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Showing posts from August, 2019

Can you smell your next sale?

You want marketing to deliver the leads but are you following the scent? Let's work backwards: Did you receive enquiries last month? You'd be surprised how many business owners don't know that answer. Assuming you had received a few, do you know how these people managed to find you? Again, many businesses do not have a coordinated funnel to proactively fetch opportunities and feed them into the sales process. But how do you turn things around to become proactive, instead of reactive? Predictive, in a sense. Can you get it to a point where you know that if you do A, B, C and D you will get around 4 enquiries and convert at least 1 or 2 into a client? Can you start to budget for income, and not just expenses? Marketing will never be an exact science, but if you do it properly, meaning you do a hand full of things well, and know why you do it and keep track of results, then it should become a tool to influence future income. Can you start to budget for income, a

Is your marketing stuck?

Many owner-managed companies are suffering from marketing indigestion. There's simply nothing happening, or whatever happens moves through the system "slowly and painfully". The marketing is stuck. The website does not get updated, the brochure remains out of date, posting to social media is infrequent, and conference attendance happens occasionally. Yet, the business owner wants to see more happening. What's going on here? What's the reason for the stagnation? The problem is that marketing invariably involves communication, i.e. telling the world a story about your business and this means a) agreeing on what the story is, b) deciding how to say it, and c) doing so in a way that achieves results. This process is exceedingly difficult for most small and medium-sized companies.  It is difficult because it is daunting. What do you say in a world where there are many more prominent players shouting much louder than you and where the wrong message can har

Does your business look good?

Too many small and medium-sized companies neglect their brand and focus solely on what they do. This is a huge mistake. Your customers don't just make decisions based on performance and pricing, but also on how they feel. The better your company looks, the better the feeling it leaves prospective buyers. Legendary marketing professor Phillip Kotler says: "does anybody really believe that people can turn themselves into unemotional and utterly rational machines when at work?" The aesthetics of your business matters, no matter the sector you serve. A well-crafted brand creates a professional image that underscores all the "soft stuff" that ultimately determines a deal, such as trust, expertise, attention to detail, modernity and a point of difference. Does your business look good to the outside world? By focusing on both what you do as a business, and how you look, you can stand out from the crowd and take charge of your customer relationships by showing

Do you know your customers well enough?

A major challenge for both the small and medium-sized business is that it does not have access to the same sources of information tha n  big companies do. Simply not knowing is often the main reason for not acting or not seeing results on the business development front. The problem is even worse when the customer is not a single individual, such as  a shopper in a retailer,  but  an other busines s  (business to business sales). It is easier asking  an individual  why they are buying  a brand of cereals  than  getting the same information from a company where many people are involved in a purchase decision .   But as a  growing  business, you ’ ve got to open the taps  on  a constant flow of market information, no matter the industry you are in. Simply sitting in your office (or on your cellphone) and hoping to  know what customers want, or trusting your sales team to tell you the full picture,  won’t work.  As the boss, you need to get your hands on some raw, unfiltered f

Thoughts on marketing a professional services startup

Too many small professional services businesses try to act like big professional services businesses when they start, leading to lots of misery for the founder(s). You can't market your small consultancy, like a big consultancy, to put it plainly. The reason for this is simple: a big consultancy has an established brand. Clients know the brand and trust it and have a broad idea of what they can expect when working with "someone from that company". This is not the same with a startup consultancy where there is no "company" brand established yet. Professional services, more than any other business, is all about trust. Clients need to believe that you can deliver and that you have their best interests at heart. This is especially true since the "product" is an intangible, i.e., a service you provide. The mistake most consultants make is that they try and hide behind the name of their business as they start out. They quickly ask a graphic designer to