Small Business Digital CoachGROW REVENUES BY 25 TO 100% OR MORE IN 90 DAYS OR LESS while reducing advertising cost and effort

“Are we in a recession”?

His response was enlightening.

“Who is We?”

From about 2003 to 2006 many real estate investors (me included) saw that despite the so-called “good times” in real estate, a record number of people were losing their homes to foreclosure…EVERY YEAR!

Charles Dickens put it best when he wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”. There is always someone having the time of their lives, and there’s always someone in the world going through the worst of the human experience.

That’s why what you need most as a business owner during a recession is PERSPECTIVE.

For any given situation, there is a positive. Allowing yourself (or your business) to be submerged under a deluge of negative economic news could be disastrous for your business. Instead, you can choose to give thought to the blessings you already have.

One of the most powerful advantages that recessions confer on business owners who keep their heads about them, is the ability to prosper through partnerships. Below are 6 quick and easy ways to prosper through partnerships.

1. Recruit talent to work with you.

During a tight job market, you have a far better opportunity to create superior value for your customers and clients by bundling and packaging the services of highly talented specialists. Over the last few months, I’ve been able to build service delivery relationships with world-class marketing and design minds who may not have been available to me a few years ago. They were either unaffordable, unavailable or otherwise unreachable (out of my league).

2. Enter strategic referral relationships with your clients.

This particular strategy makes sense whether there’s a recession or not. However, you’ll find that people are more willing to consider referring you business when they can put a little cash in their pockets and do their contacts a favor.

An easy way to arrange this is to approach your clients and have them promote a discounted offer of your services to their own clients and contacts. This can be done easily through a direct method like a letter of endorsement highlighting your services, or indirectly through their promotion and sponsorship of a workshop you teach.

For those of you in highly regulated industries, skillful use of the “endorsed workshop” technique can work wonders.

3. Cross promotions, Co-endorsements, JV Ad swaps

Another variant of the strategic referral partnership is an arrangement in which you and the other party (a client, vendor or complementary business) agree to promote each other to your respective customers. Cross promotions, co-endorsements, or in the online marketing world, JV ad swaps are all various ways of saying the same thing.

What you have to be careful about here is that you need to put the interests of your clients community first when choosing your partners. You do not want destroy in one day what took you a thousand to build because you didn’t check out your partners product, service or reputation first.

3. Employ Online Affiliate marketing.

One of the highest leverage ways to expand your market reach, increase your income and build long-term leverage for your business system is by attaching an information publishing profit center to your current business. A cornerstone strategy for most successful information publishers is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing marketplaces like Clickbank have over 100,000 registered affiliate marketers looking for products to represent to their email lists and their online audiences.

4. Partnerships with Trade Groups, Chambers, Associations.

Another simple strategy is to partner with non profits, trade groups, and associations to deliver free content to their clients. Whether through live workshops, or through virtual events like webinars and tele-seminars, you can add a ton of prospects to your marketing in a very short time using this method. It is also a great way to raise funds for your favorite charity. Recently I used this method to raise almost a thousand dollars for my church, only putting in a few hours of work.

5. Marketing partnerships.

You can also recruit other businesses (even competitors sometimes) to pool funds and resources for advertising, outreach or publicity purposes. One of the most common applications of this technique is with the “coupon mailers” that you receive in your mailbox. Each of those businesses can get together, contribute a particular amount that covers design, printing, mailing list and postage costs.

This principle can be applied to other marketing channels as well. Exhibits or trade shows. Publicity events. Online marketing, etc.

6. Full-scale business joint ventures and strategic alliances

This goes beyond just marketing partnerships and into delivering of goods and services. Whether it involves creating bundled offerings that combine complementary strengths of 2 businesses, or re-engineering both businesses to create a co-dependent ecosystem, joint ventures can be very powerful tools for business growth during times of macro-economic uncertainty.

If you grab a pen and a note pad and sit down to think about potential partnerships, you’ll undoubtedly come up with many other ways to partner your way to prosperity during this recession.

I’ve got Bad News and Really Bad News!

Which would you like to hear first?

Okay, let’s start with the Bad News.

The Bad News is that people hate companies. That’s why they hate the government.

They hate faceless, soulless organizations that seem to have the power to find you wherever you hide.

If you go to your mailbox, they find you there. If you run to the sanctuary of your home, they deputize telemarketers to hunt you down and annoy you. Even cell phones are no longer immune.

These powerful, faceless, soulless, organizations…

Sometimes they send your aunt’s confidential mail… TO YOUR HOUSE!!

“How did they know she was my aunt? She’s been happily married for decades. Complete with a different last name. What ungodly database connected her to me?”

That’s what people are thinking when you send them your mailers, when you call them, when you reach out to them with your alleged “marketing” efforts.

So to recap, the bad news is that people hate companies.

The Really Bad News is that if you’re like most companies (and chances are good that you are), then people hate you as well!

So how can we get people to stop hating you and get around to liking you so that you can contribute to their lives, sell them some stuff, and make a bunch of money?

Today I’ll share 3 rules for businesses who want to people to like them.

1. Speak “human” and not corporate.
2. Advertise humans and acknowledge human needs.
3. Act human when they come to you.

1. Speak human and not corporate.

In a perfect world, business marketing would be “communication of the humans, by the humans, for the humans”. Unfortunately, much of it is not.

A long time ago, business owners learned the shocking truth from their CPAs that the I.R.S. considers their businesses “an entity”.

In the bedlam that ensued, many businesses stopped acting like people and started acting like an “entity” – a painfully boring hybrid between a “person” and a doorknob.

Be different. Speak human.

Last thanksgiving, I received an email from Southwest Airlines. At the top of the email, it had the following caption, “Only Turkeys Charge For Bags”!

Why don’t other companies talk like that?

Every direct marketing expert worth his salt will tell you that when you approach the humans in a market, you should “join the conversation in their head”.

This means you should think about their biggest pet peeves as it relates to your product, service, company and industry. But don’t just end there.

You should then somehow acknowledge this pet peeve, and then side with them in the fight.

You see, human customers are tyrannical like that. They hate companies who refuse to take their side. As a matter of fact they punish them. Oh, and they keep long grudges. For instance, I have a longstanding grudge with a really big telecom company that I pay monthly. I’m just waiting for the day someone else can convince me that their mobile network is “just as good” and…BAM!!! … I’ll be gone.

2. Use Humans In Advertising, and Advertise Human Benefits

I really miss Frank Perdue. This guy had been selling chicken in TV commercials for 20 years before I first saw one of his ads in 1991.

My mother (who has a penchant for ridiculously candid observations) once remarked that, “he looks like his chickens”.

From this NY Times article, it turns out some people believe his ads were successful for that very reason.

In any case, because people like people (even though they hate companies), they bought billions of dollars worth of chickens from a man who was obsessed with the opinions of his human customers about his chickens.

And just because I think that every business owner could learn a thing or two about “Human communication” from Frank Perdue, I’ve taken the liberty to share this mini-gallery of “Frank Perdue Ads. (Warning: May not be suitable viewing if you are religiously or philosophically opposed to the eating of meat or meat products)

A more recent example of excellent use of humans in marketing is the recent “Bags Fly Free Ad campaign” from Southwest (again).

Why don’t other companies make stars of their ground crews like Southwest Airlines did with their “Bags Fly Free” Campaign? I mean these tough guys demonstrated their love for OUR BAGS in no uncertain terms in that series of marketing ads.

Yes, they were “tongue-in-cheek” but they were driving home some actual benefit-oriented points of differentiation between Southwest airlines and other airlines.

One of the most common mistakes companies make when they use humans in their advertising is “human advertising for advertising sake”… Humans in your ads cannot just be about personality or emotion marketing – there must be a customer benefit-based logic to your advertisements.

3. Act Human When They Finally Come To You

Okay so you’ve spent thousands of dollars in your advertising (millions if you’re particularly unlucky).

And you’ve finally gotten the humans to get over their aversion and to visit your location, or call you about your services.

Here’s where so many businesses drop the ball…again.

They forget to act human.

Actually, forget “acting human”…sometimes businesses are just downright inhumane.

Here’s a brief Mini-guide on the proper care and feeding of human customers:

1. As a business owner or manager, it is within your power to make sure that employee performance reviews include customer service metrics for all human-facing employees.

2. Expecting a uniform standard of customer care from your employees without a uniformly standardized and continuous training program is unrealistic.

Don’t assume your employees will automatically act human just because you assume they’re human (Didn’t you watch “Men In Black”?)

3. Humans like it when you earnestly ask their opinion of the service you allegedly provided them. They also expect that you will make a reasonable attempt to please them if they’re not completely satisfied. My suggestion is that you leverage every point of “expressed dissatisfaction’’ by going well beyond what they expect from you in resolving their complaints.

4. Right from the when they are babies, humans expect to be the center of attention. When in doubt, even though they hate companies, they will flock to those companies that show them attention and listen continuously to their needs. Yeah, humans… they’re complicated like that.

“The goal of marketing is to obtain competitive advantage” –
In my opinion? No good!

Another source says,

“The goal of marketing is to drive sales” –
In my opinion? Better, but not there yet!

In my opinion the ultimate goal of marketing as a business function is to turn the process of turning a profit from an art to a science, from guesswork to system, from happenstance to algorithmic certainty.

Seen this way, competitive advantage is a by-product of good marketing and not it’s goal, driving sales is only part of the goal.

A business is merely a system that turns a set of inputs into desired outputs (profit). Marketing can help even out the variance in the performance of this business system by bringing predictability to revenue flows (systemized lead generation, continuity membership programs, etc) and predictability to prospect conversions.

Integrated marketing systems, automated marketing systems and internet marketing systems are all examples of how predictable marketing messages and behavior (delivered by systems), and predictable performance (such as those of robotic websites, autoresponders, etc) can create predictability of revenues and profits.

If marketing in your business has not been streamlined and integrated in such a manner that it can be referred to as a system, you should do so today… your business will be better for it, and so will your bank account.

This method of selling is particularly popular in the financial services, professional services and software/technology environments. However if you apply the concept broadly, you might see that physicians and many, many other specialties, often engage in consultative selling.

It’s an approach that’s especially useful when:

• You hate to sell, but must sell (if you want to eat, or if you want your children to eat).
• There are long sales cycles in your industry (6 to 24 months from initial contact to sale).
• You sell big-ticket, high-dollar products or services (which might result in long sales cycles or not).
• You sell to corporate buyers (who may have to defend their purchase decision to the top-tier).

Here are a few tips on applying the power of consultative selling to your business:

1. Research the top “core” and “perceived” problems of your target customer

Your customer’s main problems must be at the foundation of your marketing communications with them. Nothing else is as important as getting this philosophical approach right. The core problems are the “deeper than obvious” issues that may be affecting your customer’s industry or marketplace as a whole. They may be issues that your customer is to busy with “day-to-day” to solve.

The perceived problems on the other hand, are the problems that the customer sees clearly and is worried about or annoyed by.

2. Create a Free or Low-cost “diagnostic tool” for your prospects
This could be a “Treasure” or “Trash” Audit, a discovery questionnaire, a discovery interview, a troubleshooter tool, decision matrix.
These tools are designed to sensitize the client to the issues that you will make more explicit further down the line. Are they wasting money? Are they stumbling around prime opportunities? Your audit or discovery tool will transition them from a pre-cognitive PWP (“problem? what problem?”) state, into greater awareness of the “perceived” challenges, and into potentially transforming awareness of the “core” problem.

3. Give before you receive
One of the best ideas to come out of marketing in the last 150 years is the idea of “sampling”. Giving a client a taste of what they will get. The consultative selling approach is embodies this idea in the service industry. However, even in product-centric industries, a sales professional who communicates superior knowledge of the customer’s circumstances and challenges will confer some of that superiority to the product he or she represents. A free consulting session is one of the most common applications of “Give before you receive”.

4. Become a Patron of The Prospects and Clients In Your Marketplace
We get our English word “patron” from the Latin word, “Patronus” meaning “patron saint”.
The Merriam-webster online dictionary defines “patron” as,

“a person chosen, named, or honored, as a special guardian, protector, or supporter…”

Your prospects and customers will see through any attempts to apply “consultative selling” techniques without adopting the mindset and approach of a consultant – a patron. This means digging into their conditions, their industry, their decision matrix.

Far too many professionals and entrepreneurs pay lip service to consultative selling by reducing it to its less comprehensive cousin “question-based selling”. They are not synonymous.

Question-based selling is transactional; focused on “a step” in the process of selling. I see true “consultative selling” as philosophical, and based on the “patron” concept.

No, not statements from me, statements from a man who sold his company for $1 billion dollars, spitting in the eye of the worst U.S. recession since the great depression!

Does that get your attention? I thought it might!

Before I send you to this amazing piece of business insight, I’ll say this:

If you like some of my subscribers struggle with the distinction of “strategy” vs. “tactics”, well the article you’ll read gives me a great metaphor.

Strategy is like decision of which table to eat at, and “tactics” might be your choice of meal.
(I apologize for breaking the poker table metaphor, you’ll understand when you read Tony Hsieh’s article linked below):

34 Bullet Point Marketing Strategy and Business Lessons -Tony Hsieh

Enjoy!!

4. Not framing communications with Lifetime client value in mind
The concept of lifetime client value comes from the world of relationship marketing and is often a difficult one for owners of small-small business to accept and operate by. It depends on the the ability to retain customers through strategic relationship marketing, and as such, comes with a price tag (on the front end) which many small businesses feel they can’t afford to pay.

If you are struggling with making marketing decisions based on customer lifetime value, then this step is not for you. However, note that you are also passing up the ability to gain clients through the cheapest and most effective ways of gaining new clients there is… referrals from current clients.

Referred clients are far more likely to refer others, more likely to spend more, stay with you longer and cost less to manage than others. If you want to pass that up, that’s up to you!

For you who knows the value of knowing the lifetime value of your customers, it is imperative that you begin to set expectations of a long relationship right from the beginning and repeatedly throughout your communications.

Dan Kennedy is one of the best I’ve ever seen at continually communicating the expectation of a long-term or lifetime relationship. Every subscriber to his newsletter is repeatedly given positive examples of other clients who have gone on to buy more, do more and make more money because they have moving up the relationship ladder with Dan Kennedy.

You must define the relationship ladder which you hope to escort your clients up, and then begin to infiltrate your communications with positive examples that convey those expectations.

5. Not communicating through multiple channels and media
Once upon a time, small businesses had an excuse for ignoring the various channels that existed to reach potential clients and current customers…those days are over. The same leaps in media and communications technologies that have greatly increased consumer choice have also increased marketing noise.

You no longer have the choice to ignore the many low cost or free ways you should be communicating with your marketplace. An accurate assessment of your average client value will also give you a framework to determine appropriate marketing, sales and advertising spend so that as much as possible, you “do it all” when it comes to marketing.

This is the way to wipe the floor with your competition.

6. Not restating your uniqueness at every communication with clients.
It’s a common mistake for small business decision makers to give up on an effective marketing message/campaign long before the marketplace grows tired of it.

“Never let your customers forget about what makes your business special and how many ways they benefit from continuing to be customers of yours”.

People do not care about you. They do not think about you… and if you give them a chance, they’ll forget how happy they have been with you and for how long. My advice to you is to make sure that you don’t give them that chance to forget.

Avoiding these common marketing communications strategy mistakes by adopting a few simple practices can save you a lot of advertising grief while helping you build an absolutely memorable and profitable small business.

Here are some basic steps to avoiding these mistakes:

1. Develop a USP and review your USP at least once every 2 years (6 months to a year if you’re in a rapidly evolving niche).
2. Commit to analyzing your average customer value and expected customer lifetime value.
3. Commit to creating a high-contact relationship marketing system with clients, prospects and referral centers.
4. Commit to creative restatement of these 3 elements in your marketing communications:

• Your USP
• Expectations of lifetime engagement through positive examples
• Repeated reminders of what you have done for them and why being a client is special

1. Not tracking the effectiveness of your unique selling proposition (or not defining a USP at all).
2. Not creating a client engagement curriculum
3. Not following up at crucial impression points
4. Not communicating for lifetime value
5. Not communicating through multiple channels and media
6. Not restating your uniqueness at every communication with your clients/prospects.

In the paragraphs below, I’m going to tunnel down with a few points on each mistake and what action steps you can take to minimize their occurence in your strategic marketing system.

1. Not tracking USP effectiveness over time
I’ll first assume that you’ve made an effort to define and articulate a unique selling proposition or differentiating proposition in your business. If not, you need to read my article on “An effective USP”.
If you do have a USP based on the 3 considerations of your business strengths, the market’s desires and a competitive vacuum, then you need to keep an eye on your marketplace over time to verify that the customers haven’t moved on from that attribute, or that your competitors haven’t caught up to make your USP completely ineffective as a differentiator.

Nordstrom’s built much of its business on uniquely excellent customer service, and it worked…but in recent years many of its high-end competitors have stepped up to deliver the same level of customer service as Nordstrom’s, therefore weakening their value proposition.

I remember once watching an episode of a restaurant makeover TV show where the proprietors were struggling to stay open. Of all the problems they had that had to do with food, decor, design, staff service, etc, the most important problem (the core constraint) turned out to be a strategic marketing problem:

12 years later and there was so much competition in that niche, in that neighborhood, that they could hardly believe it as the Makeover chef spread out the map for them to see. All this happened while they weren’t looking. They were to busy running their restaurant to notice that their USP had been taken out from right under them by their competition.

2. Not creating an engagement curriculum
Articulating a USP does not just involve creating a USP slogan or positioning statement. It involves the additional steps of cataloging the series of facts about your business that support the assertion made by your positioning statement, and the articulation and packaging of these supporting facts into such channels as your sales scripts, voice mails, certificates of authenticity, 20 point promise statements, etc.

The features of your products or services, the facts about your business, the ideas behind your processes or approach and the package names given to your products or services, all these things make up the foundation of a communications curriculum and plan which you can deploy through continuously through such things as newsletters, postcards, seminars, tele-seminars, print ads, etc.

3. Not following up at crucial periods
There are certain moments in your prospect conversion process or in your relationship with your clients that deserve special attention if you are to imprint them definitively with a lasting and favorable impression of your business. Some of these moments include:

• After they respond to a lead generation piece or overture
• Immediately after the first sales presentation (as well as subsequent ones)
• Immediately after first purchase (as well as subsequent ones)
• Immediately after mistakes are made by you (especially after mistakes are made)
• Immediately after payment has been made by customers (this may depend on your business)

These are special periods when you can differentiate your business from your competitors and build a Dan Kennedy-style “fence around your herd”. Too many businesses miss out on the opportunity to create an emotional connection in these highly memorable “hot spot” scenarios. Help your clients remember a unique customer experience that you provided them.

In this article, I’ll be sharing a simple but powerful framework for making difficult business choices such as:

• What kind of business do I want to be in?
• What market niche or what type of customers should I focus on?
• How can I know when to quit my market segment or even quit my business?
• …And much, much more.

No matter what type of business, organization or product you’re preparing to launch, this framework can help you think through your choices and give you enough reasons to keep the faith when times get tough (as they invariably will).

If you’re at the launch phase of a business or product concept, you may already be aware of a need to focus your idea a bit better.

Here are a few signs that your business/organization or product launch concept might need some fine-tuning:

1. People get a blank or glassy-eyed look after you’ve explained your concept.
2. You seem to change your basic ideas about your concept about once a week.
3. It takes you more than 2 minutes to explain the main premise or benefit of your concept.
4. Your business, organization or product ‘does everything for everybody’.

If any of the above apply to you, then you desperately need to narrow your focus, and fine tune your vision for launch.

The simplest way to do this is by asking yourself 4 simple questions:

1. What is the problem I’m seeking to solve?
2. Who has the problem I’m seeking to solve?
3. What is my particular approach to solving this problem?
4. Am I passionate about solving this problem, and why or why not?

Answering these four questions can immediately direct and focus your vision so that the resulting business plan, product launch or grant proposal is both marketable and viable.

For non-profit example, instead of saying:

“We help youth of all ages develop self-esteem and character by involving them in leadership training programs”.

You could say:

“We aim to reduce rates of suicide and attempted suicide in Denver area boys ages 12 to 15 through training in the fine arts”

In the above example, you have…

THE PROBLEM: Suicide and Attempted Suicide (incidents and rates of incidence)
PERSON WITH PROBLEM: Denver boys 12 to 15 (maybe who have attempted suicide or talked suicidally)
HOW YOU SOLVE PROBLEM: Through delivering a fine arts training curriculum covering instruments, comedy, sculpting, etc.

The example above can be adjusted to apply to virtually any for-profit business or niche.

In the last 48 hours, I have consulted with both non-profit and for-profit organizations that used that general framework to solve the challenge of making strategic planning decisions of what types of organizations they will be and whom exactly they will work with (or work for).

By re-framing your strategic planning challenges into a problem-based approach, you give focus to your plans, your subsequent market research and the eventual design of your business operations. By doing your planning in this sequence, you ensure that your concept or organization is not irrelevant (a solution looking for a problem), and that your concept is both viable and sustainable.

For instance:
Rule #1: Be remarkable
To be remarkable, you must standout from the crowd. Not every crowd, just the usual crowd to which people might categorize you. One way to be remarkable is to possess a competency that surprises…
I have a Nigerian friend who once wowed a group of Korean shoppers in a Walmart because he overheard their conversation and spoke fluent Korean to them. They could barely let him go for the next 15 minutes!

Turns out that as a boy, he’d spent a lot of time in South Korea with his uncle who traded Korean manufactured wares in Nigeria.

Another example is seen in the video below. The 9-year old boy in this video first shocks you with his sensibilities. His influences included old icons like Jimi Hendrix. Then when he began to play…

Rule #2: Be Remarkable And Have A Marketing Hook
In the example above, the guitarist is very good at his craft. However, everything gets more exciting by the mere fact that he’s 9 years old!. The marketing hook is “9 year old guitar whizkid!”.

In the video below, this group of singers sing so melodiously well that it can almost bring tears to your eyes. They range in age from 21 to 76 years old, and “they all met when they worked at the post office”. Their hook could be “Going postal has a melodious new meaning”…or something similar.
For your enjoyment, i’ve included this video:

Rule #3: Get Out There
You might be the most talented artist in the world, but if you don’t get your work out there, nobody will ever know you, talk about you, recommend you.

Rule #4: Get Out There ONLINE!
A full year before he wowed the audience on “America’s Got Talent” (when he was 8), a video featuring him was uploaded to YouTube and has gotten over 2 million views so far. This among other things may have helped him get on that Nationally featured TV show.
Get your talent out online, and let the viral word-of-mouth marketing do it’s work for you. Here’s the YouTube video:

If you’re an artist, the most important thing you need to reconcile is that marketing your art or your talent isn’t by itself a violation of ‘artistic principle’, and is not “selling out”. Just like sliced bread (Wonder Bread in the early 1900s) you need marketing for to get the world aware of your existence, your work and how important it is.

You may contact me, If you’d like to get advice on using the internet for marketing your art or music, (or even your art business).