Apr 7, 2014 | Personal Rant, Small business
The joint is in a mess.
Every time you look at the news, there is another “revelation” of dodgy morality, insider dealings, political duck-shoving and just plain corruption.
Greed has become the magnet in our moral compass, and to compete, we are all tempted to cut a corner here, increase a claim there, and in the process join the race to the bottom.
Engaging in a number of forums of SME’s over the last few weeks, it has become evident to me that the cynicism of small business owners is at an all time high, and their contempt for those who pull the levers of power never higher.
Small business (1-19 employees) is the neglected powerhouse of the economy, generating 47% of jobs, and 36% of industry value add, and are heavily concentrated in the service industries where the growth is occurring. This is just another way of saying important.
These people, who together probably lift the average hours worked in the economy 25%, and who are way more productive than most, are becoming wary of trusting our institutions, are minimising the people they employ, and the degree to which they engage. Over time their confidence is being eroded, their trust being withheld.
The long term impact is that investment, innovation, and ultimately our economic well-being is compromised.
As far as I am concerned, those convicted of offenses should be thrown into the slammer, and their assets taken, but they are the sideshow to the slow erosion in the character of our economic fabric. They just provide the evidence that all the bad stuff that the owners of SME’s believe every time they set out to engage with a local council to get a DA, have to fill in another senseless form, or suffer the invasion of someone checking that they are doing the “right thing” is really happening. They wonder at the volume of corruption and hubris that is remaining hidden, when they are getting their regular dose of Obeid and Thompson et al from both sides of politics on public display.
The public display of corruption is just a sideshow, the small fraction of the smelly deals that get done that becomes public, but just imagine how productive we would be if the stench of this sideshow was removed, and confidence and trust rebuilt.
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 31, 2014 | Uncategorized
When you have nothing else to offer, price is what people use to make a judgement about which alternative to buy.
Yours or someone else’s alternative?
However, most people also recognise that you get what you pay for, and that what you pay for is not always just more widgets in the box. Sometimes the widgets last longer, fit better, are not the same as everyone else has, are the first seen, the box just looks better, and sometimes it is a bit of all of these, and many more factors that may influence the purchase.
Every person will have a different definition of what constitutes value in any given set of circumstances. Purchase of a box of paper clips has a different set of circumstances driving it than the purchase of a new car, but the process is the same.
Last week I watched a lady in one of those supermarket type office supplies places make a choice of a box of coloured paper clips over the standard ones, paying a substantially higher price for her choice. Same number of clips, same size and shape box, just a more colourful design on the box, and of course, the coloured clips.
Well you say, it may be just a couple of dollars, so it does not matter much, which is true, but when I chatted to her at the checkout and asked why she chose the coloured clips, she did not say they were only a dollar or two more, she said she “just liked them better”
Surely our job as marketers is to find those little things that lead our customers to say those magic words “I just like it better”, and give them what they like.
Price is so often used as an excuse for a lack of imagination that it makes me cry.
