On Monday July 25, 2011 between 7:00pm and 8:00pm ET there’s going to be a Tweet Chat about the SMBInfluencer Awards.

What are the SMBInlfuencer Awards?

The small business space has become increasingly crowded and overwhelming.  Even if you troll around the small business internet space, it’s unbelievably easy to be confused about who is an expert in what and which companies provide what service.

This is why co-founders Anita Campbell, publisher of the award winning Small Business Trends and Ramon Ray from SmallBizTechnology.com put their heads together and came up with a way to recognize the companies, leaders, gurus and media organizations that help and influence small business every day.

This project started in June with nominations pouring in from all over the internet.  And the voting period started about a week or so ago.  To get some more background and see the field of SMBInfluencers, visit the SMBInfluencer site and browse around.  Feel free to vote for the people who have influenced you and helped you in your business.  You can vote daily and you can vote for more than one person.  So head over there and give it a try.

Join the #SMBInlfuencer Tweet Chat (Use Hashtag #BBSMBchat)

If you’ve never been in a tweet chat, you will find this an engaging and thrilling experience.  A tweet chat is a live conversation about a specific topic that is going on in Twitter.

You can participate in this Twitter chat by joining us on Twitter — search on the hashtag #BBSMBChat and weigh in withyour tips, insights and ideas. Or follow the action at the Tweetchat room: http://tweetchat.com/room/BBSMBchat

For all the details about the Tweet Chat and the SMBInlfuencer awards – Read the press release for SMBInfluencer Awards and Tweet Chat (#BBSMBchat)

This guest contribution comes from Philip the publisher of American Swagger blog.  Philip has the unique talent of being able to transform data into information and presentations that all of us would actually be excited to hear!  In this article, he talks about asking a magical question and the opportunities that it uncovers.

Most sales aren’t lost because the product/ service offering was not good enough, or because it was too expensive, or because the pitch wasn’t polished enough, but because the sales person did not know what the prospective customer really wanted. Asking the Harry Potter question can help you win that business.

Here is the typical sales process: Sally Sales introduces her company, her previous clients, and demonstrates a product or service to Billy Buyer. Based on what he remembers from the 2 hour sales pitch Billy makes up his mind whether or not the product or service can help him be more profitable, and if he can’t get a cheaper from a competitor, he buys.

Unfortunately this is exactly how deals are lost, because Billy is trying to fit a product his very custom need and the fit is rarely idea, therefore he will evaluate competitors, get a cheaper price, outsource or take it in house, buying from Sally is the last resort by default. This is bad, because in this scenario you are Sally.

Luckily Sally can change the odds to her advantage by asking the following question:

“Imagine you are Harry Potter and you could just cast a magic spell, and everything would be exactly how you want it. If you cast that patronus solution idealus, how would that solution look like? “

This will clear Billy Buyer’s mind of all believed limitations and self-imposed constraints and help him to truly define his need. Billy will not try to keep his need within the alleged limitations of your product or service and he will not dumb down his need so that it fits within the easily available budget. The real true need can be discovered. From here Sally can assess how her products and services can be used, maybe even in conjunction with a competitive product and service to build the ideal solution for Billy.

Here is Sally’s checklist for the Harry Potter Solution Sale:

You have secured a meeting with a prospective client, stay away from your usual product overview and company history presentations.

To give an example everybody can follow, we have Billy asking florist Sally for flowers (but same applies when Apple need microprocessors and talks to Intel):

[ ] Step 1 Stay Away from Usual
Do NOT start by talking about your company’s history, do NOT show a list of your current or past client’s, do NOT launch into a product or service presentation. That you are an old company with tons of clients and polished sales material doesn’t mean that you have a solution anybody should buy. People get fooled into buying stuff they don’t need day-in and day-out. Instead prove to the client that you can help by following the next steps.

Sally: Sally’s Flower Parlor has been in business since 1973, we sold flowers to thousands of customers including, John Wayne, Winnie the Pooh, and Lance Armstrong. Here, take this flyer about dandelions they are awesome and don’t attract bees.

Billy: Hm, thanks for your time. I am not really looking for dandelions. Bye!

[ ] Step 2 Identify Client Believe

Ask questions around what the client’s hopes to achieve by using your product or services. This is only to warm the client up. Don’t make the mistake to skip to your sales presentation because the client seems to know your products. Even if the client has used your product or service for years, he or she will only have used certain aspects of it, and will be unaware of the full capabilities, the ‘needs’ the client communicates to you will already be limited to what he or she believes your capabilities are.

Sally: How can I help you today?

Billy: I am looking for a bouquet of roses for my girlfriend.

[ ] Step 3 Identify Client Motivation

No matter what you sell, nobody will buy it unless there is a personal or monetary benefit that comes with it. You have to follow the money and trace the benefit that motivates the client to consider your product or services.

Sally: Roses are nice! A lot of people ask for them! Why do you think roses would be good?

Billy: Well, it is my girlfriend’s birthday, I think red roses will make her happy and show her how much I love her, right?

[ ] Step 4 Ask the Harry Potter Question

You know what the customer thinks he or she can get from us now, and we also know why he wants it. Now that we got the client this far it is easy to have him fully open up by asking the Harry Potter question: “Imagine you are Harry Potter and you could just cast a magic spell, and everything would be exactly how you want it. If you cast that patronus solution idealus, how would that solution look like? “

Sally: Wow, that is so cute. Roses will work well. Let me ask you this, if you could just cast a magic spell, like Harry Potter, and everything would be just like you want it, how would that look like?

Billy: Hm, I also have that necklace I want to give her. Despite it being her birthday I would like the whole thing to be a surprise that has her giggling and her girlfriends impressed.

[ ] Step 5 Design the Solution

Now that you have indentified the customer’s real need, you can go ahead and design the perfect solution consisting of your products and services and even tying in new, custom, and competitive services.

Sally: Here is an idea, how about you act like you forgot her birthday and we deliver a luscious bouquet of roses, together with the necklace to her workplace! We also could pick up a big box of See’s Candies chocolate that she can share with her impressed co-workers!

Billy: That sounds great! Let’s do it!

In summary, asking the Harry Potter question, will you to gain more insight into your customers needs, better serve these needs and build a long lasting profitable customer relationship that is impenetrable to the next lowest bidder.

Now go, cast a spell.

About the Author: Brought to you by Philip Grote, publisher of www.americanswagger.us, a communication consultancy determined to create pitches and presentations that woo your audience, and close your deals. For more sales advice follow americanswagger.us on twitter or like it on facebook. Thanks!

My last article was about a web design checklist, and this time, I wanted to share a fantastic review article written by TJ McCue from Sales Rescue Team on Small Business Trends that reviews 7 free web site design tools.

I’ve been recommending that you use WordPress for your web site because it’s such a friendly content management system and also does well in ranking on the search engines.  But if that isn’t your speed, then you might consider some of these:

1. Google Sites

2. DoodleKit

3. Wix

4. Moonfruit

5. Weebly

6. Webstarts

7. WordPress

Read TJ’s full review of these free website builders on Small Business Trends.

While it’s always great to grow the size of the pie with new customers buying new products — competitive selling something we all have to do.  If you’ve decided to dominate a specific market niche and the top customers within that niche are buying from someone else — you’re in a competitive selling situation.

I received this amazing no BS sales book called “Competitive Selling” from the author Landy Chase and just loved it.  You will see the book review on Small Business Trends but in the mean time, here is a little preview article I received from Landy on the topic of selling and keeping the competitive customer.

Selling to the Competitive User
By Landy Chase, Author of Competitive Selling : Out-Plan, Out-Think, and Out-Sell to Win Every Time

Nothing is more rewarding for any business than taking an account away from a competitor. Successfully persuading a competitive user to leave their existing vendor for you takes an enormous amount of patience, skill, and strategy. Unfortunately, most business people don’t approach the strategic issue of competitive loyalty properly, and they pay for it with limited success in their take-away efforts.

To be successful in taking accounts away from your competitors, you have to begin by looking objectively at the situation from the viewpoint of your potential client. Consider for a moment the implications to your prospect. By asking them to move their business to you, you are essentially asking them to:

• Tell the current supplier that they are fired;
• Go through the process of setting up an account with a new supplier, including all of the tedious, time-consuming paperwork;
• Get to know a whole new set of people to work with;
• Get to know a whole new set of different and unfamiliar procedures;
• Take the risk of making a bad business decision, and paying the consequences.

This collectively adds up to a sobering fact that you must accept and work with: Unless your prospective client is having a major problem with their vendor, trying to persuade them to abandon that relationship is an exercise in frustration and futility.

Does this mean that you should abandon your efforts to sell to the competitive user? Not at all. The key to success here is to abandon the notion that you can immediately replace the existing supplier. Instead, re-think your strategy for success. Look for ways to supplement the existing relationship without replacing it, by providing a product or service that meets a specific special need that the primary vendor is either not capable of addressing, or has chosen not to.

Unless your prospect is having a major problem with their vendor, trying to persuade them to abandon that relationship is an exercise in frustration and futility. This approach is much more productive, and gets you over the two major obstacles you face in selling to the competitive user:

1. You find a way to get your foot in the door and prove yourself.
2. You turn the prospect into a customer, opening the “pipeline” for additional opportunities if you deliver.

My biggest new client one year was a competitive user who told me initially that they were happy with the resource that they were using, and weren’t open at that time to new alternatives. Accepting this, I was able to persuade a decision-maker within the account to allow me the opportunity to supplement their existing relationship by delivering a specialized service that the current supplier was not addressing.

This initial program soon led to more opportunities, and before long I had successfully acquired a full business relationship that has proven to be one of the best I have ever had. This strategy worked because I requested — and received — a small opportunity to prove myself, without threatening the existing vendor relationship.

Look for ways to supplement, not replace, the needs of the competitive user. By delivering value on  a small scale now, you can position yourself to reap big rewards later.

Author Bio
Landy Chase, author of Competitive Selling: Out-Plan, Out-Think, and Out-Sell to Win Every Time, founded his own sales training and consulting firm in 1993 and has clients in more than sixty industries on five different continents. He has delivered more than two thousand paid presentations as a professional speaker and holds the Certified Speaking Professional (CPS) designation from the National Speakers Association, the highest earned level of excellence in the industry. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

For more information please visit www.LandyChase.com.

One of the things I LOVE about publishing DIYMarketers and serving as the DIY Marketing expert and resource for Small Business Trends and QuestionPro communities is that I get to explore and try programs that you might be interested in, but can’t afford to risk your time trying.

Over the next 6 weeks I’m going to be participating in the OneCoach Social Media Webinar for Small Business.

Reasons The OneCoach Social Media Webinar Series for Small Business is Time and Money Well Spent

1. OneCoach consistently delivers quality, high-end, well researched content.  Scott Allen is a seasoned social media expert.  He’s been at it since the late 90′s and that’s before LinkedIn, Facebook and what we know as social media.  This means that he lends CONTEXT to the topic.  He’s had experience BEFORE social networking, during the rise of social media and now as we evolve these tools into revenue generating resources.
2. Focused on Making Money. If you’re a CEO asking yourself how any of this will make you money — Scott Allen has made this the focus of the entire program.  As a business owner, you’ll see exactly the tool he uses to analyze and measure which connections have the highest value and bring the most leverage to your business.  No fluffy social stuff for fun here.  He explains how it can be social, but doesn’t dwell there.
3. Interactive social space community for participants. You will pay several hundred dollars to be in this seminar.  But the biggest value you’ll get is the people that you will meet and interact with.  OneCoach has created a closed social space for the participant community where they can practice, interact and get to know each other better.  I’ve already connected and learned from several people and can’t wait to learn more.  This is TOTALLY worth every penny.,
4. Tips, tips and even more tips — even for experts. I’ll admit it.  I’m a social media snob.  I was worried that because so many small business CEOs were behind the curve, that the tips I would get here would be too basic.  I was wrong.  Because the sessions are SO FOCUSED on leveraging contacts for cash – I was blown away by the quality of the tips.  Here’s my favorite — “Instead of using email – work to have conversations (that aren’t private) online using Twitter and Facebook.”  This is a brilliant tip because social media sites are indexed by Google and if you’re discussing a topic that is in your area of expertise — they YOU WILL BE FOUND.  I have about 50 of these — and that’s just from Unit 1.
5. You will learn to NOT WASTE TIME. Look.  I went into this worried that I would waste an hour and a half every week for six weeks.  And if you have that thought swirling around — put it aside.  If you’ve been frustrated by the social media topic because you feel like you’re letting this low cost marketing tool go to waste — then this program would be ideal for you.

Too Bad – I think Registration is Closed

I’m not sure if you think this is good news or bad — but I’m not writing this to sell you on the social media for small business webinar because I think it might be closed now.  You can try and see if they will let you in.  If they do, it’s worth it.

What I wanted you to know from this post is that OneCoach programs are a good value.  If you’re the CEO of a million dollar company with no marketing department — then this is a great investment of time and money.  They will not waste either.

So What Can I DO?

Don’t worry.  I’m not teasing you mercilessly.  I asked the folks over at OneCoach what they would recommend for my community that missed this webinar, but might be interested in the program — they recommended that you head over to the Business Momentum Club.  I’ve been a member and would say exactly the same thing for that program as I did for this one.

In the meantime.  Stay tuned for articles that will feature content from this Social Media Webinar Series with Scott Allen.

If you’re a reluctant sales rep like me, then you already know how much MORE FUN it is to sell more stuff to existing customers than it is to get out there and find new customers, make nicey-nice, get them to like and trust you, get them to actually consider using your product and finally get them to buy.

If you’re lucky, they made a good decision and were a good fit for your company, your product and the level of customer service you offer.

Not every customer is for everybody.

Joseph Jaffee’s latest book “Flip the Funnel” is my latest book review on Small Business Trends.  And it holds lots of lessons for DIYMarketers.

1. Focus on the customers you already have.
2. Set up a relationship retention process that engages them and encourages them to buy more of your stuff. (the more of your stuff a single customer buys, the more profit you make — it’s a good thing)
3. If you look at a piece of customer communication and it sounds “corporatey” and empty — it probably is.  It’s a good bet it will make your customer feel — NOTHING and give them a good reason to look elsewhere the next time they need what you sell.
4. Treating your customers like individuals will SET YOU APART and differentiate you from the competition and from other alternatives — remember — they aren’t do thing (go figure).
5. It will make work FUN.  Whoever said work wasn’t supposed to be fun and that’s why they call it work — died poor.  Building loyal profitable relationships with your customers (assuming they are a good profile fit for you) is FUN and will make your life and your employees life more fun.

“Flip the Funnel” is an entertaining read — but not necessarily an easy logical read.  Jaffe himself will tell you that he’s a bit ADD and jumps around and this is true.  However – it’s perfectly possible to read this book in small doses, take in the tidbits and pull out a few things that you will do differently.

As a DIYMarketer, you can’t afford to miss out on this relatively FREE strategy that sets you apart, builds business with customers you’ve already got and increases your level of fun at work.  Pick up your very own copy of “Flip the Funnel” and see what it does for you.

This article first published on Small Business Trends.  Read the review and listen to the exclusive interview with Adam Penenberg.

If you are interested in using the Internet to grow your business virally, then “Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves” is a must-read.

I bought this book as part of my search for the “Not to be missed” books of 2009 (in preparation for the second annual business book awards).  And I’m glad I’ve gotten to it before the end of the year because I believe that it is going to be my bible for helping small businesses build their brand and business online.

Viral Loop literally dissects and breaks apart the code behind what makes some businesses and ideas go viral and others go fizzle. The first sentence of the book had me completely hooked.

“Two Heinekens into a lazy Tuesday afternoon, James Hong, a twenty-seven-year-old dot-com refugee from Mountain View California, was listening to his roommate, Jim Young, a Berkeley graduate student in electrical engineering, wax on about a woman he had spotted at a party the previous weekend. Young, also twenty-seven, insisted she was a “perfect 10.” Hong didn’t believe him. He knew his roommate had a thing for “goth,” while Hing’s own tastes were more Abercrombie & Fitch. What the world needed, they agreed, was a metric to reliably rate someone’s looks.”

This book was not only educational, but really entertaining. That’s because the author, Adam L. Penenberg, is a journalism professor and assistant director of the Business and Economics Program at New York University. He has written for Fast Company, Inc., Slate, Wired, and a series of other well known magazines. And you can tell that he is an expert in explaining highly technical information to an audience that needs to learn and understand it, but doesn’t have the time or the inclination to do all the research that’s required to get there.

How to Read Viral Loop

The book is broken up into three major sections:

• I Viral Businesses: Penenberg gives context to the viral business model by going into detail about the grandfathers of the viral business model:  Tupperware, Mosaic and Ning are just a few. If you’re thinking about using a viral model, you’ll want to pay attention because each of these stories holds a key to the foundations of a good viral loop.
• II Viral Marketing: This section continues to lead the reader from the basics of viral marketing and shows you how these same principles are applied to other businesses. Perhaps the most striking thing to me about this section is how perennial a good business model is. In this section the key story is about Hotmail and how they used the “home party” idea as inspiration to spread the word about Hotmail by placing something in the footer of their e-mails.
• III Viral Networks: This is where everything you’ve read before comes into play. This book is not for the weak-at-Internet-strategy-heart. In this section you learn about building an architecture that can sustain the masses that will throng to your site if your viral loop is good enough.

You’ll want to read this book slowly and surely page by page, chapter by chapter so that you can be sure to get every bit of viral history, company story and business model.

Why Read Viral Loop

At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, you can’t afford to run a business in this economy without reading this book. The historical perspective combined with the real-life stories and wrapped up in the high quality story telling that Penenberg brings makes Viral Loop a must read for 2009.

I’m currently at the InfusionCon marketing conference in Phoenix, Arizona.  I’m here as part of Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends team and our objective is to promote BizSugar — the only bookmarking site dedicated specifically to small business.

We’ve decided to get people excited about the site by actually showing them how it works.  We’re going to get them involved by interviewing some of the attendees of the conference and asking them a few questions.  We might even create some short videos to post along with the articles.

Some of the questions we’re considering asking are:

• Why are you at the conference and what will you walk away with that will make this time worthwhile?
• What’s your strategy for getting and keeping profitable customers?
• What sets your business apart from the crowd?
• What possibilities or opportunities do you see for your business in 2010? And in what is at least one way that you’re going to take advantage of them?
• What’s been your most successful strategy in building your business so far?  What tips do you have for those of us that want to use that strategy as well?

What questions do you have of the folks here at InfusionCon who are learning more, better ways to build their business?

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This week’s book review on Small Business Trends is on “Creating Competitive Advantage” by Jaynie L. Smith.   You can see a summary of the book review as a feature video as well.  It’s one thing to read the book, get the principles and think that it’s a great idea, it’s quite another to sit yourself down and start comping up with a real competitive advantage that you can use to actually increase your sales.

I’ve got the book and will be pulling concepts from it while we go through this, but I would encourage you to get a copy for yourself – it’s stellar.  Rather than simply creating a list of what to do, we’re going to start actually doing it over a series of posts and let’s see what we come up with!

Getting Your Brain Around Competitive Advantage

A competitive advantage has three pre-requisites – otherwise it doesn’t count.

1. Must be objective.  This means that it’s a statement of fact; 3 locations, open 24 hours, etc.  If you think about it, it’s kind of like a “feature” of your business.
2. Must be quantitative. Specify how much, how many of anything you’ve got as a feature.  In the example above we made some specifics here are a few more: each service representative has at least 20 hours of training (specify what kind), your pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.
3. Not claimed by any other competitor.  This is where it gets tricky,  your competitive advantage could truly be something that no one else is doing OR it can be something that they are not claiming – or focusing on.  This gives you a lot of creativity.
4. No cliche. Stay away from empty phrases like “your solution provider.”

Start With a List

To get your brain bubbling take a moment and list as many “factual features” of your business.  Aim for a list of 49!

Here are a few areas to get you started:

• How would you respond to your customer when they ask “Why should I buy from you?”
• What’s most important to your customer when they are buying what you are selling?
• What features of your business give the customer what’s most important to them?
• In what ways does your business deliver what’s most important to your customer?

This is just a short list of thought starters – spend about 45 minutes on this exercise.

Stuck-Buster Ideas

Are you stuck on this?  That’s totally normal… here are a few brain-busters to get you started again.

• Draw a picture (stick figures are great) of your customer at the moment when their mind should be triggered to contact you.  What’s happening, where are they?  In what ways can you be “present” to remind them that there is a solution?
• Go outside for 10 minutes with a notebook.  Walk around and note the first thing you see.  Now make a list of all the ways that this item reminds you of the reason your customer chooses you.

Try this and let me know how you’re doing.

How did you discover or uncover your competitive advantage?

One of the things you can expect from DIYMarketers are periodic reviews of tools and resources that you’ll find helpful in selling to small businesses.

We all have a long list of blogs and articles we read every day – but I have to strongly recommend “Selling to Small Business.”  If you’re already an avid reader of Small Business Trends, then you might know about this one.  Both are online publications by Small Business Expert, Anita Campbell.

Anita truly has her pulse on what’s happening in the small business world.  In light of full disclosure, Anita is a client and a friend — but BOTH of these roles actually came years after I started following her work, reading her blog and relying on her online publications for my industry and trend information — heavily, I might add.  I only have one criticism of how Anita’s publications — I wish they had a portal that was all Anita Campbell small business stuff – all the time.  My biggest issue is that I have to hop from URL to URL and that they aren’t just a portal all their own.  But that’s just me and it goes to show how much I rely on her unique way of pulling information together in digestible bites and using the most credible resources on the web.

I’ll be reviewing several of her sites in the coming months, but I really want to start with “Selling to Small Business” first.

Who Should Read Selling to Small Business and Why?

Like the name implies, if you intend on SELLING to SMALL BUSINESS – you should read this blog.  But don’t even think about using this as “Chamber event” where you constantly pitch the audience on whatever your wares are.  It doesn’t work like that. Selling to Small Business is a resource to those of us who serve this market.  It will educate BOTH the large multi-national company like a Microsoft of an Intel on what’s important to small business, as well as the smaller provider of products and services.

How to Get the Most Out of Selling to Small Business?

Regardless of how you organize your blog reading, I recommend that you put all of Anita’s blogs very close together, so that you can take a quick glance and what topics she’s covering.  So put it on your reader.

It runs on a standard blog format, so the most recent stories are on the top and you can scroll your way down.  But remember – this is not so much a time driven source of information, as it is valuable category information – so be sure to look to your right where you’ll see the categories and the number of articles in each category.

Currently the categories tell you something about what’s happening in small business.  For example, she’s got one on Baby Boomers.  I never would have thought that as a category – but read the stories that are tagged and you’ll see that she’s thought this through – the stories aren’t just ABOUT baby boomers, some of them are stories baby boomers who are responsible for selling to small business should pay attention to.  Love that.

The next tab is “About” and you can learn more about what Anita was thinking when she started Selling to Small Business.

MY FAVORITE TAB – Small Business Lists!

Look you DIY Marketers — it’s all about the LIST.  It is so about the list and the community that you should not every kid yourself about this.  Here Anita gives you a wonderful resource ; calendars of small business events that you might find interesting to attend.

The other “list” she gives is the link to her SMBTrendwire podcasts.  These are weekly interviews that Anita and Steve Rucinski do with a variety of small business experts and authors.  There is so much to learn from these – you’ll have to put yourself on a daily budget of what to listen to and how much.

The last list resource is a directory of small business blogs. Againk you’ll have to look through these and identify the ones that are most useful to you.

Finally there is the archives section – which is what you’d expect it to be – archives of articles by category and month.

I highly encourage you to not only check this blog out, but I encourage you to become a subscriber and regular reader.  When you’re in dire need of quick, high quality info and data — this is your place.