For people making payroll, by people making payroll
For people making payroll, by people making payroll
November 7th, 2009
When you created your last ad, did you have a specific plan? Or did you just get on camera and yell “I’M CRAZY! I’VE GOT CRAZY PRICES! SO COME ON DOWN!”?
It’s so easy to create the same old ad that says “sigh, we’re here, yawn, snore.”
And sometimes, maybe that’s just what you need. But not usually. Whether you are doing a TV ad, something for a magazine, a direct mail piece, whatever – have a purpose.
This is something I just hadn’t thought much about until Laura showed me an ad map. All you have to do is ask yourself 4 simple questions:
This is one of the easier things you can do to improve your advertising, so why wait? Dive in right now!
Think about this for everything your customer sees. Are you asking those questions for how you answer the phone, your logo, letterhead, marketing materials, vehicles, business cards? Each of those should have been created while asking questions 1 & 3 and should be designed to reinforce your desired answers to questions 2 & 4.
We’d love to see some of yours! Please post a comment and tell us how it went (or even post your answers if you feel like sharing).
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Popularity: 26% [?]
Posted in Marketing and Selling | Comments Off
October 9th, 2009
You can give your customers that little extra personal touch with note cards. Little things like this have surprising power to help you stand out from your competition.
Handwritten notes are uncommon these days, so people notice and remember it favorably when you send one. This is particularly true if you are in sales, consulting, or any personal service business. But really, almost any business is ultimately a “personal service business”, so pay attention!
You should already have a set of postcards for mailing personal notes to customers and friends. Treat note cards as another weapon in your personal touch arsenal. Here’s one of mine:
Attach a note to a something you want to send to a client or colleague:
If I find a local newspaper article on one of my customers, I’ll cut it out, scribble a quick note of congratulations on my note card, and drop it in the mail to them.
It’s more “efficient” to scan and email it, but it’s not nearly as personal. Used judiciously, it’s different enough to get noticed. It says, “I took the time to send this to you,” much more effectively than anything that arrives on your computer (though scanning and emailing may actually take you longer).
Lisa, our bookkeeper at Conditioned Air Solutions, often adds note cards to account statements and overdue invoices during her regular collections process. It adds a personal touch and often gets some attention when other things are tossed.
We also have some blank cards (similar to mine but with no name or email address) that we use around the office for people who need one occasionally, but not often enough to justify printing personalized ones. It’s much better to write on a blank one than have to take someone else’s and scribble out their name and put your own. Note cards are cheap, though, so if you think this is worthwhile, don’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Make sure anyone who could profitably use them has some available.
If you want some of your own, any printer to whom you show this article should be able to make yours easily. You can also go to any of a gazillion web sites such as 123PRINT. You have my permission to use mine as a template.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Posted in Marketing and Selling | Comments Off
September 30th, 2009
Comanche Marketing has a terrific series of articles on boosting your average sale (#2 of The Three Ways). One that caught my eye was to use your fax cover page as a marketing tool. Wow, what a great idea!
So I decided to do that. That was the easy part. But how would I start? Right about there is where I usually grind to a halt. Maybe you have this problem, too: we have a great idea, but no clue where to start, so we just sigh and move on.
You know the phrase “the best is the enemy of the good”? In this context, it means if I don’t see how to do the best possible fax cover sheet ad, I won’t do it at all. Ryan and I have been masters at this excuse.
But let’s face it: it’s pretty hard to mess up a fax cover sheet. Just try something. As long as you don’t do something offensive (use a little judgment, right?), you’ll be OK. If you use coupons, slap one on there. If your customers need to come see you, post your hours. If you are a restaurant, post a description of your best dish. If you are anyone, just post a bunch of customer testimonials (you do have some, right?).
So how did I do it? Well, I was fast out of the gate, and my graphic designer gave me exactly what I asked for:
While it was exactly what I asked, it had looked better in my head than it did on the screen. So far, no big deal.
But then I made the Big Mistake: since I didn’t know what to do next, I did nothing. What I should have done was start using this right away and move on to something else. It was far better marketing than the standard cover sheet we had always used. But I didn’t. I failed to remember that this is only a fax cover sheet – I can change it next week and every week forever if I want. I’m not paying for a huge stack of brochures that have to be as good as possible the first time. It isn’t an earth-shattering deal that will make or break my company. It’s simply another little thing I can do to push us ahead.
Even though I knew better, I let the best be the enemy of the good. After spending far too much time on it, I wound up with testimonials:
Is this perfect? Not by a long shot. Is it good enough? Probably. Is it better than a vanilla cover sheet? Definitely.
So here’s what I’m doing: I’m declaring this done and asking the office staff to use it. If they need more space to write, we’ll fix it. We’ll tweak it as we need to, and if one day someone has a brainstorm about something better to put on here, we’ll change it.
You can do this easily. Don’t take weeks on yours like I did on mine. If you want to promote your company in this way, pick something and do it! Understand the risk of it not being perfect (very low) and adjust your time/money/energy investment accordingly.
Popularity: 55% [?]
Posted in Marketing and Selling | 1 Comment »
September 5th, 2009
New companies that want to succeed based on really great service have always started at a disadvantage.
The disadvantage is you can’t really advertise that. You can claim to offer great service in your ads, but since everyone else says it, too, nobody has reason to believe you.
You see, you have to prove you provide great service before people will be willing to choose you on that basis. Proving how good your service really is to a customer only takes one opportunity. But proving it to your whole marketplace takes a long, long time.
Conditioned Air has been in business for 5 1/2 years, and focused on superior customer service the whole time. That’s been great for our customers (our customer turnover rate is very low for our industry). Yet after all that time, not nearly enough people know about us. We add new customers daily, but the vast majority of people in our market still haven’t had a chance to try us out.
Many service businesses focus on bringing in as many new customers as possible, as fast as possible. They have to constantly rush new customers in the front door by hook or crook, since their current customers are escaping out the back door the first chance they get because the service is bad.
If you really do offer great service, you don’t lose as many customers, and don’t have to spend as much money acquiring new customers to replace the ones fleeing. In the long run, it’s a great strategy to build a large and loyal customer base.
But the short- and medium-term problem remains: how is a prospective customer to know how good your service really is until they try you? And if your main competitive advantage is great service, how do you convince them to give you a shot?
How does anyone know who actually delivers and who doesn’t? Personal recommendations are great. But relying on traditional word-of-mouth is tough, because a good reputation spreads slowly and unevenly that way.
Now along comes Angie’s List, what I consider the Amazon book ranking of the service industry. I buy a lot from Amazon – pretty much any time I plan to buy something, I check them first. One big reason is the helpful customer reviews (for an example, see one of my favorite business books). They’ve helped me see through advertising and hype many times.
That’s what Angie’s List does for service companies. What you see there are raw customer opinions about thousands of contractors. Conditioned Air can’t influence the wording, can’t pay to change anything to make us look better. About all any company can do is offer a discount coupon or pay a small amount to be highlighted within their ranking. But if a customer is unhappy with the service they got and gives them a low ranking, it’s there for the world to see. Here is how it looks:
[September 2009 - removed screen shot of Conditioned Air's current rating due to this email from Angie's List Brand Enforcement Coordinator: Thanks for the write up in your online article and for sharing it with us! I am happy to pass along the online article to our PR department, but I also want to follow up with you in regards to Angie’s List brand guidelines. We appreciate your commitment to excellent customer service and your presence as an advertiser on our list. While we hope that high ratings on Angie’s List are a mark of pride for both business owners and employees, we must still monitor how service providers promote this recognition in order to maintain the value of our brand.
Angie’s List Brand Enforcement primarily follows up with those that have unauthorized references to the Angie’s List trademarked name or logo on their company websites and online listings or advertisements. We understand service providers want to promote their inclusion on Angie’s List, and we do make some allowances to reference Angie’s List on social networking websites such as blogs, Twitter and in this case, an article. In general, Angie’s List name can be referenced in postings, but we do not allow companies to reference ratings because these ratings may be accurate one day, but not the next. Additionally, Angie’s List does not authorize duplication of website content, which is copyrighted.
Angie’s List asks that the screen shot of a ratings page from our private member website is removed from the article. I included a screen shot of the article below for your reference. We ask that this change is made by the end of the next week (Sept. 18), to meet compliance within Angie’s List brand guidelines.
Thank you for your time and the opportunity to clarify Angie’s List brand guidelines. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you ever have questions about our guidelines. I would be happy to assist you.]
Does that mean Conditioned Air gets nothing but A ratings? No, any business will eventually have some unhappy customers. But for the real customer service pros, the unhappy few will be drowned out by the many positive reviews. And what you will see is a bunch of unbiased, detailed customer opinions that you can read to decide who to hire.
How cool is that? I love it because it lets us shine through our customer’s words, not our own. It sorts out the pretenders, even the ones spending lavishly on huge Yellow Page and constant media ads. There is no hiding bad service in the Angie’s List world.
As the world gets more and more connected, and information gets more easily accessible by the people who need it, I think we are going to see lots of inefficiencies like this go away. No more having to just try some contractor (or dentist or doctor or car dealer) based on one or two data points (or much worse, their advertising budget). You’ll now be able to instantly see what people just like you have received from whomever you are thinking of using.
I say it’s about time!
Popularity: 60% [?]
Tags: Angie's List, customer retention, ranking
Posted in Customer Service, Marketing and Selling | Comments Off
August 22nd, 2009
You want to increase your sales? There are only three ways to do it:
So when you’re trying to figure out how to sell more, focus on these three things. If you can’t see clearly how some new idea will help one (or more) of those three things, toss it. It’s a waste of time.
Let’s look at each in a little more detail:
1. Selling to more customers is all about increasing traffic. Adding new customers is probably the first thing people think of when they put on their ‘marketing’ cap. It’s great to have more customers. But it’s not the only way to increase your sales, and it’s not always the best way.
Crazy? Not really. We talk a lot here about customer service. Paying proper attention to every facet of your interaction with your customers really sets you apart. But the more customers you have to deal with, the harder and more expensive this is to do well.
Acquiring new customers is pretty expensive, too. Estimates range from 2x to 7x the cost for acquiring a new customer versus retaining an old one. Don’t forget your existing customers are a valuable asset to you.
2. Selling more to each customer will allow you to sell more without increasing your customer service load from the higher number of relationships. Your existing customers buy from you because they’ve already decided that they like or trust you, or what you sell. They’ve already chosen you over your competition, so why not take advantage of that and offer them some more things they can buy from you?
Now, a little caution is in order: you have to stay focused on what you do well. Just because someone likes your ladies’ hat store, that doesn’t mean you should also open up an auto parts section inside. But within the “what you do well” arena, is there more you could do without significantly altering your business or your processes? Zappo’s started out selling shoes, then added handbags. Shoes and handbags don’t look much alike, but they share a lot of characteristics important to Zappo’s business: easy to ship, good margins, and huge overlap among the customer bases.
Your job is to think about who already buys from you, find out what they want (which you can do by asking them), and see if you can sell them some of that, too.
3. Selling more often to each customer is about frequency. Even with people that like you and what you do or sell, it’s easy to forget you’re there. One of the most important things you can do to keep a past customer a future customer is to find ways to remind them you’re there (without annoying them).
Lots of retail stores have sales for just this reason. They’re not really eager to get less for what they sell (that sort of violates #2 above), but they’ve learned that people are almost always happy to be contacted about a chance to save some money.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with running sales (there’s a lot that is wrong with how it’s normally done, but that’s another post some day). But you don’t want to sell less in return for more often. What you need to be thinking about is how to bring your customer into your store more often without bribing them to come there.
That’s it: only three things. Find ways to increase each of them without sacrificing either of the others. Increase all three together and Good Things will happen.
Popularity: 59% [?]
Tags: marketing, sales
Posted in Marketing and Selling | Comments Off
August 17th, 2009
Here’s an easy way to prospect for new business that doesn’t require cold calling, “confrontation”, or selling.
When you leave a restaurant, coffee shop, etc., just leave your business card on the table. I left this one at an Atlanta Bread Company after a meeting there.
Sure, it will get tossed, over and over, until the time it doesn’t. That time, someone who needs what you do will see it, take it, and contact you. [Wait: does your business card give a pretty clear idea of what you do? If not, this may not work for you until you get some better business cards. What else do you want a business card to do?]
That’s what it’s about: getting your name and your service in front of lots of people until you find a person who needs what you do. To them, it’s not selling, it’s a solution to a problem.
Successful businesspeople are always marketing, always selling. Not the smarmy, in-your-face, buy-this-from-me-right-now kind, but finding ways to let people know what they do and who they are, so that people who need them can find them.
This one habit won’t make you successful by itself. But if you do as many things like this as you can think of, over and over, that will.
Popularity: 43% [?]
Tags: business card, marketing
Posted in Marketing and Selling | 2 Comments »
August 8th, 2009
Becky McCray at Small Biz Survival recently asked if the Yellow Pages still matter for local businesses. It ends with some valuable lessons, including this one:
If you do advertise, track your results. And don’t fall into the “just one more year” trap. If it doesn’t generate enough business to pay for itself, kill the ad.
We’ve wondered whether we were spending too much on our Yellow Pages and Yellow Book ads (the two directories available here in Huntsville, AL). Because the Yellow Book is less popular, I had decided to drop its ads, and was considering a smaller Yellow Pages ad, too. After all, phone book usage appears to be declining, and how many calls could we be getting from the second-place phone book? Right?
Before we gave our rep the bad news, Ryan decided to check our Switchvox incoming call logs. In a moment of unusual cleverness, we’d used a different phone number in our Yellow Book ad this year, so we knew calls to that number had to come from Yellow Book users.
What we found proved once again that you shouldn’t trust your instincts if you have any way to measure instead.
It turns out we were averaging 9 calls per week to the Conditioned Air Yellow Book number and 5 calls per week to the Focus Electric number. Wow! That’s around 60 calls per month.
While it’s not perfect (some of those may have already been planning to call us and just picked up that book to find the number), 60 calls per month for what we were paying was a great deal. So instead of dropping the Yellow Book ads, we’re even adding Greenway Plumbing to it this year.
None of this means we disagree with the Small Biz Blog piece’s major premise. The evidence is unavoidable that print directories are becoming less relevant each year. We’d hate to be in that business.
But the moral of this story — like so many others — is you really don’t know what’s happening until you measure it.
Popularity: 84% [?]
Posted in Marketing and Selling | 4 Comments »
August 3rd, 2009
When I wrote the Top 10 Reasons to choose Conditioned Air Solutions, the one I may have been the most passionate about was #6 – “we want your feedback”.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that whenever I get great service I usually find that I have an easy way to give the business feedback. I recently visited Sweet Peppers Deli for the first time and it was great! Friendly people, clean place, great food, excellent service…and sure enough, a postage paid comment card on each table with plenty of room for me to tell them as much or as little as I liked. And just as sure, on Ryan’s not-so-positive eating experience a while back, there was no card for him to fill out.
“That’s great”, you may be thinking, “but how do I do that for my business?” That’s why we’re here today: to see exactly how you can start getting regular feedback from your customers. I’m going to show you how both Sweet Peppers (from my customer perspective) and Conditioned Air (from my business owner perspective) do it, and some of the thinking behind that.
Both start with an old fashioned tool: a post card. Let’s take a look at Sweet Peppers’:
Note a few important things while you think about what you want to ask your own customers:
I’m not sure how this could be much easier for me as a customer, and that’s critical: the easier it is for them, the more feedback you’ll receive.
Now let’s look at Conditioned Air’s:
The first thing you may notice is the differences in the cards that are driven by the differences in our businesses. When we designed our card, some of our goals were general and some specific to our business:
If you think you need something like this for your business, here is exactly how to implement your own customer feedback system in the form of a post card. But first, a warning: if you do this halfway you’ll do more damage than good. If you don’t have the ability to regularly deliver the cards to your customers, or if you can’t consistently follow up on any negative comments, or if you aren’t able (or willing) to actually take the feedback to heart and make changes, then don’t do it. But if you can do these things, then here we go:
This isn’t rocket science, but it does require a bit of organization, discipline, and a desire to get better. If you have those you can have a steady way to improve both your customer relations and your performance.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Posted in Customer Service, Marketing and Selling | 3 Comments »
July 13th, 2009
Steve Olsen writes about finding the right location for your business. It’s an interesting piece with a lot of good advice, but this stood out to me:
Several years ago, we almost opened a traditional retail book store[...]. We never signed the lease. The rent was right, but the taxes were too high. In Minnesota, retail tax rates are out of control. In our case the taxes were 4x the rent. High tax rates keep small family owned business like ours out of the prime locations. The problem is, no one in government seems to care. When I recently mentioned the problem to a government official, she replied, “If you can’t afford the taxes, you can’t afford to be in business.”
This is a hard thing to fix. If you live in openly business-hostile states like Minnesota and California, this sort of thing is common. You can move to a more business-friendly place. But that’s a pretty drastic step. For a lot of new entrepreneurs, losing their networks of contacts and their knowledge of the local business environment might outweigh the advantages of a friendlier tax clime.
Steve continues:
We decided against renting traditional retail space, in high rent areas (for now). Even in a recession, when the landlords reduce rent to attract tenants, the government doesn’t budge on taxes. The only viable solution for us was to rent a location zoned showroom/industrial where the taxes are 1/3rd of traditional retail.
99 of the next 100 books you read on retail business will tell you the three most important things are “location, location, location”. Most people evaluate a retail location based on customer traffic, rent, appearance, parking, and the like. But you have to consider a lot of other factors when determining whether a business location is “good” or “bad”. A critical part of doing your homework before you commit to a business lease is finding out what sort of non-rent costs you’re going to pay to operate there.
Here are just a few:
Finally, don’t be in a hurry, and don’t fall in love with a particular business location before you know whether it’s going to love you back. Quoting Steve again:
In business you need to make more money than you spend. If you can’t do that, you don’t have a viable business. And if you need a bricks and mortar location for your business, rent/mortgages can wipe you out.
But keep in mind it has to be a win-win for you and the property owner and finding the right location is going to take time. We have been passively looking for years, and actively searching for over nine months.
Got good advice for locating and evaluating property? Did I miss something? Leave us a comment and let us know!
Popularity: 78% [?]
Posted in Finances, Marketing and Selling | 4 Comments »
