The Business of Growing a Business with Lori Johnston — NURSE MARKETING: THE BUSINESS OF NURSING

If you are an experienced professional, there are lots of ways to use and repackage your expertise. Yet one thing we typically did not learn about in school is sales and marketing. Two key items that are needed for a business that allows you resources to care for your needs as well has have abundant resources to help other people and donate to causes that are important to you.

In this episode, we hear from someone who is experienced with helping businesses to grow, and Lori even shares her own story as a case study of what to do when you have to start building an audience from scratch!

Below are only the key highlights from our conversation.

Because the notes are only a summarized version of the interview, I highly recommend that you listen to the audio above, which includes details that are not on this post.

For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

00:17 Welcome to another episode! We are continuing to talk about how life and business intersect.As an expert, I work with professionals who are under-recognized. Lots of us are in healthcare field we didn't learn about lots of things when we were in school, life happens and now here we find ourselves in business and oh my goodness, there's so many things to learn. So I want to start to bring more professionals experts, subject matter experts in different fields so you can start to see resources that are our there for you to help with your success.

01:00 Today we have Lori and I will introduce her:

01:00 Lori Johnston is the President and founder of Allied Exchange, a consulting and professional services agency, specializing in Sales Performance and Process Transformation. She helps businesses struggling with changes that are needed to activate sustainable and accelerated growth. Throughout her professional sales career, with over 20 years of experience, she has been enabling the growth of successful teams and organizations. Her goal is to share her extensive knowledge and expertise with small businesses that are in search of fresh ideas and new perspectives to achieve their growth goals. Lori is a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI) and Women in Technology (WITI). She is an ‘Innovative Member’ of the International Association of Women (IAW), Group ‘President’ of The Leaders Club of the Inland Empire, and the ‘Greater Los Angeles Chapter President’ for The National Association of Women Sales Professionals (NAWSP).

02:29 How Lori accidentally ended up in sales. She loved technology, she loved helping clients, she loved finding new ways of doing things.It turns out that these were the two most important things that took her from being account executive to becoming management director, president of sales. After a lay off, she has been able to helping other people to learn how to earn more money and grow their revenue.

03:57 While she worked with various sizes of companies, she wanted to help small business in particular, because the small business owners often get lost in all of the minutiae, if you will. There is so much marketing noise and advice out there, online information and books and seminars and things like that. But often this information is always geared for mid and large size companies.

06:53 Lori shares how she helps small business owners grow their income by helping them figure out the sales process and keep up with the interested clients in their life by using a customer relationship management system.

12:06 Yeah, and that market research piece is huge. Yes. I mean personally, you know, people say, well what platform should you start with? And we could have a whole conversation about that. But sometimes when I, when someone asked me that, I said, you'll know that after you speak to a hundred of your potential best buyers, okay, let's just start crabbing. Curiosity, conversations, aim for a hundred [inaudible] for 50 and whatever keeps coming up when you ask them that question. Go for that one. And something else that you brought up that I wanted to talk a little bit more about. You talked about, oh, marketing is a science, right? We just say very much so. And so for those of us in health care, we know that no doctor in their right mind, well one automatically prescribed something without doing research and assessment one, pay attention to that. If somebody promising you that this cure would work 100% of the time, that's a quack, right?

12:57 We then talk about how marketing is a science as well. Related, be prepared to test , do not be disappointed with the first test, the first recommendation, or when the first prescription doesn't work. Just like any prescription, you need to have a goal on the outset of what you're trying to get to. Like what does healthy look like for you? What's your best level of wellness ideal, what's that target for your business? And you do an intervention and then you see how it works and if it, and then you take your lessons and then you move on from there.

14:49 Lori shares about the benefits of having accountability partner, they collaborate on their ideas, what's working, what's not working, trying new things. They talk about wins, they talk about maybe something that didn't come through.

17:04 Alongside social media, Lori also commits to going to multiple networking events in a given month and gets involved with local communities on a regular basis. Form doing this, she has built up the relationships and builds up the trust and gaining trust comes out through various conversations on what they're struggling with and vice versa, what I may be struggling with, key also following up. Lori share about specific marketing activities that she has used to nurture possible clients along their buying journey.