What does it take to be far above “it’s good enough”?

What do you do to demonstrate to your prospects that you are FAR ABOVE “it’s good enough”? This week I spent the entire day at a photography workshop. Along with being a full-time senior advertising consultant for REACH Magazine in Dayton and Cincinnati, I have a small part-time photography business. Photography has been a lifelong love in my life and each day I learn something new and grow. At this professional photographers workshop the presenter said, Everyone and his mother and everyone who buys a sophisticated digital camera thinks they are a photographer and consumers are being trained to accept photography that is “good enough” because it’s free. As professionals we have to demonstrate that our work is FAR ABOVE “it’s good enough” so that people will be willing to pay for professional photography.

Are you “good enough” or FAR ABOVE “good enough”?

There are a couple of ways that I wanted to go with this. The first thing is that there are people within your industry that are buying your goods or services from a low-cost vendor because “it’s good enough”. Are you providing goods and services that are FAR ABOVE “good enough” so that your prospects can easily see that it would be worthwhile to spend a little more to buy from you. If you are just providing “good enough” products or services, then there will always be someone who costs less than you that your prospects can buy from. Are you investing in your abilities by attending seminars and workshops that will help you to excel in your business or that will help you improve your product?

Example of FAR ABOVE

I have clients that have been with me for years advertising in REACH magazine. From time to time, they make mistakes in their marketing. As a FAR ABOVE advertising consultant, I do my best to help them not make those mistakes. In fact I insist and bend over backwards to help them to do what is best for them. In a recent mailing one of my larger clients hired out a creative agency to create their ad for a special event at their new location. They wanted examples of current ads and I spent some time explaining the importance of incentive offers in REACH Magazine (Consumers look at the coupons first – if the coupons do not capture their attention they move on to the next ad). I also explained that I would like them to send me a rough draft copy of what they working on so that I could give my input before the ad was completely finalized. They were open to this (some are not and could care less about input from an outside source).

When the rough draft arrived, there were problems. The draft arrived the day of our closing deadline, but since there were problems I was willing to bend over backwards to get them the time to make corrections. The problem was that the ad was all directed at this one day special event.

Here is how I explained the problem to the creative agency. If you do a great job getting people to this special event… lets say 300 people come to the event, how many people will be in their homes looking at this ad with NO REASON TO CALL? In this particular case, 399,700 homes would have an ad with no reason to call. It was imperative to have incentive offers for the people who would not be attending the event so they too would have a reason to call. With only hours to get the job done, this creative agency reworked the ad to include some of the offers that make the phone ring for this client.

They sent me the final ad and it looked great and reflected many of the changes that I had suggested. It is a WIN-WIN-WIN. The creative agency has avoided a major mistake and did a great job for my client. I protected both the creative agency and my client from spending a lot of money on an ad that would not have performed well. And hopefully both the creative agency and my client will appreciate me more for being willing to provide FAR ABOVE service to them.

Do you LOOK like you provide FAR ABOVE products and services?

Every day I see business people who are using “good enough” photos of themselves in their business social networking venues. What does your Linked-In profile picture say about you? Does it say I found a snap shot on my computer that is “good enough” to represent me to businesses that I connect with on Linked-In? Is it a professional image that is too formal and makes you seem stiff and not fun to work with. Or is it something that communicates good things about you so that people seeing it will want to connect with you?

If I tell you your profile image is not doing your any favors

In my interactions with people who I network with, I don’t hold back when I see profiles that are not doing that person any favors for their business. In fact I have told more than one person that their profile image is not doing them any favors in their networking efforts. In some cases, they ask why and I end up doing what I call a casual professional portrait sessions for social networking. The images are relaxed and honest to who the person is, but they are FAR ABOVE the snapshot they found from their vacation last year and they do not have the stiff formal feel that some people end up with when they just go have a portrait made. My goal is to capture images of you which will help others feel good about what those portraits say about you.

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