I have seen the future…

December 11th, 2008 Chris

I’ve been itching to update our web page. Trying to make it more interactive, more engaging. Generally to help people get to the information they need faster and take the next step in engaging…

I’m a big proponent of seeking inspiration from industry leaders (surely not blatant copying…). The other day I came across one of the most brilliant ways of helping your prospects find what they need and get engaged with you on a personal level…

It was done by a guy named Ford Saeks who is one of the leading internet marketing guys for small business and entrepreneurs. His home page treatment is brilliant: http://www.profitrichresults.com.

Every one’s using flash but I thought the marriage of video, engaging graphics and a clear call to action was unique.

You want a good test: go to Ford’s home page, then go to your home page. When I did it I was blown away by how unintuitive it was without the video and clear “do this now” direction.

We must copy his approach. In fact, I pledge to have something done like this within three months. Feel free to keep me honest!

C.

Posted in Web Site | No Comments »

Back from the Grave…and Ready to Party!

December 3rd, 2008 Chris

I know it’s been a couple of weeks. My life is slowly getting back to normalcy. At least my special version of it. I re-read my last blog posting and it was depressing. Now that I can see light at the end of the tunnel, all is better…

I did learn a good lesson: focus. I know that everyone is different and there are uber-entrepreneurs who can manage multiple businesses at once. I am not one of them and when there are only two of you in charge – it’s really hard to take your eye off the ball without it blowing up. I’m actually surprised that Colleen didn’t fire me.

But I’m back now and we’re planning for January – typically a good month for us to update our product and services. With the general economic climate – it really is time to make sure that you’re compelling and competitive (without giving up on your revenue targets):

1. Re-confirm your value proposition. If you are selling with the same messages that you were using a year ago – you could be in big trouble. A year ago, helping customers to sell more, to go faster, to build team spirit, etc… was fine. Now – it’s a train-wreck. It takes a different value to get those increasingly scarce dollars to be liberated from the buyer’s iron grip. Today, messages around cost savings, increased efficiencies, reducing headcount (gasp) is what resonates with business buyers. They are trying to control costs – just like you are – and you need to align with what they care about.
2. Focus on the ascension model by buyer. Here’s a great exercise: sit back and think about your ideal customers – who are they, what do they want, how do they buy. Think to your products and services – what is the first logical thing to offer a customer for purchase (perhaps a particular $ value or product type). What would you do next to step up the value (a product of greater value? a different product/service type). Think about that ascension model of what makes sense for the ideal buyer to purchase in the different phases as they engage with you. Map that back to your sales and marketing programs so you can focus your efforts and move prospects through their lifecycle in a way that maximizes results by delivering the right value to your customers at the right time.
3. Focus on products and services that are the key revenue drivers. Over the last few years, Colleen (due to her prolific nature) has assembled quite a collection of coaching programs, study kits, CDs, web classes, events, etc…  Some of these are key for revenue and profit, some have a negligible impact. Given my love of spreadsheets, we know which are really key to meeting objectives versus those that are nice to have. Given you’ve got a limited number of opportunities to engage a prospect and turn them into a customer, focus on the stuff that makes money! And with the other stuff – instead of actively marketing and selling it, why not include it as a bonus or add-on to incent the sale of those key products/services you need to make your numbers.
4. Deliver more value with current programs & services. Note that I’m not saying drop prices – I’m saying figure out how to provide customers with more value. For example, we’re going to be announcing additional member benefits to Colleen’s coaching programs. These will be benefits that will make our programs even more attractive without increasing our costs. As I’ve written before (here and here), we’ve done a lot to establish a cost structure that has minimal variable components.

These are four quick processes that are designed to make sure you focus in on what is going to make you successful in 2009 – despite what is happening in the economy. Why not sit down in a pub or favourite restaurant with your business partner (or friend who will listen to you as long as you buy the beer) and run through each of these. It’s a couple of hours that can make the difference between blowing away your targets next year and just blowing.

C.

P. S. The title of this blog is from one of my favourite movies from the 80s, “Return of the Living Dead“.

Posted in General, Marketing | 1 Comment »

Fool Me Once, Unleash Hell

October 15th, 2008 Chris

First, my apologies for missing my deadline yesterday. It was our federal election here in Canada and I was busy trying to hide my civil liberties in case the conservative government won a majority and tried to take them. That didn’t happen so I feel free to express myself, once again, freely.

And timing is good, ’cause I’m grumpy.

As many of you know, we hold an event each Spring in Ottawa where sales professionals and business owners all meet to discuss, well, sales stuff. And, as many of you know, we have been going through the process of finding a hotel for the ever increasing numbers that come to the event. And we’ve had our problems.

I’m happy to report that we’ve now secured our hotel location and are good to go for 2009. Contract is signed.

So now I get to unload. To quote Melville from Moby Dick: “. . . from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee“. OK – how many of you geeks thought it was a “Star Trek – Wrath of Khan” original line. OK – how many of you think I’m a geek ’cause I know the Star Trek reference. Mais je disgress…

OK, so maybe that Melville ditti is a bit over the top. But I am super grumpy about the way we were treated by the local hotel industry. Right now, they have a lot of power because supply is tight. Our local convention center is closed for a year for renovations so everyone is scrambling to find space.

In the process, most of the hotels are screwing over companies trying to do business in the city. There are demands for outrageous food and beverage commitments. There are completely unresponsive sales people who promise to help you find space and then never return your phone calls. For example, a local hotel, the Brookstreet, slow rolled me for four weeks negotiating their contract. Then, at the last minute, they wanted an additional $20K. And then when I balked, they told me there was no space anyways.

In the end, the hotel where we had the event last year squeezed us in. But they also squeezed us out of way more money than last year.

I sincerely hope that the hotels in town enjoy their year of prosperity. Cause, I bet there are a lot of organizations who are going to go out of their way to not give them business in the future.

We are now considering moving our event out of Ottawa – purely to punish those that treated us so poorly. And Colleen is currently the President of the Canadian Association of Professional Speakers (CAPS). Hello hotels – they hold a huge event every year and do you think that our experience won’t impact their decision about where to go?

I know everyone has to make a buck but when you’re so disrespectful to your customers, don’t be suprised when Nemesis drops by. She’s the goddess of retribution (shown here looking like a G-rated airbrush painting off a 70′s van) and unless you’re good, she’s coming to town. And it’s going to cost you.

C.

Posted in Events | 1 Comment »

Prospects Don’t Swing on the First Pitch

September 30th, 2008 Chris

Oops – I missed a post. Apologies – last week was crazy. We were in the end of a campaign for a specific product and in the middle of everything our phones blew up, our Internet service went down and we had on-going problems with our marketing/sales/CRM system.

And, of course, several days later… everything is still broken. But as they say… the show must go on.

This coming weekend is my university reunion. Which year? you ask dear reader. I’m afraid that vanity prevents me from telling although it’s a depressingly round number. I’m actually not going as I’ve got other things going on and, of course, I left it to the last minute so there is no place to stay in Kingston.

I have to admit that there are many folks that I’ve not seen for many, many years that I’d love to catch up with. Both in the spirit of friendship as well as a morbid curiously to see whose fatter and balder.

There is one gentleman – err… man – I remember very well as being a complete Casanova. It’s not that he was particularly handsome or charming – it’s that he had incredible perseverance. If we were out and there was a girl that he was interested in, he would try and try again to get her number. While sometimes, there would be a threat of a restraining order, just as often he would be successful after multiple approachs. And that was in sharp contrast to those of us who would get shot down and quickly moved on, finishing the evening with no numbers…

I couldn’t help but think of that story in the context of our sales push last week. We had a offering with a relatively high level of investment (~$1K). It was a great deal and we had a three-step sales campaign – that is, three outbound emails to our prospect base.

The response rate for the first email: 0%. I was very sad.

The response rate for the second email: 0%. I was suicidal.

So with trepidation, we sent out the third and final email while I scanned the help-wanted ads. Low and behold – the orders began immediately to come in and were steady for the rest of the day.

So, what happened?

I attribute the last-minute success of the campaign to two important features of our efforts:

1. Multiple Touches

We’ve found that you have to hit people multiple times with an offer. Why? In some cases it’s just that people are busy and won’t necessarily be reading everything you send them.

Also, we have to remember that people buy when they are ready – not when you want. By hitting them several times, you’re more likely build up awareness and interest until finally, when you hit them again, they are ready to take the plunge.

I know someone selling a $5K product who has found it takes, on average, 9 touches before someone purchases.

2. A Deadline

Our offer also had a cut-off day: a final date and time for a prospect to take advantage of this great offer. Our last email blast that generated all the orders went out on that last day of this offer.

Again, people are often busy (and occasionally lazy) and put things off. So, they delay purchase decisions until they are forced to make a decision. If you can remind them of that deadline as it comes up – essentially forcing them to make a final purchase decision – the orders will come. Otherwise, it’s just to easy to put it off until after the offer is no longer available.

So, when you’re designing your marketing and sales campaign – make sure you have multiple steps to hit prospects several times. And make sure your offer has a deadline – even if it’s artificial, it’s necessary to motivate prospects to become customers.

C.

Posted in E-mail, Marketing | No Comments »

A Cozy, Small Pond

September 19th, 2008 Chris

Pardon my tardiness with this post. I am teaching twice a week at night and it is killing me. After over a year of de-compressing from corporate life, I had gotten into a very relaxing routine that seldom required working at 10pm at night, as well as seldom wearing pants, shaving and other personal hygiene necessities whose details, dear reader, I will spare you.

I had a great question in class this week that I thought I would share with you as I think it’s a critical issue for the micro business. Basically, a student asked if it’s better in business to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond.

In other words, it is better to focus on a smaller, more narrow market, or a larger more general market. On the surface, it would seem that a larger pond is more attractive: more customers, more potential sales, etc…

But – especially as a micro business – that means more competitors who may be much larger than you. And as a consequence those larger competitors will be able to invest more in a product or service that has wider appeal to that target customer. And likewise, they will be able to spend more on promotion and be more able to handle aggressive pricing, etc…

The reality of the situation for you is that you may not have the resources to compete in a large, broad, general market. But don’t fret – a small pond still can be extremely lucrative.

The idea here is that if you identify a small market – something that the big fish don’t focus on, you can tune your offering to that small market. And then you can rule the pool (OK, pond – but it didn’t rhyme).

Here is an examples to make it more clear…

Let’s say I’m a small company developing a software product that helps people manage their budgets. Well, that’s a big market with lots of competitors (Intuit, Microsoft, etc…) – competitors with much more money for development, advertising, sales people, etc…

But, if I focus my product on a smaller, more narrow market – say College and University students – then I can focus on the features that those prospects care about (ex. managing tuition, student loans, etc…). And I can promote it through channels they care about – in student mags, on facebook, etc… The large competitors can’t be bothered to focus there – it’s just not lucrative enough for them.

So if you’re a student – wouldn’t you want a product that was tailored to your needs? As the business making that software, this gives you an edge and you have a shot of being the big fish in that small pond.

Oh, kind reader, but you say that this limits your growth. Well, yes it does. But it doesn’t stop you from venturing out into multiple small markets, one at a time. The “bowling pin” strategy (from the classic book Crossing the Chasm) involves winning one small market, then taking on another small market, etc… Success in the first narrow market funds your foray into the second.

Now, often people clang with this, assuming it means that any customer not from your target market is essentially a leper and must be avoided at all costs. Of course this is not the case – embrace anyone’s wallet but reserve much of your investments only for your target.

Another issue is that typically, a micro business hasn’t started with this focus and it’s simply not practical to shift the whole business at once. Do you really abondon a general marketing approach that’s bringing in revenue and start from scratch targeting a new one? Short answer, nope. You transition.

Our business started as a generic sales training business and we continue to serve customers across a variety of target markets. A couple of years ago, we identified an opportunity in a particular narrow market (specific to one industry) and extended our efforts to target it. So, for example, we have a bi-weekly newsletter that goes out to our base and we also recently launched a version of it specialized for this narrow target market.

This “extension” plan takes longer as resources are spread thinner, but it’s really the only practical thing you can do where you start with a more generic base.

Having trouble identifying a target smaller market on which to focus. Try this exercise: print out a list of your customers from last year and try to spot something common trends: is there a large number from a particular industry, company size, age demographic, geographical region, income level, etc… These are the first clues to where you’ve already got an edge… And if it’s already not full of competitors also focusing on those targets – it may be the right small pond for you.

C.

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Hold the Gin. Pass the Spreadsheet.

September 2nd, 2008 Chris

I spent a bit of time over the long weekend prepping for my first class tonight. I am teaching this term at the University of Ottawa’s MBA program – specifically on Strategic Marketing.

I always get a bit frustrated when talking to people about marketing as most assume it’s pretty much the same as advertising. The image many have is a bunch of people in a conference room engaging in random right-brain exercises. It almost sounds like a party. In fact, back in my former job, we actually used icons of stick men with martinis (shown here for your enjoyment) as a representation of marketing.

The reality, of course, is much different. Marketing is a discipline and the objective of my first class this week is to ensure that the myth is put to rest.

One of the simplest ways of doing that is to ask: What is the most important tool a marketeer must master?

My answer is the spreadsheet. Especially in a micro business, you cannot effectively market if you can’t master Excel. You simply can’t manage what you can’t measure.

And what is one of the most important things you need to manage: your Return on Investment (ROI). In other words, your job is to maximize the revenue you get from your marketing investment.

A real life example from our business is Google AdWords. We use AdWords to advertise on a bunch of sales-related key words. What we do is we advertise a free ten day eCourse with ten of Colleen’s best sales tips. Then we offer folks that take the eCourse, a membership in Colleen’s monthly sales coaching program (where we start making money).

So we need to determine our investment:

     = Click throughs  x  click through cost

And we need to determine our return, first with the number of customers we get:

     = Number that click through  x  % who sign up for the eCourse  x  % who purchase the coaching program

And multiply that by how much revenue each customer is worth. In our case:

     = Average number of months a customer stays in the coaching program  x  per month charge.

That is a fair bit of math, but it’s critical to determining if the investment in AdWords is worth the return.

First of all, it’s critical to ensure you’re getting more revenue back than you are investing. I took us literally months to determine the best strategy for our use of AdWords. For example, originally, we tried to get people to purchase the coaching program right from the ads but the conversion rate was too low – we were losing money. We then moved to the multi-stage conversion with the eCourse and voila – we made money.

There is definitely a right-brain part to marketing and that makes this measurement stuff even more critical. In our example, prospects will respond differently to different Adword ad wordings. So we have a couple of ad variations and we measure to see who each one performs. So now we’re doing the math above twice.

And we have different landing pages from the Ad with different text for the eCourse sign-up. So now that’s 2 x 2 = 4 different sets of numbers.

In other words, we continually test and refine our marketing to discover what works best, implement it, and do another test. You can only figure this out by running the numbers.

This applies to all your marketing. Every marketing effort needs to be likewise tracked. Every article and ad we use has a unique tracking code so that we can determine how many people click and if they ever buy something. Otherwise, we’d literally be guessing if we were making or losing money (aka gambling).

Are you measuring your marketing? If not, then you’re not managing it. Write down a list of all your marketing investments in descending level of investment. Start at the top, fire up Excel and start measuring. I bet you’ll be surprised at the results.

C.

Posted in Financial, Marketing | No Comments »

A Most Unpleasant Stay

August 19th, 2008 Chris

I’m very glad we’re on vacation this week. Although vacation is always a bit relative with us. Like most with a micro business, there never really is 100% down time as you’re in critical path for so many activities. But that does mean that I get to drink a beer in the afternoon while being mildly productive.

One of the reasons why I’m glad is I was completely frustrated last week just as we were winding up before leaving to drive to P.E.I. As I’ve mentioned before, I am always loathe to outsource activities that we can do ourselves. With the exception of where we clearly don’t have the skills. Things like accounting, large volume printing, etc…

Well, I found another one. I’d like to think that I’m not a completely useless as contract negotiation. I’ve been fortunate to work on deals big and small in the high tech community. Folks in these negotiations run the range from reasonable to out-right snakes. But at least I could always figure out a way to make a deal happen.

Then I went up against the hotel industry. And I was ill prepared.

As I hope you know (and our encouraged to attend), we hold an annual event in Ottawa. It’s been growing every year so we now need to plan quite a few months in advance. So off I went down the list of of hotels that we were targeting.

One by one I called and one by one, my attempts to do business with them were thrarted. Not because we didn’t agree on terms. Because I was told no dates were available, my event wasn’t big enough or they simply couldn’t be bothered to return my phone calls. It was like they didn’t want to do business with me at all.

Finally, I started to deal with one hotel who suggested a date and told me that our budget would fit. Awesome.

Then came the delays: I’d turn around contract comments in one day, they’d take one week. We’d agree on something verbally, then it wouldn’t appear in the contract. The final straw came when after one month of back and forth, the hotel announced that in that month they had had a lot of bookings and to secure my dates, my price had gone up, by 75%. All happening the day before our vacation.

In other words, after slow-rolling me for a month, they jacked up the price because of the delay from their slow-rolling. I walked away.

So, I now realize that I do not have the time, patience or Machiavellian acumen to deal with the hotel industry. I contacted a great event management company Colleen had met and asked them to make the problem go away.

Some things I did learn:

• Room count is king. When booking an event far out, the hotel will be looking for a large room commit.
• Without a big room count, they’ll be looking for a very big food and beverage commit.
• Booking something just a couple of months out can be done, but it’s relying on the hotel not having moved all their meeting space and looking to fill it.

And, consider an event planner when looking at conducting a good size meeting – even if just for contract negotiations. As they say, never bring a knife to a gun fight.

C.

Posted in Marketing, Operations | 1 Comment »

Boy, Did I Look Goofy…

July 29th, 2008 Chris

I have to admit, I am a bit of a techno-file (aka geek). I’m easily attracted by new, shiny electronics. I even bought my first PC in grade ten. That may not seem that early but not only was it my first PC, it was essentially the first PC.

OK, probably not the very first PC but the first popular one. In fact, to call it a PC is not fair and some may even suggest sacrilegious. It was an Apple II+ and in the early 80s, it was very cool.

Fast forward several years (I would appreciate you not doing the math) and, while having dinner with a friend from New York, I first saw the iPhone. No two ways about it, it was cool. And on July 11th, when they first came to Canada, I had to have one.

Luckily, a friend of mine at my former employer had a line on an unlikely place for a stache of iPhones that morning – the corporate head office of a local reseller. So, I crawled out of bed at 6am and headed out to their office where, along with my friend, we perched in our lawn chairs in line for the phone.

While lots of people lined up at other retail stores that morning, there was perhaps no more pathetic sight than that of two guys, sitting in lawn chairs for hours, all by themselves. Yep, it was such a good plan that no one else came. We sat there by ourselves as every employee coming to the office walked by, shaking their heads. We looked goofy.

Of course, after we got our iPhones, all was good. It is indeed everything that people say. After years on a Blackberry, it was very cool to see our company’s emails coming in with all their full HTML formatting, looking good…

That was now. Three months ago, those emails would have looked goofy. Month after month, we’d been pumping out emails that looked great in Outlook 2003. Then a friend of mine in the email marketing business warned me about Outlook 2007. Turns out that Microsoft’s implementation in 2007 depricated a bunch of different HTML functionality. The result is when I looked at our emails in Outlook 2007, the formatting blew up – it looked goofy. And our emails never looked quite right in GMail. And I don’t even want to think what they would have looked like on my iPhone.

What did we do?

The first thing we did was to remove all <style> commands and moved to in-line CSS. In addition, we converted everything to tables. This is the kind of stuff your web developer should be able to do.

A really cool tool we used was provided by Campaign Monitor. Their testing site allows you to pit your email against virtually every web, thick and mobile email client. For the micro business, this is a god-send. You literally get something that looks like the screen shot below… Do up your template and test it – it only costs $10 a shot.

So – if you haven’t done testing on what your emails look like, how do you know you don’t look goofy?

C.

Posted in E-mail, Email | 1 Comment »