Some women take to marketing and sales effortlessly. Many more avoid it. That results in businesses that struggle and limp along rather than create the success their owners hoped for when they started. Women have great relationship-building skills. However, often they are more concerned with building relationships than actually doing business.
Home-based Business: Easy Alternative to Corporate Life?
The corporate world with its rigid style and mom-unfriendly policies has resulted in women leaving in droves. Home-based businesses have stepped in as a natural alternative. Many women say they love the freedom of owning a business, but in too many cases the cash flow doesn’t come in as regularly.
Women start businesses with years of skill honed in their previous jobs. They also bring characteristics that make them wonderful mothers, wives and friends. Sometimes those same characteristics don’t serve them well as entrepreneurs. For example, many women are raised to feel uncomfortable ‘tooting their own horn.’ Growing up they were taught a ‘good girl’ doesn’t do that. Or, a woman may have been told, wait for people to come to you, don’t reach out to them. Frequently women believe making a profit is somehow cheating or taking advantage of customers. These ingrained traits and others make it difficult for women to succeed in there own ventures.
Who Else Wants to Say Goodbye to Scorched Earth, Old Boy Marketing?
Men consider marketing differently than women do. Many marketing books sport either infantry-division camouflage on the cover or war and sports analogies throughout. Scorched earth, damn the torpedoes marketing makes many women very uncomfortable. Women are about relationships, not killing. These relics of ‘old boys testosterone-heavy’ marketing are offensive to women. Women didn’t grow up playing “war” like boys and even if they did play sports the friendships were often more important than the score.
It’s time for women to re-frame marketing and view it not as “killing the competition” but instead as “creating.” Women create the entire human race. We can certainly give birth to, nurture and raise a successful business. Marketing is also about relationship building and that’s something women excel at.
People say, “Business should have no gender.” In a perfect world that’s absolutely true however the people in business do indeed have a gender.
Katherine and Lana: Women at the Crossroads of Success
Katherine has been struggling as she starts an online business. She offers a package of services and information to help other online entrepreneurs bring more traffic to their websites. She’s spent three intensive years learning the technology skills. Her website unfortunately is a confusing hodge-podge of freebies. Her digitally delivered information product provide an amazing array of time-saving tips, ideas, strategies and much more that’s easy to use and can help build website traffic fast. But there is no focal point to her message. Nothing leads viewers to believe the information is provided by an expert or authoritative source. Kathy refuses to call herself an expert even though she is one. Because her site is loaded with so many freebies, the only people who visit are people looking for something free – not people who intend to buy. The result: her family scrapes along on her husband’s tradesman income while she works hard bringing in only a skimpy cash flow.
Lana is a virtual assistant. She’s bright, talented and computer-savvy. Her business is based on billable hours. Last week she got a new client, but he told her he couldn’t afford her rate of pay. Lana cut her hourly rate to accommodate him because she couldn’t stop thinking how she was going to pay the rent on her two-bedroom apartment. If Lana built up her value with effective, clear marketing instead of cutting rates she might have attracted a client willing to pay her full rate without discounting and devaluing her skills. Lana is uncomfortable reaching out to others with her message. Consequently she works for far less than what the market says her skills are worth.