Apr 4, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
A friend of mine has a very successful small business selling high value services to a small group of clients from diverse backgrounds. He does not want to be the next IPO, or employ hundreds, or even tens of people, just a couple to keep the business growing manageably, by delivering a superior and personal service to his clients, and a resulting comfortable living for him and his family.
Sensible aspirations.
However, the market he is in is very competitive, highly regulated, and subject to forces outside his control, so how does he grow in these circumstances?.
It is a classic case of needing a pipeline of prospects that convert to clients over time as a purchase looms, but having a limited key resource, his time, prospects need to be pre-qualified in some way, before they consume much of his time.
There is lots of advice around, free on the web and from all sorts of program managers and consultants that can cost a lot of money. By its nature, this generic advice can be conflicting, confusing, and presenting management challenges beyond the scope of capability for SME’s, so the opportunities are missed.
The standard advice generally includes a menu of :
Get a website
Get onto social media
Use mobile
Use SEO
Purchase ads on various Social media platforms
Employ analytics to A/B test various approaches.
Actively manage your landing page
There is a lot more, but those are the common bits in the mix, and as far as it goes, is reasonably on the money, but the generic advice pays no account of the specific circumstances of any business, and the commercial and private objectives of those who own it.
A pretty common failing of generic advice.
Over a coffee, I suggested a simple, and easily managed program which he is implementing, with early success:
- He got himself a website, but rather than paying a someone he does not know a motza to do it, he used one of the free site builders, Squarespace, and had a very creditable site up in about 8 hours. He could have used weebly which is my preference, and the one I use and supply to my clients, but the point is that it is relatively easy for anyone with some level of digital awareness and familiarity to do themselves at minimal cost.
- Continue the efforts to build lasting relationships with existing customers. The program he has used to date is fairly simple, but innovative in his market. To date this appears to have been successful, so he needs to build on it.
- Given his existing customers are all very happy with the service provided, he needs to be marketing to them as a source of referrals, rather than going out onto various digital platforms trying to conjure up leads. Any one referral from a current satisfied client of somebody who could use his services, is worth a thousand hits on a social media platform.” Market to current clients for leads” was my advice to him. The service he has given to existing clients implicitly enables him to ask them, and perhaps reward them in some way for leads they qualify as people he should be talking to.
- Write a list of the 20 most asked questions ,and then answer them, in detail, from several perspectives, in blog posts over a period of a couple of months. Do a series that engages, perhaps “Most often asked question by those buying……” Followed by the “Second most asked question…… And so on, with links back to previous questions. This is a technique made prominent by Marcus Sheridan and it works. As an aside, I am a little annoyed with Marcus, as he has very successfully put a strategy that has worked for me in the past out into the public domain, and made a business of it, although answering client questions seems a pretty obvious strategy to me.
- Ensure there is a data capture capability enabled. This can be a simple as a “cut & paste” of information from a contact form to highly sophisticated and automated CRM systems. At a simple level, there are free and low cost tools like Mailchimp and Aweber that can work well as email marketing platforms.
- Measure and refine his efforts using the free analytics, and tools from Google. The range of tools Google offers to assist is amazing, but so long as you recognise that they are serving their best interests by maximising your effectiveness, and they track and use everything you do, you can become very effective relatively easily. This can become data intensive, but at a simple level there is vital and actionable information available. If you track nothing else, track the level and type of “conversions” of visitors, and returning visitors to your various platforms, and build on them. A conversion is simply a step taken along a path you have laid out that can lead to a transaction.
- Recognise that digital effectiveness is these days, is just a cost of doing business. The challenge is to mould the myriad of possibilities and opportunities available to your own objectives, circumstances, capabilities, and capacity to manage change, avoiding the snake-oil on the way through. Sounds a bit like any other management task to me.
Apr 3, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Management
Talking with a couple of mates over a beer recently, one of whom has a successful boutique recruitment agency, we found ourselves reflecting on the changes in word usage that had occurred over the last 20 years, and how we had contributed to the changes, most of which we did not feel were improvements.
A few examples.
“Gay”. A friend of mine at school was named Gaye, lovely girl, great fun, bet she has changed her name.
“Like”. It actually used to mean something, rather than acting as a tool of verbal punctuation.
“Green” used to be a really nice colour, not a political label.
The kicker for me was “passion”.
I have been guilty, there are several posts over the years talking about how important passion is, so I have made a contribution to turning this word into a management cliché
Do we have to be passionate about everything? Cooking. Suddenly we have to be passionate about cooking, when sometimes cooking is just to refuel, and jobs. A quick look at any jobs site will tell you that to be considered you must be passionate about your job, the mission of the enterprise, collaborating with others, and so on, Sometimes, a job is just a job, it pays the bills, keeps the kids occupied , and with luck delivers some intellectual and emotional support.
“Passion” has become a cliche, and has an unfortunate simile, Pretentious.
If you really want someone to be passionate, to make the emotional investment you are seeking, you had better give them a very good reason, because passion is a very private emotion, not given easily.
Apr 1, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Customers, Marketing
What do I do now?
The great paradox in selling is that to sell successfully, we often raise the expectations of those to whom we are selling, but to have satisfied customers, we need to under promise and over-deliver.
Complicating that dilemma of the potential mis-match of promise and delivery is that people hear what they want to hear, filtering out stuff that is inconsistent, unexpected, off their personal radar, or is just uncomfortable, while interpreting and exaggerating the stuff they want to hear. This particularly applies to sales outside the expertise of a customer.
Flicking through the TV channels last night, a bit slower than usual, I saw (another) ad for some sort of home training device that promises to deliver me the body of an Adonis in 10 minutes a day with little effort. A classic case of over promising if ever I saw one, but I guess someone is sucked in every minute, or they would not be aired.
Wonder if the poorer suckers ever get their money back? Guess not, but they do get to keep the flab.
The only antidote is to build a brand that customers trust. To do that you need to deliver on the value proposition consistently, over a considerable period, and act with honestly, humility and transparency. Big call for the “fat-be-gone” industry.
Mar 28, 2014 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
Hunt around in Google, and there are thousands of posts out there giving you lists of things to do to have a successful blog. A few Are pretty good, but most a just lists of the blindingly obvious, hoping that the headline “Top 20 tips for success” and their ilk attract attention.
My contribution to the pile is a really simple list of three:
- Know who you are talking to well enough to, well, talk to them. It is after all just a conversation.
- Be original, relevant, interesting, and engaging, by reading widely, building on the ideas, looking for angles and unexpected applications, and offering connections to your readers.
- Do not forget rules 1 and 2.
Pretty simple, but like most seemingly simple things, there is much to distract from the simplicity that needs to be distilled out, hard choices need to be made, and focus found.
Never easy, but rewarding.
Mar 17, 2014 | Communication, Governance, Management
Trust is a word that keeps on coming up, everywhere.
Increasingly in a complicated world we are looking for those we can trust, to do business with, to have as friends, or just to share a cup of coffee.
I have just completed a project of chain re-engineering that did not deliver all the hoped for outcomes, but during the debrief process, the word “trust” and its foundations that in this case proved to be a bit fragile, loomed large. Similarly, a friend of mine is selling her house, retiring to the south coast, and she appointed an agent from a small number in her local area, and as it happens, one of the unsuccessful bidders was also a friend of mine, someone who I would get to sell my house, when the time is right, because I trust her.
Got me thinking about the components of trust.
It seems there are four headline components, which is good for me as a consultant, as I can conjure up a quadrant and deliver it as a deep intellectual exercise. However, the reality is that it is common sense, just like most consultants quadrants, but common sense that paints a picture, that delivers a perspective, and makes you think.
- Engagement. You do not trust those with whom you have no experience, who have not earned that trust. You may think they are trustworthy, but would you confide your pin number to them?, there is a difference. Engagement of the type that generates trust happens over time, is a two way process shared equally by both parties, and is devoid of ambiguity and hidden agendas.
- Integrity. It becomes clear over time that the positive behaviour that builds trust is not just for the benefit of the chosen few, but is based on a “personal code” of some sort that extends to those not closely engaged. The individual or enterprise concerned consistently puts the interests of those with whom it interacts above its own short term interests, and it acts the same way to everybody, irrespective of their status. They “walk the talk,” always.
- Operational excellence. This sounds business-like, but is just as applicable to individuals. Summed up it simply means that they never over-promise and under-deliver, what you get is what you saw and at least what you expected, but usually is more than you could have reasonably hoped for.
- Fit for purpose. The product or service is the right one for the purpose for which it has been delivered, and there has been an effort to ensure that the purpose has been defined sufficiently by both parties to ensure that the product was the right one for the circumstances.
Back to my chain exercise. When I look at it dispassionately, the parties had insufficient opportunity and incentive to build the trust in each other that was necessary. Individually, they trusted me, as I knew them all, spent considerable time articulating the process, and have a history with several, but they did not know each other well enough to offer the real trust we were looking for.
And to my two friends who did not do business. The house seller went with an alternative that offered an up front incentive, it seemed to reduce the cost of selling. When the process is over, her house of 30 years which is the only substantial asset she owns has been sold, I suspect she will wonder if the agent delivered her a buyer that just made his life easy, a cut price, quick and easy sale that delivered him an easy commission, in return for the added costs he incurred up front, all wrapped up in the clichés of the real estate agent. Had she trusted my agent friend, it is quite possible that she would have delivered them a buyer, just the right buyer who wanted the house because of what it was, not because the price was great, the cash benefit of which would have been to dwarf the up front saving that was made.
During the research for this post I put “trust” into several dictionaries, and the options for a definition are many and varied, according to the context. No wonder we have difficulty.
Mar 12, 2014 | Collaboration, Communication
“You complete me” a really cheesy line, made famous by the Jerry Maguire movie, but relevant elsewhere.
Communication devices have exploded over the last decade, most of us now have multiple tools by which to communicate, but just how well are we doing it?
Pretty poorly by my count.
We spew stuff out, and sometimes some of it comes back on us, good and bad, but are we actually communicating?
Isn’t communication supposed to be a two way process, something that engages the parties, grows, informs, adds value ?
Tools are only useful when well used, communication devices by themselves are just objects, they need people, stories, and emotion to be of any value.
Communication tools need people to complete them.
