Why The Corner Shop Will Never Die

March 15, 2017 //
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We’ve all heard the horror stories and domesday predictions about the death of the High Street, as shoppers move out of town to the malls, or into their homes to their computer, or right where they are via their mobile phones, tablets, phablets and any other form factor you can imagine. Except that is, the move away from the quaint corner shop.

In Europe we still have corner shops, loads of them.

The corner shop I’m thinking of is in the small town I live in (a village by England standards). It’s not quite on the corner, but it’s next to 2 public houses, as you would expect in Ireland. It’s a health food shop. Ironic, given its location, but there you are.

Now if we’re in the very big city we can go onto a colossal online marketplace and get the thing we need delivered within an hour, for a premium, or the next day for probably next-to-nothing extra. But most of us aren’t in the very big city.

My wife asked me to pick up something for her during my lunch break the other day, since I was doing a couple of other errands. She was in a city and the vast supermarket she visited didn’t have said item. I went into the health food store and asked for the item. It has quite a long title to it, but even before I’d finished articulating its name the lady had pulled it from the shelf next to her till and it was ready for purchase. I was out in 120 seconds, the amount of time it takes to properly pour a pint of the black stuff.

This why the corner shop will never die. They are often specialist providers. You can always find staff to ask something. They can give you a knowledgeable and immediate answer the vast majority of the time. They usually smile and are grateful for your business. And, you are done in a matter of minutes.

In certain circumstances, then, the corner shop is alive and well and still a great retail experience.

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Categories Customers, Sales, Strategy

The Seller’s Cooling Off Notice

March 13, 2017 //
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To protect the buyer, and give them a little more comfort behind the fairly toothless ‘caveat emptor’, it’s customary for the buyer to have a cooling off notice, or period, usually of 14 days.

Common in industries like financial services, it’s the 2 weeks’ grace during which we can consider our purchase, read the small print if we’re interested, and duck out of the contract if we felt unduly pressured into the sale.

The other day I was negotiating new mobile telephony contracts for my wife and I. This involved us upgrading both our package and our devices. I wanted to insure our swanky new devices – well, they are new devices and new to us, but not the latest models, as we’re perfectly happy being a release or 2 behind the bleeding edge – and was surprised to know that even though the start date of the insurance was day 1, I wasn’t covered and so wouldn’t be able to make any claim until day 15.

This is effectively the seller’s cooling off notice. It was also a major inconvenience to me as I was about to go on an international trip and didn’t want to make it, uninsured, with my new phone. I left the new phone at home.

The seller’s cooling off notice is the caveat vendor to our caveat emptor, but with more teeth I think.

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Categories Customers, Sales

Other People’s Money

March 10, 2017 //
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Return on investment is the corner stone of business. We have a number of competing projects to invest in. We can’t invest in them all, so we have to select the best ones for our circumstances and objectives. We measure success by the money we get back for the money we’ve spent.

So what better return on investment is there when your outlay is zero? Yes, I’m talking about getting value and return from other people’s money, or OPM. Not your partners’ cash, your competitors’.

For example, companies often sponsor projects like events, white papers or other publications. If you’ve carved a reputation for yourself as a thought leader in your field, or even someone whose opinion would be interesting, then there’s an opportunity for you to get a platform for your message in something that someone else has paid for.

You don’t need to prevail on your competitor for air time. Often, the event or the publication is organised by a third party, like a journalist, many of whom respond to the argument that a greater breadth of views and opinions makes for more balanced output.

Leveraging other people’s money, legitimately, is always better than leveraging your own.

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Categories Marketing

Subject Line Signposting

March 8, 2017 //
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Subject line signposting is the most decent thing we can do as communicators. It’s a pull thing. You pull interested parties to you rather than pushing stuff to them – or rather at them.

We should do it with all our emails, tweets and advertising. I hope I do it with my blog posts.

With a good subject line you pique the interest of your audience while still signposting them to either read on or move away. After all, what’s the point of encouraging an audience with a poor fit through intrigue or duplicity?

Subject line signposting saves everyone’s time, yours and theirs. After all, we don’t want to be labelled time-wasters.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales

The Time-Waster

March 6, 2017 //
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Beware the time-waster. The person that wastes your time, not theirs. They are the scourge of modern society.

We all know them. We see them at work or at play, they are everywhere. The most heinous individual – barring the bully or the abuser of any kind – is the time-waster. They suck the life-force out of you. They rob you of the most most precious resource you have. They don’t value your time.

The time-waster is the person who can’t see or or doesn’t care that they’re clearly taking up too much of your time. They love to talk, they love to unload. They can’t make their point quickly, succinctly, pointedly. They hog the oxygen at meetings, holding forth yet coming up with nothing of consequence or action. They are often shirkers, stallers, avoiders, prevaricators.

You see, you do know them.

Don’t suffer fools gladly. Be direct. Cut them off. Move on.

And what if they do that to you? Well, examine thyself. Either you’re a time-waster and you need to improve your interactions, or you’re not, in which case you need to find another way.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales

Churn or Growth for Startups

March 3, 2017 //
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I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and blogs. A few of them I even get around to reading too. One in particular focuses on start-ups.

If you’re in a start-up, you should read this chap’s stuff. He’s memorably called Tomasz Tunguz and he’s a VC investor in software-as-a-service companies with a firm called Redpoint.

One particular post that sticks in the mind is called: Which To Prioritize – Churn or Growth? The answer, in case you didn’t have time to read his article, depends on your maturity as a business, but for early stage start-ups it’s churn. The one thing you need to establish as a start-up is product-market fit. You want to demonstrate how difficult your early customers think life would be without your product, which is why they’re all staying around. The stickier it is, the better your long-term prospects.

Tom – I don’t know him personally but I suspect he prefers to be addressed as such – offers many more reasons why churn is what you focus on instead of growth. For me it boils down to the business model. If you’re in an annuity-based business, founded on recurring revenues, then the more customers you can retain and renew, the greater your revenue starting-point is at the first of the year, before you’ve even begun to win new bookings.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

6 Types of Pitch

March 1, 2017 //
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I recently finished reading a 2012 tome by Daniel Pink called To Sell Is Human. I thought it was excellent. It revolves around the premise that we all practice selling, even those of us in non-sales roles. We sell our kids on going to bed on time, our company on our project over someone else’s, our spouse on this holiday destination over that, and so on.

One of the sections is about 6 different ways to pitch a product, service or idea. They’re developments from the tried, trusted and a little outdated elevator pitch. Here they are:

  1. The Once Upon a Time pitch. You tell a story as follows: Once upon a time [there was a situation]. Every day [something happened, like a problem]. One day [introduce your solution or idea]. Because of that [something different happened]. because of that [there was a specific benefit or good outcome]. Until finally [there was a new situation brought on by your solution or idea].
  2. The twitter pitch. As it sounds, can you get your basic idea over in 140 characters or less, ideally less to allow others to retweet it?
  3. The rhyming pitch. Something is more memorable, catchy, lasting and prone to propagation if it rhymes. Example: if you don’t make it rhyme, you’ll need to make more time
  4. The one word pitch. If you had to distill everything it’s about into one word, what would it be?
  5. The question pitch. A pitch can be more powerful than a statement as it invites you to think about fairly solid facts. Think: what could you do with a faster internet connection?
  6. The subject line pitch. Designing your offering like the subject line of an email that you really want people to open is a really good way to tighten your pitch

All of these have their merits and situations they’re best suited to. The book has loads of other thought-provoking recommendations and is well worth a proper read.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Sales, Strategy

The Five Pound Bag of Manure

February 27, 2017 //
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There is a phrase used colloquially in business: ‘trying to fit 10 pounds of manure into a 5-pound bag.’ OK, so the word manure isn’t usually used, but here it deputises nicely for its much more graphic and vulgar counterpart. You get the message; it conjures up a vivid image of what happens when we don’t prioritise well.

It’s a topic I’ve dwelt on before and it goes back to how well we manage our own time.

You can’t get everything done that you want to during the day, so list the things you have to get done and estimate the time it will take you to do each of them. Then rank them by importance, rather than urgency. Then work down the list and figure out how many you can do in the day. You’ll not get to the others. If item 1 is going to take you more than the full day, then you need to break it up into manageable chunks, which you can then re-rank.

Sometimes I pick off the smaller, less important jobs first, but this is high risk because then you might be looking at a very long working day since you have to get the most important job finished before you clock out.

If you don’t take a prioritising approach to your work, you’ll see your key projects drag on far longer than they should.

So should you be spending your precious time on the advice dispensed in this blog? If it helps you be more productive and successful, then of course.

That said, and from my own personal perspective, I don’t know how this blog gets done 3 times a week. Probably because I don’t view it as work. It’s more like living in another country. The longer you stay, the more used to it you become, and the harder it is to move.

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Categories General

Thanking Your Suppliers

February 24, 2017 //
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Here’s a thing. In business we’re maniacally focused on our customers. We even call them clients, or patients even in the caring professions. Everything we do revolves around them. We work hard to win them, and in the private sector we thank them, take them to lunch and send them corporate gifts. This is something I write about in my first ever blog post here.

I have customers in my business too, and I try to look after them so that there’s a fair exchange of value between us.

What I also really focus on as well is my suppliers. Often we treat our suppliers with a fraction of the care we provide to our customers. Whereas our customers are on the highest pedestal, our suppliers are often the afterthought in the basement.

Good suppliers are absolutely critical to your success, especially if you’re in an industry where you take what your supplier gives you and build on it or resell it for your own wellbeing. I don’t send Christmas cards to friends or family. They have plenty of them already. I send Christmas cards, each with a personal note, to all my suppliers thanking them for their service, help or support during the year.

Are you in the habit of thanking your suppliers? Do you award the best ones with a ‘supplier of the year’ accolade? If you do, you’re in a pretty small minority. You’re bucking the trend. When the world zigs, you zag.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Rarely What You Expect

February 22, 2017 //
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Things in business or life rarely turn out exactly as you thought they would. They’re rarely what you expect.

The other day I was working on a customer project that relied on two third party companies for help. My experiences of dealing with the two companies, and the opinions I formed about them, led me to the following conclusion. One company – let’s call it company A – was going to help me out and it was going to be a fruitful exercise. The other – which you’ve probably guessed is company B – probably wasn’t going to oblige too much.

As it turned out I was completely, 180 degrees, wrong. A didn’t go anywhere and B was superb.

It reminded me that even though you can go into things with a positive frame of mind, hoping that all engagements will work out for you, you can often get your assumptions wrong. While it’s great to act on a hunch in the absence of anything solid to go on, we have to check our facts where possible, speak to people and see things through. I’m sure there have been many times when I’ve said to myself, ‘why didn’t I get to this before, why didn’t I speak to them sooner?’ Is that true for you too? If so, it’s probably because things are rarely what you expect.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales
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