Month: May 2014
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Quotable Coach: The First Step To Selling Your Idea
The most important sale you have to make in your business is selling yourself on it first. Why would anyone else believe in something that doesn’t work for you? Establish a vision that you can genuinely get behind and feel passionate about. Only then can you carry out the second two sales in your business:…
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How Do You Deliver Your “Why?”
“People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” – Simon Sinek I sat in on a Strategic Coach Program workshop recently where Dan shared a brilliant TED talk by Simon Sinek called “How Great Leaders Inspire Action.” The crux of his argument is that people in business tend to talk a lot about…
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Tip Of The Week: What’s An Intellectual Capital Company?
If you’ve got a breakthrough idea, some people will love it, some will resist it, and eventually someone will reverse-engineer it to make a cheaper copy. You can have a Value Creation Monopoly, though, if you’ve got exclusive ownership of a process rather than a product. You can sell products and services inside your process—probably…
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Quotable Coach: Releasing Inexhaustible Creativity And Growth
When you and your team members are focused on your Unique Ability®, you gain access to an inexhaustible source of creativity, drive, and growth—and there’s nothing you’d rather be doing. Contrast this with trying to explain to or motivate someone who isn’t talented at or passionate about what they do, and you’ll understand why Unique…
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Are You Focused On Contribution Or Status?
There’s an important distinction that keeps coming up in our Weekly Planning Calls with entrepreneurs in the Strategic Coach Program and their teams: contribution versus status. In the corporate world, the measures of success are often very status-oriented, like: “Where’s my office located?” “Do I have an impressive title?” “Am I working with the higher-ups?”…
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Tip Of The Week: What’s Important To Your Clients?
People will gladly tell you what’s working and what’s not working about what you’re doing—if you ask! If you don’t ask, important clients and customers can drift away, carrying with them the most valuable raw material for the development of your business. We might think people don’t want to open up about themselves in a…
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Quotable Coach: Who’s The Authority In Your Field?
Nothing helps people get behind an idea more than coming up with a good name for it. You don’t even have to get there first; if you’re the one who creates a verbal bridge, a framework for thinking about something, you become the trusted go-to authority on the subject. A participant in the Strategic Coach®…
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Tip Of The Week: Package Your Clients’ Ideal Future
People do things for their reasons, not for your reasons. So instead of doing what most people do—talking about yourself or trying out random designs—try this first: Have conversations with the people you already have great relationships with. Pay attention to the words and images they use to describe their ideal future. Use this valuable…
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Quotable Coach: What You Give vs. What They Expect
You know what people notice at Strategic Coach®? The hand towels—they’re just lush. Yes, we could spend less on them, and they’re hardly our top priority, but it’s funny how one tiny little detail like this shapes people’s feelings about our business as a whole. They say, “This is a first-class experience.” What dash of…