OK.  I admit it.  I’m a huge fan of American Idol.  I haven’t missed an episode since Season 3, and it’s not likely I’ll lose interest anytime soon. I don’t care what anyone says: it’s just great entertainment.  And since it’s (finally!) Idol season, I thought I’d share three business lessons I’ve learned from AI over the years.

#1: Know who you are

One of the things we’ve heard over and over from the judges is “you need to figure out who you really are”.  In other words, the contestants need to be able to take someone else’s music and sing it like it was their own, to give it their own unique brand.  And there’s business lesson #1.

I don’t know what business you’re in, but I’d be willing to bet that the product or service you sell is available somewhere else at a lower price.  That’s OK; a lot of bands make a great living playing covers.  But every now and then, along comes a singer or a band who can make a cover sound like an original.

Think of what Whitney Houston did for the Dolly Parton song “I Will Always Love You”.  Dolly wrote a fantastic song, and so long as she was the only one singing it, everyone knew that.  The second Whitney’s version hit the airwaves, though, it was “Dolly who?”  Whitney made the song her own, and every person who sings it from now to the end of time will be compared to Whitney, not Dolly.

So here’s the question: what can you do to make whatever product or service you sell, no matter how long it’s been around or how commoditized it is, your own?  How can you make sure that when customers think of your product, they think of you?  How can you create a situation where you are the industry standard by which all other suppliers are judged?

#2: If you’ve got it, flaunt it

Another common criticism from the judges is “You sang that well, but I felt like you were holding back.”  The most common cause?  Lack of confidence on the part of the performer.  They allow their fear of failure to hold them back.  They don’t take risks, and as a result their performances are a little bland.

Then along comes a performer like Adam Lambert, and things get interesting again.  Adam did things with familiar songs that no one on the Idol stage had ever dreamed of doing before.  He dressed like a glam-rocker from outer space, went for impossible notes without any hesitation, and owned the stage.  You couldn’t take your eyes off him, and every week you wondered what kind of magic he was going to do.

So here’s your homework assignment: What risks have you avoided taking because of your fear of failure?  If you weren’t stuck in fear, what would you do differently that would set you apart from the crowd?  What makes you outrageous?

When you figure it out, go do it.

#3: At the end of the day, it’s not just about how well you sing

The judges are always quick to remind the performers that Idol is ultimately a singing competition, but I think Chris Daughtry, Jennifer Hudson, and Adam Lambert might disagree.  All three lost out to performers who are nowhere near as talented as they are, while performers like Sanjaya Malakar and Jasmine Trias survived on the show much longer than their talent warranted.

The same is true in your business: being the best at what you do doesn’t always mean you’re going to be on top.  Business is, ultimately, a popularity contest.  Don’t be mad about that, and don’t try to fight it.  It is what it is.  Just realize that you’ve got a decision to make.

If you want to get the most votes (make the most money, sell the most product, beat the competition), you have to give the voters (customers) what they want.  Remember, though, that the voters are fickle: what they say they want isn’t always what they really want and what they really wanted last week is entirely different than what they want this week and in a different universe than what they’ll probably want next week.  Confused?  Get used to it.  If you decide you’re going after the popular vote, this will be your job: figuring out what to sell to people who have no idea what they really want.

Of course, the other option (and the one I’d encourage) is to just do what you love and be really great at it, no matter what the majority might think.  You run the risk of alienating some of the voters, but the ones who like you and like what you do will stick by you (again, just ask Daughtry, Hudson and Lambert, who’ve sold millions of albums in spite of “losing” on the Idol stage).

There are many other business lessons AI has taught me, but these are my top 3.  What business lessons has American Idol taught you?

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I know this is really late, but I wanted to let you know that the winner of last week’s Social Media Fable Pick-a-Moral contest is Jim Keenan, who said that the moral of the fable was “Act online as you would offline. Being social is being social no matter where you are. It’s still about people.”  (I know, that’s technically three morals, but all three were really good!)

Congratulations, Jim!  If you’ll direct message your mailing address to me on Twitter (@jerrykennedy), I’ll get your autographed copy of “Motivation 101″ sent out right away.

Thanks to everyone who contributed a moral…all of them were great!

My friend Joel D Canfield, author of The Commonsense Entrepreneur (seriously one of the best business books I’ve ever read, and he doesn’t even pay me to say that), made an interesting comment to me today.  He said that he never wants to go to his book’s page on Amazon and see 3s in the ratings; he only wants to see 1s and 5s.  That might at first seem a little strange: after all, why would he prefer 1s to 3s in his book’s ratings?  Wouldn’t it be better if people thought his book was just okay instead of hating it?

Not in Joel’s mind.  Why?  Because Joel is a polarizer.  Love him or hate him; just don’t say he’s “okay”.  In fact, Joel says that if someone disagrees with an opinion he states, he’s likely to lean even further into that opinion.  He never aims for the middle ground.

We could all learn a lesson from that.  Far too often, businesspeople try to pander to the middle of the road.  We think that if we can make everybody happy, we’ve done our job, but that’s just not reasonable.  It’s also not possible, because what makes some people happy is sure to piss others off (if you have any trouble believing that, just ask the man in the White House).  Your goal should not be to make everyone happy; it should be to make your ideal customers happy.

“Hold on a minute, though,” I hear you say.  ”Isn’t everyone a potential customer and therefore deserving of my efforts to make them happy?”

And therein lies a huge problem in the thinking of many businesspeople.  Let me be completely clear: not everyone is a potential client for you! No matter how well you think your product or service could be used by each and every person on the planet, it’s just not true.  Yet, it’s what almost everyone believes.  Just ask any small (or large, for that matter) business owner who their ideal client is, and the most common answer you’ll hear is “Everyone!”

Have no doubt: this is a big problem.  If you don’t have a clear idea of who your target market is, how in the world are you going to find them, let alone sell anything to them?   The answer: you’re not!

So, back to the lesson we can learn from Joel, then.  Since we’ve established that not everyone in the world is your client, why are you trying so hard to please everyone?  That approach will get you, at best, a lukewarm response.  But if you’re not afraid to lose a few potential clients by being really clear about who you are and what you offer, you’re reaction from the potential customers who are in alignment with you’re offering is going to be enthusiastic, to say the least.  You’ll probably even create some raving fans!

So take Joel’s advice: stop thinking that a 3 on a customer satisfaction survey is better than a 1.  It’s not.  Start aiming for 1s and 5s only.  I guarantee you’ll make a lot more money and have a lot more fun with a few 5s than with a legion of 3s.

It’s like my childhood hero Dr. Suess said: “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

You’ve probably heard before that, in order to really have success in business, you need a written business plan.  Trouble is, most small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t take the time to create one.  They see it as something that’s only important if you’re looking for a loan or trying to raise venture capital.  That’s a fatal mistake in many businesses.

I recently co-authored a free report called 6 Mistakes That Could Destroy Your Business - And How You Can Avoid Them (107).  Please click on the link to get your copy now.  And don’t worry: there are no strings attached. 

I hope you enjoy the report and, more importantly, I hope you take some action on it.  Just like you can’t build a sturdy house without a well-drawn blueprint, you can’t build a successful business without a well-thought out, written business plan!

Here’s a scary statistic for you: according to the US Small Business Administration, about a third of new small businesses fail within their first two years, and a total of 56% fail within their first five years.  Any gambler will tell you: those odds suck. 

And why do so many new businesses fail?  Studies say that this high rate of failure is primarily because businesses have a difficult time making a profit in their first year and run out of capital.  I disagree.  I say it’s because most business owners are afraid to sell.

Have a look around you at any business mixer geared toward small business owners and entrepreneurs and what do you see?  A room full of intelligent, industrious, charming people interacting and exchanging contact information via the business card swap.  They’re here to “make contacts” and “expand their network”, and they are, for the most part, pretty good at working the room and meeting new people.

Fast forward to the following morning, and what do you see?  Those same intelligent, industrious, charming business people, sorting through all those business cards and putting the information into their databases and CRM programs, flagging them for follow up, then moving on to other “more important” tasks.

A couple of days go by and the CRM program pops up an alert to follow up on those contacts, but they hit the snooze button because something “more important” has their attention at the moment.  A few more days go by; the alert pops up again, and is again ignored in favor of ”more important” work.  Then a few weeks have passed and they say to themselves “Well, I’ll feel pretty silly calling them now, after so much time has passed…maybe I’ll just look for them at the next mixer and re-connect.  I’ve got more important things to do right now, anyways.”  

In the sales profession, we call this kind of behavior “call avoidance”, and it’s caused by fear: fear of rejection, fear of looking stupid, fear of not knowing what to say, fear of what other people will think of them, fear of all kinds of silly and irrational things.  The obvious cure for this disease, of course,  is to pick up the phone and start selling. 

“Now wait just a minute,” they cry, with a look of panic in their eyes.  “I didn’t get into business so I could become a (hissed through clenched teeth) salesperson!”

Well then, my friend, you didn’t really get into business.  After all, if you’re not selling something, isn’t it just a hobby?  Here’s a reality check for you: selling is the most important part of every business, because without sales your business joins the 56% mentioned in the first paragraph of this post.

So how can you get over your fear and start selling?  Let’s chat about that in our next post…