Apr 1, 2015 | Communication, Governance, Innovation, Leadership
How do you know
Some pretty smart people say some pretty dumb (with hindsight) things.
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, US Patent Office has been widely credited with this quote in 1899. He may not have said it, but it was reasonable at the time given the pace of innovation that had occurred for the previous 50 years. It is no sillier than Bill gates saying in 1981 that “640k should be enough for anybody”, or “Man will not fly for fifty years,” Wilbur Wright, 1901.
It is really hard to get a handle on all the stuff you do not know, by definition, you do not know you do not know it.
However, coming to grips with the opportunities that become available when you discover something from an unknown left field is where the gold is.
So how do you begin to see things you do not know you do not know?
This question is not common, but has come up a couple of times ion the last few years when working with clients with deep technical knowledge, but perhaps a narrower than ideal breadth.
In considering the answer, there appears to be few simple strategies to put in place:
- Be constantly and remorselessly curious, and ask questions. Anyone who has had kids knows that for a few years, the most common question they have is “why”. Go Back to your childhood, and ask why all the time.
- Have a diverse group of people around you who will challenge the thinking, preconceptions assumptions and most importantly, the status quo.
- Be prepared to give and receive honest feedback. There are rarely any right answers when you go looking for the unknown, just more questions, and the often unexpected and insightful responses you get from people, use them.
- Make sure others know you do not know, and are seeking answers, not offering solutions.
- Read widely and with great variety. This is now easier than it has ever been, we are overwhelmed with information sources, and the problem is curation and absorption rather than finding stuff out.
We are undoubtedly in a knowledge economy, competitive advantage is in knowledge, so gathering, sharing and leveraging it should be high on every enterprises agenda, from multinationals to the small business around the corner.
Mar 30, 2015 | Branding, Communication, Marketing
What is my position?
Over the years I have seen hundreds, probably thousands of statements of various kinds intended to position a company, product, opportunity, and most are crap.
As a marketing graduate decades ago, in one of my first challenging situations, an interview for a job I wanted, I was asked what “Positioning” meant. My answer which I realised at the time was waffle, indicated I really had no idea.
The answer now is pretty simple:
“Position is how customers and potential customers see your product, what it looks like through their eyes”.
Doesn’t matter if it is a position statement for a product, or a statement for business, the rules are pretty much the same;
Who is it for,
What is the need,
What is the product,
What is the key benefit to the buyer,
A competing alternative statement
Product name and differentiator.
For example:
For households
Who do not have enough room store all their stuff,
Ebay is an on line auction site
That offers access to thousands of potential buyers
Unlike advertising in local newspapers
Ebay will reach more buyers to get the best price and get you back some room.
Pretty simple really, but the construction takes some thought.
Feb 2, 2015 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
courtesy toprankingblog.com
The purpose of a website is either commercial, or it is a hobby.
Assuming in most cases it is the former, the usual commercial rules apply, just because you have a website does not mean everyone apart perhaps from your mother will be excited.
So, to have a successful web presence the same 5 basic rules of marketing that have always applied, still apply:
- Understand the drivers of behaviour of those in your market
- Have a clear objective.
- Have a plan that lays out the “roadmap” to achieve the objective.
- Execute against the plan, but enabling learning from experience to occur whilst you do.
- Have a few key metrics to track performance towards the objective.
You can make this as complicated as you like, but it will generally not help, just confuse. Nowadays however, navigating through the digital tools and options available has become a job for a specialist, and that does not mean the pimply teenager down the road who is a Facebook maven.
A website is just another tool of commerce, the starting place that enables small businesses to communicate and compete in ways unimaginable 20 years ago. The digital revolution has also spawned a host of further tools to enable relationships and transactions, but the basics of finding a customer, engaging with them and moving towards a transaction have not changed one bit.
For small businesses too compete, they need to do a few things well:
- Have a really detailed customer profile. Demographic, geographic and behavioural knowledge and insights are what enables them to target messages specifically, as if to one person.
- Create and/or curate information of interest to this specific audience. Information that alerts, informs, and demonstrates your knowledge, has the opportunity to at some point in the targets future, to give them a reason to engage. There are myriads of tools to do this, from those that scrape social media platforms for key words, to following thought leaders and repackaging their ideas, to creating interest focussed newsletters automatically. However, don’t believe that any of this is easy, as you will be sorely disappointed.
- Open the chance of engagement. By simply making the target aware of the content, and giving them a reason to stay on your site or platform, you open the opportunity for engagement. This is where the tools really come in, to sort, organise, and direct the appropriate content automatically once set up. The reach of social media into most segments is now extremely deep, but increasingly the platforms are seeking to be paid for the provision of that reach to you. Advertising, but once you have someone’s attention, by whatever means, you need to make sure you do something useful with it, as you may not get a second chance.
- Engage the targets with the content, by demonstrating that you are the one who can and will deliver value at the time of a transaction.
- Enable the transaction. Often this doe not mean buying over the web, it is much broader, and encompasses all the elements of the sales as well as the logistics channels and after sales service.
- Retain the faith of the customer for future sales, and turn them into a source of referrals for you to their networks.
Again I say, none of this is easy, but the point is that none of it was available to small business just 20 years ago. There has been an immense democratisation of opportunity, make sure you use it, and when you need assistance, call me.
Jan 19, 2015 | Collaboration, Communication, Small business
Great communication is a two way street!
Working with a colleague over Christmas to assist in the development of a presentation that was a really important opportunity to build her personal brand with the audience. Creating presentations that work is a process, and hard work, so to start, we broke the task of building the presentation down into three components.
- Twitter Pitch. Twitter has its detractors, but the huge unintended benefit for those communicating ideas as distinct from the minutiae of their lives is that it forcse us to distill ideas into 140 characters, what I call the” twitter pitch“. Applying this discipline to the preparation of a presentation is usually the same sort of challenge as presented by developing the elevator pitch for your business. In this case, the challenge was to articulate in one sentence the central idea that was to be conveyed. Not easy.
- Know what you want to happen. Clarifying this really has three parts:
- Define what it is that you want the audience to know as a result of the presentation
- Know what you want the audience to feel during and after the presentation
- Know exactly what it is you want them to do with the information you provide, and deliver them the means to do it. A “call to action” if you like.
- Create a structure for the presentation that delivers on the points above. Again, there are three factors at work:
- Have a logical, sequential structure of some sort for the presentation.
- Gain the trust of the audience, listening but not believing is a waste of everyone’s time.
- Do it with feeling. People rarely remember facts, but they do clearly remember the emotions they felt while the facts were being recited. I do not remember the date of the assassination of JFK, but I do remember (yes, I am that bloody old) exactly what I was doing at the time, and how I and those around me reacted to the news.
Delivering a presentation is a difficult to obtain opportunity to sell. An idea, a product, your skills, the reason your business exists, it varies, but the common point is that those in the room have given you their time and attention, their most valuable resource, don’t waste it for them, and miss the opportunity for you.
On a final note, you may also notice that all of the above is in “threes”. For some reason I do not understand, the human brain is very efficient at remembering things in threes. If you organise your presentation into blocks of threes, you will be better able to manage the flow, remember the sequences and words, and deliver.
None of this is easy, and rarely is a great presentation prepared alone, and it is never done at the last moment and without practise and a critical eye.
Need a critical eye, and sounding board? I can help.
Jan 16, 2015 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business
http://www.markstewart.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/women_chatting.jpg
Most would acknowledge that word of mouth is the most effective marketing channel there is, then promptly forget that fact as they set about preparing and implementing their programs.
Discounts, bundles, making ads, facebook likes, social media mentions, retweets and shares, and many other activities all get a guernsey, but when was the last time you explicitly set about creating word of mouth, real life endorsements, Margie from Marrickville telling her neighbor over the fence that your product is the best thing since sliced bread?
How much of your marketing budget has as its specific aim to create personal endorsements?
We all know that “WOM” is the original marketing channel, so I was surprised to see this research that reflected that only 28% of small businesses when asked to identify their best marketing channel noted Word of mouth in its proper place.
Have we just forgotten the basics, been seduced by the the welter of choices available?
Perhaps it is just the sample, choices, or that it is from the US, but I asked a small group last week a similar question, albeit open-ended, and word of mouth came in at about the same level.
We can now target messages to specific behaviors practiced by very discrete subgroups, why would we not seek to ensure we deliver outstanding value to them, then encourage them to spread the word amongst those they know who are similarly interested?
Word of mouth, the original and still the best social media platform.
Nov 20, 2014 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
Success these days is hard won, how do you go about winning your share?
Most progress of a sales prospect through the sales funnel happens with some sort of design in mind, rather than accident, even though the actual process is usually chaotic. As the one setting out to engage, there are things that need to be done to maximise the leverage that can be applied without exerting any “hard sell” pressure on a prospective customer, poison in this day of sales mobility.
There are three headline of questions that you can ask yourself, and then reflect the answers in the manner in which you communicate, in every way from the published ads, to the website, location signage, the words your staff use, and the way you follow up any contact.
What is your Share of Attention?
- The world we now live in is one where everyone is bombarded with messages almost every moment, from every imaginable device and location from the sophisticated and targeted offer on your own mobile phone to the ad on the back of the dunney door in the shopping centre. Those marketing their goods and services are in life and death competition just to get noticed, and extract the few seconds it takes for someone to skim a headline, and hopefully be sufficiently intrigued to take some action. Usually that action at the first point is just to read or listen to the rest of the message.
- Who is it for? Nothing can be for everyone, and but too often this simple and basic fact of marketing life is ignored. The targeted ad to a mobile phone number is way more challenging to assemble than the general ad in the dunney door which can only discriminate by gender. Gaining a share of attention of someone in the market for a new car has to involve recognising the personal circumstances of that person. Setting out to sell a two seater sports car to a lady with one child and another on the way is usually a waste of effort, better to focus on delivering a car that will meet her particular needs, more likely a 4 door sedan that fits her budget and preferences. The process of answering the question “who is it for” will always throw up uncomfortable choices. In days past, as someone who spent millions in advertising on the 80’s and 90’s, the typical target audience was something like ‘women 25-40, with children” It was about as good as we could do in those days, with a bit of U&A added. Nowadays, that broad description is so inadequate as to be laughable.
- How are you going to reach them, to create an awareness that you are in a position to meet their need or solve their problem, when and f it occurs. The tools of the web have been absolute game-changers here.
What is your Share or engagement?
- Why should a prospect be giving you some of their most valuable resource, their time? To be worthy of peoples time, you need to add value in some way to build a share of their brain, to get them to think about what it is you have to offer and how that offer can be of value to them.
- Why should they buy from you? In almost all cases, a buyer has options when it comes to buying something. Being clear about why the chosen vendor should be you is fundamental to getting the sale. To continue the analogy above, a car dealership that has some female sales personnel, and who have as a part of their marketing efforts a pick-up and delivery service from the local day-care centres is more likely to make the sale to our pregnant Mum than a dealership full of men emerging from the workshop with grease to the elbows, calling prospective female customers “Luv”.
- In sales with long lead time, there is a process that most prospects will go through, from initial awareness of a need through often several stages of engagement, before a sale can be made. Tactics vary through this sales funnel, but one thing remains consistent, the sale goes to those who are constantly working all points in the funnel, being available to the prospects, and . Perhaps the best salesman ever, Joe Girard who sold 13,001 new cars over a 12 year career in one dealership, a feat that sees him in the Guinness book of records. Joe not only never missed an opportunity to engage, and develop a relationship, and once you were on his radar, he created opportunities to speak to you, all in the days before the internet. Once you had bought a car from Joe, you got a post card about monthly from him, always thanking you for your business, congratulating you on a birthday or promotion at work, and offering help in some way. When it came time to buy Another car, Joe was the only salesman most people spoke to, as they knew him, trusted him, and understood he would be there for them.
What is your Share of Wallet?
- Share of wallet is an absolutely vital and often overlooked measure. When you have created a customer, ask yourself how much that customer buys over a period that you could supply. If they spend $1,000 dollars a year on products similar to yours, but you sell them only $200, your share of wallet is 20%. To continue the story of Joe Girard, he knew that the average time between new car purchases was about 3 years, so sales cycle his typical customers “wallet” was about $20,000 every three years, and he stayed in regular contact, so that when the purchase time came around, his share was high, I have been told as high as 60%. Given some people moved away, some died, and some just changed car brands for any number of reasons, that is an astonishing figure.
- Defining the wallet is usually a challenging exercise, what to include, what to exclude, and over what time frame. My advise is always to calculate the wallet over the average purchase cycle time, for cars, 3 years ago it was about 3 years, for refrigerators it may be 10 years, for womens fashion it may be a couple of months. A friend of mine, a professional woman shops almost exclusively at a particular retailer. They know her sizes and preferences, offer her an exclusive first look at anything new that comes in that they think she might like, deliver on a few minutes notice, collaborate with the shoe shop, and accessories retailers in the vicinity to ensure everything is matched, and do a number of other small things that ensure she simply has no reason to go anywhere else. I suspect their share of my friends considerable wallet is very high indeed, and they have defined it to include the things that go with their products, on which they make no money, but it adds to he service they provide.
None of this is easy, there are no formulas that work for every case, but there are general rules that can be applied. In addition, today, everything is measurable, every time you reach out to a customer or prospective customer you can measure the effectiveness of that action. Joe Girard would have been in hog heaven.
