Being Humble in Business

Business owners that understand this one concept can do extremely well with their own business.

Being humble encompasses a lot of things. Primarily I’m talking about learning the amazing skill of “The customer is always right.”

This has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with a philosophy of business that, if you adhere to it – becomes an amazing tool that pays for itself over and over.

Learning to turn an angry customer into a satisfied customer is a great skill to acquire and it takes practice.

In life – in our relationships with people outside of any business relationship we can have disagreements with people and insist that we are correct. We can argue, fight, whatever we want to do in order to prove our point and we’d be “right” in our minds for doing that in many cases, if the point was important enough.

In business the ONLY important parts are:

1. Give people something of value.
2. Charge them money or some other “currency” for it.

Winning arguments is not the important part.
The big picture is that if you are arguing with your customer and insisting you’re right, there are going to be 2 losers. You, and the customer.

Your customer, because they are arguing – has presumably lost something already. You have the power to make this a win-win or a win-lose.

A win-lose might take two forms.

1. You drop your side of the argument. Just don’t argue anymore. You can’t do what the customer is asking for, something went horribly wrong – it wasn’t your fault or your businesses fault. You can’t help the other person no matter what you do. There’s no sense arguing or talking about it anymore. You “won” and the customer lost, but it’s unavoidable. That’s reality. You “won” because you didn’t lose any cash or inventory or whatever it was. You lost too because you won’t ever see that customer again – but, it’s a cost of doing business. Call it a loss.

2. You decide to bend over backwards and sideways for this customer. You do whatever you can to make it “right”. You go the extra effort and give them an outcome they’re happy with. You do it willingly and in the spirit of “helping”. You don’t need to do it, you just do it anyway. The customer won, and you lost. You lost because you lost money or something else that’s tangible. You won though because that customer will speak better of you, and, if (s)he was in a position of influence among other customers or potential customers you won big.

A lose-lose takes place when you argue with a customer, you don’t back down, and yet you COULD have made it right with a minor or moderate loss to your business. These are the most preventable forms of lose-lose interactions that occur.

Your ego shouldn’t be in front of your business. If you want your business to continue… to thrive, you’ve got to drop the ego and make it right for the customer.

If the customer is being reasonable… like maybe they’re trying to return an item that the warranty ran out on at midnight, but it’s now 9 a.m. and you’re the OEM – (Original Equipment Manufacturer) you can make that right with a minimum of loss. You must. That’s reasonable.

If someone is complaining about also getting the difference between what they paid a week ago and the price the product/service is now – can you do that? Maybe offer them half back if you can’t reason with the person. Give them something that enables them to turn around gracefully and walk out with something. Sometimes what’s reasonable isn’t what the owner of a business thinks. It’s tough to put yourself in a mindset of every customer that doesn’t “get it”, but it will help your business grow and expand over the years as more people here about your fair dealings and fewer arguments.

If the customer is unreasonable – call it a loss and stop arguing. Offer the customer something as a token of your intent – 30% off their next purchase or something to settle them a bit. You can’t give in to every unreasonable person that is dissatisfied with your business. But you can give them something!

Swallow your pride. Eliminate your ego when dealing with customers. Be humble. Practice being humble. Practice making win-wins at your expense. That’s what business is – two sides coming to agreement. You hope it goes smoothly after the sale, and in most cases it will – but, you may have another opportunity to make it “right” later when things go wrong for that customer.

Make it right whenever you can by giving something – even a little, when normally you might not – and your business will grow.

Twitter for Business

One of the newest ways to market your business being talked about a lot is called “Twitter”. This is an online tool at www.twitter.com.

Twitter is like chat – but, it’s much more. When you sign up and get a user name you can start adding people you “follow” to your account. Others can also add you to their list of followers.

When you “tweet” something – or send a text message it will be (can be) seen by your followers. They’ll have to look for it, but they can find it if they’re looking. Likewise if you want to you can see the tweets the people you’re following sent out by going to twitter.com and looking for them in the center column.

What does this have to do with business?

Go to Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com). Type in a keyword for a product or whatever business niche you’re involved in. Say I have a travel agency that specializes in Hawaii travel, I might type in:

“going to hawaii”

When I did this I got 9 results out of 15 for people that tweeted they were going to hawaii. In less than 1 minute I found 9 potential customers for my business.

Using advanced search you can tweak your query to be more specific.

How you handle the next step is up to you. You could try the direct approach and send them a reply by putting the at “@” sign infront of their username followed by a space and your tweet message to them. “Mentions”  are easier to see than general tweets and there is a link to see mentions on the right side of the twitter.com home page when you’re logged in that looks like @username.

I might direct message those 9 Twitter users with a message like,

“Hawaii is the best! Which island will you go to? If I can help you with finding best price for anything just let me know… – John”

You only have 140 characters to work with, which is one of the idiosyncracies of Twitter.

Learn to use Twitter at a high level and find leads daily for whatever business you’re focused on. Twitter has about 7 million people today, that is growing very quickly as more people find out what it can do for them.

Try it!

3 Ways to Grow Your New Jersey Business Online

Growing your business, expanding it’s reach and gaining new customers is one of the prime focuses of all new and established businesses.

The internet has made growing your business a whole different ballgame. We think it’s much easier than it once was. All we had before were word of mouth, business cards, telephone, magazines, newspapers, radio and TV.

Why is the internet better than all of these? On the internet when someone finds your business they’ve arrived because they’re LOOKING FOR YOU. Not true for the other cases, except perhaps word of mouth.

Here are 3 Exceptional Ways to Market Your Business Online:

1. Give Something Away!
Give something away – a free report, a free product, a free sound clip, video, or something else of value and collect the visitor’s email address and name using a tool like Aweber.com has for managing email lists. Start a newsletter or an email campaign to continue to give more to these visitors until they become not just a visitor, but a customer.

2. Leave Great Comments on Related Sites.
Go to http://blogsearch.google.com. Search for keywords related to your business so you can find others doing a business either similar to, or exactly like yours. Once you’re there read some articles and find one or two to comment on. The goal is to make the comment an ad for yourself without sounding like an ad. In the name field use something like

“John | johnswidgets.com”

Don’t forget to fill out the url section as well – and use the http:// before your website address or it won’t register as a valid link.

When you write your comment you want to compliment the writer on some aspect of their article – and suggest another tidbit that helps the audience – something profound if you can muster it! The goal is that when someone reads your comment it adds a lot to the original article and lets readers see you as an expert on the subject. You’ll have visitors come through that link to your site. Some internet marketing experts do this constantly, all day – and have built up amazing levels of business as a result.

The trick is not to fill your comment with links or statements about you – but helpful comments about the topic. The trick is to have the writer approve a comment so it gets published at his/her site.

3. Write More Content
Google indexes website pages and each page has a certain amount of reach in the results. One page might bring 6,000 people per year to your site. More pages = more visitors from Google. Most businesses create pages for their website that cover the basics and no more. If you have 3 products you sell online, should you have 3 pages explaining those products?

No.

You should have 9 pages or more describing them… using the keywords that are important for you to be found in Google for often. Let’s say you’re selling MCSE Training – This is microsoft training for networking professionals.

Here are some pages you could create about MCSE Training:

What is MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) Training?

How can MCSE training improve my options?

What does MCSE training cover?

What is the process for getting certified for MCSE designation?

How long does it typically take to complete MCSE training and test successfully?

Why is online training better than classroom MCSE training?

That’s 6 pages for one topic… and, if you were smart you’d go on finding topics about MCSE training you can write.

Why?

Google assigns value to each page you create. The more pages you have about a subject – the higher your perceived value by Google. If you had 6,000 pages devoted to MCSE training you’d rank VERY high in Google for those pages. You’d probably beat Microsoft on that keyword phrase in a year or so.

When you get into business online you’re competing against everyone that’s already there. If most websites in your niche have 5 pages about a product you’re selling, you should have 10 or more. Google wants to rank pages and sites according to their authority. A site with 100 pages about the topic of MCSE will get more search engine traffic than a site with 5 pages. Usually – yes, there are exceptions.

Suffice it to say, it’s very important to create many web pages for your website – not 5, not 10. A small website should have 30 pages as a minimum, and grow as time passes. Adding fresh content (pages) is important over the life of your site.