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Start-ups Have to Start

March 27, 2015 //
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There’s an old adage that nothing happens in a company until somebody sells something. In fact, it’s also true of you, when you’re trying to sell yourself or your idea.

I do a bit of work as a mentor in the technology sector and so I come into contact with quite a few very early stage companies. In the tech sector in Ireland there is plenty of support, guidance and funding for building your software product. Once you’ve built your product, and you have to start selling it, in other words commercialising your idea, the funding is not so forthcoming.

This is a problem, because many of the people who have the idea for and develop their software product also have a lack of knowledge and confidence when it comes to selling it. Start-up companies can avail of a few meetings with sales and marketing mentors like me, but that’s nowhere near enough. They either need to start full-time selling themselves or else find the funds to get someone with the expertise to do their business development. They don’t have the money to do that, and the business development specialist is probably not going to work for free, or even equity, if they can’t see the promise of steady sales. Which brings it back to the fledgling business owners, who have to do the work themselves.

Start-ups have to start, but if they’re not capable of starting, then the money already invested in them, by them or others, is wasted. We need to train our entrepreneurs to sell, or else fund the sales expansion efforts and increase their chances of turning their idea into a functioning, growing business.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The OTE in Promote

March 23, 2015 //
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There is a term in sales remuneration called OTE. It’s a three-letter acronym – aka TLA 🙂 – naturally. OTE stands for On Target Earnings or On Track Earnings, though I prefer Opportunity to Earn myself. In sales jobs you can have a base salary element and a commission element that together give you your OTE if you hit your sales quota.

In a previous post I talked about the importance of having a product/market fit. Once you have that, then you need to scale your business so that you can capitalise on your potential. Your ‘opportunity to earn’, therefore, is to be found quite literally in the word ‘promote.’ To attract the right customers in the right numbers, you need to effectively promote your business.

If you’re a business owner/manager with a successful product, you want to take your business to the next level and you think the key is something to do with this marketing lark, here are some things to think about.

– Do you know your market? Can you profile it, describe it, and define it, tightly?

– What slices or segments make up your market? Remember that you can slice the market ‘pie’ according to things like region, industry, size etc, but also according to what is important or needed by customers. How you segment your market is crucial.

– Which segments of the market do you want to sell to? Even though you want to grow, you can’t be all things to all people. Well, you can, but not for long.

– What are these buyers like? What are the buyer ‘personas’? How do they prefer to buy?

– How will you position yourself to these segments? Positioning is the third leg of the segment-target-position stool on which will sit much of your go to market plan. By ‘position’ I mean your messaging, or how you describe your value to customers.

– Does your brand truly reflect where you’re going, not where you are or where you’ve been?

If any of this is alien to you, invest in someone to help you figure it out. It’s the key to unlocking the OTE at the end of promote.

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

The One Thing You Need For a Successful Business

March 20, 2015 //
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The one thing you need for a successful business is this (no drum roll necessary) …

Product/Market Fit.

You’d be surprised – actually you might not be surprised at all – how many product-based companies don’t have it, or can’t get it.

Product/Market Fit is this, put simply: people want your stuff. A lot of people. In fact, they don’t simply want your stuff, they need your stuff, and a good number of them would be up the creek without a paddle if you took it away from them.

You need Product/Market Fit for your business to grow, and people won’t invest in your business unless you can demonstrate you have it. Conversely, if you’re looking to join a successful company, and this is perhaps the most obvious thing you’ll read this month, join the one that you’re sure is shifting product.

If there’s no market for what you sell, or plan to sell, there’s no business for you. Too many companies find this out too late, usually after they’ve built their product. “Now, who can I sell this to?” In other words, do the marketing first, not afterwards.

 

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

Everyone’s an Author

March 9, 2015 //
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Have you got something to say? Do you think it will help other people? Do you think they’ll be interested in it?

Then write it! It’s never been easier to set up a blog and commit to writing on a regular or even semi-regular basis. We all have something to share that would either be useful for other people or entertaining to them.

You used to hear the common refrain that everyone has a book in them. The traditional barriers to publishing and the financial realities of getting projects to pay for themselves meant that for over 99% of people the cost of entry was too high, in both time and money. As a consequence, the impetus that people had to publish their writing was quickly snuffed out.

Nowadays, it’s easy for people to set up a blog page, free of charge, requiring nothing more than a little of their time. What’s more, the self-publishing phenomenon has made it possible for us all to publish a book of which we might sell as little as one printed or electronic copy. Talk about the long tail-leveraging power of the Internet…

“See that? It’s mine. I wrote it.” It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

March 6, 2015 //
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The first law of retail in the pre-Internet era – so it’s still valid for over two-thirds of global retail trade – is location, location, location.

The first law of communication, leadership and business relationships, is, to this writer’s mind, consistency. If you are consistent in your dealings with people, then it’s easier for them to be aligned with you in terms of expectations. They know what they’re getting from you and this helps them save time and money in the long run. Your consistency makes them more productive.

If you’re inconsistent, they don’t know where they stand, they can’t plan properly and they can’t make progress smoothly. No-one finds the maverick or the loose cannon that easy to work with when there’s so much at stake.

You should be predictable and constant for all the right reasons with the people that are important to you. They will appreciate you for it and come back for more.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales

Pressure Good, Stress Bad

March 4, 2015 //
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My late Dad, who oozed insight, guidance and modesty in equally Herculean proportions, was fond of aphorisms. One of his favourites was: pressure is good, stress is bad.

How right he was! We thrive on pressure, it helps us meet deadlines and increases our productivity. If we don’t apply pressure to ourselves, or we don’t get it from an external force, we’re get nowhere near as much done. It galvanises us, energises us, catalyses us. Just ask any journalist, writer or sports person.

Stress, on the other hand, is what happens when pressure overspills, or we don’t handle the pressure appropriately. Stress reduces our productivity, affects our equilibrium and harms our health, sometimes dramatically so.

The difference between the two is our relative ability to channel the inputs correctly into the desired outputs. And if we can’t do it, we should call for help – and call early.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Who Reads Long Stuff Anymore?

March 2, 2015 //
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Does anyone read any long articles on the web these days?

Me, I love reading books. I like reading thrillers and crime stuff last thing at night before I turn out the light. These are physical books too, with the added thrills to the senses of smell and turning real pages.

I’m only just getting used to reading books electronically. This is in part because a couple of friends have taken the self-publishing plunge and opted for Kindle only, so otherwise I wouldn’t get the chance. In part it’s also because my screen-based reading habits have changed.

Don’t get me wrong, I still read long documents for work, but I don’t read long articles on the web any more. I prefer to read small, pithy stuff and when I see web content that looks long, I give it a skip, or else try and glean the high points.

It’s also why I prefer to blog in small chunks, rather than those who only blog about once a week or fortnight and it’s a War and Peace job. Who has time for that these days? Who has the attention span for it?

The web is primarily for us to glean information, knowledge or insight, and for that we want it immediately, authoritatively and expeditiously.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Accents in communications

February 25, 2015 //
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I wrote in a previous post about the differences between writing for the US and UK markets. Of course, an increasingly popular medium for marketeers is the movie, where the verbal side of the equation – as opposed to the written – comes to the fore.

Those of you in sales will have of course wrestled with the verbal side of accents, be they regional, national or spoken as a second language, from the wealth of face-to-face meetings you’ve had. Getting on with someone verbally is the ‘sine qua non’ of sales success.

As consumers and business-to-business people we’re well used to forming an opinion of someone from their voice and they way they use it, and this is arguably more important in the movie medium where often, in the case of voiceovers, you can hear the person but not see them.

Again, as with writing, it’s important to figure out what your key market is, and how disposed they are to either a regional accent, a domestic accent or a non-domestic one. Statistically speaking, some accents have more of an allure, a cachet, and some are a turn-off. It is what it is.

One of the companies I worked for considered the US its major market and the UK its secondary market. It produced collateral that favoured the US format, spelling and phrasing. For one of its more prestigious videos, it adopted a ‘mid-atlantic’ accent developed with a professional (and quite well-known) actor. Compromise which pleases no-one or sensible one-accent-fits-all approach? It depends, of course :-).

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

Writing for the US Market

February 23, 2015 //
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“Two countries separated by a common language.” This well-known phrase, attributed to quite a few people, is not really an issue, at least to this writer, who has spent a few years writing business content for the UK and US markets.

A few key points will serve you well when it comes to writing for other markets who speak a version of English. Firstly, you should decide whether you are going to maintain two discrete versions of your content: two different websites, two youtube channels, two versions of collateral for each piece of content, and so on. I’ve worked for some companies that kept two versions, and other companies who simply decided which was their main market and wrote one version of everything which favoured that market. A third way is to settle on a ‘MidAtlantic’ version which takes from both, as long as it does so consistently. It depends on the relative importance of the markets and how ‘precious’ your audiences are about content which they feel is commoditised and does not put them first.

Secondly, formats. As is often the case with formats and measurements, the US and UK have gone down different directions with their formats. UK A4 is 297mm by 210mm, whereas US Letter is 11 inches by 8 1/2 inches. This makes US letter a bit shorter and fatter than its UK counterpart. I didn’t realise this until I was doing my MBA in the US and printed off copies of my resume for the MBA office files and they wouldn’t fit properly in the filing cabinets. This is also true of digital versions of all your content. So if you live by downloadable pdf documents, then you need to make a call on format size, or else incur the ire of those people who try and print them, only to find they don’t fit so good.

Thirdly, and perhaps most obviously, spelling and vocabulary vary between the two tongues. I won’t go into exhaustive detail here, but I’m sure you’re aware that in the US the ‘favoured’ from the second paragraph of this post would be minus the ‘u’. Also, the US tend to go in for a lot of ‘ization’, so the realization should set in early that you need to watch this area too. Then there are the much more nuanced differences. For example, one would tend to write ‘despatch’ in the UK, but ‘dispatch’ in the US, ‘programme’ in the UK and ‘program’ in the US. Vocabulary is more standardised for business, with us following the US lead, but common or garden situations can still trip you up, with hood vs bonnet, trunk vs boot, retainer vs braces, suspenders vs braces and garter vs suspenders, to use some examples from cars – Americans, read automobiles! – and personal appearance.

Fourthly, phrasing. This is the area that can catch you out if even if you have good familiarity with what I’ve included so far. This is the kind of knowledge you pick up over time, by making mistakes, or by osmosis, or by sensibly looking for feedback from your US colleagues on your drafts – and even we in the UK write drafts over draughts these days. In the US, one would probably say ‘when are you going to write me?’, eschewing the preposition beloved of the folks across the water. Furthermore, if you wrote ‘our software has built-in intelligence’ in the UK, a US audience would expect to write and read ‘our software has in-built intelligence.’ Finally on this, the US audience has a slightly more relaxed acquaintance with adverbs, so at the end of paragraph three a UK person would write ‘so well’ over ‘so good’, wheres a US person might consider themselves ‘real smart’ rather than ‘really smart’.

You can’t really do justice to a subject so vast in one post, especially since I’ve not even mentioned writing styles and we’ve barely scratched the surface of the other areas, so perhaps we’ll return to this another time.

That’s my view, period, I mean full stop, oh never mind…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing
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