Did you know that it’s just as important to have the right mindset as it is to have a good business idea? Without the right mindset, all the opportunities that could be will simply fall to the wayside. An entrepreneurial mind combines good ideas with the mindset to pull through and let them flourish. You must have a vision and then make it your reality. How you think will have a large part to play. If you don’t have the right mindset right now, the good news is that they can be learned and practiced. With the new skills you hone, you’ll be more successful.

What Exactly is Mindset?

A mindset is a belief that becomes your actions. You handle situations through your beliefs. It’s how you navigate what you should do. Your mindset will help you find opportunities, or they’ll put you into self-defeating cycles. Carol Dweck, a Stanford University psychologist reported on mindsets in 2006. She concluded that if your fixed mindset is innate, you’ll have a hard time with failure. It puts doubt into your mind on how good you are.  

If you have a fixed mind frame, you use your effort to prove how good you are. This creates defensiveness when someone points out a mistake you made. When you fail, you measure that as how good you are. So, while you might feel on cloud nine (or just neutral) when you succeed, failure can cause you to downward spiral. Someone with a growth mindset will persevere past failure. They are resilient even amongst adversity. You see it with someone like Warren Buffett who was wealthy, bankrupt, and then wealthy again. Truly successful business people have a growth mindset. That’s how they got to where they are in the world.

What a Fixed Mindset Looks Like in Business

A negative way of thinking, or mindset, can wreak havoc on your business. You lack flexibility so your business doesn’t have a chance to grow. If you’re not a good leader in this sense, the people that work under you won’t feel inspired. An unwillingness to take advice from your brilliant team can cause you to lose out on opportunities for growth. Napoleon’s downfall, in part, was shooting the messenger every time they gave him bad news. Eventually, nobody told him what was going on and it ended in disaster for him and his army. If you have a mindset of non-abundance, you’re going to have that tension. You’ll react and make choices from a place in yourself that doesn’t feel there is enough business or enough money to succeed. This will cause you to make choices based on that negative mindset.

What a Growth Mindset Looks Like

A positive mindset is about solving problems as they arise. Not letting them get so overwhelming that you can’t think straight. It’s about being open minded and honest, being the leader that people can look up to. Being realistic about your goals and knowing how to measure progress can only come from a clear mind. When you can learn from your mistakes and make things better, this allows you and your business to grow. You don’t give up and you seek out the help of others, taking their advice and rolling with it. This allows your team to feel valued, which is motivation for them to work hard for you. Instead of throwing out raises, you make your employees loyal and passionate about working for you.

Changing from Fixed to Growth Mindset

You can take steps to change your mindset as it’s not a fundamental part of your character. Start asking “what if” and “why” when you’re looking for a new way to deal with a problem. This takes away that nagging voice that says you’re not good enough. It’s a change of focus on how you think. You want to look for new way to learn and do things.

See that you do have the potential to learn and achieve whatever you want. This is about stretching your mind and making it sharper. It’s scary to go out of your comfort zone but this is how you will grow and accomplish things you never thought possible (with that old fixed mindset). Even if you fail, work through it and find solutions. When you do this and you turn things around, the confidence will start to build in you. The positive growth mindset will become a natural occurrence as the shift takes place.

Changing Your Mindset

It takes a change of perception to change your mindset towards things. Here are some helpful tips to get you in a growth mindset:

• Be mindful as you look to solve a problem. Observe the situation, identify the problem, and act on the passionate solution you come up with.
• See your problems as a happy challenge and get certain that you can find the solutions instead of allowing feelings of defeat to sneak in.
• When there’s a problem that comes up, be creative. This could mean being resourceful.
• See failure in a different way. If things don’t go the way you wanted them to, take some time to look at the reasons why. This will allow you to make things better for the next time. Every failure is one step closer to success.
• Don’t get too disappointed or give up when there is a challenge. Make an intelligent change to your course of action.

Mindset Skills

The mindset skills you want as an entrepreneur will help you create growth in your company. You will have a team that are excited and passionate to come to work. You’ll feel a great energy when you enter into your workspace. There’s less burnout and less resistance. These skills will not only help you as an entrepreneur but also in other aspects of your life. It’s worth honing these skills. When you do, you can get to the mindset that has no boundaries. You can manage any problem and accept failures as a chance for growth.

Creativity – When you can be creative, there are no limits to what you can accomplish for your business. This is a bold, imaginative mindset that takes away any of your old limited ways of thinking.

Teamwork – Your team of people is what will help you get things accomplished. You have extra minds so they can offer a difference in perception. They have skills and talents you don’t have. Embrace this part of them and give them the freedom to help you.

Idea Generation – Innovation is important for any business. If you want your business to grow and thrive, you want to have ideas being brought to the table all the time. Even the wildest ideas can be watered down to be something extremely successful. Let your mind, and the mind of your team, be free to think outside of the box.

Opportunity Analysis – It’s important to analyze what’s going on in business and specifically in your industry. Look at the patterns and trends to figure out if your idea is becoming available at the right time and if it will be successful. Gathering up information about your target audience (the people who will be using your product/service). This will allow you to turn the idea you have into the thing they want.

Design Thinking – This is your ability to create the right solutions. To do this, you need to have a fundamental understanding of your users. Getting feedback from them allows you to design based on their needs and wants.

Prototyping – Entrepreneurs that create prototypes will want to first create a simple model just so the world can understand the initial vision. From there, they can get feedback which will allow you to improve your product. This takes flexibility on your part with the ability to take constructive criticism.

You want to create a product or service that people want to buy. That’s the whole point of being an entrepreneur. It’s essential that you embrace the feedback you get. If you find it’s uncomfortable to receive negative feedback, remember that you’re working on having the growth mindset. Look past your perceptions and feelings. The bigger picture is that when you take this feedback gracefully and make changes, your chances of success are much greater.

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Demand generation. It’s not an easy task but it comes with effective outcomes if done correctly. There are many channels and strategies you can use which almost makes the task more daunting. Many B2B marketing organizations will be caught up in the huge pool of options and not produce results. There is a lot of time spent on creating valuable and quality content and then ensuring the campaign is performing well. It is the best method for success but it’s not always easy to get the right leads, take the opportunities when they’re available to you, and create satisfied customers.

The rule of thumb with demand generation is to do less but do it properly. So what does that mean exactly? What is the right way?

Offer Something Lucrative for Free

This has been a strategy used for decades. Give your potential clients something free. Something useful that they cannot resist. You may want to step outside the norm on this though. So many companies are using eBooks so it’s not as exciting to receive a freebee anymore. Offer a useful tool that makes your potential customer’s life easier.

The new free stuff people will subscribe for include:

• Tools that are interactive.
• Checklists that help them organize their day.
• Calculators.
• Courses that are education.
• Certification programs.

Re-purposing Content

There is a lot of work that goes into creating content. It takes hours to write, get the facts, create incredible headlines, figure out what your target audience wants to know about, and more. This is why you should go ahead and reuse the content. Make it worth your while and use it for a variety of channels by doing a bit of tweaking to make it fit. This is going to maximize what you get out of your content.

A great example of this is turning a 10,000-word eBook into a few smaller articles for your blog. Perhaps creating a few Facebook posts that summarize various chapters of your eBook. You can of course add some of this information into your monthly newsletters too. You can even make a video out of the concept of articles. Add pictures that coincide with your content and add background music. Post it on Facebook, Instagram, and wherever else you choose.

If you’re creating great content, you might as well reorganize it to work for you repeatedly. This saves you a lot of time and money. It also keeps your brand message consistent.

Offering Social Proof

Your business is going to need to prove itself through social media and other digital methods. A great way to do this is to highlight your customers. You can do this through your content creation. Why does this work? It shows other potential customers that you have a great product or service that people are happy with. A statistic from Demand Gen Report’s seventh Annual B2B Buyers Survey says that 67% of B2B buyers have trust in recommendations from their peers.

Highlight how happy your customers are across all your marketing channels. This is a great method to be used through the whole marketing funnel. It makes you more real and reputable to people who are unaware of your business but have an interest in purchasing from you. Share customer stories and testimonials. You might even want to see about video testimonials or stories; this can have even more impact.

A/B Testing Marketing Emails

If you do demand generation emails but you’re not seeing a benefit to it, you are wasting precious resources. It’s important to do A/B testing on your emails so you know what works and what does not. Email has been found to give you the highest ROI when compared to other marketing channels. Of course this is only the case if you do it right.

There are email-marketing tools that will help you make the most of your emails. When you do split testing (A/B testing), you will start by testing disruptive elements and progress through to the least disruptive.

You’ll want to test elements such as sender, the subject line, preview text, what the messages says, main and supporting images, the design and colors as well as CTAs.

Content on Your Site that is Personalized

If you’ve got people coming to your site or social platforms, you want to ensure all obstacles or friction are removed. Do you have all the right information that they need? Do they have easy access to get that information?

It’s important that you have content, which will help the buyer through the ‘sales funnel.’ Having the right content placed in the right spot can have a major impact. It can make or break a person wanting to buy what you’re selling. If they weren’t sure, they become sure. Alternatively, if they really wanted to buy and content was misplaced, they may leave you for good. It’s important to remember this when you’re creating your website.

Consider what the lead goes through when they’re on your site. Are they getting the content they need and is it in the right order? Your content should be smart and help you accomplish your sales goals. Your website serves a function. It is a store that should be designed to invite people in, give them information, show them value, and make them want to buy. Your content has the power to do this, use it wisely.

Nurture Your Clients

It’s great to generate many leads, having plenty of followers and people who subscribe to you. It’s important that you nurture everyone. Every demand marketer that will excel knows the importance of full-funnel lead nurturing. While you used to do this through emails and SMS, technology allows you to extend out to a variety of channels and mediums.

Getting to know your audience and what they want out of life is an important part of the funnel. When you know what prevents a person from purchasing or not, you can create a message that could turn them around. You can make them see the value in your company and products/services again. This is going to help you gain a higher closing rate per lead. You have to pay close attention to your customers and find out what they need to hear from you. This should be easy as you have your business for longer. It takes a few minutes but brings you closer to a sale every time.

Demand generation is all about highly targeting your audience. You send strategic messages that hit the right heartstrings on the right people. You streamline your marketing efforts so you spend less while maximizing your sales. It isn’t easy to develop but the reward is worth the effort you put into it. If you’re going to spend money for online marketing, you want results. These practices are the most effective means to get those results.