Solopreneurship can be a lonely place – a place where we judge ourselves based on sales, finances, or outcome metrics controlled by clients or other people. Numbers are essential for business success, but they can also lead us to roller coasters of emotions since we are evaluating our success on metrics. Feedback, however, is an equally essential element to promote the continuous improvement cycle that you need to answer to the community’s needs, remain viable and relevant in business and fuel your passion to continue doing what you do.

As a solopreneur, it can be tricky to find feedback, as friends and family have a different perspective on your business adventures than your ideal clients and business partners. If you are open to entertaining ideas to fuel your continued growth, take a moment to entertain the following ideas on where you can uncover the gift of feedback.

1. Your clients

Your clients offer both informal continuous feedback, as well as formal feedback (if you ask). While many service professionals think of their service as something they provide to others, your clients also offer continuous feedback in their body language, as well as verbalizations. As you walk away from a client or business interaction, rate the session as red, yellow, or green. Red means that the session felt “off.” Yellow means that the session felt “OK.” Green means that the session felt uplifting. Then decode the feeling from the interaction with 3 questions in your own head:

1. What key message is my client sharing with me today?
2. What can I learn from this message?
3. What should I continue doing, or change based on this message?

We can also ask clients or business partners for formal feedback. This process can be awkward if you are not used to doing this on a regular basis. While the types of questions might vary based on your relationship with a client, here are a few questions to help you start asking for formal feedback:

1. I’m looking at ways that I can serve better. What is one thing I could do to help you more with _____? (Fill in the blank with a service you provide).
2. I value the gift of feedback, as it allows me to continue helping you ______. Would you mind sharing with me what you enjoy most about how we work together?
3. I’m redeveloping my website, and I’d like to include client testimonials. Would you be willing to answer 3 questions to contribute?
4. I’m doing a self-audit and would love your input. Would you be able to share one thing that you’d like me to start, stop, or change as we grow in our professional relationship together?

2. Social media

Social media offers a brilliant and dynamic quick feedback landscape that can inform your way forward at any part of your business development. Social media offers valuable feedback both through the process of social listening and evaluating your own social media metrics.

You can practice social listening in a variety of ways. Here are a few examples to open your mind to possibilities:

1. Join Facebook groups both within your industry and also within other industries. Take 10-15 minutes each day to study the kinds of questions people ask, and the kinds of responses that other people share. This will help you better understand your ideal client, his/her interests, and his/her problems, as well as tone and voice. When offering your solutions, matching the problems, interests, tone, and voice will better help your ideas resonate.
2. Examine your own social media metrics. While it is easy to focus on post likes, this metric, alone, does not provide much information relative to your business goals. Instead of starting with surface numbers, think about your goal in each of your content shares.
3. If your goal is to increase awareness, likes and impressions might be good enough.
4. If your goal is to increase engagement, look for bookmarks, re-shares, meaningful comments, and organic mentions. On some platforms, you can also calculate the number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. The higher the number, the more people find your content interesting. Impressions are how many times a post shows up in someone else’s feed. Reach is the number of unique viewers.
5. If your goal is customer conversion, the number of sales or referrals would be the key metric of interest. The click-through rate, meaning that someone clicked on your call to action, can also be valuable to gauge interest in your offering. When the click-through rate is high, but purchases are low, this can be a signal to revise your landing page.
6. If you are wondering what “good numbers” are, take a moment to search the keyword “competitive benchmarking” to learn about the concept and how you can engage in the practice yourself.

3. Self-auditing

Ever wonder why coaches and great athletes spend so much time studying game film? Their analysis creates amazing learning moments, from which they develop their next strategies. The same can apply in business. Try audio or video recording your next client or business interaction (if appropriate). Be sure to ask the other party for permission and state your purpose of self-auditing to help become better at _____  (fill in the blank with your intended skill).

 Make yourself a list of 3-5 elements that you will watch for as you listen to or watch the recording. The nature of the elements can vary vastly, depending on what skill set you are interested in developing. Here is an example for non-verbal communication:

1. What percentage of the time did I mirror the client’s body language?
2. What message was the client’s body language communicating? Did it change at particular points in the interaction? Why?
3. Where were my eyes focused most of the time?
4. Where were the client’s eyes focused most of the time?
5. What were my hands doing during the session?

Asking such questions can help develop your awareness of elements you feel facilitate positive communication, as well as areas you may want to modify to enhance future collaboration.

In conclusion, if you are feeling lonely, stale, burnout, or stuck on an emotional roller coaster dictated by outcome metrics, it’s time to uncover the gift of feedback. Pick one of the above ideas to shift your journey into re-igniting your business passion and growth today. Once you try the strategy, circle back with us to let us know what you discover!