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My client Blake Hendrix and my fellow BACN member John Todor have co-written an article containing one of my favorite pieces of business advice: Don’t Compete on Price:

Court the engaged buying personality and you will win over highly profitable customers who will want to be your customers for a long time. Let the Wal-Mart’s battle over market share. By winning mindshare you sell the experience; customers stick with you and become your best source of word-of-mouth marketing. You will not have a direct competitor. You have found your niche!

Download the complete article here.

Blake Hendrix draws upon 20 years experience facilitating small business. His practice stresses perspective and simplicity in defining and solving the issues that confront the small businessperson. His keynote is integrating Strategy, Logistics and Tactics to achieve the goals of the organization. His latest book, “Strategic Decisions for Small Business” was published in 2006. The second in the small business series is due for release in June 2007. Learn more at www.saltmineconsulting.com.
John I. Todor, Ph.D. is the Managing Partner of The Whetstone Edge, LLC, a customer experience consulting and training firm that applies scholarly research on human behavior to buyer-seller dynamics including customer loyalty, trust, retention, customer service, CEM—customer experience management, and marketing strategy. He speaks and consults worldwide on these topics. www.TheWhetstoneEdge.com

This month the Bay Area Consultants Network asked its members the following question:
To what end do we network? What happens to the cards we collect? How do we make the most of networking? What will enable you to say “I know someone who can help you with that?” when someone says says “I need an XYZ”?

• Check to see whether the person is on LinkedIn and connect with them there.
• Go to other networking groups such as BNI. Networking is about relationships built up over time through regular meetings.
• Go through your database every week and e-mail, call, or write to someone with a suggestion that can help them.
• Keep in mind that the search for the ultimate contact manager is like the search for the Holy Grail.
• Stay in front of people you network with by being visual: send a gift or postcard which is attractive with your contact info on the back so they’re constantly reminded about you.
• Try to find something right away that might help that person. For instance, go on the IMC database and look for someone and pass on the name. They’ll remember your helpfulness.
• If you can be a resource to someone that creates a better relationship.
• Note: don’t automatically add people to your newsletter if they give you their cards. This is more likely to anger than attract them.
• Don’t take cards from anyone you haven’t had a real conversation with.
• Forward job announcements from your new contacts to your distribution list. The position will be filled and the contact will remember you.
• Be clear about what you do and what it is that you want.

There was a record turnout at today’s Bay Area Consultants Network meeting this morning, where I was speaking on a panel about “Virtual Marketing Magnets.” For those who couldn’t make it, there’s a web version of my PowerPoint (complete with the text of what I said, or at least, the text of what I was planning to say) and a clickable imagemap of my handout. You need Internet Explorer to view the PowerPoint properly, I’m afraid.

The November 18th BACN forum posed the question “What have you learned this year that you’re going to apply next year?”

Here are the answers:

• Do less thinking and take more action.
• Follow Robert Middleton’s suggestion about offering something in exchange for people’s e-mail addresses and get more contacts to add to your mailing list when you speak.
• Make an appointment with BACN member Nora Wolfson to figure out what you most need to do for the success of your business.
• Automate your marketing structure.
• Create a marketing structure with Robert Middleton’s Marketing Plan Workbook and Infoguru Marketing Manual.
• While you’re at it, subscribe to Middleton’s More Clients e-zine and his free monthly conference calls.
• Get your own advisory group.
• Start speaking in public.
• Focus on one thing at a time and you’ll get it done.
• Examine your priorities: what’s your purpose and where do you want to go?
• Give yourself maneuvering room.
• Redefine persistence: give something a one-month trial rather than a six-month trial.
• Align what you do with your identity: if it’s not important to you, you can’t sustain it.

Remember: these tips are the suggestions of individual BACN members, based on what has been helpful to them. Your mileage may vary.

This month the Bay Area Consultants Network asked its members “What’s in your bag of tricks?” Here are the answers.

10-28-05: What’s in Your Bag of Tricks?

Tools and techniques used by BACN members.

MARKETING

• Use your outgoing voicemail as branding opportunity. Make weekly changes to include a short tip.
• On your second contact with a prospect, send a video intro by e-mail (for samples see www.christopherrichards.com)
• Ask prospects what kind of company they want to see in 5 years.
• Speak slowly and clearly when leaving your name and number on voice mail.
• Send your top 10 tips to new clients/prospects.
• Ask your prospects “What are your hopes for___? And why is that important?”
• Listen and ask questions-go away without proposing anything until you’ve thought of what’s appropriate to the prospect.
• Follow up quickly and with something unusual, e.g. Red Jellyfish e-cards or an actual handwritten note.
• Start writing a blog. Personalize it a bit and tie it back to your
  business. Make sure there’s an e-mail link to you in your posts and on
  your main blog page.
• Use Camtasia for Windows or SnapZ for Mac to make screen-capture videos and send them to clients and prospects.
• Invite prospects to look at your website while on the phone with you instead of sending them off to do it on their own.

RESEARCH

• Hoovers Premium is free if you go in person to the San
  Francisco Public Library main branch. You can get not just contact
  information but background information about your prospects there.

WORKING WITH THE CLIENT

• Pass out something clients and seminar participants can play with
  and remember you by, for example Koosh™ balls to represent frontal lobe brain cells and help them think.
• Be aware of an organization’s shadow culture, which is what you’ll have to deal with.
• Show up early for your client appointments-you can learn a lot in the lobby.
• If clients aren’t taking your advice, you need to charge them more money.

SELF

• Do it now-you’ll only get more things to do tomorrow.
• Attend BACN every month.
• Focus on your vision and the big picture.
• Create a roadmap for your business.
• When networking, focus on what you can offer the other person.

Really sophisticated power networkers not only enter all these cards into their contact management program but create e-mail follow-up templates along the lines of “great to meet you at _____. Here’s a link to something useful I’ve written. Let me know if you or any of your clients ever need help with _____.” By means of grouping the contacts and mail merge, they can send these personalized follow-up notes to everyone they met.

I’m not quite that organized or sophisticated, and while I go to lots of networking events and meet (by my own standards, anyway) a lot of people, I haven’t become quite this systematic. (I did recently set up a CardScan for a power-networker client who collects business cards by the bushel, however.)

My current preferred follow-up technique is to send my new acquaintances e-postcards from Red Jellyfish. This organization is dedicated to saving rainforests and endangered wildlife, but I have to admit I mostly stick to the free e-cards. You select one of the gorgeous images and can, if you wish, include an appropriate quotation, as well as your own message. Red Jellyfish sends you a copy of your card and a notification when it’s received.

I’ve gotten very positive feedback about these cards. They’re a simple way to stand out and stay in touch, and I’ve begun sending them to friends as greeting cards, because I think they’re a lot classier than most of what I see from Blue Mountain and the like.

At the September 23rd meeting of the Bay Area Consultants Network, the Members’ Forum returned to the topic of how to deal with “scope creep”—those jobs which expand far beyond their original scope—particularly when the client doesn’t want to pay for the additional work. Here are a few of the suggestions.

• Explain the situation in terms which are familiar to the client. For instance, one member had a client in the construction industry who wanted to shift the scope of the project midway through. When she compared this to a change order from one of his clients, he understood immediately and stopped objecting.
• To prevent scope creep, start out with a clear statement of work which includes something about how to address changes. Expect to have to mention that clause four or five times before the client will really get it.
• If you prefer one-page, plain-language agreements a la Alan Weiss, include a very short list of objectives and respond to any additional requests by saying “I’ll be happy to do that, but there’s an additional fee.”
• One member found himself in a situation where the more he dug, the more he found. What he said to his client was “We’re hitting things but it’s not what we agreed: why don’t you just put me on a monthly retainer?” She agreed and he now has carte blanche to do what he needs to do for her benefit.
• It’s important to make sure up front that you identify the key stakeholders and decision makers up front and involve them on a timely basis. If they’re with you as you’re moving into these new areas, they’ll see that the scope is changing and be more accomodating about expanding fee or putting it on a second tier (new project) while keeping the original project on target.
• Frame changes in scope in terms of tradeoffs. One member took this approach when dealing with Alameda County: “Sure, we can do this, but you understand that time comes out of all the other stuff we’ve booked and built. What do you want to trade for it?” The county created a subsidiary contract to cover the additions.
• Try to anticipate the places where clients will fall down on their obligations and list these as aggressively priced options during the contracting phase. (The aggressive pricing is recommended for things that you really don’t want to do.) If adding the options delays completion, that’s okay, but the member who recommended this makes it clear that his payments are still due on schedule.
• Understand your client’s contracting process very completely. If possible, learn how they do their other contracting, e.g. with their own clients.
• A lot of clients think they they know what their needs are and confuse their needs with their wants. This is a worse problem with larger clients: large companies try to squeeze everything they can out of a vendor.
• One way to handle this tendency on the part of large companies is to get the client’s staff to do the parts of the job you don’t want to do yourself. One BACN member describes this delegation as a staff mentoring service for her clients.

The remainder of the September 23 Forum was dedicated to collecting a list of recommended reading, which can now be found on the Suggested Reading page.

Ah, hyperlinks. They let us do so much—but they also increase the size of your Word document. If you only have one or two links, it’s not a problem. But what if your Word doc is full of links you don’t need?

A typical trademark search report is over 20 pages long and contains hundreds of links to the USPTO’s Trademark Database. The problem is, these links expire very quickly, so by the time my client gets the search report, the links are useless and the file is huge. Even turning it into a PDF doesn’t always compress it enough to make it easy to mail.

I checked all the Edit and Format options in Word, but didn’t find a “remove all links” command. However, a Google search on the phrase “remove all hyperlinks from Word” took me to a page in the Microsoft Development Network Library with instructions on how to create a macro for removing hyperlinks.

I’m a complete beginner when it comes to macros, but this one is very simple to set up, and it worked like a charm. After taking 5 minutes to set it up in the Visual Basic Edtior, I clicked Tools | Macro | Macros, selected the “Remove Hyperlinks” macro, and clicked Run. Within a few seconds I’d taken 200K off my 800K search report.

If you have documents that are full of unnecessary hyperlinks, I urge you to try this.

How do you ask clients for referrals? Here’s a terrific line one Bay Area businesswoman uses.

Alice Tsai of ReMax Accord has the following line printed on the backs of her business cards:

The Finest Compliment I can Receive is a Referral From Past Clients and Customers. Thank You For Your Trust.

Referrals are the kind of compliment most consultants want. This is a graceful way to ask for them. I might, personally, prefer to put this phrase not on my business cards (which I hand to strangers) but on thank you notes, invoices, or other materials which go to clients after I have been working with them long enough to know they are happy with my work.

There are lots of good reasons for not wanting to meet clients, especially new ones, in your home office. (This goes double if your office is your bedroom, as mine is.) There may also be good reasons not to meet at the client’s office. So where is the best place to meet a client?

I wanted a place that was (in order of preference):

1. Easy for someone not familiar with the neighborhood to find
2. Close to my office (within about a 10-minute drive)
3. Quiet enough to have a conversation without shouting
4. Had a comfortable, prosperous atmosphere
5. Provided wireless internet access and was otherwise laptop-friendly

Since I didn’t want to take the time to tour every cafe within a five-mile radius of my home, I asked for input from members of the Brain Exchange mailing list. This mailing list has about 800 subscribers, all of them very inventive women and many of them solo professionals, as I am. And, unlike members of most mailing lists I’m on, most of them live, or used to live, in the Bay Area.

The recommendations are all local to me, so if you don’t live in the East Bay, they may not be useful to you. But my own top choice (so far) is Starbuck’s in Barnes and Noble, and you can find those scattered in malls near freeways about every five miles throughout the country. The only downside is that they don’t accept the Starbuck’s cards which I seem to accumulate without buying them.

I think any bookstore coffee shop would work as well. I’ve used the wireless internet in Borders several times when traveling, and the coffee is better. Besides, I have a fond memory for the original Borders in Ann Arbor, Michigan, before K-mart bought it and turned it into a chain. Now there was a good bookstore!

Now, however, they’re pretty much identical in terms of books and atmosphere, and Barnes and Noble is closer, right over in El Cerrito Plaza next to the BART station and close to the Central Ave exit from 80/580. It’s easy to find, easy to get to, and there’s plenty of free parking.

Because the cafe is in a bookstore, it’s both quieter and less crowded than a cafe which is just a cafe. There’s a stand-alone Starbuck’s in the Plaza, but it’s usually packed and it’s usually playing music which is loud enough to be distracting, if not quite loud enough to be painful.

There’s also a psychological advantage for me in meeting a prospective writing client in a bookstore. We can walk down the aisles and find out where the client’s book should be shelved once it’s written, and do some preliminary research for the book proposal by checking out the competition.

So thanks very much to Lindy Sinclair for that recommendation.

I do want to mention some of the other suggestions, because they’re good ones.

Claudia L’Amoreaux of Learning Conversations Extreme Coaching recommended Teance’s Celadon Tea Room at 1111 Solano Avenue in Albany, CA, is an elegant location with a big table by the window that works well for meetings with clients.

D.G. tutors ESL students at Au Coquelet on the corner of University and Milvia in Berkeley. I’ve been to Au Coquelet many times, and while it’s location is convenient to the campus and to public transportation, all of the tables I’ve ever sat at have wobbled. The restrooms are also definitely declasse. The staff will, however, let you spend quite a while there undisturbed, and there is a full-service restaurant in the back.

Liz Rutter likes Caffe Trieste on San Pablo Avenue because of the absence of cell phones and laptops. Joan Bobkoff, who took my FileSlinger™ photos, uses it to hold office hours for her students. It tends to be on the crowded and noisy side for my tastes.

Mani Feniger recommended The Junket in El Cerrito Plaza, where her husband meets clients. I’ve been past the Junket a thousand times and have yet to go in, but it has always looked quiet. The Junket is not a coffee shop but a delicatessen specializing in European imports. It might be best to hold off on the German beer on tap when you’re having the first meeting with a new client, though.

Jill Nagle of Get Published prefers Espresso Roma at 1549 Hopkins, near the Monterey Market. (Not to be confused with the Espresso Roma on College Ave at Ashby, which offers wireless service.) This cafe has a large outdoor seating area for use in nice weather, but has a certain shortage of power outlets. That’s not necessarily a downside for me, because I don’t always bring my laptop when meeting clients. It’s just nice to have the option available.

Many thanks to the Brain Exchangers for their recommendations. I’m sorry it’s taken so long for me to put them online.

If you have a suggestion for a great place to meet clients either in the East Bay or elsewhere, click the comment button () at the top of this post or e-mail me.