I coach a client who is a freelancer. He’s generally productive and looking at different strategies to grow his small business. In a conversation a couple of weeks ago he mentioned that he had just spent an hour browsing through a website that collected and posted complaints that freelancers have about their clients. He related at how funny it was to read these complaints because so many of them mirrored his own experience with customers.
Now, if someone is relatively productive, the occasional internet browsing is okay and it’s nice to take a break to laugh at something funny. But my advice to him was to drop the site from his bookmarks. It’s not that it would make him unproductive – that’s not the issue that he and I are working on. Rather, the site is poison. It’s highlighting something that is negatively funny about paying clients who are very much like his own. While a humorous site is okay, a site like the one he was browsing can bring serious harm to his business because it can highlight things he doesn’t like about customers in general (and his customers specifically!). I’ve seen it happen: Negative talk about customers can turn into negative feelings toward customers. That’s poison.
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A friend of mine is a freelancer and he is a self-confessed tyrant of metrics. He analyzes the proposals he sends out and monitors how many people call him as a result. He analyzes every action in his sales process and has goals and can tell me at the end of the day how close
he came to achieving his daily goals. He claims that he’s not obsessed with charts, per se, but with the productivity that results from them.
It’s the old “what gets measured gets managed” adage. Makes sense (even if it seems excessive to the rest of us).
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This blog post was on my list of “things to write about” for two weeks now, but I’ve been busy with other things. That’s okay, though, because it’s a perennial topic.
I was recently reading a blog in the New York Times (published October 15th) by a CEO of a NY-based company. She referenced that, in a previous blog (published October 7th), she had written about ways to bypass high-priced agencies and run your own PR. And in that blog, someone had shared with her a brilliant piece of wisdom which sounds like something I tell people every day: In essence, the commenter said “you’re already busy as a CEO; why do the PR yourself as well? Focus on your core competencies to build your business and leave PR to someone else.” Read her original October 7th blog, entitled “Which PR Firm Do You Use?” .
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When presenting your product or service for sale, a testimonial can go a long way. Testimonials can show a potential buyer how a previous buyer has been impacted by your offering, and I’ve even seen circumstances where they were the tipping point between “I might buy” and “I will buy”.
When we have testimonials, we can present them in online and offline formats and create a powerfully convincing “chorus” of happy customers. Testimonials are useful, multi-purposed, high value, and convincing. They really are ideal marketing tools.
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The following are true stories of project management gone terribly wrong. Only the details and the names have been changed to protect the guilty. These stories were collected from colleagues who work on projects in large and small organizations in varying industries. Click here to read more »
