Jul 29, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
Small businesses selling B2B always struggle to generate sales leads. Survey after survey confirms it as one of the biggest challenges they have.
There are plenty of tools out there that supposedly make it easy, and certainly they do make it easier than it has been in the past to generate many contacts, but it is still hard to generate a warm lead, and then to convert to a sale.
None of the tools are any good unless you have a crystal clear picture in your minds of the value you can deliver, being “wishy washy” and peppering the conversations with adjectives (particularly “awesome” my latest hate word) no longer works.
Following is a list of options that have worked over the years for my clients. Most are pretty obvious, when they are pointed out.
1. Referrals. Being referred is the best sales lead you could ever have. Someone who is familiar with your work saying “Bill is great at …. you should talk to him” to a colleague would be wonderful. Yet, so few of us explicitly ask for referrals. When you have done good work, ask who else your client knows who could benefit from your expertise, not expecting to be referred to their competitors.
2. Testimonials. Perhaps second to referrals are testimonials, people with whom you have worked who are prepared to say in the record how great you are. Video is the only way to go with testimonials. Nobody believes any more that the written ones on your website from “Monica X from Parramatta” are real, they believe you have written them. It takes Monica to front a camera, identify herself and say how great you are for it to be effective, then is very effective.
3. Personal networking. A lot of small business people join network groups, in the expectation that this will lead to referrals and work. It can, but almost always takes time and effort. Others in the group need to understand what you do, and how that is relevant to their problems, then they have to be convinced that you offer the best value solution to them. Being in such a group can be rewarding for small businesses in more ways that just generating leads, as it get them out of the office, and forces them to speak publicly about the value they can deliver, which almost always acts to sharpen the elevator pitch. These skills come in very useful when actually in elevators.
4. Digital networking. LinkedIn is the obvious tool here, too often misused by those who just see you there and immediately start selling. LinkedIn like any social platform requires that you demonstrate your bona fides first, and the best way to do that is to identify the groups, preferably closed ones, where your prospect hang out, and start to engage in the debates and conversations that occur. You can then follow up privately with some, and have a more focussed conversation about their needs and after a rapport is established, your solutions.
5. Seminars, webinars & e-books. In most cases, our clients buy from us because we have something, or know something that they cannot get elsewhere. Demonstrating your mastery of a topic by running seminars on them, producing webinars, and writing e-books demonstrates your mastery. The secondary benefit of this type of content is that it can be used, reused, repurposed, and reused again, and again.
6. Platform cross-posting. Many people blog on their own site, hoping people will stumble over the posts, but there are many other platforms now that can provide a shopfront for your products and services. LinkedIn recently introduced a blogging platform which works very well, you can open up a YouTube channel and post instructive videos, or put great information up on slideshare. Then there is guest blogging, a great way to leverage the lists of others, by adding value to their audience, a win win both ways.
7. Lead magnets. These are things that visitors can gain access to by exchanging their email address. It is a great way to reuse the content you produced in a webinar or e-book. Here the challenge is that you need to attract the eyeballs to the lead magnet before it has a chance of being magnetic.
8. Direct mail. Yes, snail mail does work in this day of digital everything. Now we get so few things in the mail that is not either bills or junk, that a handwritten envelope with a stamp, will always get opened and read. This requires that a modicum of research into your prospects is done, as a wrong spelling or title means immediate filing in the round-file. Best done in small batches, that way you can also test the response to the sales letter you send.
9. Warm cold calling. Bit of an oxymoron there, but a deliberate one. If you do not know the name and position of the person you are preparing to call, do to waste your time. However, if you do know their name, there is a reason they might be interested in hearing from you, and you can articulate that reason in 20 seconds or less, then that implies you have done sufficient research to make a cold call a warm one.
10. Advertising. The last and perhaps most obvious tactic to generate leads. All social platforms survive by taking advertising, they are the newspapers of the 21st century in that regard. You give them your profile and preferences, inadvertently or otherwise, and they sell that to advertisers to whom your profile fits their target. Having said that, the tools available on the platforms are terrific. Both Facebook and Google in particular set about making it increasingly easy to spend ad money with them with features like Facebooks lookalike audiences explained here by Jon Loomer, easy and AdWords strategies outlined by Wordstream.
Most businesses use a mixture of the above, too often randomly rather than as a deliberate strategy. The old marketing communication “rule of 3” still applies: Know what you want to say, know and articulate why it is relevant to the receiver, listen to the response.
Jul 9, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Demand chains, Marketing, Strategy
All those brand stories: gone.
Every now and again I see something so stupid, so irrational, and so destructive of a valuable brand, that I think that perhaps the loonies really do have the keys to the asylum.
One of them happened yesterday.
There was a radio news report that Akubra would cease to buy any of the raw material required for their hats, rabbit skins, from Australian suppliers.
From here on they would be using 100% imported skins.
One of the honchos from Akubra was interviewed, and he was blathering about looking after all stakeholders, that sacrificing 4-5 jobs in Kempsey where the hats are made was worth it to ensure the business remained viable, and that the 5,000 retailers around Australia needed to be assured of continuous supply, or they would be in trouble.
Blimey, stone the crows, 5,000 retailers rioting because there is uncertainty about the viability of a supplier of .00000001% of their sales.
Then it turned out that just 10% of current skin supplies were local anyway, as the khaleesi virus has cut a swathe through rabbit numbers, for which we are all thankful. Then a supplier was interviewed. He breeds rabbits for the table, the skins to Akubra are a very useful addition to his cash flow, important even, but not make or break, so now the skins will go to landfill.
How much better it would have been to set about supporting the Australian industry, modernising their equipment, working with their suppliers, so that this Australian icon could continue to grow, particularly as wild rabbit numbers seem to be increasing as the virus becomes less effective.
What a positive brand story they could have created and spread, reinforcing the existing position, telling the stories that are the foundation of their brand, but instead they chose to trash their brand, built up over 100 years plus.
Your brand is an amalgam of all the stories told about you, your products, the situations encountered, and the experiences users have with the products. The stories Akubra could tell are legion, but instead they choose to self-destruct their most valuable asset.
Next thing you know, a global brand like Coke will replace itself. Oh, poop, they already did.
Sigh.
Let the loonies go free.
Jul 8, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
Free works
It happened again last week.
A client asked why I advocated giving away a lot of information on their products and supporting technology, seemingly for free off their website. For them it is a challenging idea, one that runs against everything they have ever thought or done.
Their products are challenging, technical products, heavy in intellectual capital, so why give it away?.
To answer, I created the following list, and it is all about creating value before asking for the purchase order. Do it well, and customers do not have to be sold, they become buyers.
Provide assistance. Information assists potential customers to recognise that they have a problem, an opportunity, or that there may be a better way of approaching a situation.
Demonstrate. By demonstrating how their problems will be solved, enabling comparisons, and offering technical and financial case studies, the cost/benefits of a purchase can be more easily calculated. This makes the internal purchase approval processes easier for those charged with their carriage in a customers business.
Risk identification. Risks of adoption, and non-adoption can be articulated, demonstrated, and often costed and compared.
Learn. Information offers a prospect the opportunity to learn without the costs usually associated with learning, and they will not forget the opportunity.
Decision necessary information. Availability of strategically significant information from a supplier can accelerate the adoption and implementation of new products and processes, delivering a market benefit.
For my client, the list of benefits is as significant, and in this information driven modern commercial world virtually a competitive necessity.
Be expert. We will be seen as the experts in the market, and who would want to buy from an also ran?
Cycle time. It has the potential to shorten the sales cycle by removing some of the steps normally associated with such B2B sales of significant size
Conversion cost reduction. As a result of both of the previous items together, our cost of conversion from random and often unknown prospect to a transaction is likely to be reduced, and the numbers increased leveraging the costs of our sales effort.
Short listed. Information availability increases the chances that at least we get onto the short list of those who are considering making a purchase, but who may not be in our immediate sales radar.
Sales funnel information. Downloading of various material by prospects gives us not only information on who is in the market, but what they are looking for, and leads on their specific interests and concerns.
Build a brand. The biggest benefit of all is that of the building of the brand, the position of expertise in the market. In this day of ubiquitous information, being seen as the expert in any domain is a hugely valuable asset.
Being secretive, and believing that information held closely is power is now a failed strategy. It worked in the past, but no longer. Information is still power, but the way you leverage it has changed radically.
Jul 2, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
I find myself writing a proposal for the development and implementation of a digital marketing strategy for a bunch who know they need it, because I suspect their kids told them, but have no idea what it is.
Part of the challenge is to figure out how to balance the digital and social media education against the tough realities of marketing which have not changed despite all the new tools. The entrenched view that marketing is about putting out a monthly newsletter full of general bluster and crap and discounting as and when deemed necessary, usually from an inflated starting point pervades the thinking, and has contributed to ensuring the previous efforts in the digital space have failed.
Perhaps I am wasting my time?
Some of the essential early questions are proving to be challenging for them. Questions like:
1. Who is your audience? We need much more than generalised demographics, we need specific behavioural information informed by the demographics to the point of being able to give prospects individual personalities which we can address in communications.
2. Why and where do they spend their time online? The prospective audience all have digital lives, and if we are serious about becoming a part of those lives, we need to be serious about understanding how it works on an individual basis now, or we risk alienation.
3. What do you have to say? Unless what you have to say is of interest to them, sufficient to engage and over time lead them to a transaction, there is no future. Speaking to a prospect in their words, explaining why should they care about what you have to say is now essential.
4. How does what you have to say add value to their lives? It is one thing to be noticed, and hopefully gain some interest, but unless we can tell them specifically how the item being promised will add value to their lives, they will not engage. Long gone are the days of broadcasting generalised features and standing back with an order book. Now we have to specifically target benefits and articulate them unambiguously and with sensitivity to the aspirations, situation and needs of the prospect.
5. Why are you reaching out to them? The initial and quite reasonable and logical reaction to digital communication is that you are just trying to reach them to flog them something, and nobody likes to be a target. Describing the payoff to them in their terms is essential.
6. What results are you expecting? Knowing the end you are seeking is pretty important. This is not just the end point of the whole process, but the end points in all the building blocks in the engagement to transaction process. The practise of marketing has been revolutionised by the ability to collect and analyse data. For the first time we can now identify which half will be wasted and eliminate it.
Todays digital consumers are pretty savvy, cynical and can smell a con a mile away. However, they are also able to see the intention behind the tools and the benefits that can be delivered to them by the tools, and are comfortable with the trade-off if it is of benefit to them.
Jun 26, 2015 | Customers, Small business, Social Media
Customer profile development
It often happens at events at which I speak, big or small, does not seem to matter.
Someone afterwards comes up to get some advice on their particular scheme to make a million from an online business.
It happened again last week, one very sensible business idea that has been road tested and while sort of working, is sputtering, and a second that is as likely as the second coming to deliver salvation.
The advice I give always starts at the same place, the 4 core questions that need to be asked before anything else:
Who is your ideal customer?
Where can you find them?
What is it that you can deliver to them that will attract them to you?
What result do you want to give them?
It is rare that anyone I speak to has really thought through all four, indeed rare that even the first is clear, but without that discipline, you may as well keep the money you would give away chasing the dream.
It is reasonable to start with a view, and after testing, alter it based on what you have learnt, but let’s take them one at a time.
Who is your ideal customer?.
In the pre digital age, all we could do was describe our ideal customers in very broad demographic and assumed behavioural terms, now we can be extraordinarily specific. We have also broken the bounds of geography, our customers can be anywhere in the world, and we can reach them. Bombarded as we all are with messages, unless a message speaks specifically to us, about something of immediate interest, we no longer see it, the auto spam filter between our ears screens it all out. In the event your million dollar idea has more than one ideal customer, do the exercise twice, be prepared to have two, or three, or four, sets of ideal customers and the messaging that is specifically relevant to them researched and prepared.
Where can you find them?
This question is not about geography, but about our digital lives. People with similar preferences tend to stick together, it was always so in the school yard, and it is the same in our digital lives. My eldest son is a specialist in old fashioned large format, black and white, architectural and landscape photography. His peer group around Sydney is pretty small, in Australia modest, but his global network of like minded specialists and hobbyists is substantial. You will find him in digital places that accommodate those particular specialists, and if you want to talk to them, the way to do so is to go there digitally, and say something of specific interest. Unless you can identify and deeply refine the profile, you will never find him, or anyone else who might buy your idea.
What can you deliver that is attractive to them?
Our range of choices of goods and services and their providers is vast, what is it about you and yours that is likely to be attractive to a prospective customer? To continue the analogy with my son, if you just knew he was a successful photographer, and you sold top end photographic equipment, you might think he was a prospect. No so. You need to be able to deliver him something specifically about his form of photography that is unavailable elsewhere, and that he is currently thinking about, or could be enticed to think about, before he will even notice a message from you.
What result do you want to give them?
Everyone to whom you try to sell something recognises that you are doing it for profit, not your health. While they may be happy to see you healthy, they will only buy from you if there is something in it for them beyond the warm feeling of making you successful. It is therefore essential that you define the result that your prospect will get from using your product. Again using my son, it would be attractive to him to find a large format camera and tripod setup that weighed less than the many kilos of his current setup, which he packs onto his back as he walks long distances to get just the right aspect and light, but any sacrifice of image quality, and his standards are extraordinarily high, would be absolutely unacceptable as a trade-off.
When, and only when you have thought through all this in detail, will you be ready to seriously contemplate an investment in the digital technology and content creation necessary bring your dream alive.
Jun 22, 2015 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, retail, Small business
retail crash test dummies abound
Watching the rather sloppy way Grant O’Brien was moved on by Woolworths last week, I got to thinking about all the converging things happening that will impact the FMCG landscape over the next few years. A superficial look would suggest that things are pretty set, and change that happens will be incremental, but a closer look would suggest there is a lot of paddling going on under the surface.
These are the things I see:
Coles resurgent.
In the 40 years I have been around, I have seen the pendulum swing a couple of times, and it looks like Westfarmers have pulled off another mighty swing with Coles. Across pretty much any parameter you choose to look at, they are catching or have caught Woolworths, and remain on the improve.
Woolworths momentum.
In this high fixed cost retailing game, momentum is a huge contributor, not just to the financial outcomes, but to the day to day operations and shop floor “feel”. The momentum seems to be all against Woolies now, after enjoying the benefits for a long period. Their failure to drain cash from Coles by putting pressure on Bunnings with Masters has not just crunched their financial results, but it seems to have knocked the wind out of their confidence at the sales face across all their formats except perhaps Dan Murphy’s, which seems to be bucking the trend. Woolworths do not have a player in the office supplies game, which must be hurting them, further draining competitive resources.
Discounters are winning.
Aldi is doing really well, opening stores and taking share hand over fist. I have not seen the figures that would substantiate the notion that woolies are losing more to Aldi than Coles, but it would not surprise me at all. On top of Aldi’s blitzkrieg, it seems that their German competitor Lidl is coming. Lidl is a potent long term competitor with substantial experience across many markets.
Costco is seemingly carving out a niche, although not as aggressively as was first forecast, but the crowds in the Costco store at Auburn in Sydney would suggest they are not going away any time soon.
The $A.
After a period well above US $ par, the Aussie is back to more like its long term position. However, the carnage wrought by those few years on the mid sized supplier base cannot be turned around. Retailers by going offshore when they could and leaving their local supplier base to contract will have a continuing impact, as now the dollar is sensible again, there are few suppliers left with the wherewithal to be reliable national suppliers. It is also clear that those who have survived are a pretty resilient bunch, and are disinclined to replace their eggs back in a basket they cannot control.
Housebrands.
Coupled with the carnage of the high $A, the retailers strategic decision to rationalise proprietary SKU’s and replace them with tiers of housebrands to capture the proprietary margin has further led to the rout of the mid sized suppliers. Those left who might be inclined to chance their arm are generally not large enough, and lack the sophistication to manage a business relationship with a major retailer, but some will probably go broke trying.
Margins.
Many FMCG suppliers lose money on most sales to supermarkets. The negotiating power of the retailers, resulting trading terms and promotional guarantees that enable retailers to never pay beyond the discounted price, while restraining top line price increases to compensate has led to the situation where only a madman or the financially illiterate would stake their house on success in FMCG.
Innovation avoidance.
Markets evolve with innovation, but the barriers against success are so large that risk avoidance is the priority. Suppliers trumpet a new pack colour scheme as an “innovation”, and retailers get serious by asking the few second tier suppliers left to copy the proprietary market leader for yet another housebrand “innovation” . Retailers think they are good at innovation, but the experience from around the world as well as locally is to the contrary.
Promotion as marketing.
Continual price promotion only erodes the value of a brand, but brand building is a long term proposition, while staying on shelf is an immediate priority. Guess which wins, and we are rapidly approaching a brandless future beyond the few global mega brands that have the grunt to stay on shelf while spending with consumers to brand-build. Marketing budgets have been consumed by promotion spend. We have a generation of marketing people who have never experienced or even seen real marketing in FMCG.
Wholesale death.
Metcash as pretty much the last man standing is being squeezed by overheads and competing access to consumers outside the major chain supermarkets. Their recent financial results demonstrate the challenge of being the middleman in an environment where it is increasingly easy, and there is increasing motivation to go around the middleman. They seem to be trying with IGA, and with some success, but the local positioning of IGA mitigates against the mass merchandise wholesale business model they operate. Nevertheless, I do see IIGA as a potential bright spot for smaller suppliers who are unwilling or unable to service Woolies and Coles.
Opportunity?
Amongst the doom and gloom, I see several bright points of opportunity.
- While the traditional marketing strategies no longer work, it remain a fact that it is consumers who actually put their hands in their pockets to buy something. Retailers are just a choke point in the system exercising control, and the emergence of digital marketing offers small businesses the opportunity to engage and motivate their consumers to ignore the predations of retailers and express their purchase preferences with their money.
- The shortage of retailer suppliers may lead to a loosening of the noose around those remaining, and open opportunities for them to focus on a niche to deliver a product offer that the retailers do want, but that is hard to copy effectively. Combined with digital marketing, there are opportunities to engage with consumers in ways not dominated by price promotion and generic substitution.
- Local suppliers with a following in a region do have an opportunity to build a business. Coles have been playing with this for a while, and it does work, although the model of local supply does not sit very comfortably alongside the national supplier mentality that exists. For retailers to really get behind this opportunity to nurture “local” they will have to wear an increase in transaction costs, as well as make exceptions to their trading patterns. The big blokes may not, but there are real opportunities in the independents and non chain retail segments.
- Niche retailing will boom, and suppliers have the opportunity to participate. Harris Farm in Sydney continues to rise and rise, and even Thomas Dux, owned by Woolworths but operated largely separately are harbingers of the future. Consumers are increasingly engaged in their retail food shopping, they want their concerns and individual tastes to be met, and that cannot happen in a mass retail outlet focussing on discounting and housebrands.
I am sure there are thoughts I have missed, and would welcome feedback on them as well as comment on those above.
