Not having someone to answer your ‘phone!

Many small business owners lose stacks of business because they don’t have anyone to answer their phone when they are not there. Instead they have valuable sales leads directed to an answer phone.

Each time they hear a click as the phone is put down with no message being left, that’s another potential customer lost.

The solution is to hire a professional phone answering service or virtual office. Prices range from about $40 upwards per month. Typically they will answer calls in your name (you divert when you are going out to the special number they give you).

They will take the callers details, what they are calling about and then text or e-mail you, so that you can call them back when convenient. You will not lose any leads this way and it gives the impression that you have a full time receptionist.

Some people might be tempted to divert to their mobile, but then it often cuts out, diverts to voicemail etc. If you give out your mobile as the only number, your potential customer is being forced to pay for a premium rate call or use one of your competitors. I wonder which option they will choose…

- Keith Banfield

Creating a product or service for which there is no market

This really amazes me. Business owners create a product or service and then try to find a market for them. How crazy is that? Why create a product or service and then go hunting, hoping that you’ll find someone to buy it? The correct way is to find your market first, identify the product or service that they are screaming out for and then give it to them.

So for example, Dyson identified that one of the frustrations in the vacuum cleaner market was that a
vacuum cleaner would start to lose suction as the dust bag filled up. Knowing that there were millions of potential customers with their hands up waiting for a bagless vacuum cleaner which would not lose suction, he created one and subsequently took a huge share of the vacuum cleaner market from under the noses of his competitors.

- Keith Banfield

Not knowing your numbers

Many small business owners see marketing as an expense rather than an investment. Ask them if a campaign has been successful and more often than not the answer will be a general “yes I think so, we haven’t done too badly”.

Responses like that are complete nonsense. What does haven’t done too badly mean?
You need to know precisely how much you’ve spent and how many leads you have generated from that spend.

You then need to qualify how good each lead is and monitor your conversion ratios. Only then will you be able to see how effective your marketing is.

Advertisement in Woman’s World Magazine Results
No of advertisements 6
Number of leads generated 65
Number of appointments made. 30
Number of sales 15
Total value of sales $ $14200
Total Cost of promotion $ $5000
Profit $ $9200

- Keith Banfield

Trying to advertise like the big guys

There is a big difference between the advertising strategy you would adopt for marketing a large multimillion-dollar company and that for a small business. You see, the big guys have got big budgets and with big budgets you have more options.

The biggest difference though is that large companies are often focusing on building their brand and getting their name better known. As a small business, you will be more interested in creating direct response. In other words, you want your advertisement to generate leads that you can turn into orders. You want to be able to see a direct return on your investment and as quickly as possible.

So when you are planning any type of advertising, think about how you will measure the response and what response you expect, rather than building a brand.

- Keith Banfield

Not using the Internet to generate leads for you

The Internet is such a powerful tool yet most businesses don’t realise how to utilise this powerful resource to generate leads for them. Some have pretty looking Websites but have no idea how to capture the traffic that visits their Website.

If you are serious about building your business, it is essential that you understand how to utilise the power of the Internet, capture the traffic that visits your site and learn how using cost per click campaigns you can drive targeted traffic to your site. You might want to check out https://adwords.google.com/select/ where you will discover a step-by-step process for setting up a ‘cost per click’ campaign.

If you haven’t seen this before, it is essentially like paying for an advertisement where you only pay for the responses you get. Imagine what it would be like if all the major magazines conducted their advertising programs in this way.

- Keith Banfield

Not telling potential customers what they want to know

Since we were talking about business cards in the last example, let me continue on the same subject, since virtually all businesses have a business card. At least 50% of all business cards that I am handed miss out the vital information that’s important to me, the person receiving the card. Take a look at the business cards that you’ve received and you’ll see what I mean.

They have a persons basic details on, a pretty logo and in most cases that’s about it. Oh dear, that will be costing that company money in lost business, lost opportunity and ultimately lost profits.

So what is the vital information? The answer is, what can you do for them? So your business card needs to clearly state on it what the receiver will get if they contact and work with your company. If you think about it, isn’t this really the only thing that they are interested in?

As well as telling someone what they will get from being a customer of yours, the second thought is to remember that you want someone who has your business card to remember you. Now we all remember names to a degree, if however you really want a potential customer to remember you, put your photograph on your business card. Do you remember faces more than names? I know I do.

Finally, make sure that you use the back of the business card too. This is a place where you could add a powerful marketing message. How many do you see that are left blank?
- Keith Banfield

Mistake No.6

Creating The Wrong Message About You

We’ve all heard the expression that you only get one chance to make a good first impression. The fact is though that many small business owners are too hung up about spending money and end up creating a marketing image that looks homemade.

If you want to attract business, everything about your company needs to create the right impression. I’m talking about your letterheads, business cards, printing everything
that your customers or potential customers are going to use to decide whether or not you are worthy of their business. I can perhaps best illustrate this with a story. A few years ago I was attending an exhibition and I spotted an odd looking man in one of the tiniest exhibition stands that I have ever seen. In fact, it looked more like a broom cupboard. (He probably got it cheap-it’s certainly looked like it!) So being curious, I walked over to the exhibition stand then spoke to the man who was dressed with a suit and bow tie. I asked him to tell me about his business and he revealed that he was in fact a management consultant and handed me one of his business cards. The moment that he did, what little credibility that he had was instantly dissolved.

The business card that he handed me was printed straight from his ink jet printer on what looked like reasonable quality toilet paper. To make matters worse, the ink jet printer that he had used to print the business cards was running low on ink for the ‘ card’ that I received.
So the message that he was putting out was that he couldn’t afford a full sized exhibition stand and neither could he afford to pay for any business cards to be printed. What a waste of time. Would you hire him as a management consultant in your business?

- Keith Banfield

The seven most expensive words in business are…

By Catherine DeVrye

‘The seven most expensive words in business are: “We have always done it that way!”

How often do you hear those words around your organisation? Wasn’t it only last month that a senior manager blocked a new employee’s suggestion with that exact phrase, adding:

“You just don’t understand how we do things around here.”

Or, worse still: “We tried it that way once and the guy who suggested it is no longer here.”

If all this sounds overly familiar, it’s time to seriously examine the way in which your organisation operates in today’s rapidly changing environment. Certainly, it’s important to build on your past success and not simply change for the sake of change, which is a costly exercise in itself. But, never forget that even if you don’t change, your competitors and customers may.

Too often people confuse necessary change with change for the sake of change. That is not to say that you throw out the baby with the bath water but any organisation, regardless of its past success, should always remain open to new ideas. It’s a recipe for disaster to continue to do things the same old way without at least occasionally assessing if that mode of operation is actually working or you simply think it’s working for you.

Past success is no guarantee of future success. Of the Fortune 500 companies at the turn of the century, only 3 exist in their present format today. And, since 1986, only 46% of the Fortune 500 companies are still in business. When Tom Peters wrote “In Search of Excellence” in 1982, he applauded companies that were innovative, quality focused, and growing exponentially. Today, many of them are no longer in business, when only a few years ago, they were considered invincible!

Take a look at a computer company that dominated the world for generations. IBM had incredible market share, rising stock prices and amongst the highest paid employees in the world. When I did my sales training with them in 1982, we were told that only 3 computer companies would be in existence by the turn of the century. Never was it considered even a remote possibility that IBM might not be one of them.

It was widely agreed that personal computers were only a fad and wouldn’t be a serious contender in the market of the future. And, customers would always buy IBM because they’d always bought IBM! Yet, in the mid-‘80s, the share price fell from $US142 to $US42 and over 200,000 employees left the business of the once invincible company.

Meanwhile, a little backyard company-Apple- was on the rise and seemed to be the new force in the PC business of the early ‘90s. Yet, Apple’s share performance has also fluctuated. Both Apple and IBM are excellent organisations but change happens particularly quickly in information technology. Fortunately, IBM adapted and at the time of writing, I’m pleased to report their shares were at an all time high. But, no high tech organisation will even have a parking place on the super highway (or super hypeway) of the future unless they constantly look at new ways of doing things.

This applies not just to computer companies but every organisation as technology, among other factors, continues to have an ever-increasing influence on the way business is conducted both domestically and internationally. Can you afford to be complacent that the Internet will have no impact on your business?

To succeed, enlightened managers will always look at better ways to run their organisations, rather than comfortably resort to that deadly phrase: The seven most expensive words in business today…

“We have always done it that way.”

______________________________________

Catherine DeVrye is a best selling author and speaker on customer service, managing change and turning obstacles to opportunities This is a modified excerpt from ‘Hot Lemon & Honey-reflections for success in times of change’. Other best sellers include Good Service is Good Business, ‘Hope Happens!…words of encouragement for tough times’ and Who Says I Can’t? Past winner of the Australian Executive Woman of the Year Award, Catherine can be reached on www.greatmotivation.com

More from Catherine DeVyre here at Your Success Club ]]> http://www.yoursuccessclub.com/blog/2009/10/02/catherine-devyre-7-most-expensive-words/feed/ 0 http://www.yoursuccessclub.com/blog/2009/09/09/12-marketing-mistakes-looking-for-new-customers-in-the-wrong-places/ http://www.yoursuccessclub.com/blog/2009/09/09/12-marketing-mistakes-looking-for-new-customers-in-the-wrong-places/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 20:45:25 +0000 Selina Lai http://www.yoursuccessclub.com/blog/?p=690

Mistake No.5

Looking for New Customers in the Wrong Places

Going back to Marketing 101, we all know that good quality research can cut back on wasted time. One of the key factors in market research is knowing who your customers are and knowing where to find them.

The best of the best in marketing have already got this down pat, but it’s possible to still find marketing strategies which are targeting the wrong places. You’ll find that if you set up marketing strategies in very specific areas which your specific potential customers frequent, it will not only save you a lot of money, it will also save you time and bring in more conversions!

This may seem absolutely ludicrous that anyone would deliberately look in the wrong place for potential new customers and even worse, place advertisements and other marketing in the wrong places too. Surprisingly though, this happens all too often. That is why it’s critical to know who specifically your customers are and where they hang out.

For example, if you are running a business as a mortgage broker and one of your products is a home loan which requires no financial statements and the tiniest amount of paperwork, but at a slightly higher interest rate than normal. Who would this appeal to most? The answer might be self-employed people. (Can you see what we have done here? We have focused in specifically on
one product rather than trying to be all things to all people. This is an important element in marketing.)

So the next question to ask yourself would be: where do they hang out? What do they read? Who else is already speaking to them who is not a competitor? Taking all of this information into account, you could quickly create a list such as:
•Chambers of Commerce
•Breakfast networking groups
•or even Government funded events.
So where do your customers hang out? Isn’t that the best place to put your marketing message?

- Keith Banfield

Mistake No.4

Getting Advice From or Using Companies That Don’t Know What They’re Talking About

In the early days when I didn’t know how to generate all the leads I wanted, the temptation was to hire a marketing company. In fact, I hired not one but six marketing companies in total. It seems that their expertise was in squandering my money rather then being accountable for the results that I wanted them to generate.

Each time, they would promise the earth and then make feeble excuses as to why they hadn’t achieved results. Two that stick in my mind, “I can’t believe it, this has never happened to us before…”, and the other was, “well there are no guarantees in marketing!”

I realise now that this is complete rubbish. If you follow a tried, tested and proven strategy that works for others, it will work for you too. That’s why for example, in our Profit Booster Kit, we are prepared to put our money where our mouth is. If you are going to use a marketing company, make sure that they give you a guarantee

- Keith Banfield