Virtual Partner

by Tina Forsyth

What makes some­one a great Online Busi­ness Manager?

That’s a bit of a loaded ques­tion, and of course a big dis­cus­sion all on it’s own as there are a myr­iad of things to con­sider. How­ever one thing I know to be true is this.

A good Online Busi­ness Man­ager will present you with solu­tions and not just options.

Let me give you an exam­ple. Let’s say you are Bob, a busi­ness owner who is look­ing for some help with pick­ing a new broad­cast­ing sys­tem for your newslet­ter. You aren’t happy with the one you have now and want to change it.

You ask a mem­ber of your team Suzy to look into this for you. Here are two poten­tial responses that i’ve seen in this type of situation.

Response #1:

Hi Bob

I did some research and found some broad­cast­ing sys­tems that look pretty good. Here is a list of what I found:

Which did you want to use?

Suzy

Response #2:

Hi Bob

I did some research and found some broad­cast­ing sys­tems that look pretty good. I found a num­ber of sys­tems and these are the ones I took a good look at:

Option 1 is great because of ABC, how­ever they don’t have D which I wish they did. Oth­er­wise I quite liked it, would be easy to import and start using.

Option 2 could totally work, they do have D but don’t seem to be quite as robust as Option 1. Plus they have a pretty strin­gent re-opt in require­ment when import­ing a list which could mean los­ing subscribers. 

Option 3 could work as well, they seem to have great fea­tures how­ever i’ve heard of some deliv­er­abil­ity issues with them so I hes­i­tate to use them.

My sug­ges­tion would be to go with Option 1 – I know of a num­ber of peo­ple using this sys­tem and they are quite happy with it. 

Let me know your thoughts? If you agree I can get started on a plan to move the list of Option 1… or if you have fur­ther ques­tions I can look into those as well.

Suzy

Now putting your­self in the shoes of Bob – which response would you pre­fer to receive? I’m guess­ing you picked #2, but of course. 

The dif­fer­ence in these two responses is obvi­ous – and the rea­son why this is so impor­tant is that you are mak­ing it EASY for a deci­sion to be made. The­o­ret­i­cally yes, the sec­ond response could (and in a real response prob­a­bly would) go much deeper… how­ever you can see in the exam­ple the focus on pro­vid­ing the best solution.

Busi­ness own­ers already have enough on their plates – and when you send a response of options (such as in #1) that just gives them more work to do. That kind of response is ask­ing me to go to each site and check things out on my own… which most busi­ness own­ers don’t have the time or incli­na­tion to do!

In response #2 every­thing has been laid out, so that I can take a quick peek and imme­di­ately be able to respond with “yes, lets do it” or “hmmm, what about X… can you look into that for me?” No more work on my plate, and progress is made.

I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again (like a bro­ken record, hehe). The role of the Online Busi­ness Man­ager is to take things off the busi­ness own­ers plate, so they are free to do the things only they can do in their busi­ness (mar­ket­ing, strat­egy, devel­op­ment and such.)

And this includes light­en­ing the ‘bur­den’ of mak­ing deci­sions as well as reg­u­lar ole to-dos. Present your clients with solu­tions so that the deci­sion mak­ing process is quick and easy. Don’t let them get ‘buried’ in hav­ing to fig­ure things out on their own (and run the risk of not mak­ing a deci­sion at all.)

Com­ments, thoughts?