Lead. Just say the word at a gathering of your company’s sales and marketing executives and you’re likely to re-open the debate that still sparks heated discussion. What is a lead? Sales executives have one definition. Marketing executives have another. If you’re really brave, try to get the group to agree on a definition for a qualified lead. Good luck!

Regardless of definition, both groups agree that leads - especially good, targeted, qualified leads - are a good thing. So, what is a lead?

At its most basic level, a sales lead is the first stage of the sales process and represents the identity of a person or entity who has expressed an interest in either addressing the underlying business issue which your product or service addresses and/or your specific product or service.

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While that definition is technically accurate, the proper definition of a lead is whatever best suits you and your company. It’s more important that you agree on a definition than the definition itself. Once you agree on the basic meaning of lead, you’ll want to create variations - such as targeted lead or qualified lead.

Let’s use the definition above and add some qualifiers.

A Targeted Lead is a sales lead (as defined above) from a company that resides in your target market. For example, if your solution only delivers significant value for companies between $250M and $5B in revenue and the company expressing an interest has only $5M in sales, then the lead is not a targeted lead.

A Qualified Lead is a sales lead from someone in a targeted account with the proper role who has expressed a well-considered interest in your solution AND acknowledges elements of BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and/or Timetable) with respect to the business issue your solution addresses or your specific products/services. In other words, a qualified lead is from the right person in the right company with the right problem and the desire and ability to evaluate your solution.

In doing research for my next book project, I posted a question to a group of entrepreneurs. The question? “What is the biggest challenge you face in your small business?”

To be frank, I thought I would receive a variety of responses ranging from employee issues to cost control. One challenge is coming out loud and clear:

I don’t have time to work on my business (including marketing and lead generation).

This only confirms what I share in my free e-course - entrepreneurs are wearing too many hats.

The entrepreneurs must take the time to work on their business – to ensure its future, support the current business, and make the team as strong as possible. How do they do that?

There are three easy ways to have more time to work on your business:

1. Understand how you are spending your time. Keep detailed track of your weekly calendar – at least one week. At the end of the week, examine where there are opportunities to streamline your time. Examine the role you are taking in your business. Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited describes entrepreneurs as three people in one: An Entrepreneur, a Manager and a Technician. The majority of entrepreneurial overwhelm comes from a strong focus on task – the “thing” you did when you started the business (e.g. copywriter, plumber, attorney, technology consultant). If your daily focus is on tasks, it is nearly impossible to work on your business.
2. Choose tasks to give up – and do it. Even if you are a solo-entrepreneur, there are tasks that can be assigned to a virtual assistant, freelancer, bookkeeper or a variety of other resources to free up your time. If you have a staff, take a serious look at how they are supporting your business. Are they being used to their greatest potential? Do you have the right people working for you? This exercise can open a bigger question – how is the structure of your business supporting you and your plans for the business? (This level of discovery can benefit from the help of a business coach)
3. “Plan your work and work your plan”. Now that you understand how you are spending your time and have “farmed out” tasks to internal or external resources, have a plan for that “new” time you’ve found. How will you generate new leads? What kind of marketing strategy do you want to implement? How about personal development – how can you work that into your plan to work on your business? Prioritize these activities and schedule them. “I’ll work it in” is the kiss of death – if you don’t commit to these actions (via a non-cancellable appointment with yourself), you know as well as I do that it won’t happen. You’ll find more “tasks” to fill the time.

What are some ways you can work on your business rather than in it? I’d love to hear from you.

I talked in a previous blog posting about the importance utilizing “pull” marketing, which is simply drawing people into your business by ensuring you constantly provide value to them.

Sounds good, but how are you supposed to provide value to your prospects and your clients?

The best way is with content rich material - which is just a fancy term for information-packed material that your prospects want and need.

Some examples are:

* an interesting news article photocopied or scanned and sent to them
* free reports available via your website or links provided in an email
* ezine or newsletter
* access to downloads on your website
* links to interesting studies or articles
* how-to lists, tips & tricks and top 10 lists
* new book titles
* information about applicable workshops or seminars (don’t have to be yours)

There are many, many different ways you can offer valuable information to people. You can help them learn to view you and your company as an important resource for them - someone who shares what they know (and others know) with them.

Providing value also extends to your email marketing. Obviously the purpose of some of your follow-up material will be to pass along information such as sale dates or workshop registration details, etc.

But you should strive to have the majority of your marketing emails to prospective and current customers to be of some value to them and their needs - whether you’re targeting consumers or businesses.

Let me give you a couple examples.

If you are a tax consultant, instead of sending out an email letting people know of the tax return due dates, why not send out an email that lists some of the most-overlooked exemptions (personal or business - depending on your client base) they could claim. You could be seen as someone who cares about making sure people are educated about overlooked money on their taxes.

Or you may run a health and wellness store. You could send out an email to people on your customer list 3 -4 times a year, outlining what nutrients and vitamins people’s bodies most need or lack during specific seasons (ie. vitamin D in winter). You’re not overtly selling them anything, just letting them know some important health information.

Take a look around your business and take note of all the material and information you have (on your shelves, in your filing cabinets, in your head) regarding your company, product or services, and the market you serve.

Quickly jot down 5 ideas or ways that you can make this valuable stuff available to your prospects and your clients and then get it up on your website, put it in an email or ezine, post it on your counter.

Start positioning yourself as someone who is valuable and shares valuable information…then watch your number of leads and customers start climbing.

Goal setting is a critical skill to learn for any business owner. Without knowing where you are going, “any road will get you there,” as said so poetically in Alice in Wonderland. Without a clear understanding of where you are heading, you are almost guaranteed to become side-tracked by opportunities that will pull you off of your true course and original intention.

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There are four simple things that you can do to help you define your goals and stay on track:

1. Commit your goals to paper. Research shows that less than 5% of business owners actually write down their goals. However those who do write out their goals generate up to 10 times the revenue what others do! Now if that’s not incentive to take 30 minutes to write down your goals, I don’t know what is!
2. Ask yourself why you want the goal. Dig deep to find out why it’s important to you. This will help you experience the root of your desire. For example, if your goal is to create an additional income stream of $20,000 in the next six months, make sure you know why that is important. Do you want to take the summer off? Go on vacation? Pay off your car? You can even post a picture of your goal in your office if that is helpful to you. Knowing the essence of why you want to reach a goal is extremely motivating!
3. Next you should list out all of the different things you need to do to in order to reach your goal. For example, I brainstorm each step and write them individually on a post it note and put them all on my wall. From there, I organize the post it notes into categories and/or into a flow chart so I can see what needs to happen first, second and so forth. From there, I put each step into my calendar so I can be assured that if I just accomplish one or two things toward my goal on the assigned day, I will be directly on target to meet my goal.
4. Lastly, if you share your goals with a trusted and supportive resource, you are much more likely to achieve your goals. It takes courage to put yourself out there and tell others what your goals are, particularly if they are financial goals. But if you choose wisely, you’ll find the support to be uplifting and very helpful.

© 2008 Meredith Liepelt, Rich Life Marketing

Meredith Liepelt, President of Rich Life Marketing, publishes Smart Marketing, a free bi-weekly ezine featuring marketing tips, insider secrets and thought provoking articles designed to help the busy female entrepreneur become known as an expert in her field, build trust with clients and prospects and generate more income than ever before. Claim your free subscription today at www.richlifemarketing.com.

I was talking to a client the other day about the difference between push and pull marketing and why you want to use pull marketing.

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Briefly, “push” marketing is as is sounds - you’re pushing the prospect or client into buying your product or service. Your marketing communications are all about what your product and your service can do for them and why they should buy now, purchase now, get it on sale now, talk to you now.

“Pull” marketing is more about drawing people towards your business. Prospects and clients come to you instead of you chasing them. They want to contact you and find out more, get more, buy more.

What makes the difference between each of these two types of marketing comes down to relationship. With push(y) marketing it’s a very one-sided relationship, while pull marketing is a two-way street of sharing information and having communications back and forth.

The means to start and foster a relationship between your small business and your prospects and clients centers around value. When you go out of your way to provide value to people you are viewed with trust, credibility, authenticity and as an expert.

All of these traits are necessary for a prosperous relationship between you and your customers. As well, it will help ensure that people come back again and again - because they’re getting something, not just always giving something (their time, their money, their attention).

The value I’m talking about is not offering 2-for-1 sales and giving away something gimmicky. It’s about becoming a valuable source of information and knowledge who helps prospects and clients be better, feel better, use your products and services better, keep growing and learning, and so on.

Businesses and companies that build their marketing around constantly and consistently providing value to everyone who comes in contact with them will enjoy constant and consistent profitable relationships with their clients and customers.

It’s pretty well that simple!

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Everyone talks about developing a brand. Some people understand immediately the return of having a recognizable brand. Some don’t really believe that concentrating on developing a brand name will really help the business or become an asset in the future. I can assure you of one thing. Developing a brand challenges you to understand what is truly different about your company, what you do and how you do it. Those not interested in building a brand either don’t know what truly makes them different or they are too lazy to find out.

If you want to ensure that the time, work, money, emotions, sacrifices and all else invested in your business ends up becoming a respected and known brand then here’s where you start.

Start from within. Two companies may offer landscaping services and yet be very different. The owner/operator of one may naturally be a very jovial guy, a real people person. He knows his work and does a great job but his approach is more friendly. Perhaps his way of communicating is more neighborly or even familial. The second landscaping company operator could be just as skilled but she is more academic in her approach. She is polite and kind and treats everyone with respect but her natural focus is to educate her customers on what is being done on their properties and she has more of a teacher/student-type relationship with her customers.

See the difference? What you see emerging here are two very different brands. Here are some steps to get you started with identifying how your brand is special and unique. In later posts we’ll look at how you stack up against your competition and what you look like compared to your favorite brands. This three-dimensional perspective is going to map out your brand very clearly.

Now, more about you. Answer these questions to start to define your brand.

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Our product:

1. Is our product or service innovative, just better or completely new?
2. What motivated us to develop it? (frustration with existing product, a vision for a new way of thinking…?)
3. When customers have a good experience with our product or service do we want them to be relieved, completely enthusiastic or feel a sense of safety or comfort, or something else?

Our communication:

1. How do we communicate with our customers? Is it erratic, overly communicative, friendly, jovial, distant, educational?
2. Think of someone in your organization (or life) who you really like to talk to and describe their characteristics (friendly, empathetic, and so on)
3. Make a list of the 3-5 basic rules of good manners that are most important to you? (the golden rule, always returning a call within 24 hours, and so on…)

Lay out the answers to these questions on paper, make particular note of the adjectives you use. Take a step back and see if a personality - or a way of ‘being’ emerges. This is what makes you unique and different from your competition. These are the qualities that will form the foundation of your brand.

In the next “Developing your Brand” post in July we will understand how to learn from your competitors. Your learnings will be juxtaposed with your personality profile that you’ve developed here to help you further refine your unique brand.

It seems as humans, we have a predilection for judging others. Have you noticed yourself as the judge? When someone wears their hair in dreadlocks, you make an assumption about them. When we pass by a homeless person, we make a judgment that they are somehow not worthy. While we feel compassion, we place judgment on them for allowing themselves to reach that point.

We are judges in everything we do. Our children must measure up. Our spouses, our careers, our homes, our neighbors, our friends - all compared to that of others, and always against the measuring up that happens in our mind. Everything is compared and contrasted with everything, compelling us to constantly seek more. Or worse, we stop seeking because we fear we’ll never measure up.

Judging is simply the thought that occurs based upon the story we’ve created as our expectation. After all, all of our expectations were created by our own thoughts. When someone or something doesn’t measure up, it’s often because our expectation was unrealistic. It seems we imagine what something will be, wishing our life away waiting for that something to happen, only to find out when we get there that it is nothing like we expected.

We judge others harshly because we see something in others that we don’t like about ourselves. Our ego leads us to ignore what we see in our own life, because it is painful to do otherwise. It is much easier to transfer that emotion by making a judgment about another.

We measure success in ways that create an insatiable desire for more. Our friends have a boat; we suddenly want a boat. Our children’s friends have the newest gadget; we wait in long lines to get one because we don’t want others to make a judgment about our ability to keep up. We are running in circles to fill spaces with material things. Our homes are full of stuff - stuff we never use - stuff we look upon sadly after years of storage. We wonder how we got to this place of need where we fill the spaces with stuff.

It begins with our judgments. How many times has someone told you a story about someone, and your thought was “If it were me, I’d…” Well, seriously. If it were you, what would you do? How can we possibly know what we would do until we are in the situation ourselves? How can we know the emotions, the thought process, the feelings and actions surrounding a situation that is really no more than someone’s story? How can we judge anything about the person who is wearing shoes in which we haven’t walked?

We make unreasonable judgments about our own life, and our own performance and accomplishments. We set goals, only to feel unworthy when we don’t reach them. It’s not that goal setting is a negative exercise. It’s more that we try to fill the empty spaces with accomplishments, rather than taking a good hard look at what is missing inside of our hearts.

We must begin to look at the value of that space. All of the things that matter are meant to be inside it. We must be careful what we put there.

Coach Charrise

While you were sleeping the world changed. You might not know it for a few months or years, but new technologies were discovered or perfected, and those technologies will be refined into tools that will offer your business further growth and efficiencies. This process is almost as fixed now as sunrise and sunset. Those who deny technology has moved to the forefront of how businesses operate on a daily basis are being eclipsed by those embracing the advantages technology offers. To ensure your busy is the latter and not the former, ask yourself…

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“How can my business benefit from technology?”

The final answer to this question isn’t known until you actually implement a solution, but there are iterative answers that will lead to a positive outcome.

1. Know your business processes. This might seem redundant but it’s common that small companies know how to work the business but don’t know how the business works. It can be a time consuming process to document your procedures, policies, and work flows, but your business must drive technology decisions (not vice versa). Start with a simple outline of how you get from A to Z; that outline will be your guide when selecting the technology right for your business.

1. Prioritize your technology decisions. Your process outline will highlight areas of need for technology: phone systems, network security, e-mail, file sharing, and so on. Your goal with this step is to build a wish list of technology solutions (go crazy, wishes don’t cost anything) from which you can establish a schedule of which solutions you require now, later, and nice-to-have. And in all honesty, budget plays the most significant role in this phase; allot yourself a certain dollar amount and stick to that figure (give or take 10%). This will force you to focus on just that technology which will do the most for your business now and later.

1. Know what you don’t know. Don’t expect to know any technology by reading articles, books, or blogs. Technology is supposed to make your life simpler, but it takes complex technologies, such as advanced VoIP phone systems, to do that. Look in the mirror and tell yourself the truth about your technology aptitude. Now you’re ready to investigate the right solution for your business. This is where you Google to find resources; ask colleagues or competitors or friends for contacts; talk to manufacturer’s of the technology in which you’re interested. You’re looking for those who know the technology like you never will, but who will be able to translate that technology into benefits for your business. This is a leap-of-faith moment, but if the resource you find asks you more about your business than tells you about the solution, you’ve found the right resource. (Remember, business drives technology.)

1. Prepare the troops. Your employees will be the primary user of the phone systems, or any technology solution you implement. Let them in on the process as early as possible (outlining the process stage is about right). The input you’ll receive will be invaluable to determining a final selection. Once you have chosen a tool, put employees in charge of implementation (to a certain extent). You build rapport with the vendor this way that will be invaluable later when you require support or have follow up questions; you also empower employees to make the tool their own – it’s much easier to adjust technology than it is employees’ processes and habits. Your odds of a smooth and success install rise dramatically with a team-based approach.

This is a much abbreviated list of to do items when selecting a technology, but it touches on four vital points that will help ensure you benefit from implemented technologies.

If you are reading this, chances are that you are looking to make a change. Perhaps you are looking for a business to start or perhaps to buy … something to create a better lifestyle, with more opportunity and more money for you.

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For many people it’s the money that drives them. But being passionate about making money can drive you to take on things or get into ventures with only the thought of the money driving your decision.

Is the money important? Absolutely!

Is how you make it important? Yes, if making your life more comfortable is also one of your goals!

This factors in because if you started or bought a business that is capital intensive and/or heavily regulated and competitive you could find out that the business became the worst high-pressure job you ever had.

You do want to choose an industry that is growing but any industry or market that is growing fast is probably also a highly competitive one (and may become increasingly so). Unless you have a lot of money behind you it is better to think tactically than strategically about entering such a market.

The same can be said for starting or buying a business that you are unsuited for.

If you are not a “people” person then you may not want to buy or start a business that calls for you to interact frequently with people. If you are not comfortable in a sales role then do not start or buy a business where your success is tied to your personal sales efforts. One thing to keep in mind here; as a business owner you are always going to have to perform some level of “salesmanship” for your business. So understand this going in so that you are prepared to accept that as part of owning your business.

I tell clients and people that I talk with about starting or buying a business to be methodical in how they approach either one. Don’t jump ship, leave your job and pin all your hopes on something (the business you plan to start or business you buy) trusting that all will be well. Sometimes they aren’t.

I’ve been successful in several businesses (from writing, publishing, manufacturing to business services) but have also had flops. That’s normal experience for someone who’s been an entrepreneur for 26 years. Often you learn more from your failures than you do the successes. Odd but true.

Here’s how to learn from those things that don’t work out and use them to find the right business for you:

1. Take the elements of the things you have tried in the past that you spent time and money in exploring as business opportunities but that did not work out (and do this also for your current job).
2. On a sheet of paper draw a line down the middle of it. On the left at the top of the page write “Bad” and on the right top write “Good”.
3. For each thing you have tried and your job, list out the bad and the good aspects of it; the bad will constitute the determinants of why it did not work out for you or why it did not make you happy or fill you with any passion. The good are the positive elements that helped offset the bad but did not carry enough weight to make it work for you.
4. Once you have done that look at what you’ve written. Take a new sheet of paper and transfer all the good things to that page. This becomes a profile of the things that were positive that you need to look for in a business or opportunity that may present the most attractive and suitable scenario for you.
5. Now with your “Good” profile in front of you, take the market or industry that interests you, think about how you can utilize those good aspects in a business of your own serving that specific market or industry. Make notes about the different businesses that you can start or buy that have those good aspects to them. Those should be your focus.
6. Once you’ve done that calculate what I call your Personal Economic Burden (all your monthly personal expenses that you need to pay to live: mortgage, rent, insurance, food, utilities, car payments, etc.). Total that up and add 20% to it (10% for miscellaneous and at least 10% for savings). Take that total amount multiply by 12 and divide by 365. That is the daily amount your business must generate for you to be “comfortable”. We’ll call that the “Comfort Number”. That’s not making you rich but if you achieve it; it will give you a solid foundation to build on so that you can make even more money.
7. When you have that daily number and with it in mind, review your notes from number 5 above and research to determine if you feel that business can generate what you need to meet your Comfort Number. If so, then that is a business you should focus on starting or in finding to buy.

Take some time to think things through – never jump blindly or go off on a path that you’re not reasonably sure is going to lead you to where you want to go. The above steps will help you.

Good luck and best fortune to you (and fortune favors the prepared)!

Dennis Lowery
Adducent, Inc.