Archives for category: Marketing
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Revenue Avenue

February 8, 2017 //
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There’s a guiding principle for all businesses, regardless of their size, industry or stage of life. It applies across the business or for a specific project or initiative within the business.

What’s the revenue avenue?

By which I mean, what is the quickest path towards revenue? What do we need to do to get the sales? After all, nothing really happens in a business until somebody sells something.

Sometimes we can get too caught up in the planning, or do too much analysis, or maybe overcomplicate our strategy, making it too hard for ourselves. When this happens, we need to keep it as simple as we can and ask ourselves what we need to do to get it going, to get the revenues going.

It’s far easier to make decisions for the future of the business from a position of income. Always look to take the revenue avenue.

 

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Genuinely New Idea

February 6, 2017 //
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What do you do when you come up with what you think is a genuinely new idea for a business, product or service? Inventions, as we all know, are 1% perspiration and 99% inspiration, so you probably still have one foot in the starting blocks even though you have a great idea.

Maybe it’s such a great idea, so obvious that when you make it a success people will say ‘that’s so obvious, why didn’t I do that?’. Maybe you don’t know if it’s been done before and you’re anxious to get it off the ground before someone else who’s better resourced and financed than you comes in .

I’m not an expert in this area, as I tend to help people scale their start-up, which is a step or few beyond what I’m describing here. Nevertheless, there are two things you can assess pretty easily. First, does this thing, or something close to it, already exist? Second, is there a market for it?

If it doesn’t already exist, it’s often a good indicator of viability if your idea dovetails into some of the emerging mega-trends. You need to look out for articles like this one from people who know the field. Who knows, you might be nicely aligned with some of the future ‘big things’. There’s no guarantee that someone somewhere isn’t already developing precisely your new idea, and you could argue that if it’s been identified as an emerging trend you’ve missed the boat, but who knows, there might be room for more than one player in the truly hot areas.

Sometimes it’s a genuinely new idea that there isn’t a market for, and we’ve all had those, probably several of them. And perhaps it’s a genuinely new idea that we don’t have time to work on, because of other commitments. I had a genuinely new idea about two years ago. I researched it and nothing like it existed, which amazed me, because it seemed so obvious. Two years on, I’m still working on my idea, and it still doesn’t exist.

At some point, you have to forget the genuinely new idea and move on, or go for it. Nothing ventured…

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Read vs Retain

January 30, 2017 //
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I don’t know about you, but as I get older I find it harder to retain information.

I read loads, at work and for leisure. I remember the information for the short term, but it doesn’t stick over time and I have to go back to the information I need again. And again.

When I was younger, at school, I used to have regular tests, like loads of other kids. A lot of the tests were vocabulary tests, for different languages. I would cram, learn the words by rote, regurgitate them in the test, score well, and then forget many of them over time. Later, when I started taking the kind of exams where you couldn’t learn something by rote – you had to learn how to do it, like a solve a maths problem a certain way or learn how to do an income statement – I struggled.

When we need to retain information or knowledge, it has to happen regularly over time, as we absorb the new information or methods and learn the patterns that help us embed them with repetition and practice.

Something else needs to happen, though. We need to listen or read actively. We need to be engaged. It’s like saying hello to someone new for the first time and engaging the brain actively to remember their name. If we don’t pay the right kind of attention, the name is gone in an instant. If we listen actively, it stays for years, decades even.

There are lots of books and courses out there that help you remember names and other more involved concepts by figuring out connections and stories that make them memorable. But to me they’re more developed ways of engaging the brain for retention.

So it’s not really my getting older that’s the problem. It’s more that I live in an era of information overload and I’m scanning everything, rather than reading it properly.

The difference between read and retain is the difference between passive and active.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Client or Customer

January 25, 2017 //
2

Client or customer? Which term do you use? I must confess I’m not keen on the word client, at least in business.

I remember having this conversation about a decade ago with a software VP. ‘Which term do you prefer,’ I asked. ‘Oh, I don’t like the word client. Hookers have clients…’ was her reply.

Well, yes, I suppose they do. Yet, so do social services organisations, charities, artists, business agencies and probably a good few professional services companies too.

In business, everything revolves around the customer. But it’s still a partnership between you and your customers, a fair exchange of outcomes between you and them. Usually, they pay money and you deliver products and / or services, but not always. It’s a business relationship built on a series of mutually beneficial transactions over time.

Calling them clients in business – internally within your business or externally with your various stakeholders – puts them on a pedestal and makes for an uneven relationship that’s open to abuse, or at best unnecessary leverage.

Client equals master-slave, whereas customer equals business relationship.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales

Primary, Secondary

January 9, 2017 //
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Almost everything we do is secondary. Not secondary in importance, you understand. Secondary as in it’s been done before, said before, heard before, tried before.

We spend 99% of our entire school and college lives learning stuff that has already been figured out. We’re getting it second hand and not doing the primary work, the genuinely ground-breaking stuff. Remember that odd time when you stuck your neck out in school or college and wrote what you felt was something new, a product of your independent thought? I bet it was marked wrong, right? You’re treading where thousands of people have gone before, so your new thing is not thought to be right – thought being the operative word.

So much of what we do is secondary. Our working lives are about replicating processes, re-working, recycling, renewing what’s been done before. So little of it is actually new, never done before.

There is a very small number of people doing the primary stuff. Making the law, setting the precedent, inventing a financial mechanism, product, sport, piece of technology, process, creating something new and valuable. The rest of us are studying it, reading it, criticising it, adopting it, using it, benefitting from it, and sometimes improving it.

In the world of doing primary stuff there is failure, mistakes, false dawns, incorrect conclusions, disappointment and a huge amount of wasted time. But also, by an order of magnitude greater, there is fame, fortune, progress, history, satisfaction, gratitude and humility.

What primary stuff are you doing, or trying to do?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Really Viral

January 6, 2017 //
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There’s nothing like the physical world to give us a powerful corollary of how it works in the cyber world.

I’m always reminded of this in late December when families and friends get together at the end of a few months of solid graft and a winter vomiting bug or two runs riot, moving through areas like wildfire.

That’s really viral, genuinely viral. You can see why the term virus was coined in the cyber world. A physical virus is an amazing thing, replicating itself, producing different strains and moving quickly through people in different cycles and timeframes.

Millions can be affected within the space of a couple of weeks, brought on by the combination of people being at a low ebb and slightly more vulnerable to infection after a sustained period of work, proximity to others, and mobility within family groups and circles of friends.

I’m always fascinated by how terms like desktop, folder, cloud, virus and so on are borrowed from the physical world for their digital equivalent. They always seem so apt.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Community Pride

January 4, 2017 //
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Community pride is a great thing for getting projects off the ground and delivering the benefit to that local tranche of society.

Some countries are better at it than others, and it’s perhaps a function, of history, culture, wealth or simply how well governments tends to fund things. Some are really proactive. Others less so, knowing and expecting that a few individuals will get it done for their community.

It is in the countries and areas with the best culture of community project success that you find the most generous people, I think. Everyone pays their taxes, theoretically, and they have very little control over how their taxes are disbursed, unless it’s via the indirect and infrequent mechanism of voting. Yet in community-minded societies you find people who are very actively generous towards a number of different projects, none of which they may ever use or benefit from.

It is pride and spirit in one’s community that sparks the generosity, which probably engenders more attachment to and better care of the end product.

 

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Categories Communication, General, Marketing

Tell A Story

January 2, 2017 //
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Do you want to sell something to someone?

Do you want to market a product or service?

Do you need to convey a complex idea or concept?

Are you trying to get your audience to remember something?

Do you want your audience to be able to absorb, internalise and re-use the information you’re giving them?

Do you want someone to learn something?

Then tell a story!

Stories connect. They resonate with people. They’re memorable. They attach all the links in the right order into a coherent chain.

The story is the basic building block of the sales person and the marketer. Even if you don’t need a full story to get over your message, then a metaphor makes it memorable. So does an image, or a picture.

In this hectically fast world we occupy, with woefully short attention and retention spans, people are still engaged for hours and hours reading a good book, far longer than watching a movie or TV program.

So tell a story. It works.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Speaking with non-Native English Speakers

December 30, 2016 //
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I was reading an article the other day which suggested that native English speakers need to learn how speak English with non-native English speakers.

It seems pretty obvious to this writer that we need to adapt the way we speak – to some degree – to every single person we speak to, even if they’re also native English speakers. That’s what communication is all about; adapting our vocabulary, phrasing and colloquialisms to the person and situation at hand. This is what all communicators do naturally, talking more slowly to non-native speakers, avoiding idiom, softening accents, and so on.

Those that don’t do this are small-minded, either because they don’t understand the basics of communication or they don;t care to make life easier for the person they’re in dialogue with.

Non-native English speakers may find written English easier to understand, because it’s more formal, they can take their time with it and revisit the sentence if they want, or look a word up for a translation. Spoke English offers none of these luxuries, unless you help out. Written and spoken English are also two different, and diverging, languages, each subject to different forces like speed of change and formalising regulations.

So, speaking with or writing for  non-native English speakers is like speaking with or writing for any speaker. It;s basic sales and marketing. You adapt your content to your audience.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Meeting with New People

December 16, 2016 //
2

Did anyone notable ever say something along the lines of ‘a wise man speaks less, a foolish man does not’?

If they didn’t, they should have, so I’m filling the gap now.

When you’re in a meeting with new people, I think it’s a sensible course of action to keep your own counsel first. This is deferential, which is polite and considerate, but also gives you a chance to gauge the situation, see what they’re like, assess what they know, and generally rate them as individuals, based on your early impressions.

Then, when you’ve given them a chance and you’re surer of the situation, you can start contributing from a more knowledgeable basis.

This approach certainly works well in sales and marketing, when you’re looking to get the customer to do the talking so you can learn more and propose a better solution that builds on your increased understanding of their requirements.

When you understand the situation and the new person you’re talking to better than they do you, you’re in a position to help them better, make a better first impression, and have a better chance of controlling the dialogue and the output.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales
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