Jun 29, 2015 | Marketing, Sales, Small business
13 routes to success
Small businesses have few resources, so they need to get a lot of mileage out of what they do have.
How do they generate successful marketing campaigns that generate revenue and a long term position in a market without breaking the bank?.
Following are 13 ways that I have found to be successful in 20 years of advising small businesses. It is also fair to acknowledge that 20 years ago, the astonishing range of tools now available were barely in the minds of science fiction writers. There has been a revolution, and small businesses suddenly have the opportunity to look like and act like large ones, while retaining the advantages of being small.
1. Hone your elevator pitch.
You need to be able to engage a prospect in a very short time, sounds easy, but is very hard. The pitch is rarely about the product or service you have, although this is the subject of 9/10 pitches, the successful ones are about the outcomes your product can deliver to the prospect.
2. Collaborate.
Small businesses have great opportunities to collaborate with others with complementary products and services. The shoe shop with the dress shop, the florist with the liquor shop, the chiropractor with the gym, and so on.
3. Leverage social media.
I am often asked about the value of Social media, and can only respond by observing “that is where your customers are, so why would you not be there?”. However, managing social media can however become a burden if you try and do it all yourself. Listen to and believe many of the pundits with a silver bullet to sell, and you risk finding yourself lighter in the wallet, but no further forward, but trying to do it all yourself consumes considerable resources. The advent of digital marketing tools has not changed the basic foundations of marketing at all, just made them more accessible, and so outsourcing the bits you do not know how to do offers great opportunities for leverage.
4. Have a digital presence beyond a Facebook page.
If your marketing effort is all about Facebook, you have missed the boat. Facebook is a fantastic way of connecting, but it is only one, and it is not the best place o transact business, or cover the final step prior to a transaction, that is best done on a website. Social media delivers a set of great tools to drive people to a website, and start the process of engagement, moving them through a “funnel” towards a transaction, but it is only one of the tools needed. Refer above.
5. Foster creativity
The management structures of large businesses are designed to ensure the repeatability of process, so that they are not dependent on the knowledge and commitment of individuals. Therein lies their weakness, as another way of looking at a process is that it delivers multiple opportunities to say “no”. Find ways to foster the creativity of those in your networks, or out of them currently who have expertise and knowledge that can be applied to your sphere of operations.
Network relentlessly. Get out of the building, create networks and friendships that know about your businesses, what it does, its “Why” and it will enable over time organic growth.
6. Open envelopes.
A colleague of mine once said disparagingly about a mutual acquaintance that he would “go to the opening of an envelope”. On talking to this bloke on another occasion, he laughed and indicated that it was right, so long as he could wield the letter opener, meaning, he had an opportunity to put a point of view, and be the focus of some attention, even if only for a moment. I always thought it a good idea to take every opportunity to speak, as it builds credibility, and as a result, builds a business organically. It follows that you also need to be a competent public speaker, so if you are not, get some training, or opening envelopes at the local “toastmasters” group would be a good idea.
7. Seek referrals.
The most powerful marketing is word of mouth. When someone we trust tells us that a particular product or service is good, we tend to believe it, and will try it out when the need arises. Referrals are now hackneyed, as many web sites have them from people we have never heard of, and often we think the site owner probably wrote his own, but that does not diminish the power of the personal referral. Seek the personal referrals out, ask for them, post them, and build “social proof” in other ways.
8. Be the expert.
Whatever is your niche, make sure that you present yourself, and indeed are, an expert. The world is full of experts, but for a small business, if you are the expert in your local area, and those around who may need you understand you are the expert, who will get the business as it evolves?
9. Build relationships.
People buy from people, not businesses. I know that sounds odd with all the stuff being sold on line, but look at the sites that are successful, beyond the mega sites like Amazon and Alibaba, they all have a human face, and a personality. You might be sending your money via a credit card to a business you are not familiar with, but 9 times in 10, you would have looked at the profile of the “face” of the business, looked at the products they sell and endorse, sought some sort of social proof. You get to feel that in some way you know them, then you might buy. An old mentor of mine used to say, “Success comes to those who build many bridges, and never burn one”
10. Localise.
Most small businesses are local by their nature, be sure that your customers know where you are, that they can get their hands around your throat if necessary, but more importantly have a cup of coffee with you wen all is going well. Local, and the human touch that brings is enormously valuable. Even large businesses are localising. I rang the customer service lines of one of the banks recently, with a complaint, something they had done which had (presumably) unintended consequences on me, and I was nit happy. The first call was answered by a call centre, clearly not in Australia, the first hand-off was to the supervisor, again clearly nowhere near Australia, by which time I was getting really annoyed, but the third was to someone in a local call centre, who handled the problem quickly, easily, and in a language we both had as our first.
11. Offer incentives.
Most times these words are uttered, the first thing that springs to mind are discounts. These may play a role, but are far from the only ones. Time limits, quantity limits, guarantees, freemium, there are all sorts of incentives that do not require you to make a sale at a discount, many of them when used creatively will actually increase your conversion rates by adding some urgency to the selling process.
12. Everyone is in sales.
In every business, particularly small businesses, everyone in the business needs to recognise that they are in sales, that their job relies on selling, irrespective of the title they may have on their business card. This particularly applies to some of the marketing people out there who seem to think their job ends before accountability begins.
13. Promise the world, then deliver + Mars.
Under promising then over delivering used to be an effective strategy, but it has lost its gloss. Promising the world is easier than ever, and there are more people than ever making those promises in your space. Today you need to be known as the one who promises the world, like all the others, but then delivers with more than was promised. In effect it is an over delivery on the expected over delivery.
If you can do all of these, even a majority, the world is your oyster.
May 21, 2015 | Customers, Sales
Making an offer they cannot refuse is the ultimate selling outcome, notwithstanding the limitations of the law, and common decency.
So how do you make a Godfather offer?
- Know your customer intimately
- Know their business intimately
- Know their pain-points like they were your own
- Create an offer that removes the pain-points for them
- Make the payoff compelling
- Make the payoff unique
- Present the offer like your life depended on it, with passion, conviction, and from the receivers perspective.
- Create tension in the decision by ensuring there is a decision time after which the offer is off the table.
This works pretty much all the time.
When you are able to the identify components of a problem a potential customer has, for which you have a solution that is both valuable to them, and unique, and you clearly understand all the challenges in their situation, why would they not buy from you?
May 18, 2015 | Change, Customers, Sales
mindset switch
Access to information, the tools to make up our own minds has not just changed our behaviour in the way the sales process works, it has changed our mindset.
In a fundamental way.
We believe information we source ourselves, and distrust anything we are told.
We filter the available information and make up our own minds about the bits we will accept, and blend into our version of the truth.
The power to say no” has never been stronger because there are a myriad of options available to us to get the information ourselves.
I work from a home office, and usually do not answer the home phone, as most of the time it is an unwanted cold sales call, and those who I need to be able to contact me almost always do it via the mobile or email.
However, last week I did answer the phone, and yes it was a sales call, but a pretty good one. A very nice Aussie lady, so her first language was English, rang and politely inquired if she could take a moment to speak about how her insurance company could save me a heap of money.
As it happens, I had been considering just that proposition, I am over 60, work from home, but still pay full whack contents insurance, so I had concluded that I should save some money by changing, or at least negotiating rather than just paying the auto premium.
So what happens when the nice lady rings, I surprise even myself given I had concluded that I should change and said “No thanks”.
It was not her, she did a good job, unlike most cold phone sales calls.
It was not that the timing was wrong, I had decided to do the research and take some action.
It was my mindset.
Being given information on a plate by someone who I saw as having a vested interest was automatically rejected.
Yes, I understood she could help, and that it was great timing, but the opportunity was still rejected almost without thought.
Imagine how hard it is to make a sale when all the stars are not aligned, when you cannot even get past the front door when they are!
Selling used to be a staged process with information delivered by someone who had the access you did not have, but needed to make a purchase decision.
No more.
The process has been completely disrupted and reversed, all the power is with the buyer, and if you try and sell them, even the if tools you use smell of you trying to sell them, you lose because the automatic response now is “No”
Think about it the next time you set about motivating the sales force at the Friday rev up, as you will probably just be wasting everyone’s time if you do not recognise and accommodate the mindset change that has occurred in the last decade.
May 1, 2015 | Customers, Sales, Small business
Design your sales process
Everybody in business is in one way or another, in sales.
After all, you do not make a living by giving stuff away, you actually have to sell it.
It is also true that not everybody will want your stuff, in fact, usually very few will want it, so the challenge is to find them, engage them, demonstrate the value, and then create a transaction.
All this takes time and effort, it will not happen by some sort of osmotic process, giving a bloke a sales folder, a car, and map no longer works, the sales process needs to be specifically designed to create the circumstances in which a transaction can take place.
35 years of designing them in one way or another has led to a few conclusions on the best way to go about it,
- Ensure you understand the buyer, and their buying processes. One size does not fit all, each will be different, and by whatever means you need to define their processes, pain points, and priorities so you can build messages that resonate.
- Design a detailed process. Given each prospect will be different, the process needs to be both robust and sufficiently agile to accommodate the nuances of each customer. Generally it will have a number of stages that fits the product you are selling. Office supplies will differ substantially from power stations, but the principal remain the same. Set the stages, and the triggers that move a prospect from one stage to the next.
- Develop a playbook for each stage. This will involve both the response to the persona of the prospect and delivering the type of content that they will respond to at their point in the sales cycle, the delivering the content in the most appropriate manner.
- Routinize the sales process. Like any process, a sales process is best if it works routinely, in a predictable and consistent way. Improvements then come from the anomalies and outlier things that pop up, and become very obvious simply because they are outside the norm. it may be a inquiry from a market you had never considered, or an idea on how to improve your product for a particular purpose, whatever, the sales process needs to make the odd thought obvious so it does not get missed in the welter of activity that occurs.
- Manage the metrics. Like any process, a sales funnel can be continuously improved, you can also ensure sales priorities are optimised, and KPI’s set and managed.
- Engage your sales force in the process design and ongoing improvements, and feedback loops. Over time as the process evolves and new sales people come along, to keep a sales process delivering it needs to be able to evolve at least as fast as the customers you are seeking to serve. Sales people come in many colours, like the rest of us, and managing any diverse group of people requires that they buy into the objectives of the strategies in front of them sufficiently strongly to resist the temptation to chase the new shiny thing.
None of this is easy, despite all the verbiage out there that seems to indicate it is. Designing an effective sales process takes time, effort, investment, and iteration. The good pat is that effective process design quickly pays for itself.
Apr 29, 2015 | Marketing, Sales, Small business
sales rule No. 1
Shut up!!.
I have been spending a bit of time recently helping develop and implement strategy in a very interesting start-up with an innovative, and potentially extremely valuable piece of Intellectual Capital. Even after doing this stuff for so long, there is always something to learn, and being involved with this process has brought home a lesson learnt a very long time ago about what works in sales and what does not
The founder is deeply, irrationally, in love with his product.
Usually this emotional attachment to the product is seen as a great thing, but it can be a bad mistake, as potential clients rarely share the attachment.
As a result in this case, when he finally gets to talk to someone who may have the need for such a product, he delivers a passionate diatribe about all the things the product, can do, will do, can be adjusted to do, and how it evolved. Little about how it can deliver value to these potential clients, little about the potentially substantial problem successfully addressed, and little in words the potential client would use to describe his current situation.
Yawn.
Asking questions, followed by listening intently to the answer, and reflecting that answer in another follow up question is the single best sales technique there is.
The best sales people I have ever seen always do surprisingly little talking.
If you are the seller, and you do more than 30% of the talking, you have probably failed, or will fail. You will not at first know much about the potential customer, what their problems may be, how they are currently solving the problem and what they might be thinking when you show them solution, so you need to find out.
Ask questions: even confronting ones,
Why did you take this call?
How are you solving this problem now?
What would it be worth to solve this problem quickly?
How would it feel…etc. etc.
Sales however is still a numbers game.
Not everyone, no matter how well qualified, will want or see the need for your product. So, have many sales conversations in parallel, having done sufficient research on your targets that you know them sufficiently well to control the conversation, so you do not have to do the talking.
Follow up religiously, but politely and respectfully. They may not have opened your follow up email or called you back for the 3 times you called, sometimes it means you have made not piqued their interest and will make no progress, and sometimes it is just that life can get in the way.
However, do not forget that the most important resource a small business has is their time, so you need to invest yours wisely, and your prospects will thank you or not wasting theirs.
Mar 17, 2015 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
marketing funnel
Creating a marketing funnel is the basis of all digital marketing initiatives. If you put the term into google, you get back 3 million plus responses, many of them having nice illustrations attached that in one way or another, look like a funnel, with stages and various names attached.
However, there are very few places with useful advice on how you create and manage a funnel, perhaps it is easier than I have found it.
Every situation is different, and every prospect needs to be addressed personally in some way, nevertheless, there are a number of generalised stages I have seen, which drive the manner in which you deploy the digital tools.
Step 1. Create a “Hook”. A “Hook” is something that arrests the attention of someone in the target market. This implies, accurately, that you have defined your target market in considerable detail. I am working with someone who is an expert at setting up self managed superannuation funds. His target market is the owners of small businesses that rely on the owners presence, often they are tradesmen, who are over 55, and have not put enough money away enough for retirement. The “Hook” we have evolved is “If you are over 55, and behind in savings for your retirement, you have the opportunity to use a tax effective self managed super fund which delivers a doubling of your net worth in 7 years”.
This statement is in 4 parts:
It identifies the prospect very clearly,
It is very specific about the situation the prospect finds themselves in
It tells them of a solution to the situation
It makes a big promise.
Without the very specific definition of a target market, the Hook is less effective, as it does not speak to anything specific to which a reader will relate, it becomes too general.
Step 2. Generate traffic. This can be done by a variety of means, using both paid and organic means. Organic is slower, and is centred around personal networking, blog posts, articles, and other content that gets shared on social platforms. It is a passive approach. By contrast, paid traffic generation can be very effective with the great degree of target definition that can now be generated by all the social platforms. For my self managed superannuation (SMSF) client, we are targeting the small business owners with a very specific and targeted Google Adwords campaign, coupled with an extensive organic program.
Step 3. Customer capture. Having driven traffic to a website, you need to do something with them to progress them through the steps towards a transaction. Usually this involves the download of something of value for free in exchange for a name and email address. The lead is then followed up with a staged set of automated emails that are responsive to the actions of the potential customer, often offering further “freebies”. This tactic is now so widely used that it is losing its effect, so increasingly it is being supplemented with the further offer of something of greater value still for a minimal amount, $3-7. This does two things:
It qualifies the lead as a real lead, not just a freebie follower,
It gets leads used to using their cards to purchase from you.
Step 4. Transaction development. This process can take many forms, from the gentle prompting towards a transaction that can be a highly iterative and lengthy process, to the maximisation of a sale by adding value to the original offer. By way of example, it takes me ages to come to the conclusion that I need to buy a new suit, it is a substantial cost, and occasional purchase. However, once in a shop, the opportunity to also sell me a tie, belt, shirts, and perhaps another pair of shoes is real. The upsell stage, or as McDonalds have perfected, “would you like fries with that?”
Step 5. Remarketing. Once you have a customer who has bought and hopefully had a good experience, it is easier to sell them again, and again, and over time you can build a very good picture of what they like and what they do not by their interactions with your database. Again, by way of example, I still buy a lot of books, real books from one of the few remaining bookshop chains. I have a card that gives me a discount based on purchases, yet they insist on sending me emails with offers that bear no resemblance to the purchase habits exhibited on their database via the card. Utterly stupid, and exactly the reason they will go out of business eventually. Amazon will never make that mistake, their offers are very specific and targeted to behaviour, not just of the individual, but of the cohort of individuals with similar behaviours that can be ascribed to the individual. In addition, once someone subscribes to your database, you have their permission to market to them, so irrespective of where they may be in the funnel, there should be processes in place to periodically “re-tweak” their interest.
Funnel management Toolbox. There are a range of tools, digital and otherwise, for each step in the sequence, and their relative performance is the subject of much very effective review, so I will not repeat it. Suffice to say several specific tools are necessary for any effective automation.
- Registration page . To attract the registration and manage the delivery of the “freebie” and of the leads details to the auto responder software. There are many around, but Leadpages seems to have the game pretty well sewn up. Recently both Facebook and Twitter have added “one click opt-in” capabilities to their sites that leads people directly to your autoresponder.
- Autoresponder software. Absolutely necessary, and there are a host of suppliers, from those with simple tools to those fully integrated with CRM systems with more bells and whistles than even the most sophisticated and technically savvy medium sized business will struggle with, so my advice for the small businesses where I operate, is to keep it simple. Mailchimp and Aweber are the most popular around my patch, and both work well.
- Creativity and originality. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately for some of us this does not yet come in a box, or made available for download, it resides between the ears of real people.
- Customer centric copywriting skills. As with the above, not available via download. It is one thing to get all the digital tools right, but someone still has to be able to make them work to optimum levels, and the copy writing skills and experience needed are significant.
- Technology implementation . Again, somebody who knows what they are doing with this technology. It is one thing to know how it works, it is another entirely to actually make it work. Implementation simply is not as simple as all the vendors would have you believe, for most small businesses, implementation sucks.
PS. The illustration at the top of the post is confusing, hard to understand, and not at all like the last one you saw. Just like in life!!
