Some of the most effective marketing doesn’t come from you at all. It comes from your past clients.

ADR is a word-of-mouth business and one way you can boost your own efforts is to encourage satisfied clients to sing your praises to others. To get results, remember these two important factors:

1. You’ve got ask them for the favor. Don’t assume that satisfied clients will automatically mention you to others with similar needs.

2. And you need to make it easy for them to act on your request. If it’s a testimonial you seek, for instance, give them the questions you’d like them to address in their testimonial, give them a print or online form, and make it so concise an activity they can do it in 5 minutes or less.

Web Worker Daily has a short, excellent primer on the features of an effective testimonial, how to ask for them, and how to use them most effectively. Here’s a taste:

What makes a great testimonial? They give details, cut out the sugar and help answer prospects’ objections.

1. Specific. Good testimonials don’t stop at “They did a great job” or “The product made a difference in my life.” They explain why the service did a good job or how the product made a difference.
2. Believable. Sugary and fake-sounding testimonials tend to lead to mistrust. To make a testimonial sound as credible as possible, include details like full name, business name, web address of the business and a photo. Video testimonials add more credibility. After all, would you give a fake video testimonial?
3. Answers common concerns. When prospects consider your product or service, what barriers stand in the way of their buying from you? Testimonial that erase potential objections are incredibly useful.

Read more good advice at How to Get Good Testimonials.

Earlybird discount for conflict resolution seminar

The earlybird discount for my November 5 conflict resolution seminar, Achieve Your Conflict Zen, ends on October 4. I have a few spaces left and always welcome mediators who want to learn more about keeping their own cool and balance in the face of client conflict or about helping their clients manage their emotions better. This fall’s seminar takes place in a lovely retreat setting at a private New Hampshire Inn, with our lakeside cottage meeting space overlooking Mount Monadnock.

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MakingMediationYourDayJob.com.

When Daniel Bowling and David Hoffman’s Bringing Peace into the Room first came out in 2003, I adopted it for one of my mediation courses at Woodbury College.

Prepping for class one evening, I read aloud to my husband an excerpt from a chapter by Peter Adler. When I finished, he gave me a long, sad look. “No wonder mediators have such a tough time convincing the public to embrace mediation. Even those who benefit from it think you didn’t do a damn thing.”

This is the excerpt I read him:

…I’m aware of the disconnect between how we mediators and facilitators look at our work and how our work is seen by the mediated and facilitated-upon.
 
Several years ago, Kem Lowry of the University of Hawaii Department of Urban and Regional Planning did an analysis of some thirty successfully mediated cases that had been in a program I directed. His study drove the point home for me. First Lowry asked the mediators in our cases to explain what they did to bring about success. Then he asked the parties in those same cases what they actually observed the mediators doing. The mediators – myself included – gave elaborate explanations of strategies, timing, and tactics. We identified how we went about conducting our conflict analyses and circumscribing issues to be worked on. We deciphered the breakdowns, breakthroughs, and the windows of opportunity both lost and found. The participants in our cases had a very different view. What they recalled us doing was opening the room, making coffee, and getting everyone introduced.

In Mediation in the mainstream: 5 successful strategies for spreading innovation, I stopped at the fifth strategy, observability, so I could take a time out and tell you the above story.

Diffusion of innovation theory tells us that when people use an innovation and the good results are visible by others, the innovation will spread more rapidly. It’s the observability factor.

But, if Adler’s story holds water, and my husband’s smart-ass comment is on the mark, the ADR field has a real problem with using observability to help spread mediation use. When we’re good, when our work is seamless, and when we’re not strutting around to stroke our own egos, we and our contributions may be invisible.

Ways to increase observability of good, successful mediation

It’s tricky stuff, this observability. Sure, you can go on Twitter and promote your successful mediations, as some mediators are now doing, or blog about how good you are, as some ADR providers are now doing. It’s a fine line between building observability and over-the-top, wince-inducing self-promotion.

Credible observability doesn’t come from us talking about ourselves. It comes from others talking about our work and successes.

I’ll throw out a few ideas that speak directly to credible observability, then I’ve got a question for you:

• Testimonials. But not just any testimonial. Specific ones in which the writer or speaker explicitly says what you did that helped.
• Tapping people with courage. Some folks who’ve used mediation won’t discuss it with others, even when they’re happy with the results. It’s the dirty-laundry thing. But the blogging, cell phone generation may have fewer inhibitions. You need to find the people with courage to talk – again, very specifically – about what you did that helped.
• Tapping people affected positively when the parties work things out. If successful observability is about making the good results visible to others, you may have more success getting people who weren’t directly involved in the mediation to talk about the successes. People like HR directors, managers, CEOs, family members.

Ok, your turn. I know there’s a whole lot of ADR smarts out there, so I’d love to start a brainstorm of ideas of building observability in a credible way. Please leave a comment with your contribution (if you’re reading this in email, just click the article title, then scroll down to the Comments section on the webpage that loads).

Making Mediation Your Day Job by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at MediatorTech.com.

Like Victoria Pynchon, I dove off the cliff. I began the process of building my mediation process and being a first-time business owner the day I submitted my resignation to the president of the college at which I served as a vice president and dean. That was almost 11 years ago and I still remember breaking out into a cold sweat driving home that evening.

My first steps after resigning, aside from panic stricken moments where my daily jogs turned into runs so fast you might think the hounds of hell were after me, were to [Read more...]