Corve Consultancy - Marketing for UK SMEs

Do as I say and as I do!

2009-10-12T08:33:00.000+01:00

I’m always telling my clients that blogging is a great, informal way to communicate with their stakeholders. I also try to ensure that for those businesses reliant on natural ranking, a blog forms an integral part of their web site. But while these things work well for clients, it has very much been a case of do as I say not as I do!

And yet so much happens every day in my world of advising on business and marketing strategy around greater Manchester that I need to be more focussed and keep sharing it! Last week was a good case in point. On Monday the activity was target marketing. My client has previously taken a very unspecific approach to target sectors and never had the patience to drill down into sectors and target the prospects where there is complete synergy between my clients competitive positioning and the absolute needs of the newly identified market niche.

Why bother was their question. My answer was that in today’s communications environment, if our marketing messages are not appropriate, intelligent and compelling, we run the twin risks of being ignored or being outsmarted by the competitor who understands that successful marketing communications is about the audience not the sender. Why do so few people get that in Business 2 Business – it’s a basic?

Last Wednesday we were further back up the strategic marketing chain. A client in central Manchester has had a great new idea to develop an additional service offering from his company. I think innovation is about the most exciting thing going. As we challenged his idea it just kept being reinforced. So now we have the opportunity to develop intelligent and compelling market entry strategies and help his business to add another successful service string to its bow.

For he’s a jolly good fellow!

2009-08-04T15:22:00.001+01:00

It was only a month ago that I received the honour of being awarded the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s Member of the Year 2009 for the North West of England.

>> Click here to read more

To get the recognition of your peers for the work you do delivering business strategy, marketing strategy and marketing communications consultancy to Manchester, Cheshire and North West based owner managed businesses was terrific.

Working in my spare time as the CIM’s Greater Manchester Ambassador to SME’s is also something that contributed to this award, but to be honest, being able to use that role to spread the word about best practice strategic and tactical marketing is not a hardship.

I’d only just got over this when I was advised that the Chartered Institute had awarded me a Fellowship, which in tandem with my Chartered Marketer status is about as good as it gets! Looking back to 2001 when Corve Consultancy was emerging from the shadows of a twenty five year career in corporate finance, I never thought I’d be Chartered, let alone receive these other awards and recognitions.

It’s humbling – I now truly consider myself a marketer by profession, qualification and vocation – my corporate finance past is at last laid to rest!

Presentation to Business Bolton - 10th February 2009

2009-02-11T07:54:00.003Z

Presentation to Business Bolton 10th February 2009

Yesterday, I had the privilege of addressing 140 SMEs during a Business Bolton event held at the Reebok Stadium. The theme was marketing in recession, something which I’m working on all the time as Corve Consultancy develops business strategy, marketing strategy and marketing communications programmes for our clients around Manchester, Cheshire and the North West.

This is a transcript of the presentation.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen and my thanks to Business Bolton for inviting the Chartered Institute of Marketing to be a key partner in this event.

I’m Jeremy Bassett. Eight years ago, after more than 25 years in domestic and international corporate finance, I set up a Strategic Marketing Consultancy which is now based in South Manchester and in my spare time I’m proud to be the Chartered Institute of Marketing’s SME Ambassador for Greater Manchester, bringing information and initiatives to SMEs through events just like this.

Tonight I’m joined by five colleagues who are also Chartered Marketers and we will be available during the evening to discuss business and marketing strategy, as well as tactical marketing communications issues with as many of you as we can meet.

Now is not the time to cower in our shells and hope this whole recession thing passes by. If you fear the economic change that is upon us, the consequences for you will be poor results, bad decisions and for many – job losses.

On the other hand, if you embrace change, build a plan to capitalise upon it and lead your company with the attitude of being stronger as a result, you will find that the bumpy ride ahead can be more enjoyable with a positive focus and a determined approach to tackling the challenge.

Tonight we are going to explore some ways to take this philosophy and transfer it from a PowerPoint presentation into the real world of SME businesses.

We only have 20 minutes or so and even Gordon Brown needed longer than that to save the world, so we won’t be covering everything. But we do have a Q&A session at the end of this part to pick up on some of the issues raised, or to talk about things I won’t have had time to mention.

So what can we do?

I think the first thing is to remember that we must not become invisible, either as a business, or as the business owner during a recession. It is imperative that we maintain our communications expenditure to generate properly planned promotional activity and exposure.

This may mean trying to do more with less resource, but we must ensure that we keep strong differentiated messages about our products and services in front of our most fertile audiences.

So how do we differentiate our messages? Well the first rule is to talk about our customers and what they value, instead of talking about our own organisations and products! Remember nobody wants an electric drill – they want a hole! Revlon don’t sell cosmetics, they sell hope; Sony doesn’t sell electronics, they sell entertainment.

But also remember Woolworths – what on earth did they stand for? They lost their competitive positioning to the supermarkets and the pound stores a long time ago and the only thing that really differentiated Woolworths was pick and mix. You cannot sustain a major high street retail presence on pick and mix!

So we need to really understand what our businesses bring to market and start to talk about this aspiration in terms that our customers will recognise, understand and respond to.

Now is also the time to look for alliances amongst our business contacts. Bundling together elements of our products and services to make a broader, stronger more competitive offering, as a result of a partnership or joint venture, may help both parties increase market share.

Again this is about understanding exactly what is in the mind of our target market and thinking how we can best augment our offering and deal a blow to competitors who maybe acting slowly and cautiously.

Along side this is a root and branch review of our products and services in relation to a recessionary economy. Just how relevant is our offering today, compared to two years ago before the downturn really kicked in? Is it now time to develop or modify our offerings as a way of maintaining differentiation and competitiveness?

Now is the time to consider innovation and product development. Many businesses are now reassessing their core products and services, with a view to either augmenting or streamlining them. They want them to fit the economic circumstances that will prevail for another year or so, and the shift in customer needs and wants that will occur as a result.

Being different will help us to compete without lowering our prices – and remember in any developed market, 90% of customers would prefer to buy on non-price reasons and pay some level of premium price for perceived additional value. Only 10% will always buy the cheapest – because they don’t care about that category of goods or services.

Even in an undeveloped market, a proportion of customers will still prefer to pay premium price for some additional value. A larger proportion may appear to want the cheapest but they will have latent needs that have not yet been identified and exploited.

Of course, the smart businesses are those that find the latent, undiscovered needs of the market and exploit them first. But even then, expect a residual 10% to always buy the cheapest.

Being the cheapest is not a no-no strategy in a recession – look at Poundland who have reported record sales and profits. The secret is to be able to guarantee sustaining a critical mass of volume sales sufficient to deliver break even plus.

Here is one way to secure sales on price without necessarily slashing prices. Many online retailers, as well as businesses using the web to attract offline customers, are now running 30 day campaigns with adwords based on low cost phrases like “best deal”, “highly discounted” or “lowest price available”. In this way the cost conscious Googler is drawn to the proposition looking for a deal and providing there is a deal, which need not be at rock bottom price, you may just have a new customer!

We all have three core target markets to address; our existing customers, those who have actively enquired but not purchased and our prime prospective audience. First of all, let’s look at our existing customer base. In hard times we need to be so close to the people who already spend with us.

They are converted and our challenge is to increase the share of wallet we receive. How do we do this? We look for ways to add value to their relationship with us – not necessarily at a cost to them.

Consider one strategy – resolve to stop issuing bland communications and start serving the customer. As an example, there are so many businesses that send out a monthly newsletter with the fierce discipline of an Olympic athlete. They are dead set on getting that email out at 10.00am on the second Tuesday of each month and will drop everything to make sure it goes.

But has there ever been a flood of incoming phone calls if by 10.01am the email has not arrived – no of course there hasn’t, which should make us wonder long and hard about the value of that piece of communication.

Try this – instead of clinging to old newsletter habits, create segmented email campaigns for your different groups of customers with highly relevant information that will be of most interest to them. I’m presently working with a large firm of accountants in the south of England that has over 3000 clients.

Every half year they produce and send out a pre budget or budget report – you know the eight page booklet we all get from our accountants. Actually they don’t even produce it, there’s a company that produce a job lot of these things for over two hundred UK firms with different covers!

This firm has clients across the whole economy; manufacturers, retailers, service companies, leisure businesses, private sector, public sector, SME, quoted companies, high net worth individuals, the lot.

Until they segment effectively and deliver information that is specific, relevant and informative to each of the segments they serve, they might as well burn the money in the street for all the effect it has. They need to start spending on relevancy and segmentation as do all of us.

As a client, I want tax and general financial information that has relevance to the size of my turnover, the size of my payroll, the sector that I operate in, the age and net worth of the directors of my business, even the amount of capital equipment I use. I don’t want bland generalities that could be applicable to anyone and end up being applicable to no-one.

If we all resurrect those dead enquiries we received over the last two years, by delivering a sector specific personalised communication, that has relevancy to the prospect and integrates our products or services into the solution, then our chances of reopening negotiations will be the highest possible. This is also true as we approach the low hanging fruit amongst our primary target audiences. We must make all our communications relevant in the world of the audience – not our world

Reaching all these people electronically is both feasible and cost effective for the SME, but it begs one huge question - what are you going to do about that website of yours?

For SMEs the web is the most extensive and cost effective media we can work. So what have we all done to make our business visible, to make our site one that the market bookmarks? And what do we offer from our site that keeps customers and prospects returning week after week?

Placing relevant informative and specific bulletins on our website in direct copy, or via an integrated blog, is one of the best ways to add value to our customer segments and to raise our natural ranking.

While we’re on the subject, let’s kill a few myths on Search Engine Optimisation. You don’t need some pointy headed guru or, even worse, some smooth salesman to improve your website rankings.

There are a series of simple straightforward things you need to do, like getting rid of flash components; embedding keywords to each page; correctly structuring your page headings; using internal and external links; choosing the right search terms and making sure your site is properly listed, which Google, MSN and the other key search engines will acknowledge and respond to in terms of raising your position.

And then you need to keep refreshing your content on a regular basis, twice a month at least, to demonstrate a dynamic site that the search engines will recognise. None of this is particularly expensive!

With the support of my web sub contractor I have moved my own website and that of numerous clients to the front page of Google on particular key search terms in as short a time as two months.

It also pays dividends to have our website copy reviewed by professional copywriters from time to time. Being a great engineer, retailer or solicitor, knowing our sector and our organisation inside out, does not meant that we are the best person to write about it. Hundreds of good looking marketing communications are ruined by inadequate or inappropriate copywriting.

This may give you an example of what I mean. Just out of interest how many of us have a page on our website entitled “About Us”? And how many have a page aimed at our audiences entitled “About You”.

At any time, but particularly in these difficult times, do please remember that as a buyer I am not interested in you. I am only interested in what’s in it for me and I want to be told quickly, succinctly and in a way that demonstrates competitive advantage in my purchase!

Make sure your content reflects this – in all communications, not just online

As we communicate now, in a recession, we need to think about whether we should update our messages as well as use more creative targeting to reach both new and existing markets. We need to determine whether the media we are using to carry our messages is still the most appropriate. Markets and individuals change their behaviour when times get tough and this can offer new options and new opportunities.

Two related things – the unenlightened will have cut back their marketing and training budgets – how daft is that? It has never failed to amaze me that in tough times the marketing budget gets cut first – but do you know what – I know exactly why that happens and I entirely understand it!

It’s because many businesses look at their tactical marketing communications activity and say “well it didn’t work” – and on many occasions they are right.

This is because so many businesses go straight into direct marketing, advertising, PR, personal selling and sales promotions without any thought as to who they are trying to reach, what competitive position they are trying to hold, what competitive advantages they offer to the market against their rivals and how they are going to sustain a communications programme over a 12 month period.

Remember, marketing is for life not just for Christmas! Unfortunately so many seem to see it a as a random or haphazard activity when no one can think of anything else to do!

They bang out a mailer or buy a hopelessly inappropriate piece of ad space and then when it doesn’t deliver a doubling of turnover they castigate the marketing department and they cut the budget!

I’ll only say one vaguely promotion thing about the Chartered Institute of Marketing tonight – you wouldn’t seek advice on a building from an un-chartered surveyor or take strategic financial advice from an un-Chartered Accountant – please don’t fall into the same trap with marketing – there’s a very good reason why it takes a long time and huge commitment to qualify as a Chartered Marketer – do please use the many resources our Institute offers to all businesses at http://www.cim.co.uk/

The second thing about new options in a recession is that there are still a lot of very good businesses out there who are already doing all the things we are talking about, and more, because they understand the fantastic opportunities that exist for good businesses during hard times.

They are still creating lots of noise in the market and you have to make sure that your target audiences not only get to hear your messages, but they keep tripping over them in all the places they go – online and offline.

At the other end of the scale to my accountancy client I mentioned earlier, I work with a one man hypnotherapist and counsellor. He doesn’t have a big marketing budget at all, but through the adroit use of free advertising and networking we’ve got his weekly appointments up from 10 to 36 within the space of three months. It’s cost him £30 so far and he’s trebled his weekly income!

Free advertising and networking in his local area has got him right in the faces of people who want to lose weight, stop smoking or needed to talk about relationship issues during January, which is traditionally splitting up and divorce month.

Free advertising is particularly appropriate in B2C – business to consumer environments. People congregate in all sorts of different places – churches, libraries, supermarkets, leisure centres, bus stations, coffee shops, and so on. It is entirely legitimate to seek out ways to get your messages visible in these places. This is what a new start firm of Solicitors that I worked with did, all over Derbyshire, and built a huge a new book of business on the back of it.

We’ll talk more about what we can do as individual business owners in a while, but we owe it to our organisations to be out flying the flag at every appropriate – and I stress the word appropriate – opportunity. You know which business groups your customers and targets will attend and you know which ones offer you a route to market. Make sure you use them, as both my hypnotherapy client and the solicitors did.

Not everyone will enjoy their level of success for that return on investment, and it is important for us to understand the type of business we are trying to win when we spend money on marketing communications so do be clear about the level of profit that each new order will generate.

This allows us to directly relate these figures to our communications costs and to calculate the success rate required and the ultimate return on investment. In tight financial times, return on investment is important and you may consider focussing on tangible marketing tactics where ROI can be most easily measured. Tactics like direct mail and e-mailshots are two that can easily be quantified by cost and return.

Now let’s talk about the people we know.

And I’m going to recommend two sets of actions for each of us. One is strategic and one is tactical under the heading of personal selling.

First the business and marketing strategy suggestion. Have a staff meeting. Sit down with all your employees and ask them what they would like and dislike about the business if they were a customer. What they perceive today, your customers will perceive and believe tomorrow.

Let them be the owner for an hour and uncover what the first three things are they would do to make the business, the products, the services or the delivery, better for your customers. Internal marketing is vastly underrated within SMEs – the feedback may surprise you and may help you unlock new competitive advantages for these times.

Now the marketing communications part, and as we said at the start, now is not the time to be invisible. Draw up a list of all the people you know or you ought to know, who could be or who should be referrers to, and advocates for, your business.

Meet up with at least three of these people a month as you are out and about visiting your existing customer base.

Why are you visiting your existing customer base – because this is part of your strategy to increase share of wallet. We all need, continuously, to sound out each and every one of our customers about what they would do if they were in our shoes, to maintain and increase our business relationship.

This works.

I spend a large part of my time talking to my clients’ customers, finding out the good the bad and the indifferent, so we can plan to build on the good, eradicate the bad and galvanize the indifferent during the coming months. You can do this for yourselves and I strongly recommend it, you’d be surprised how much people are prepared to share their views and ideas with you.

Finally, one of my colleagues at the back of the room has coined a great expression for businesses during this recession. Go from fat to fit.

So many businesses have gorged and become fat in the good times. Best practice has slipped and complacency has set in. Now is the time to get fit again and stop doing the things that are wasteful and not cost effective. We could all recalculate a new efficiency based break even and do more of the good things a healthy business should do.

This is the fifth recession I have experienced in my working career – one in each decade. However this one is different. Previously there was always a strategy called “I’ll get the bank to lend me some more money to cover my inadequacies and I’ll ride out the storm”.

Well we all know that’s not going to happen this time, so reverting to the efficient, best practice based organisation that was able to take such strong advantage of the good times, seems like a plan to me.

We all need to keep going. In the end, it is much cheaper to maintain or grow share of mind, share of market and share of wallet during a recession than it is to try and come back and build it all up again later, and I hope this evening’s event will end up benefitting each and every business in the room. Thank you.

Now, along with my colleague Dawn Holmes – Regional Chairman of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, I’ll gladly take any questions from the floor for the next few minutes.

2008 – Did you achieve your objectives?

2008-12-04T12:18:00.002Z

So as another year draws to a rather chilly end, it’s a good time to check back and see if the 2008 business strategy really did come to fruition. As a marketing strategist I’m fervent about focusing my clients on their short and medium term objectives, ensuring that they always have clear but challenging financial goals to get them out of bed each day.

This year has been a year of change for Corve Consultancy. As from January 1st, the focus of the business finally moved away from North East Wales and a new strategy was implemented to reposition providing business support in Manchester, Cheshire and the North West of England. It was a natural progression. A long standing contract with the Welsh Assembly Government had run its course which meant that Corve Consultancy no longer had to be domiciled in the Principality.

Reluctantly we vacated the offices in Rhosllanerchrugog’s beautiful STIWT Theatre and finally took possession of the new office built into the garden of the house in Cheshire and affectionately nicknamed by the children as The Hut. Then it was down to the serious stuff. With one exception, all the Welsh work was terminated and so Corve Consultancy had an almost clean slate to develop new contacts and a new client base - almost like starting again from scratch!

So time to employ the advice that I give to so many other SMEs, about doing a few simple things well, to get the new business ball rolling. I scoured the Cheshire area for a business club to join. I’m not a big fan of the BNI set up, just my opinion, it’s very popular and obviously does a good job for many, but its format is not for me.

So I was delighted to discover the County Business Club based at Edgeley Park, the home of Stockport County – a ground where I’ve never seen my team (Wolves) lose! This is a good club with around 40 members who turn up regularly every Thursday morning to network, refer business and have a bit of fun. As I’ve said before, networking is about the people you can meet through the people you meet.

And while some of the members at CBC have referred business to me directly and have also used my services themselves, it is the people I have met as a result of introductions from them that have been the real contributors to establishing Corve Consultancy as a North West facing business.

Whenever I’ve been involved in networking clubs, I’ve always tried to discover early on who the prodigious networkers are and unashamedly try and leverage the extra work they do at the array of other clubs and meetings they attend. Anyway as a result of my involvement at CBC I’ve now replaced the Welsh Assembly Government work with my involvement in the delivery of a high growth programme for SMEs under the ultimate aegis of the North West Development Agency.

As a Chartered Marketer, I’m listed in the Consultants Database on the CIM website. It took a while for the CIM to get up to speed in terms of offering this service – they were a long way behind the Chartered Institutes that represent accountants and solicitors. But two years or so on, the database has been another excellent source of new business for Corve Consultancy.

It’s a nice payback, because as the CIM’s SME Ambassador for Greater Manchester, I do considerable unpaid work to promote the institute and further the cause of making high level marketing strategy and marketing communications available to SMEs. This involves providing marketing clinics at business fairs and shows across the North West and Cheshire as well as undertaking one off evening events for groups of SMEs who just want more information about business strategy in these difficult times.

So why do these times seem more difficult than the other recessions I’ve experienced in my working lifetime and what does that mean for the profile of marketing and business strategy?

Well in the recessions of the early 1990’s, the 80’s and the seventies there was still an ocean of lending around to help businesses weather the storm. I was working in business finance during each of those eras and we prospered as there was a greater demand for borrowing from home and abroad.

Today, as we all know, after laying waste the last generation of proper lenders and replacing them with children who do some form of credit scoring and call it analysis, the banking chickens have well and truly come home to roost. Hardly surprising really – lending is an art not a science and machines programmed by the inexperienced will never get right.

So today business finance is at a premium and while it is available in small pockets, here and there, if you know where to look and how to apply, the well has almost run dry and businesses are having to face up to the fact that using additional working capital to paper over the cracks of a poor business strategy is no longer and option.

What I’m seeing, is more and more owner managers turning to Chartered Marketers to take advice on marketing strategy because this is the way to reorganize and secure the right future for a business rather than hiding the inadequacies under a carpet of additional business finance.

But how has that helped my 2008 strategy to reposition Corve Consultancy as a North West facing business. Well it wouldn’t have done, if I had become more visible in the area where I put most of my promotional resources – online.

With the right web and online strategy partner, SMEs can achieve solid visibility through natural ranking, without paying some cowboy a small fortune to ‘unnaturally’ boost your position. Online strategy has always played a big part in my work with SMEs and without the right technical support I’d be nowhere near as confident in the results as I am.

So it was nightmare when Dewi, my erstwhile all things online associate packed it all in and got a proper job last autumn. But as one door closes another opens and as Dewi had been North Wales based, it presented an opportunity to strike up a new and if possible even stronger partnership in Greater Manchester.

Enter Darren at RedStar in Manchester, who came highly recommended through Business Link and who has worked wonders on some of my clients sites not to mention galvanising me into sustaining the kind of online presence we can all achieve by doing a few important things very well and regularly.

So as 2008 draws to a close I’m delighted that Corve Consultancy is now firmly repositioned as I planned. It was April when the last Welsh based client ran its course and much I loved my work with them in Neath, you can’t get much further away from Bramhall! Now we have 2009 to look forward to and a new series of objectives to achieve.

Are you rubbish at networking?

2008-10-02T15:41:00.001+01:00

I used to be and if I'm honest when I compare myself to some of my peers (yes Catherine that's you - the uber networker!!!) I could still improve. A while ago, a Ladies Business Luncheon Club asked me to do my top ten networking tips so here they are.

Get out there and do the do!

Tip number one – remember why we do networking. We do it because it is, potentially, the best and least expensive way of developing new business. But remember, the word is networking, not net lunching or net drinking or net gossiping, it’s a business activity and as the networking guru Nigel Risner says if you are on the pitch then you need to play the game. Why go if you don’t want to network? The hospitality may be excellent, but it’s not a strong enough reason on its own, in the light of our busy schedules!!

Networking is so effective because people buy people first and personal recommendation is the strongest introduction and commendation we are ever going to receive. The endorsement of a third party individual that knows what we do and how well we do it is more effective than a thousand business-to-business mailshots.

The big difference is realising that networking is not about who you know; it’s about who they know and how and why they know them. Networking is farming not hunting, we are not trying to trap just one big customer here, we are planting a meadow that the first customer eats in and then goes back to tell the whole herd where to come and graze!

We all need contacts; none of us, no matter how dedicated we are, can make it in business in complete isolation. If you locked four strangers, a solicitor, a bank manager, an accountant and an Independent Financial Adviser in a room for an hour, they would come out doing business – but so would a plumber, a builder, a carpenter and an electrician. Do you build mini networks and have you thought about who can be in a small synergous group like this with your business? Are you getting to as many events as you possibly can and putting yourself into environments where your prospective clients will be? Our next big customer may be sat right next to us now!

Tip number two – be prepared! Do we organise networking events and then not tell anyone who’s coming or even give them a name badge when they arrive! Imagine how much more productive it might be if we knew that a certain person was going to be there and that we had the opportunity to contact them before hand and ask if we can make sure that we have 5 minutes during the event for a discussion or to make an introduction to a colleague who may be with us. How much more effective and impactive could our time be during this business event, if we have the opportunity to prepare well beforehand and don’t have to spend precious time trawling the crowd to find useful new contacts?

More on business cards later, but how many of us could hand out ten of your business cards to someone take away? And how many of us carry a pen and maybe a small notepad to jot down the names of the nine other people that will receive our cards? PREPARATION!

Tip number three – look and feel the part. Consider something that’s embedded in us from our childhood when we are told DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS! Well at networking its okay to talk to strangers, in fact it’s essential! Without being too glib, the police are never called to a threatening networking meeting and nobody ever got abducted from a Business Link lunch! But despite that we don’t like talking to strangers do we?

What usually happens at networking meetings, (and blokes are the worst at this), people slide into the room, notice the wall is about to fall down and decide they ought to prop it up to save everyone else from getting hurt! Then they put the antennae out and scan the room for some one they know who they can go and stand with and feel comfortable!!

Read Susan Jeffers, Feel the Fear and do it Anyway – it covers this topic in detail? Ivan Misner says that pride; shyness and fear are the three major obstacles to successful networking, which cannot be solved in 20 minutes, but there are some quick fixes.

Walk tall even if that’s metaphorically not literally, maintain lots of good eye contact, be interested (it makes you interesting!) and SMILE, there will be so many terrified people in that room, that you will stand out like a beacon and attract all around you. Most people at networking events are too scared to circulate and meet up, show enthusiasm and passion you will be a magnet – even if you don’t feel like it! The motivational speaker Anthony Robbins has an expression, (which I assure, is on this theme); it goes FAKE IT UNTIL YOU MAKE IT. I assure you he’s talking about self-confidence.

Tip number four – working the room. The golden rule is don’t ever leave anywhere without speaking to the person you really wanted to, whether it was a person you had identified before you got there or someone you saw when you arrived. Target a number of people to see during the event – why not try and meet two people you didn’t know before at every event you go to.

Be persistent, the only thing failure cannot live with is persistence! This is business, so remember all the reasons why we are doing this in the first place. Assume no one will seek you out and don’t talk to people you already know – if you need to have a specific conversation with them agree a time for a telephone call later or tomorrow – but both stick to that arrangement. On average, 5 to 7 minutes is about right per conversation. Minimise small talk, one good contact is worth more than a dozen chatterers.

Tip number five – ways to break into groups or break the ice with individuals. Do be aware of body language first, a close, huddled group of individuals may be discussing things in confidence and not welcome an intrusion at that point. A more relaxed group posture will tell you its okay to approach.

So groups first – “DO YOU MIND IF I JOIN YOU FOR A FEW MINUTES”. It really is as easy as that. Believe it or not the whole event has not been pre-arranged so that hand picked groups of people stand casually around waiting for you to come up so they can crush you!!! DO YOU MIND IF I JOIN YOU FOR A FEW MINUTES. Half or more of that group would never have had the confidence to do that and will immediately feel admiration for you and interest in you through that one simple exercise.

With individuals the options are more varied but equally simple to use. DO YOU KNOW A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE HERE? If they say yes – what do you say (WILL YOU INTRODUCE ME TO SOME OF THEM PLEASE)? If they say no, you say ‘neither do I shall we get to know each other and then see who we can meet together?’ Other variations on the theme could be – WHAT ARE YOU HOPING TO GET OUT OF TODAY? WHAT KIND OF BUSINESS CONTACTS ARE YOU LOOKING FOR TODAY? SO WHAT DO YOU DO THEN?

Tip number six – horror of horrors, someone says to us – SO WHAT DO YOU DO THEN? And do you know what, we tell them what we do and they switch off in seconds! This is a topic on its own, but here are some bullet point thoughts on your elevator speech – so called because you could deliver it in the time it takes a lift to go from one floor to the next – about 10 seconds.

There is a school of thought that says we have subliminally positioned certain professions in a negative light and switch off immediately we hear the words accountant, management consultant, estate agent, independent financial adviser etc. Proponents of this school of thought recommend that you don’t say ‘I’m an estate agent’ when asked what you do because of the supposed negative connotations.

They suggest a flowery alternative like – ‘I enable people to live in the houses of their dreams from bungalows to mansions’. The cynical amongst us may respond OH YOU’RE AN ESTATE AGENT THEN, and immediately think they were weak for not acknowledging their chosen profession. Far better to say ‘I’m an estate agent, I co-ordinate buyers, solicitors, building societies and surveyors for up to 20 clients at a time.’

It’s far more impactive because it’s telling people WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR THEM – AND THAT’S ALL WE ARE INTERESTED IN – WHAT CAN YOU DO FOR ME OR SOMEONE I KNOW. So position what you choose to say in relation to the benefits to your Clients not the tasks and functions you perform. Use your own words, be comfortable with them, and make sure they sound like you not like something from a book. Remember – WHAT I DO, BUT HOW IT BENEFITS YOU! The confidence it will give you walking into a room knowing you have something important and valuable to say is immeasurable.

Tip number seven – so how do you get away from someone at the end of your 5 or 7 minutes? We need something better than ‘I’ve just got to go to the toilet’! There are times when it seems only the incontinent go to networking events!

The professional way to exit that conversation is to say I’VE REALLY ENJOYED MEETING YOU BUT I NEED TO MOVE ON TO MEET SOME OTHER SPECIFIC DELEGATES. Then follow up with CAN I INTRODUCE YOU TO A.N. OTHER / SHALL WE JOIN THAT GROUP AND INTRODUCE OURSELVES / CAN YOU INTRODUCE ME TO.

Playing the role of the host is a very appropriate way to exit these mini meetings without leaving the other person high and dry and that is essential for their self-esteem and most importantly to leave them feeling good about THEMSELVES having just met you.

Tip number eight – Business Cards. We have already highlighted the basic importance of being well stocked with your own cards at networking events, and there are one or two specifics to look at as well. When you exchange them it is useful just to jot date and location on them either at the time or afterwards- it may be the difference in someone remembering you or not in six months if you can say we met on November 19th at the XYZ meeting in London.

This is also a basic, but never underestimate how important our names are to us especially when other people get them wrong – so take care when receiving a business card to read the name carefully and commit it accurately to memory.

Do we have something printed on both sides of our business cards? A business card is your most frequently used piece of marketing communications material, so make it work. Remember that elevator speech – there is a derivation of it that we can all put on our cards – Jane Smith Estate Agent – COORDINATING BUYERS, SOLICITORS, SURVEYORS AND LENDERS FOR YOUR PEACE OF MIND. If you are a consultant with multiple strings to your bow, then highlight Business Strategy, Marketing and Finance on the back of your card for clarity.

Tips number nine and ten are the most important of all and left until the end to highlight them albeit slightly out of sequence.

Tip number nine concerns our expectations and tactics at any networking event and indeed like so much of this it covers many other life events & experiences as well. We have to go to networking events in the mindset of a giver not a receiver. The words HOW CAN I HELP should be amongst the most frequent that you use at these events. Ask people the question WHAT’S TOP OF YOUR LIST OF BUSINESS NEEDS AT THE MOMENT? It may just be that you or someone you know has the ideal solution or can move the situation on for your new contact – HOW POWERFUL IS THAT.

Remember what the sales guru Robin Fielder calls the UNFAILING BOOMERANG OF LIFE – whatever we throw out comes hurtling back towards us ten fold – so make it good. Think about giving for a moment and think about that HOW CAN I HELP scenario. What’s the worst that can happen? Someone says no thank you and you move on – being remembered for having offered!! Someone says YES your business could really help us. Or you say I know just the person you should talk to, to solve this issue. Or you say I don’t know but I’ll ask around my contacts and come back to you – because NETWORKING IS NOT ABOUT YOU AND THEM, ITS ABOUT WHO YOU EACH KNOW AND ONE OF YOUR CONTACTS, UNBEKNOWN TO YOU, MAY HAVE THE IDEAL SOLUTION AND THEN THREE PEOPLE HAVE BENEFITTED FROM YOU ASKING ‘HOW CAN I HELP’.

If you come to networking events with a ‘what’s in it for me’ attitude the answer will be nothing. If you shift the paradigm and think what’s in it for everyone I meet, then you will be a successful and as a result a profitable Networker.

Tip number 10, - is more important than all these things that have gone before. It’s the follow up or as the Americans say, YOU TALKED THE TALK, CAN YOU WALK THE WALK. If you don’t undertake all the follow up actions you agreed within three days of the meeting then you may as well not have bothered! When you leave the meeting make yourself some follow up notes, perhaps when you are notating your new business cards with dates and locations and then do whatever you said.

Self Employed Marketing

2007-11-12T11:06:00.002Z

One day this week I got an email from Karen, my next door neighbour. She’s a director of a marketing agency in Greater Manchester that had high hopes of being taken over by a larger competitor with all the resultant benefits for her and her fellow shareholders. The email said ‘well this wasn’t in the plans – the other directors have decided to close down and we’re all going to be redundant!”

It brought back all the memories of my last employer deciding, seven or so years ago, to retreat to Tokyo and close its UK Investment Banking Division. So I was delighted when my friend told me that she was going to start her own business and doubtless over the next few days we’ll sit down and talk about it.

It made me reflect on what you learn when you go out on your own and step away from the comfort of a corporate environment. I’d been fortunate to work for some well know international financial institutions and often wondered whether I got through prospects’ doors because I was competent and capable, or because the business card said “Representative of Billy Big Bank”?

I suspect that the Billy Big Bank name probably opened the door, either out of courtesy or curiosity. How far the door stayed open and what kind of relationship flowed out, was probably due in some part to me, but more likely based on my skill to pass information to even Bigger people within Billy Big Bank, who were able to make really BIG decisions.

All this changes for the self employed consultant who lives (according to management guru Charles Handy) like a flea on the back of big corporate elephants. Do you remember the old saying about women in business – something like they have be twice as good to be thought of as almost the equal of a man (rubbish incidentally – we all know its three times!!!!) well that’s the same for the self employed, doors don’t open for you as readily as they used too and you are the offering – so you’d better have it planned out and make it add value to your target market or you’re buggered!

Took me four years to achieve the two year plan!

It teaches you real attention to detail because no one covers your back; though if you’re fortunate enough you have friends like Andy the Claret (that’s the football team not drink by the way). They will look at the stuff you do without really knowing what it’s about but still be able to ask you questions that hit the target with rapier like precision!! (More than Burnley FC did last season!)

Self employment keeps your feet on the ground. You lick all the stamps and soon realise that Petty Cash is an oxymoron. But you know that when the job is complete and the client’s cheque is safely tucked away, you alone were responsible for the satisfied customer’s experience.

There’s no calling on IT to support your technological issues, no asking a colleague to do one of the tasks in parallel to speed things along, no sending someone else to the tricky meeting and certainly no saying “he’s in conference now” when you don’t want to take the call!

We’ll be helping Karen and husband Mark start to create an upstairs office space and look forward to welcoming her to the world of SOHO (small office home office). In the early days I used to love working at home, so much so that I’ve just built an office tucked away in the garden of our family house in Cheshire, so I don’t have to drive to the North Wales Office every day if I don’t feel like it.

Working at home is great if you have the self discipline. If you don’t, apparently it’s even better! For some it’s a real throwback to university life when day time TV ruled, afternoons were for sleep and if you had to work, well hey there’s nothing else going on at 2.00am is there?

There’s a trendy trend developing for blokes to go to work in suits and shirts but not to wear ties. You see them around the city thinking they look cool; they don’t know Jack. Home based self employed blokes have been going to work with no trousers for years – how cool is that!! Wonder if Karen will adopt the morning shuffle across the landing in pyjamas at 5.00am to do that thing you haven’t been able to get out of your head since 3.27am when it woke you up!

I wonder if she will find a replacement for the drive to and from work, the familiar tones of Wogan, or Humphries and Naughtie or Allen and Garvey. Will she make Monty the cat a fully fledged partner, and will she stop, religiously, for a daily lunch break and play computer backgammon or Sudoku, just to give her brain a change?

You don’t always consider these weighty issues in Corporateland, nor do you necessarily have to make a commitment to yourself that every week, no matter how you feel, you WILL engage in some form of marketing communication aimed at your target market to keep your businesses head above the parapet.

Here’s a big lesson for the elephants from the fleas. Elephants spend fortunes on all manner of exotic marketing communications (not recommended by this flea incidentally!!). On the other hand, fleas tend to get nearly all of their business by word of mouth and recommendation, at next to no cost, other than a job really well done.

I’ll talk at length with Karen about this, as after 20 years working in marketing agencies in the north-west, she’ll know more than enough business contacts to ring up telling them the story of her start up.

Good luck to her!

Ten top tips for SME marketing

2006-09-07T14:17:00.001+01:00

The Chartered Institute of Marketing asked me to knock something up which could be a hand out or expanded into a presentation (or even a rant :-):-)!!)Hope these are of help to someone if only as a reminder there is marketing communications and there is business and marketing strategy. The two are complimentary branches of marketing but need to work together and not in isolation.

1. Each time you are thinking of undertaking a piece of marketing communications, don’t allow your self to do it until you have identified two subsequent communication activities to under take. The main reason most marketing communications issued by SMEs generate disappointing results is that they are one off tactical exercises, not part of a sustained campaign, where core messages are delivered over a period of time through a selection of different media.

2. Understand the type of business you are trying to win when you spend money on marketing communications and be clear about the profits that winning one order will generate. Directly relate this figure to your cost of communications to measure the success rate you need and the ultimate return on investment.

3. How dull is your website? When it has been visited once, what is the motivation for visitors to return? Make your website an interactive communications tool.

4. It’s easy to sit in our offices and factories staring at the four walls. Spend some time drawing up a list of people you know or people you ought to know who could and should be referrers to, and advocates for, your business. Set a target to meet up with at least two of these people a month.

5. Because you are a great butcher, baker or candlestick maker and you know your sector and your organisation inside out, does not mean that you are the best person to write about it. It’s astounding how many good looking pieces of marketing communication are ruined by inadequate copywriting! Use a professional.

6. Following on from this, particularly if you are sceptical about someone else writing your copy, review all your current literature to see how much it talks about you and your company and how little it talks to customers about themselves. Consider changing your messages to make them about customers and not about you.

7. Have a staff meeting. Sit down informally with all your employees and ask them what they would like and dislike about the business if they were a customer. What they perceive today, your customers will perceive tomorrow. Let them pretend to be the owner for an hour. What are the first three things they would do to make the business better for customers? Internal marketing is undervalued in SMEs; the feedback may just surprise you!

8. Review your customer sales for the last 12 months to see which have been your biggest customers, but evaluate their spending with you against their total spend on the type of products and services you can provide. Use the findings to target customers where it is entirely reasonable for you to challenge for a much greater share of their spending over the next 12 moths.

9. Review your business plan. A plan doesn’t have to be a forty page document full of spreadsheets and strategy; it may just be a list of key objectives with a series of simple tasks and milestones. But whatever form it takes, you should have one to drive the day to day activity of your business, which can so often be driven by whatever ‘crisis’ arises first on any particular day!.

10. Go to a trade or industry exhibition with relevance to your sector. Remind yourself what a great sector it is to work in and meet many of the other good people, just like your self, who work in it. Listen to some seminars or workshops and hear other people’s perspective on the issues that you are facing every day. It’s an uplifting and useful business exercise particularly for those of us within SMEs who can end up working in a confined bubble. If it doesn't motivate you seriously consider changing direction!

Stuck in the middle with you?

2006-07-24T14:37:00.001+01:00

When I first started studying marketing, I was overwhelmed by the number of theories and models, developed by “experts” to explain why businesses are less successful than they should be. The more I read, the more I realised most have been developed to serve the needs of book publishers and that they have no relevance whatsoever for real businesses, owner managed small and medium sized enterprises who want to understand business and marketing strategy and planning.

But then I have read a lot of books!

And some of the theories and models developed by the great and the good of marketing are absolute belters and are as relevant to SMEs as they are to the multi-nationals they were designed for. I’ve built a toolbox out of them, with nearly 40 different components, that has been invaluable when working with Corve Consultancy’s clients.

So which one is hot at the moment? Well it’s number 16, the rather grandly titled Porter’s Generic Strategies. (Don’t glaze over yet – it’s good!)

Business guru Michael Porter believes that while a company may have loads of strengths and weaknesses relative to its competitors, there are only three types of real competitive advantage you can develop, by being the cost leader, by serving niche markets or by sustained differentiation.

Lots of SMEs that I talk to are not consciously developing their business with one of these strategies in mind and are (if you view the three options as points of a triangle) floundering about somewhere in the middle.

So what do they all mean?

Being the cost leader is about being the lowest cost producer in the industry. Companies who do this often have a broad scope and serve many different industry segments. Companies can get a cost advantage because they achieve economies of scale; have proprietary technologies, or an advantage in accessing key (raw) materials. Cost leaders are often selling a standard product with no frills and they place considerable emphasis on size, economies of scale and cost advantages from all sources.

It’s a difficult long term position to sustain you are always vulnerable to being undercut and having the closest scrutiny on your price offering as the market tries to catch you out. Ryanair is a good example of this type of business. It’s difficult for SMEs to choose and sustain this position. Our resources usually mean that we have low marketing budgets which are vulnerable to competitors and a s re-seller online trading client of mine is discovering, someone else can always procure cheaper using a bigger budget for bulk purchases, and undercut you.

Serving niche markets is all about becoming a specialist to a specific sector. This is something SMEs do particularly well. We develop a specialist reputation concentrating on one or a small number of segments to the exclusion of all others. This allows us to focus and concentrate our efforts to get a deep understanding of our target segments and become acknowledged as the experts. The greater our expertise and the more we demonstrate our effective affinity with the segments, the higher we make the barrier to entry for others.

If possible we want to choose highly specialised niches which are easier to defend against local or international competition than less specialised ones. The difficulty we can face with this strategy is that to serve niche segments in a market leader position SMEs have to provide high customer and technical support, which can be resource intensive.

Sustained differentiation is where a company selects one or more things that many buyers in an industry perceive as important and then uniquely positions itself to meet those needs. The reward is a premium price! You can base differentiation on product attributes, service levels, the method of distribution, even your marketing campaign. But the trick is to make sure the cost of this unique differentiation does not exceed the value of the price premium it commands.

Delivering the groceries to my house in a stretch limo as opposed to a white van may be a unique proposition, but the marginal price is unlikely to recover the marginal cost! Sustaining differentiation can be hard, but SMEs have the flexibility, adaptability and responsiveness to customer needs to be successful with this strategy.

What’s the most obvious downside? Over time, as a market becomes mature, it can be increasingly hard to sustain true and meaningful differentiation.

Many SMEs that I meet are stuck in the middle, trying each strategy but failing to achieve any of them. As a result, they have established no competitive advantage and they are usually performing below average. In these cases, the SME will only earn profits if the structure of its industry is highly favourable (i.e. the conditions are such that it’s nigh on impossible NOT to make money – Ice cream vans in a hot summer, pubs during the world cup??) or if all your competitors are also stuck in the middle (what an opportunity!).

Businesses become stuck in the middle because they can’t decide how to compete, or don’t know how to make the choices. What have you decided to do?

Does the numbers man know what the marketer's doing and vice versa?

2006-06-19T12:57:00.000+01:00

I’m talking about SMEs rather than large corporates, because SMEs comprise the majority of all businesses in the UK and also it would also be foolish to suppose that this combination of skills does not exist in abundance in larger organisations. Whether they use it or not is a completely different matter!

Many SMEs have a real scepticism about business and marketing strategy and planning. They get drawn into the process reluctantly and often see disappointing results. This article explores one of the main reasons for the failure of SME business planning and offers a straightforward solution.

When SMEs look for a business plan, they often turn to their accountant for help. After all he’s the numbers man and a business plan; well it’s just a sheet of numbers isn’t it? Something we have to show the bank every now and then to tick a box – right? WRONG!

It often ends up as a sheet of numbers, because that’s an easy way to represent the plan as a summary. But it also ends up like this because it will only be those with a financial understanding that ever get involved in its preparation or analysis. So let’s just follow that process and see what happens.

SME owner – “I need a business plan with some forecasts for the next twelve months”

Accountant – “Great, I’ll knock up an Excel spreadsheet and you can give it to the bank – what’s your turnover likely to be for the next year?”

SME owner – “Well, we’re hoping to add about 15% on top of last year’s figures”

Accountant – “So that’s going to be about £1,200,000 isn’t it, remind me, is there any seasonality?”

SME owner – “No, not really sales seem to be evenly spread”

Accountant – “Well that’s the top line done; we’ll aim for £100,000 of sales each month. OK?”

This is how the process works more times that you can believe! With all the best of intentions, the accountant then calculates gross margins based on historical experience, adds 15% to the general overheads and bob’s your uncle a new business plan for the next twelve months has been constructed.

SME owner is happy, it’s cheap, it’s done, it ticks the box for the bank or other interested parties. The accountant’s happy, it didn’t take long, there’s a degree of credibility in his assumptions and a few more hours to add to the annual bill. The bank’s happy, because the accountant did it and so it must be right, he really understands the numbers!!

But it doesn’t work and nobody seems to care let alone understand the absolutely flawed premise of its construction.

Turnover, the top line of the business plan is not a guess! It is the answer to a series of strategic and tactical marketing questions that the business and its advisers should be asking in the construction of the plan that make the top line the real driver of the business.

A criticism of the role of marketing by many that do not truly understand it, is that it is hard to measure and as such an opportunity for the creative staff to run riot without accountability! Nonsense!

The biggest misconception about marketing is that it is just about communications rather than the strategic planning of the business. Decisions about target segments, competitive positioning and routes to market should lead any promotional activities, but again SMEs are seldom trained in these areas and consequently indulger in haphazard promotional activity, often spurred on by so called marketing consultants without a specific qualification to their name and unable to differentiate their Porter from their PIMS.

But hey, we’re in danger of forgetting the bean counters while all this infighting is going on! While we’ve been debating strategy and tactics, they have created the top line, calculated the gross margin, racked up the overheads by 15% and re-calculated net profit before tax and, with a flourish, added on a headline cashflow forecast for good measure.

There on the table is a conventional financial model and the owner and his advisers are all patting each other on the back for another job well done. But hang on. Where is the correlation between top line sales and the marketing budget, identified somewhere amongst the vast array of overheads to the business. Where is the marketing activity forecast, sitting below the cashflow and tying in activity, to budget spend, to top line income in a structured, time sensitive, numeric model based on robust conversion ratios.

Do what! Now the bean counter understands what we mean, but many marketers are totally fazed by the prospect of converting activity to scheduled and budgeted planning, but this is the key to the plan and its future success or failure.

So here’s the question for marketers – what do you do, when and at what cost, to deliver the top line income of £100,000 in October 2007 (or any other month’s target for that matter)?

Show me a model of the communications activity, show me the metrics, show me the budget allocation in the financial model, show me the sensitivity analysis and show me plan B.

In every business plan drawn together by SMEs and their advisers, it is critical to analyse marketing communications activity, (direct marketing, public relations, personal selling, sales promotions and advertising) and all the sub activities therein to set out in within the financial model, the individual activities and costs that WILL generate the top line.

Then let’s shift the argument away from the measurement and effectiveness of the marketing team (this will now be proven) and start looking at just why overheads never stay in budget or the cost of goods sold seems to edging above the predictions. Answers please Mr Accountant!