Professionalism is a curse for you as a small business owner. Just the other day, I read on a discussion forum someone asking: “I’m going to be published, but should I include my website as a contact? I’m afraid it will turn off people who are more conservative.”
What I wrote to her was: “Be yourself. Forget about ‘conservative areas.’ If you hide who you are and they show up, then what are you going to do? Continue hiding? Or show up and then they disappear anyway?
“Also, don’t make assumption about ‘conservative areas.’ All kinds of wierdos 😉 (like you and me) live everywhere, and one of the strengths of the internet is that people can access like-minded people without risking social censure from others in their community, who are probably doing the same thing they are, on their broadband connections at 11pm.”
Why do people buy from you? They buy because they trust you. How is trust built?
There are three components to building trust in a business relationship:
1. Expertise. Do you know what you are talking about? Can your product or service really help me?
2. Dependability. Are you really there? If I lean into you, can I trust that you will catch me? That your product won’t break down on me, that your service will really get me the results I’m looking for. If something goes wrong, will you show up and help fix it?
3. Humanity. Do I know who you are? Can I relate to you? Are you enjoyable to be around, and are you real and authentic with me?
Adam Cohen’s book The Perfect Store: Inside eBay is a fascinating read. It was amazing to learn that the company was profitable from it’s first month and was one of the fastest companies in history to reach $1 billion in value. And it started with Pierre Omidyar’s vision to “level the marketplace,” so anyone could participate, not just big companies.
But what made the company successful was the community that grew up around it. Rabid AuctionWeb users (as it was known in the early days) who spent hours on message boards, forging relationship with each other, helping each other.
And the glue that kept the community vibrant, and drew more and more people into it, were that there were a few characters who exhibited all three of the trust characteristics: Expertise- they knew their stuff and were happy to share it, Dependability- they spent hours on the boards helping people, and people noticed when they went missing, and Humanity- they had distinct personalities.
One of them, Uncle Griff, became known as a “cross-dressing bachelor dairy farmer who liked to answer questions.”
I see the same thing in action on a marketing discussion forum I take part in, where one of the members is outrageous in his stories, prolific in his postings, and both deep in his knowledge of business and generous in sharing it. And he is openly credited as being the person who built the activity on the forum when it was stagnant a few years ago.
When I look around in the marketplace, and I think of businesses I genuinely like, and are big-time successful, they have all three of those characteristics.
I’m guessing that in your business you are already displaying your expertise and your dependability. But, did you translate that into a quiet “professional” demeanor?
Add who you truly are into the mix. Be outrageously you.
If you are a financial professional who likes playing a dragon, breathe fire! If you are a nutty New Zealander cartoonist who loves psychological marketing, write in a fake French accent. If you are the chief technology officer of a fast-growing firm, email customers referring to yourself in the third person as “Skippy,” a technology genuis who lives in a cave and has a pet vole named Marta.
All three of these examples are real, and each of them has achieved outrageous levels of success in the business world, by being themselves. Me, I’m a Sufi spiritual healer who loves small business. I don’t impersonate a dragon, but I do quote ancient mystics, and spend a lot of time talking about wierd things like your business having a heart of its own.
Here’s a question for you to take action on: What part of yourself are you hiding from your business, because you think it will scare people off? And, how can you begin to introduce it into your presence in the marketplace?
Read practical keys to being an effective unprofessional professional.
Keys to being an effective unprofessional professional.
• Stop trying to sell to the entire world.
The last time I checked, the world had more than 6 billion people on it. Your business doesn’t need to appeal to even a small percentage of that in order to be very, very successful. How many customers do you really need to be super-successful? A few thousand?
Case in point: A retail store I know does more than $5 million in sales annually off of a list of about 4000 people. Adding even a thousand or two people to that list will have a huge effect on sales.
• Be authentic.
Use your everyday likes and dislikes as a way to bring yourself to your business. Like a certain kind of music? Use it for analogies in your marketing- you’ll create a kinship with others who also like that music.
Hint: One of the best places to start doing this is on your web site. Most websites are caught in the horribly dull “corporate drone” language. Yet, your website is a prime opportunity to make a real, authentic connection with someone.
• There is a difference between “like-able” and “understandable.”
You don’t want to hide yourself in order to be “like-able.” But you do want to be understandable in your uniqueness.
Take a good look at references you make to be sure what you communicate is understandable outside of your in-group. Especially on the web, in today’s increasingly global marketplace, you can connect with people from anyway. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve received emails from: Germany, Australia, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Canada, as well as all over the U.S.
You don’t have to explain every little bit, but just make sure any important points you are making are clearly understandable. Feeling left out is not whatyou want your prospects to feel. But for them, hearing something unique from your culture, in an understandable way, can be very attractive.
