Digital Business

When should you be honest?

Looking up virtues on Wikipedia gives you an impression of just how many virtues there are. Honesty is a virtue.  Honesty is slap-bang in the middle of the table, below helpfulness and above honour. To the left of it is consideration. To the right is patience.

And yet, as virtuous as it is, honesty is something which is tricky. Being honest can make you friends and lose you friends equally quickly. Here’s a story about honesty which I hope will show, at least, when not to be honest.

Years ago, a friend was going out with someone who worked in a well known advertising agency. She was in charge of their account with an equally recognisable international brewery. They were launching a new beer which was a bit different in that it was supposed to appeal to different types of male beer drinkers. In fact, the beer was trying to attract people who wanted a good pint of bitter in the winter, which was also appealing to lager drinkers, and those who wanted something to drink with food. Ridiculous, right? It sounded like a Swiss Army knife in what it was trying to achieve. A beer just cannot do that.

The advertisement was on TV and showed a man moving through three different rooms each of which met the atmosphere to match when they were likely to drink the beer. It was a nice advertisement and must have taken hours to pull together.

The advertising executive asked me what I thought of her advertisement. I was honest. I didn’t like it because the beer did not appeal to me. I am not really a lager drinker and I don’t often drink beer with food. Her face dropped.

In retrospect, I should have said it was great because it did not really matter what I thought of the beer. She was going out with my pal (and eventually they married) and it was more important to be friends with them than what I thought about her advertisement. I should have lied.

Another time, I was running my own online delicatessen and selling hampers. They were good hampers and not the standard stuff that is turned out in volume by the big companies. A customer found my site and rang me up to say he loved what he saw on my site and I could I do him sixty hampers. I was honest. I did not have enough stock to be able to fulfill the order at the time. I should have lied. I should have said ‘yes’ and worked out how the hell I was going to get the stock in and out on time.

On other occasions, particularly in business, I have found that being honest saves a huge amount of time and builds relationships that are strong and beneficial. Too often I have been in meetings when I was honest with a client about whether we could help them or not only to be rebuked by a colleague afterwards. Or I was honest about the reality and that we were unlikely to deliver on time because I knew the dire situation with our resources to be able to help them.

In my experience, clients like to know where they stand because people don’t like surprises. People like to know so they can plan for the change in expectations. People respect honesty. But being honest can lose you opportunities too. You just have to use your judgement  whether you need to be honest or charming. You need to consider whether you are honest and pass by some luck or whether you take a risk and grab an opportunity by less than frank.

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Generation M wants to be great at doing stuff that matters

Before you get upset by my heading, I really do mean this as a personal comment. I know several people, including friends, who have been badly affected by the recession in their businesses. I too have had a couple of tough years, most of which came from starting a business at the beginning of 2008 which is still going but for which I am no longer working on.

Bad timing, perhaps, and the recession did not help. The business strategy was ambitious. We were taking a new product to markets we thought we knew well but the clients were cautious and they did not buy as much as we thought despite the benefits available to them. I have learnt a lot in the last two years of my business life and my home life.

One of the main consequences of the business last year is that I have had to look through my personal finances to adjust my lifestyle according to my funds. And it has been a valuable exercise in highlighting how inefficient my household had been in the last ten years with the way we were spending money.

For example, we had borrowed money to extend our current house in a modest way. It improved the house, for sure, but the house has a limit to what people were prepared to pay for it and the growth in the equity has not improved enough to have made it worthwhile. We are selling our house and moving, hopefully, into a new town house which has energy bills half that of our current house. We will drop our mortgage by £100,000 by moving into the new house and it feels good.

Furthermore, it will save us having to drive our children from our current village house to school in town. The children can now walk to school and we save a lot of money on petrol.

Also, I have downsized my car to a car which does 70 miles per gallon (mpg) and 80 mpg if I drive a little more carefully. What was I doing beforehand in a car which only managed 25 mpg? Also, the tax on it is much lower than the previous car.

I admit that I am now becoming a bit obsessive about what I use day to day and I question even the humblest products and their value. For instance, why the heck do I need a razor which has five blades? How close can a razor get before it starts taking your face off anyway? Two blades are fine and the shaving foam I use now is a supermarket brand which is a third of the price of the branded equivalent and just as good. I don’t seem to be the only one either who is changing their ways either. Caroline Eveleigh at Anatec Software and Systems is doing the same with her lighting.

The main point is that we will soon have a great deal more ‘disposable income’ so that our family can invest in the really valuable things in life such as giving our children the best education we can, investing money for the long term, and actually having some fun.

And this is what we are doing in our business, of which I am now a part, too. We question the value of all of our investments very closely. We are investing in the skills of the team. We are investing in building relationships with our new and existing clients. We are making sure we have some fun as business too.

And as the tough conditions continue for businesses and people alike, it seems like their is change in the atmosphere in how people perceive their environment. Umair Haque wrote a very interesting article where he pointed out a change in society in a group which he calls ‘Generation M‘. Generation M is searching for greater meaning in a world which is “full of big, fat, lazy business” but which is seeking “small, responsive, micro-scale commerce“.

I am part of Generation M. I have moved out of big business and into small business where I can make a difference. I am glad that I am downsizing so I am no longer burdened with an oppressive mortgage. I don’t buy products which purport to make me a better human being because the brand tells me so. I am buying products which do a good job and no more. I am getting my life back and getting some meaning into it so that I can enjoy what I do, spend time with my family and friends and just enjoy a simpler life.

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The Generation M Manifesto – Umair Haque – HarvardBusiness.org http://ow.ly/jxfF

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Network marketing companies are strong, profitable and growing

If you run your own business, I expect there have been times when you wondered why on earth you started it. You might even be in a business where you are responsible for bringing in new customers and sales. The pressure is on to perform and you have moments of self doubt. “Can I do this?” “Am I good enough?”

The times that make you wonder why you are putting yourself through this pain often come down to one of two things. Money and people.

With the money, you are worrying about getting sales, whether they are profitable sales, whether you have enough money in the bank to to pay your current bills while you wait for the money to come in from the sales, chasing debtors and then working out whether you have made any money at all at the end of each month.

With people, it can be that you have tough customers who do things like ask you to show them exactly how you do what you do so that they don’t have to use you anymore. Or you have some tricky relationships at work where you feel as though you are not entirely on safe ground because your boss is being particularly distant from you.

The hardest thing that people have to deal when they are running their own business and selling for the first time is the fear of rejection. Getting turned down by the customer who you thought would buy your product or service without doubt is a hard thing to deal with in business when you are not used to it. That’s why cold calling is loathed by most sales people. Rejection after rejection, day in, day out is not only demoralising, it’s boring.

But dealing with rejection from prospective customers is one thing. Dealing with rejection from friends or family is another. When you start your own business, you start it with optimism, enthusiasm and fear. You are giving up that regular salary  and the certainty which that brings. The support that your friends and family give you is vital to making you feel as though you are not entirely on your own.

But when you don’t get that support, it can be very difficult to deal with. Belief in your products or service is what holds you together and the determination to win against all odds is one of the characteristics of an entrepreneur.

Someone I know well has started their own business and that person is one of the most determined people that I know. In five years, they have taken their business from zero to £500,000 in turnover having started it part time. That person is now being joined by their spouse in the business who has given up their highly pressurised but well paid nine to five job.

But their family does not see their business with the same enthusiasm as they do. In fact, they don’t see it as a proper business because it is a network marketing business. And that’s not really a ‘proper business’. Network marketing is regarded with quite a bit of snobbery in this country. People think you are selling them some sort of ‘pyramid-ponzi’ scheme where they will have to buy a load of ridiculous water filters or similar which you can’t sell.

But this is old thinking. For sure, some network marketing schemes in the past have given the model a bad name. But this is not the same. Network marketing is becoming a phenomenally successful and influential route to market for many companies who do it well. If network marketing is bad, why do you see so many brands using social networking to get their name out there to help them sell products?

The plain fact is that the world has become wise to the effectiveness of networking, network marketing and social networking. The days of brands marketing at you are declining rapidly. We no longer accept what marketers tell us about their products. We tell them what we think about their products and not just by refusing to buy them.

Networking is a people-centred activity. People buy from people they trust. People buy from people who sell good products. Network marketing is built upon that principle but people seem to think that just because the product was purchased in this way that it is less than legitimate.

You know what? If that’s the way you think then all I can say is “Get over it”. The best network marketing companies are strong, profitable, growing and they are quietly making the people who work in the businesses a lot of money. In fact, I might just join them.

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Be genuinely interested in what other people do

Networking is an essential activity for anyone in business and it is especially important for people in small businesses to carry out. Small businesses should be very wary of gambling precious resources on buying lists, running advertising campaigns, or carrying out mass mailings.

Networking in its face to face or internet forms is effective, it is easy to measure results and builds strong business for the present and future.As a part of the marketing mix, it has to be near the top of the list for allocation of resources for small businesses.

Nevertheless, it has to be carried out in a professional, targeted and considered way. If you network in an amateur way, you will immediately present your business as one which is less than credible. I network a lot and it is fruitful. I meet a lot of people and some of them become clients and some of them become contacts.

Some events are clear that networking is a definite part of the structure. Some events do not stress that networking is part of the structure but it is implied by the fact that everyone eats and drinks together at the event and if you are not using the time to network then you that’s your bad luck. Some events are well organised for networking. Some are poor.

The more I attend networking events, the more I learn about how to make them work for me and other people. I follow some rules which make the time productive and increase the return that you gain from it. If you are thinking about whether to do more networking as part of your marketing mix, these rules might help you.

Read the rest of this entry →

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Show your boss the evidence and make it real

I realised that I first learned how to sell a few years after I first did it. I was a young British Army Officer and one of my jobs in the Mess was to have all of our dining room chairs restored. The chairs were getting battered by many functions and daily use by thirty blokes and their occasional guests. I took one chair as a sample to a local furniture restorer to be restored and took it back into the Mess to gain the approval of the senior officers before having all of them restored.

But I didn’t just show them the restored chair. Firstly, I showed them a chair which had not been restored and which was probably the worst one of our set. The unrestored chair was rickety and had had much of the varnish chipped off. I showed the group of senior officers how bad things were but how good that they could be by investing in having the chairs restored. Having the chairs restored was a whole lot cheaper than buying a complete new set. Approval was gained.

One of the biggest challenges that some employees or even business directors face is having to convince their boss or fellow directors that they need to invest money into their project. Most people fear the rejection or fail to persuade their boss or bosses on why the investment is an investment and not a gamble.

I met someone recently who is facing this challenge. Their business is a web based news site which focuses on a science and technology. It has grown its unique visitors to the site from 6,500 per month to nearly 15,000 in the last year. It has benefited in the economic downturn, it would seem, as people seek more knowledge and information.

On the outside, it appears that this is a good news story. But, the underlying trends on the site show that people are spending less time on the site. The site is very much a ‘broadcast’ site meaning that it does not have capabilities for viewers to interact with the site by way of leaving comments, sharing articles with friends or colleagues, or even posting other content onto the site such as photographs.

Its competitors are large. One of their competitors has fifty times the number of unique visitors per month to their site. The competitors’ site is more advanced by way of tools which allow visitors to subscribe to the web site through RSS feeds, to read blogs, or to download and listen to podcasts, for example. Not only are their competitors larger, they are competing more effectively for the visitors by providing reasons for them to keep them coming back.

Herein lies the problem with the smaller news site. They have an infrastructure to their site which is bespoke and they are finding it nearly impossible to change. Furthermore, the owners of the web site do not see the problem. They see rising visitor numbers and they have achieved their original aim of setting up a successful web site providing the specialist news. “Why should we change the infrastructure?”

The infrastructure they have is bespoke and there very few people who can develop their system to customise it and add new features. They are stuck with a single supplier who charges them a lot of money to maintain but not develop and expand the capabilities of the site.

The owners are not seeing that their web site will become soon see the number of visitors declining because they receive better services and news elsewhere. The people in charge of marketing and running the site don’t have the support of the owners to make changes because the owners don’t think there is a problem. So, the status quo prevails and when the number of visitors and subscribers decline, they won’t be able to react. This is a classic case of people not worrying about what a rising tide covers up until the tide turns.

How do you deal with this inertia? How do you show that something is wrong when all seems to be rosy when your boss doesn’t believe it? Think back to the chairs earlier. Everyone in the mess was uses to the chairs being a bit battered or wobbly. Nobody was really complaining about them. But, by showing them how good they could be and how much more presentable and professional our Mess would appear, the senior officers approved the investment. They did not care how the chairs were restored as long as they were done professionally.

This is similar to the situation with the contact I met who was struggling with their bosses to see that their web site was not competitive. You have to show them evidence and keep showing them and not just accept the status quo and the inevitable pain they would go through again if they did not change their infrastructure. You need to show them what their competitors are doing. You need to show them what real people want and then how that will help their business survive. It’s tough but evidence and outcomes are very persuasive. You need to be bold, strong and persistent.

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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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Anyone can stand up in front of an audience and present. Presenting well so that people enjoy your presentation and feel moved in some way by it is a skill which takes practice. Many presenters have the attention of their audience for the length of time it takes to say “Hello” and quickly lose them before they even say “I’m…”.

This week I spent two days at a conference in London which had a good selection of people presenting topics covering digital publishing subjects. Overall, the presenters were good mostly, and some were excellent. The presenters that gripped me were not the ones I would have necessarily have thought would have a subject that interested me. No, the presenters that were  gripping, inspiring and interesting were good story tellers.

The poor presenters disconnected themselves with the audience in two ways:

1. They expected us to read their slides.
2. They did not build a relationship with us.

When you watch a film at the cinema, the most text you see in them are the credits. The main film stars, the director and the producers get their names displayed briefly at the start but rarely do you see two names on the screen at the same time. Everyone else gets their names displayed at the end as the audience is walking out. In scenes when a character is, say, reading a note, the director zooms in on the single line of text or they will highlight the important sentence. But the director does not expect you to read the whole letter or newspaper.

So, why then do so many presenters think that we can do the same when trying to follow their presentations? When was the last time you saw a film at the cinema which contained bullet points? I expect you cannot recall one film that used bullet points.

Relationships take time to build. You never start a good relationship by talking to someone you are trying to attract as if you were trying to speed talk. To build a relationship, you speak slowly so that your words are heard. You listen, you watch for body movements and you don’t ask questions which give the person you are opposite no time to think. You ask them questions which are easy to answer.

And yet, so may presenters fail to connect with the people they are trying to attract because they do not make their audiences feel as though they have any empathy with their situation. For instance, Barack Obama’s slogan for his presidential campaign in was “Change We Can Believe In“. It wasn’t “Change I Can Believe In“.

Nevertheless in the conference this week, the zeitgeist on Twitter from the audience in several presentations was along the lines of “This guy is trying to sell to me and I don’t like it“. The audience switched off from listening and moved in protesting. Business life has moved on and people are more sophisticated. You cannot sell to them. They have to buy from you and they only buy from you if pass through a process of building trust to form a good relationship.

As a result, the presenters who didn’t connect with the audience wasted a huge amount money and opportunity at the conference by distancing themselves and failing to entertain us.

Here are my recommendations for excellent presentation skills:

1. Go and watch a film and note how much text you see in it.
2. Judge the script and the acting and ask yourself how you would improve it.
3. Buy the book ‘Beyond Bullet Points‘ by Cliff Atkinson and practice what he preaches.
4. Read this blog – Presentation Zen
5. Spend some time studying relationships.
6. Practice in front of a mirror until you find yourself entertaining.

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Within twelve hours of being on Londonderry, I was in one of the British Military bases in the city with my platoon. It was early 1991 and I had flown out to take over from a fellow officer who was needed for preparations the Army was making to commence the first Gulf War. I had been through training for an earlier tour to South Armagh but this tour was on the streets and not in the fields.

We sprinted through the gates of the base onto the streets and within a minute a bomb went off some 500 metres away. Our drills kicked in and we made our way towards the area to cordon it off. It turned out that it was a small bomb but we still had to do the drills and provide a safety zone to keep people out so the bomb disposal team could come in and make the location safe and clear any other potential bombs.

The next stage is the part of the ninety-nine percent of boredom that all troops experienced in Northern Ireland when you are out on the streets for twelve hours or more while the bomb disposal team do their jobs. Trying to keep alert is tough, so you move your teams around in the area to keep them sharp. You make sure that they are supplied with hot food and tea to keep them happy. And all the time you are there, you are not somewhere else. And that’s what the terrorists know.

The next thing we saw, some eight hours after the bomb, were the phosphorescent tracers of rounds streaming through the air towards one of the watchtowers in another base in the city. The IRA were using an M60 machine gun and they had been very clever. They sucked us into setting up a cordon around the bomb while they set up their real target.

And that’s why they say respect your enemy because they are not stupid. This is why you are trained not to set patterns in the Army so that you minimise the chance of walking into their traps. And this is a lesson for anyone in business too.

Last week I was with two people who run their own business making weights for balloons. Their manufacturing business is an industry where there is little marketing carried out by their competitors. Most web sites are dull and most of their business is carried out through orders sent by fax and there are no distinct brands. 

But the business owners I met want to grow their business and they wanted to start doing it by developing their brand and using the Internet to reach new customers and sell more to their existing customers. Their competitors are setting patterns and doing business in the way that they have always done business. My clients have recognised that they need to use their competitors complacency to their advantage and out-market them. 

So, respect your enemy or your competitors. Get to know the patterns they are setting and disrupt them. And be prepared to set off on a path of continuous change and innovation to stay ahead and keep them on their toes.

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The Mob Rules

In 1991, I found myself in a lonely part of the Central African Republic, cycling towards the capital, Bangui, with my brother, Dan. We had been cycling for over six months since leaving the UK. The route we were on took us along dusty roads and tracks, through rain forest and into the odd town. The particular town we were in was fairly typical of most small towns in the region, being made of buildings built from wattle, daub and wriggly tin on the roof. The difference with this town was that we met a guy who was working for the American ‘Peace Corps.’

He was welcoming and invited us to stay for a night or two. Over dinner that night, he talked about what he was doing there for the Peace Corps. His role was to help the local people generate cash from fish farming. He was showing them how to build fish ponds, nurture and tend the fish to the point where they could sell them to earn a decent living from it. He was very frank and said that it was a hopeless task.

Fish farming was not as easy it seemed. Digging fish ponds, filling them, feeding the fish and making sure they are healthywas not for the faint hearted. In reality, he said, the local people could earn money far more easily by planting a banana seed in the rich soil, and then walk away only to come back a few weeks later to harvest the bananas without having broken out in a sweat. 

He believed that his task was one which the Peace Corps believed was beneficial to the local people because of the greater amount of money they could earn through fish farming. But they had misunderstood that there were far easier ways to earn a living for the people and that earning money from harvesting bananas was good enough. The locals were not interested in the good intentions of the Peace Corps.

Years later, I was working as a commercial manager in a large training company. One particular sales team was struggling to meet its sales targets because their clients were asking for the courses to be customised to their requirements. A director of the business, in a frustrated yet revealing moment in a meeting, raised their voice saying “Why can’t they just sell what we have to their customers?” It was a classic moment of a company selling what they wanted to their customers rather than enabling their customers to buy what they needed. 

Both of these instances show how organisations and individuals became out of touch with their ‘audience’ and which used old ways of thinking about providing what they thought their audience needed. And this way of thinking for a business in the world we are in now will leave them obsolete very quickly if they do not adapt. 

Marketers in large corporations have until now launched a new product with a large ‘push’, spending huge sums of money telling their customers that they should buy their new product. This was the status quo. And it was risky, so the marketers spent a lot of time and money researching their customers seeking reassurance that their customers would buy the new product. They employed lots of consultants and experts to reassure them that this was the right thing to do. This all took months, even years, before the new product was launched. 

And then came along the internet and the customers started to say what they thought about the new product and the good marketers listened. The marketers started to provide tools so that instead of hiring a few highly paid experts to tell them if their product would sell, their customers had ideas about what they would like and other customers started to vote for the best idea. 

The marketer suddenly became the best listener in the world and put down their megaphone and old ways and realised that the mob now ruled and that employing ten thousand for free was infinitely more effective and quicker than paying a small number of experts to see if customers liked what they assumed they would like. 

Long live the mob.

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