Last night, I watched an episode from the second season of the British version of the show, and had a great “Aha!” moment. A team of exceptionally talented and well-trained French culinary prodigies working at buidling a fine dining establishment in Inverness, Scotland ran into a strange problem: they had an empty restaurant that couldn’t attract the locals.

Chef Ramsay immediately saw a problem: the ellaborate menu was in French, and the Scottish locals couldn’t figure out what it meant. To make the point to the culinary team, he showed them a traditional Scottish menu of local food specialties and then asked them to read it. The confused French team quickly realized that it was impossible to tell if a menu item held any appeal when you couldn’t figure out what it said.

This is something that I struggle with every day. Words and phrases like CMS, SEO, PPC, Twitter, RSS, HTTPS, PHP, QA, RFP, ROI, CRM, PMO, etc. all come flying out of my mouth faster and more readily than my own name. And it will typically take a few minutes before I realize that I’ve lost someone.

It is often so easy for us to get caught up in our own little world of jargon, that we forget something really important: part of your job as an expert, is to inspire confidence in the people who come to you for your expertise. While demonstrating that you speak the native language of your industry may have value, what is more valuable is demonstrating that you can translate between your language and your customer’s.

After struggling with this problem for years, I’ve discovered three tricks that help re-set my brain back to a normal member of society, instead of just a die-hard project managing web geek.

Network outside of your network
Most of us go to a lot of networking events. The easiest thing to do is to go to events and gravitate towards people who do something similar to you. This is common, because you speak the same language, you understand the same issues and you start off with immediate common ground.

So flip the coin. Go to a networking event that is totally foreign to you. Maybe go to a small business event that targets people of a different industry, or one that specializes in collecting business people across multiple industries. Talk to people. Tell them what they do, and then see how much they understand.

This is great for two reasons. For starters, often times, you’ll see other struggling with the same problem: their jargon doesn’t make sense to you, or other people who are not in their industry. Secondly, it forces you to think about how you speak, because it’s clear that your normal language isn’t their native tongue.

Record a conversation or a meeting
If you know that you are guilty of speaking in too much jargon, try recording a conversation. (Legally, you are required to tell anyone else who participates that you are recording it.) Play back the recording later — a week or so, is often best.

Put down the distractions, and really listen to what you say. Are you tossing out words that are useful to your client, or are you confusing them? Often times we can miss important cues while we are in the middle of a discussion with someone. But if we can experience that same discussion as a ‘third-party’ we can see things from a different perspective. Sometimes this makes it clear that we missed critical clues during the first go-around.

Can you explain it to your grandmother?
When all else fails, especially if you are in a relatively new industry, talk to your grandmother (or someone else of her generation). Can you discuss what you do with them in such a way that they understand what you are talking about, and can you avoid confusing them? If not, go back to the drawing board.

Clients and customers need to feel secure that you know what you are talking about. But they also need to feel secure that you can understand and communicate with them. If you are getting so caught up in your little corner of the universe that you stop being able to communicate in their language, then your value to them suddenly drops like a stone.

Anyone who has ever been married knows that communication is always hardest when you start getting in the habit of making too many assumptions. So stop yourself, back up a bit, and then start over. Conscious communication is not difficult, but it takes focus.

But, then again, so does entrepreneurship.

Conversely, his wife is one of the top selling agents in the area. He has watched while, even in a down real estate market, she has continued to out-perform nearly every one of her competitors. She follows a very specific (albeit relatively informal) process, designed specifically to build the necessary relationships in order to successfully close sales.

I was thinking about this example when reading Scott Olsen’s recent article on VentureBeat, “Need sales leads? Think like an editor.” Scott breaks everything down in clear and specific terms that are refreshingly focused: the purpose of your content is sales.

In the world of web strategy and content development, I often see an endless stream of white noise on this topic. People will get sidetracked with search engine optimization, social media, online marketing, email campaigns, multi-media formatting debates, customer engagement strategies, analytics, driving traffic, etc. Every single week I see these debates rage, and I am constantly finding myself puzzled at the focus.

All of your content, across all of your communications channels, are a means to an end — yet all too often, I find people forgetting that fact, and framing these discussions as if they are an end in and of themselves. They aren’t. Why do you care about your customer engagement strategy? Why do you care about your email marketing campaign? Why do you care about your social media presence? To drive sales. Period.

I recently heard a sales training specialist illuminate a valuable point: Marketers market to organizations. Salespeople sell to people within organizations.  Sales is about relationships, even more than marketing is. Good marketing can and should lay the groundwork for potential sales, but by the time it becomes a sales process, it must shift to a more personal process.

My friend’s wife outsells other real estate agents in her market because she understands this. Even though she and her husband are both major tech geeks, she understands that her customers are not — and even if/when they are, that’s not the most effective way for her to build a relationship with them that is going to build the level of trust needed for her to be successful.

In her case, it is literally a matter of using the phone and in-person meetings versus relying on email. She is a great — and low-tech — example of Scott’s point: becoming a trusted source depends on delivering relevent content to your prospects in a format that is in-line with their needs, not simply what is most convenient for you.

In my web-based world, this is often an easy trap to fall into without even realizing you’ve done it. Scott outlines some great solutions for maximizing online content to help meet these needs, but what about the offline world?

Phone: This one is still a biggie for most people. Pick up the phone and call. However, as someone who can’t stand the telephone and who tries to avoid answering it at all costs, I always give major bonus points to a salesperson who asks me what my prefered method of communication is.

USPS: Good old fashioned mail still has its place, especially if you send something personalized. I recently met a real estate agent at a networking event, and two days later I had a hand-written “great to meet you!” letter in my business mailbox.

Local Business Groups: In the end, there is nothing like face-to-face when it comes to building trust. No matter how well we ultimately virtualize our world, enhance our technology or distribute our business models, human beings rely on far too much subtle, contextual information when we interact with people. Unless or until we have a solution that can convey body language, tone of voice and even things like smell, face-to-face will still be the most effective way to engender trust and build a relationship with someone.

Scott’s point is a great one: we should always remember that one size does not fit all, especially when what we are really trying to do is to build the trust necessary to close a sale.  Don’t make assumptions about what channel works best for what purposes.  Dig in and find out — and if you aren’t sure, then ask.  More than anything, though, make sure that you keep in mind that “content”=”communication” and that whether you are focused on your SEO or your weekly YouTube video, that content is a means to an end, and the “end” that will ultimately matter is a successful sale.

Scott’s analogy, to “think like an editor” is an interesting one (and nicely non-threatening). In the end, though, his point ultimately amounts to “think like a good salesperson.”

As we march forward into 2010, businesses need to recognize that a lot has changed from the early days of the web.  What was once under the strict purview of elusive technophiles, has morphed into the purview of marketing, and is now shifting again into the hands of the every-person.

It’s an exciting time to be on the web.  Finding your voice and expressing that to your customers is more important than ever.  Do you know how to put your best foot forward?

Alora speaks with Jonas Lamis of Tech Ranch about web marketing strategies for startups and personal branding.

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is not as straight forward as most people want. The good news, however, is that — long before an entrepreneur starts looking at expensive outsourcing solutions — there are a TON of things he or she can do for themselves.

Our SEO Plus Workshop is about just that. The class consists of one part lecture and information, one part interactive collaboration and brainstorming, and one part personal plan building. Designed specifically for entrepreneurs, this workshop includes tons of valuable information to get every entrepreneur on the right track — on their own! Our training is designed to accomplish three critical things:

1. Help you understand what you need to know to manage your websites online presence yourself.
2. Build a plan, based on your specific business needs, on how best to move forward given your resources.
3. Understand how to find the appropriate SEO resources at the right time, and not be sold something you don’t need at a price you can’t afford.

The way we do this is by educating entrepreneurs on the most vital elements of online marketing solutions (including SEO) for themselves. And since we are not an SEO firm seeking a monthly SEO contract, we have no conflict of interest about sharing information with you. One way that we do that is by giving workshop attendees an additional half hour of face-to-face consulting time, plus on-going access to our student-only online services.

The class is being held on the evening of Monday, November 9th at Tech Ranch from 7:00-10:00 p.m. You can register for it at Eventbrite. And if you have any questions, please contact us and we’ll be happy to answer them.

At the time the new association launched, there were a small handful of businesses involved: BatchBook, FreshBooks, MailChimp, Outright and Shoeboxed. The companies involved were starting the affiliation and announcing that, though a series of API-based integrations, they were offering a new capability to their customers: integration between their services. Since each solution provides a single slice of back-office functionality for small businesses, by integrating with each other, they are able to support a much more robust lifecycle of back-office activity.

The requirements for joining were simple but essential:

First, a public, demonstrated commitment to customer service.

Second, a technology solution that includes an API.

What I love about this is that, though most business people may not know what an API is, they know what it does: it makes their lives easier. It makes a huge difference in a socially-interconnected eco-system. The fact that these applications are all capable of communicating with each other, sharing vital data, eliminating duplicate entry and providing a much broader view of small business activity, by re-using the same data across multiple areas of their business.

What I love even more, though, is seeing how many additional businesses have joined the original handful since launch earlier this year. If you look at the list today, twenty-seven (27) additional companies are on the list. Not all of them have integrations (not all of them need it), but they are all companies serving the small B2B market. It is one of the first resources I send small business owners to, because it’s a great place for them to see what is available at price points they can afford.

My only lament, of course, is that unless or until we all become part of The Matrix, consultants can’t have APIs, so we can’t join.

I still vividly remember client phone calls in which executives on the other end of the phone could barely contain their disdain, because — in their view — the web was a fad that would eventually fade away, and there was no reason for them to invest anything in it at all. Obviously, even the most die-hard ludites have eventually capitulated to the realities of an online world and succumbed to the importance of the web for the survival and growth of their business.

One of the most critical lessons we have learned over the years, though, is how to get better about separating out the technical parts of a solution, so that it no longer takes hand-coding HTML in order to update content. The advent of the straight-forward, open source CMS is one of the greatest things that could have ever happened to small business.

Of course, with power comes the power to make mistakes — and in a world where your customer’s first impression of you is often your website, that means that developing an appropriate and aesthetically pleasing website is vital to your online success, even if your core business is not web-based.

Indigo Heron is excited to announce the launch of a new set of products and services tailored to meet this need. In addition to our consulting services, designed to provide this capability for our clients, we are now also developing the training needed to help clients understand the basics, and learn to self-serve as much as they would like to tackle on their own. Training will be available in class settings, on-site private sessions for your team, or online.

Training services will focus on:

• Getting a straight-forward CMS implemented
• Configuring the most relevant widgets and add-ons appropriate for your site
• Organizing your content to support good Information Architecture practices
• Understanding SEO’s most vital Do’s and Don’t's
• Writing strong SEO-friendly site copy
• The basics of online marketing and advertising
• Social media tools, how to use them and when
• eCommerce best practices, technologies and solutions
• Website hosting needs, considerations and options

As always, Indigo Heron is available to provide any of these services (and more) to companies in need, but we also realize that for the best possible on-going care and management of your website, a basic understanding of how things work and why cannot be skipped or assumed.

If you are interested in joining an upcoming training session, or in having us come on-site to your business to provide training for you, your team, or your group, please contact us.