Nance Rosen Blog

Only two types of people matter when it comes to connecting yourself or your business: 1) your ideal prospects and 2) your referring sources.

The trick that turns all business development into success is to know exactly whom you need to connect with in order to maximize your time and income.

1. Prospects

This includes anyone who has a need and a budget you can serve.  It sounds simple, but actually you may have more requirements than prospects do. We always think that we’re being judged when it comes to connecting and competing for business. In fact, you have a lot of thinking to do before you begin to develop business relationships, or re-start your business development campaign.

You might have several constraints that narrow down who would be your ideal prospect. For example, given your overhead and business expenses you may be able to work only with clients who have a budget of a certain size. Conversely some clients may be too large for you to successfully serve.  To manage large accounts, you might need administrative support you currently don’t have, or partners with whom you haven’t yet connected.

There might be geography involved as well. For example, you might not want to travel farther than a 50-mile radius from your location. While it’s fashionable to say no one needs to physically meet with anyone to do business with them: actually meeting may be a condition of your getting the first deal at least. For example, to provide a proposal  you might first need to walk a manufacturing floor, see the condition of a property or simply meet the staff you’d be evaluating or interfacing with. Sometimes, to really see if you’re with a real, trustworthy and motivated prospect, you simply need a face-to-face meeting before it makes sense to start a relationship.

So spend a lot of time developing the profiles of your ideal prospects. Exactly what are their needs, ranges of budget, demands on your time and attention, typical deadlines, types of deliverables and even their corporate cultures and communication styles? Decide what clients you serve best, and you can maximize your time and resources in business development. Of course, this works for job hunting and career changes as well.

2. Referring Sources

This includes anyone who knows anyone with a need and a budget you can serve. The surprising thing is most everyone you meet is a potential referring source. That’s because almost everyone knows someone who would be a perfect client for you, if you are able to articulate who is the perfect client for you. You only get referrals when you are able to crisply tell other people about the ideal clients you serve. Then add how you uniquely, competently and with great care serve these people and businesses.

The best suspects for giving you referrals are your current clients, your past clients or employers, and your own professional consultants including your accountant, bookkeeper, attorney, business coach and the like.

Overlook these people at your own peril

The most overlooked referral sources are the service people you patronize. For example, consider the person who cuts your hair. Almost everyone gets a haircut. It’s likely your ideal prospects are getting their haircuts from a professional hairstylist, including yours. Therefore, it’s likely your hairstylist has several ideal prospects for you. They are the people sitting in the same chair that you do, just getting their haircut at a different time or a different day.

Ask yourself: am I talking about the right thing to people who know me?

Here’s the other questions to ask yourself. Does everyone who know me, know exactly the type of client I serve well and that I want more of? Can my referring sources easily tell other people what I do and how I do it? Have I shared some simple to remember – and easy to repeat – success stories? Do I regularly speak in positive terms about my business and my business development goals? Would I be top of mind when my referring sources meet with people – or sit next to them at a holiday dinner?

Take advantage of holiday “down time”

Take one day at least to profile whom you want to do business with. Identify all the details about your ideal prospects. Use adjectives and descriptive phrases that make it easy for you and other people to recognize them. It’s kind of like creating the composite sketch that professional illustrators make for police when they are looking for a suspect and need help from the community to recognize and locate that person.

Once you know exactly what type of person or company you want to meet, make a list of everyone who can help you find these ideal prospects. Then, speak up! Use the gratitude attitude to make it not so “pitchy.”

Even when it’s not Thanksgiving, give thanks

Thank your referring sources, every time you bring up the topic of your business development goals. Here the trick: thank them for helping you – BEFORE they help you. That creates a need to in them to have earned your gratitude. And, what’s a better attitude than gratitude for all the new business you’ll be creating?

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To reach a department that is closed and doesn’t take voicemail, press 1.

To be re-routed to the wrong department, press 2.

For static over bad music while Google Voice screens your call and then drops it, just wait 10 seconds.

To get the message that you and your call don’t mean much, just leave a message at the beep.

Is that how it feels to do business with you? That’s hard work.

How hard? Like getting through the defensive line with its gargantuan force of weight crushing your attempt to move the ball forward. Like being the kicker who gets roughed up, after waiting through the time out and thinking about it.

Not into football? Okay, how about being deep underwater in scuba gear and having your air hose crimped. Like the way your shoulder feels when the butt of a rifle strikes it as the firearm discharges.

You get it. It is painful that people want to reach you to do business with you, and can’t do that easily.

Even vendors and sales representatives – who might have the one thing you can purchase to change the economics of your business for the better, deserve better.

Because my fields of expertise are communication and personal branding: I’m all about having people answer your phone. That’s right: people! A human voice. One that understands not only the language of your callers, but the culture as well. At least, the majority of them.

For right around the same price as two lattes a week, you could be in business. I mean, really in business. That means customers and prospects calling you on the phone, and your making money because they reached a person and not a machine. Could you go without lattes for a month, if that were the difference between getting clients or not?

When my reception staff can’t handle the calls coming into my office, we have an answering bureau that picks up the line – right here in Southern California. I’ve met most of the people at the bureau and they do their best, which is mostly to be human. They can text me, email me and even direct connect me (sometimes they do all three at my instruction).

Of course, because they are human, they are not perfect. But I bet on them because real people are a better bet than the losing game of voicemail. (BTW, it’s only when you really know me that you get my voicemail, but that’s a critical part of communications strategy for another day).

Personal brands, consider how far you are willing to go to have people remember you. When it really matters, get a vanity number – and one that is toll-free. Ask yourself: does it really matter that people remember me? Yes, it does.

Buy a phone number that makes a statement about your personal brand. It’s one of those branding touch points that’s also really inexpensive, but makes the statement that you are serious about being personal brand.

Go ahead and try it.

If you want to hear a sample of the sound of real voices – and maybe you want to discuss coaching – either becoming a coach or getting coached on personal branding: I’m happy to chat with you. A human being will take your message if you don’t reach me directly. Urgent? Let them know, they’ll get to me pronto.

As I say to my clients, the media and my audiences: just call 1-888-GO-NANCE.

What will you say about reaching you?

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One of lingering fallacies about business is believing that Jim Collins is right. As the bestselling researcher-author of Good to Great and now, Great by Choice, Collins is pretty good at retrospectively interpreting what worked in the past for some businesses. But he’s not great at forecasting how they’ll do when the research project is complete and the book is published.

Turns out, if you follow the companies Collins called winners, they are now: not so much. Turns out Collins is a lot like the uncle you’ll soon sit next to at a holiday dinner. The one who tells you how great General Motors was before its CEO Robert McNamara started the Vietnam war.

Okay, that’s harsh. But, it’s the truth. Actually, that’s a good measure when judging whether something important is true. The truth probably hurts, or at least causes you to wince. If someone tells you the so-called truth, and your cheeks are blushing with how wonderful you are? It’s not the truth and it’s not going to help you succeed in this chaotic environment.

What does work in helping you predict the future, and more importantly deliver the greatest odds of succeeding in the nearly incomprehensible rush of problems and opportunities you face?

Your attitude is what really matters.

Not your skill set. Not your network. Not the number of business books you suck back and arm yourself with – or at least buy to fill up your Kindle or iPad.

I had a look back at a course from Dr. Moshe Rubinstein, the father of problem-solving, productivity and leveraging the creative forces that is your brain. Without trying to express how profoundly grateful I am to have found a moving box that included some of my coursework from the then UCLA Graduate School of Management (now Anderson), I will share what Rubinstein knew a long time ago.

The 9 attitudes that solve any business problem

1. View a problem as a challenge, an opportunity for new experiences to expand your problem-solving repertoire.
2. Focus on the present and future obstacles, and deal with those you can do something about. When obstacles appear to be insurmountable: question the goal, and if necessary, modify it.
3. Pay attention to the distinction among facts, opinions and judgments. First get the facts, then interpret them. Don’t judge the facts before you do that analysis.
4. Listen to experts, authorities and others you trust as if you will be required to take an exam on what they are saying. Don’t refute or judge what they say when they say it. Ask questions if you don’t understand, but don’t argue.
5. Use reason not pride.  You will be tempted to distort the facts if you have to manage your ego rather than manage the problem-solving process.
6. Don’t solve the problem too soon. Take every minute you can to gather and process information from sources. Don’t take more time than you can afford, but do not begin your evaluation and selection of a solution prematurely.
7. Focus your attention on surmountable obstacles that block the way to a solution, any solution. Identify what can’t be overcome, and if a path still exists around those, then pick off the ones that remain.
8. Expect that implementation of the solution will be harder than coming to it. You’ll undoubtedly need other people to implement. Educate them about the benefits of a solution, before you tell them what they will need to do.
9. Believe you have control, because then you will. Even if you are wrong in fact, the perception that you have control will promote your ability to perform. Ask yourself if you have a choice, and if you answer honestly, you almost always realize that you do. Choice is control.

So no hedgehogs or foxes needed now or in the future, sorry Jim.

What Dr. Rubinstein documented about the power of communication? It is the greatest formula anyone ever devised about how you can get exactly what you want and more: from yourself and others.

Change your attitude; change your life.

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As if you ordinarily invite us to see the real you, Halloween gave you the proper opportunity to pretend. That is pretend to try and fool us with your mask or costume.

At work I saw witches who believe they were wearing clothes becoming someone with a worse attitude. Ghosts who believe we don’t know they regularly hide from hard work. And, some French style maids who appeared in slightly more scanty clothes, basically wearing the same underwear that artificially pushes them in, up and out on the average Monday.

In other words, you’re not really fooling us the rest of the year. It’s just that Halloween gives you a little more permission to reveal yourself by pretending you are someone or something else.

The same is true on social media. You try to fool us, but we eventually know what’s really going on in your life.

On Facebook, I’ve begun a experiment that is pretty telling. Outside of my true friends, colleagues and former students, I am staying “friends” with people I really don’t know. I have about 500 stranger-friends, kind of like sister-wives.

As a trained sociologist now in business, I don’t have a better opportunity to watch a worldwide panorama of personal thoughts, societal mores and of course, what people photograph before they eat.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the same thing, but fundamentally I “see” people doing these things of social media:

1. Love
2. Hate
3. Amuse themselves

The current social media formats allow such a simple typology, because there’s so little subtly in any post, or more properly put: so few characters allowed.

Look at your Facebook. You see mostly short bursts of:

1. Love: Anything quoting Mother Teresa
2. Hate: Anything quoting Herman Cain or Ron Paul about immigrants, the unemployed or poor people
3. Amusing: snide truisms like “the grass is greener where you water it.”

No matter what anyone of us tries to be, social media will eventually reveal us for whom we really are. The same is true for any other communication over time.

A very close friend who’s a psychiatric nurse had a date with someone who looked like a legitimate prospect for the dreaded/longed for long-term relationship. When he didn’t call her again, she moaned, “How could he not like me? I was much better than I really am!”

The spooky thing is, we will eventually see you for who you are. Consider being you earlier and more often.

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It was a cry. It was a verb.

Now it is simply a statement of fact. It is a noun.

Free Libyan people.

This is what happens when people rise up against the worst odds. It’s people who make nations come together, even the ones that don’t like each other.

Miracles happen.

Cancer will be cured.

Fresh water will be man-made, cheaply.

Power will be supplied by something plentiful and inexpensive.

And, if someone doesn’t corner the market on that, then the water and power will raise everyone’s boat.

Wars will cease.

Good healthcare will raise the quality of everyone’s lives.

People who applaud the death of rights to others will be scorned.

The one percent won’t be able to pay for a voice louder than they are due, which is one percent of the sound and fury that 6 billion plus people make.

Children’s birthday parties won’t mean ponies for some and another day of hunger for others.

Access to the cloud will be a right.

What does this have to do with business and jobs?

The last four people I hired all cried during their job interviews.  That kind of burst out crying, the kind that comes when you don’t expect to get what you need, much less what you deserve. Some people I haven’t been able to hire cried too, when I said let me see who I can refer you to, because you are surely a good fit for another company.

The willful indifference paid to regular people and their families is destroying the fragile patina of sanity that maintains a civilization.

You and I know that all the miracles we need to be cancer free, war free, poverty free, and every other kind of good free can only come when people are paid to think and create. When managers have great administrative staff, enough colleagues to really get the job done, and real people who answer phones or otherwise represent companies in all the small ways that make us want to do business rather than loathe trying to order a product or get service.

People who work in markets: real markets that sell food and the small farmers who grow food, should be at least as important as people who speculate in markets like oil and gold that they never touch.

So why are we letting individuals who are all about firing and not hiring control what happens in business and thus on the planet?

Why are we giving up the right to care and share?

How did we elect or let rule the despots who are hoarding or stonewalling financial resources that should be used to put regular people back to work doing great things that only people can do?

Investments don’t cure cancer. Off shore accounts don’t buy toasters. Polluting one area of the world to make a battery one dime cheaper isn’t creating consumers able to purchase one.

It’s time to join forces with like-minded people, make a drum circle or a phone tree or however it is you feel like you can organize to be heard.  Collect voices to create a greater impact for your cause. If you are a #OWS, then tell the rest of us what you need to keep dry or warm or just going.

Take some small action every day. Call your bank and say if you charge me and people like me $5 to use our debit cards, then loan the gargantuan profits to small businesses that can hire us.

My personal brand leverages the facts that I am a capitalist and a business owner.  That same brand platform demands I say aloud: I don’t want companies to make record profits and still have people cry in my conference room because they got a job.

We helped free Libyan people against all odds after decades of enslavement. Now is the time to free us all to contribute and prosper.

Make jobs not war on the working class.

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“Perfect for Wedding Photographers” is the quote that killed my interest in Animoto Pro. My creative director had sent me a note about Animoto a couple of weeks back. I next saw it advertised on the Mashable Tech site last Sunday night, because I was trying to figure out how to teach Siri to tweet without my lisp on the new iPhone 4S.

Of course I should have been sleeping, because I was wrung dry from teaching a solid two days at my personal branding bootcamp for UCLA extension. But, what does a social media expert do without any time off? Look for something new and difficult to do on social media, of course. Hence my near delirious consideration of hacking my phone or engaging in some off label workaround to save time spitting out 140 characters or less as often as possible.

The ad for Animoto Pro reminded me of so many ways that small businesses kill off their own brands. That is, they take – or make – any testimonials to add credibility in a naive effort attract new buyers.

Most people don’t know this: not all good feedback is worth announcing in an ad, or on your website, or even accepting for your LinkedIn profile. That’s true even when the feedback contains golden words like “perfect.”

Your business or high dollar consumer prospects aren’t looking for just any supplier. They are looking for trustworthy, high value, low risk providers. Hence, who’s doing the recommending matters, even though “opinion” sites try to say it ain’t so.

“It’s all about personal sources” is the mantra that Yelp, Angies List, and the other faux-neighbor sites are using to successfully upsell ad programs to local businesses. These sites aggregate supposedly highly influential ratings and comments. I think the underlying principle of relying on what neighbor-strangers bother to type in is a shaky way to make your consumer choices much less bigger business ones. It may just be my luck, but I’ve gotten sick on Chinese food and now work on a bowed hardwood floor, because I used those recommendations.

Nonetheless, we marketers continue to espouse that personal sources, or barring that possibility, at least human sources lead prospects to your door or landing page. Hence the cash machines that are social media sites, review sites, or other comment aggregators.

That said, “perfect” recommendations from a less than perfect source is bound to #epicfail when your target buyers are from a larger, better class.

The idea that a wedding photographer, arguably the least demanding, critical and professional of nearly everyone who wields a camera for pay, thinks Animoto Pro is perfect? Perhaps that’s meant to impress high school yearbook photographers? Or the guy who sells soccer photos on picture day?

The recommendation does not impress media and marketing professionals, because for us, photography is a part of strategic campaigns, not a memorial of love for those who have only just begun, or grandparents proudly wearing that big button featuring their favorite five year old.

I know I am unfairly picking on Animoto Pro, its advertising agency, and it media buying firm. That’s the problem with being in business; we have to spend money heartlessly. That would also be known as responsibly.

And before you jump on the comments to say that wedding photographers have a tough job and are often elite professionals, may I call your attention to Adam Sandler’s career. It wasn’t for the effect of high art and drama that he starred in The Wedding Singer. We wouldn’t have laughed if that movie were a biopic of Pavarotti, famously not a wedding singer.

Beware of kind words and use them judiciously.

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The same way it’s easy to hate the homecoming queen or class president in high school, it’s easy to resent the business owner who succeeds at what other people see as a Sisyphus-like task. Taking in the reasons why someone else succeeds is like trying to swallow a bitter pill. Are some people just born to do what others see as impossible?  Is it nature or nurture that separates the employee from entrepreneur?

A successful small business starts with a dream, but we all have dreams, don’t we? I worked with a young man who created LinkedIn. Well, not exactly LinkedIn, just the concept. Jack drew it out on a white board for me, drawing circles and lines to indicate all the access to experts and others we had if we leveraged the connections of the people we knew.

I had built a small advertising agency and Jack was my first employee. We had a new client who came up with a fancy customized cat box to sell in upscale pet boutiques. At the time Jack was dating a woman whose father is a veterinarian. Jack point was this. We were just one separation from the expert opinion we needed to weigh in on the finer points of ideal living spaces for cats (much less feline hygiene requirements).

He then expanded his case to show that if we put all our friends, family and business contacts into play, we were less than six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon much less anyone else we might ever want to know for business.

On that whiteboard Jack had sketched out everything he needed to create LinkedIn. It was a perfect business idea, except for the three key factors that would make him a successful entrepreneur.

1. Tremendous will

This isn’t the same as optimism. It is the ability to remain undaunted and intrepid, even when it appears to be impossible to start or continue to build on your idea. Just like Olympic athlete Kerri Strug nails a gold medal vault for herself and team USA in 1996, sticking the landing on a busted foot, the best business owners play hurt. They play tired, they play sick, they play worried and they play big with what could be their last dollar.

2. Acceptance of reality

You might think a business owner has to overlook reality in order to beat the odds. No. It is their understanding of the brutal truth that allows business owners to move around obstacles, rather than continue to crash into them. Strug landed her gold medal-winning vault on one foot, because that was the one foot still working.

3. Commitment to a “change or die” philosophy

This attribute causes the most conflict. Almost everyone in an organization hates change except the successful business owner. Typically employees resist when it’s time to move along to a new product, new market, new delivery mechanism, new vendors or new anything.  Painful but true, successful small business owners cut anyone who stands in the way of survival or progress.

My former co-worker Jack is now employed in a staff position by a multi-national energy company, where he enjoys the work and loves his free time. I think he twinges a little when the subject of LinkedIn comes up, but he doesn’t regret what he could have done, because he never pursued the idea past our whiteboard session.

The facts about success in a small business are these. Genius doesn’t get you anything but a starting place for hard work. Freedom to do your own thing probably comes when you’ve sold out or retired. The excitement of launch becomes a fond memory and eating cold take-out stops being fun.

Here’s what remains as the conditions of success.

• The inevitable pain of fortitude on a rocky road.
• The uneasy embrace of the worst scenarios in the least favorable times.
• The misery of losing friends who were once colleagues but had to be cut because they couldn’t live in a state of constant change.

So, don’t envy successful business owners. The same thing goes for homecoming queens, senior class presidents or gold medal winners. Even with natural good looks, physical skill or genius, my experience is these titles are earned.

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Jason Padilla had less than one hour of sleep for an entire week. Along with the other harsh conditions and brutal physical training that are routine for hell week after hell week during Navy SEAL training, Padilla earned his trident in a graduating class of 20, a significant cut from the 223 US military candidates who started with him during SEAL training.

Proving that the US is the home of the free and the brave, Jason exited his proud military service and launched SEALS on Security, a small business leveraging the rare combination of honed intelligence skills and extraordinary physical abilities he and his cadre of former SEALS, FBI Special Agents and Army Special Forces relied on to complete missions and stay alive under fire.

According to the Sage Business Index, small business owners appreciate what’s in their favor, even in this economy. Particularly, most entrepreneurs know there’s not another place better than America when it comes to the spirit of risk-taking. Padilla personifies how to do it right when launching a new small business. His personal brand is now defined by what he has done professionally and whom he is personally, which is how he chose his profession in the first place.

Like the best authors who stick to writing what they know, the best entrepreneurs launch ventures in fields they know really well. Padilla now protects business executives and their families, at work and at home, with the same strategic approach he used to protect dignitaries and diplomats in hostile environments overseas.

Given that most executives go global, even if it’s just for a vacation, it helps that SEALS on Security provides travel planning, too. And, with an eye for contingency planning, squad members are also trained mediators and emergency medical technicians.

A lot of business coaches will tell you to follow your passion. But that only works if you are also really good at what you really love, and you have the ability to plan out your funding, marketing, operational and human resource requirements.

Of course, protecting lives is a different business than opening a knitting store or providing web design services. But the approach to business planning isn’t all that dissimilar. Padilla looked at his competition before deciding on his strategy. Particularly, he saw how other firms in his sector hired personnel. Per the Sage study, access to a qualified workforce is another benefit that US firms enjoy.

In Padilla’s case, he means no disrespect when he points out that firms he competes with in his industry often hire retired police officers.  “Statistically, police officers, who comprise a large portion of other companies’ security teams, have a 10% shooting accuracy. It is hard to fault them, however, when you realize they only go through a six-month academy and they are rarely given opportunities to brush up on their shooting skills,” he says. When you can sum up your competition as lacking fundamental expertise in what is perhaps the single most important part of your offering, you are probably in the right venture.

While not every small business demands as much as SEALS on Security does from its CEO or employees, it still takes some heroics to depend only on yourself to choose the right business and decide on the right tactics for implementation. Even with the best planning, you really won’t know if you’ve done the right thing until you’ve pulled the trigger and seen if you have what it takes to run a successful small business.

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