Digital Business

Barack Obama knows how to reach out to people

One of my colleagues pointed out to me that I am one step away from being connected to Barack Obama on LinkedIn, the online business networking service. I had no idea that I was so close to greatness through the web.

I’m sure Barack has got better things to do than get connected with me, but, if any of you recall, just how effective the new President was at using social media to reach out to voters then this illustrates just how close he can get to people.

I use LinkedIn every day so that I can understand people better before I contact them. If you’re not using it then you should try it. You may not want to contact the President, but you might well find the person you are looking on there.

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Download now or listen on posterous

Will speaking on BBC Radio – 10-08-09.mp3 (12397 KB)

Posted via email from Digi-business.co.uk

Here is the latest recording with the BBC where William Wright (@mrwilliam) and I talk about security issues, paid for content, cloud computing and how large businesses are using services like LinkedIn to recruit people for specific jobs.

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Using LinkedIn for Lead Generation Stephen Jones – QAlias http://ow.ly/jfgc

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People like lists. So use them.

When God gave Moses the Ten Commandments written on those stone tablets, he started something which has captured people’s imagination ever since . He started a fascination for lists.

Perhaps one in every ten tweets that I see on Twitter has a link to a list of some description. It might be a list for the top ten Twitter tools, or a list for the top things to do when looking for the best way to find new customers. It might be top tips for learning to how to be a better manager.

Why do people like them? Some of it is due to their easy access. People can read them quickly to learn new things and then decide whether they want to read more detail. Lists are easy to remember. They can be amusing. They can be serious. You only have to look on popular web sites like Amazon to see lists in action. Bestseller lists, music charts, video charts. There are numerous web sites that are dedicated top ten lists of just about any subject, item or product you can imagine. The list goes on.

A list is often passed around to friends and contacts too. People like sending lists to people with whom they share an interest. People feel happy to send them to their contacts because they are quick to read and easy to pass around.

For anyone who has their own blog or web site, then lists are a surefire method to attract new visitors to your site. You can use lists to show your expertise in your field. They are a good way to provide fresh material to your web site and to build mailing lists.

Lists can be incorporated into documents which visitors download from your web site in return for their email address. When you use this method, you can identify their interests to help you send them relevant news and information if you have a newsletter.

Promoting a list is important to get right. If you have no marketing money to promote the list, then make use of tools like Twitter, LinkedIn Groups and Facebook. Share the link to the list with your friends and contacts through email too. Let as many people as you can know about the list. If it’s a good list, they will pass the link to your list around.

I recently put together a list which was in a document and which could be downloaded from my blog in return for their email address. It was on a particular subject, namely ‘QR codes and 2-D codes’. I promoted it through specialist groups on LinkedIn as well as through Twitter and Facebook. As a result, traffic increased five-fold on the first day of the promotion on my blog and it continues to be a popular link.

So, if you want a simple and effective way to build your mailing list nd vistors to your web site, start thinking up a list on your area of expertise, place it on your web site and promote it. It’s an effective and cheap way to bring visitors to your web site or blog who share your interests and value your expertise.

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Big business connects with candidates through social media

Some time ago, I wrote an entry about traditional recruitment companies facing the challenge of showing their value to employers when it is now so easy to use the internet to find potential employees through services like ‘Monster’ or LinkedIn. It was an entry which created more people to comment on my blog than had done for some time.

I read an article today on ‘computerweekly.com‘ which highlighted an example of how large companies like Microsoft and KPMG have recruited technical staff through LinkedIn and Second Life and saved themselves tens of thousands of pounds in the process.

Furthermore, companies like Accenture are using Facebook to attract potential employees to their business through the use of games. For a fraction of the cost of placing advertisements in newspapers, major organisations are now able to connect with candidates and present themselves in a less formal manner than more traditional methods.

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Getting leads does not have to be costly

All businesses need sales. It’s probably the most important activity to keep a business alive. With profitable sales, cash flow is the next most important aspect to get right. Most large businesses (e.g. Microsoft and HP) I have worked in have the luxury of being able to test marketing initiatives and they have vast armies of sales and marketing people to develop, test and refine them, along with the budget to do it.

In a small business, you don’t have such luxuries unless you happen to be swimming in cash. Most people start their own business with plenty of determination, some cash to keep themselves afloat, a great idea and the experience to be able to help other people with it, and, perhaps, a list of contacts who they can approach who might want to buy their product or service. Resources for sales and marketing are limited so every penny has to count towards getting sales.

Learning how to sell can often be the hardest part of starting your own business. The fear of rejection. The fear of failure. These are all common anxieties that occur when you are about to either pick up the phone to speak to a prospect, run your first show stand or talk to people at an event who you don’t already know. But you can break these fears and anxieties down by following simple steps in your business planning and not be tempted into sales and marketing activities that don’t fit into your plans.

When it comes to marketing, I hear plenty of worrying stories about business owners who have been recommended to get a web site for their business to bring in sales which, in the end, brings in no leads and, of course, no sales but takes vital cash out of their business. Also, people are often tempted to buy lists of names who are supposed to be qualified prospects in their target market at great expense but which can often be found for free on the internet using business networking sites like LinkedIn.

Often this comes down to a lack of experience in sales and marketing, which is understandable when these are not your main skills. But, when you start your business, you have to become good at sales and marketing to survive and get yourself into a position to grow your business and make profits.

When you have limited or near-zero marketing funds, then you need to be laser targeted in how you use them to bring you fruitful leads which convert into sales. You need to be clear about the objectives for your marketing. You need to be clear about your sales objectives too. Once you have determined your sales and marketing objectives, then you can begin to work on your sales and marketing strategies.

Sales objectives might sound like this: “To cover my costs each month and to pay myself a living wage, I need to bring in £5,000 of sales per month”. And it might follow on like this: “In order to bring in £5,000 of sales per month, I need to sell two of my widgets per month”.

Sales strategies might sound like this: “To sell two widgets per month, I need to send ten quotes out per month”. Sales tactics might sound like this: “To send out ten quotes per month, I need to make fifty contacts with new prospects or customers per month“.

Marketing objectives might sound like this: “I want to become the first choice when clients need an HR consultant in my local town within two years”.

Marketing strategies might sound like this: “I want to meet one new prospect a week who is in my target market”. A marketing tactic for this strategy might be “To meet one new prospect per week I am going to join my local business networking group”.

Only when you have planned your sales & marketing objectives and strategies, can you start to decide on the right tactics to achieve them. This is where many people starting up their own business start. They start with sales tactics and marketing tactics without fully understanding how they support their strategies and objectives.

For instance, you might say I want to build a web site to sell to new customers. But do your customers buy your type of product or service through the web? This is where your precious resources can be wasted in an instant.

So, before you spend anything, ask yourself how sure am I that I will get any business from this? If, for instance, you are buying a list, check on the web to see if your potential clients can be found for free. Before you build your web site, make sure it supports your strategies.

In my experience in owning and running small businesses, you should keep everything simple, focus on what you do best and learn how to sell. You need two types of lead generating tactics to get you sales. Tactics which can offer you quick access to prospects (e.g. your existing contact list or contact details from tools like LinkedIn), and tactics which can offer you an opportunity to build long term networks of leads (e.g. networking at events or business clubs).

These two are the cheapest and most secure ways to get leads and sales into your business and they are based upon relationships. You need to convince people that you are trustworthy. With short term tactics, it is good to have a nice logo and a well designed web site. They instill confidence in prospects that you are serious.

But, you should not spend more than you can afford until you have enough money to develop them into more sophisticated tools. Keep it simple. Use the great tools which are out there on the web to help you connect to customers which are free and adapt them cheaply. Keep the cash in your business for as long as you can.

You don’t need to spend lots of money on marketing at first. You need to spend lots of time finding prospects and working with existing clients. Always ask yourself how sure you about the return you will get from your sales and marketing investment and whether it supports your plans. Trust your instincts and be firm about how you invest your resources.

If you keep these principles in mind, you can generate good business without spending lots of money.

If you would like to contact me for further consultancy on how you can get leads to your business at low cost, then please email me: will@digitalbusinessblog.co.uk

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Cold calling can be surprisingly productive

People hate cold calling for good reason. It’s hard work and does not make you feel good about yourself. The cliché used by sales managers is that every cold call which fails gets you closer to a sale. It is true but it’s an agonising process to go through. Common scenarios are that you have to make 60 to 100 calls per day and you could get through to between 10 and 20 prospects of which one or two of them might end up buying your product or service. There are hundreds of ‘business opportunities’ which promise that you never have to do any selling and no cold calling which play on people’s fear of doing it.

Generally, people don’t like receiving cold calls either, particularly in the UK. The receiver picks up the phone, is met with a small barrage of information, gets asked a couple of ‘qualifying questions and then gets interrogated by the salesperson. The salesperson might then expect to close on something, whether that’s a meeting, a sale or sending further information. All in all, cold calling is an experience which leaves both sides feeling distinctly frosty after the moment has passed.

For both parties, it’s a strain. The salesperson is nervous about getting through to help them meet their call quota for the day, and they are often so surprised that the prospect does actually sound interested in what they are selling that they gush out a whole load of verbal nonsense that the prospect can be quite easily put off. The prospect is likely to have received several cold calls that day or that week already and may sound fed up with yet another intrusion into their working life, unless they have, of course, put in a blocker to having direct access in the form of an assistant or another gatekeeper.

But, the stark reality is that cold calling is still an effective way to find new customers if it is carried out with intelligence. Every other form of marketing to attract a prospect’s attention can be ignored, switched off, thrown in the bin, unsubscribed from, sent to the spam or junk mail folder and added to the ‘Telephone Preference Service’ list.

Cold calling is painful when carried out blindly. You can make it much more productive by applying some simple principles.

Firstly, remember that you are trying to build a relationship. If you went up to a stranger in a street and asked them out for a date without any preamble, the likelihood is that they would either laugh at you, walk away in a hurry, seeing you coming and try to avoid you, call the police or, perhaps, assault you! People who accept your offer are running the risk of going out with this stranger who could be a nut case.

Our natural instinct is to be suspicious of strangers which is why cold calling is thought of as being hard work. You have to ask a lot of people on a date in the scenario above before you meet someone that you genuinely like and who genuinely likes you.

To make your time productive, you need to have carried out basic marketing principles to make good matches. You need to assess the type of person who will buy your product or service. You need to work out what type of job they have and their responsibilities. You need to understand what type of difficulties or challenges they are likely to have in their working lives, which could be any number of things but could be something to do with finding efficencies, selling more or reaching more people. You need to understand the environment they are in and the forces which they have control and which they don’t have any control over.

How do you find out this type of information? You need to read their trade publications, you need to look at their ‘LinkedIn’ profiles on the web and see which ‘Groups’ they belong to. You need to look at their employment history and their achievements, find common ground amongst what you read, look at their Twitter feed to see what they are chatting about and who they chat with.

Once you have carried this background research, you are in a much better position to be able to talk with them in such a way that they feel as though you have bothered to find out about them. People like that. They feel respected when you have taken some time to get to know about them.

You also have to remember that the prospect that you are cold calling has all the information and the answers. You should not expect them to listen to something which you have or do without taking the time to understand their circumstances in detail.

Despite all of the background work that you do, you still might get rejected. But, in my experience, if you treat prospects well at this stage, it is far more likely that they will be happy to speak to you at another time when their circumstances have changed and you might be in a position to help them.

The main point to remember is that cold calling is effective as long as you improve our chances by ‘doing your homework’ and making the time you spend contacting them as productive for your prospects as it is for you. Don’t kid yourself that cold calling is a thing of the past. If you don’t do it, your competitors will.

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Use Advanced Search to find candidates

It must be very hard to be a recruitment consultant or headhunter these days unless you are adding a lot of value to your clients. It’s so much easier to find a selection of candidates for a role, and then filter through them to a build a shortlist before inviting them for an interview. For a few hundred pounds per month, as an employer, you can access a site like ‘Monster‘ and search through a vast database of candidates.

You can also use services like ‘LinkedIn‘ to find prospective candidates to where business people will list their career history, skills and experience.

In certain sectors of the economy there is bound to be a larger supply of candidates then there are positions open. Many of my oldest friends are in this industry and make a good living from it. But with the vast majority of recruitment consultants are not very good at illustrating how they add value to their clients.

Every day our office receives calls from recruitment consultants trying to help us fill the roles we have open and which are advertised on our web site. I admire their enterprise for calling and trying to place their candidates with us. But their calls meet with our policy on not using headhunters to recruit new people.

Our experience with headhunters has been disappointing. When we have accepted the terms of a headhunter who then sends us candidates for our project manager or developer roles, their candidates were no better than the individuals we found through the online services like ‘Monster’ or through networking.  The difference is that you pay a large percentage of the successful candidate’s first year salary to a headhunter and you can save yourself some time trawling through the online services.

But the fact is that many headhunters send us the same candidates that we have found ourselves through the online services. Furthermore, we can find potential candidates through LinkedIn for free, bar the time spent contacting them.

So, the difference between paying 25% to 30% of the first year’s salary of a successful candidates salary through a headhunter and what you pay to trawl through ‘Monster’ yourself is so wide that you would expect a recruitment consultant to add something more valuable than if you did the leg work yourself. You would expect them to have vetted them to check their suitability, skills and experience for the role. This is simply not the case in our experience.

Digital technology and social media tools are shedding light on the mediocre and poor headhunters who add no value to the challenging task of hiring good people into a business. In the current economic climate, recruitment companies are going to have to work hard to show their value to clients. They used to take the leg work out of finding candidates by going down to the Jobcentre for you or placing ads in newspapers for juicy sounding jobs to attract prospective candidates.

You can do most of this yourself by simply learning to use the advanced search functions in the online job sites now. Top recruitment companies now have to do more for the large fees if they want to survive rather than using hope and ‘mud-throwing’ as a strategies to get a candidate to ‘stick.’ You would, at least, expect them to have a rigorous selection process themselves. The good ones will do this. Most of them don’t.

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One of the most challenging aspects of anyone in sales is finding new prospects and then getting to meet them.

There is a whole industry built around getting sales, closing deals, sales techniques, using the right language, what not to wear and how to win. Most of them don’t tell you how to find them because that is what marketers do, so all of the sales skills in the world are no good unless you can get in find and meet the right people.

There are some good books, of course, and everyone in a business should read at least one sales training book or attend one sales training course in their careers. Knowing how to sell is a life skill.

However, how do you find the new prospects you would like to speak to in the first place?

Of course, you launch a marketing campaign which is put together by a marketing team who generate leads for you. Or you could hire a telemarketing firm to find your prospects for you and book appointments for you.

But, that takes time and money which, if you are a small business, you may not have.

So, to cut to the chase, if you are getting bored of the ‘hype’ around ‘social networking’ and how it is changing the world but you have not participated in any social networking, then WAKE UP!

It’s not all a fatuous exchange of photos taken at student parties (much as though I used to enjoy them). It is an extremely efficient method for finding who you need to speak to for free.

Drop the telemarketing company, and don’t buy a list of names of which you have no way to check its accuracy. Sign up to LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and make sure you have your paper address typed into Outlook.

Your basics do not change in identifying the type of people in the roles within the type of organisations you need to target. It is just the ease with which you can find them using tools like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

I have recently carried this exercise out for finding new prospects for a business I am part of and I have made appointments within the target clients I am looking for within three days of starting my campaign.

Previously, to find new prospects would have been a laborious and expensive task and some companies still expect their people to plough through directories from A to Z.

Those days are gone. Get signed up and get prospecting using social networking tools. It is not the waste of time that some employers think it is. It’s saving you time and enabling you to get sales quicker. 

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I have recently joined a great small business which develops digital solutions for its clients and produces very high quality work. I have been hired to develop new business so that they can continue to grow their profits and expand their capabilities.

The small sales team is very good and highly committed. In the past, to generate new leads and appointments they hired the services of a telemarketing company. They pay them £400 per appointment made as long as it is qualified to their requirements.

Fair enough, you may think, for them to pay the telemarketing company that sort of money for making them appointments according to their brief. But, if they make five appointments for them a week the bill soon mounts up (£2,000 a week if your maths is a bit tired!).

I have been encouraging them to use LinkedIn and it was easy to see that using this tool will be far more effective for the sales team to find new clients than paying a telemarketing company.

Using LinkedIn, I found a prospect in the group of one of their existing key clients. We asked their current contact if he knew the person in question and he replied in the positive. We now have an appointment with contact found on LinkedIn and it cost us nothing bar a couple of phone calls and an email, saving us £400.

So, my question is simple. Will LinkedIn, and other tools such as Twitter, kill telemarketing companies when it is far easier and cheaper to find key prospects using these tools?

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