National Association of Disk Jockeys….. the results are in!

Last month we were honoured to be asked to talk at the NADJ AGM in Wales. Whilst we had so many people from a single industry in the same room we took the opportunity to do a bit more surveying!

Regular blog readers will know that I think too many of us fail to properly differentiate our business from our competitors- we use words to describe our service which any of one of our competitors could (and do) use. To illustrate this, during our presentation we asked the attendees to write down 5 things which differentiate them from their competitors, the results are below.

Our experience across multiple industries suggest that this is not a DJ-specific issue, so whoever you are, and whatever you do, now is a great time to have a really big think about what sets you apart!

For many DJ’s who have been in touch since, and asked about the presentation- here is a lin here: http://prezi.com/wohyexzlwzhl/nadj-agm-ooom Remember to keep in touch with us!

WIRE Connect Conference – The Results

As many of you will know, we’ve been busy this week with the brilliantly bonkers women of Wire (Women in Rural Enterprise).

In one session we asked people to write down 5 things which made their business special and unique. We wanted to demonstrate how often we all use “differentiators” which just aren’t that different. The results are in and I wanted to share them here- we do this exercise regularly and this is usually what happens- quite a lot of convergence in what we say is different about out organsiations….. begging the question…. If everyone else is saying it, is it really  differentiation if you can’t prove it?

Here are the top 20 from the WIRE conference:

So there we have it…. time for us all to keep thinking about what it is that truly makes us distinctive!

For those of you who were there you may also like these links to the presentations we used:

Ooomphonomics

Connect with Customers (the Doves!)

We’re also starting to collect some of the images from the day- we’ll be adding these to our facebook page at www.facebook.com/RubyStarAssociates.

As always…. let us know what you think!

The Accidental Business School is coming….

Click to see the animation,

Or…. visit accidentalbusiness.eventbrite.com to join the revolution.

We’ve been nominated for an award….

Hello there, we don’t usually use this blog to talk about what’s happening with us, but we’ve just found out that we’ve been nominated for an award, and as we are a bit giddy, thought we’d share.

A huge thank you to our lovely client Jo Belfield Photography, who nominated us!

Find your voice

You know that thing you do? When you are nervous? You know? When you get ultra-formal, or use too much jargon, or use phrases which you’d never normally use? Stop it.

We know that lots of people get nervous in some work situations- giving a pitch, making a call, meeting new prospects- and time and time again when we do shadow-selling, or rehearse with clients, we see the same pattern emerging. Engaging, witty, relaxed and confident people turn into automatons, and start talking in jilted corporate jargon, forget to smile, and forget how to interact with other humans. Sound familiar? People invest a lot of time and money in making their marketing messages and copy “sound” like them – they try as hard as they can to make it human and engaging. Surely the next step is to apply the same principle to the conversations we have with clients, partners and prospects?

Mind the gap!

Recently we’ve been talking a lot about Minding The Gap. In our experience all business people have a gap – its the perceived space between who they know they are, and who they think they need to be to be an effective representative for their organisation. We’ve talked to people at all levels in private, third and public sector organisations and rarely met anyone at all who doesn’t experience this gap.

Having this gap is no bad thing, we call it our work face- the slightly more positive, composed and professional person we are in work mode. But….. if our perceived Gap gets too big- that can be uncomfortable and can lead to reduced confidence, and feelings of inadequacy. Sometimes we think we are the only person who feels that way. We are going to blog more about this gap in future, but for now, we just want to get it out there- it’s real, for you, and for the people around you.