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 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.
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 15, 2015 | Change, Innovation, Small business
Wheels still on?
There are lots of reasons, I have heard them all, and even used a couple myself, but blaming the retailers, engineers, competitors, lack of advertising, or the weather misses the essential truth.
The process is flawed.
We know the constraints of the retailers, they set the rules and suppliers have to live with them. We cannot control the competition, although mostly they are pretty predictable, and resources for advertising are never enough. Our engineers and designers are ours, so we can get the best out of them, if we are good enough, and we cannot predict the weather, let along control it.
The thing we do control, but rarely leverage well is the innovation management processes most of us use.
If 9/10 products fail, surely there must be something wrong with the logic and processes that allowed them to progress through the system to launch, consuming precious resources as they go.
They get spat out, launched, fail, and we blame everything but the stray dog around the corner, and our NPD&C process.
Silly really.
Why are the processes flawed?
There are standard operating procedures taught with minor variations almost everywhere, they are logical, sequential, and like economics assume knowledge and insight. Nothing like the real world really.
Following is a list of the failure-drivers I have seen over the years.
The ideas are narrow. Ask yourself where most ideas that get into the system come from.
- Customers. In many industries, solving a customer problem is a great source of ideas, but in FMCG, customers or as we should call them, buyers, have little idea beyond ways to save a few bob, or copy something else that is doing OK, but they have the shelf space to rent, so we bend over.
- Consumers. We spend millions asking consumers what they want, then trying to interpret the answers in some coherent way, when the truth is as it always was, consumers do not know what they do not know. Henry Fords quip that had he asked his customers what they wanted, they would have answered a faster horse, still holds.
- The bosses wife. Always a good source of ideas, mostly crap, but carrying considerable weight in the system.
- Your sales force. There can be the gem hidden amongst the dross, but usually they are responding to what their customers (read buyers) tell them, what the opposition has done to pinch a shelf facing, or just looking for reasons they are behind budget. Good sales people are usually pretty focussed on the things that make a difference now, not next year or next decade, so at best they may come up with a useful range extension.
The business case. I am in favor of rigorous planning and being held accountable for results, but when you think about it, our ability to tell the future is pretty limited to non-existent, but we persist with executing on a business plan because it is, well, the plan. Every business case I have ever seen has two common features:
- A positive forecast of outcomes. Profits, market share, volumes, whatever it is, the forecast is for great things.
- Detailed cost analysis. This includes the costs to manufacture, buy shelf space, promotional programs, advertising, research, and all the rest. Again, all if we are honest with ourselves, factors we can only really take a best guess at. The only thing we know for sure is that the forecasts will be wrong.
We believe our own bullshit. Because we have spent all that time, effort, and money creating a business case, we then use them to prioritise the options on the basis of the best returns.
We fail at articulating the product. Every successful product I have seen has some essential component that both makes it different to anything else around, and in the process adds value to sufficient lives for there to be an incremental source of new demand. If all we do is cut the existing cake differently, the only winner is the retailer. Somehow we need to make the cake bigger, find that new and elusive consumer demand.
We fail to brief designers. This follows the previous failure, we stumble at articulating the product specs against which the technologists, engineers and creatives have to execute. If we do not know, how can they? Besides, they are usually brought in too late in the design process, they respond to the performance specs marketing tells them the market wants, instead of being a proactive part of designing the specs. This usually ensures that few operational or technology innovations get a guernsey.
Momentum. Once a project starts to move along, it builds momentum, garners support in all sorts of places, and becomes a “project” to be completed, rather than an expression of new consumer demand.
The net result of all the above is that the biggest risk is at the end, when the sunk cost in resources and ego play against anything other than a gung ho launch.
So what is the solution to all this waste, apart from just getting better at fortune telling?
Take some lessons for the “lean” movement, the operational implementation of the scientific method.
Iterate in small steps, get a few consumers involved early in a hands on way to see of if your value proposition is sound, do a series of small experiments testing hypotheses, and be prepared to be wrong, and alter the approach. Deploy genuine cross functional teams from both inside and outside the organisation, engage in constructive “devils advocate” thinking, and most important of all, have a strategy for the business that drives the new product development process to contribute to the strategic outcomes, not just the forecast sales and financial ones.
None of this is easy, but that is why there is so much upside, the corporate clones cannot see the opportunities. It is also why increasingly, small and medium business has an advantage over the corporate behemoths that dominate the landscape. They are able to take quick decisions based in instinct, experience, discontinuities that emerge, and an intimacy with customers large businesses can only dream about.
Call me when I can help.
