I am not a huge fan of making resolutions on January 1, but I am a huge fan of resolving, so I usually end up setting some sort of yearly goal. This year, I didn’t really set a SMART goal. Instead I just sort of vaguely thought, “I  need to do better at everything,” with everything including running more often, marketing more efficiently, visiting with friends regularly, and probably most importantly, cleaning at least now and then.

A surprising thing has happened. Despite the lack of a defined goal, I have been superduper busy. The kind of busy where you occasionally forget to eat. The first week of the year, several past clients got in touch with new orders, and a few referrals metaphorically knocked on my door. My invoices for the month of January were double my best month of 2011.

When I realized that January was the best month ever for Smiling Tree Writing, I was shocked.  The last quarter of 2011

image courtesy of borkur.net via flickr.com

was terrible. Both my father-in-law and my grandfather were diagnosed with terminal illnesses, suffered rapid declines in health and passed away during that time. From August until December, my life was about family, terminal illness and grief. In many ways, just living felt like a slow, tortuous climb.

Luckily, my three longest-term clients were understanding and I was able to continue working with them, but pretty much everything else business-related was put on hold. As a client once told me, “Personal turmoil is never good for your business.”  I didn’t do any in-person networking, participated only in the most minimal way in social networking, sent no query emails or letters, certainly made no cold calls, and fully expected to more or less start from scratch in January.

You can imagine my surprise when my accountant handed me the numbers for 2011 and I found that my income from writing had almost tripled it was in 2010. You may be imagining now that I am getting close to that fabled “six figure income from writing at home!” That is so far from the truth it’s embarrassing -BUT! Holy moly! My business was growing, even with all the difficulties of 2011. Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

Things are settling down, and I am once more marketing and networking and query-ing. Oh, and posting on this blog, which has been sadly neglected for a month. A few others have reported being similarly busy in January. What about you? Have you experienced a noticeable increase in your workload so far in 2012? 

Living in a small community means you often know things about strangers’ lives: who he’s related to, where she works, who her kids hang out with, where else he has worked, and a myriad other odd details. At the same time, you might not really know that person – around here people say, “I know of him.”

My family knew of one man who was a Dollar General cashier. He had another job as well. All four of us had a positive impression of him. He was always friendly and particularly polite. We even know that he lives on our street because we see his truck at a house about a mile away from ours. When we heard that he was fired from his second job for being rude, we were really surprised. We felt it was probably unfair. After awhile, he didn’t work at the Dollar General anymore, but showed up in the convenient store across the street. Again, we felt bad for the guy. He was clearly a hard worker, and willing to do whatever he needed to in order to have a job. Third shift in a convenient store can be a tough gig.

Then, one night, we were headed out of town and needed a bag of ice. We stopped at the store and the friendly cashier was working.

image courtesy of JorgeBRAZIL, via flickr.com

There was a group of teenage boys in line in front of my husband, who really just needed the key to the ice chest (really? people steal ice? geez.). My husband asked for the key. The nice man we thought so well of suddenly turned rude. He refused to give my husband the key, and acted like we were going to steal the ice.

Maybe he was afraid he would get in trouble for just handing over the key. Maybe he was worried about the group of teenagers stealing something. Regardless, he didn’t have to be rude. But he was. It ended up taking over 15 minutes for us to buy a $2 bag of ice, and we felt like suspects or something.

That one interaction changed everything we thought about this person. Now instead of saying “the nice cashier who lives down the street,” we say “that weird guy who used to work at the Dollar Store.” After hundreds of positive encounters, this ONE ugly one wiped away our good feelings toward this man. It didn’t have anything to do with customer service, although it was a bad experience on that level, too. What I’m talking about is much more personal.

Now when we run into this guy, or he is our cashier, we feel wary. We don’t know what to expect. Will he be nice? Will he imply we are thieves? How is he feeling that day?

It amazes me that one bad experience can outweigh hundreds of good ones. But, since the night we bought ice, I’ve observed the same sort of thing with other people – you think you have a comfortable – if shallow – relationship with them, then all of a sudden, things aren’t so comfortable.

As the owner of a small business, I’m finding an especially important lesson in these observations. Everyone has “off” days when we are maybe snippier than we realize. It’s scary to think that on one of those not-so-fabulous days I might unwittingly change how a long-term client views me and my business. Some client relationships take months or even years to build, and while I hope that after that much time, both parties would be a little more lenient with judgement, you never know.

Of course, I work hard to make sure my relationships with clients go a little deeper than my relationships with cashiers who work at stores nearby. But in one way it doesn’t really matter. A bad interaction can color the relationship, making it so that either party is looking for the negatives – and that is bad for a service provider who bases her prices partly on providing outstanding overall service.

I’m not sure there is a way to guard against coming across rougher than you intend to once in a while. The best we can do is try to understand when someone else does so in the hopes others will do the same for us. I’m going to try to think of the “weird guy” as a “nice guy” again, and just imagine that he was having a bad day and that he didn’t really think we would steal the ice.

Have you ever had one incident change the nature of a sales or customer oriented relationship?

Are you taking care of the basics? The stuff you know you should be doing, and that only rookies or arrogant suckers fail to do?

image courtesy of Nrico via flickr, click image to see his profile

If you aren’t, you are going to see a slow slide, followed by a painful THUMP. Then you are faced with the daunting task of climbing right back up.

I can tell you because I’m there. Rubbing my business bum and wondering how in the world I let this happen.

For months, I had a comfortable client list. Each of my clients was pleasant and the work was challenging, but not stressful. A few referral jobs here and there filled in any gaps in my schedule, and I had plenty of time for lunches with friends and working out and all sorts of other good things. So I left “marketing” on my to-do list week after week, and didn’t think too much about it. Yes, I’m hanging my head in shame. Such a common mistake! Who hasn’t read (or written!) a post about the importance of marketing even when things are going great?

Of course, even with the greatest client list on the planet, you are going to have some attrition. Things change, people move, businesses close and life generally happens. And such was the case for me – all at once, of course, because of some law written by some guy named Murphy.  Now, I’m scrambling with no one to blame but myself.

It was easy to let marketing go for several reasons. I didn’t really want to be too busy through the summer. I wanted to make sure my existing clients were well-served and happy. I wanted to see if it would be possible to work by referral only.

Excuses. Lame excuses.

If you are running a business that involves attracting customers (and what business doesn’t?) you have to keep on marketing. If your business is big and successful your marketing activities might take the form of networking, maintaining your brand, or simply responding to emails. For the rest of us, marketing is probably a much longer list of activities.

Over the weekend, I wrote a new plan. This one includes a heavy dose of daily marketing – but also a few “built-in” ways to market so that later, when my roster is full again, it will be easier to stay in the marketing habit.

It is difficult to publicly admit to such a silly mistake, but really, everyone messes up. Make me feel better: share your common business errors. Have you let your accounting go for too long? Stopped marketing and paid the price? Failed to respond to an inquiry? Surely I’m not the only one feeling the sting of embarrassment! 

Last week, I wrote about a few of the things I hear when making cold calls. I also mentioned the fact that my cold calls aren’t exactly cold because I do a ton of research before I ever pick up the phone. Like most people, I hate cold calling. It can be so uncomfortable. In the process of procrastinating I figured out a few things that make it a bit easier.

image courtesy of chang2034 via flickr.

First, I should tell you that I tried other methods of finding new business. Being a writer, I most especially wanted cold emailing to work. In my experience it does not work, at all. Out of maybe 100 cold emails, I will get at most two responses. It doesn’t matter how much research I do or how tailored the email is to the person receiving it. If you’ve had success with cold emailing, please, please share your secret!

In my last “real job” part of my responsibility was to find lists of companies that would be prospects for a group of third party recruiters to call. When I started my own business, I did the same for myself. It got depressing pretty fast. The rejections and blow-offs came thick and fast. It didn’t take long to start coming up with a list of things that would rule out a prospect before I called.

After a while, I began developing profile of my ideal customer, and using that profile as a guide has helped me become a much more successful cold-caller. There are a few other things that I do before calling that really help. Here is my basic process:

1. Look for companies that have an existing marketing budget. In other words, try to determine if they are spending any money on marketing currently. I do this by looking through the classifieds in various publications. If a company paid to run a classified ad, they probably have some money set aside for marketing, but not a whole marketing department.

2. Thoroughly investigate their current practices. In my case, I check to see if they have an inconsistently updated blog, whether there are errors in their site copy, if they have a Facebook Page and so on. I make notes about all of those things, including what could be better. I find at least a few things that look really good.

3. Figure out who to call. If I can’t find a name, it doesn’t automatically rule a company out, but it drops it to the bottom of my list because it’s just easier to call and ask for “Kim Smith” than it is to call and say “Can I please speak to whoever handles your marketing?” Your chances of getting screened out by a gatekeeper are lower when you have a name.

4. Make the call. If you don’t pick up the phone and make the call, you’ve wasted an awful lot of time with all that research. Even with the first three steps, I still end up leaving messages and doing a ton of follow up. However, when I do get the right person on the phone, we have something to talk about.

I only make about 10-20 calls a week, and end up getting some kind of new work from those calls an average of every  other week. As time goes on, those numbers are improving, probably because I’m getting better at deciding who to call. I don’t depend on cold calling for all of my business – some comes from referrals, some from social media and some from in-person networking – but it is an important source for me.

How do you generate new business? Do you have a process for gathering prospects and contacting them?

A significant portion of my business is generated through cold calling. Well, I do quite a lot of research before

Yep, that's me.

actually dialing a number so it isn’t exactly cold calling, but that’s a story for another day. Today’s post is about what people say when I finally do call them.

It is extremely rare that anyone is rude, but most of the time, people have reasons they won’t hire a writer. Sometimes, the reasons are valid but very often they are closer to being excuses. I wanted to share some of them with you, as well as why I call them excuses.

1. My niece’s husband does all of the writing for my company. All right. I’ll admit I’ve never heard that one, but I’ve heard just about every variation of it you can imagine. My mom writes our copy. My sister writes our copy. My brother-in-law writes everything we need. One of our employees takes care of all that.

Although I cannot tell the person offering me this excuse, when I make that call, I’ve already looked at their copy and found it wanting. Either it is poorly written or hasn’t been updated. Or perhaps they don’t have a blog but could really benefit from one, or an email newsletter would work well for their business.

What I do instead of insulting their mom/sister/brother-in-law/employee is start asking questions. Do they write professionally or is it a spare-time kind of thing? Have you ever considered a newsletter or blog? Is time an issue?

Most of the time, all those questions serve to get the person to at least think a little more about how a professional writer could help. Depending on their reaction, I either answer questions and talk specifically about my ideas for their business or politely thank them for their time and ask if I can email my contact information in case anything ever changes for them.

2. It would take just as long for me to tell you what to write as it would to write it. This one stymied me at first because I couldn’t figure out exactly what they meant. Do people imagine they would need to dictate things to me? Or do they think I couldn’t take a list of bullet points or random thoughts and turn it into a cohesive piece of writing?

As far as I can tell, people do think both of those things. The other thing people mean is that they will have to explain their industry, business or whatever to me in explicit detail so that I will understand it well enough to write about it. They have no idea that good writers are also excellent researchers.

My response in this situation is to offer to do a “test” article at a deeply discounted rate. I say, “Well, why don’t you let me write one article for you so that you have some idea of what I do and can make an informed decision?” I know that there is a huge debate about whether or not writers should discount their work for any reason, but this method has gotten me more work than any other.

The key to making it work is to put an enormous amount of effort into that discounted piece. It is meant to impress. To stun. I want the prospect to read it, say “Wow!” then hire me on retainer to totally revamp their copy or to write their blog posts each week or whatever.

If they aren’t interested in even a “test” article, I thank them for their time, ask if I can email them my contact information and hang up.

3. It’s a great idea and all but we just don’t have enough customers to justify it. When someone says this, either they don’t want more customers or don’t understand that good copy brings in more business. Sometimes explaining the whole idea of using content to get more business nudges them in the right direction, but I have yet to get a customer who starts out from this point.

Even if they don’t call it content marketing, most good business people understand the idea. Business owners who are not interested in staying in touch with their customers or who don’t see the value in offering high-quality information that is complementary to whatever they are selling probably won’t ever “have enough customers to justify it.” That may sound harsh, but it’s true. Relationships and good service are beyond important.

Of course, sometimes, this is code for “I really can’t afford any additional expense right now, even though I know it would help.” Either way, my response is a brief explanation of how my services could help them get more customers, followed by a request to email my contact information in case they ever change their mind.

4. Our customers aren’t really blog readers. The italics don’t come close to conveying the tone people use when they say “blog readers.” It’s almost like they are saying “the biggest nerds in the world.” Now, you know (obviously because YOU are reading a blog, right?) that blog readers aren’t necessarily nerds, and I know that, too, but you might be surprised by the number of people suffering under that illusion.

You might also be surprised at my response. Instead of trying to convince them that blogs are not exclusively for nerds, I suggest that perhaps an email newsletter would work better for their customers, or ask if they have considered submitting articles to industry print publications. If they become customers later, then I’ll return to the idea of blogging…

The conversation can go a couple of ways at this point: either they are intrigued and start asking questions or they begin to sound impatient. If they are intrigued, I proceed to sell my services and if they are impatient…well, by now you know, I ask if I can email my contact information, thank them, and hang up.

The key to making this work, as I mentioned at the very beginning is careful research. Look for the next post for more on that. For now, please share. Do you make cold calls in your business? Do you hear excuses? Have you developed a set of responses?