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How can someone outside help?

For a long time, in my first years of business I found myself thinking and saying this.  How can someone outside really understand my business?

One of the key reasons I have chosen a path to helping other business owners is that I have travelled this journey and get it – I have the scars to prove it ?

Sharing 30 Years of Experience

Therefore, I have prepared a comprehensive Sales & Business Process Review for FREE.  I spent many weeks putting down on paper the major questions that need to be considered.  Not only is it done in a manner that should take little time to respond – I will also review each of them and provide feedback for FREE.  No catch, of course if you see value in something I can help with, then I am in!

I am not suggesting anyone can move to any sort of business and provide specific advice – but what is true is that there are more things similar between business operations than there are differences – especially around the Sales operations.

More of the Same

I spent 8 years in a business group with around 14 other business owners.  Some of these changed over the years, so let’s say there were between 25 and 30 businesses I had the privilege of looking inside.  Purposefully they were all non-competing different businesses.  Transport, IT, Manufacturing, Printing, Consulting – all sorts.  It was very rare for someone to raise a problem or challenge that we did not understand – why??  In the end, way over 90% of the discussion was related to some core areas that covered all of us.  Finance, HR, Sales, Marketing, Planning, Legal, Systems/Process.

Sure, employing a software developer is very different to employing a storeman – or is it?  Are the steps/processes not extremely similar – just the content that changes?

I say all this as a premise to my own experience managing other businesses.  It all becomes quite clear that there are many common factors.

Obtaining help?

Business coaching/consulting has been around for a long time and is a popular business tool.  What I found after having a range of consultants in to help my business in the early days, was that, like so many things with a strong personal involvement, you needed a match to get the MOST out of it.

My biggest issue was getting that extra layer of them connecting with our business, not just the process it required.  When I found that, it was like GOLD – a massive turn around.

Another parallel I would draw: I can go to 5 equally qualified and experienced sports masseurs – why is it that I connect better with one of them?  Part of the human mystery; the others will help but the right one will help all that more.

What am I saying: an experienced coach or mentor will always be of value but don’t hesitate to try a few to be sure that you get the best fit.  That way you will have a much longer-term relationship, deeper understanding and help for you and your business.

It is a curious thing, all the elite sports people you can think of plus most of the successful entrepreneurs, all leverage coaching and/or mentors.  Some of the most renowned entrepreneurs are skilled coaches themselves.  Warren Buffet and Richard Branson are good examples – they employ people to run their business and coach them without telling them what they can and cannot do – very empowering.

Here is a nice summary of how Richard Branson thinks, how he coaches his leaders. https://youtu.be/i3fQqUs5WSQ

So why is it that most SME business owners think they don’t need help?

Energy

It is fair to say that most entrepreneurs have a huge amount of energy and ideas often pour from them – the staff around them find much of it hard to keep up with or understand.  Having someone from outside that can highlight what is being missed is invaluable.  Employees, partner, shareholders – they are too close, too involved.

What I noticed as I travelled through the various roles and businesses is that when something was brought to my attention – I already knew how to do it properly; but in the busy hectic environment of growing a business, some things slip, I need to bring my focus back.

My favourite “busy” story is around playing squash, when you are on the court and everything is happening so fast, having someone watching and reminding you of what to pay attention to is of high value.

If you are a CEO or Owner and interested in some input, drop me a note via our contact form and I can arrange access to our Free review. https://www.delivio.com.au/contacts/information/ Select Sales Process Review.

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I am asked this most often – the typical question is – “do I need to engage with social media?”

Remembering that most of the businesses I deal with are business to business and what I would call solution focused.  In other words, generally not consumer based.

Now statistics can say all sorts of things.  On the surface the appealing thing is that around 70% of the population engages in Social Media – maybe the other 30% get the work done!! Just joking… The figures are clear that we cannot ignore Social Media as PART OF our marketing mix.

It sounds like there is a great pool of opportunity there to tap into.  Hell yeah!!  If you are seen when it matters – when someone is receptive.

Is someone on Facebook going to look at a software strategy for their business? Probably not.

Build Engagement

Social Media is all about building an interest and desire to engage.  You need a medium to long term strategy and to follow a plan.

In the Online world, most business will be driven by web search and email interaction. Social Media is a great open net, but direct engagement is where most professional businesses gain success.

You need to leverage the big net of Social Media to pull it back into your more targeted and personalised marketing & engagement.

Having said that, promoting your brand can be of great relevance in Social Media.

Social Media is a phrase for describing some extremely different platforms.

Facebook and LinkedIn are very different; however, the strategy of building contacts has some similarity.

Build an Engagement Process

The more important question is “What do I do with a new potential business contact?”  “What is my engagement strategy?”

How many of you have met a contact at a conference, connected on LinkedIn and that’s it?!  There is a whole lot more you could do.

With one recent project, we knew we needed to target a set of roles, we understood who the buyers were, so we used LinkedIn to help focus in on these. This was not a one off “blast” but a planned engagement over a period of time.  Facebook was the wrong place for buyers but still good for awareness.  We found a high incidence of potential customers saw us on Facebook, but our actual engagement came from LinkedIn and subsequent traditional sales activities.

Conversely, another business we built a strategy for meant Facebook was a great fit as we could target business owners, above a certain age and within a very specific geography.  Targeting this group with a Facebook Event was ideal.

(Click here for our blog article “Targeted Approach to Marketing”)

Publishing to Multiple Platforms

We have mentioned LinkedIn and Facebook, but you still need to publish to blog articles and via email campaigns.

This leads to the other question; how do I manage publishing to multiple sources with the minimum of effort?

To help I have produced a “flow chart” image.   If you would like a copy of this click here.

Analytics and Integration

There are some great management tools around, but I have found Zoho Social to give me the best value outcome (Particularly as it integrates back into my CRM).  It is simple to use, can publish to all the main targets including: LinkedIn for both your personal and business pages; Facebook (page only, not profile); Twitter, Google+, Instagram.

You can create drafts, so others can review before publishing.  You can also schedule a list of articles to publish.  Zoho Social delivers great analytics about all your activity on Social Media in one place.

Here are a couple of examples.

You will see from the flow chart that the key aim is to build a list of people who find your information relevant and that at some stage will potentially be a customer.

Through these methods we can build a long-term nurturing process that is inexpensive to deliver, yet can give us great metrics on interest levels.

Communicate, Educate, Engage, Resolve, Transact, Service. CEERTS

One of the best tips I remember getting for marketing – if you have marketed well, the customer is ready to buy from you.  That is a whole other discussion, however getting the customer ready to buy is certainly a function of Social Media.

Content

The other thing we will touch on briefly is what do I talk about in Social Media, what material do I present?  As with all marketing, the old saying is still true … “Content is King”

A couple of quick things to consider:

Provide informational pieces.  Back to my CEERTS process.

Don’t oversell, focus more on good information. The parallel I draw here is how I conduct a seminar – most of my effort goes into ensuring the audience leaves having learnt something.  Sure, I am upfront about why an event is sponsored, of course someone needs to create business from it – but it is not about the product, it is about what you can do with the product or service; what you can say without even mentioning the product name.

Content is always important….

• Video has rapidly become the king of communication on LinkedIn and Facebook. Short 2 to 4-minute videos about a subject are very popular and there are many economical ways to build a video; even just you in front of your phone video recorder.
• Make it educational.
• People love reals situation examples, you may not be able to mention names, but describing the scenario is very helpful.
• Something new you have come across

So, in summary – what do you need?  You need something to manage your Social Media Campaigns. I am using Zoho Social, there are other popular tools like Hootsuite, Socciable etc  You also need to have a Campaign tool for your email campaigns.  I use Zoho Campaign, once again due its tight integration back into my Zoho CRM but you might use Mail Chimp, Constant Contact or similar.

Let me finish with a note on why I am using and promoting Zoho – simply put; INTEGRATION.  The screen shot below is a great example of the benefits.  All that other activity shows up in my CRM, LIVE.

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This is another one of those headings that many people would say – of course, targeting is obvious.  But truly how many do this and understand the many aspects of sales and marketing this applies to?

Being clear about who you are targeting drives huge efficiencies and increases the win rate when you know who you are engaging with.  I have found this can help Sales staff immensely.

Let me put a few stories together to help explain…

What is your target definition?

First, you need to come up with a definition of your target that is easy to understand and clear.

This can be related to market accessibility, verticals, geography, technology.

Let us also be clear on the difference between focused selling and accidental sales.

Focused Sales

Focused selling is where you are spending most of your energy in an outbound mode.

Accidental Sales

Accidental sales are those that come to you through referrals or advertising but are not necessarily your target group.

Example Targeting Health

Let’s see how it could work with a technology company, targeting Health.

First, Health is a big banner with many different facets, so you need to break this down.

We have decided to focus on nursing homes as we have some reference customers in that field and some technical expertise that fits.

The first thing this has done is tell us where we are NOT going to spend outbound energy – Hospitals, Consulting rooms etc.

The other thing it tells us is where to network.  What events to attend, or sponsor?  What linked in profiles to connect with and build relationships?  What vendors to leverage into that space?

The next is to narrow this down further.  How many beds would our target have and what is our primary geographic target?

Develop a Target Statement

So perhaps we can have a target statement like this…

I am focused on Nursing homes within a 1-hour drive from Dandenong that have a minimum of 40 beds.

As a sales manager this also helps as you can review sales activity and anything that does not fit the target you can pull the sales person into line.  Many sales people focus on activity, not effectiveness.

This allows you to buy research and lists that are very targeted.  You know what the primary LinkedIn groups are that you should join, look for any other meetups or similar for that industry in the defined area.  Attend functions that fit the description.

All outbound energy MUST be targeted at this definition.

Now let us look at the other side, why it saves effort and improves efficiency.  If I decided to go to hospitals as well, then we now have a different networking group entirely, typically different events to attend.  I would be watering down my efforts.  If hospitals are potential users of our technology, we can target them later once we have cemented this area of focus.

Referrals are Great

Of course, as you do your networking and people move around you will get inbound enquiries from outside your target that fit your expertise; these are the accidental sales. That is great, we all love referral business.  It lowers the sales effort and increases the success factor.

I have an example in line with this where a provider did some great work in Brighton, that customer told another person at a conference in Sydney resulting in a customer on the Sydney north coast.  That is an accidental customer.

Expanding your Target

Now the beauty of the targeted approach is that this statement is just the beginning.

One way I like to look at this is that my target is to get xx% of the addressable market in my defined target before I expand the target.

Addressable market is always up for interpretation. Still using our Nursing home example, let’s suggest there are 500 nursing homes within that 1-hour range, 250 with more than 40 beds.  Further to this, we learn that around 30% of them have had major technology upgrades in the last 18 months so would be difficult to target.  That leaves 175 as an addressable market.  There is more you could add, but you get the idea.

So, following the example…

I am focused on Nursing homes within a 1-hour drive from Dandenong that have a minimum of 40 beds.

Could change to all of Victoria or Melbourne and Sydney metro.  You get the idea.  As you build profile and success – reaching saturation levels – you expand the target.

The advantage I have found in this style of approach is how much more successful the engagements are.  We know the lingo, we know the problems they face, we have seen them before, we know how to position ROI.

Building this activity around a well structured CRM solution will bring significant rewards.

Here is simplified example of a worksheet you can use to have a quick review of your Customer Focus.

We have just started with the top 5, you can add as many as you would like.

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Customer Service

Seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?  However, I have seen too many times company’s systems adjusted to make it easier for the company to operate while causing grief to the customer. We need to identify what your customers consider important.

Here are two examples;

a) What is going to make the customer happy and want to tell people how good you are?

b) What would really tick off a customer, lose them and have them tell all their friends how bad you are?

It is a good exercise to go through.

Rank & Improve

It is not going to be just the one good or bad thing, list them and rank them for importance: your score and your urgency to fix the problem will help you identify an improvement or potential problem.

I had a great example with my internet service provider recently – they called me – yes a phone call – to let me know their monitoring has shown that my service was operating below par and that it is likely to be an issue in the street and they are sending out a tech!! Wow, I just thought some of the websites I was visiting were slow.

A company I helped put together a streamlined quoting mechanism had customers raving about the quick response time and was clearly bringing in more business.

Opposite to this I asked a company for a quote for some work at my house and they wondered why I had picked someone else when it took them 3 working days to respond!

Quoting is just one of the key elements of customer service – you need to get it right and be prompt.

Here is a link to an example review sheet.

Set Expectations

So, what is it that your customers like and don’t like?

Setting expectations and meeting those expectations would have to be one really important area – over promising and under delivering just makes for unhappy customers.

In another example in one of my previous business’s, our customers wanted overnight delivery and we thought we had that covered so promoted the new level of service – what customer would not want overnight delivery?

It quickly became obvious that we could not provide overnight delivery as the courier often took an extra day.

We changed to quoting 1 to 3 day delivery depending on location, because we discovered an accurate delivery time was more important than overnight delivery. Consequently our customers indicated in a follow up survey that our delivery was very highly rated.  This is because we set the right expectations and delivered on them.

Measure and Analyse

Data is king.  Find those important aspects that can make a huge difference to your business – either way – measure and monitor them.  If the element is hard to specifically measure, do your best – an indicator is better than no idea!

Keep your Staff in the Loop

Get feedback and deliver KPI information back to your staff.  There are many examples of simple feedback systems – could be just clicking Happy or Sad or a simple survey.

Are you also calling your customers to see if they are happy with their purchase?  One simple thing we have done for several companies is to provide a follow up call – are you happy?

Customer service requires good training and good systems.  How are you tracking new enquiries and response times?  How do you record internal and external problems?

Take the customers view: if they don’t like the view, they will not engage or will move on.

If you would like a free review of how you are doing, just use the Information Request button to the left or click here.

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Millennial’s

One of the traits of many Millennial’s is the desire to have access to the latest software tools, and their tendency to want “best of breed”.  In times gone by we saw more interest in an integrated package.  You could argue that Saleforce started this by having the CRM of choice outside of other integrated offerings from the likes of Netsuite or more recently we see people adding Pipedrive or running online marketing out of MailChimp or the big jump to Xero for accounts.  Initially these were pretty much stand alone; now we see many integrations to make sure the data is available across platforms. In the end, they are separate apps with an integration.

Integrated vs Best of Breed

There is not a clear answer with Integrated vs Best of Breed as it comes down to functionality and how good the integration is.   I have seen companies promote Suite style products that have often been tacked together through acquisitions that have appalling integration.  The devil is in the detail.

You need to spend the time understanding what integration you need and what benefits it brings.  Having a fancy dashboard for opportunities loses it’s gloss if you cannot drill directly down to the detail.  To have an efficient team, you need good integration.  A final example I can highlight is the need to integrate email with CRM – a basic feature many of you will say – the fact is that not enough use this.  Most communications are still via email; you need to capture communications in your CRM!

Zoho Business Platform

I am doing a lot of work with Zoho CRM where I can not only see email trials but also integrate fully with campaign management, Social Media activity and Web site access.  Add to this financial visibility through Zoho Books and you get a fantastic customer view.  This is just one example of integrated.

We are seeing Google, Microsoft and others working hard to cover your business needs with integrated solutions.  You still need to understand the benefits some very clever point solutions offer, perhaps with sufficient integration to your core needs.

Understand System Requirements

Take the time to document your system requirements with a keen eye on efficiency and customer service.

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Baby boomers are now in or near their 60’s, and all that experience is about to head for retirement.  You are faced with some of your most expensive employees with the most experience who won’t be around for too many more years.  What is more, they are being bogged down with basic data entry work instead of maximising their value.

Here is one simple example we helped with.  The most senior and successful sales person at an IT business was spending nearly 40% of their time looking up standard items and populating quotes and then updating CRM.  Ask yourself, what is the key value points of your best sales staff?  I would wager that they are excellent at engaging with the customer and know how to close a deal. So why not give them time to do more of this.

It takes time to achieve quality

Give them time to go deeper and wider with their customers, time to properly follow up leads and generate new opportunities. Another partner we worked with stated that they were able to reduce costs while getting much higher customer satisfaction stats resulting in a lift in profits in the range of 20%.

Document & Understand Success

There are many ways to improve overall efficiency and most importantly hold onto knowledge. The first place to start is with documented & standardised processes.

Do you spend time understanding SUCCESS?  Most of us are quick to pull apart a lost deal but how much effort goes into analysing why we WON a deal and then documenting this to build into our process.

As we build this documentation and train support staff we make our most expensive staff all the more efficient and effective.

Automate

Next is to consider how we can automate some of the process and remove cumbersome systems and double entry.

Staff Tiering

Finally, is there room to move some of the standard and repetitive items to other staff.  This could be local or overseas based support staff.  The key is to maximise efficiency.

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I have just returned from travels into Asia, this time Malaysia and Cambodia.  Just like I have seen in Vietnam and Philippines, there are many people there that would be keen to be loyal workers as they generally lack opportunity outside of hospitality, farming or micro businesses. This is one way of coping with Job Hopping locally.

The small dilemma I have is the concern that people have here in Australia that we are “not supporting local jobs”. I share that concern to a point.  Australia has been doing this for many decades, typically bringing in immigrant labour to do the jobs established Australians don’t want to do.  Early on it was sugar cane, then market gardens and now factory or repetitive style jobs.

The plain fact is that most people between 20 and 45 are either looking for an easy fun job or a stepping stone to somewhere else. By the age of 48 the average person has had around 12 jobs.

Job Hopping

Many workers spend five years or less in every job, as a result they devote more time and energy transitioning from one job to another. In January 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the average employee tenure was 4.2 years, down from 4.6 years in January 2014. It is now approaching less than 4 years.

We have a storm brewing; increased demands on work regulations, increased desire for quality work environment/systems/equipment, job hopping for wage rise. Add to this a low unemployment level and it is easy to see the challenges.  Further still we are seeing global players getting bigger  here while they leverage low wage economies around the globe.  Sure, they may deflect the attention by saying “we have thousands of employees locally”- however you can be sure that a good portion of their business is based on low wage economies.  If 20% of your workforce cost 1/3 of a local employee – as the employer, you would be happy with that.

Yes, you do need the right balance and off shoring is not the only solution.  Later we will talk about the importance of setting solid foundation systems before anything else. Our off shore staff are keen to do those repetitive but important tasks and to do them for the long term.

Value Reliable Staff

I remember my senior engineers wanting to replace a support engineer because he did not “know enough”. Support engineers are valuable but often on their way to another role.  To have one that simply liked the role he was in, brought an anchoring point for customers to have a known contact who was great at follow up and cared for them.  Have a holistic view is important.  If the staff member can do a good job, is reliable, gets along with other staff well and most importantly – the customers love dealing with them!  That is a great employee to be valued.