The second question to ask in your experience process is what’s the first step that your clients must take to engage in your offering.  The first question?  The first question is, where do you ultimately want your clients to go?

There are a couple of mistakes that businesses make with regards to getting an audience engaged in their offering from the start.

The first problem is that if their product or service is new or changing the rules of what’s been done before, it may not be easily understood right off the bat.  The key is getting people to understand your business in as simple a way possible.

Problem number two is having a tendency to jump the gun with our potential clients.  If we have a client even look at our business we turn into Night at the Roxbury and we are all up on them before they have a chance to breath.  Slow down a little bit.  Let the relationship develop.

The best solution for getting your audience engaged in your loop is to create an entry product that people must consume before they do anything else.  The step must be easy to take and must engage your audience to take further action.  This is the way that you present the second question of taking the first step.

Take problem number one mentioned above.  We work with a financial advocacy firm called The Freedom FastTrack.  Their message is counterintuitive to the traditional financial planning model of investing in a 401k.  Here’s a video they created to help people understand the vision of their business. They illustrate the problem that their audience is facing and demonstrate how they can help.

Your initial product can be free like the video above or it can be a lower priced item.  If you are looking to reduce friction, I would suggest a free product to get people engaged and make sure the product is good.  Free does not equal mediocre.

Your initial product can answer the second question in your experience process in a number of different formats.  DVDs, Audios, an e-mail campaign  or a membership.  You can offer hard copies of your product or keep it all in digital format.

Hopefully you have been thinking about what product or service can serve as the gateway to further sales in your business.  Take some time and jot down some ideas right now.  Figure out where you want to take your audience and then determine the best way to answer the second question in your client experience process.

Most business owners have a hard time with figuring out the nuances of employee management.  Confrontation is especially difficult.  We wait too long to confront, when we do confront we take an adversarial position and then we wonder why we don’t have a good relationship with our employees.

Today’s business tip deals with the 3 steps you must take to properly confront employees of your business.

One of the reasons juggling tasks can be overwhelming is due to the proliferation of online communication tools that we have coming at us on a daily basis.  The proliferation of e-mail through smart phones, social media, etc may have you thinking that technology is more of a curse than a blessing.   What if you could turn this curse into a system that delivers the type of client experience that sets your business apart from the rest?

Technology has made delivering the right client experience easier than ever.  I won’t get into all of the specifics of total experience design, you can read more about experience design here.  What I will do is give you a few handy online tools for automating aspects of the client experience that your business is trying to deliver.

My list consists of the most common areas where I see business owners being inconsistent or working too hard with their experience delivery.

Doing What You Say You Are Going To Do- Clients won’t have a great experience with your company if you can’t deliver on the promises that your business offers.  For small businesses, this starts with the business owner.  A simple tool for helping business owners remember things is Evernote.

Keeping Your Clients In The Loop-  There are a lot of tools to help with this but a simple and inexpensive tool is AWeber.  Aweber is an e-mail service that helps you manage your e-mail database and allows you to send messages to these lists.  When it comes to keeping your clients informed and educating them, this is as easy as it gets.  I still see business owners keeping their lists on a spreadsheet and sending out e-mails manually.

Managing Projects-  Getting your team on the same page and getting projects completed on time can be challenging.  We created a project management system called Akomplish for this very reason.  Now we can share projects with team members, sync activities with our calendars and have a daily snapshot of what needs to be done.

Those are three of the biggest areas that business owners seem to struggle with when it comes to delivering a client experience.  The great news is that there are tools to help you automate what you are doing as you interact with clients and create the experience.

How have you overcome challenges with delivering your client experience?

Execution really comes down to the types of decisions that we make.  There is not a lot that we can control within our businesses.  Decisions however are one of those things that we do have control over.  After spending some time with Brent Bradshaw, owner of the consulting firm 9 Decisions, I realized that the ability to make sound decisions is so critical to fulfilling on promises.

Starting with decisions, here are three ways to help you execute for your clients:

#1- Make Good Decisions-  I recently talked about how bad graphic designers can be about over-promising and under-delivering.  The biggest way they did this was in the estimated time frame that a project would be completed in.  The reason for the estimation issues?  Their estimations had no basis in reality.  They never took the time to actually think about what was realistic.  And that’s just one of the nine decision points.

#2- Have A  Clear Set Of Values-  When you know what you value,  you know when to say “yes” and when to say “no”.  If you lack a clear value set then you tend to say “yes” to everything thus ensuring that you are going to disappoint someone by working on a project that doesn’t match your skills.  Values can be a great filter for decision making.

#3- No Excuses Allowed-  If you give yourself permission to make excuses for underperforming, I promise you, from personal experience, that you will find a reason for why something doesn’t get done. You’ve probably heard the story of Spain’s landing in Mexico and Cortez ordering his men to “burn the ship”.  Whether you believe that story to be true of not the point is that if you give yourself outs, you are more apt to take those outs.  When it comes to excuses, burn the ship.

Creating value for your clients and setting yourself apart from the rest of the crowd can be as easy as executing on what you say you will deliver to the public.  So many businesses struggle to do this.  There’s no reason that your business needs to be one of them.

Understanding the nine decisions to performance

I just touched on a couple of the 9 Decision points to making effective decisions for your business and ultimately improving your performance.

Join us in Salt Lake City on September 15th-17th as we go through the 9 Decision process as well as share how to coach these into your business.

Check it out here.  You and your business will be better for it.  We guarantee it.

Before I get into that.  I recently ran across the 2011 rankings for businesses who have the dubious distinction of being “best” of the worst.  What you will notice in the list is that there are certain industries that seem to be much more prevalent than others.  Think of the new opportunities that EXIST within these industries to create value that the market hasn’t seen.

While you chew on that, here are my five rules for thrilled clients.

Rule #1:  Do What You Say You Will Do-  I owned a branding a design firm for a period of time.  I guess it was just a phase I was going through.  One thing that struck me about graphic designers.  Damn they were unreliable.  Always overpromising and under-delivering.  Excuses, excuses, excuses.  For a graphic designer to be gold, all they need to do is get their work done, on time and they were put up on a pedestal.  This rule is simple enough.

Rule #2: Get To Know Your Client and Allow Them To Know You-  Why is social media so important?  It breaks down the barriers between entities and their clientele.  Even in industries where you may not work with a client/customer on a personal level, there are communication vehicles available for sharing.  Being authentic with the public isn’t just a nice idea, it’s essential for doing business today.  I recently spent time at Jonathan Sprinkles Presentation Boot camp.  He has a great line for up and coming speakers, “The audience won’t hear you until they know you.”  You can apply this principle to your business in general.

Rule #3: Set The Right Context-  This rule is a little harder to get right up front.  This develops through trial and error on working with past clients.  As you work with clients, you start to uncover the holes in your communication process at the beginning of your sales process.  Setting the right context ensures that you are working with the right clients and that they know what to expect from you throughout the use of your product/service.

Rule #4: Understand The Experience You Want To Deliver- The Business Blueprint works in the realm of Total Experience Design (TXD).  The critical starting point when designing experience is, “What is the experience that you want to deliver?”  You don’t have to be the Four Seasons but you should have an understanding of what you want your clients/customers to sense as they work with your business.

Rule #5:  When You Screw Up, Own It-  You are going to screw up.  As much as we business owners want to be a perfect, robotic creature.  We aren’t.  We are living, breathing, fallible humans.  Screwing up isn’t the issue it’s how you react to it and own it.  Jason Fried recently reminded me of this in a recent article in Inc.

The common theme with these five rules?  Communication.  The better you communicate at all points of the client experience as people use your product/service, the more likely that you will build a long lasting, productive relationships with your end users.

What are your rules for building great client relationships?

So now that you know about my failures, I am going to give you seven things to consider before you hire your next contractor.

Component #1: Only Hire People or Firms That You Absolutely Know Will Get The Job Done-  This seems obvious right?  Almost like a no brainer, until you get caught with your pants down and you need immediate help.  Vetting a work relationship takes time but we had a situation at my consulting firm, The Business Blueprint, where we had more work than we could manage.

What did we do about this situation?  We scrambled because we weren’t ready for it.  We hired a couple of people that we thought would do a good job that we sort of knew but knew nothing about professionally.  The end result?  We got killed on those projects.  Over-budget.  Overdue. Client relationship ruined.

In hindsight, we should have turned the work down or set more realistic timelines for the project.  Instead we went down the overly optimistic path to failure.

Component #2- Hire Locally. I know some people have great success with hiring overseas but it has never been that great for us.  Our best vendor relationships are close to our area so that if we absolutely have to meet about something, we can do it quickly.  The moral of this story is that it seems to be much harder to let someone down who you have looked in the eye and made a promise to.

Component #3- Do They Ask Good Questions?- What I have noticed in hiring vendors is that the great ones ask really good questions about the projects that they work on.  Intuitive vendors and contractors see problems around the corner that maybe you don’t anticipate and this is because they are good at what they do.  Be on the lookout for this as you screen possible vendors and contractors for your next project.

Component #4- Do They Have a Full Time Job?- There are a lot of contractors, especially in the creative realm, that moonlight on the side for others.  There is nothing wrong with this but I have noticed that while some of these folks work great, a lot of them have difficulty managing time.  Think about it this way.  When a contractor who has a full time job has to decide between a project at work that pays the bills and your side project, what do you think they are going to choose?

Component #5- Set Firm Expectation-  Set firm expectations for the relationship right up front.  Don’t be loose with your agreements either.  Make sure you have contracts with your contractors.  Also make sure you have outlined all of the other expectations that range from fees to confidentiality.

Component #6- Remember that it’s a two-way street.- A great contractor/vendor relationship is dependent upon building a great relationship.  That relationship is built upon solid communication.  There have been a couple of times for us where a project got started on the wrong foot and it’s usually because we didn’t communicate need effectively.  Don’t make the vendor/contractor have to figure everything out the hard way.

Component #7- Know when to walk away.-  The country philosopher, Kenny Rogers, said this back in the early 80s about gambling.  The same is true for relationships.  My rule of thumb now is that if a vendor or contractor we hire is late on their first project, they are done working with us.  There are a lot of contractors that don’t know how to get a project done on time.  On the flip side, there are a lot of contractors who do.  Don’t settle for mediocre people on your projects.

We have held on to people way too long in the past and we regretted it and at the same time learned a huge lesson about how to handle these situations in the future.

If you have been utilizing a lot of vendors and contractors for your business then you know that it can be a frustrating process to find great help.  But great help is out there for you.  You just have to know what you want and demand that you receive it.

What are some things that you have used to hire great contractors and vendors?  I would love to add to this list.

There are stupid ways to build instant celebrity.  You can participate in a reality show, drink too much, say shit that you shouldn’t and…bam!…you’re famous.  I’m sure you don’t want to go that route so we will skip that for another post.

The instant credibility builder that I am talking about is utilizing case studies.  Case studies have been around forever in the physical product world.  In the physical product world, they are called “free samples”, “test drives” or a “trial period”.  If you work in a service or thought leader business, then case studies are a great alternative for people who need help building credibility.

Are you confident that what you have works?  Great, then prove it.

The first thing you need is some potential clients to do a case study with.  So ask yourself, “Who do I know?”  Identify some people that you feel could benefit from your service.  Ask these people if they will participate, for a reduced rate or even free, in exchange for their specific feedback on the experience.  These potential case study clients also need to be willing to share their results with the public.

Assuming that you deliver on the goods with your potential case study clients, now you have some credibility for your process that didn’t exist.  Now you can demonstrate how your process works and you can back that up with social proof.

Beyond social proof, there are several other benefits to case studies, including testing the assumptions that you have about your product or service. Software companies do this, in the form of beta testing, all the time.

Case studies are simple to set up and easy to execute.  If you are someone who is looking to build some instant credibility, then you need to give case studies a try.  Oh yeah and don’t forget to bring your “A” game.

Yesterday is a canceled check; tomorrow is a promissory note; today is the only cash you have – so spend it wisely.

How many times have you said or heard someone say “I don’t have time…”.  It’s typically used to describe why you or they could not get something done or why we aren’t handling certain things.  Successful people don’t seem to use this phrase as often.  Successful people have time.

Time is one if the greatest excuses of all time.

Yet time is really never the real issue for why people don’t do things.  Time is usually an innocent by-standard, sort of like my two year old daughter who gets blamed for everything that gets broken or drawn on in our house.  She’s just an easy mark and half the time she really is guilty.

You ever hear the phrase “if you want something done, give it to a busy person”.  Why is that?  Busy people know how to manage their time.  Busy people know how to juggle several irons in the fire.

Successful people are busy.  They are making things happen.  They are making sure that they are working on the right things.

If you have ever been to a time management seminar, many of them talk about personal values to start.  Why talk about values?  So that you can get clear on what’s most important.

When’s the last time you really sat down and articulated what’s most important to you?  Not in your mind but on paper?

When you have that clarity, you can then start filtering how you use your time.  We all know that time is finite.  I think it was Jim Rone who said that you can always make more money but you can’t get more time.  Time is a finite currency.

Successful people know this and they manage their time accordingly.  They understand their values.  They set objectives and they run their day based on those objectives.

If you want to be successful in business, you need to manage your time properly and take responsibility for what is going on in your business life.

“I don’t have time” lacks personal responsibility on several levels.  It’s not us who didn’t get the job done, it was time.  If you find yourself having this “lack of time” conversation with yourself on an ongoing basis, you don’t have a time problem.  You have an accountability issue or you are worrying about things that aren’t important.  Either way it’s time to regroup.

How have you been able to address the “I don’t have time” excuse?

Want more time management tips?  Check out our free membership at My Business World.

Our clients want to know that we care about them and what they are trying to accomplish.   Telling them that we care is one thing.  Demonstrating that through our actions is what really sets you apart.

We all need help in delivering value and service to our clients.  One way that we do that at The Business Blueprint is through the use of technology to keep us on task.

Social media is a great relationship builder and has been touted as so.  Social media use is just one piece of the puzzle, however.  Social media can’t manage every facet of your client relationship.

For project management we have used services like Basecamp and Highrise HQ.  My partner in The Business Blueprint, Billy, decided that those services weren’t good enough for him so he and his brother went out a created their own project management software as well as a client CRM for The Business Blueprint’s clients.

The name of the project management software is Akomplish if you want to check it out.

Using software to manage the workflow allows us to stay on top of deadlines and stay in communication with our clients.  We have learned through our own shortcomings with managing clients and projects that if you don’t have a solid system for communication and follow up, you risk upsetting your clients.   Utilizing online tools allows us to do that.

The great thing about most project management and CRM programs is that they are cloud based which allows you to access your account regardless of where you are at.  You just need access to the internet. Now if something unexpected comes up with a project or a client, you can access their information from your smart phone or laptop.

Communication is a huge component to having a successful relationship with your client base.  The better you are at communicating with them, the stronger the relationship that you will have and the more likely that you are to create favorable results for your clients.

For those of you who consider yourself “people persons”, technology doesn’t replace that in your business.  It just works to enhance the connections that you are already good at developing.

If you don’t have an online system for managing your client relationships, I would suggest checking a few out ASAP and find a system that works best for you, your business and most importantly, your clients.   Happy relationship building.

Purpose and passion are sexy topics that seem to really speak to people who are at a transition in their lives where they are feeling unfulfilled and wondering where their life is going.  It was at this type of transition that my own Soul Purpose journey played out.

Like a lot of people, I went through the tools for discovering my talent, asked questions and reflected on my life.

That was where my journey started.  Where the mistake is made is in thinking that knowing what you are good at is the same as knowing how you can utilize those talents.

I will hear people say, “I know my purpose, now why isn’t anything happening?”

Understanding yourself better really is a critical first step and knowing the first step in your Soul Purpose journey is important.  It’s the second step where true knowledge is attained.

The second step revolves around taking action and putting your assumptions, about how you create value, to the test.  Soul Purpose is as much of a science as it is anything else.  It’s putting together a formula or a process and then putting that into play to see how it comes out.

The great thing about doing this is that you can then review your actions during your morning routine and analyze what is working and what isn’t.  My purpose has been refined considerably since I started my journey.  Things I thought I liked, don’t engage me.  Things that I ignored that were staring me in the face I realized were drivers for me.  You never know until you go out and do it.

Realize that during this journey you fail some and you will succeed some.  Analyze each and use that data to move forward with more certainty than you had going into the process.  Each failure and success brings you one step closer to understanding the true path for creating value in the world.

If your Soul Purpose does happen to fall out of the sky and hit you, that’s great.  Just do me a favor, don’t make that plan A.

What are your successes in Soul Purpose discovery?  What are your failures?