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Article by, Brent Virkus – Senior Managing Director of Find the Capital You’re at an industry event mulling over which cheese will go best with which crackers at the buffet. The person next to you introduces himself. You introduce yourself. Then he says: “So tell me, what do you do?” The challenge is to communicate the key elements of your value. When we work with our clients to teach them how to sell, we tend to focus on helping them learn the right things to do. However, even those on the right track can get derailed by common mistakes. It’s often just as helpful to know what not to do as it is to know what to do. Here, then, are the most common mistakes we see people making when trying to answer the question, “What do you do?” and ideas for how to avoid them. Mistake #1: Talking, but not saying anything “Our solutions help Fortune 500 and mid-size companies succeed. Our unique blend of people, process, and technology allows us to build and deliver value over-and-above our competitors. One unique thing about us is…” Even if it’s well-practiced and smoothly delivered, a cliché that doesn’t communicate anything is still a cliché that doesn’t communicate anything. Make sure you avoid sounding like a buzzword bingo robot and focus on adding value to the conversation. Building rapport is a major component of a successful sales conversation. Starting off with a cliché, however, won’t help build rapport – it’s more off-putting than endearing. Mistake #2: Going on too long at first “I read my first book on tax shelters in junior high school and was hooked. Immediately, I got a job at a tax accounting firm and started doing research in international tax. After junior high, I got another job at an accounting firm and got my first introduction to nonprofit auditing. Let me tell you about some of the projects I worked on in high school and their results…” In any sales process you have to do three things if you want to communicate your full value: resonate, differentiate, and substantiate. Indeed, you have to resonate on two levels, differentiate on two levels, and substantiate on four. If you’ve...
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Article by, Morgan Housel Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN ) was once the poster child of what happens when excitement about a company detaches from reality. The headlines “Amazon founder named TIME magazine’s Person of the Year,” and “Analysts Fear Amazon Is Going Bankrupt” appeared within 14 months of each other around the year 2000. Short of fraud, there little precedent for this in business history. But 13 years later, Amazon is thriving. It is dominating, in fact, including in lines of business having little to do with its original undertaking of selling books. Shares now trade for three times what they did at the peak of the dot-com bubble. Thank Amazon’s quirky CEO, Jeff Bezos, for this success. He created a culture that’s not only different from, but often totally at odds with, how most business leaders think. He’s also quite quotable. Here are 20 smart things Bezos has said over the years. 1. “All businesses need to be young forever. If your customer base ages with you, you’re Woolworth’s.” 2. “There are two kinds of companies: Those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.” 3. “Your margin is my opportunity.” 4. “If you only do things where you know the answer in advance, your company goes away.” 5. “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” 6. “I very frequently get the question: ‘What’s going to change in the next 10 years?’ And that is a very interesting question; it’s a very common one. I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’ And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that’s going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It’s impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, ‘Jeff I love...
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Article and Video by, Brent Virkus of Find the Capital So we all want to get noticed more in the search rankings. One great way to do so is to get your image to show up for your posts or web pages that show up on a Google search. These are the simple steps to accomplish this: Step 1 Set up a Google+ account. You can do so at the following link: https://plus.google.com Step 2 Go to the “About” section...
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Article by, Lisa Virkus – Founder of Find the Capital To quote the great Al Pacino… “Life’s this game of inches. The inches we need are everywhere around us. It’s the guy that’s willing to go that extra inch that dominates his goals Because, when we add up all those inches, that’s gonna make the difference between winning and losing!” So summer is finishing up, Labor Day is upon us and, after the upcoming long weekend, are you are ready to dominate the 4th quarter? As you know, I founded Find the Capital to provide you the tools and resources to grow your business. Remember, the inches we need are all around us. We’ve got 7 days to till it’s time to get serious and “hit the ground running”. To help jump start your 4th quarter, I thought I’d share with you Find the Capital’s 4 Simple Steps to Goal Setting and dominating your competition. Let’s take a look at the 4 steps: The GET Step What do you want? Decide what it is you want and write it down. Make a list of all the things you’d like to do, goals you’d like to achieve, a list of all the places you want to go, and everything else you want to accomplish. Put it in writing! The ORGANIZE Step Organize your plan by listing every step that it will take to get you what you want. Now, organize your plan by prioritizing your list. Make a list of the order that will best accomplish your goal. If some of the items on your list look overwhelming, break them down into more manageable pieces. The ACTION Step Take some action every day to move you toward your goals. Write down the three or four things that are most important to do every day, week, and month to move you toward your goals and plan when to do them. Then do them! The LIST Step Make lists as you go. List what you want. List how to get there. List the steps you need to take to accomplish your actions. List the obstacles that might get in your way. List how to overcome them. List your action steps. By writing...
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Article by, Libby Kane – Forbes What do you do with your LinkedIn profile? Do you check it only every once in a while when a connection request comes through? Have you linked it to your Twitter account? Did you never quite remember to sign up in the first place? As much as it’s convenient to merge our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram accounts into one large social networking experience, LinkedIn has a special designation: professional networking. And there is a difference between professional and personal networking, according to LinkedIn Career Expert Nicole Williams: “I see the same mistakes over and over!” And, on LinkedIn, those faux pas can damage your career. In fact, data shows that LinkedIn is especially helpful when it comes to landing higher-paying jobs—”informal recruitment” is a favorite of hiring managers aiming to fill positions up there on the payscale. So whether you’re hunting for a new job, making the most of the one you have or just looking to learn about professional possibilities, avoid these eight big LinkedIn mistakes. 1. Not Using a Picture “One of the biggest mistakes I see is no photo,” Williams says. “You’re seven times more likely to have your profile viewed if you have one. Like a house that’s on sale, the assumption is that if there’s no photo, something’s wrong.” She also makes a great point: If you leave a networking event with a handful of business cards, intending to follow up on LinkedIn, it’s much harder for you to remember who’s who without pictures. A missing photo can easily lead to missed connections. If you’re worried about unwittingly sabotaging your career through social media, check out the ten worst blunders you can commit. 2. Putting Up the Wrong Picture “No dog, no husband, no baby!” Williams says, adding that your photo is meant to show you at your professional—not personal—best. “Especially for mothers getting back into the workforce, a picture of their child doesn’t convey that they’re ready for a full-time job.” Another photo blunder: Misrepresenting your appearance. “I see older people who are worried about age discrimination use a photo of themselves in their 30s, but an interviewer wasn’t expecting them to look so different. And instead of listening to your answers,...
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Article by, Carl Weiss of Site Pro News Search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO, has been bandied about since the inception of the internet as if it were the holy grail of online success. But what is SEO really? More importantly, what has it become? Is it simply a matter of optimizing your website? Or, has it grown to include a number of other parameters? My answer to these questions may surprise you. SEO is no longer just one thing. It has grown to mean so much more. In this article I will discuss how search engine optimization has evolved in order to become Search Engine Marketing (aka S.E.M.). I will also provide you with information that will show you how you can improve your search ranking. This includes techniques designed to insure a strong ranking position. Best of all, you can accomplish all this without resorting to tricks, gimmicks or deception that attempts to hoodwink the search engine spiders. Stop Acting Like it’s 1999 Before the turn of the century, achieving search ranking was relatively simple. You selected a keyword relevant to your business, created a website and added the desired keywords to your content. You made sure you included the keywords in Meta and Alt tags. Then you posted your web pages to the top 100 search engines and directories. Voila! If you chose your keywords carefully, you soon showed up on page one of Yahoo, AltaVista, Net Taxi and other search engines. Today it isn’t so simple. The major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing are mostly concerned with quality content, delivered on a timely basis. Google has even admitted that it no longer even gives Meta Tags a second glance. This content needs to be diversified (web pages, blogs, social media, videos etc…) and it needs to be highly relevant to the keyword or phrases that are searched. Today if you meet these criteria you will do well in organic search, (assuming your competition is not better at it than you). If you ignore these items then your chances of showing up on page one are slim at best. Is On-Site Optimization Dead? I am often asked is web page optimization still important?...
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