Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

The Austin American-Statesman launched the Texas Social Media Awards last year, and I’m humbled to tell you that the 2010 award winners were just announced and I’m one of the awardees.

Thanks very much to the judges on the Statesman staff and to those who supported my nomination.

It is truly an honor to be recognized in such a constantly-changing space and with so many other fine people.

From the paper’s article about the Awards:

“In the year since the awards were first held, social media sites increasingly have become a part of daily life. ‘We’ve gone from people who were early adopters and having fun with the technology to people using it for business and nonprofits in ways I’ve never even thought of before,’ says American-Statesman social media editor Robert Quigley.”

I sincerely hope that my work in the social Web is helpful to the tourism and travel communities.

Take a gander at the list of awardees to appreciate the variety of folks, and allow me to give a special shout-out to a few of them….

1. Michelle Greer – last year’s overall winner and one of this year’s judges. A tireless advocate of using tech for worthy causes and an expert on cloud computing with Rackspace.
2. Jennifer Navarrete – A good friend and occasional business colleague, Jennifer is the driving force behind much of San Antonio’s tech scene, plus she’s a dynamite podcaster at (among other shows) Tech in Twenty.
3. Dara Quackenbush – Dara is a PR professor at Texas State, and I love watching how she brings her students into modern PR, done right. Here’s her class blog where they practice what they learn.
4. Jenn Dearing Davis and Hayes Davis – They tweet and tell us about good deals, on CheapTweet. They appreciate all of us on a budget. They are super-nice. Drawbacks = none.
5. Mando Rayo – He investigates the local taco scene, then blogs about it on Taco Journalism.  He told me that my best local taco joint is Juarez Mexican Bakery, and when Mando tells me where to go, I go. I eat. I’m happy.
6. Hugh MacLeod – He draws quirky cartoons at Gaping Void. He does marketing for a South African winery from his location in Alpine, Texas; hey, it’s the Web so it makes sense to me.

I’m thrilled to be in such company, and thanks again for your support.

We did it.

Our Tourism Currents online learning community launched on September 9 – Becky McCray and I couldn’t be more excited about it.

We’re offering a newsletter, monthly training lessons, exclusive video interviews with experts in the social media and tourism fields, a member’s Forum plus live hour-long video Q&A sessions.

These are the organizations and people that we think would find our membership site particularly helpful:

• Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs)
• Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs)
• State and city governments who do marketing and outreach related to tourism
• Main Street, historic preservation, heritage trail and historic highway organizations
• Parks, nature preserves, botanical gardens and other nature/outdoors-related attractions, including scenic byways
• Public Relations professionals who do tourism work
• Chambers of Commerce
• Those with niche focus like agritourism, culinary tourism, arts/culture, sports/adventure and educational travel
• Festival and event planners
• Attractions, museums, lodging etc. that depend upon tourist traffic

If you’d like to know more, go here to see if Tourism Currents is right for you.

Thanks for your support!

I attended an excellent Network in Austin “Netstorming” session this week (my first one since joining the paid membership community) and I listened carefully to our table facilitator, Amy Hardin of acSELLerate, to learn more about sales.

Do I know diddly about sales?  Nope, not much, which is precisely why I chose to sit at that table.

There is a language to learn – “funnel,” “conversion,” “revenue recognition,” “added value propositions,” “price sensitive,” etc.  Bonus….now I am better armed for playing Marketing Bingo.

There is a standard sales process – prospecting for clients, “qualifying” them as good targets,  demonstrating the value of your product and proposing it to them, closing the deal and setting up for repeat business.

When you are speaking to a large group of your target market, and you do a good job of presenting yourself and your expertise, your audience is a bunch of “ripe bananas” in terms of being open to a discussion with you about your product or service,  but you have to move fast to catch them at that ripeness point (within 24-48 hours, even faster if you can do it) to get wallets to open.

A lot of this seemed very rote, mechanistic and manipulative, and it left me feeling somewhat uncomfortable.

So, as I usually do with such a visceral reaction, I’ve sat around for a couple of days mentally poking at those feelings of discomfort.

Here’s what I think, and this of course assumes (duh) that you have an outstanding product, service or feature that you back to the hilt and believe in:

You Do Need A Sales Process

One of Amy’s “money quotes” from our discussion was that you….

“….must have a sales process, a plan. Just saying ‘I’ll do some networking and depend on word-of-mouth’ is NOT a sales process.”

Break down each of the steps.

Lay out very specifically how you want to go from finding clients to closing a sale with them.  As Amy says, “Get incredibly granular.”

How will you prospect for clients? Networking might be fine as a part of the Prospecting phase, but where are you networking, how are you networking and what do you do with the business cards or interaction that may result?

How do you follow up with prospects? How will you know when you find likely customers;  i.e., how will you qualify them as appropriate candidates to buy your product or service?  What are your customers’ pain points and how can your product or service solve their problems?

Newsflash – your ideas or service or product are great, but if you want to make money with that passion, you have to sell it to someone. You know, for money.

You Don’t Have To Bruise Your Bananas To Sell To Them

Closing a sale means that you have convinced someone that what you can do for them will solve their problems.  That’s a nice feeling.  It’s better than mechanistic banana-harvesting in my mind, but the fact is that it is easier to sell when you catch people at the right moment.

Me, for example.

I stood in CVS Pharmacy the other day looking at a Olay moisturizer that is, ahem, targeted to my 40+ age group.  I have other products in their line and I like them. The price was reasonable, but even better was a shelf coupon on the moisturizer that halved the price.

I was a ripe banana right then, honey. I bought that “hope in a jar” and was happy to do so. In sales parlance, it “met my value proposition” even though I’m very “price sensitive.”

If you’re like me, you’d prefer to see people as humans rather than ripe bananas, so inject humanity into your sales process.

Certainly you should have a plan – a mechanism – that helps you stay on track and know where you’re going, but never lose sight of your customers as people.  They are not simply fruit in your sales funnel, no matter how desperate you may be to sell stuff and make money and pay the light bill.

The best ripe banana customer is one who doesn’t mind being picked, because you’ve done a thorough and honest job of convincing them that you’re worth cracking open that wallet.

Does that help take some of the possible “ick” out of sales for you?

The process of moving all of my previous content over here was ridiculously easy (thank you, Wordpress code gals and guys!) but I ought to stop while I’m ahead and get some sleep.

I haven’t yet sorted out the sidebar very well, so RSS subscriptions and email sign-ups are still rather a mess, but I’ll get it figured out.

You know how it is when you move to a new place, and all you want to do the first night is get the beds set up and made?

That’s where I am….tomorrow will be the pots and pans….

Welcome to Sheila Guides You To The Good Stuff,  where we’ll be talking about using the social Web (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) for better travel, tourism and destination marketing and economic development.

This blog will be my new “home” for that topic, but right now it is a temporary placeholder for my Wordpress.com blog of the same name.

I will move all of my other Sheila Guides…. content over here very soon, plus (I hope!) all of my RSS and email subscribers, too.  This is a self-hosted blog on BlueHost, which means I pay for it but get more features and control than the Wordpress.com blog, which is free but has some limitations.

I will need that control when I launch a new business in September, Tourism Currents, with Becky McCray.

Moving Day is planned for either Monday or Tuesday, July 13 or 14, with the help of my Wordpress guru friend Jennifer Navarrete.

I expect some broken crockery, smooshed boxes and empty rolls of packing tape laying about, so please excuse the mess!

Thanks,

Sheila Scarborough (who guides you to the good stuff)