When making business resolutions, don’t forget to show gratitude to your customers for their business. It’s human nature to want to be appreciated and people will spend more money at a business that they feel truly appreciates them than to save pennies on the dollar at a business that won’t even keep enough lanes open to facilitate the people standing in line to give them money. Genuine gratitude goes a LONG way in earning trust and earning business.

Small business owners: What have you done to show thankfulness to your employees that has been successful to you as a company, and more importantly, to your customers?

How do you do it? How do you attract the last minute shoppers to you, especially if you’re in a more obscure location (i.e. not a shopping mall or outside Wal-Mart)?

1) Talk to those who do come in as customers and ask them to recommend you to friends that have last minute shopping to do.

2) Again, take some of your more popular items and put them on Twitter tagging them with your City’s name (i.e. #Huntsville) to draw the attention of those watching that topic. If you’re product happens to be video games, tag them too. Use Facebook to spread the message. Create a video of yourself (the owner) at your store’s location talking about what you offer and put it on YouTube and send the link to the video out through Twitter and Facebook. People want to relate when they make purchases. Help them relate to you.

3) Draw new customers in with stocking stuffers at super deals. Then let them see what else you offer.

4) Bring in donuts and coffee for the cold morning shoppers. Again, use Twitter and other Social Networking sites to invite your city’s inhabitants to share breakfast with you as they shop in a warm, safe environment.

These are just some ideas; there are many more. Be creative but also be smart. You don’t want to spend a fortune and negate your new profits, but you do want to bring in lasting customers that have never been in your store before.

Welcome everyone as they enter. Be joyful, no matter how you felt getting out of bed. Develop a new passion for your business (with hopes you had one before your started your company!). Stress shows, so does passion and excitement. Both are contagious. Make people excited to visit you!

Confused on Social Networking and how it can improve your business’s profit? Use the contact link and let me know your questions. I’ve helped companies across America with the same.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Seth

When we learn to walk, our body instinctively pushes us to continue trying even when our legs object, the floor causes us to slip or when we fall and cut our lip on the edge of the coffee table. To a one year old a busted lip is a big deal, yet, we push on and we stand up and we eventually walk.

Many are born with inconveniences that cause normal childhood growth more difficult for them, yet some push through and overcome those difficulties in their life.

To grow, to become stronger, better prepared and more successful in life we learn to overcome objections. Sometimes those objections seem harder to overcome as we get older.

Some people fear rejection and have much of their life. They can look at relationships and how they’ve handled situations and know very well that they don’t handle rejection very well! The girl he had a crush on at 16 finally got married at 25 and he never told her how he felt; he is afraid of her rejection of him.

This is a particularly difficult situation if you’re in business for yourself or want to be (including being a commission-based employee). If you desire to grow your business, make new friends and earn new patrons you will have to learn now to deal with objections and overcome them!

So, where do you start? How do you go from being afraid of “no” or even just at a loss of what to do once you’ve been told no to overcoming their objection and making the sale?

Just like in marriage and life and business, it’s a process and you can learn to follow it and be successful!

1) You must find out what the true objection is.

Typically when a customer or potential customer says “no” they will say something like “we don’t have the budget for it” or “maybe next quarter”, etc. These are simply stalling tactics even if the customer doesn’t realize that’s why they’re doing it! Rarely will these actually be the reasons the customer said no. It is your job to understand your customer’s needs and the real reason they didn’t buy. You can overcome this objection very easily by being understanding and reassuring (remember: if the customer said ‘no’ it’s partially because they either don’t know you, don’t trust you yet or haven’t been convinced that they need what you have to offer).

You can begin to discover the true objection by offering a way around their current reason to say no. For instance, if they say they don’t have it in their budget, you can show them a similar product that is less expensive or is a little less initial-payment heavy or stretches the payments further. You can show them how, by adding your product, they will increase their revenue beyond the cost of the product or how it will reduce expenses elsewhere (like energy saving appliances and bulbs).

Once you have overcome the initial objection, if money wasn’t the actual issue then you will begin to get to the root of their decision. It’s likely the next statement will be more along the lines of “Well, I just don’t see how this will benefit me or my business” or something like “But you’re new in town. I don’t know if you’re going to be around in 1 year to take care of your warranty.” Valid objections, and now time for you to do your job and make a sale!

2) Overcoming the true objection.

Once you’ve been able to get past the initial pseudo-objections, it’s your time to sell yourself because that’s actually what the customer is buying into or not buying into. They are buying you, your presentation, your relationship, your trustworthiness, your good looks, your hygiene, the whole works! When you make a sale, unless your customer was just desperately needing your product just before you walked in the door (or before they walked in your doors), it is you they are buying so you have to focus on who you are and what you do best, not what the product is and what it does best. You must now focus on your strengths to create a new relationship with this person. This product won’t last forever; you probably won’t even be selling it 20 years from now, but hopefully you will still be around and your customers will still have needs, and you need them to want you to be the one to fill those needs no matter what you’re offering today.

So, at this point, it becomes a game of you showing the customer who you are because you’ve likely already demoed the product; doing so again will often end up without a sale and without a customer. It’s now about you.

3) Sell yourself to your customers

Who are you? Do you know? Have you done a self-evaluation lately? It’s important to know your strengths and weaknesses before you sell yourself to your customers. You likely know some of your strengths if you’re a people person at all, because you know what you do or say and how you act that make your friends laugh and enjoy being around you. Now is the time to relax, not to be stressed, and to be yourself. SMILE and be confident in you and what you’re selling. Your confidence makes all the difference in the world.

If that pitcher throws 92mph and is bigger and meaner looking that you (in your mind) and you walk up to the plate terrified, you’ll likely strikeout. If you love the game of baseball and are thrilled just to be facing Randy Johnson, knowing it’s a challenge but also knowing you have the ability to turn that fastball into 405 foot home run (even if the first pitch was just under your chin) your chances of success are much greater because your mind and your perception of the situation  (your confidence) heavily weighs in the outcome of your success.

So focus on being a person, not a sales-person. Turn the customer’s focus away from the item you sell and onto you as a person. Talk about your family or your past or your dreams for the future. Let them see you as intelligent and confident, but also as a person they can relate to. Once that happens, well, remember? People buy from people they like and people they trust. Once you’ve destroyed the barrier of you vs. potential customer and turned it into you + customer = good relationship (regardless of product) is when the true selling begins.

So how hard is this? Well, just like anything worthwhile in life, it takes practice and persistence. But it shouldn’t be too hard being you, maybe just hard telling yourself to be you in those situations, but you can do it! You have to do it if you want to learn to overcome objections and develop customers that keep doing business with you tomorrow and years from now. That’s how you stay in business; that’s how you compete with big corporate chains; that’s how you make money and build relationships.

~Seth

Understanding that money doesn’t just appear because you decide to go into business is very fundamental to your success. Buying a franchise or opening up a brick and mortar store of your own creation is a great and exciting time! But too many new entrepreneurs fail to remember how money is earned, expecting that because they invested in a building or in a product line people will line up at the door to get in and give you their hard-earned dollars.

We see the craziness that surrounds the opening of a new WalMart or Target. But those lines today came at a cost before. People line up because they know what to expect and they want to be a part of it.

You can generate that much buzz about your business too! But you have to be willing to earn it, because rarely will it come easy!

I’ve seen restaurants that looked like they had it all together be run of out business in 6 months while a location just down the road that had nothing flashy to compare couldn’t be open late enough or early enough. If they were open, they were packed.

Why? What had they done to make…I mean, earn so much business? I guarantee you it wasn’t that way their first month.

Ask them. Business owners are proud of their work and they love to talk about it (most of them anyway!). Ask them! I bet you get one common theme…”we just treat people how we want to be treated”.

Really? That simple? Probably. Because people do business with people they trust and people they like. If you enjoy being around someone you find reasons to be around them.

Now, you still have to have a good product and you have to be competitive with your pricing. What you sell must be worth what you are selling it for. But earning the right to sell your product is as important as the product and price is. The customers will let you know when you have the right to take their money in exchange for what you offer.

That’s the Seashell Methods of Doing Business. It’s relationship based. It’s doing unto others, and it produces two things: 1) recurring business   2) talk among patrons to others about your business and there is no greater, more solid way to build a business.

Happy thanksgiving!

~Seth

An extreme case, I know, but we all probably feel a little piece of that every year around this time. Extra shopping when everyone else does their extra shopping, busier streets, darker earlier yet more people driving around later than normal…it can seem a mad house!

I think of my youngest brother who just recently got married. Now, (as many of us do) he has an additional set of family that will expect his (and his wife’s) time each year. And that set of family is hundreds of miles away. Of course, he would also be a professional musician and as I was hoping to get to spend some time at Christmas with him (wondering if his loyalty would be up North this year for his wife), I find out he may be in China, playing a week-long gig there.

Christmas, a vacation? Maybe not!

But I love this time of year. I’ve grown to love the colder weather and I’ve grown to love the excitement this time of year brings. I love business. I love watching it happen. I love seeing people shopping and business owners and managers unable to keep up with the purchasing demands.

I’ve grown to love it all…the music and lights. I wonder if that’s because I’ve grown to love the One for whom I celebrate Christmas? Maybe I should say I’ve grown more in love with Him because every year I realize more and more how important Christ is to me…and to Christmas. Without this day (no, not literally December 25th) there’s not a lot of reason to live, there’s no reason for my love of life because that will come to an end sooner than I’m ready for it to. But it’s my hope and excitement of a life that goes beyond what I know now that has me excited. It you can’t celebrate that, there’s nothing else in life worth celebrating, because no one…..no one has given to you what He has and no one deserves celebrating more than Jesus.

So, what are you doing this Christmas? Hopefully, if you’re in business, you already have your strategy in hand and are bringing folks in to celebrate with you! There’s no getting around that even in our economic concerns Christmas is the big spender of the year. Are you attracting new business? Have you thought very thoroughly how to retain a good portion of that business as recurring patrons throughout the year?

As busy as Christmas is, don’t forget it’s the relationship that bring them back. Be thankful for Christmas that it brings them in…and make good use of that! Be the owner or manager. Make sure your customers feel good about you and your integrity. Make them want to come back. Not because you run killer specials but because you are a great person to do business with!

If they like you and they trust you…the might do business with you! Never forget it. =)

Seth

In life and in business there is little, if any difference. One of the top ten most important emotional needs is that of admiration and feeling accepted. Many people have this as a top need in their life and it’s one need that any person can meet. If you’re a golf caddy, milk salesman or pet store owner, you can take part in making the lives of your customers better, easier and more enjoyable.

When your customers come to you it’s because they have a need or at least think they might. When your spouse marries you it’s because he or she has needs that they feel you have the ability to meet. Success comes when you are able to discern those needs and then find a way to meet them. In marriage you can do this by going over the top ten most important emotional needs and find out what yours are as well as your spouse’s.

In business, well, there’s not exactly a form you typically give your customers asking them to fill out their needs. It’s up to you to ask the right questions, find their need (or needs) and meet them.

Ok, so you sell dog food and it’s not that hard to know what your customer came in for, deciding to engage your customer anyway drives into them that you value them, their business and their needs in a way most other stores that carry dog food simply won’t do. Asking them about their dog, what it likes, dislikes and finding out what brand of dog food they normally prefer will go a long way toward earning trust and earning the right to offer them a different brand of chow if you feel you have a potential better solution for them (note: that does not translate into a better financial incentive for you! If the customer feels you have their best interest at heart the financial benefits will take care of themselves).

I realize that at 5:00 on a Friday afternoon you often can’t possibly try and take unusual amounts of time with customers when others are lined up to check out, but always remember, your customers pay your rent and utilities and your house payment. Getting to know them and in turn causing them to feel that they are important to you will benefit your business in ways you cannot get by hiring a minimum-wage staff to run your shop. Recurring business is built this way. Feeling that you are valued and important feels good! People repeat what feels good to them. You have the power to change peoples lives and even how they feel about themselves…even if you think you just sell dog food.

Seth

You can get it through Amazon.com or on my SeashellMarriage.com website. You can purchase it in paperback for $16.95 or download the PDF for $10.95.

Soon we should have a workbook out that will compliment the book and will be great to small groups and classes to do together. I’ll post more information as I have it!

In the meantime, if you would like to schedule a time for me to come speak to your group or church you may contact me using the contact form on this page! I’d love to come share good news for marriages any time I can.