Rooted In Revenue

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

We no longer just create events. We create experiences. Follow along with the questions below and develop your event using your past experiences and your personal preferences. Visualization is really powerful when creating your event experience.
Think about all of the events you have ever attended.
What memories or experiences stand out to you in this moment?
Are they good?
Are they bad?
Why did you like it?
Why did you dislike it?
Did that experience turn you off from attending that particular event in the future?
Would you go back to that event?
Let’s take it one step further. Think about the event that you want to create.
If you were attending your own event, what kind of experience do you want to have?
What does the event sales page add or take away from the experience?
How does your pre-event communication enhance the experience?
What are you feeling when you arrive in the host city or country?
What kind of feelings and emotions are you feeling as you arrive at your hotel for check in?
Was your hotel check in smooth and seamless?
Do you feel welcome?
Next, let’s walk through the event registration.
How do you feel?
Calm, cool, collected, nervous, excited, frustrated, angry, tired, ready to go home?
Now I want you to move yourself through the event.
What excites you?
What type of personality or energy are you and what do you need?
Do you need space to decompress or are you ready to party all day, every day?
Is the food amazing? Are you never leaving the buffet line? Or are you out looking for the nearest sushi restaurant?
Are you wow’d by the decor?
Does it impress you or are you completely blind to it?
How is the speaker line up?
Are you on the edge of your seat or are you trying to hide that yawn to not be rude?
Is the music too loud or not loud enough?
Are you enjoying the connections you are making?
Are there even opportunities to make connections?
What is keeping you at the event? Or are you ready to bail after the first day?
What’s the best thing you are feeling?
What makes you grumpy thinking about your event?
Ok, now that you’ve experienced your own event make note of the good that you experienced and the bad that you want to avoid.
Get Lany’s 7 Tips to Create an Amazing Experience at eventsbylany.com/rootedtips
 

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 episode Lany shares the first 2 foundational pillars to creating successful events. There are 5 foundational pillars and Lany will cover them all over the next few episodes.
In events there are 5 different areas that will help you build a solid foundation for your event.
Defining Your Purpose & Goals
Identifying Your Target Audience
Creating an Amazing Experience
Budget Planning & Management
Setting an Event Timeline
As you go through this episode and begin creating your event, ask yourself these questions that we cover.
Here are some questions to ask yourself.
Why are you holding this event?
What is the end result you want to achieve?
Are you doing an event to make money?
What is your ROI?
What is the perceived value? For you? For your attendees?
To grow your audience?
To increase brand awareness?
For a product launch?
To make money (yes, I repeated this on purpose)?
To create a unique experience for your followers?
To help your audience learn something new?
What do you want to accomplish?
Do you want to gain media coverage?
Do you want to increase visibility?
Do you want to contribute to your community?
Do you want to celebrate a milestone or success?
Do you want to build more connections/grow your tribe?
Do you have attendance goals? How many butts in seats do you want?
Once you have your purpose and goals defined, it’s time to develop and define your target audience. Check out Hubspot’s Buyer Persona Template or our SLMA friend, Matt Heinz’ Buyer Persona Template.
Download your free Purpose and Goals cheat sheet & access your Buyer Persona Templates at eventsbylany.com/rootedtips

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]