It's Snow Excuse Not to be Selling

Is it deep and crisp and even where you are?

Snow has covered much of the UK overnight and more is forecast. Of course this causes major disruption to all our normal activities but it does provide big sales and marketing opportunities (not least, of course, if you’re stocking shovels). If it hasn’t affected you where you are it may well be that it’s affected some of your customers.

Many people who are usually in a busy office may be at home today and will have only their inbox and their mobile to keep them company (apart from perhaps overly-excitable, off-school children). No colleagues by the water machine or office politics issues to take their attention. Even in full offices today, normal business won’t happen in quite the same way. Customers will be away, deliveries and meetings won’t take place, and there will be a very different atmosphere.

So take advantage. What can you do to keep in touch with your customers today? What can you do to help them? Could today be the day when you just call the people you need to keep in touch with but never seem to get round to doing? Could you review your marketing plan or your sales pipeline? Could you send a relevant, personal email to people? Could you write that direct mail letter you’ve not got round to? Could you do a sales plan that helps you with your major objections? These are the days when you can gain a real advantage over lazier competitors.

The other big advantage you have is that people remember the conversations they had and the things they did on days like this. So if your customers have snow – even if you don’t – they are far more likely to remember whatever you do today.

Take advantage.

Then go tobogganing in your lunch hour.

Sometimes You Get More than You Bargained For

I recently worked with a plumbing company – a very straight forward husband & wife team. (Marketing to many plumbers is an ad in the Yellow Pages and a name on the side of their van, so they had approached me with some trepidation). We worked on a localised mail campaign which addressed the real concerns of people looking for plumbers and I advised them to spend a little time and boot leather delivering the letters around their local area.

Yesterday was wet. Very wet. Yet undeterred, and armed with a couple of hundred envelopes, Mrs Smith (not a changed name, she really is Mrs Smith!) posted letters on four roads in the pouring rain before deciding that enough was enough and going home. When she got back she was astonished. She had four calls from customers waiting for her and through her letterbox she found a handwritten note which read:


'Many thanks for your circular. As a retired commercial director I must congratulate you on your efficient presentation of this excellent letter. I have put your sticker on the inside of my kitchen units and will most definitely be using you when the need arises.'


What do we learn here? That;

1, Getting marketing done professionally pays
2, The fundamental principles of profitable marketing are universal and recognisable
3, Adding something that engages the ‘might use you in the future’ group is a sure-fire winner
4, Don’t put things off because it’s raining (use that as a metaphor for recession if you will too)
5, Hand written notes have the power to touch people even more than four new customers

They Don't Believe You

When people don’t believe they don’t act. You don’t get many Sikhs going to church on a Sunday morning, and you won’t find many environmentalists queuing up to buy a 4x4. Strangely though a Sikh may be welcomed into a church very warmly and many 4x4s are actually quite green with good mpg/CO2 figures, clean engines, and long life cycles. But it won’t happen if people don’t believe.

When people do believe they’ll act in utterly incredible and even unjustifiable ways. They’ll camp outside your shop of a cold night waiting for it to open, they’ll fly to the States to buy the latest Apple i-whatever so they can have it three months early, they’ll rave about you. In extreme they’ll do frightening things that are totally justifiable only in their own minds – like deliberately blowing themselves up and killing innocent women and children in the process. Belief is sometimes frighteningly powerful.

People make their decisions around what they believe and what they don’t. What they believe about you, your claims and your industry. The time share business suffers here. Time share holiday homes – what a great idea – but we all believe we’re going to get ripped off so we avoid them. If their claims get bolder – however true they might actually be – we only believe them less.

If people aren’t buying from you in the numbers you’d like it’s probably because at some level they don’t believe you. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s just you haven’t convinced them otherwise yet. It’s (probably) not that they think you’re lying either. You just haven’t got them to really ‘get it’ yet.

When they do believe, they’ll buy. And they’ll rave about you. That’s what people do.

So if your product really is that good, it really is twice as powerful as your competitors’, how are you going to communicate that credibly? Because unless they’re believing it, you’re wasting your time and probably your marketing spend with it. It’s more than likely something really simple that’s blocking your path. Be honest with yourself and identify it.


Happy selling.

The Big Marketing Budget Mistake

Imagine your bank did this deal for you. For every £1 you give them, they give you £1.10. They then give you thirty days to pay your bit, too.

Now here’s the question. How much are you going to budget to spend with them?

Of course you’d be mad not to spend as much as you possibly could with them and to continually reinvest what you take out. Why would you put a budget on it?!

This is the madness of marketing budgets. If your marketing works – ie: it’s giving you a measured positive result – why would you do anything other than spend as much as possible on it? High growth companies of all sizes tend to get this and they become obsessed with working out customer lifetime values, how much they are happy to spend to acquire each new customer and then continually spending in the areas where they can be sure to get a positive return that they can measure.

Much of my work centres on getting business owners and directors to stop dreaming up and wasting budgets, and to start learning to find and actively maximise these calculated money makers. (When you consider I guarantee my fee for this work you realise how sure I am of the difference there is for you here). Good marketing is like your bank giving you £1.10 for every £1, not about sticking to budgets.

How to Increase Retail Sales in 2009

The widely predicted January retail bloodbath has begun as early and viciously as the sales did a few weeks before Christmas. The outcome of this will change not only the business landscape but also the landscapes of many towns. Yet retailers have let it happen to themselves in so many cases by sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring simple sales and marketing practices.

Retailers are blaming the economic situation. Mmm. And they’re blaming online e-tailers. What?!

The facts are that ‘physical’ retailers have seen the internet & economic trends coming and done either little or nothing about them in most cases. They have failed to understand why people visit shops and why people buy online, and what the relative advantages of both are. The simple fact that many online retailers have seen themselves as fighting the internet for the last decade rather than embracing it is just beyond belief.

Most retailers believe that the online e-tailers have them beaten because of price. Wrong. Or convenience. Wrong again. The main reason that e-tailers are forging ahead is because of information. It’s the way that e-tailers are able to get the details of prospects and customers and use that information intelligently that is key. An online e-tailer can continually remind its customers and prospects exactly why they should do business with them; whether that’s because of price (or the perception of better pricing), convenience or any other USP.

The sad thing is, physical retailers could have been doing this for years but it never occurred to them. It never occurred to them to get their customers’ details let alone to continually keep in touch with them or offer them relevant new products. It never crossed their minds to continually tell them about a home delivery service because they never bothered to dream one up. They never thought about telling everybody who bought Widget LX that Widget GLX had just been launched, or about the wonderful in-shop service, the advantages of professional fitting, or of their…. you get the point.

If you’re in retail and have no system of gathering and effectively using customer details – however manually – then get very excited. Implementing some basic practices here could have an utterly amazing effect on your business at a time when many in the sector don’t know what to do apart from slash prices still further.

Three Wise Moves

Three things it’s great to do over the Christmas period:


On Your Marks. The working days over the Christmas period give you a great opportunity to ensure that your plan for the coming year is either complete (if you’re running to the calendar year), or on track (if you’re not). This applies equally to your fiscal, marketing and personal plans.

Get Set. Spend some time on housekeeping. Get your office space cleared, empty your inbox and feel really clear-headed for the coming year.

Go… and enjoy spending some time with your friends and family. It’s Christmas! Go and do something different and allow your mind to focus on something else for a few days. Go on!!


Thank you to you all for reading, for your comments, your referrals, and for your business during 2008. I look forward to helping you take control of 2009.

Wishing you a very Merry and Peaceful Christmas,

Jon

Beating the Paradox Conundrum

There are so many confusing paradoxes in the world of business.


Woolworths’ problems stemmed from the fact that it didn’t have any particular focus, yet there are many companies that are failing because they didn’t diversify enough.

Many businesses enjoy success because they take risks – Porsche’s Cayenne off-roader for example. Many cause themselves problems because they do – take Toshiba’s now-defunct HD DVD format. Or who could forget the calamitous Sinclair C5?

Some ventures fail because the board or the owners give up too early. Others because they didn’t give up on something early enough.

Some will say your primary focus should be to maximise the value of each client above all else. Some say you should have as many clients as possible to spread risk.

If you do lots of marketing people will think you’re desperate. If you don’t do lots of marketing you’ll fail.


Whether you succeed because you do one thing or succeed because you do another is down to the perceptiveness of the people in charge to consider a situation – maybe a situation that hasn’t even presented itself yet – make a decision on it and then take conclusive action. Even if that decision is then to do nothing about a particular situation. The problem is that if you do nothing because you’ve considered nothing then you’ll be a very mediocre business, and one thing that’s absolutely black and white in business is that mediocrity always fails in the end.

It’s simple to explain how to make decisions that will more often than not bring you out on the right side of the paradox: you drop all your own pre-conceived notions about how right you are about something, learn to always be researching and taking calculated risks, map out your end game with every venture, continually communicate your core values, and ensure you can deliver.

Easy to explain, not always so easy to do. Which is why perceptive decision makers are a rare and often very wealthy breed. Why not decide to be one?