Peggy Klaus (16 page)

Sensing it had been a long time since Cheryl felt there was anything to brag about in terms of her “outside” activities, Wendy pressed on: “So I hear you’d like to start doing some work with foundations. I read about how successful you were at raising money for the reading program. Can you tell me more about the fundraising work you’ve done?” With a little probing, it all came pouring out: Cheryl’s volunteer work turned out to be quite substantial. Apparently she had quite a knack for soliciting money, and had done so very successfully for several organizations. Beyond the reading program, she had helped raise $15 million for the hospital’s new pediatric wing through individual donors and several fundraising events she had chaired. Cheryl had turned around a local charity for teens on the brink of closing by taking over as board president and writing grant proposals. Her most recent project had been helping her college roommate, now living in rural Maine, raise money for a health clinic. Although Cheryl seemed perfectly able to mentor a friend on foundation grant writing or approach a private donor to ask for millions, she was hard-pressed to tell someone at a cocktail party about her own accomplishments.

When people, especially women, choose to leave the workforce and become stay-at-home parents, they tell me that they fear losing their identities. Yes, little-Johnny stories are great if you are in the company of others with similar interests and if that’s not all you talk about. But even parents tell me that they get bored with nonstop kiddie talk. So in order to avoid the second-class-citizen treatment in broader social situations, come prepared with bragologues about yourself, not just your kids!

CHAPTER 8

When You’re Out on Your Own

•  “He introduced me the wrong way. I was horrified.”

•  “My website is ready, and I’m all set for business.”

•  “It was a stretch even for me.”

•  “I’ve always remembered what she said when we met.”

•  “He was all flash.”

When you
are
the company, promoting yourself takes on a whole new meaning. In effect, you have to become a walking billboard for your business (without sounding like one!). Whether you’re a graphic artist, an accountant, a freelance writer, a management consultant, or a software developer, it’s really all the same: You’ve got to brag every chance you get, and that means being ready 24/7. Your livelihood and future, along with all the sweat equity and dollars invested, depend on how good you become at self-promotion, at telling your story in a catchy manner and distinguishing yourself so that you rise above the fray. The bottom line is quite simple:
Before you sell anything, you’ve got to first sell yourself in a personal and memorable way.

Most new business owners that I have met and coached, however, fall victim to brag-fright. While they can go on and on about their products or services, even the most skilled and polished professionals fumble when I ask them to shine the spotlight on themselves—to speak about what they’ve accomplished and how it connects to the services or products they are selling. They are at a loss for words when it comes to articulating the very things about themselves that will differentiate them from the competition, demonstrate their effectiveness, bolster credibility, instill confidence, and personalize their pitch into a message that resonates. They let unchecked brag-fright get in the way of developing the self-promotion approach needed to stand out from the competition and make the deal.

“But … it’s okay to brag about someone else, just not about myself.”

That’s a shame, because what you’re really saying is that you’re not as proud of yourself as you are of others or that you aren’t as accomplished as others. If this sounds familiar, then you’ve got some work ahead!

Further, talk to most entrepreneurs about promotion, and all they see are the dollar signs connected with an advertising campaign, event sponsorship, hiring a fancy publicist, or developing reams of collateral materials. But effective promotion of your business has less to do with the amount of dollars spent on expensive marketing campaigns and everything to do with how well you personally communicate your story on a daily basis wherever you go. And I don’t mean repeating what’s written on your website or brochure. Take the time to carefully craft personal and conversational bragologues and brag bites customized to meet a wide variety of situations, both planned and impromptu. Be ready to pitch a prospective client or venture capitalist, talk to a journalist, or spread the word about your company to family, friends, or the guy mowing his lawn down the street! It’s one of the surest ways to maximize your exposure without spending a dime.

MAKE SURE YOUR FANS GET IT RIGHT

“He introduced me the wrong way. I was horrified.”

As any entrepreneur knows, friends and family members can be an important source for contacts and for spreading the word to the outside world about the rising success of your business. But sometimes you need to literally put the right words in their mouths so they will convey the correct message about who you are, what you’re doing, and your successes or goals. One budding entrepreneur I recently coached learned this lesson in a painful and embarrassing way.

After twelve years Judy had tossed away the New York City rat race and her impressive advertising career for an idyllic country lifestyle in a small New England town. In the advertising world she had risen to the rank of account director, but now she longed to return to her roots as a writer. In fact, she had a degree in journalism and had started her career as a promotional copywriter for a well-established women’s magazine on Madison Avenue. Longer term, she envisioned becoming an author. But in the short run, to prove herself and to make ends meet, she was ready to try her hand at any type of writing. Enchanted with her new countrified lifestyle, and anxious to meet other professionals in her area, she took on some local assignments. She wrote a brochure for a local real estate agency, a quarterly newsletter on fabric care for a large regional dry cleaner, and ad copy for a restaurant.

Judy told me that after about six months, “Phase One,” as she called it, had ended, adding, “I was so overqualified and underpaid, it was ridiculous. Now it was time for the big stuff and Phase Two.” She called all her city contacts in advertising, spreading the word that she was available as a freelance copywriter. Before she knew it she was landing some great work. She was quickly hired to write the copy for a major TV ad campaign and for a promotional video that ran in one of the largest U.S. retail chains, among other assignments. With her portfolio of work expanding and her confidence growing, she was anxious to begin planting seeds for Phase Three, fulfilling her dream of becoming an author. She had a few nonfiction book ideas, and wanted to make herself available for ghostwriting projects as well. The perfect networking opportunity presented itself by way of an engagement party that she threw for her sister and future brother-in-law, Brian, where some of the invited guests of the couple were heavyweights in the New York publishing world.

Judy was especially interested in meeting one guest in particular, a book editor who was an old friend of Brian’s from childhood. When the big moment came, Brian said to the editor, “I’d like to introduce you to my future sister-in-law, Judy, who is throwing this beautiful party today. She’s a New York City transplant who has struck out on her own as a freelance writer and has written for …” Suddenly Brian paused, looking to Judy to complete his sentence. Before Judy knew it, Brian continued, saying, “She’s been doing some great things. She wrote a newsletter for one of the largest dry cleaners in this area and has been working with a hot new restaurant. Wasn’t that newsletter you did on fabric care?” Judy was mortified and felt her face flush. How was she ever going to brag her way from writing copy for a local dry cleaner to writing a best-selling book? She smiled uneasily, and responded, “Hi. It’s nice to meet you. Well, I actually have been doing some work that I’m pretty excited about…” but before she had a chance to elaborate, the editor’s wife called him away and they left soon after. That was it, an opportunity lost.

The next day, she lightly chastised her misinformed future brother-in-law. Bringing him up to speed on her Phase Two accomplishments and Phase Three goals, she begged him to never mention the dry cleaner ever again!

I can’t stress enough the importance of making sure that people who are going to introduce you have the facts right about your current situation and goals. We often think we don’t have much control over what others say, but we do. When others introduce you, they often either repeat what they have heard from you or make something up. So get your bragologues and brag bites down, repeat them often, and make sure to keep them current so that others have the most up-to-date version.

Apply similar techniques in prepping the person who will be introducing you when you are making a speech. I recently got a call from a friend complaining about the lame setup she got as the keynote speaker to a group of four hundred professors at a university. Not only did the person forget to mention her twenty-three-year career as a journalist, but also that she had taught for this same university early in her career, and that she was now returning to the academic field. Instead, she was introduced as the person who wrote some obscure website, a writing job she had taken as she was transitioning from one career to another. It wasn’t as bad as the dry cleaner, but it was close!

Having been zinged a few times myself before a speech, I now always call ahead to the person making the introduction and say, “I just want to get a feel for how you will be introducing me, so I can segue into my presentation.” Nine times out of ten, I hear “Well, I was kind of thinking about…” or “I hadn’t thought about it. Do you have any suggestions?” I then give them my bragologue, customized to the occasion, of course. This not only ensures that I am presented in the most current and appropriate light, but the person making the introduction often appreciates my thoughtfulness. She’s usually frazzled about getting up to speak herself, so it’s one less thing for her to worry about. Remember: A successful word-of-mouth bragging campaign is contingent upon getting the words right to begin with!

DON’T OVERLOOK THE MOST IMPORTANT ELEMENT

“My website is ready, and I’m all set for business.”

Tim, a thirty-year-old computer guru, boy wonder, and the son of my neighbor, left his job in corporate America a year ago to develop a simple piece of software that he is convinced will revolutionize online collaboration. With the software complete, he has officially formed his company and brought in two college friends. Initially the plan is to sell the software directly off the company’s website and to get the word out through the press and by networking at trade shows. Tim, who sits at the helm, has followed all the rules for presenting a professional image of the company: He designed a flashy website and logo, printed a four-color brochure, purchased the finest and most expensive business cards with matching stationery and envelopes, and even invested in giveaway pens and mugs that are imprinted with his company’s name and catchy logo. He’s all set for business and raring to go.

Nine months into his venture, I ran into Tim and asked how things were going. He said, “Pretty good, though the market is tough.” I told him that my company was looking to buy collaboration tools, and to stop by and show me what he had. We made an appointment and when he arrived, Tim laid out his materials on the table, including his freebie pens and mugs. All of it had the markings of a well-conceived, marketing-oriented start-up until Tim opened his mouth:

As you know, Peggy, I have developed what I believe is the most revolutionary software in the collaboration space that brings about a significant paradigm shift in powerful, scalable, end-to-end development solutions. [I would later learn that this was the lead-in on the company’s press release. No wonder the press wasn’t returning his calls.] It is based on peer-to-peer computing. Let me explain. It’s where computers bypass third-party web-based servers and connect directly point-to-point. The technology is Internet-based versus web-based. Most people think they are one and the same, but they aren’t. The World Wide Web is not the Internet. It’s just a small piece of the larger picture, which is the Internet. If you have heard about peer-to-peer computing, you’re probably thinking of Napster, but our product has nothing to do with Napster. In fact, most companies that sell peer-to-peer products are …

He continued with his encyclopedic technical knowledge of the market. Eventually he got to his product and in painstaking detail provided a demonstration. Unfortunately, by that time my eyes were glazed over and all I wanted was to get him out of the office. By the time he finished, I was nearly comatose and it was going to take several cups of coffee in his logoed mug to revive me!

Tim had broken every rule of effective self-promotion, and no fancy website, logo, brochure, or freebie pen was going to save him. He hadn’t taken the time to develop a short, pithy bragologue, so his whole pitch sounded more like a product blabologue. To make matters even worse, he was suffering from one of the worst cases of geek-speak I had ever encountered.

Everything I needed to know would have easily come out, had he just bothered to answer a few simple questions:

1. What’s your background? How did this product come to be? (Presumably, once he told me, I would have confidence in what he was selling.)

2. How will your product benefit my business? (He hadn’t taken the time to ask me about my company and its needs. I didn’t care if the software let me work on complicated 3D models. I wanted to know whether I could use it for laying out my brochures, sales presentations, workshop booklets, or sharing photos with my freelance staff across the country.)

3. Is it easy to use? (Very important to a non-technically oriented company.)

4. Can I afford it? (A deal breaker or maker!)

After bringing myself back to consciousness I was honest with Tim, telling him he had failed to make the sale and why. I offered him a second chance. He returned a few days later with answers to the above questions and a cutoff time of fifteen minutes max. Here is what Tim said on the second go-round: