But Enough About Me

August 25, 2014 //
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In addition to my sales and marketing consulting work, I do a little bit of mentoring. The companies I work with tend to be either start-up companies looking for the best way to go to market or established companies who want to break into new markets.

I often ask the companies to show me samples of their communications and marketing, or to explain how they approach a sales presentation with prospects and existing customers. Most of them – around 90% I would say – start with themselves. Who they are, what they do, their history, that kind of thing.

It happens a lot, but it’s fundamentally wrong. Everything should start with your customer and their market. Whether you’re hoping to build a relationship, or you’re looking to challenge the assumptions and knowledge of your customer, you always start with them. Their market, their issues, their drivers, their objectives, their barriers, their success factors. If you can’t demonstrate that knowledge, you can’t make a connection, you can’t tell if you can help them, you don’t know if there’s a fit, you don’t earn their respect.

Once you demonstrate that you understand your customers’ pains and requirements, then you can establish how you’ve helped other companies with similar problems and how you’re uniquely placed to help them.

The direction of the dynamic with successful companies is from the customer to them, not from them to the customer. That way you’re not selling to them, you’re guiding them to buy.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

What If We Started at 200 Years?

August 22, 2014 //
2

Here’s a question for you. What if we were all born with an allotment of, say, 200 years? This was our total allowable credit at the beginning of life. The genetic hand of cards we had been dealt would immediately reduce the credit, as would our geography, socio-economic conditions and so on.

Then, what if every social occurrence reduced it further by a set amount? Smoking a cigarette, 7 minutes off. Passively smoking a cigarette, 1 minute. Having an alcoholic drink, 3 minutes. A sugary snack, 1 minute. Inhaling the fumes from another car, 4 minutes. And on and on.

Obviously, fatal accidents reduce the credit to zero balance almost immediately, and incurable diseases and other unplanned for calamities seriously eat into your allocation. Somewhat ironically and seductively, oxygen, which we rely on to survive also contributes to cell ageing and therefore ultimately kills us, so we might need to factor in something for exercise or other activities that cause us to draw in more breath than during normal breathing.

I don’t mean this to be a religious question. I think it’s an academic discussion anyway, as believers will argue that the Maker could be behind such a plan, and non-believers will probably think it paints a pretty dystopian picture of 100% scientific and medical transparency.

So here’s the question: if this situation existed, would you live your life any differently? Would you be as generous and act for the betterment of others, knowing exactly the sacrifice in personal time you were making and the added time you were bestowing on your beneficiaries? Or would it descend into a Lord of the Flies thing where we deliberately inflicted time reductions on others, small, petty reductions or big ones?

Personally, I think that even thinking about the concept makes us strive to do our best with each thing that we do.

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Categories General

Self-Mockery is Often the Best Policy

August 20, 2014 //
1

My wife – otherwise known as Mrs D, or sometimes Ms H when she’s cross with me, occasionally feeds back on my blog posts. She’s a technical writer and has a laser eye for typos and other inadvertent gotchas. She also lets me know when she has no interest in my posts. These are usually the ones focused on sales and marketing, so pretty well all of them.

This blog post is about how to recover from a mistake and I’m going to cite an example from one of her current addictions, which will hopefully induce her to get to the end of it.

When you’ve made a booboo, the best way to recover is to come clean, and if you can be self-deprecating and humorous too, then all the better. When a worthy third party also benefits from your recovery, then it’s a slam dunk.

Take the recent much-publicised gaffe in a promotional shot on the Instagram account of Downton Abbey.  The BBC gleefully reported on the ‘water-bottle-gate’ affair which affected its commercial broadcasting rival. These things happen and the word gets out very quickly and virally thanks to the times we live in.

What better response than to publish a self-mocking response, together with a link to the charity WaterAid UK who work to provide safe water to those that need it.

Nicely done eh, Mrs D?

 

 

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Categories Communication, Language, Strategy

When Airlines Flip

August 18, 2014 //
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I’m not talking, dear reader, about airplane accidents but about when competing airlines flip positions.

The two Irish airlines, Aer Lingus and Ryanair, seemed to have flipped. They seem to have swapped places with each other.

I’ve been banging on regularly in this blog, most recently here, about Ryanair’s blithe disregard for the customer. Something’s changed in the last wee while however.

Ryanair appointed a Chief Marketing Officer at the beginning of the year, a role that many of us senior marketing people could have done and would love to have done, and the changes are already bearing fruit. They were starting from a pretty low bar of course, which is why folk were probably queueing up for the job.

It’s working already though. Those obvious things we all would have done are now bearing fruit. Now it feels like Aer Lingus is the airline that is playing catch-up in customer service. It’s almost like it wants to fill the role that the old Ryanair made its own. I guess that’s OK, except, that it’s not the Low Fares Airline, not by a long chalk, so it’s a dangerous development.

The last thing we want is one Irish airline. Not good for competition…

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Categories General, Strategy

I Was Old – I Needed the Money

August 15, 2014 //
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Desperate times call for desperate measures. There are many people in the public eye, especially entertainment, who regret their entrance into the house of stardom via the less salubrious side door of their industry. I don’t know if this industry gives rise to the phrase ‘I was young; I needed the money,’ but it seems likely that it was so.

When we’re old, however, we’re not supposed to need the money and you’re not supposed to hear us utter this blog post’s title. All our assets are supposed to be paid off, we have a good pension and investments, our kids are self-sufficient – kind of – and we have time on our hands and money to burn.

That now seems a little outdated for most of us. I’ve already talked about the ticking time bomb that is populations and pensions in the next 30-50 years, but it seems to me that unfortunate timing and macro factors have scuppered the plans of many in my generation. To list a few examples:

– Those who chose a long mortgage term or who remortgaged have pushed out their liabilities further than they would like

– The global meltdown and ensuing property slump mean that for many the value of their house is likely to be less than the amount they borrowed, locking them in for longer and meaning they can’t necessarily down-size from their empty nest

– The global meltdown has seriously dented the pension pot of those who are not on a guaranteed pension, which is most of us. Throw in the property slump and those pension funds that were invested in buildings have been more than seriously dented, and in some cases wiped out

– The nature of work has changed. Jobs are more flexible, locations are more flexible, options are more flexible. People are staying at companies less often and changing more, either by design or because they have to. This brings with it great opportunity but also the risk of being in between opportunities for longer, eroding any savings built up while scrabbling around for the next revenue source

– More people are doing their own thing and moving from employed to self-employed. This increased freedom comes at a price, in the form of unpaid holidays and paying for benefits that might have been included as an employee

Even though it’s acknowledged that we’ll be working for longer, we can’t work forever. The alternative is to work until you drop, having forgone retirement, leaving someone else to pick up the pieces.

I mentioned in the linked post above that technology will probably find a way to close the loop for us, to solve or at least assuage the problem. And those of us working in or around technology will probably be able to capitalise on it first, unless it is some immense democratising force.

But my question is this: will the old have to resort to desperate measures like the young once did?

 

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Categories General, Strategy

What’s the Call to Action?

August 13, 2014 //
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In my previous post, I shared the first of the two things you must do in any business communication. The second is so simple, yet is so rarely done.

What’s the call to action? In plain English: what do you want your customer to do? Your customer is busy, you earned their interest by explaining quickly why they should be interested in what you have to say and how they will benefit.

At this point they’re looking for your guidance. How do you want them to proceed from here? Make it clear what you want from them. Here are some examples:

– click here to request your [whatever you’re giving them]

– please expect a call from me early next week

– call this number to book your place

– reply with #AmazonBasket to add it to your basket & buy later

You’ve got your reader this far. Don’t blow it at the end by leaving them hanging. Tell them what you want them to do and make it easy for them to do it. Simple.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Who Cares?

August 11, 2014 //
0

Whenever you communicate with someone in business, whatever your business, there are two main things that your communication needs to do, otherwise you’re wasting your time – and theirs.

The first of these is the first chronologically as well. Why should the person you’re communicating with be interested in what you have to say? Their time is at least as precious as yours, so you need to be able to quickly provide them with an answer to the following questions that are really variations on a theme:

– what’s in it for me?

– who cares?

– why should I read any further?

The only way to answer is for you to clearly state the benefit to them of what you have to say. Ideally in the heading of your communication, and certainly in the first paragraph.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Adventures in Travel – Not – Part III

August 8, 2014 //
2

Do you ever fly with ‘low fare’ airlines? I do, frequently. We are blessed with 2 in Ireland. One’s called Aer Lingus, the other is called Ryanair.

Aer Lingus used to be quite up-market. It still is up-market to the US, but has joined in the race to the bottom on the cut-throat European routes. The pilots are good too. As my son said to me a few years ago when he was 9 years old, ‘Daddy, can we fly Aer Lingus? Their planes land like shadows.’

Ryanair competes on price and punctuality. When it’s not punctual, you feel cheated, violated almost. The pilots are learning their trade while at Ryanair I think. The landings are as if they lose interest at an altitude of 2 metres and drop you onto the tarmac. Our landing the other day was bone-shakingly hard, even by Ryanair standards. We are talking a free chiropractic session thrown in for the fare.

Vertebra realignment anyone?

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Adventures in Travel – Not – Part II

August 6, 2014 //
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UK train travel is legendarily expensive, and usually fashionably late.

I had occasion to travel from a major city to London the other day. It’s a major inter-city service, chocka-block full, where not to reserve a seat means you’re making your own seat.

There was no wi-fi on the train. Yes, you read that right, no wifi. This is 2014, in the first world. Heck, they’ve had wifi on Irish trains for years!

I find that unbelievable. For an international visitor, business as well as tourist, you rely on a reliable wifi service. Not to offer one, as part of such an expensive service, boggles the mind.

The train arrived fashionably late too.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Adventures in Travel – Not – Part I

August 4, 2014 //
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In the old days of travel, you never really knew when the bus was going to come along. Yes, there was a published timetable, but it only ever bore a passing acquaintance with reality. They came when they came, that was it.

Nowadays, as I observed in the UK recently, you have electronic signs telling you – presumably via GPS – when the next bus is due to arrive. I think this is supposed to manage your expectations better, but it still has only a passing resemblance to the agreed passage of time. This has the opposite effect of what is intended. Sometimes a bus will be 25 minutes away for half an hour, by which time you know it has been cancelled because the next one has turned up.

At other times the bus might be 8 minutes away, but the subsequent minutes are long ones, it being 2 minutes away for 2 minutes, then 1 minute away for 2 minutes, then ‘due’ for 2 minutes. Somewhere there’s an awful lot of rounding going on.

It’s progress, Jim, but not as we know it.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General
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