I recently came across a fantastic way of describing the levels of service that a vendor or consultant provides. As Ed Delia describes it, we can be:

Commodity Suppliers: generic and lowest-priced

Trusted Suppliers: consistent and good to turn to in a pinch

Valued Suppliers: proactive and vocal with the client’s customer in mind

Preferred Suppliers: live and breathe continual improvement

Innovative Suppliers: influence the market

Partners: co-creators, seamlessly integrated into the client’s team

Strategic Partners: enter into joint ventures with the client

At the very least, Ginger Donnan Events strives to come in to a first-year event as a valued supplier, evaluating the event from top to bottom and keeping the attendees’ needs first and foremost. With our second-year clients, we are preferred suppliers looking for ways to take the event to the next level. Some second-year clients may even be consider us a partner.

In the middle, though, is the innovative supplier, someone or some company who is making a very public and visible difference in the industry, such as designer extraordinaire Preston Bailey,  Howard Givner and his Super Planner iphone app  or BidPal and their auction bidding device. This is a category that I would like Ginger Donnan Events to join.

Which level of service are you providing? What kind of supplier or partner do you aspire to be?

If you’ve attended a marketing or small business conference lately, you know that the topic of social media marketing is all the rage. Yesterday, SCORE and American Express OPEN presented “Small Business Speed Coaching Test Drive,” a day-long conference of workshops and individual counseling sessions. While nothing can beat 30 minutes of free advice from an experienced professional, more than half of the agenda, including the keynote speech and the workshop “Tough Times? Refocus your Market Target & Positioning,” focused on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media channels.

Now, it is possible that the hundreds of attendees weren’t using these mediums and could use the education, but since the agenda wasn’t released in advance and a survey of participants wasn’t taken, it’s hard to say for sure. What I do know – from the lack of “Services” name tags at the registration table - is that the majority of attendees were service providers like me: people who gain most of their clients and customers through interpersonal relationships and referrals.

So why was there no talk of face-to-face marketing? Not one of my corporate and non-profit clients or prospects has ever preferred to be contacted via Facebook. Most of them don’t have a Twitter account. These days, they do prefer an email over a phone call, but an in-person meeting trumps both.

Is social media causing us to become unsocial, or worse – shallow? Are we really connecting with others if our communications are limted to 140 characters? How many times have you asked someone to be “added to my professional network on LinkedIn” and then once they do, you respond with silence? I know – I’ve done it.

What we need is a conference on balanced marketing for small businesses: comprehensive stategies, prospecting, phone outreach, email marketing, content development, and yes, social media. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go tweet this.

This year, I participated in a PhD candidate’s study on female entrepreneurs that provided a lot of insight into my path to become a small business owner. I wanted to share a few of these discoveries with you:

I don’t ever think about being an entrepreneur, really. When I think of the term entrepreneur, I think about a different industry, like biotech. Running an event planning business, for some reason, it doesn’t bring ‘entrepreneur’ to the forefront of my mind. Yet I define entrepreneur as somebody who starts a business, someone who is a risk-taker. And I don’t see myself as a risk-taker, which is funny! I also believe an entrepreneur is someone who’s good at building relationships and making things happen for themselves and I can easily identify with that. When I look in the mirror, I see the person who gets things done. I’m the doer.

I took a risk in starting this business but generally, everything is very calculated and thought through and planned. I have timelines for my life the same way I have timelines for my event, but I remain flexible. Once the business started to slow with the economy, I realized that’s what makes you an entrepreneur – going out to get that business and proving how you’re different from other people who also claim to be an event planner. How do I stand out? What do I do that’s different? How do I provide a better service? Defining that and promoting that. I think a lot of it also is the ability to work independently and to be self-motivated. That’s always been a part of me, even when I’ve been in-house in a full-time position, because my roles were always developing something from nothing. Positions didn’t exist, and I had to create them and mold them and make it something that could be carried out by someone else.

In regards to marketing, I get all of my business through referrals, so without those personal and professional relationships, I would have no business. Everything I do is about making relationships with other people to provide a service for me or for my client. Since I’m an event planner, I gather together resources to make something happen. So relationships are everything.

When I meet with a potential client, instead of sharing my stories and telling them what I can do and what I have done, it’s important for me to look at everything from the opposite person’s direction. So what are you trying to do? What are you trying to achieve? It changes the way you think and act and talk on a regular basis when you’re always asking that question. What do you need? What can I provide you? Focus on the other person sitting in front of you telling you what they need and what’s going on in their world.

I’ll send out four proposals for the same month, and I don’t like to do more than one event a month, because I want to provide a high level of service to my clients. I’m an external, internal person. I become ingrained in their company. I know, just like my full-time positions, if something is going on in another department that’s going to affect this event, and to do that, you need a lot of time for each project.

One of the things that I love about entrepreneurship is the ability to teach and tell others about your experience and help others move their efforts forward. So I could see myself eventually teaching a class on event planning or even teaching about building a business and sharing my experience. That’s something that I’d like to do in a couple of decades.

I’d love to hear from other entrepreneurs about your personal and professional insights! ~Ginger Donnan

As a small business owner, I’m constantly fitting in marketing efforts between my client work. In order to have next events to plan, I have to think about what I’ll be doing in 6-12 months and talk to my clients about what they will be doing in 6-12 months. Seems pretty simple, especially when my relationships with my clients seem like I’m another (cheaper!) employee to them. But this year I came across a dilemma. What do I do when clients aren’t planning anything in 6-12 months? Time to find more clients.

I’ve never been a very good networker. I prefer my role as a behind-the-scenes person and wasn’t planning to even name the business after myself until one of my mentors – a marketing guru – reminded me that I’m selling my skills, so using my name was absolutely necessary! I typically attend networking events with someone else I know, look for others I know and, only if I’m feeling extremely adventurous, exchange business cards with a few other people I will never contact. Not exactly a recipe for success.

The problem is, I’m a relationship person. Fleeting conversations with people I’ll never see again is of no interest to me. I have realized that I need to have opportunities to see people repeatedly, really get to know them (aka care about them), and develop a reciprocal relationship with them in order to expand my network (and therefore my business).

This is why I’m starting a chapter of Business Networking International in my area. We’ve been meeting once a month to grow the group and little by little, we’re all really getting to know each other. Next comes caring about each other, particularly, each other’s businesses.

Already, someone interested in the group introduced me to her contact, who was looking for a local event planner. She passed along my information because “I was the only one she knew in the area.” Now that isn’t the greatest vote of confidence, but by handling the referral professionally and putting my best foot forward (always!), the next time she thinks of me will come with a better introduction.

Her contact took a chance on me and I was able to prove I was worthy of that referral, solidifying a new relationship with much potential. This is marketing I can get into. Now onto the next 6-12 months!

-Ginger