Bright Silver Linings in a Charcoal Sky

Overnight, it seems, all of us must adapt to sudden changes in social and business policies brought on by our friend the coronavirus. How will your company adapt to keep interacting personally with customers? For some, it seems like a bust and for others, it may only require a few adjustments. In the end, we’ll be fine and look back at this experience having gained new wisdom.

Businesses need to reach out to customers and recommend ways of working through the recently imposed social distance rules. For us, it’s to offer remote assistance and write clear messages that included proper tone, style and approach for each individual company, their market and industry. For those clients still accepting onsite meetings, we’re happy to do so according to their social distance and sanitation rules as well as our own.

Seize the Science!

For every action, there is an equal and corresponding reaction. Okay, there’s your science.

Have I lost some business? Yes. What I find amazing is how busy I’ve been in the last few days, working double shifts getting websites updated, e-blast messages out, articles written and social posts managed. A couple of new business projects came in last week and this week. My family and I are in good health and spirits. Praise God!

One of my very wise, and if I may, sage clients hit me between the eyes this week as we were discussing his calm and reassuring response. My first approach to this crisis, he said, “was terrible.” He’s right. I led with trepidation instead of a rational perspective and vision for the future.

We’re Solving This Now

Ignore political and news media-driven negativity completely.

It’s false!

Our country is uniting and mobilizing very well to save people’s lives medically while holding together the foundations of the economy that must support it all! Each day good news emerges out of this crisis. If staying home can refocus some of us toward our spiritual center and to more fervently seek God’s will, how awesome is that?

I’m seeing many examples of individuals offering unconditional support to neighbors and local small businesses. My own client dropped everything to rush a few hundred precious N95 masks to a regional hospital in desperate need of them, and his competition followed suit.

Need Help?

This is a big, generous country and every one of us is a resource for each other. We’ll be fine!

If you need help composing appropriate and relevant messages for your business during these times, free free to email back or contact me personally at 603-345-7223. Our telephones still work fine and we’re always glad to jump on a video chat.

The post Open for Business with Cleaner Vision appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

We can all understand why some executives need to protect themselves from interruption and time wasters. But anyone in sales, which includes most CEOs, should be accessible because the public at large includes all potential customers and other opportunities. A company to remain nameless lost my potential referral this week and a smaller, more approachable competitor will get it.

Big companies that fold ultimately fail for one reason. They become irrelevant to their customers. They can do this many ways. One big way is failing to make 2-way communication easy or deliberately making communication one sided, pissing off customers and potential customers. I see you nodding your head.

We’ve all experienced frustrating web forms that attempt to gather too much information or corral us into areas we don’t want to enter. We’ve also called for service or questions only to the dead end of non-options offered by the auto-assistant.

A percentage of customers may accept this unacceptable kind of relationship but a juicy, potentially lucrative portion of the market will bounce off the web page or hang up as soon as they sense a programmed waste of their time. They will make a beeline for the nearest competitor with a friendly agent ready to help them (buy something) and serve up a great experience!

The accessible business that lets the public speak with real caring people wins every time in the long run.

Aside from utilities and sometimes limited options, I choose to do business only with companies willing to have a relationship with me. I know they primarily want my money, but they are willing to keep earning it by taking time to help customers and potential customers – giving us a good reason to send them new customers.

Here are a few ways to avoid the false efficiency of limited service options and auto-attendant call processing.

• Answer the phone! Always let callers have the option to talk with a person. Make it the first option.
• Require only the minimum needed information on web inquiry forms.
• Respond to voicemail and web inquiries fast! 24 hours max.
• Fire customer-facing employees with bad attitudes. Fill in for them yourself if necessary.
• Hire only smart “people persons” in those jobs.
• Go the extra mile to delight or satisfy every customer for every dollar they spend.
• Don’t worry about the clock when you are providing excellent service. It’s not a zero sum game!
• Manage growth. If new business actually threatens your quality delivery, make that very clear to the prospect. Some might even get on a waiting list if you’re known as the best in the market.
• Be creative with add-ons and freebies that cost you little but are valuable to customers.

If any of the above sound like too much labor or cost, just think about what you already do when presented with vendor choices. Read the list again. The Golden Rule is so amazingly simple, isn’t it?

The post Make things easy for customers and they’ll help you grow! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Twitter is the place where industry thought leaders, celebrities and other news makers break their ideas on the public scene first. It’s the place to chronicle short bursts of thought, leading followers and the online public to a new video, website, landing page, blog post, news article or single idea.

Twitter has absolutely nothing to do with telling a group of followers what you happen to be doing, which is what most people thought it was at first. Sure you can try and use it for that but few will notice or care about your tweets. Twitter is really the driver of breaking news around the world as well as an amazing connector of people with the same or similar interests.

Of course, people tweet whatever they want and Twitter can be a great medium to share inspirational quotes and ideas whenever they occur. I very often use it for that purpose myself. I enjoy scrolling through my Twitter feed now and then when I’m in need of some ideas. There is never a shortage of them springing from the well of minds out there in the cyber world.

The hashtag (#keyword) makes Twitter the most powerful search engine for real-time conversations. When you include a hashtag in your tweet, it will automatically and instantaneously be indexed and bundled into a group of individual tweets using the same hashtag – every single one in the world. Hashtags are created for every big event going on – business, social and political.

Enter the hashtag in the search bar and you will see every single tweet using it in chronological order. Do you see the usefulness of this in connecting like minded people worldwide at any given time, including potential customers?

See the twitter feed here? It’s a snapshot of what’s being tweeted around the world about the recent Consumer Electronics Show #CES2014. Notice the big tech brands making hay over it.

Talking Twitter 101 can be a reminder to us marketers about how important this powerful social and business conversation engine can be for getting our messages noticed on a worldwide scale. The key to using it successfully, like anything else, is how relevant and interesting you can be to your audience.

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This is important and serious business. Social Media – Facebook and Twitter in particular, have a bad rap in some business circles. Here’s why you need to consider some combination of Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, depending on what business you’re in.

The post One salesperson = 2,000 more. Sound good? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

In the early years of my selling career, I was lucky to have a decent smile, a sharp suit and manners instilled by my parents. Just showing up at the right time enabled me to take orders from prospects and customers. It was luck (to me, Providence) because all I really cared about was making the sale so I could earn money. I was driven to be a good salesman to feed not only my family but as much my ego. If I hit it off with a customer, that was nice but it really wasn’t the relationship I was seeking. Notice how many I’s are in this paragraph?

Many years of cold calling, follow up calling, appointment setting, winning and losing taught me some lessons about why, for many years, I was putting the cart before the horse. Customers didn’t care about my success, they cared about their profits and their own careers. Then I started reading about sales and marketing from some masters of the profession. With skepticism I attended more networking events but tried collecting business cards and insisted others take mine and call me the instant they needed my products, promising “competitive prices and great service.” (Ho hum!) Persistence was my only real selling asset for a long time.

Fast forward a decade and a half to my entrepreneurship. I wouldn’t have a business of my own had I not learned to care genuinely for people in my network. Networking events now are fun and rewarding because my focus is on how interesting other businesses are; how fascinating the professional lives of others can be, not to mention their personal and family lives. 

Common ground is fertile ground.

Most people in business love to talk – about their business. The person who actively listens to them is a valuable and attractive person. The person who really listens to them, understands their value and takes action to connect them with someone else who can benefit from their value is a treasured contact. The resulting relationship crosses from connection to friend. People want to help their friends. Business networking is a great way to build your personal brand and it works for you when you show up with the goal of listening to help. People like that. Therefore they will like you. People prefer to do business with people they like.

Do you have a start-up? Is your website delivering results? If not, find out why and what you can do about it – from experts. It’s guaranteed:

Submit Your Startup. Get featured. Get feedback. (Sponsor this newsletter)

The post Isolation is Desolation appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Clients and customers are just like you, me, our friends, neighbors and coworkers. We use social media to stay in touch and be informed about people, groups, organizations and causes that interest us. It’s mostly about the people.

You and I don’t intentionally log on to Facebook to be wooed by a big brand and persuaded to share their self promoting messages with our friends. Neither does your social media audience (if you have one). They are online to socialize and be entertained or informed. Some are there to feed their egos.

Social Media is nothing but a collection of tools that are free for anyone to use. Social Media is not a free advertising medium. It is a good paid advertising opportunity but that’s a topic for another article. We’ll stick to free organic use for today.

Presumptive conventional thinkers continue to treat social media as a place to broadcast without paying for time and space. All they have to show for it is a lack of results and the conclusion that it doesn’t work.

I’m going to let another author take over by way of an article share. Liz Gross writes in Social Media Today about the best current approach to social media use. It’s all about networking, public relations and stakeholder service. READ MORE…

The post Marketing Mistake: Focusing on Social Media appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

This article may start out sounding like a sermon but it is more of an observation.

Hire the best suited people you can find for the various roles in your organization. Pay fair and equitable wages for work performed. Provide the best possible training and working conditions for your employees. Be sensitive to individual employees’ needs and unique backgrounds. Be sure to reward achievement and praise your team often. Freely give some of your profits to the community and the charities you choose to support.

Conserve resources and open spaces for future generations to enjoy. Strive to continually improve the efficiency of your operation. Make smart, economical use of recycled products and innovations in efficiency. Reduce consumption and waste. Clean up after yourself. Carry in, carry out. Leave each place better than you found it.

All of the above are rules of common decency. These are good habits that when practiced have always paid dividends in the short run and the long run.

Conventional wisdom today seems to convey that private business enterprise is inherently bad and its management greedy unless it conforms to a proclaimed standard of “socially responsible” behavior. Consider these key points from a leading socially responsible business advocacy website:

• Businesses can do well while doing good.
• Social responsibility begins locally, with each of us.
• Businesses can be financially successful while bringing out the best in the human spirit, enriching the community and being respectful of the natural environment.

Most successful businesses have already been doing these things for a long time!

The underlying assumption is that these are newly enlightened positions; to do well financially, one previously had to shun these ideas or not care about people or the environment. Can you point to any business in America that has done well by doing bad, being an offensive neighbor, oppressing workers or destroying the environment? If there were such companies, they have long since cleaned up their acts or justifiably gone out of business, rejected by the marketplace.

There are a few major US firms that promote wonderful, sustainability and socially responsible practices here at home but have most of their manufacturing operations in countries with little or no environmental regulations so they can avoid compliance with ours; where workers are paid only a fraction of a fair wage. Are these companies having their cake and eating it too? You be the judge.

I love the convenience of K-Cups for brewing my coffee. Isn’t it ironic that millions (maybe billions now) of those little plastic containers have massively added solid waste to the environment while the company that designed and produces them will have you believe they are singlehandedly saving the planet? Please don’t get me wrong. I’m very brand loyal to that company because they make an excellent product. I don’t personally believe the extra plastic is going to destroy the environment. Obviously, neither do they.

Free markets always correct themselves – they must!

Free market forces include movements by disturbed customers and concerned citizens. It can be a wonderful thing. In an ethical and free society, people won’t tolerate business practices that abuse and pillage workers and resources. They will respond by taking their business elsewhere or demanding punitive responses. Government mandates only make matters more complex, confusing and ultimately worse, especially for small business. Just look at the healthcare debacle.

If you haven’t noticed, American business, especially small business, is heavily taxed and regulated. It’s getting much harder to thrive economically in this formerly business-friendly nation. We should pause to think long and hard before we place even more mandates on businesses to be “socially responsible.” The motivation should come from the head and the heart. Beware the violators. We, the marketplace, are watching!

Look around the country. Witness the vast open spaces, shining cityscapes, suburbs, parks and even strip malls (except in Detroit). Perhaps you’ll notice as I do that in spite of the comparatively high consumption levels in America, we have a clean and beautiful place to call home. There are many millions of good reasons to keep it that way and each one has a name and a tender face.

The post Social Responsibility or Common Sense? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

By Chuck Sink

The default position of almost every corporate communication decision is the watered down, safe, politically correct version of the story. Unfortunately, that’s the bogus version.

The risk of offending one vocal audience member has executives cowering in fear of the social and political mobs. Honesty and truth are hiding in the minds of communicators as they try to offend nobody and please everyone.

Did you know that you are often right and those who disagree with you are often wrong?  Seriously, did you know that your deeply held, principled values are very likely better for our society than the values of those vehemently opposing you? Yes it’s true and you need to speak truth to power as well as to ignoramuses.

If you know something to be true and have the evidence behind you, be forthright and honest in your communications, regardless of whom may be offended. I’m fairly certain I will lose 2, 3 maybe 5 subscribers over this newsletter content. That’s okay with me because I have a very loyal core of readers in this audience. You are the people who make good things happen in my world. Thank you! <3

Trust in business is vital to our economic freedom and vitality. The only people we can really trust are those who are willing to tell us exactly what they believe to be true. Keep in mind that discretion and judgement are important in guiding what needs to be said, to whom and when.

Keep all communications relevant, in proper context and based in love. That way, even your adversaries will hear the ring of truth in what you have to say.

The post Crack a Few Shells to Get Food for Thought appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

By Chuck Sink

In today’s marketing world you need to be a good Content Curator (Curator, huh?)  Curating the content is also known as getting the content so if I use the word “get” instead of “curate,” forgive me. The last real curators I knew worked exclusively for museums.

Give Me an Easy Tool!

A client of mine recently asked her SEO vendor what they use to generate fresh content for the dynamic news feed on their website. What “Curator Plugin” did they use? The answer came back starting this way: “There’s no easy answer on this one…” The vendor went on to explain how they manually get (curate) articles for their news feed. “We all do a lot of reading and we share the best of what we find…” continued the answer.  That answer is one reason I respect this particular vendor so much. They are diligent specialists and very good at what they do.

The post Curate Content that Drives New Business appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

The day before a recent holiday which many love to celebrate, I wanted to ordersomething nice for my wife so I called the store of one of my networking contacts. This store owner and I had developed a typically nice networking relationship. One of the topics we’ve talked about is email marketing, something she knows I do for clients. Early in the day of my call I got an e-blast from her business and it made me pick up the phone to order from her.

I knew the store would be busy just before this holiday and I was doing what new customers do. Call ahead, ask about options and place an order for pick up. I asked for my contact by name and the person who answered was a bit stiff and guarded asking “Is she expecting your call?” My answer was no. “Hold on a minute.”

The owner got on the phone and I stated who I was. “Oh, hi Chuck.” Her tone was rushed. I said. “Hey, like we talked about before, email marketing works! I got your e-blast this morning and it prompted me to call.” Then she said, “Chuck, it’s the day before Valentines Day! We are super busy here! Can you call back another time?” I knew at that point she assumed I was making a sales call to her. I followed with, “Yes it is and I need to order a bouquet for my wife.” Then, realizing I was a customer instead of a salesman the conversation turned to business, became more friendly and there was a happy ending. I bought a couple of nice things for my wife – more than what I set out to buy – and felt good about patronizing a networking contact’s business. But I didn’t forget about the initially cool response to my call.

This experience stuck with me because there’s a pointed lesson here. Treat everyone, including sales reps, with kindness and respect.

Did you know that people who sell for a living buy a lot of stuff just like anyone else? Most business owners are the top salespeople for their firms. And did you know that many sales professionals are excellent referral sources for their prospects as well as their customers?

Most professional salespeople are respectful of their prospects’ time and avoid wasting it. Treat them like the fellow professionals they are. Avoid the assumption they’re always looking to clean out your wallet or waste your time. They might just be your next new customer. They might even refer the biggest sale you ever made – to you!

The post When you ASSume… appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.