10 ways not to do business in 2010

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Happy New Year to all of our Being Smarter readers.

I wanted to start the year by resurrecting a post from December last year – which seems very appropriate for the start of the working year for most people…

At a recent conference, a now colleague of mine, Ed Dale did four separate sessions on a topic which I am calling “How to do business in 2010“… he had a different title, but my take on it was simple – it was a message to all corporate management… to all the folks who’ve sadly been made redundant recently from that world… and to all smaller businesses who are paralysed by indecision. The message was something along the lines of

“Wake up and smell the coffee… the world has totally changed (not just by the Internet.) If you carry on doing business as it was done ten years ago, or do you know what, perhaps even a year ago… then you are dead in the water.”

There were 86 separate provacative statements, here’s my top 10:

1.) Whatever you do, make sure you’re in a business or market place that you are completely unpassionate about. Make sure that it leaves you feeling cold, empty and completely drained at the end of the day. The great news is that if you’ve found a marketplace you particularly have no interest in, it will help you to be average at best when it comes to selling to and supporting your customers – and they will love you for it.

2.)If you are in a small business, ensure you try to run it like a corporate entitiy. Make sure you absolutely do not in any way try to differentiate yourself from these bigger companies. Treat your customers like numbers and be completely devoid of any business personality.

3.) When developing products or services, it’s imperative that you don’t start to build anything without examining every ounce of detail at the early stage. Take as long as you like to write specs and make sure you start with the small picture and buld it up. You’ll never get anything launched if you don’t spend many weeks and months getting the finer detail argued about, before talking to customers about the concept – they won’t thank you.

4.) When your service is launched – for goodness sake try to sell it to everyone that moves… ignore segmentation and playing in niche markets – it’s a complete waste of time. If the product is good enough, everyone will want it.

5.) If you’re in the online game, think very carefully about building giant server or data centre infrastructures the minute your product is out the door. There’s literally no one else out there that does this kind of thing… and they certainly wouldn’t be able to scale it up to your demands.Your data is important to you, and so you should keep it under your control at all times.

6.) When designing your next product, ensure you get every feature that your customers will need into the very first release. Don’t design it so that it could be released in stages, or people just won’t buy it. They need everything on day one.

7.) Decision making – this is key. Involve everyone at all times. Ensure you plan as many meetings as possible – all day ones if necessary to reach a consensus. If you aren’t able to make a decision with the whole team after a huge amount of analysis and delay, then play safe and don’t make one.

8.) When it comes to recruitment, make sure you hire experts in their field, irrespective of whether they are difficult to work with. It’s much better to have a team of experts who don’t communicate than a team of generalists who gel as a team and work for the common good. Oh – and don’t work with them as affiliates or freelancers first to test them out – that just isn’t the done thing.

9.) Customers don’t mind being slightly misled about what they are about to receive as a service… as long as you hook them in, they’ll generally soon get over it. It also helps to provide a very detailed contract, which is difficult to break out of, for your protection.

10.) And finally, the Internet is just a fad. Stick with the old rules of marketing – direct mail and cold calling has worked for years. Your customer base has no idea what a twoot or a blag is, and they’re still on 56k modems, so video will never work on their pcs – you will just need to invest in a support department.

If you like my take on Ed’s wisdom, check out this post 5 Days with Ed Dale.

Guest post: Do you challenge the status quo?

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Ian Mash of Yeoman Consulting helps us to continue the theme of ‘practical ways to help your business life” by sharing some of his experiences of working at the coalface as a senior manager in one of the UK’s largest companies – BT.

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How many of us get up to do a full day’s work, and then conform to the expected norm?

Most of us I suspect, but the key to competitive advantage is to continuously challenge the norm, continuously challenge the status quo.

Think of the new and successful products or brands that do just that. Look at EasyJet. Who would have thought, 20 years ago that we would all be flying around Europe for £20 a seat, and that whilst we had to give up a free warm gin and tonic and a handful of nuts, we now accept a cheaper price and ‘what you see is what you get’ service.

BA certainly didn’t.

Look at Apple’s continued success based on innovation…the Ipod, and the iPhone. OK some of the ‘apps’ are pretty trivial like the beer glass one, but others like the SatNav one are powerful and have started to really shore up the niche.

Look at Mark Copeman’s idea of challenging the status quo of the training world with The 8.45 Club, a great idea to keep up to date while you’re having that first cup of coffee. (Ed-Thanks Ian) All of these are about challenging the status quo, getting an edge and most importantly asking ‘Why?’, the world’s most powerful question.

Why do we do things that way?

Why can’t it be done this way?

There are big inhibitors to that ‘why’ question in most companies… “because we’ve just spent £x million on a new system to support the process’ or “because that is how we built the business doing it this way”, but the competition or new start up doesn’t have that inhibitor when they’re looking for their edge…so it’s important that you challenge the status quo on a regular basis, if you’re not going to be playing panic catch up on your competition.

Interestingly that got me thinking about the question “what is a strong brand?” I remember being asked this by my marketing tutor and answering that “it was one I went to because I recognised it”. A torrent of sarcasm ensued and he drummed it into me, that a strong brand was one which one someone was prepared to pay more for.I’m sure BA comforted themselves on that mantra when Easyjet sprang up. In my view, they are both strong brands and plenty of folk still use BA… but Easyjet certainly doesn’t fit the definition of my old tutor.

So, maybe a strong brand is about being clear on the price for the deliverable and being consistent with that deliverable. Any way you look at it, it’s a challenge to the status quo.

Ian Mash will be back with more pearls of wisdom in the next couple of weeks and can be contacted on +44 7860 621976 and via email at ian dot mash1 at btinternet.com
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Advice is for listening to, but not necessarily taking

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Ian Mash of Yeoman Consulting helps us to continue the theme of ‘practical ways to help your business life” by sharing some of his experiences of working at the coalface as a senior manager in one of the UK’s largest companies – BT.

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When I’ve been looking at new product development or moving into new markets, I’ve always been struck by how quickly folk want to get down to the design phase. Frequently I’ve noticed that the main design input has been personal bias or copying the competition. An old marketing guru of mine tore me off a strip for just such a view when he asked me why I had chosen a particular design. When I answered that it was what I would have wanted had I been in the market he used the phrase

‘Beware the sample of one’.

Given the cost of new product development and the cost of failure if you don’t get it right, a little time and effort at the front end using proper customer segmentation and needs analysis will save a lot of red faces later on. It’s our job as management or marketing professionals to do this spadework up front.  It doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Personally I like Kotler’s (Marketing Management, Analysis, planning and control) views of perhaps 3 axis segmentation e.g. gender, hair colour shoe size so that you can get to the segment of fair haired women who wear size 6 shoes for your better mousetrap. There are of course many others who write on segmentation, it’s up to you to choose.

This brings me onto my next thought. Often we are deluged with huge amounts of information or views from colleagues. As a manager it’s not easy to cut our way through, but I’ve seen an increasing trend from people of not wanting to listen to counter views and arguments because it takes up their time. This is a dangerous course and the time saved will be wasted in spades later when you re-appraise the position.

None of us are that good we can work in isolation.

I’ve always felt that advice is for listening to, but not necessarily taking

Consider the idea of writing a mail but not sending it until later, it’s useful to give yourself just a little time to consider what you know and what you don’t know. Sometimes this can be overnight, but if time is pressing, and it often is, it can be a walk to the coffee machine, just to get that processing time to make your own decision. You’ll find that decision is both easier to make and easier to communicate when you’ve taken this approach.

Ian Mash will be back with more pearls of wisdom in the next couple of weeks and can be contacted on +44 7860 621976 and via email at ian dot mash1 at btinternet.com
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Complaint handling – how would your company rate?

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This is a follow up article to one I made last month entitled – Smart email marketing – NOT! It was my first rant on this site about a company definitely not being smart. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that they were being quite the opposite… so much so I voted with my feet and unsubscribed from their marketing database, despite me really rating their product. That’s a strange combination I know.

In case you haven’t got time to read this original rant, in a nutshell, I bought a holiday to Cyprus to be taken in October, from Sovereign holidays back in August. They then proceeded to send me emails selling me holidays and special offers for holidays in October, despite the fact I’d just bought one. Terrible, appalling, rubbish marketing. I unsubscribed before I went away, and had a wonderful holiday.

This annoyed me, as it’s simple to fix, so I had Tweeted @ them, I had written the rant article and I had written to their customer relations team. Surprise, surprise, I thought I’d been swallowed up again by the corporate black hole of complaint handling.

Well, I was wrong. Well sort of. When we arrived in our hotel room in Cyprus a couple of weeks back, we had a huge bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne waiting for us in our room, with a card welcoming us to the hotel, and signed from a lady at Sovereign. No mention of the reason for sending however…

At first I assumed they greeted everyone like this… but after investigation it turns out we were special – so I was even more intrigued. After much detective work, I got hold of the relevant email address and wrote to them on my return, thanking them, but also asking why it was sent.

This was their response:

Dear Mr Copeman

Thanks for your letter and I’m pleased you got our small apology in resort.

We have recently changed email marketing companies to prevent the problem you experienced happening, We have also just recently changed our customer database management system with the plan of implementing some serious changes to our customer contact strategy to make it much more customer centric and more engaging.

I hope this clarifies the problem and I hope you continue to travel with Sovereign. Please let me know if you have any further questions I would be happy to help.

Best regards

Thoughts:

1) They had gone to the efforts of marrying my name from my email to their customer relations address,  to a booking and bothered to send flowers and champagne to the room on our arrival – very nice touch. Quite delightful in fact.

2) It was slightly marred however, by the fact we actually thought they did it for everyone – and there was no mention of the email I had sent. If I hadn’t have followed up, I would have assumed that my email had gone unresponded to and would have spread bad news about Sovereign.

3) The explanation in the email response was impressive… I have to assume I’m not completely responsible for this change of strategy, however, it’s great that someone has listened and is reacting to customer opinion.

So, how do you deal with complaint handling? Would you have done better? Do your customers’ emails go into the corporate email blackhole?

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Five ways to test your marketing messages

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Last week was interesting for lots of reasons – but one of the most common themes which came up was how often marketing and sales organisations are brilliant at devising strategies for their clients, yet struggle to do it for themselves.

I’m sure many of you can relate to this issue – you spend so much time working on your business, you can’t see the wood from the trees when it comes to devising the right words for describing what you do.

There’s no hard and fast rules about how to come up with the right words when it comes to marketing your own organisation, although getting a basic understanding of what value propositions are all about will help you along the way. Once you think you have something – here are five good ways to check you are on the money…

  1. Give your materials to an ‘average’ 13 year old and let them unprompted tell you what they think. They will be an excellent barometer of the language you are using.
  2. Even if you messages make sense – it’s always worth a back of an envelope test to see whether people are actually searching for the phrases you use. Use the planet’s best market research tool to test out your keyphrases. If no one’s searching for what you’ve written, rewrite it or you will always be running uphill.
  3. For every 10 people you discuss branding/marketing with, you will always get at least 11 opinions, so bearing that in mind, send your materials to 5 people you are close to and respect and then to 5 acquaintances for feedback. Ask each group three specific questions about your materials – DON’T just ask for feedback – that’s too hard.
  4. Get brave – head off to a local networking group and make a real effort to meet 10 people in the room. This is the perfect place to test your elevator pitch, which forms part of these messages. Get good at refining it in front of people. A great test for success is whether you get a follow up question after the initial “So what do you do?” one. When people start to offer you names of people you should talk to – you know you’re onto a winner.
  5. Finally, whilst it’s not scientific, NEVER ignore your gut feelings (or your team’s gut feelings) about what it is you’ve produced. If you aren’t comfortable and proud to be using the materials and messaging you’ve produced, then make changes immediately. The best marketing won’t work, without the belief of a team behind it. Confidence and passion definitely breeds success.

Now – go and test!
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5 must have professional skills

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Ian Mash of Yeoman Consulting helps us to continue the theme of ‘practical ways to help your business life” by sharing some of his experiences of working at the coalface as a senior manager in one of the UK’s largest companies – BT.

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I’ve had time recently to contemplate things I’ve observed which really don’t do business people justice on a day to day basis. Having the right professional skills is such a simple concept – we only have limited interaction with most people and certainly in new situations people tend to make up their mind in the first 10 seconds. Once that has happened it takes a while to change that view.

1) Returning calls

Many of us have answering messages on the phone or mobile which say that we’ll call back. Or indeed, when it’s not convenient at that exact point to talk we say “I’ll call you back at 4.o0, is that ok?”, and then don’t.  We’re all busy people and respecting other peoples time will result in them respecting yours. If you make a commitment, put it in your calendar and deliver on it.

Mark McCormack in his book  ‘What they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School’ said that he didn’t trust managers who couldn’t take their holiday. In his view, if they couldn’t manage to take their holiday, what else couldn’t they manage to do? I think calling back comes into the same category. If you don’t deliver on that commitment, what else won’t you deliver on?

2) Control your emotion

One of the key professional skills in a close knit office environment is controlling your emotions. When I first stated work an old and wise manager who was my boss sat opposite me. One day I had a run in with a peer and wrote a great letter saying what I really thought of him. I felt a lot better. I showed it to my boss and he said “What a great letter, he’ll really know what you think of him after that!” He also said “I tell you what, put the letter in your drawer and then when you come in tomorrow, if you still feel the same way, send it”.

Naturally when I came in the next day I looked at what I had written, put myself in the other person’s shoes for a moment, then ripped it up and threw it away.  The same applies for e-mails, but it’s tragically easy to press send too quickly. Take my old manager’s advice, save it as a draft until tomorrow, it might save you a lot of humble pie eating.

3) Take pride

I see many, many e-mails these days where basic spelling and grammar have been ignored. It’s to the detriment of the writer I’m afraid, and I bet you notice it when it’s done to you. Whether its lack of knowledge or lack of effort I’m not sure, but the time pressure on us and the proximity of the send button doesn’t help. Use spell check and if you’re not too hot on grammar, then look at Lynne Truss’s book “Eats shoots and leaves” which is great. I’m not suggesting at all that I am perfect and I’m confident that there are plenty of errors in this piece, but it’s something to think about.

4) Bother to follow up

I guess this is very closely linked to my thoughts above. I’m constantly frustrated by people promising in a meeting to send me something or to complete an action and then seeing that promise unfulfilled. Is it me or are people starting to get slightly surprised when people actually do what they say they are going to? This certainly applies in the faceless call centre. I’ve had a couple of experiences recently where an email has been sent to me as promised from a call centre and there was a small part of me which was shocked.

Clearly this isn’t a great reflection on society – but don’t fall into that trap! A tip for you – bother to write down the action, however trivial in your to do list and then actually do it as soon as you are able. You will delight people.

5)  Be helpful

There’s a school of thought which suggests if you constantly go out of your way to help others, then you will be set for life. In the time I’ve had to observe some of these business people traits – I don’t see this helpful behaviour happening too often.

I’m a big believer in what goes around comes around. Go and make an effort to help a colleague today – and I mean really help – spend a couple of hours doing something for them that they aren’t able to do. It will make you feel good if nothing else and over time, it will pay back.

Ian Mash will be back with more pearls of wisdom in the next couple of weeks and can be contacted on +44 7860 621976 and via email at ian dot mash1 at btinternet.com

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Create an org chart for a one person startup. Are you serious?

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The Being Smarter team has a lot on its plate at the moment and we would all love to read more, but fail dismally. There’s one book however that the whole team has read – it’s almost like our induction course and it’s called the E-Myth. If you are starting or running a small business – it’s a must read.

Today, I wanted to pull one of the key concepts from that book and show how it really can work. It features as #26 in the popular 51 lessons learnt in year 1 as an entrepreneur post.

The book addresses the age old problem of going from startup to 50 person company. How do you as an entrepreneur keep the ethos and style of the business alive whilst expanding? How do you as an entrepreneur let go of responsibility and trust others? How do you as an entrepreneur ensure that letting go does not affect quality of the final output?

Michael E Gerber is a bit of a genius. He’s been there and bought the t-shirt. One of the many excellent tips I’ve taken from this book, which has stayed with me is to create an org chart from the outset. That’s exactly what I’ve done as the founder of Being Smarter Ltd which now has two other businesses under it’s umbrella – The 8.45 Club and TargetstoProspects. I have a very clear idea of how the organisation needs to look and with a £0.5m worth of investment I could fill every position tomorrow and move the company on at great speed, but…

Clearly that’s not a practical solution – and so the second part of his advice is to put YOURSELF into every position in that org chart. Write the manual for every job – document everything – and become expert in every position. Pin it on your wall and stare at it every day.

Your key to success then is slowly back filling those positions using smart recruitment techniques once the cash starts to flow and you can afford to employ people.

At the moment, I’ve got three people on my org chart and about 15 positions with my name on it. That would explain why I don’t sleep a lot – but at least I can see a way forward. Can you?

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When did you last go the extra mile?

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This is just a short post – but hopefully a thought provoking one, based on an experience of mine today.

I had a really great lunch today with a colleague/friend who I have huge amounts in common with. She sorted out the venue – and I’m pleased to announce it here – The Golden Pot, in Hampshire, UK.

It’s a lovely, traditional English Pub, as you’ll see from the photos. My friend goes there a lot – and I could see why.

The owner, who served us went out of his way to help us have an enjoyable meal. He actually asked a question I’ve never heard before in a restaurant when he was seating us – “What time do you need to be away?”.  He knew it was a business lunch – we must have looked busy, and so he wanted to ensure his timings fitted around us. He could hurry things along, or keep things relaxed, depending on the timescales we gave him. Brilliant.

He was a smart guy and I bet he also knew he could maximise the revenue earned from us if he got dessert and coffee served in time. If he delayed – we’d spend less – but I also bet that wasn’t why he was doing it.

Whilst ordering, I mentioned I had to catch a train to London from a small station nearby. I didn’t know the area and he told me I should allow 30 minutes. When we got up to leave (on time) – he was there WITH A MAP – so that he could best direct me to the station.

No one does this stuff… no one. And it’s so simple.

There – go ponder. When did you last go the extra mile?

How to leverage your next customer event

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It’s always great to write on subjects dear to your heart and ones based on personal experience. Today is both.

I’ve been lucky enough to watch many great presentations, speeches and seminars over the last few years, however have also been incredibly frustrated that no one apart from those in the room at the time can benefit from the experience. How long does it take event organisers to pull good speakers together? How long does it take speakers to put their materials together? Days? Weeks? And it’s all over in a few hours.

Ever cooked a roast dinner for 12 people? Spent 6 hours preparing it to see it all eaten in 15 mins? Well it’s the same thing with events, except with a roast dinner, I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to keep it for ever…

Today and tomorrow our team is working with one of our partner companies to record an expert seminar, given only to a select few. The speaker is then going to spend some time with us after the session, recording in a green screen studio and we are then going to turn the whole event into an ‘8.45 Club’ style course for them…

So what’s the point of all this?

  1. The presentation which has taken many hours to put together will not be lost forever. It can remain a useful asset for years after the event.
  2. An audience other than the limited few that could make it to London on that specific day can now benefit from the material.
  3. The company putting on the event can leverage this material with other clients – possibly even sell it, because of its value.

And how will it be presented?

  1. The material will not be presented as a giant, unmanageable block of 2 hours, it will be turned into an engaging video training course.
  2. The 8.45 Club style of training means it will be delivered to email inboxes, first thing in the morning, in bite-sized chunks of ten minutes per day, perhaps for a couple of days of week for a month or so.
  3. Learners can now benefit from this session without leaving their desk and still be at their desk by 9.00.

I believe that’s win, win, win…. and possibly win.

How are you leveraging your next event? http://the845club.com/bespoke

Guest post: Take it as a compliment when people poach your staff

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Ian Mash of Yeoman Consulting helps us to continue the theme of ‘practical ways to help your business life” by sharing some of his experiences of working at the coalface as a senior manager in one of the UK’s largest companies – BT.

Most businesses are people businesses in some shape or form. You rely on both the skill and intelligence of your staff in any given situation to keep the wheels rolling on the right track. That isn’t to say that those skills can’t be improved though…

It’s a part of any manager’s role to work with his or her people, giving them regular constructive feedback and helping to improve skill gaps. No end of year appraisal should be a surprise to the appraisee. These days there are lots of ways to address skill gaps from the traditional face to face course, through management books to the more modern and innovative online courses like The 8.45 Club. (unprompted – Ed).

Over the years I have only ever had one person push back about learning or improving skills, and that person was almost terminally self critical and lacking in confidence. Over time we addressed this by discussion and their attendance on a course on self perception. Later this manager was able to run and successfully manage a team of 40 disparate staff. The comment was made to me by the manager that they were now doing things that they never thought they would be capable of. It’s great to see this happen.

An important point from my perspective is that this isn’t about finding a course and putting the person on it. You can help to define the skills gap, but they need to take the action to select and get on the course. I hate it when the trainer goes around the room asking why people are there and someone says ‘my boss sent me’. Its not a good start and frequently those people just don’t get as much out of the training.

When you have a high performing team, you’ll know not just from the quality of the output but also from the fact that your colleagues keep poaching your people ‘because they’re so good’. It’s frustrating perhaps, but there is really no bigger compliment.

Ian Mash will be back with more pearls of wisdom in the next couple of weeks and can be contacted on +44 7860 621976 and via email at ian dot mash1 at btinternet.com