May 2, 2010

Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 5

Filed under: Requirements, Sales and Marketing, Strategic thinking, communication skills, management skills, product development, soft skills — Tags: communications, marketing plan, marketing strategy, networking strategy, sales and maketing — admin @ 1:43 pm

What’s the right strategy for me?

Previously:

Bridging between the web and the real world
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 2
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 3
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 4

In defining a marketing strategy you will as a minimum need to:

Define your USP and write it down.
Define your target market
Write down the benefits of your product/service to that market
Position your product/service in comparison to it’s rivals so that it appeals to your market (2)
Define the activities you will engage in to deliver your messages and monitor results e.g. networking, direct mail, telesales, events, etc
Develop the messages that suit each method of delivery, drive home your USP, consolidate your positioning statement and motivate the required actions from your target market

Your USP, positioning statements, Elevator pitch and all that good stuff

Me (the business) has to be understood first and that is often where the exercise is rejected then the products come under the microscope.

Most networkers will tell you how important trust is in selling your products and services and this is the section that deals with that trust. Trust is not in a product, or service, but in a person or organisation delivering it and you simply can’t afford to ignore this aspect of your offering.

The simple and obvious questions

What do I stand for? what do I want out? What am I prepared to give? Where are my boundaries? Now you need to step it up a notch to look at yourself through your customer’s eyes.
What do they stand for? What does it mean to me? Is it an image that inspires me to deal with them? Are their changes that would improve this image and influence me to buy from them?

Now the money question
How good are my products? Who are they aimed at and why should they buy?
Now from a customer viewpoint

Do I use their products? Why? What would motivate me to start/stop, how do they compare to the opposition? And how does this influence me? Is there anything unique , or memorable about them?

It is rare that this exercise does not lead to a startling difference between the internal view and the customer viewpoint and there is always something to be learned, but be warned, the results must be consumed with a measure of common sense.
The idea of giving the customer what he wants is fallacy. The customer wants you broke and giving him products for free, even products he will never use. You have to talk to realistic customers of the kind you are able to sell to profitably. You have to ask the right questions carefully and explore the answers if in doubt.

Before you can establish a strategy for your marketing you need to be confident that you have got your proposition right and you are projecting an appropriate image successfully. Without that you can spend a lot of cash and effort for very little return.

Unity of thought and action in all things is the key

Two messages that reinforce a strong influential theme is three times as powerful as one message. Two messages that contradict each other, even a little bit can be very damaging.

Messages in the marketing context mean every communication and action that says something to your customers. If you deliver a day late without an apology, that sends a message even more effectively than an expensive TV advert only not the one you had intended. The lesson that needs to be learned here is Don’t over guild the lilly.

If you are not going to be able to deliver it consistently, drop it from all offers and don’t promise it. This is the commonest mistake in business and it is even more upsetting when you come to realise that the customer didn’t even rate it in his buying criteria, but now he’s upset because you promised and didn’t deliver.

E-commerce and the retail shop, email and the call-centre, networking and the marketing campaign

Have you ever dealt with an organisation, or a professional who managed to get these aspects of the business integrated even a little bit? I certainly haven’t.

You buy something online, but you are not allowed to return it in the shopping mall.
You see an advert 15 times in the course of an evening telling you how your bank value their customers, you call about your account and ten minutes later, with steam coming from your ears, you finally get through to a call centre person who is trained only in dealing with irate customers. Two minutes later you put the phone down in despair, no wiser.
You meet the boss at an event and tell him you need a big order and he is very pleased and very helpful. You call in a few days later to order and you are told, it will be two weeks now before we can deliver, if only you’d called in yesterday.
The call centre reminds you that your annual subscription is overdue, because they have never been told that you paid by direct debit last week

We both know that this list could go on for many pages and hopefully you are beginning to think of this in terms of conflicting messages and wasted effort. Fixing this type of thing should be at the top of every marketing strategy.

Don’t take a sledgehammer to crack a nut

The most difficult thing about developing a strategy for marketing can be to avoid starting at the beginning and making too big a job out of it.

If you are happy enough that you don’t have the problems highlighted above then in reading this you have done enough and you can get straight to the point.

Billions are wasted every year developing strategies that are consigned to the bin by changes in events within the first year, so stick to the highest possible level and don’t get bogged down in detail.
If you want to spend a little more time at this stage then I would strongly advise a couple of workshops facilitated by an experienced external person. In particular PEST is a great way to avoid falling foul of Political, Environmental, Sociological and Technological drivers that render your plans useless.
SWOT is a powerful tool to help you define your Strengths and Weaknesses and to explore. Opportunities and Threats facing your business. Done well with a good cross section of the team, these can be lively and informative short sessions that afford a chance to take stock and to improve management communication.

Defining your target market

Your target market is a segment or segments of the overall market that you believe is sufficiently large to deliver your targeted sales volume and offers you the best possible opportunity to make sales. Why waste time climbing for the high apples, get the easy ones.

When defining your market segments the best strategy will often be to understand;

1. The jobs they want done as opposed to features they might want

2. How easily accessed they are
3. How profitable they are to your business.

e.g. If you are a Lawyer who used to work in the city and now you are in practice, you have a Unique proposition in terms of your financial knowhow, you may be able to highlight a large group of potential clients who engage in financial dealings but are not big enough to retain a lawyer and you may find that there is an easy route to access them all through a particular association. Provided this is sufficiently profitable for you, you have clearly defined your target market using my criteria.

Defining the benefits to your target market

If you remember, we focused on ” job done” as opposed to features when defining the target market, very simply this is because the benefit is that it allows your customer to get a job done.
This way there is less confusion over language and better defined offering in terms of language.

e.g. The tiler isn’t looking for a “better cutter”, but a “smoother cut”, or a “faster cut”

Don’t forget emotional drivers

Emotions play a large part in all purchases, even the very logical ones, but many purchases are dominated by emotion. Cars are bought for the feeling they give the driver when he sits into it.
Homes are bought for what they say about the owner as much as anything else. The list goes on.

People are very swarm conscious and like to be hiding comfortably in a crowd doing what the crowd are doing. The underlying driver is fear of being singled out for r ridicule if they get it wrong, so people need a way out and they need social approval for their decisions.

You must identify these social drivers and write them down

Remember to record the constraints

It may be that only at certain times of year, or when certain conditions occur, will your customers make a buying decision, or that certain seasons are better. Remember the low hanging fruit theory and record all of these constraints so you can use them to your benefit.

Define your positioning statements

Positioning statements are statements that help the customer understand your proposition by comparing it to the competition and by comparing it to other known things.
“The Venice of the North”. “Accounting’s answer to Coca Cola”. These are positioning statements.
They very simply and subtly say a great deal about what you think of your product, they are very easy to remember, because they follow the basic principal of how we remember things and if you can get the customer to accept this comparison, you will very powerfully and memorably define your product’s position in your customer’s mind.
Nothing in my view is more powerful in the marketing strategy than getting the positioning right and then driving it home consistently.

Plan the activity at a high level.

At a strategic level you don’t want times and dates etc, but you do want these key elements:

Clarity about how and where you will deliver your messages for what outcome and how you will measure success.
You should have a regular review strategy to make sure your strategy is working and to make adjustments when appropriate
You should have clear targets in terms of sales, enquiries, list growth, share of voice, share of mind etc
You should have a budget defined
Divide your activities into Hunting and Farming (Hunting being the search for new contacts)

To help you decide on tactics, the best approach is to go back to your notes on target market and n particular the bit about accessibility. At that point you decided that this segment was accessible, how?
Who and what are their strongest influencers?
Where do they go? What do they read? Do they network? Can you get them to join a newsletter? are they in your database and reachable with certain types of media?

A simple chart like this one can help

	Offline Networking	Online Networking	PR	Email	Events	Telesales	SEM	Website
London engineers £1 to £10m	Meet senior management at key engineering focused gatherings: Institute of ..	Directors will stay in touch with opposite numbers and forge new relationships	Monthly announcements on the following themes: 1 2	Quarterly newsletter with valuable key trends analysis	Invite up to 50 key people for working lunches	Add 200 names to the database of potential customers every month	Target buyers of widget who is searching for “custom” max budget £n	Provide all the information buyers need Track visitors from all electronic messaging. Integrate this information with offline communications records
Target	10 Potentials	50 new relationships	20% improvement in share of mind.	15 enquiries monthly	40 new potentials	2400 new contacts	10 orders per month	Traffic growth 10% Repeat/New 7:4
London legal practices £1m+	Meet senior management at industry gatherings	Minimal as they don’t do it much	Occasional announcements timed with ..		Working breakfasts with short informative training sessions		Target all widget searches	Use ecommerce to capture small orders. Email key bridging pages to the mailing list monthly
Target	30 potentials
Total sales forecast
Cost
ROI

Develop the messages

1. Write out your USP

2. Write an elevator pitch that you can give to anyone in any circumstance and they will immediately “get it”. Imagine being forced to still use it word for word in ten years.

Define the segments by name
Define the jobs they want done
Define the emotional drivers involved
Define their key influencers

Define each of the delivery methods you have proposed for this segment

For each of these individual segment/method instances, write out what action you want them to take and what would make them take it.

For each of the above, write out the message to be delivered
Write out an example of body copy.

The actual body copy can be created close to the event so that the language and mood of the time can be built into it.

e.g.

Segment1	Type	Influencers	Job done	Emotional	Action	Message
	email	Peer group afraid of being left behind. Competition . sales people telling them we are no good. Trade body wanting their business instead	Enter new markets. Find new products	Mustn’t be seen to fail even a little. Must feel comfortable with these new ideas. We are afraid of not being up to the job	www	Message1.doc
	Networking				enquire	Message.doc
	website				enquire	Message.doc
	telephone				Agree to a visit	Message 2.doc
	events				Invite us to tender	Message 3.doc
	Direct mail				Make an enquiry	Message4.doc
	Newsletter				Visit the www	Message4.doc

I expect it is much more evident what your message should be saying when you work form this chart and a good copywriter should be able to produce powerful collateral very quickly.
What is especially good is that all your activity is now delivering consistent focused messages direct to receptive audiences and they can continue the conversation across the website, networking, events etc without any confusion. If you work a little on timing and language you can achieve a great deal from your new marketing strategy.

If you invest in some tools to help you coordinate all these communications it will make your job a great deal easier

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April 24, 2010

Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 4

Filed under: Internet, Sales and Marketing, Strategic thinking, product development — admin @ 1:25 pm

How can Soviralnetbusworks become a key part of the marketing mix as opposed to an alternative lifestyle

Previously:

Bridging between the web and the real world
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 2
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 3

“The filofax of the twenty first century?”

One could easily assume from reading the previous sections that my opinions are anti- networking. I have been accused of this twice by people who use networking successfully .

In fact nothing could be further than the truth. I am especially against misleading people to expect the impossible from networking as many self professed gurus tend to do. It does not work for everyone and not in the same way. I also resent being accosted at networking meetings, or spammed incessantly. I do recognise the power of networking to deliver spectacular results for some people when used intelligently.

Fundamentals of networking

Traditionally we all rely on support networks to advise us about what worked for others, let us in on the next big thing and very occasionally to buy from us(invariably in expectation of substantial discount) and once in a while to recommend us. Nothing about this is new and it is a critical activity for most of us. It helps to know an expert on telephony and instead of three days of comparing deals you call your trusted old school pal and ask him to recommend a deal. You trust him and make the purchase. Add on the saved time and effort and you have a bargain for sure. This is not someone you casually met at breakfast, or online though, so be careful when drawing comparisons.

When I needed two telesales people, I ignored the agencies and told my eighteen year old daughter, who told her Facebook friends and within 45 minutes I had three interviews set up. That is powerful, but it is using technology to speed up what we always did. It is not some mystic new black art.

Mass “networking” is another thing altogether. It is “the filofax of the twenty first century”. Many people approached via internet research and focus groups expressed the belief that they had to be seen as networkers and that if they didn’t use twitter they were yesterdays people. The hours wasted for little or mostly no financial gain is eating up their personal time as well as business time. Sometimes they just shouldn’t be doing it at all and other times they are approaching it all wrong lead astray by “Web2 gurus” who last year were “SEO experts” , before that “web design gurus” and before that “filofax gurus” and studying to be “Twitter gurus”. God help us!.

Who does it work for?

If you enjoy spending a small amount of time chatting to people you wouldn’t otherwise meet, or writing a blog, or learning from forums, good for you, it is working for you and keep on going.

If you are the local builder who completes two bungalows a year, local networking may be your sole marketing effort and it works very well.
If you are an insurance salesman you will have been indoctrinated in this from day one and you’ll be the guy at every dog fight collecting numbers and turning the conversation to pensions. A friend of mine did this all his life and made a tremendous income out of attending Indian weddings.

The formula is ultra simple.

Cast your mind back to the basic sales process we discussed in the last instalment; tyre kicking, need, facts and figures ,trust building, desire, urgency , etc.

However you organise your funnel, whether you base it on a buying, or a selling process, you will have steps like these that qualify your potential customer through stages to the point where you are presenting and negotiating for business with them. Most people call this a “potential” in CRM speak

Let’s compare two scenarios:

Widgets

1 person in every thousand buys my widgets. My process is to:

identify people who buy the product in sufficient quantity and start the conversation
ask permission to pitch for a small piece of business, or offer a trial
convince them of the benefits and our USP,
establish trust
time a motivating offer with a current urgent need
win a customer
develop the relationship.

At point A, there are 65 million or so people to talk to until we have done our qualifying. For a reasonable chance of a sale we need to get 1000 people in the room. How much do you think it would cost to build relationships with all of them? Let’s say five of them know someone who might be in the market, what do you think is the likelihood they will go to the trouble and take the personal risk, of recommending us, or anyone will respect their opinion? Not great.

Accountancy

Every business with few exceptions uses an accountant and they tend to change every three years on average. In order to stand a reasonable chance of doing business we need only three or four in the room per accountant present.
In this case, as long as the ratio of accountants to SME in the room is better than 1:4 we can start on the relationship building phase with complete confidence. Everyone knows what the product is and only buy because they have to. The decision points are price and trust.

Three simple things to “DO”

Divide your networking into two separate functions “Hunting” and “Farming”.
Hunting is about meeting new potential contacts and finding out quickly whether they fit in your network as potential suppliers or customers.
1. Restrict your network to a size you are able to maintain contact with (Accepted scientific research put’s that at around 150 contacts maximum).
2. Don’t try to be everyone’s pal, find people who share your views and attitudes and are likely to value your product, or service. (positioning)
3. Spend your farming time with people who are likely to become a customer, or that are likely to be a useful supplier in the near and foreseeable future and those who have bought from you and are likely to buy again or to be recommenders and ambassadors.
Be a listener and use your judgement to keep evolving your products and services according to the feedback from trusted and commercially viable customers
Control your networking time and budget, it still deserves no more than a few percent of budget and a few hours a week. If you could be completing paid work, do it and spend the profits on traditional marketing, you will get better and faster returns every time.

Three simple things to “NOT DO”

Don’t expect people to buy your product because you are their pal
Don’t forget to attend to all the aspects of the sales/buying process for every prospect regardless of how well you know them, they still need to have their questions answered and fears allayed and they need to justify their decision to others
Don’t pounce on everyone who looks remotely interested and try to “sell to them” get an invitation to pitch first.
1. Don’t fill their inbox with spam just because they gave you an email address.

A revolutionary new idea you are not going to take up because it makes sense and there’s no voodoo involved.

Make your customers your sales force. Treat them so well that they are delighted to sing your praises.

Spend that marketing budget on discounts to people they recommend, so they get kudos and you get extra business recommended by your existing customers.
Spend on taking them to the races, inviting them to parties and useful free conferences and encouraging them to invite a colleague or contact.
The budget you set aside for telling them how much you value your customer’s, spend your budget on taking care of them. Action speaks louder ..
Have a banker answer the phone about queries, not a call centre in Pakistan and have them develop a relationship (network) with the customer and the customer’s friends.

Spend your time networking within this great group of customers and hot prospects learning about their needs and improving your offering.

It will require great research, great positioning, crystal clear branding, and an enlightened staff open to new ways of working, but it could be transformational. There’s no Voodoo here, just common sense and delivering on the promise, but you won’t do it, so we won’t labour it.

Coming next:

What is the right stategy for me?

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April 18, 2010

Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 3

Filed under: Internet, Sales and Marketing, Strategic thinking, communication skills, management skills, product development, soft skills — Tags: business networking, importance of the website, networking, online networking, sales — admin @ 10:54 am

Previously:

Bridging between the web and the real world
Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 2

Are there really clear parallels between Soviralnetbusworks and Sales and Marketing theory?

This is bound to be an area of some contention, for the reasons mentioned previously. Most networkers, especially online, are motivated by a need to be out and about finding customers combined paradoxically with their powerful fear of and resistance to actually selling their services.

If you draw parallels then you have to face the big purple elephant again I.E. Why are you in a business that you are afraid to sell to customers? If you don’t believe in it, who will?

There is a fairly popular and utterly flawed theory that underlies most networking activity, which supports the latter folly and it goes something like this:
If you meet the same 60 people every month for a year and you tell them what you do and then you are nice to them every time you meet and if you pass a few scraps of leads to a few of them, eventually one of them will order from you.
The reasons it’s flawed are simply these:

1. I won’t, and neither will you, wait for the next meeting to place an order with somebody who said hello to me. When I need a widget today, I’ll either call someone I used before, or turn to Google.

2. If I need something very complex and very reliant on the person supplying it, e.g. Interior design, or a management consultant, then I will turn to people I trust, who can make recommendations, but the recommendation will only be as strong as the trust attached to it. Again the chances are not good , though admittedly better, that I will turn to my networking for a supplier.

3. The 60 or so people I know though networking are only likely to contain one or two potential clients, unless I’m an accountant, marketer, or lawyer etc and plain mathematics would tell any sensible person that it is never gong to produce much of value for me. Above all, it is never going to produce anything proportionate to the time put in.

What do Soviralnetbusworks offer that might be different

The bits we have discussed so far are networking, but of course there is more to soviralnetbusworks than networking. When Trout and Reis announced “marketing “ to us, they made a few hints at an aspect of human behaviour which back then, they had very little influence over. The need to “be part of a gang”, to “ conform”, to “be accepted”. Good marketers have always known how to give the impression that “all the in crowd are wearing this fragrance” or “ hanging around on social networks”, but in the past the ability to influence this stopped at traditional advertising.

Facebook, Linkedin and especially Twitter have begun to provide a new type of influencer. It shortens the message to almost subliminal levels and delivers it like hail stones. The result is that users are bombarded with a sense of what “the gang” is doing and thinking and it provides powerful potential to really influence huge volumes of people to blindly go where you want to send them.

The best parallel in the natural world is a flock of starlings in Northern Europe doing acrobatics in the sky before settling in for the evening. They gesture to each other and in an instance either conform or influence their surrounding group. Quickly the group automatically selects a few who seem to be more influential via the timing or style of their gestures, who knows and the whole flock attempts to ape them as they free fly around the evening sky creating incredible shapes and patterns.

Learning how to influence the social scene in the same way will undoubtedly deliver massive dividends for savvy marketers going forward, but just like TV advertising quickly ran into traffic problems, so too will this format. What we should be doing is looking for the next big thing.

What do they have in common? And what is different?

Marketing and selling is first of all a debate in itself that often gets heated. My own favourite take having spent a lot of time close to direct marketing is that marketing is predominantly about generating enquiries and creating the right environment in which to generate enquiries. Where I disagree with some traditionalists is that I don’t believe you should do it if you can’t measure it.

Marketing and sales is there to generate potential leads, generate leads from those, qualify the leads, build and maintain relationships and convert some leads into orders in sufficient numbers to run a profitable business. How well you do this affects the cost and value of your product as much as anything else does and has a direct impact on customer experience.

The order in which I described this is not all that important, because in truth things happen in all kinds of orders in the real world, but generally, all of the various switches have been pushed before you end up with a customer.

In a social networking environment, the trust building may start the ball rolling and the product enquiry come later, in the traditional environment the product enquiry may come first, or in between.

People like CRM vendors often have a blind spot about process and struggle to see how things can wander safely and securely via their own paths and yet arrive in the same place. This is just a human failing and nothing more and they shouldn’t be allowed to interfere with how people work.

There have always been weak sales people often described as the “ personality salesman” who believes that his amazing charm is all that matters and pays no attention to the product, the customers need etc. There is also the “technical salesman” who thinks that all that matters is features and benefits and mathematics and fails to consider the customer’s need to trust him and the supplier and the emotional drivers.
Neither of these is typical, but both failings are very noticeable in the flawed theory often put forward by networking gurus and ecommerce gurus.

What the internet has changed forever about marketing and selling is that it allows the sales process to begin much earlier and it greatly extends the “Tyre Kicking” phase.

When a new customer enters your showroom now, he has kicked your tryes many times, talked to your friends and knows you intimately. He has downloaded all the datasheets and knows the products as well as you do. He may well have talked to previous users or even your previous customers. This process goes on all the time and all happens earlier in the buying process than where we used to begin when Trout and Reis were teaching us their tricks.

The big mistakes you can make are:

To assume every tyre kicker is a potential customer and pounce on him. Most will run away and never return.
To ignore the need to support this tyre kicking process sufficiently to be on his list of maybes when he is ready to talk business.
Hang around the car lot waiting for tyre kickers instead of focusing on the ones who are ready to buy, or the ones who did and need support

What can shrewd marketers learn from traditional marketing to make their networking more productive?

What is critical going forward is to understand the importance of the website, social networking and traditional marketing and how they interact, how they satisfy tyre kicking, attract a halo of interested parties, build a funnel of leads, qualify leads, build relationships, support the buying process and generate orders without making your product too expensive to be saleable.

It is vital to apportion the right amount of time and financial investment at each level so as not to put your self out of business.
A typical example of getting this wrong is spending vast sums on website traffic only to find that they don’t buy anything. Why? Because they are not at that stage yet.
Better to use different search terms and target people who have done their tyre kicking and want a better deal. Positioning is still everything. The rues have not changed, just the tools.

The next time you are drawing your sales funnel, or configuring your CRM, add another slice 50 times wider than the biggest one. In here you will put all the” tyre kicking, just looking, maybe some day” people. The ones you’ve been networking with go in here too.
Create a manageable strategy to understand the information and contact needs of this big slice and provide it with minimal effort and expense
Test and establish a way to qualify your people from the tyre kicking slice into the lead slice and back out again without losing them altogether. This upper slice becomes an ecosystem like the halo over a glass of water. And you need an inexpensive way to keep it in place and growing.

Coming next:

How can Soviralnetbusworks become a key part of the marketing mix as opposed to an alternative lifestyle?

What is the right strategy for me?

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April 10, 2010

Bridging the gap between the web and the real world part 2

Filed under: Internet, Sales and Marketing, Strategic thinking, communication skills, soft skills — Tags: Internet, Marketing, marketing theory, sales, Social media — admin @ 1:27 pm

Part one: Bridging between the web and the real world

This one is a real enigma, no matter what angle you approach it form you get an entirely different viewpoint and just when you think you’ve nailed it along comes somebody to spoil your party with a new twist in the tail.

What is it?

This is the fun bit, it is not at all unusual to follow a conversation on this subject for some time and see everyone nodding sagely in agreement only to discover later that they were all talking about different things, sometimes very different things. Even when I pointed this out recently to a group, they seemed unperturbed and continually agreeing what a wonderful thing “it” was as though I had been merely a figment of their imagination.

I recently started a discussion on networking on one of the social networks. I have done this every year since 2004 and previously it had always been obvious to the users of the “online network “what I was referring to. This time, it was not the case. This time person after person steamed in to tell me how well they are doing out of ”networking” and when questioned, “networking” covered every flavour of human communication from trade shows, to conferences, breakfast meetings, Facebook and Twitter and meeting your pals in the pub.

The thing that stood out in fact was the deliberate omission of online networking in the majority of answers and those who did mention it were rarely very positive.

Also significant for me was the volume of private messages I received that were negative about all forms of networking online and offline, but especially online. The negative comments about offline activity mostly focused on bad manners at events.

My conclusion was that there is no definition at all out there for networking and it basically means communication. If you want to narrow it down and have a useful discussion then you have to enforce some rules very aggressively on the conversation.

Based on responses so far, I am defining networking as: ” making new contacts and keeping in touch with old ones for the purpose of gaining business”

This is not necessarily my definition, but this is as close as I could get to a consensus of opinion.

Define boundaries by agreeing what it is not.

Many people responded to this with remarks to the effect that it is “not selling”. When probed, they defined selling as approaching a stranger and trying to sell them your product or service. I tried probing to discover why it was OK for the other networker to assume they were looking for business, but not OK for them to be up front about it. I.E. Everyone at a breakfast meeting is there because they want business and therefore they know why you are there, so why carry on a pretence, or why be scared to ask for business? I found almost everyone evasive and extremely reluctant to pursue this discussion.

For the purpose of this discussion I am defining networking as:” making new contacts and keeping in touch with old ones in the hope of getting business from them”

What is the demographic of networkers? And what can we learn from it?

This bit was very easy, over a five year period there has been no change at all in this and it is driven home by the owners of all the major online and offline social networks, the users of business and social networks of all kinds are self-employed people who work either alone or in very small companies and partnerships and these are primarily knowledge workers as opposed to artisans, or sellers of goods.

The only exception to this on a fairly large scale is recruiters who dominate LinkedIn in particular and they only differ in that they work for large organisations, but act independently for the most part. They also differ in that they are actively targeting and approaching customers with immediate propositions.

The key piece of information in this, I believe, is that we have a large group of self-employed people who need to find themselves new customers from time to time, but have no sales , or marketing training or ability and suffer from a classic sales phobia (over active cringe gland). Interim and contract agencies capitalise heavily on this market need.

Is anyone making any money out of it?

Linkedin have built a huge job board for passive candidates and they are making a fortune. Others online networks are doing well too, The likes of BNI are doing well out of it.

Stories of people actually building up sizeable small businesses, let alone large businesses are pretty thin o the ground and when you challenge the claims, it is even hard to find many self-employed consultants that have earned considerable fees via online networks.

In terms of offline networking, then it is somewhat different. Financial advisers and management consultants have always used referral selling as the number one source of new business. They sold intangible products that were bough on trust and these huge financial and consulting firms recognised the need to invest in building this trust, so they focused on building strong relationships with good customers and then asking for referrals. The new “prospects” were receptive because a large part of the critical trust building had already been taken care of via the recommendation.

Professional firms continued to curt their big influential clients by inviting them to events networking with them. This still continues and generates the billions turnover in consulting business.

I do believe that, in a ham fisted sort of way, modern networking follows this same principal . I certainly believe that modern networking offers professionals the chance to achieve the same ends on a smaller scale, though the skills are still required and the training and back-up is missing.

In conclusion

The key to understanding modern networking is to realise that no two people are talking about the same thing they are mostly just talking and indeed that, for them is the end goal.

Hardly anyone is gaining very much from online networking and in many ways it is probably because it needs to mix with offline interaction on order to let people build trust before making business arrangements, but the role of online is steadily growing and in my personal view it will steeple some time in the next ten years as the Facebook generation become influential in the marketplace.

Offline networking is producing gains, but in truth it is far inferior form the professional networking carried out for two centuries by the best financial and consulting firms, it is suffering bad press due to rude predatory members and just like so many bartering clubs in the past, it falls foul of “too many sellers and no buyers” syndrome

How can Soviralnetbusworks become a key part of the marketing mix as opposed to an alternative lifestyle?

What is the right strategy for me?

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April 3, 2010

Bridging between the web and the real world

Filed under: Internet, Sales and Marketing, Strategic thinking — Tags: business networking, Marketing, marketing theory, networking, soial media, web2 — admin @ 11:34 am

Soviralnetbusworks and all that jaz

How do you find the longest way form a to b. Well here’s a good contender, call the guy in the next room on his mobile. That message will go into space bounce of a satellite and return to your pal next door.

In a world of 7000,000,000, in a country of 60,000,000 in a town of 30,000 people, who do you find 100 clients for your new accountancy business?
Why you search the 7 billion of course via the internet until you find some who happen to be near you and need an accountant, or at least like you enough to pay you anyhow. OK got that thanks.

Here’s the official theory, in so far as there is one:

You build as big a network as you can and you keep sending emails and publishing tweets and blogs so they all wake every morning wondering what you have to say to them today.

You keep asking what you can do to help and trying to get them business, or worrying about their grannies bunions, until eventually they give in and say I know you don’t really want to be my accountant, but if I begged you, would you do my accounts?

Sales and marketing theory

This is one of the times when I can speak as an authority and indeed the principals are so widely taught and so well understood that it takes little effort to make the points successfully. Here goes.

You start with a product for which there is a defined market, i.e. You know that they have a need and that they are accessible and that it is possible to service this need profitably Product, Place, Price Promotion etc.(Common sense stuff)

Next you design your messages to position your offering so that people can understand it and can hang it on their mental notice board as close to the top of the list as possible. E.G. “The guy to call when you want straight talking and common sense solutions” “Mr No Bull …”

Now you need to target this market so you are delivering the messages to the right people, not the whole 7 billion, or even the 65 million, but maybe a few thousand. If you’re an accountant you might time this with a pressing annual need and you wouldn’t send it to too many Non-Doms. With me so far.

Now you give them an opportunity to put their hand up and say, I’m possibly in the market. E.G. A free booklet on setting up offshore trusts might attract them.

Next you need permission to pitch a few of these and permission to stay in touch with the others in case they need your products at some future time. The relationship building begins now, but most business people are strapped for time, so references and case studies, professional memberships and guarantees are a very important part of the mix. 2, or 3 out of every four who meet you will be unsure about some aspect of you, or the product, or their need and not do business this time, but most can remain in contact and maybe do business in future.

How I approached this confuddle

I have been planning this series for a while and always reluctant to make a start because there just seemed to be more to learn and new angles to consider.

I was faced with an agonising choice between methods of presenting the information. E.G. taking all the new information and then comparing it to what I already knew, superimposing it on this framework and presenting the differences. This is a great way to assimilate new knowledge and skills, but sometimes it blinds you to the whole concept so that you just miss the point.
Imagine introducing wine for the first time to a 10 pints a day man and having him approach the subject in this way?

As a natural born cynic (survivor) I am not good at the other method, E.G. suspending disbelief for while you listen intently and even in the cinema, it had better be good or I’ll probably leave early, so I was not about to immerse myself in the” religion” of the thing in the hope that at some point I’d have a divine revelation.

What I have done is adapted a sort of midway approach that considers all viewpoints without extending the blog to book length. I hope you find it as useful, as I did.

Coming next week …

Making sense of Soviralnetbusworks

Why is it there? Is anybody really making any money form it? Why would it work as a way of winning customers? Why would anybody give up so much time for this when they could do it much more effectively by other means?

Are there really clear parallels between Soviralnetbusworks and Sales and Marketing theory?

How can Soviralnetbusworks become a key part of the marketing mix as opposed to an alternative lifestyle

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