What differentiates you from other entrepreneurs in your field are the skills or qualities you possess that they don’t have or the qualities they have that you do not possess; either way there are some qualities that you, as an entrepreneur, must have to succeed in your business.
The following are the 3 vital skills you must possess as an entrepreneur:
1. Be creative
Your clients want to see more of you; they want you to proffer better solutions to the problems they need your products for and this requires you to be really creative; you’ve got to know when and how to bring in new and helpful ideas, for instance; if you are a fish seller and maybe you make about 15 pieces in a row; why don’t you think of a way to make 50 pieces in a row in order to serve your customers better and thereby showing your expertise.
This is where diversification also comes in; you need to provide other channels in the line of your business in order to serve your clients better. Diversification does not imply that you do too many different things at the same time; no, it means you should do one thing in different ways, diversification simply implies that you expand your service when you are so sure that you are really satisfying your customers with the main service or product you offered initially, what I’m saying is this; your customers already know you as an expert in selling fried fishes, but you serve them better if you start selling cold drinks too, which means that they can now take cold drinks after eating the fishes you sold to them; this way, you are not only serving them better, you are also showing your expertise and thereby earning trust from other prospects.
To show your expertise, your diversification should be in the same line of your business. What I’m saying is this; if you are a copy writer, and you want to broaden your horizons in the services you offer, you can include other writing services like ghost-writing or newsletter writing after you must have educated yourself enough about what you are diversifying into.
2. Know your market and audience
Whenever and wherever you want to make your products known, you must always decide who your audience are; you are not advertising to everybody, you are only making your products known to those who need them. If you try to advertise your work to everybody, you might end up not making your product known to anyone.
The world today has the population of about 7 billion people and your audience resides within this 7 billion people; your aim is to extract your audience from the 7 billion people in the world but of course, you have your competitors, those who you share the same audience with; what would differentiate you is the skills you possess and that is why you must recognize your own audience.
Like I mentioned earlier, you shouldn’t try to do too many things; if you sell fish you shouldn’t sell clothes at the same time, customers tend to prefer experts a just one field to expert in all fields. When you concentrate on just one function, you would be able to expand on that one function and you’d realise that you’d be able to extract your own clients.
3. Speak the language of your audience
This is a very important skill you must possess as an entrepreneur if you want more customers for your products, when I say “speak the language of your audience” I’m not saying if your audience are French people, you must speak French too; no, I’m talking about what your audience want to hear while you are making your products known to them, you shouldn’t stand in front of your audience and make use of words that do not even reflect that you are an expert in your field.
If you are advertising your products or services and you do not speak the language of your audience, how do they get to be convinced that you are an expert in your business? After all, they don’t know you before, if you are a financier and you decided to start helping other people to invest their cash on stocks, bonds, currencies, equities etc; how do you attract your audience to your business? You don’t just say stuffs like “let me help you invest your money and get 30% returns after two months” you need to say more than that, you need to reflect the fact that you are an expert in what you claimed to offer so that they won’t see you as one who just has an idea.
If you want to help your prospects invest their money on forex or stocks, you should be able make use of terms like leverage, percentage of risk, rate of interest, etc; before they can trust you, they want to be sure that they are not going into any contract with a quack and one of the most important ways to earn their trust is by speaking their language.
This is a guest post by Victor Ijidola, founder and CEO of veeblogs.net, a website designed to help both entrepreneurs and prospective entrepreneurs who demand success in what they do.
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