Being Smarter

Happy New Year to all of our Being Smarter readers.

I wanted to start the year by resurrecting a post from December last year – which seems very appropriate for the start of the working year for most people…

At a recent conference, a now colleague of mine, Ed Dale did four separate sessions on a topic which I am calling “How to do business in 2010“… he had a different title, but my take on it was simple – it was a message to all corporate management… to all the folks who’ve sadly been made redundant recently from that world… and to all smaller businesses who are paralysed by indecision. The message was something along the lines of

“Wake up and smell the coffee… the world has totally changed (not just by the Internet.) If you carry on doing business as it was done ten years ago, or do you know what, perhaps even a year ago… then you are dead in the water.”

There were 86 separate provacative statements, here’s my top 10:

1.) Whatever you do, make sure you’re in a business or market place that you are completely unpassionate about. Make sure that it leaves you feeling cold, empty and completely drained at the end of the day. The great news is that if you’ve found a marketplace you particularly have no interest in, it will help you to be average at best when it comes to selling to and supporting your customers – and they will love you for it.

2.)If you are in a small business, ensure you try to run it like a corporate entitiy. Make sure you absolutely do not in any way try to differentiate yourself from these bigger companies. Treat your customers like numbers and be completely devoid of any business personality.

3.) When developing products or services, it’s imperative that you don’t start to build anything without examining every ounce of detail at the early stage. Take as long as you like to write specs and make sure you start with the small picture and buld it up. You’ll never get anything launched if you don’t spend many weeks and months getting the finer detail argued about, before talking to customers about the concept – they won’t thank you.

4.) When your service is launched – for goodness sake try to sell it to everyone that moves… ignore segmentation and playing in niche markets – it’s a complete waste of time. If the product is good enough, everyone will want it.

5.) If you’re in the online game, think very carefully about building giant server or data centre infrastructures the minute your product is out the door. There’s literally no one else out there that does this kind of thing… and they certainly wouldn’t be able to scale it up to your demands.Your data is important to you, and so you should keep it under your control at all times.

6.) When designing your next product, ensure you get every feature that your customers will need into the very first release. Don’t design it so that it could be released in stages, or people just won’t buy it. They need everything on day one.

7.) Decision making – this is key. Involve everyone at all times. Ensure you plan as many meetings as possible – all day ones if necessary to reach a consensus. If you aren’t able to make a decision with the whole team after a huge amount of analysis and delay, then play safe and don’t make one.

8.) When it comes to recruitment, make sure you hire experts in their field, irrespective of whether they are difficult to work with. It’s much better to have a team of experts who don’t communicate than a team of generalists who gel as a team and work for the common good. Oh – and don’t work with them as affiliates or freelancers first to test them out – that just isn’t the done thing.

9.) Customers don’t mind being slightly misled about what they are about to receive as a service… as long as you hook them in, they’ll generally soon get over it. It also helps to provide a very detailed contract, which is difficult to break out of, for your protection.

10.) And finally, the Internet is just a fad. Stick with the old rules of marketing – direct mail and cold calling has worked for years. Your customer base has no idea what a twoot or a blag is, and they’re still on 56k modems, so video will never work on their pcs – you will just need to invest in a support department.

If you like my take on Ed’s wisdom, check out this post 5 Days with Ed Dale.

Ian Mash of Yeoman Consulting helps us to continue the theme of ‘practical ways to help your business life” by sharing some of his experiences of working at the coalface as a senior manager in one of the UK’s largest companies – BT.

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How many of us get up to do a full day’s work, and then conform to the expected norm?

Most of us I suspect, but the key to competitive advantage is to continuously challenge the norm, continuously challenge the status quo.

Think of the new and successful products or brands that do just that. Look at EasyJet. Who would have thought, 20 years ago that we would all be flying around Europe for £20 a seat, and that whilst we had to give up a free warm gin and tonic and a handful of nuts, we now accept a cheaper price and ‘what you see is what you get’ service.

BA certainly didn’t.

Look at Apple’s continued success based on innovation…the Ipod, and the iPhone. OK some of the ‘apps’ are pretty trivial like the beer glass one, but others like the SatNav one are powerful and have started to really shore up the niche.

Look at Mark Copeman’s idea of challenging the status quo of the training world with The 8.45 Club, a great idea to keep up to date while you’re having that first cup of coffee. (Ed-Thanks Ian) All of these are about challenging the status quo, getting an edge and most importantly asking ‘Why?’, the world’s most powerful question.

Why do we do things that way?

Why can’t it be done this way?

There are big inhibitors to that ‘why’ question in most companies… “because we’ve just spent £x million on a new system to support the process’ or “because that is how we built the business doing it this way”, but the competition or new start up doesn’t have that inhibitor when they’re looking for their edge…so it’s important that you challenge the status quo on a regular basis, if you’re not going to be playing panic catch up on your competition.

Interestingly that got me thinking about the question “what is a strong brand?” I remember being asked this by my marketing tutor and answering that “it was one I went to because I recognised it”. A torrent of sarcasm ensued and he drummed it into me, that a strong brand was one which one someone was prepared to pay more for.I’m sure BA comforted themselves on that mantra when Easyjet sprang up. In my view, they are both strong brands and plenty of folk still use BA… but Easyjet certainly doesn’t fit the definition of my old tutor.

So, maybe a strong brand is about being clear on the price for the deliverable and being consistent with that deliverable. Any way you look at it, it’s a challenge to the status quo.

Ian Mash will be back with more pearls of wisdom in the next couple of weeks and can be contacted on +44 7860 621976 and via email at ian dot mash1 at btinternet.com
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OK – so it’s a day later than planned – the final part of my “5 days with Ed Dale”, founder of the Thirty Day Challenge. If you’ve missed the first three, you can see the intro here, How to do business in 2010 here and 3 golden rules to creating content here.

It was an inspiring few days with Ed and his team which I’ve enjoyed writing about. Today, however, seeing as a few people came to ask me during the event we were recording how I managed to persuade him to work with us, I thought I’d do my final article on how to get noticed… or more specifically, how we got noticed.

I’ve not had a great deal of experience of getting noticed in the B2C space, however I have spent the last 10 years or so working in the business to business environment, and believe me, it’s not an easy thing to do. Attempting to create new relationships with Directors of Marketing or HR in large corporates is difficult to say the least. Inboxes are crowded places, cold calls aren’t exactly the way forward, and snail mail will almost certainly end up lost in some strange basement post room.

So – how did I get Ed’s attention? What are my tips for getting noticed by your Targets?

Know your Targets

You are looking for new customers – you have to know who they are first. Remember, one size doesn’t fit all. You have to niche it down. If you are selling a service with mass appeal, focus on one niche at a time. Figure out 100 targets and then get to know them before approaching them…

Legal stalking

Do some basic searches on your Targets… find out all about them. Use Gist as a great tool to data mine and cross reference. If you can’t find anything on them, get to understand their company instead. People so often ask my why I bother with Twitter. Legal stalking is my answer – follow those of your targets who have a Twitter stream. Get to understand what makes them tick, so that when you finally come to approach them you can be personal and relevant. The key words in this whole article.

Email marketing is dead in the water

Broad brush, blanket, call it what you will, email marketing does not work when you are looking to target new customers. Sure, it’s fine to maintain a relationship (although I’d still question that) however you are never going to get noticed with an html newsletter. How many do you delete on a daily basis?

Get noticed

So – my personal favourite tack is to write a short, punchy email – question every single word within it to see if it is relevant and adds value to the approach. Make sure your target knows that this is not a cut and paste email. Write something personal in it… “I noticed you were interested in chocolate tea pots…” etc. Make it easy to read – and don’t send it straight away. Send it the next day. As the Lynx advert rightly says, you’ve only one chance to make a first impression.

Now comes the clever bit

I’ve been developing and refining a system for the last 8 years and have shown beyond reasonable doubt that the more personal you get, the higher the chance of a response. At the end of your email, refer your target to a URL, and do not make it your company URL – again, that’s not personal enough – if they liked you, they’d look it up anyway. Instead, make the URL personal. ie www.chocolateteapotsdemo.com/richard-fox.

That’s right – a URL with their name in it… put your mind in your Target’s shoes… they open the email, see the link and think  “Huh – they’ve done something for me? wow – I’m intrigued – I’ll take a look.”

Think about it – you’d click the link wouldn’t you?

Get them engaged

So they click the link – and you’re thinking it’s just a redirect to the main website? Wrong. Big mistake, I’ve tried that too. Instead, that link needs to go to a page which is personal to them. A page which carries on the conversation and then tells your story. Typically in a short video format. Here’s an example of one we use… (imagine this at the bottom of your email).

http://the845club.com/five_minute_coffee_break/richard-fox/

The feedback loop

You then need to know if / when they clicked the link so that you can follow up, or if you do it well – so that you can predict when they might respond to you.

How to automate this process

Having used this technique for a while now, I started to get my targets asking whether they could  buy the system.  My first answer was no, but now it’s yes…. Targets to Prospects is now born and in 30 seconds, you can create a personal page and personal link for your target. This is the exact technique I used to get Ed’s attention. This is what he said to me once we’d started to work together…

“I get dozens of approaches on a weekly basis and 99% of them tend to get ignored. I noticed Mark’s email to me, because it was personal. The link with my name in stood out from the rest of the crowd, and the page it landed on hooked me in, due to the excellent video story… As a result, I’m now looking forward to working with him over the coming months.”

He is a busy man to say the least. No one was more shocked than me when I got a response from him in 12 hours. I created cut through, because the communication was personal and relevant.

Tell me more

To see a full demo and details of how to buy a system for your choice of domain, you can check out Targets to Prospects here.

A big thank you

To Ed for a cracking few days and for the quote above. I learnt a load and am looking forward to bringing together his expertise in 8.45 Club style courses over the coming months.

This really amazed us… when we were researching Being Smarter’s next service, Trade show follow up we came across a statistic which is nothing short of astounding.

80% of trade show leads never recieve a post show sales follow up.
- Center for Exhibition Industry research 2009. (ceir.org)

There are literally dozens of trade shows going on in the UK alone every day of the week. Dozens of companies, dozens of employees off the road, dozens of creative agencies designing stands and dozens of millions of pounds invested.

Most companies waste this trade show investment.

Only 20% of companies bother to follow up.

I spoke to a colleague yesterday who told me his previous company used to invest over £0.5m in their presence every year. They collected 2,000 contacts one year. Their trade show follow up strategy clearly wasn’t brilliant because when planning for the next year, he asked how many of those had turned into new business. You can guess the answer, can’t you?  NONE.

Time to do things differently. Get personal. Email marketing isn’t working any more is it? Your contacts from the trade show, which are effectively Targets don’t respond well to be blasted by irrelevant email newsletters… however they will respond (because we’ve been testing this for about 7 years) to a personal URL and personal webpage:

Our system takes about 30 seconds to create each personal url and personal webpage and our beta trialists have been delighted with the results. The good news is, it’s now available for purchase…

Click the link to see the trade show follow up story and to get your system up and running.

I’d firstly like to thank everyone for their interest in the posts from the last two days. 5 days with Ed Dale and 10 ways to not do business in 2010 have been amongst the most popular posts I’ve ever written – so I’m hoping you’ve found them interesting. Let’s get back to it then in day #3 of our series of articles on my experiences and learnings of spending 5 days with Ed Dale, the creator of www.thirtydaychallenge.com.

The three day seminar he gave last week has been inspiring to many (Hashtag here). Today, as someone that creates content online in various guises every day of the week, I wanted to add my take on Ed’s thoughts on creating content online.

#1 Overcoming writer’s block

“It’s all been done before”… Oh no it hasn’t… not with your spin on it… not for your audience – think about a different take. Add your opinion. Leave your own web footprints around the Internet by creating opinion. Create an audience for yourself. Granted, it won’t happen over night – but it will do eventually if you are discipined in your approach. Go find the prominent bloggers out there – Chris Brogan didn’t say that everything’s been done before… he just started writing and created an audience.

“I’ve got nothing to say”. Of course you haven’t, because you aren’t following rule #2.

#2 Be a selective  information sponge

Google Reader without question is the most awesome free business tool you can possibly use. It is your very own personal information database, which pushes the information you need to you… If you don’t know what it is and how powerful it is, then take a look here.

Get into the habit of:

• Using the ‘note in reader’ button on your browser toolbar, collect information as you go. Don’t get distracted by it – store it away for when you need it.
• Use the TAGS function. If you see an article you want to share – note it and tag it as tweet. When you’re short of something to say – head into reader and dig it out again. When you are going to write a blog post, look at the blog post tag for articles you’ve filed away.
• Clean up your RSS feeds on a regular basis. Your information needs change over time – so manage your feeds accordingly.

HEALTH WARNING: be obsessed by relevance. Don’t collect information unnecessarily and don’t get distracted by it. There’s a time and a place for reading – schedule it.

Get into the groove

Ed talked about having a process for creation – whether it be writing or video recording or whatever. This is great advice. I write blog posts at the start of each day – never in the middle or at the end. It’s when it’s quiet. Some people literally put their writing hat on to get into the zone. What could you do to help you focus? Turn the phone off, turn your email off and turn the children off if you have to … that’s the only way it will happen.

Once it’s happened – whatever it is on the page – then take a break, and go back and edit… add the images, add the links, tidy it up and make it fit for purpose. Key to success is – don’t edit as you go.

Day #4 of my experience of working with Ed comes tomorrow…

So, first things first, this is not a sycophantic rant about someone I have admired for afar for a while… this is going to be a 4 part series of articles explaining what I’ve learnt over the last few days from a man who’s been there and got the t-shirt in many ways. I hope you pick up something from the wisdom.

You may not know who Ed Dale is. He’s the architect behind www.thethirtydaychallenge.com which simply put, is a free 30 day online video training guide on ‘how to make your first dollar online.’ It runs every August as live, but is available all year round for the price of your email address. 80,000 people went through the process last August.

It’s the course I stumbled upon about 18 months ago when looking for the next ‘thing’, and being frank, I’ve not looked back since. It may be over the top to call it a life changer, but it’s not far off, as it changes your view on the Internet Marketing world (for the better) and explains in detail the principles behind it and how to do it. Ed’s not the only one in front of the camera. He’s assembled a great team who’ve helped research the principles and then go on to present it.

I’m delighted that Ed has now partnered with us here at The 8.45 Club and so we spent some time together filming, had a very nice lunch and followed that with a three day seminar we recorded and so I got quite an insight into the guy…

Business can be fun

Ed brings humour to most things he does… he records a lot of video (as we did together) and humour is a key element. Not humour for humour’s sake – it’s appropriate and injects personality into everything he does. He passionately believes in making business fun. The  three day seminar was based around the FUNdamentals of business. Think about it.

• If you are doing something repeatedly in your day job which is potentially a chore, for goodness sake, make it so it’s easy and fun. (Have you read FISH! ?)
• If you are not doing, creating or writing around a subject you enjoy, then it is not going to be fun. You’re never going to excel in that space until you change your subject matter or role.
• Have fun and celebrate success with your teams. He’s made that mistake of not doing that before and won’t make it again.

Newton’s 3rd law is an essential rule of business

Newton’s 3rd law for those of you who hated physics at school is simple.

For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

It was a superb piece of advice someone gave me 10 years ago which I value and Ed is a prime example of someone who embodies this law.

• He’s a self-made man who’s taken action throughout his life. He’s created and sold businesses and created quite a following. You don’t do this by prevaricating and sitting on the fence. You don’t create a following (eh Seth?) without taking action, without expressing opinion, without helping people.
• So – taking action is all about making decisions… and making them quickly. Don’t take 3 months to write a technical spec. Sketch it on a side of A4 and review as you go.
• Don’t spend months trying to create a brand and spending thousands on an agency to do it for you… keep working on the content behind the idea and the brand will come. (Sometimes in the shower or on a tube train – true story).
• You will make mistakes, regret actions (or inactions) and there will be disappointments along the way. Dust your selfdown – take a day out and then get on with it again. Even if that decision cost you millions, you can’t get it back – so go find another way to make it back.

You can be a good human being and still ‘make it’

This is an interesting one. So often in business, you come across successful people who have sold their own grandmother at least twice to climb to the top of a greasy pole. You don’t have to – and I’ve seen this a few times now – which is really rather good news for us all don’t you think?

• Don’t try to be someone you’re not. Be YOURSELF.
• Live your values – and stick to your principles. If you don’t believe something is the right way to do things, despite many others doing it to further themselves – then find another way. A way you believe in.
• Go out of your way to help others… give something back. Good karma will come around. Eventually.

Tomorrow – what I’ve learnt from Ed and his team on how to get your web business started.

By the way, you could do a lot worse than following @ed_dale (oh and @ME of course…)

Update (March 2010)

You can see the results of the photo above at www.ed-ucationonline.com

Most people recoil when hearing the words client satisfaction survey, normally with good reason as someone waves a clipboard at them or sends them an impossibly long web form or document. Even worse – they probably only do this once a year?!

Let’s get smarter – it really shouldn’t be like this. Annual surveys are a waste of time (damage is already done) and customers don’t like filling in forms – so let’s make it easy for them.

I used to work for an agency which got it right.

Every two weeks, they’d send an email to their principle clients, each working on projects at that time. On the email was a simple traffic light scheme. They were simply asked to click the relevant button:

Purple - I’d like to award a gold star to my account team.
Action taken – Account team rewarded.

Green - Things are going OK – we love you guys.
Action taken – greens noted and recorded.

Amber - I’m a bit concerned we’re off track.
Action taken – immediate call to client from account director to find out where concerns are.

Red - I’m really unhappy with progress.
Action taken - lights and sirens would go off, cries of “I’ve got a red one” would be heard across the office. Within hours of receipt, the MD would call the client personally to figure out what was wrong and to put a plan in place for resolution.

This was such an excellent way of working – you catch clients before they walk off in a huff and stop paying bills, you reward account teams for great work and you can very simply analyse trends across the business.

Why not try it today?! (oh and please get rid of the giant forms too!)

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• Five ways to spot awful customer service (gadling.com)
• Is the customer always right? (kevin.lexblog.com)

I don’t get a huge amount of time to read, and so when I do read, I like to make it count. One of my favourite business authors is a guy called David Meerman Scott.

It’s a strange name don’t you think? Well actually, no… one of the reasons for David’s success on the speaker circuit and beyond is because he set out from the outset to stand out from the crowd. How many ‘David Scotts’ do you think there are when you search for that name in Google? On the other hand – how many ‘David Meerman Scott’s do you think there are? Clever huh?

David is an expert in all things viral. He’s researched viral campaigns (if you should really call them that) for years and argues a simple point. ANYONE in ANY SIZED BUSINESS in ANY MARKET SEGMENT can create hype and a buzz, hence revenue online. It doesn’t matter what you do… YOU can create you very own World Wide Rave… a phrase he’s coined as well as the title of the book he’s written. He cites dozens of examples of people who’ve done this successfully including a Dentist…!

I listened to a webinar given by David last night (REPLAY HERE) and whilst I’ve read all of his books and knew a lot of the material – it was SO good to be reminded of some of his common sense thinking. There’s three key points below for you to consider below…

Nobody cares about your product.

Think about that for a moment. How much time and energy do we spend pushing our products on our market places. People don’t care about your stuff… they care about their stuff… the problems that they need to solve. Help them to solve them and they will buy from you.

The back button is the third most used web feature.

I’ve no idea how this was researched – however it doesn’t matter – you can just imagine it being true. How easy is it to use the back button when a page doesn’t deliver what you are wanting it to? Think about making your pages and site stickier. Reduce your bounce rate. Make it easy for people to buy your ‘stuff’. And finally…

Figure out your buyer personas.

This is a massive subject and the third book below is dedicated to it… Simply put – write down today a detailed profile of one of your buyer types… where do they hang out, what are their likes and dislikes, who do they interact with. Do the same for all of your other types and then have a serious think about how you market your products and services. Are you hitting them between the eyes?!

David’s books are insightful and pragmatic and will benefit both you and your business. The three I’ve read and recommend are listed below. Click for more details and if you buy one, you should know I will reap the rewards equivalent to a can of Coke…

World Wide Rave

The New Rules of Marketing and PR

Tuned in

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We hope you enjoyed this article. What can we do for you now?

• Would you like to see how to use bite-sized video chunks to deliver messages to your teams or customers?
  
• Would you like to see a demonstration of how to convert sales targets into prospects?
  
• Would you like to follow the founder of Being Smarter on Twitter?

Would you like to read related articles?