F-2-F Marketing

What seems to be a dying art – being face-to-face with someone – is still relevant for marketing your business. For those of us who enjoy interaction with other people, the trend toward faces down with eyes glued to the small screen is annoying.

Sure, texting and the other tasks you can accomplish on your smart phone seem to increase efficiency and enable us to do more, but does the fascination with being connected all the time detract from reality? How often do you see people in restaurants on their mobile devices when there’s a live, breathing person seated across from them?

Who is more important than the person you’re with at the moment?

There, we’ve exposed the secret to face-to-face (F-2-F) marketing: Be in the moment with the person you’re with!

If that person is someone you’ve never met before, you should get to know them for a number of reasons:

Are they a potential customer?
Do they have valuable connections?
Are they someone you can trust with your business?
Could they refer people to you?
Are they a reliable resource?

If the person you’re face-to-face with is someone you already know, how well do you know them? Do you know what they like to read? Where they live? How they earn a living? What they enjoy doing in their leisure time? Why they do what they do?

We can learn so much by being open to F-2-F discussions with other people. It may be awkward at first, but you begin by approaching someone and introducing yourself. Remember: They may be as bashful as you are when they’re approached.

Ask them their name, and try to remember it. A technique that we’ve found to work well is to repeat their name several times in the first few minutes of your conversation.

Ask where they work and what they do. Be genuinely interested in their answers. Pay attention and avoid distractions, such as looking for someone you’ve been dying to meet. That’s rude.

Ask why they do what they do, how long they’ve been doing it, and maybe even how they got into doing what they do. You may discover a rather fascinating story that leads you into a deeper relationship and potential friendship. You may share a favorite cuisine or vacation destination.

We struck up a conversation with a couple on a flight and showed interest in them going to help their son open a new restaurant on the east coast. Before the flight was over, they had pulled out the business plan and financial statements for us to look at!

The point of a F-2-F meeting may be to get acquainted, conduct business, close a sale, or to share camaraderie. Avoid being in a rush as much as you can. Take the time to enjoy the conversation. Assume you will learn something new. Crave knowledge.

If you’re face-to-face with a customer or prospect, concentrate on the individual and what his/her needs seem to be. If you’re unclear, ask clarifying questions. Get down to what they want and you’ll enjoy far greater success with higher closing ratios.

In our next blog we’ll cover the topic of Handling Customer Complaints. Stay tuned.

Practice the 3-foot rule: If someone is within three feet of you, they should know what you do. If they’re beyond three feet, get closer.

Brand Your Work – Work Your Brand

The Trust Factor

Credit must be given when credit is due. The trust factor is a concept we learned about word-of-mouth (WOM) marketing from the networking guru, Dr. Ivan Misner, founder of BNI (Business Network International). The concept is worth elaboration since it applies to more than WOM marketing for your business.

Graphic designed by Brand Irons.

The process of building trust begins with Visibility. From the networking perspective, you must make yourself visible in order for people to begin building some trust. That often means attending networking events on a consistent basis, whether it’s a BNI meeting or a Chamber After Hours event.

From the business and marketing perspective, visibility is important because your consumers and potential customers need to know you exist. In this case, visibility is how your place of business is perceived, how your products and/or services are viewed, how visible you and your employees are, and how well you advertise and promote your business. Perception needs to reflect reality. You need to be seen and recognized!

In networking, you also establish trust by building Credibility. You have to say what you mean and mean what you say.

The same principle holds when it comes to marketing your business. If you promise to deliver within 24 hours and it takes 36, your credibility is damaged. If your advertising offers a “wide selection” and the consumer discovers they have two choices, your credibility is suspect. If you post certain hours and are closed during those times, it has an impact on your credibility.

Credibility, like visibility, must be maintained on a consistent basis to build the trust you want your customers to have in you and your business. Our last two blogs have harped on consistency because it is so vital to continuously growing your business.

When it comes to networking, and we have found this to be true in more than a dozen years of being involved in BNI, your Profitability comes from the trust that’s established when you are visible and credible in your business dealings.

From the business and marketing side, establishing the profitability of your company is also built on the other two sides of the trust triangle. When your products hit the market and gain visibility, they hopefully become credible and desirable in the eyes of your consumers. This establishes the trust in you, your company, and your products and/or services that leads to the profitability you desire.

Trust is at the center of building customer loyalty to your brand. Trust must be established and maintained with your clients. Remember, too, that trust is easily destroyed. It requires honesty and hard work, as well as consistency throughout your organization. It is also worth protecting when you achieve it.

One service that a consulting firm, like Brand Irons, can offer is an evaluation of the trust factor for your business, your products and/or services.

Brand Your Work – Work Your Brand

Lessons In Consistency – Part 2

Here’s another perspective on the importance of consistency in business, albeit from a different angle than our last post.

Is she your avatar? Part of your ideal market segment?

Your sales process – part of your company’s over-arching marketing strategy – should be consistent from one end to the other, top to bottom. It starts with a constant known as your ideal customer. Can you describe that individual?

Are they male or female? What is their age? How do they live? What do they like to do? How much do they use their cell or smart phone? Do they listen to the radio? Watch TV? How do they feel about your products and/or services? How do you want them to feel? What gives them pleasure? What causes them pain?

The more narrowly you can define your specific target by answering these questions, the closer you can come to arriving at a sales process and effective marketing strategy that addresses their needs, wants, and desires … and gets them to want (demand) what you offer at whatever price you want to charge or that the market will bear.

When you have a solid idea of what motivates your customer to purchase your products or services, you can devise a consistent message that inspires them to be loyal to your company. The key is to be consistent with the message and every aspect of your business that’s related to it. Varying from that consistency costs you money!

For example, if you have customers purchasing your service at $60 per hour and they pay it without hesitation, what do you open your company up to by offering a “special” rate of $50 an hour for “a limited time”? In a word, trouble!

By lowering your normal rate, you devalue your standards, especially if you continue to provide the same level of quality service. Do you want to offer lesser quality because you’ve lowered your rate? Not a good idea. How do your customers who have paid $60 an hour feel about the discounted rate when they find out about it? Not happy.

Sure, you have to justify that the service you provide is valued fairly at the rate you offer, but we have discovered that companies tend to under-value their products or services. The reason they do is the fear they won’t have any business if they’re too high priced but, again, it comes back to the value provided. This is where companies become their own competition. You need a clear understanding of the value you provide, and stay consistent with your offer. Another reason you can engage professional help to keep you on course.

While we don’t advocate raising prices “just because,” it is important to assess your product or service in the light of market conditions. If the consumer perceives the value is there, they will pay the price. If not, they won’t. Simple.

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How Critical Is Consistency?

We all like to try different things. In business, however, being consistent is important … unless you don’t care if customers come back.

Think about a pizza joint as an example. Assume you order your favorite toppings and crust for delivery. When it shows up, within the promised time frame, it is hot and prepared to perfection. Your expectation has been established for the next time. The bar is set.

Two weeks later, you order the same pizza from the same establishment. It shows up hot and on time, but the crust is a bit overdone and the taste is different somehow. Maybe they forgot to spice it the same way. Okay, you can tolerate that, but now your expectations have been altered, maybe even reduced. You may even call the pizza parlor to ask the manager why there’s a difference.

The next few pizzas you order are tolerable but still not as good as the first. The joint seems to be having a hard time with consistency but still within a tolerable range fro delivered food. Then the bomb drops.

You order again and the person answering the phone is rude, asks you to hold, and rather than wait, you hang up and have someone else call it in. Same thing happens to them, and it takes five minutes to get back to you. If you are emotionally tied to ordering from that pizza place, you wait and place your order.

Thirty minutes after your pizza should have arrived, you call to find out if the driver got lost or what’s going on with it. No apology, just some line about being backed up and your pie is just coming out of the oven, so it should be there within a few minutes.

You expect a fresh, hot pizza that meets your standard for this pizza parlor. You’re hungrier than ever since you were ready to eat when it was due to be delivered. Instead, it arrives cold, the whole pie looks burnt – especially the crispy crust, and it tastes horrible. This is unequivocally not acceptable. Yet you’ve still paid good money for your dinner.

As the owner of this business, what would you anticipate the customer would do if you were them? Shut up and eat the pizza without complaining? Eat it but call to complain? Bring it back and demand a refund? Or the more likely scenario: Never order pizza from you again and tell everyone they know how horrible your pizza was?

The lesson for any business owner: What does it take to deliver a consistent product or service to your customers? In this case, making a pizza should be relatively simple: make a crust using your signature ingredients, put it in a cooking pan, add your signature sauce, top it with consistent ingredients and spices, and cook it in an oven set to the right temperature for the specified amount of time. Then box it up and get it delivered within the promised time frame.

Walk through that exercise with whatever product or service you offer to consumers. Assess what it takes to be consistent. The steps should be relatively simple and easy to identify. Those steps should be your normal and your staff should clearly understand that “normal” is the minimal standard to achieve. Nothing less than that should be tolerated.

What goes along with delivering a consistent product or service is the customer service side of the process. Back to the pizza example: How difficult would it be for someone in the business, preferably a manager, to call a customer back, apologize, and let them know the pizza is going to be delivered later than previously stated? Find the order slip, pick up the phone, and call the client. The point is to retain customer loyalty if possible. Unless you have enough business that you can afford to have only one-time customers.

For some business owners, it may be essential to have a business consultant come in and analyze what’s going on when it comes to processes and consistency. The solutions are often simple but may involve changing a company’s existing culture. There are firms, Brand Irons comes to mind, that can help assess those challenges and create options.

Brand Your Work – Work Your Brand

Consumer Oriented Marketing

Rule #1 – The customer is always right.

Rule #2 – When in doubt, see rule #1.

Sound familiar? As a business owner, you know rule #1 may be false but that the customer’s perception is that they are always right.

In either case, the consumer is the lifeblood of your business. The more focused you can be on exceeding the needs of your customers, the more profitability you enjoy. You will build brand loyalty and have repeat customers as well as solid referrals for years to come. Think about what you would have without any customers.

Here are some steps to consider in becoming more consumer oriented in marketing your business and your products and/or services:

Know what you’re selling. You may believe you sell insurance, but your customers are buying peace of mind and the ability to sleep well at night. Think about what your customers are purchasing.
Know your customers’ buying motivation. This relates to #1, but goes further by analyzing whether they’re purchasing on price, convenience, satisfaction, previous experience or some other factor. Think about why they buy from you.
Know your customers. How often do they come to you? What other demographic information do you have about your market segments? Do you know where they live, or what they do for a living? Can you address them on a first name basis?
Know how to reach your customers. Traditional advertising methods such as radio, TV, or newspaper ads may fail to get their attention. You need to know what appeals to them and how you can best get your message through to them.
Know what you want. If you want loyal customers, treat them like they want to be treated. That’s the platinum rule. If you want referrals, ask for them. If you want volume and traffic, that’s a different call to action. Ask them to do what you want.

In many cases, your consumers want you to listen to them. That is the foundation of the rule about the customer being right. They may expect that you will refund their money or take back the merchandise or hear their complaint, and those all relate back to them knowing you will listen to them.

Some of the most innovative new products and services have originated from listening to consumers and their suggestions. Keep an open mind and listen!

At Brand Irons, we walk business owners through a proprietary process that helps them identify their products, markets, value propositions, and viable distribution channels.

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Brand & Business Review

You should review the status of your business every six months, if not more often. This includes an analysis of your brand and the products or services you offer to consumers.

This review can be a simple process of taking a step back and looking at your business from a couple points of view, or a rather lengthy evaluation with a professional consultant.

If you’re going to do a self-evaluation, the hardest but most important thing to do is to remove any emotional attachment you have to your business. Think rationally. Emotion is what you bring back when it’s time to market your business and advertise your products. Look at everything from an objective, independent perspective, just like a consultant would do:

Evaluate your cash flow situation
Assess actual sales vs. projections
Consider how far out are your receivables
Rate your advertising return on investment (ROI)
Look at employee turnover rates
Where is your company in terms of the industry standard

These are a few of the areas to evaluate on your own. Take the time to get the information you need to make intelligent decisions, and think through what the cold, hard facts are telling you. Look at it as if you were someone on the outside looking in.

You need to know the value of your company … and the value you provide to your market segments.

If you’re honest and open with your consulting firm, a six-month assessment may not be as critical with them as doing it by yourself. Your consultants should know where you are on a monthly or quarterly basis. The idea is to help you take corrective action while it can have a positive impact and before it becomes a huge risk or serious problem.

Looking at your business impartially enables you to discover if certain employees need to be released or divisions need to be trimmed or modified. Your investors and shareholders have to know you can make the tough decisions when they need to be made. Removing yourself from the urgent demands of daily activities to review your status reduces the risk of making fatal mistakes and reveals the validity of your company.

As the owner or CEO of your business, the responsibility for making hard choices falls on your shoulders. It may be your chief bookkeeper who is engaged in fraudulent activity and needs to be prosecuted. It could be that your closest friend and VP of sales is stealing clients and collaborating with your competition. You may have an obsolete product line that needs to be terminated. It’s difficult to make a decision unless you have the correct information, and your job is to make sure you have all the right information.

Let us know if you would like help.

Brand Your Work – Work Your Brand

A Global Perspective

Many business owners only think about their local clientele. They want to make sure they take care of the customers coming in the door of their establishment. That’s admirable, especially if your business is a restaurant or retail store.

A service business like a plumber or electrician may think more regionally and not have clients or prospects walk in the door, but any territory beyond that is rarely in their vocabulary. That’s a fault with most businesses who may think globally, but act locally. The reverse is what’s happening in the world’s economy today.

Thinking local but acting globally is the realm of the Internet, an essential location for any business to have a presence. The old adage about the three most important keys to success in business holds true – location, location, location.

Think of it this way – Any consumer in the world can access your corporate web presence. Anyone! So what? What if a corporate executive from Sri Lanka is relocating to your community and looking for a general contractor to build a new home for the family? Does your website … as a general contractor … let the executive know you are a professional and can get the job done? Is it relevant? And does your web presence enable the potential customer to contact you easily? What if the business person wants to build a new factory and employ 450 local workers?

Granted, the example may be a rare circumstance for a general contractor, but how do you know who’s viewing your web presence? Have they gone there intentionally or discovered your site at random? Did a social media post in LinkedIn trigger the investigation of your company’s capabilities?

Whether we like it or not, having a business presence on the Internet exposes our products and/or services to the global marketplace. It opens the door to doing business with people from every nation – from South Africa to Germany and from China to Chile. It also means you should be sensitive to requests from foreign countries and be amenable to providing your goods and services to residents of those nations if the opportunity presents itself.

You may not want to go global, but the global market is out there if you want to expand your business. If you want to avoid thinking or acting globally, you still need a web presence for your business. There’s no avoiding that in today’s business environment.

Make sure your website is mobile enabled so the younger generations can view it on their smart phones. You need to make sure your content is also relevant to the market segments you want to reach. Have a call to action, too. The future is here, now.

Brand Your Work – Work Your Brand

Business Challenge: Managing Life Cycles

Every business goes through cycles, whether the owner cares to admit it or not. Business owners must first understand these cycles exist and realize when their company is entering a new one. The challenge is knowing how to manage the changes required to survive and thrive.

It begins with the start-up phase, where plans are made, products are defined, and strategies are formulated and implemented. This can be a difficult period for the business owner because hopes and dreams are attached to the success of their venture. Failure is a real possibility, but motivation is fueled by emotions rather than clear-headed thinking. From an outside point-of-view, an entrepreneur or potential business owner should stop and think about what they’re doing before getting in too deep.

Have someone look at the financial projections objectively, or consider hiring a firm such as Brand Irons to conduct a feasibility study to clarify the route to profitability. Base your business decisions on cold, hard facts instead of wishful thinking. Emotions can be brought back in with your marketing strategies.

Once the tough stage is behind, the next business phase is either a growth spurt, the transition to a different attack plan when there’s no growth, or closure. Growth is often the easiest phase for owners to manage. It requires adding production capacity, employees, sales people, and other elements that are indications the business is doing well.

The caution in growth stages is to continuously keep on eye on the numbers. Growing your business means adding more revenue, and it also means adding problems tied to that growth. Outside advice can prove valuable in matching projections to actual results and avoiding sugar-coating what may appear to be a rosy picture. Stay real.

As the company grows, business expands to fulfill the demands of the marketplace. There are many lessons where companies tried to expand too quickly and lacked the marketing or infrastructure or management to handle the expansion. Krispy Kreme doughnuts tried an expansion program and had to re-trench, as did Sonic with drive-in restaurants in northern climates. Controlled expansion is far more manageable, despite how strong a management team you may believe is in place to handle it.

One of the most difficult phases in the life cycle of a business for the owner to grasp is when the business has entered a maturity stage. Maturity can be caused by product or service obsolescence, changing market conditions, an inability to adapt to changes, the aging of owners and management, as well as time itself.

When it becomes obvious that a business has reached maturity, the critical decision is determining what to do about it. The major factor to look at is whether the products and/or services are still relevant to the consumer. Changes are needed when you can determine that what you’re doing is no longer relevant.

The logical choice for handling maturity is the next phase in the diagram, which is transition. Transition might involve selling the business, turning it over to a different management team, or implementing changes to adapt to the market’s demand. Keep in mind that maturity is a good phase for a business and may last for quite some time. Successful businesses start out with an end result in mind, making the transition a planned event. Mature businesses should also be considering transition options.

At every stage in the life cycle of your business, you can benefit from the advice of professional business consultants, such as your accountant, attorney, insurance agent, financial planner, and yes, a business and marketing advisor. Their role is to help you make more money and reduce your risks.

Brand Your Work – Work Your Brand

Brand Success: Band-Aid

A key to the success of your brand, or any other brand, is to be first in the mind of the consumer. Do you ask for a facial tissue, or for a Kleenex? Do you ask for a soft drink, or for a Coke? Do you ask for an adhesive strip, or for a Band-Aid?

The 3rd Immutable Law of Marketing is the Law of the Mind, as defined in Al Ries and Jack Trout’s 1994 book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. Briefly stated, it means that being first in the mind of the consumer is more important than being the first to the market with a product or service. The success of Johnson & Johnson’s Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages is a perfect example of a company owning the consumer’s mind. The Band-Aid brand name today is synonymous with a first aid product, but it is also identified with a method of providing solutions to problems. It has become a common term in everyday language, which solidifies that place of ownership in people’s minds.

How many times have you heard someone identify a temporary solution as needing a “Band-Aid” for fixing the problem? The benefit to Johnson & Johnson is that every time the name is mentioned, in whatever context, it reinforces the brand’s identity in the minds of consumers. The consumer may not know that Band-Aid is a Johnson & Johnson product, but they do know what a Band-Aid can do for a cut, scrape, or other minor injury. The consumer doesn’t ask for a Curad bandage, even though that might be what they wind up using to patch up a small injury. They ask for a Band-Aid.

Owning the consumer’s mind, however, does not excuse Johnson & Johnson from continuing to provide a quality product to customers. That sense of ownership comes right back to the company. Johnson & Johnson’s reputation, to a certain extent, is built on the credibility they’ve established with the Band-Aid brand, and other brands in their portfolio. Johnson & Johnson must constantly monitor quality and sustain the brand’s identity at an exceptional level to continue their ownership of the consumer’s mind.

The success of the adhesive bandage for Johnson & Johnson has enabled the company to diversify and offer other medical-related products to that consumer market. Gauze bandages and a host of other products have found a place because the Band-Aid brand is so strong.

While this may be a great success story, you’re probably wondering what this has to do with your business. Good question.

Your brand may never achieve the level of ownership Band-Aid has in the mind of the consumer, but it could. You may need professional advice, but if you can become the leader in your industry and own a specific category or niche, there is an excellent chance your product or service can become the preference of your customers and others. It takes market research, graphic development, and a number of other pieces to put it all together.

Brand Your Work – Work Your Brand

The Business Mindset

In a previous blog, we wrote about The Consumer Mindset. Now it’s time to turn around and focus on the mindset of a business owner.

Two of the more important elements in operating your own business are: 1) Remembering why you’re in business in the first place; and, 2) Remaining focused on your customers at all times. Having a valuable product or service, strong management, and exceptional customer service are significant as well, but everything else usually falls under one of the two more important elements.

Let’s elaborate.

You probably got into business for several reasons. Filling an under-served niche market to meet a consumer demand or need may have been one of them. Having an impact in the world and making some money might have been the reasons. Some people start a business to fund their retirement or to create an enterprise for their children to take over. There are those who merely want to say they did it and they had the world in the palm of their hands!

Whatever the reason you started a business, or are thinking about starting one, take the time to stop and think about that mindset once in a while. Every six months is a good benchmark for taking the time to reflect on your purpose for doing what you’re doing. If you need to make changes, weigh your options. Think deep about whether it is a change that really needs to be made.

A quick transition to another owner, a fire sale, or a bankruptcy can be traumatic and devastating to your employees, your customers, and to you and your reputation. It is best if you can take the time to think through and plan a transition that benefits everyone involved in the change. Consultants such as Brand Irons can assist with these transitional periods and smooth the waters.

What is also important in the business owner’s mindset is having a mission that is clear and conveys the vision of the company. Owners have an obligation to portray their vision to their employees, their customers, and the public on a consistent basis. That takes constant, open and two-way communication with team members, along with the insistence that the same level of communication is shared with customers and potential customers.

It’s also about setting objectives and striving to accomplish them. It involves being able to make tough decisions without emotional attachment. It means being confident and assertive without being offensive or demeaning. Praise in public and criticize (we prefer instruct) in private is a valuable approach. A pat on the back goes further than a kick in the pants.

Be open to suggestions. An employee on the front line may have an idea that could make you millions. Be generous and share the credit. Herb Kohl, former U.S. Senator and owner of the Milwaukee Bucks, reportedly paid each of the employees of the facility where his team played $500 for their dedication to the team.

When your purpose is clear, your service to your customers also has clarity.

Brand Your Work – Work Your Brand