“What do you want your attendees to get out of the Grow Retreat this year?”

Earlier this year, one of the speakers I was interviewing for the retreat asked me that question and I have to say...  It was probably one of the most poignant questions that I’ve been asked about the Grow Retreat (Our primary product service) because it made me take a step back. 

I’ve learned to be careful about how I answer the questions that my speakers ask me because it tends to influence how they approach their presentation at the event!

This question caused me to pause to gather my thoughts. As I was thinking of how to answer it, I realized that we business owners often don’t ask ourselves this question enough. We forget to think of what our customers are getting out of our primary product/service, which translates into marketing that doesn’t perform and doesn’t bring in warm leads. Which results in businesses that often shut down.

The answer I ended up giving the speaker was “I want our attendees to walk out recognizing how much they matter. There are too many moments where small business owners don’t give themselves the credit they deserve. They make impacts and change lives every single day, often when they don’t even realize it.”

It was sobering for both of us when I enunciated that!

Let Me Explain…

Small business owners change lives. I’m living proof. 

Back in 2011, I walked into a jewelry store as a sales rep and it changed my life. I walked in hoping to reach quota as a sales rep that week, and walked out recognizing that I had value and mattered as a person. Why? Because the way the business owner ran her business team made a difference in how they treated others. 

That day encouraged me to the point that I went out and did my job so well that I was promoted to run department retention by the end of the year. And another year later, when the company started messing with commission checks, I had enough self respect that I couldn’t stand there and take that. That one moment with a Jewelry Store, because of a small business owner, gave me the confidence to walk away from a job where I was being treated poorly. I started my own business that has morphed and grown to where we are impacting and changing thousands of lives yearly. 

And why? All because of a small business owner having such a vast impact on her team that they treated a sales rep with dignity. 

That’s impact. 

But small business owners are often too caught up in the details to see what we’re actually doing. We get so caught up in the minutiae of actually running the business that we forget what we’re doing for our customers. Because I will tell you: it goes far beyond your functional product/skill.

But when we forget that, we lose the ability to convey to potential customers the exact impact we can have on their lives. 

Beyond the functional skill/service (Car cleaning, pet sitting, plumbing, event producing, hair dressing, etc), what do you want your clients to get? If you know the answer to this question consciously, you can actually begin to look at your marketing and branding with an eye that can tell if you’re conveying what you want to say.

The original question that I was asked, honestly? Had nothing to do with content. The speaker wasn’t asking me what kind of content I wanted them to walk away with. He was asking me what I wanted them to feel as they walked away. Because people are more emotional that we’d like to let on, we make emotional buying decisions. So we have to bring our marketing back to what we want them to feel when they’re finished with our service/products.

So as you get to the end of this blog, my question for you to ponder today is this: “What do you want your customers to have when they’re walking away with your primary product/service?”