We recently helped one our our clients, a college training centre, do research with small business owners. We discovered that the three top issues were how to find new customers; stay ahead of their competition; and spend marketing money more effectively.
A good first step in getting to the next step in your business is to discover what your company is really good at. In business lingo, this is called “defining your core competency.”
Another way of asking the question is, “If you were forced to divest your company of everything it does every day except one set of activities, what would you keep?” What really generates your profit and makes your customers keep coming back? And what could you ditch with no real danger to your business?
Once you know what is core to the survival and prosperity of your business, it gets easier to see who you appeal to, and therefore where to find them, and how to spend your sales and marketing dollars.
Here are some ideas to start your thinking.
Are you better than your competition at the nuts and bolts of getting raw materials and components, turning them into products and setting up a great distribution and sales network? This is probably the only time we will recommend you look at your pricing; if you can drive cost our of your processes and guarantee delivery times, you can pass savings on to customers and create long-term business relationships.
If research, and designing great products is what you are good at, you can go to market saying you really have developed the equivalent of the better mousetrap! Unique products is where you’ll compete.
If you are known for creating fantastic ads and marketing systems that drive customer relationships, you’ll be able to say that you are easier to do business with than your competition, and be able to prove it. If your team excels at creating happy customers who can’t wait to refer you, you’ll want to focus on the results you offer.
It’s a simple idea: find what you are good at, and spend your hard-earned marketing money on finding customers who want just what you do best.
Ken & Liz, the Marketing Masters
Ken & Liz, the Marketing Masters
Monday, November 16, 2009
How a Business is Learning What Small Businesses Want to Learn
One of our favourite clients is a business training centre at a local college. For the past few months, we’ve been working with their team to find out what small business owners want most from training, and how they want to receive it.
We began by doing a telephone survey. It was illuminating to see how extremely satisfied the training centre’s clients are with the great customer service they get from the staff, and a bit daunting to think that we could help grow such a well-established business even more.
We could have asked a standard question like, “Is (subject) of interest to you?” or “Do you or your employees need training in anything?”, but our work with entrepreneurs has shown us that the answer to this question is usually “No. I don’t have time.”,
AO we ended up asking “What topics would be worth taking time off from your business to learn about?”
Small business owners told us they would indeed take time off work if they could learn: a better way to find new customers; stay ahead of their competition; and spend marketing money more effectively.
This was a great start. But these topics cover a lot of territory and the training centre wisely wanted to do further research to hone the new offerings. To do that, they decided to offer a series of free seminars to businesses in three separate regions, teaming up with partners in each area.
The seminars will be samplings of the broader courses they are considering offering at the centre. They will gauge interest in the topics via the number who enroll for the seminars, andcirculate a questionnaire to gather even more information. They will also ask for permission to continue sending information to participants.
The results should provide guidance on what courses to offer and what kind of businesses will be interested in each. Further, the seminars will kindle interest in training in those companies that participate.
Sampling is a standard strategy in package goods marketing. This project by a training centre shows how the same technique can be used to develop or improve a product and build new business.
We began by doing a telephone survey. It was illuminating to see how extremely satisfied the training centre’s clients are with the great customer service they get from the staff, and a bit daunting to think that we could help grow such a well-established business even more.
We could have asked a standard question like, “Is (subject) of interest to you?” or “Do you or your employees need training in anything?”, but our work with entrepreneurs has shown us that the answer to this question is usually “No. I don’t have time.”,
AO we ended up asking “What topics would be worth taking time off from your business to learn about?”
Small business owners told us they would indeed take time off work if they could learn: a better way to find new customers; stay ahead of their competition; and spend marketing money more effectively.
This was a great start. But these topics cover a lot of territory and the training centre wisely wanted to do further research to hone the new offerings. To do that, they decided to offer a series of free seminars to businesses in three separate regions, teaming up with partners in each area.
The seminars will be samplings of the broader courses they are considering offering at the centre. They will gauge interest in the topics via the number who enroll for the seminars, andcirculate a questionnaire to gather even more information. They will also ask for permission to continue sending information to participants.
The results should provide guidance on what courses to offer and what kind of businesses will be interested in each. Further, the seminars will kindle interest in training in those companies that participate.
Sampling is a standard strategy in package goods marketing. This project by a training centre shows how the same technique can be used to develop or improve a product and build new business.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Three Magic Questions That Drive Sales
Some of our best business conversations happen in the most unlikely places, including our daily walk to the local coffee shop we fuel up in, and the dog park where Liz takes her border collie, Mike.
One of our dog park buddies is a woman we’ll call Mary. She’s a self-employed consultant who knows we’re always open to providing what insight we can while we throw tennis balls for Mike and his doggy pals.
We like what Mary does, so we took her along to meet a client of ours who needed the kind of services she provides. Now, when a colleague accompanies you to meet a client with a stated need, you can be pretty sure there is real business to be had, and that you have a better-than-even chance of getting it.
Here’s how the meeting went. Client to Mary: Here’s what I need (gives detail). What would you charge me for that? Mary to Client: That would be X dollars. But I could give you a discount if that’s too much.
So Mary got the job, but gave away about 20% of what the client was willing to pay her, because she didn’t know the Three Magic Questions she should have asked.
Magic Question Number One
What is the biggest frustration, or the most powerful opportunity you have been facing in the last twelve months?
Magic Question Number Two
If you had solved that problem, or been successful with that opportunity, what would that have meant to your company (In dollars? In market share? In profit? In store traffic? In lead generation?)
Magic Question Number Three
On a scale of 1 to 10, how committed are you to solving that problem, or succeeding with that opportunity, in the next twelve months?
Can you see why these questions are pure magic? Because the client has the opportunity to talk about his favourite subject (himself) and is actually telling you exactly what he wants to buy and how much it is worth to him.
If the prospect had said his commitment level was 8 out of 10 or more, Mary could have said, "I specialize in providing solutions that (solve the biggest frustration the prospect has) so that my clients can achieve their goal of (what the client said he wanted to achieve). She could have quoted a fee that was reasonable in relation to the answers to Magic Question Number Two.
If the prospect had said his commitment level was under 8 out of 10, Mary would have suspected that the client was not willing to pay her usual fee. She might also suspect that the project might be terminated early, or even that she would have trouble getting paid on time.
In this case, she could have said, “You’ve said your problem is (restate the problem or opportunity) and that resolving it would result in (restate the results he mentioned). But it doesn’t sound like it’s your number one priority in the next year. I specialize in this type of work, and I feel that you should invest X (a reasonable fee). How does that sound?”
Based on the response she got, she would then be able to make a decision to accept the job, decline it, or negotiate a short-term contract she and the client would be happy with.
One of our dog park buddies is a woman we’ll call Mary. She’s a self-employed consultant who knows we’re always open to providing what insight we can while we throw tennis balls for Mike and his doggy pals.
We like what Mary does, so we took her along to meet a client of ours who needed the kind of services she provides. Now, when a colleague accompanies you to meet a client with a stated need, you can be pretty sure there is real business to be had, and that you have a better-than-even chance of getting it.
Here’s how the meeting went. Client to Mary: Here’s what I need (gives detail). What would you charge me for that? Mary to Client: That would be X dollars. But I could give you a discount if that’s too much.
So Mary got the job, but gave away about 20% of what the client was willing to pay her, because she didn’t know the Three Magic Questions she should have asked.
Magic Question Number One
What is the biggest frustration, or the most powerful opportunity you have been facing in the last twelve months?
Magic Question Number Two
If you had solved that problem, or been successful with that opportunity, what would that have meant to your company (In dollars? In market share? In profit? In store traffic? In lead generation?)
Magic Question Number Three
On a scale of 1 to 10, how committed are you to solving that problem, or succeeding with that opportunity, in the next twelve months?
Can you see why these questions are pure magic? Because the client has the opportunity to talk about his favourite subject (himself) and is actually telling you exactly what he wants to buy and how much it is worth to him.
If the prospect had said his commitment level was 8 out of 10 or more, Mary could have said, "I specialize in providing solutions that (solve the biggest frustration the prospect has) so that my clients can achieve their goal of (what the client said he wanted to achieve). She could have quoted a fee that was reasonable in relation to the answers to Magic Question Number Two.
If the prospect had said his commitment level was under 8 out of 10, Mary would have suspected that the client was not willing to pay her usual fee. She might also suspect that the project might be terminated early, or even that she would have trouble getting paid on time.
In this case, she could have said, “You’ve said your problem is (restate the problem or opportunity) and that resolving it would result in (restate the results he mentioned). But it doesn’t sound like it’s your number one priority in the next year. I specialize in this type of work, and I feel that you should invest X (a reasonable fee). How does that sound?”
Based on the response she got, she would then be able to make a decision to accept the job, decline it, or negotiate a short-term contract she and the client would be happy with.
Friday, October 16, 2009
All about technological progress.
I was watching a TV show the other day. It was a series about a New York Ad Agency in the 1960's. As far as what passed for technology in those days, the IBM typewriter was IT. The secretaries actually put the dust covers on when they left work each day!
The only other hi-tech contriviance in evidence was the telephone—they all had the black desk model, circa 1949, with the row of buttons on the front. The switchboard girls worked in a closet somewhere, connecting the phone callers to those desk sets by plugging in wires. When a call came through, you pushed whatever button was lit and took the call. Ah, the simplicity of it all!
But I digress, the point of this blog is about the complexity of tools we all use every day here in 2009.
In one episode at that ficticious ad agency, in 1961, they took delivery of a newfangled photocopier—a real innovation at that time—a bulky behemoth with canted sides! The thing was, they didn't know where to put it! They tried it in the hall, in the secretarial pool, in the art department and finally in an office where the junior copywriters worked. I seem to recall that back in those days, you used to even see them in reception areas! Were these high tech marvels of the time meant to be shown off?
Well speed ahead and here we are in 2009! Telephones are no longer simple, they do all kinds of things never dreamed of in '61, and what's more, they can live in your pocket and go wherever you do—there's no escape. And copiers, (yawn) what's the big deal there? We have computer networks that are connected to everything in the world—want to know something? …ask Google. Need a photo? …download whatwever you need. etc. etc. And who needs that landline phone? We can talk on the computer with Skype and actualy see who we're speaking with! Does anyone under twenty even know what a typewriter was? ...or a dictaphone?
My point is: that 1960's ad agency seemed to get the job done without all the gadgets we have today. No one seemed to need 24/7 access to the internet (even if there was an internet), no one needed to have their phone with them all the time or have their phone provide games, a calendar, music, a camera (remember film?), or a thousand and one other "apps".
They came into the office around 9am and left around 5pm and got all the work done—of course everything took more days to do. But now that we have all these handy dandy gadgets, we can come in at 7am, stay 'til 7pm and still not get it all done because everything was expected yesterday.
Ah progress!
The only other hi-tech contriviance in evidence was the telephone—they all had the black desk model, circa 1949, with the row of buttons on the front. The switchboard girls worked in a closet somewhere, connecting the phone callers to those desk sets by plugging in wires. When a call came through, you pushed whatever button was lit and took the call. Ah, the simplicity of it all!
But I digress, the point of this blog is about the complexity of tools we all use every day here in 2009.
In one episode at that ficticious ad agency, in 1961, they took delivery of a newfangled photocopier—a real innovation at that time—a bulky behemoth with canted sides! The thing was, they didn't know where to put it! They tried it in the hall, in the secretarial pool, in the art department and finally in an office where the junior copywriters worked. I seem to recall that back in those days, you used to even see them in reception areas! Were these high tech marvels of the time meant to be shown off?
Well speed ahead and here we are in 2009! Telephones are no longer simple, they do all kinds of things never dreamed of in '61, and what's more, they can live in your pocket and go wherever you do—there's no escape. And copiers, (yawn) what's the big deal there? We have computer networks that are connected to everything in the world—want to know something? …ask Google. Need a photo? …download whatwever you need. etc. etc. And who needs that landline phone? We can talk on the computer with Skype and actualy see who we're speaking with! Does anyone under twenty even know what a typewriter was? ...or a dictaphone?
My point is: that 1960's ad agency seemed to get the job done without all the gadgets we have today. No one seemed to need 24/7 access to the internet (even if there was an internet), no one needed to have their phone with them all the time or have their phone provide games, a calendar, music, a camera (remember film?), or a thousand and one other "apps".
They came into the office around 9am and left around 5pm and got all the work done—of course everything took more days to do. But now that we have all these handy dandy gadgets, we can come in at 7am, stay 'til 7pm and still not get it all done because everything was expected yesterday.
Ah progress!
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Basic Mistakes Retailers Make When Times Are Tough
We originally wrote this for the AMEX OPEN Forum August 25 09
There’s an old story in the ad business about a man who ran a hot dog stand. He did really well selling his hot dogs. One day, a customer mentioned, while adding mustard to his hot dog, that he felt there was an economic downturn looming. The hot dog stand owner decided he’d better prepare for the worst so he immediately fired his helper, switched to lower quality wieners and stopped advertising. Sure enough, business dropped off and he finally had to close down. “It’s a good thing I was prepared,” said the hot dog stand owner, as he signed his bankruptcy documents.
The fact is, that when times become tough, the first thing many business owners do is stop marketing, and lay off staff. This most likely means there will be fewer customers coming in and fewer people to serve the ones that do show up—a good recipe for disaster.
Furniture manufacturing and retailing have fundamentally changed, first with ferocious price competition from China, and then as the economic picture changed. In Canada, the sector is worth $17 billion dollars a year, but profits are thin and the market is highly fragmented. The Brick has about an 8% share, and lost a ton of money in both 2008 and 2009.
But arch-rival Leons, while facing slowing store sales and profit declines, were still making money. How come? Because The Brick made some decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time, and nearly drove their business into the ground.
Look at what they did and see if you would have done the same thing. We bet most of you would—and we bet you would face the same bad results.
The Brick “saved” money by chopping advertising and laying off hundreds of sales staff. As a result, store traffic tanked. Fewer customers came into the store, and those who did come couldn’t find the help they needed, so they didn’t buy. Not enough commissioned professionals on the floor selling meant revenue dropped even lower.
Lax controls chewed up cash. Inventory did not match customer demand–too many items that didn’t move off the floor, too few of the high-demand items. The result: long delivery times that annoyed customers and kept them from coming back. And following that, problems with supplier credit, as inventory turns slowed and inventory costs rose.
New Brick CEO, Bill Gregson figures that only ten percent of the company’s troubles were due to the recession. The real culprits were the wrong stock in the showroom, no expert sales staff on the floor, no advertising to get customers in the door and lax inventory and supply chain controls.
There’s an old story in the ad business about a man who ran a hot dog stand. He did really well selling his hot dogs. One day, a customer mentioned, while adding mustard to his hot dog, that he felt there was an economic downturn looming. The hot dog stand owner decided he’d better prepare for the worst so he immediately fired his helper, switched to lower quality wieners and stopped advertising. Sure enough, business dropped off and he finally had to close down. “It’s a good thing I was prepared,” said the hot dog stand owner, as he signed his bankruptcy documents.
The fact is, that when times become tough, the first thing many business owners do is stop marketing, and lay off staff. This most likely means there will be fewer customers coming in and fewer people to serve the ones that do show up—a good recipe for disaster.
Furniture manufacturing and retailing have fundamentally changed, first with ferocious price competition from China, and then as the economic picture changed. In Canada, the sector is worth $17 billion dollars a year, but profits are thin and the market is highly fragmented. The Brick has about an 8% share, and lost a ton of money in both 2008 and 2009.
But arch-rival Leons, while facing slowing store sales and profit declines, were still making money. How come? Because The Brick made some decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time, and nearly drove their business into the ground.
Look at what they did and see if you would have done the same thing. We bet most of you would—and we bet you would face the same bad results.
The Brick “saved” money by chopping advertising and laying off hundreds of sales staff. As a result, store traffic tanked. Fewer customers came into the store, and those who did come couldn’t find the help they needed, so they didn’t buy. Not enough commissioned professionals on the floor selling meant revenue dropped even lower.
Lax controls chewed up cash. Inventory did not match customer demand–too many items that didn’t move off the floor, too few of the high-demand items. The result: long delivery times that annoyed customers and kept them from coming back. And following that, problems with supplier credit, as inventory turns slowed and inventory costs rose.
New Brick CEO, Bill Gregson figures that only ten percent of the company’s troubles were due to the recession. The real culprits were the wrong stock in the showroom, no expert sales staff on the floor, no advertising to get customers in the door and lax inventory and supply chain controls.
He’s figuring on a fast fix (their August long weekend sales were way up) by fixing inventory levels, hiring back the staff, running more ads and finding economies in some novel ways like holding inventory at the manufacturers rather than the Brick warehouses.
We are not saying you can’t find real economies by reviewing your staffing, inventory and advertising practices; in fact, much of what we do for our clients is to make these processes more efficient.
We are saying that it’s easy to “cut off your nose to spite your face” when you cut the very services that bring business in the door. Bottom line is: when the economy is bad is the time to increase your marketing and upgrade your service. Do so and you’ll be way ahead when the good times are back.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
The Marketing Secret My Client Paid Me to Learn Again
This post was originally featured in the AMEX OPEN Forum, Sept. 2 09.
We got a surprising phone call last week. It was great news – a nice piece of business – but surprising because we had written the lead off several months ago. We had been consistently ignored and then rejected when we finally managed to get in front of the decision-maker.
Here’s the story. About a year ago, we identified a number of key targets for our business. On paper, these were the ideal prospects for us: we wanted to add privately-held profitable companies in the $6 million dollar range, who had no internal capabilities that matched ours, and who wanted to move up to the next stage of growth.
These canny business owners recognize that they need a systematic approach to marketing and are willing to invest in outside coaching and consulting to install it.
Our marketing program is pretty classic. We reach out via social marketing, make sure our site is optimized, offer lots of valuable educational materials and seminars, feature our target companies in our weekly newspaper columns and work our network to get personal introductions and speaking engagements.
We have researched our prospects and their issues and make sure we offer solutions that make sense to them. We have tons of terrific testimonials from similar firms attesting to how easy we are to work with, and how effective our solutions have been.
Well it was clear when we met Marty that nothing we could say or do would make him even consider working with us.
Yes, he wanted to move the business ahead. Yes, he liked our educational materials and thought our work was “interesting”. Sure, he’d love to see us.
But no, he wasn’t going to invest in our help. Actually he never came right out and said this; he’d give us all kinds of buying signals, react positively to out story...and never commit.
We couldn’t figure out why. Now we really wanted Marty as a client; he’s well-known in his industry, and we figured that we would be set for life if we could say we had him on board.
But we also knew Marty was eating up hours of our time as we tried to invest a new way to do sales so Marty would sign up.
Finally my partner Ken said, “This is nuts. We are redesigning our own marketing process around a guy who won’t even buy our services!”
We took the advice we give to all our clients, and put Marty on our automated follow-up system. We have a category we call “long shots” and we put Marty in with them. These people “should” buy from us, but don’t.
“Long shots” get a 45-day series of educational emails with pithy, useful business articles and ideas. They get event invitations and any important or meaningful news we think they might find useful. If we don’t hear from them, they go on our monthly newsletter list. We’ve re-worked the system a couple of times, and we’re still tweaking it, but that’s what it is right now.
The open rate for people on the long-shot list isn’t great. Sometimes we get a 15% open rate; sometimes it’s zero. Occasionally it shoots up to 40%. We track the open rates so we can optimize our subject lines and landing pages based on real world data.
So imagine our surprise when Marty called us to ask us to drop by after 8 months on the long shot list. We almost didn’t go, but it was a beautiful day and frankly it was more fun to get out of the office than continue to do the onerous month-end paperwork that we were facing, so off we went.
“I’m glad to see you,” said Marty. “And thanks for all that stuff you send me. It’s been interesting. Here’s why I wanted to see you. We just reviewed our customer list, and there are some things we’ve discovered that you could help us sort out. I’m willing to invest $25 thousand in fees for a three month contract, with an option to renew depending on what you find. Is this something you could do?”
So after 25 years in the marketing business, Marty reminded me of the basic marketing principle I had lost sight of: People buy when THEY are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell.
It’s all about timing. You know – maybe I should pay Marty for that lesson!
We got a surprising phone call last week. It was great news – a nice piece of business – but surprising because we had written the lead off several months ago. We had been consistently ignored and then rejected when we finally managed to get in front of the decision-maker.
Here’s the story. About a year ago, we identified a number of key targets for our business. On paper, these were the ideal prospects for us: we wanted to add privately-held profitable companies in the $6 million dollar range, who had no internal capabilities that matched ours, and who wanted to move up to the next stage of growth.
These canny business owners recognize that they need a systematic approach to marketing and are willing to invest in outside coaching and consulting to install it.
Our marketing program is pretty classic. We reach out via social marketing, make sure our site is optimized, offer lots of valuable educational materials and seminars, feature our target companies in our weekly newspaper columns and work our network to get personal introductions and speaking engagements.
We have researched our prospects and their issues and make sure we offer solutions that make sense to them. We have tons of terrific testimonials from similar firms attesting to how easy we are to work with, and how effective our solutions have been.
Well it was clear when we met Marty that nothing we could say or do would make him even consider working with us.
Yes, he wanted to move the business ahead. Yes, he liked our educational materials and thought our work was “interesting”. Sure, he’d love to see us.
But no, he wasn’t going to invest in our help. Actually he never came right out and said this; he’d give us all kinds of buying signals, react positively to out story...and never commit.
We couldn’t figure out why. Now we really wanted Marty as a client; he’s well-known in his industry, and we figured that we would be set for life if we could say we had him on board.
But we also knew Marty was eating up hours of our time as we tried to invest a new way to do sales so Marty would sign up.
Finally my partner Ken said, “This is nuts. We are redesigning our own marketing process around a guy who won’t even buy our services!”
We took the advice we give to all our clients, and put Marty on our automated follow-up system. We have a category we call “long shots” and we put Marty in with them. These people “should” buy from us, but don’t.
“Long shots” get a 45-day series of educational emails with pithy, useful business articles and ideas. They get event invitations and any important or meaningful news we think they might find useful. If we don’t hear from them, they go on our monthly newsletter list. We’ve re-worked the system a couple of times, and we’re still tweaking it, but that’s what it is right now.
The open rate for people on the long-shot list isn’t great. Sometimes we get a 15% open rate; sometimes it’s zero. Occasionally it shoots up to 40%. We track the open rates so we can optimize our subject lines and landing pages based on real world data.
So imagine our surprise when Marty called us to ask us to drop by after 8 months on the long shot list. We almost didn’t go, but it was a beautiful day and frankly it was more fun to get out of the office than continue to do the onerous month-end paperwork that we were facing, so off we went.
“I’m glad to see you,” said Marty. “And thanks for all that stuff you send me. It’s been interesting. Here’s why I wanted to see you. We just reviewed our customer list, and there are some things we’ve discovered that you could help us sort out. I’m willing to invest $25 thousand in fees for a three month contract, with an option to renew depending on what you find. Is this something you could do?”
So after 25 years in the marketing business, Marty reminded me of the basic marketing principle I had lost sight of: People buy when THEY are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell.
It’s all about timing. You know – maybe I should pay Marty for that lesson!
Monday, October 5, 2009
How a Branded System can Increase your Accounting Firm's Value
From my AMEX OPEN Forum post, July 23 2009
Whether your accounting firm has been successful by acquisition, the efforts of the partners or just through organic growth, you are likely facing a big challenge as the partners mature.
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