to switch email providers.

After dialling in and selecting the ‘Support’ option I was placed in a queue.  After 5 minutes I gave up and got on with some work.  Then I got an email from one of my newsletter subscribers reminding me of another email related problem.  Now anything that concerns my subscribers is top priority, so I dialled the provider again, selected ‘Support’ and waited to speak to a human being.  And I waited..... and waited ...... After 10 minutes I was getting pretty steamed up and seriously wondering if the support desk had taken the afternoon off!

I hung up and dialled in again, this time selecting the ‘Sales’ option.  Wouldn’t you know it, that line was answered after two rings!   I won’t bore you with the rest of my story, but it got me thinking about how we sometimes treat existing clients and potential clients differently, without realising it.

Great efficiency and helpfulness are often deciding factors for potential clients in the buying process.  These factors can outweigh price objections and see off competitors, even in a crowded marketplace!  But the reality has to live up to the promise and that’s often where the problem lies.....

Are you pushing too hard?

Do you have a time of day when you could cheerfully take a nap for half an hour?  I know I do - for me it’s between 2 and 4 in the afternoon - I really struggle to work and probably should move to a country that has siestas!  And yet I used to push myself every day to keep going, to work through it until I got a ‘second wind’, lasting usually from around 4pm for a few more hours.  I did this for year, until a few weeks ago.

My laptop, which is brilliant in nearly every way, has an annoying habit of overheating if switched on continuously for over 12 hours a day, every day (what a surprise!).  It just dies without any warning which can be particularly embarrassing if I’m on a Skype call with a client or in the middle of my online radio show.  When it dawned on me that I was perhaps expecting too much from it, I began to turn it off for a couple of hours in the afternoon and find myself something else to do while it was ‘resting’.  The results weren’t quite what I was expecting.

At first it felt as though I’d been disconnected from the outside world (no Twitter or emails, and no surfing either). I work from home so I did a few chores, but they didn’t take long.  What should I do for the rest of the time? 

So I got out some good old fashioned pen and paper and started planning a new product system I’d been thinking about for a while.  I'd become so used to typing everything (like this blog post), it was quite relaxing to just think, doodle and mindmap on paper and the time simply flew by.  I couldn’t believe how much I got done in a relatively short time period.  So I did it again the next day, and the day after that.....

Rather than pushing yourself to keep working through your daily energy dips - try relaxing and ‘switching off’ for a while.  You’ll be surprised how much more productive you become!

Do you remember when?

I heard on the radio last week that some ‘old fashioned’ sweets are making a comeback. The news immediately triggered memories of choosing sickly pink ‘shrimps’, blackjacks & fruit salads (always popular because you got lots for your precious pocket money!), and bonbons (guaranteed to dislodge any slightly loose fillings). Ah, nostalgia!

Then I started wondering why we regard the past so fondly? From repeats on TV, retro furnishings and fashions to cookery recipe revivals – we lap them up and reminisce about experiencing them the first time around (showing my age here!). So if they were so great in the first place, why did we abandon them in favour of the latest trends? And why do we now seek to recapture snippets of the past? Here are my thoughts.

Constant changes and improvements have enabled enormous progress to be made, affecting every part of life and business for those of us living in the developed world. While such changes satisfy our natural human desire for variety, they also eat away at another very basic need for security and stability.

Adapting to the speed of innovation is rather like riding a roller-coaster, exhilarating and a bit scary both at the same time! And even though it’s fun to do, we also need to get off the ride and slow down occasionally. But slowing down from life isn’t so easy.

Could it be that reconnecting with a time when the pace of life was more gentle is one way of temporarily switching off the seemingly never-ending rush of change? And could revisiting old favourites be an attempt to regain an element of control and find comfort in what has become an uncertain world?

What do you say?  And how could you use this in your business?

Grow your business with systems

I often get a blank look when I mentioned systems to my clients and students.  But I bet you already use systems, even if you’re not aware you do!

If you have tasks you do regularly that involve the same, or similar, steps, then you probably follow those steps each time if you want to produce the same result. 

Let’s say you want to make a meal.  You decide to cook your favourite recipe for Spaghetti Bolognese.  So that you get the same delicious sauce every time you’ll need to have the same batch of ingredients in the same quantities, and follow the same method.  Having the recipe makes things easy.  You don’t have to wonder what to put in the sauce or how long to cook it for.  You just follow the recipe. That recipe could also be called a system. 

In your business, having systems means you can produce a consistent result (important for quality and efficiency).   Having systems means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you do something (saving you time and energy).  Taking things one stage further will make a tremendous difference to your business.

Writing down the systems and processes you follow will help you to grow your business when you want to delegate certain tasks or employ outside resources, as your business grows.  You’ll be able to pass over the document and know that whoever reads it will be able to follow the system and produce the same result as you.  Just like following a recipe.

Are you an expert yet?

When I first started out as a coach I was positively in awe, and not a little envious, of experienced coaches who had written books and appeared on TV or Radio (or both!).  I thought I could never aspire to their level of expertise.

After a few years I realised that expertise is relative and it’s largely about how you present yourself.  If you tell enough people how good you are at something over and over again, some of them will believe you!  But this is where a lot of people hit a metaphorical brick wall.  They don’t like to brag - indeed we were told as children that it isn’t the ‘done thing’ to boast about how good we are. 

The problem is if you don’t tell people how expert you are at your business; you could be missing out on potential clients. There is another way. 

Producing excellent work and results for your clients means they will sing your praises too and back up your claims of greatness!  But don’t leave things to chance - ask for testimonials (written, audio or even video).  If they don’t respond after a reasonable time, write one for them, email it over with a covering note – they’ll probably be really glad not to have to think up the words, and will give you the go ahead to publish it.

In the eyes of your clients you are already an expert, how much more convincing do you need?

How are you today?

I don’t know about you, but those 4 words are guaranteed to get my back up when uttered by a total stranger on the phone.  In fact, they’d be better off saying “This is a sales call and this is what I’m selling.”  At least that would be genuine and I might not feel the urge to hang up the phone.  Whatever sales training course the ‘how are you today’ people go on, is actually teaching them how to antagonise the very people they want to establish rapport with. 

I’ve been getting even more unsolicited calls than ever recently and, to keep myself amused, I’ve kept a note of all the sales clangers – here are some of them.

 ‘This is just a courtesy call.’ No it isn’t.  What would be courtesy is to ask if this is a good time to talk and if I’m interested in (fill in the blank) before launching into their pitch.

Have you ever noticed that if you interrupt them in full flow, they pause before speaking again?  That’s because they nearly lost the place in their script - and they’re absolutely determined to read the whole darn thing!

Another lesson they’re taught in Sales 101 is to repeat the person’s name a few times, which of course they diligently do, over and over and over again.

And what about the background noise because they’re wearing a headset?  Even if you were interested in listening to their spiel, they’re packed so close together, like battery hens, that all you can hear is their neighbours shouting to try and make themselves heard.

‘We’re contacting businesses in your area.’ Well that makes me feel really special, I don’t think!  At least have the intelligence to find out who you’re calling before you dial.  Nearly every business, large and small, has a web presence nowadays so there’s no excuse for not doing the research.

I’m (usually) polite to sales callers because they have a job to do after all.  But oh how I wish the companies who employ them would teach them better selling techniques!

Have you heard any telesales clangers lately?  Do share!

A lesson in record-keeping from Business Link

Yesterday I received a letter from my local Business Link (a UK government funded business advisory service) inviting me to apply for a free guide to help me start my own business...  excuse me??!

I had to read the letter three times before I believed the evidence in front of me! 

I was so incensed I actually wrote a letter back informing them of a few facts they seemed to have forgotten, namely that

• I have been in business for over 10 years and been registered with Business Link for almost as long.
• I’ve attended many of their events and seminars (and had to register for each one)
• They’ve invited me to to be a speaker for groups of their members several times over the past few years.

Not only that, I’ve even consulted on several occasions with their advisors and filled out numerous forms detailing every aspect of my business.  Unbelievably the letter they sent had no company name so it seemed as if they wanted to erase the past and start a brand new relationship with me.  I wasn’t at all impressed as you might imagine.

I realise that a big operation like Business Link has many thousands of members but that really is no excuse for poor record keeping.  And they’re not alone in being guilty of this.

Just think what would happen in your business if you treated your clients like that?  I’ll bet they wouldn’t be clients for long. 

Being in business is all about building relationships and that means remembering and writing down (or recording on your computer) every little snippet of information about your contacts.  At the very least you’ll want to know what services or products they have already bought or expressed interest in.
 
Your database is your most important business asset and even as it grows, you need to note every point of contact so as to be sure to send out relevant information; something Business Link seem to struggle with.