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How do you market multiple businesses at the same time?

June 3, 2009 by Leave a Comment

Marketing more than one business is much more difficult than it first appears. I don’t know how many of you have tried this, but I’ll tell you right now, if you are into networking and you have more than one thing going on, you are going to have issues.

The funny thing about it is that it seems easy at first. You see a need. So you start to offer a product to fill that need, but then you slowly begin to realize that you are having more difficulty selling on the whole.

This has been my experience at least. I have found that I just need to slim down, sometimes, and stick to what I’m good at. What has been your experience in this area?

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What do you do when a competitor has tainted your entire industry?

May 28, 2009 by Leave a Comment

I deal with this one on a daily basis. I don’t know about all of you, but people have computer techs squared away in a box. And because of these large franchises (not to name any names) I end up taking flack for things other companies have done.

Things like, keeping someone’s computer in their shop for 8 months!! Or taking someone’s hard drive (with all of their family photos) and then disapearing off of the planet. How crazy is that? But I end up taking some of the blame because these companies are giving my industry a bad name.

So I am forced to really push through some resistence when it comes to selling my own services to my target audience (who has lost faith in my industry.)

I have been going through the book Tribes by Seth Godin recently, and he has a pretty interesting method for dealing with resistence in a market. That is quite simply summed up as “change”. When you present yourself as opposed to the status quo, you tend to shield yourself somewhat from what people think of your industry.

What do you think? Are you in an industry that has made a bad name for itself and you find that you are battling against that all the time?

If you are, what are some things that you have done to overcome that? Hit us up in the comments below :).

“Keeping your success in focus”
-Coach Kolansky

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Strategies for Speed Networking

April 21, 2009 by 2 Comments

Most of the topics we have covered on networking recently have been more abstract in nature. Today’s topic is the last one I had set under “week three.” It is Speed Networking.

I actually have never been to a speed networking session and from Coach Powell’s response which we’ll hear tomorrow it doesn’t really even seem like I will ever need to.

What has been your experience with speed networking? Did you meet the people that you wanted to meet? Was it profitable for you?

If you have been, what were the strategies that you employed to get effective results from this very specific form of networking?

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What do you want to be when you grow up?

April 17, 2009 by 8 Comments

It is always interesting when I am at a networking event and I ask someone how they got into the line of work that they are in. I get all kinds of answers, but often the resounding thing that I hear (with a few exceptions) is that they did not plan to be where they are now.

I don’t know about you, but I am exactly where I want to be at this point in my life. There is (despite what my wife may think 😉 ) an overarching plan that I am following for my life which I have been developing since I was in my teens.

The plan has changed some, but overall, I have ALWAYS wanted to be an entrepreneur. I like business. Always have. Likely always will :).

The other night Marvin and I were discussing this because we had been talking about his VisionQuest90 process. I was asking him about what this process does for people that they might not already know about. He told me that the process helps people capture who they wanted to be when they were nine years old. How cool is that? I’m sure you knew what you wanted to be when you were nine years old. A fireman, an astronaught. As Marvin put it, it was the time of your life when you thought you could jump and then never have to come back down. That was magical, wasn’t it?

Why don’t you hit us up in the comments below. Are you what you wanted to be when you grew up? What did you want to be?

This should be a lot of fun :-D.

Join the Revolution!
-Dan Kolansky

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Community Day 13: Keeping your pipeline active.

April 17, 2009 by 5 Comments

This is a question which really pertains to all this doom and gloom going on regarding the economy. People are so afraid about not getting business right now, it is scary. Interestingly enough I have been getting a lot of feedback that small business has been doing exceptionally well at keeping their pipeline full.

What has been your experience? What are you doing right now to keep people coming back?

One of the biggest issues that I have is that when I go out networking I end up bringing in so much business that I just simply cannot handle it all. So I get caught up in delivering the service and then I forget to network, and then my pipeline goes dead. After a week or two I’m wondering where everyone went, lol :).

Do you all suffer from this issue? What have you done to keep your pipeline regularly full?

Hit us up in the comments below.

-Coach Kolansky

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Community Day 12: How do you stay in touch, personally?

April 16, 2009 by 3 Comments

Yesterday a marketing program launched called the Product Launch Forumla. This program has been revolutionary in marketing because it is all about how to use the internet to keep a “personal touch”. It is amazing too, because as the owner of the product says, the people who have purchased it have used it to make over $103 million dollars worth of income.

I’m not trying to make you go purchase it, what I’m really trying to do is illustrate just how important that personal touch really is. It is amazing in today’s day and age because it is possible to have such a personal touch in this impersonal world that you could have people think that y’all have been lifelong friends, yet you have yet to even meet each other. You might not even know their name.

I know Internet Entrepreneurs who have pull that off quite successfully. It is like the old adage goes, it isn’t who you know, it is who knows you.

So with all that said, the question of the day is, how do you manage your relationships? I don’t expect you to have a massive following of people who know everything about you, but I do suspect that there is a group of people out there who you want to maintain a personal interaction with. How do you go about doing it?

-Coach Kolansky

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Community Day 11: Finding Networking Opportunities

April 15, 2009 by 3 Comments

Today’s community question about finding networking opportunities.

This is more along the lines of the beginner who is getting started with networking, IMHO (in my humble opinion). I know that when I first got started I didn’t even know what a networking opportunity was.

Now I think that a networking opportunity is something along the lines of something that:

  • Connects me with someone who can help me develop my business.
  • Connects me with a group of people who will promote or help the growth of my business.
  • Puts me in a situation where I can help promote people who I am networked to.

I suppose it is about keeping your eyes open and being ready for oncoming networking opportunities.

But I want to hear from all of you. How do you find networking opportunities?

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Community Question Day 8: How do you maximize your networking?

April 10, 2009 by 4 Comments

Ok, so yesterday we talked about reducing costs (and what awesome responses all of you had!) Today I want to ask you all about the flip side of that coin which is how do you maximize your networking time?

There are so many ways to go about this but one strategy that I can think of is to make sure that you have done your research before attending an event.

For example, when I first joined BNI a while back I had no idea what I was getting myself into. As Marvin and a few others established in the first day’s answer, the difference between a novice and an advanced networker, I was shooting from the hip and was just happy to see any results.

As I began to learn about networking though, I began to start researching the BNI groups I would visit before I would come. I’d do this in a very simple way, though. I’d only visit groups to which I already knew someone in the group. Then I’d just ask them, “is there anyone in your group that I should keep an eye out for?”

This strategy works pretty well because any decent BNI chapter will have guests from other BNI chapters at any given week. So when I’d visit a new chapter I knew who to focus my attention on because they’d have been pre-qualified as a potential client/contact by one of their other chapter members :).

So yesterday was trying to be smarter about spending your money, today I’d like to hear what strategies that you have used to be smarter about your time.

Hit us up in the comments below ^_^.

Join the Revolution!
-Coach Kolansky

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Community Day 7: How to reduce the cost of networking

April 9, 2009 by 4 Comments

I was the original person to ask this question at Coffee Tea You and Me, and I can tell you that I got an incredible answer from the Coach. For those who attend the actual event, you know that Coach Powell asks for Panera Bread gift cards if you get something out of the event. Well, needless to say, I owed him a coffee card!

The question stemmed from a situation that I saw a while back. There was a business person that I knew from all the networking events that I was attending. He was middleaged and was trying to jump from one end of the IT field to the other by starting his own business. We had been bumping into each other at networking events for upwards of 6 months when at a networking training event someone asked him to give a story about how he had gotten some business through networking. His response was “I haven’t.” And I about fell out of my chair!!

To reveal a little personal information, my networking costs average about $300-$400 a month, and I know that that is low. If I was to really push the limits I’m sure I could double that (I just don’t think I could handle all the business!) But I tend to make more than I spend when I’m out networking. In fact, a handful of jobs would put me into the black. So when I heard from this gentleman that he wasn’t making ANY money off of these events but I knew that his expenses were around the same as mine, my jaw dropped.

So, instead of asking the Coach how to make networking more effective (thats for another day), I ended up going the other direction and asked how to make networking cost less. We’ll post up the Coach’s fantastic answer next Monday, but let me give you one strategy that I know of and then I want to see your input ^_^.

I learned this strategy from Jon Graft a great networker and estate planning attorney. (Also a really funny guy who seems to keep turning up in the paper’s style invitational.) He told me about a friend of his who was a BNI member. Not all BNI chapters do this, but this guy’s BNI chapter charged for the meeting. There was a weekly charge of about $15 per member for food and the meeting space. As you might expect that can add up! (think $780 a year!) But this guy figured out an ingenious way to solve his problem with paying this cost every week. Every week he’d contact another member of his personal network and invite them to BNI, all they had to do was pay for his breakfast and he’d introduce them to 30+ business professionals who could explode his guests profits.

Sounds like a fair deal to me! And thats a NICE way to clear out several hundred dollars worth of expenses and enjoy a LOT of free breakfasts! Hehe :).

Now it is your turn, what are some ways that you can lower the cost of networking? It is an expensive sport (kinda like golf… in fact I’ve seen that networking often involves golf!) There are ways to keep your wallet from melting away to networking heaven.

Post in the comments below :).

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Community Day 6: Starting with networking when you don't know anyone.

April 8, 2009 by 5 Comments

This is a fantastic topic. A year and a half ago I showed up at my current BNI group, and despite having lived in Northern Virginia for years I didn’t have ANY connection to the members of that chapter. My current network was relatively small and there was no way (at least that I knew at the time) to leverage my current network to break into this entirely new networking scenario.

So the answer to this question held a special interest to me because I have really been able to expand my networking, especially from what I have learned from sticking around Coach Powell :).

I have since gone into entirely new networks and worked hard to make myself known in those networks. But I have often been able to leverage my current network to usher that process along.

If you were suddenly without your current network, what are some strategies that you think that you might employ to get a new group of people to know you, like you, and trust you?

I know that I would work very hard to establish my competancy before anything else. That way people would be encouraged to try out my services or products and then I would have a chance to show them my character as a person. Thats what I have done with countless BNI chapters that I have visited and it has worked pretty well so far.

What are some strategies that you have used?

God Bless,
-Coach Kolansky

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