Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Are You Taking Advantage of Your Uniqueness in Your Business?
When my kids were young, I had to chuckle at their desire to conform to being different. I can't tell you how many times I've heard kids say, "I'm weird," as a badge of honor.

As kids, we aspire to be unique. But when we enter the business world, we tend to lose that.

We feel that if we don't fit in to the professional "norm" we'll fall behind everybody else. So our promotion becomes stilted and formal. We try to impress them with how "professional" we are.

It's crazy! Will people look at our formal, "businesslike" presentations and say, "Oooh! That person must be really smart! I want to do business with them!"

Of course not! But, having that nagging inner fear that if people really see us in our business, they'll reject us, we try to appear as something we mistakenly believe will impress others.

Someone told me once of a Realtor who has taken the opposite approach. She calls herself "The Pet Lover's Realtor."

Every picture of herself in her advertising shows her with her dog. She advertises in local pet magazines and newsletters. She takes out ads in the PET section of of her newspaper's classified section. She's in the local parenting magazines, always with her dog.

Guess which Realtor is the biggest seller in that city. That's right: "The Pet Lover's Realtor."

Rather than hiding behind some mask of professionalism, she embraces who she is, what she loves. And like-minded people flock to her to do business with her.

Take some time to look at yourself, who you are, what makes you unique. Look for ways to use it in your marketing. Let people see the real person behind the business. You might be surprised what it can do.

Labels: entrepreneurship, marketing, mindset

The Way to Put Obstacles Out of Sight
Here's a favorite quote from Henry Ford:

"Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal"

When I was fresh out of college, I took a job selling encyclopedias to make a little money before starting grad school. I was not a smashing success.

Each morning I would come into the main office and get a lot of laughs as I related my latest horror stories of the previous day's disastrous sales calls. Eventually, though, the other sales reps stopped laughing.

Eventually, they recognized that I was subconsciously starting to look for obstacles in my sales calls because I found it easier to get positive social reinforcement (laughter) for my failures than it was to improve my sales skills enough to get positive monetary reinforcement (sales).

When I lost focus on my goals, all I could see were the obstacles.

That's the lesson I see in Henry Ford's quote. And I see that situation a lot in many new business owners.

It's easy to get caught up in obstacles when you don't focus clearly on your goal. It's easy to complain about what stands in your way and believe that if it weren't for those obstacles, you'd have a clear path to your goals.

But those obstacles are like billboards alongside the road. If you focus on the road, the road will eventually take you past them. If you focus on them, you'll lose sight of the road and eventually run right off of it.

That's the way your obstacles stop you -- when you pay attention to THEM instead of the road to your destination. You can probably get sympathy from friends and family when you complain of those obstacles, but is sympathy really what you started your endeavor to achieve?

Keep focusing on your goals, not the obstacles. The obstacles are only the billboards along the way.
Jeff

Labels: inspirational quotes