Host: Susan Finch

Join us for a valuable revenue tip from Deb Calvert. We are also talking about her new book, Stop Selling and Start Leading. Her tip revolves around the fact she's been in sales her entire professional career. She has inbound and outbound strategies for generating revenue. Tune in to take notes! Be ready, she's a firm believer in good old-fashioned cold calling. Outsourcing is not HER solution. Keep your skills honed.
Revenue Expert: Deb Calvert
Deb Calvert has been named by Treeline as one of “The 65 Most Influential Women in Business” and consistently appears on lists of Top Sales Influencers and Thought Leaders. She is UC-Berkeley Instructor, field researcher, trainer, instructional designer, speaker, and author, and has worked as a leadership program architect, sales productivity specialist and researcher since 2000.
Deb’s newest book is Stop Selling & Start Leading, co-authored with leadership gurus Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner. Her bestseller, DISCOVER Questions® Get You Connected, has been named one of “The 20 Most Highly-Rated Sales Books of All Time” by HubSpot. Deb is the founder of The Sales Experts Channel and of the movement to Stop Selling & Start Leading®.

It’s so exciting when we outgrow our office space or buildings and need to move to bigger digs! You have a prep list for the move that probably includes utilities, ISP, updating the post office. But did you think about your online address that has been there for a while? That needs to be updated EVERYWHERE and consistently.
I’m talking about NAP - Name, Address, Phone number. For search credibility, your business listing needs to be consistent in every directory and with every search engine that indexes your content and site. By precisely I mean that if you have a suite number, and you list it sometimes at Ste. and sometimes as Suite or # or Unit those are not the same. Your phone number. It’s great to have an toll free number on your site, but for this purpose you need a LOCAL phone number that a human answers. The SAME number everywhere. You can add additional numbers in listings in directories, but the MAIN number needs to be local and formatted precisely: 503-555-1212 vs. (503) 555.1212.
A great place to start is Google My Business. I’m assuming you already have a profile set up for your company on Google My Business. This is what shows up in the right column boxed info when people search for your company. It has hours, location, reviews, photos. You need to take control of that first. Then, you can search out the rest of the listings to see how you are listed.
A quick hit list includes:
Google
Yahoo - yes it still ties to and feeds other directory listing sites.
Bing
There are about 80 more in the list - many are fed by these three, but you still need to make sure they are all matching precisely.
Once these are cleaned up, and you start to post to some of your profiles 1-4xs per month with images, recommendations, strategic partner news you’ll start to see an organic rise in your search rankings.
Just as moving an address can affect things, so can changing your domain. Long-term domains hold some credibility. If you’ve used the same domain for years and years and suddenly you want to change directions, had issues with hacking or other reasons, you will lose a ton of traction from your old search results. You want to make sure you account for the change through redirects from the most popular pages in old domain to changing the content on the old site to thin it out and then a custom 404 page to redirect to the new site or content. Without careful planning, making this one change in your business can have you fall off the face of search results and it’s a long road back. Be aware of and regularly review your search console on Google to see where errors are happening. Where are people trying to get to in the OLD domain. Do NOT remove the old domain from analytics or your search console - not yet. It doesn’t hurt to keep it all running to track traffic and come up with redirect solutions. If you can, retain the old domain to use it to your advantage in the redirecting. You can change your hosting plan to something tucked within another account if money is the issue, but do not delete the domain or the site - at least not all the way.  Be careful with a domain change that the mail is set up with the change, as well. Auto responders are handy for a transition such as this. You want people to use the new email account? You’ll have to have your entire staff find EVERYWHERE they are listed with the old domain email and have them update it. They’ll need autoresponders. You’ll want to set up forwarding for a while. You don’t want to pay for 2 mail plans indefinitely, but at least let the dust settle.
You now have a good list to start with.
If you would like me to dig around for you to find your entire list and see where things need to be corrected, let me know. It’s one of the discovery packages I offer through Exit Power Strategies.
http://sfs.tips/epslist
 

In this interview, Susan asked Lori Richardson these questions:
How does generating revenue look for your business?
What are the key services/products you offer that generate the most revenue?
What is a tip you'd like to share to generate revenue?
Listen to this short episode with a HUGE aha moment in it.
About Lori Richardson:
Lori RichardsonCEO, Speaker & Founder
Lori founded Score More Sales in 2002 to help companies grow revenues through strategic sales efforts, using lessons learned from 20 years in B2B sales and leadership roles.
Extrovert/Super Connector   Lifelong Learner/Teacher

Saying our FREE online profiles in all of the social venues is costing us money may be confusing. Let’s think about that statement. If you create a profile and forget about it for a long while, it becomes dated, perhaps even incorrect. Not just headshots and the company you work for, but your basic statement about yourself. When you created your profiles chances are you were just checking off a box to get marketing off your back.
Facebook - check
LinkedIn - check
Twitter - check
Google+ - check
About.me - check
And what about all of the other profiles you forget about - such as trade organizations, professional and alumni associations, online directories. There’s a HUGE chance you have no clue how many profiles you’ve created. If you only think about the ones you remember, that gives you a place to start.
Starting with the more obvious: LinkedIn, Facebook - page AND profile, Twitter, About.me and Google+ the first thing you want to think about is WHOM you are trying to reach and what you want them to do. How do you want them to connect with you? What do you want them to THINK about you? It is not one profile fits all here. You have to tailor it. What I say on Facebook is not the same as LinkedIn. If you are in the camp that favors the, “It’s all me - I’m the same everywhere - they can accept me or not!” chances are you wish you earned more money, but that arrogance is getting in your way. Business is business, even if clients become friends or friends become clients, it’s a different hat. You are asking them to pay you for your knowledge and skills. Respect that and them. This segways into headshots. Keep it clean and professional on LinkedIn. Have more fun on Facebook, but it’s still a good idea to have an actual photo rather than cartoon, a picture of your dog - unless that’s your business,. You want anyone seeking you to know it is the RIGHT you. On all of social media, I’m grateful that the OTHER Susan Finch in New York is a blonde. It helps at first glance. Also, the fact I’m in Oregon and she’s in New York. We are both clear who we are in all venues.
Moving on to your links you can include.
Have you tested them lately? As a producer for several online radio shows, I run across guests all the time that haven’t updated their LinkedIn profiles for months or even YEARS. They link to old companies and broken pages. It makes me wonder if they realize that company doesn’t consider them an employee any more. This leads into work history and projects and the topic of lost revenue through social media.
When your profile is broken, outdated with only crickets chirping in your timeline, people will think you are not current. You’ve done nothing new, can’t be bothered keeping your details updated. How can they count on you to help them if they can’t take care of themselves?
Spend some time reading EACH social media profile.
Would you hire you?
If you were interested in becoming YOUR client, how would you connect?
What is the next step?
An example of a pretty decent About.me profile is at susanfinch.me Short, with a clear call to action and OFFER in the same breath.
You will note that my social profiles are not as consistent as I’d like. Remember I mentioned that OTHER Susan Finch - vanity URLs are tough when your name isn’t super unusual.
And now we move on to the call to action in each profile.
Ask someone else to read your profiles through. Ask them if they understand what you do, your capabilities and what they need to do next in order to work with you. Ideally, the person helping you by reviewing it would understand your buyer personas pretty well to help you see any holes, potential confusion, or nannering on you are doing in your profiles. If they help you with this, at least send them a gift card or take them out for drinks to thank them. Return the favor for them, too.
At the end of your profiles, entice people to make an appointment, get to know your company better, invite you to speak - whatever the goal that makes you money, ASK FOR IT with an EASY link. It may be a different landing page for each venue. That’s a great way to track it if it’s working. Perhaps you simply link to your appointment scheduler page. The goal isn’t to close the deal, but to get them to call. Give them the time, don’t tell them how to make the watch.
With LinkedIn - this will be an entire episode on it’s own, realize you can add PROJECTS without changing jobs. Something like a case study where you can show off something with great results.
Facebook: Once you are done updating Facebook with a new image - it will notify all of your “friends” and followers. LinkedIn used to do this, but caught on that people played this in order to get to the top of the newsfeed with a visual update. Now you have to do something more than upload an image - change your position, add a company - when you do that, you will end up in notifications and news feeds on LinkedIn.  Before you do that, consider writing an ARTICLE to publish in your profile to make a bigger splash. If you don’t have much to say, with your newly updated profile, commit to a BARE MINIMUM of 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn for two weeks only sharing items from others, stories from the news, nothing self-serving. MENTION companies and PEOPLE.  Let people know you are still around and are now current and of value rather than just tooting your own horn.
Ready to clean up your profiles and stop losing money with them?
If you need help finding all the ones you’ve forgotten, check out: https://exitpowerstrategies.com/determining/ to figure out which scenario fits you so we can start collecting all of the forgotten profiles and clean them up!
Be sure to subscribe to this podcast via email on RootedInRevenue.com so you never miss an episode, or subscribe to us on iTunes - look for Rooted in Revenue
 

In this 6 minute episode, Susan covers the checklist to create your own online press kit. It’s great when people include you in their posts, include your photo, mention your company. But, you want people to post about you with the correct, current images, logos and statements. If you have a place on your website you can send them, it makes it easy for a consistent, current message.  
How about yourdomain.com/mediakit? or /presskit ? This makes saying it or sharing it easier.
You can also include a contact form on that page for additional requests, including interviews and speaking engagements.
FILE NAMING FOR ORGANIZATION:
Create a shared folder for your company and make subfolders:
BIOS
HEADSHOTS
LOGOS & COMPANY INFO
Name your headshot images something unique for tracking purposes. This makes sorting easier and to see what you've missed or pull a grouping quickly when the names follow a pattern such as:
Companyname_headshot_susanfinch_250x300.jpg
Companyname_headshot_lanysullivan_300x400.jpg
Then you can actually search for those file names online to see if they are in use anywhere. This won’t always work, as some sites rename images when they upload them, but it won’t hurt and gives you a consistent naming convention for your resources.
bio_susanfinch.txt, or .docx - something they can easily copy and paste. Don't make it hard by printing to PDF. Sometimes when you copy/paste from a PDF, the lines may get rearranged, words skipped or other formatting issues.
What you need - a check list:
Company statement/footer type of info that you’d include in press releases.
Leadership bios of varying lengths: 200-250 words, 100-150 words, 50-75 words.
Leadership intros - spoken for live events. Keep it short and punchy.
Leadership intros - spoken for podcasts, webinars. Keep this even shorter - just a sentence or two. You can bring them to your site to learn more at the end with a call to action.
Leadership PROFESSIONAL headshots in varying formats: JPG 300 x 300 and 300 x 400, JPG 1600 x 1600, Grayscale for pint 3” x 3” CMYK/Grayscale
Company logo in varying formats:FULL COLOR: small (under 28K), medium (up to 100K and 600px across), large (up to 1MB 1200 x 900 or a variation)TRANSPARENT (png):  small (under 28K), medium (up to 100K and 600px across), large (up to 1MB 1200 x 900 or a variation)CMYK version for printed applications - one size large, or PDF in CMYK.
5 quick facts about the company.
Remember to review this section of your site quarterly, since team members change and photos should be updated at least every other year. Annually is better to keep styles current.
If you need help creating this resource on your website, let me know [email protected]