This week, I had to contact a company which deals in large quantities of email to process a refund. The experience showed me what a good email policy is.

One evening, I realized that a purchase I had made had never been delivered, and so I emailed the vendor requesting a refund. Minutes later, I got an automated response telling me that my email had been recieved, and would be taken care of within 2 business days.

The following afternoon, I got a personal email asking for more details so that they could process the refund, to which I sent the requested information. I was notified that the refund would be processed within 5 days, and would get an email once the processing was done.

An hour later, that email came as well.

What this company did right is that they followed up at every step of the way:

1. They acknowledged that my email arrived, and let me know when I could expect a personalized response;
2. They met the timelines they set with a generous margin;
3. They constantly assured me that they would deal with this issue promptly and that they were concerned with my ultimate satisfaction.

If you receive more email than you can deal with immediately, following the example above may help reassure those emailing you that you will respond, and will do so in a friendly and professional manner.

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1. Growth and the Panic Response
2. Show That You Care
3. Question: Fake it Until You Break It?

Company Claims Guaranteed Search Engine Placement Service

Only, of course, this company is not Google, but rather, an SEO company based out of South Africa. Knowing the value of such a statement, they’ve offered to guarantee results, with your money back if they fail. While many SEO companies will talk about this, few offer guarantees, since they don’t control the outcome.

In business, what most SEO companies promise makes sense – they promise effort, based on their experience, to help you reach your goals. However, in most cases, clients do not care about effort – they want results. Except the companies who promise them have, so far, proven to be inept.

Nitch is different. While they may not tell you what they’re doing, they do guarantee that their efforts will not be in vain. They will stake their entire efforts against a hit or miss – if you aren’t on the first page of Google, you get your money back.

Yes, they are promising something out of their control. Google could change the rules, change their algorithms. But even so, there are techniques that will work in the long run, and companies which are in tune with their industry can stay in line with the changing field.

But if you’re going to make a promise, make sure you follow the Nitch example – put your money where your mouth is, especially if delivering on that promise is not within your control.

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1. Bad Marketing Pitch Raises Scam Alert
2. Promise to Deliver
3. Make Money While You Sleep

The banner seemed to contain fairly current information – it had a cancelled class and a new class starting, both pieces of information being about a week old. Not too bad for a gym with a relatively stable schedule.

The Twitter feed was more disturbing. It had not been updated in about a year. Looking around at the rest of the site, signs of neglect were everywhere. Schedules were out of date, information was no longer current.

It had the feel of a passing fad.

In social media, and online in general, being current is incredibly important. If some information is clearly dated, visitors will quickly leave. While a website and a Twitter account are by no means expensive, they can cost quite a bit in terms of lost business.

Unfortunately, it can be difficult to find motivation to keep going, but persistence is required. It took 9 months of writing articles on this site before I made my first sale that I could attribute directly to my writing, but it paid for that effort. Even when you think there are no visitors reading, you continue to write, to update, to maintain a sense of freshness.

You never know when the big break will come, and you don’t want to have only yourself to blame for not being prepared.

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1. First Steps for a New Business
2. Social Media is Not a Strategy, but you need a Social Media Strategy
3. Bad Marketing Pitch Raises Scam Alert

In some businesses, it has become the practice to request a portfolio, or a sample of the candidate’s work against which their abilities can be assessed. However, many businesses shy away from this practice, and some candidates are reluctant to provide copies of their work for a variety of reasons.

What methods does your business use to assess the competency of potential employees prior to making an offer

Naming a Business

There are a few common methods used for naming businesses. In general, though, naming a business should be a serious endeavor, as it will continue to be used to identify your business long after the reasons for choosing the name may be relevant.

Named for the Owner

The simplest, often used in service-based businesses, or those which have grown out of a consulting or sole-proprietorship, is to simply use the name of the owner[s] as the name of the business. Common examples include Dell, HP, Ford, Lloyd’s, Harry Rosen, and many others.

The industries in which this is fairly common are legal and accounting, in which the people involved in the business are highly relevant to their clients, or fashion, in which the name of the business is the name of the designer behind the business.

Named for the Product

Other businesses name themselves after what they sell. This can serve a business well if the name is chosen to be both specific and vague such that it covers its market effectively, and can outlive the life of any of its specific products.

Examples of such businesses include Home Depot (which caters the home renovation market) and Business Depot (servicing the business market).

Named for the Vision

Some businesses use their name as a derivation of their vision. As an example, No Frills is a grocery store which tries to keep everything as simple as possible. Best Buy includes an association with good deals as part of their name.

One additional factor to consider when choosing a name is that there needs to be an avoidance of brand confusion. If there is another business with a similar sounding name, even if they sell a different product, you need to be sure that your target market will not confuse the two businesses. This includes looking for a domain name that is easily associated with your business, and the domain most easily associated with your business is not owned by someone else.

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1. Question: How do you name your business?
2. Effective Marketing Strategy
3. Question: Who Does Your Business Taxes

Social Media is even less like radio or TV, in that there are many aspects to social media, each of which is a tool on its own. Perhaps this is where the confusion arises – does the creation of a Facebook page, a blog, a Twitter feed, some presence on Linked In – do those add up to a strategy?

As many business people I know who utilize Social Media heavily in their marketing efforts will tell you, using the tools does not make a strategy, though a strategy uses the tools. A coherent Social Media strategy understands the role each of the tools can play, the type of work needed to balance the various aspects to Social Media against one another. The strategy involves more than just the tools, but also how they will be used.

Will the Twitter feed be used to showcase products, or will it be for chatting with the target market?

Will the blog focus on issues internal to the company, or external to the industry?

Who will manage the Facebook page?

The answers to these questions, and many more besides, result in the creation of a sound strategy, one which has an objective, and shows how the various tools will be used to bring the goal closer to fruition.

For example, my strategy with my blog here is not to promote my own work, or my business. It’s to help showcase my expertise by talking about issues relating to my target market. While occasionally I will talk about my business, it’s not really about that – it’s about issues potential customers might want answered. Ultimately, some of the readers of this blog may choose to work with me, but only because I’ve already established credibility with them through my writing (over 170,000 words to date).

Strategies don’t need to be complicated, but they need to involve more than just a tool, or set of tools. Social Media is a set of tools – not a strategy.

Related posts:

1. Business and Social Media – Part 2
2. Using Social Media the Wrong Way
3. Business and Social Media – Part 4

Where would you find your mentor, or, if you already have a mentor, how did you select him or her?

Retaining Customers

Last week, I asked what it was that would drive you away from a business. Not surprisingly, the most common answer was customer service, or rather, poor customer service. While consumers can be tolerant of poor quality and high prices, service is something we’re unforgiving of, unless we’ve been prepared to accept it.

As an example, going to dollar stores in general does not make one think of good customer service. The expectation there is that the prices be a dollar (or, with inflation, perhaps as much as two or three dollars). The criteria for measuring the store is in its name, thus there is more flexibility in terms of other factors such as service.

Other businesses, though, do not have that luxury. We expect, when entering a store, to be received in a friendly manner, that the sales staff be knowledgeable about their products. Customers don’t like to wait in line, or be ignored while the staff chat on the floor.

This extends to online stores as well. When we shop online, we have an expectation that we will be notified whether items are in stock, the estimated shipping times, and any extra fees that may apply. The site is expected to have a current security certificate, to ensure that our credit card information is being sent to the site in a secure manner, and being handled responsibly.

If a store processed your card, and you immediately were contacted by fraud alert that several transactions had been processed seconds apart, you would be concerned. Even if the reason for the multiple transactions was later determined to be legitimate, corresponding to each of the expected deliveries, you would not be impressed with the site. If this resulted in a delay in your order being processed, you would be concerned, since the site had precipitated the problem.

This is not an unusual scenario. A recent order placed on the Best Buy website for several hundred dollars of miscellaneous equipment was split into four shipments. A separate charge was placed for each portion of the order (though they were all ordered as a single unit), since the site policy is to bill as the orders are shipped. This makes sense when shipments are being made on different days, but not when they’re all shipped on one day. Not a surprise, the credit card company held the transaction until I verified that the transaction were okay.

Several hours later, I got an email from Best Buy saying that the order was being held because my card was denied. This, in fact, was not correct – the credit card processor had sent an error message that Best Buy was to contact them in regard to the charge, and they had already approved the charge.

In this, the site failed in my expectations. They looked at the order from the perspective of computational simplicity, not from customer experience. Since this had been a compounding of previous bad experiences with their store, they lost me as a customer. The issue was completely in regard to service – and when a store fails in its customer service, it will lose potentially more than just the one customer who had the bad experience.

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Brian Crozier and Joseph Iuso have now presented their business, UseMyBank, twice on Dragons’ Den asking for the exact same investment, at the same valuation – $20 million. The first point of contention is therefore the fact that their previous valuation a year ago was clearly wrong – a company that does not change in value over the course of a year is quite unusual.

Once again, they turned down the offer, which was for a 50% equity stake in the company, or a $2 million valuation. Clearly, the difference in opinion as to the value of the company was quite high. What I found interesting, though, is the fact that they got any offer at all.

When I wrote my previous review of their pitch, I looked at their website and was not impressed. The current website, though, is a lot more sleek and polished, which was a significant problem with the prior version of the site. However, based on my research, at the time of their most recent presentation, sometime mid 2010, they were still using the old website, which did not bolster confidence. Various technical details about their current site also leads me to question their credibility with the volume of exposure they claim to be getting.

At a more fundamental level, I do not believe that the market wants their product. With the increasing number of stories of fraud, the use of a credit card, or any kind of intermediary service, can help reduce the risk of fraud. If someone uses my credit card, I can dispute the charge with the credit card company before I actually pay any money. With a debit service, I need to dispute the charges after the money has left my control. While some people may accept the risk, more people will look for ways to use existing intermediaries to handle their online transactions.

The fact that they turned down the offer is not surprising – it was a massive difference in valuation, even worse than last year. The fact that they are still in business, and claim to have high transaction rates, and yet continue to seek an investment of 20% of their income for the previous year, however, begs questions as to their true ability to run a proper business.

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3. The Value of an Idea

Perhaps the author was unaware of the implications of their message, though I find that unlikely, and suspect that author was perfectly aware of the implications of the appearance of the landing page. The result was a marketing pitch that had all the appearances of a scam.

If you’re in business and looking to design your website, there are better ways to get people’s email addresses and communicate with your target market than to offer them something free before you’ve convinced them that value exists. As such, there are a few fairly simple rules to follow when designing your site:

1. Keep the design simple, with subdued colors. The page shouldn’t appear to be shouting its message, but rather to be displaying its message in a cool and calm manner.
2. Provide information, or something of value, without asking for anything in return. This can be pages of your site with tips and suggestions, a public blog, or a free PDF that can be downloaded in a single click.
3. When asking for an email address, explain what you’re going to do with it – what kind of emails will you be sending, how often, and will you share the address with anyone?

Failure on any of these might gain you addresses in the short-run, but you will find that people will either ignore your emails when they start arriving each morning, mark them as spam (which eventually can impact people who actually read your emails as well), block you, or report you. As well, if the people who’ve given you their emails are active on any of the social media sites, they may pass along the information about your practices to their friends.

Perhaps this is the confusing aspect to this form of marketing. Your website is a place where you can post information about yourself, what you’re selling, and your expertise. Social media is a place where you can interact with your target market. However, pushing a hard-sell at your target market is little different from being an aggressive telemarketer – and most people have learned how to block such people out of their lives.

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1. Social Media is Not a Strategy, but you need a Social Media Strategy
2. Business and Social Media – Part 2
3. Using Social Media the Wrong Way

Vaporware describes products not released on the date announced by their developer, or announced months or years before their release… Vaporware first implied intentional fraud when it was applied to the Ovation office suite in 1983; the suite’s demonstration was well-received by the press, but was later revealed to have never existed.

The current usage, though, is more along the lines of creating a website promoting a product, and seeing how many customers attempt to purchase it. This tactic can be used to determine how much interest there is in the product, and whether or not the price is suitable.

The risk, of course, is that once a tactic like this is used, any trust between the company and the potential customer is lost. The customer has been led to believe that they were purchasing a product, only to find out that the product does not exist. While this is not fraud, since the customers are not actually paying for anything, it isn’t honest.

However, the problem remains as to how to go about measuring consumer interest in a product that has not yet been created.

One approach, perhaps a bit naive, is to go out and find some customers who are willing to pay for your product. Ask them for prices they would be willing to pay, and use that as the basis for your business model and income projections. The problem, however, is that until a customer is asked to put out money for a product, any statement they make regarding pricing has to be taken with a grain of salt. This is, in fact, the basis for the statement “Put your money where your mouth is”.

Customer surveys in which information about the potential product is provided, and general statements regarding pricing have similar problems. While this can help narrow down the range, it does not validate that a particular price will work, for the same reason as asking customers to name a price won’t work unless they are prepared to back that statement with cold hard cash.

The approach that does work, though, is to find some actual customers who will state that not only will they purchased your product at a specified price, but will actually lay out at least some of the money up-front. Such validation indicates that these users are prepared to believe in you and what you can build, and that they see a specific value in what you’re building.

The risk, of course, is that if the product does not get built, you have to return the money. Be careful using this approach to ensure that quantifiable milestones have been defined for the product development, and that it is clear how the product can be assessed objectively to determine whether or not it has met the goals defined during the research stage.

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1. Market on the Future, Sell on the Present
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With this validation under their belt, he hoped that the VC he was meeting with would see the promise. However, he left the meeting empty-handed, though the VC parted significant amounts of advice on how he might proceed. The reason he gave for declining the investment, though, was something along the lines of:

It’s not big enough for me to get involved. I think your business will do well, and will be profitable in the near future. However, you have a long road in front of you to reach the market, and the competition is quite strong. It’s not for me.

There are actually two types of investors who would make such a comment, and trying to differentiate between the two is complex at best, impossible at worst.

The first investor knows the industry, the competition, the existing products, and understands the business idea you’re proposing. He’s looked at how it compares to the current offerings, and has made an educated guess as to how the target market will respond. He’s factored in changes in the nature of the market itself – in this case, it’s age-specific, so understanding the generation that will be targeted to adopt the product is a key requirement to being able to project the business’ performance.

Once all this has been taken into consideration, this investor feels that the adoption rate will not be high, the product will not redefine the market as a whole, and there will be stiff competition. It’s unlikely that the business will do much beyond turn into “yet another” player in the specified market.

The second investor is likewise well-educated in the industry, but is also looking at it from the perspective of his own generation. That is, he sees how his generation would react to such a product, and projects that thought onto the current market. With limited adoption by that generation, a generalization of how it might be adopted by other markets is created, resulting in the same conclusion.

The difference between the two types of investors is that the first has made a properly balanced argument for why the business will not be the next shining star. The second, however, has merely projected an attitude against a new business, whose market he does not really understand. When the advice comes from the second investor, it should be taken dubiously, since he clearly does not get it.

The problem, however, is how to tell the difference between the two. For that, you need to know the people involved, past investments they’ve made, and then make a judgement call based on that.

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1. Competition is Healthy
2. Financial Planning and Advice
3. Get Some Skin in the Game

I was forwarded a talk by Jason Fried about Why Work Doesn’t Happen in the Office, in which he discusses where people like to go when they need to get some work done. Interestingly, the answers he got were pretty much anything but the office.

The question is the same as Jason’s question:

Where do you go when you need to get some work done?

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First Time in Business

If you are in business for the very first time, then what you need to do is go out and find some customers. No fancy business plan, no expensive incorporation, just a phone number or email address at which you can be reached. Reach out to your network, announce that you’re in business (explain what type of business you’re looking for), and ask people to send you leads.

What you are trying to do is get some momentum, and the simplest way to do that in the early days of a business is to find one person who will pay for what it is you have to offer.

One friend started his business with $500 in his pocket – he unpacked the coffee machine, pulled out a list of phone numbers for every person he knew, and started calling each to let them know he was in business. A few years later, he has several people working for him on a variety of projects, and has some idea about where he’s taking his business. But the start was informal – just a bunch of phone calls.

What it comes down to is networking to find one client. Once you have that one client, you can worry about determining where your business should go – taking legal steps to protect yourself, setting yourself up to be as tax friendly as possible, etc. The first step for someone in business for the first time is always networking.

Been There Before

If you are starting your second or later business, then the steps are different. Finding your first customer isn’t as important as figuring out what this business will do. You have to reflect on your previous business to determine, from a business perspective, how you can do better. In that case, a formal business plan might be wise – you may have the time to do this, and can afford to spend valuable time researching your target market, the industry, raising capital, etc.

The steps aren’t as clear here either – what was the end of your previous business that pushed you to start a new business? Would you call your previous venture a success? How would you apply the lessons learned there to your next venture?

These questions, and other related questions, need to be answered in order to determine your best approach to starting anew.

Summary

If it’s your first time in business, then don’t over-think it – just go out and find someone who will pay you to do the kind of work you want to be doing. If it’s not your first time, then reflect on your previous endeavors and figure out how to apply the lessons learned there to your next venture.

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I clicked the link, and found myself looking at a marketing pitch for a course on how to get other businesses to pay you to get a listing on Google. After watching for a few minutes, my scam radar starting beeping. One of the images just seemed wrong:

The map was accompanied with an explanation that the items marked with letters were businesses who had claimed their listings, while those without letters (just a red dot) had not. Money could be made by listing a business for someone who doesn’t know how to do it, and then get paid a maintenance fee to keep up the listing.

This didn’t seem correct, and further investigation showed that the dots are actually for businesses who have ALREADY claimed their listings. The reason some are marked with letters is simply because they’re on the current page of Google listings. Not only that, but there is no maintenance fees to keep up the listing – once you’re listed, you can forget about it. A quick check online directed me to another page, which had the details of the scam, and so I passed it back to Jill in case she didn’t realize she had just posted a scam to her feed (the other posts from her I had read didn’t seem to be scams, after all):

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was no response from Jill regarding her dubious post.

What is interesting, though, is that what triggered the scam alert was an actual lie – that is, what the map represented. Anyone even somewhat informed on Google would be aware that their statement was simply wrong, and therefore everything else claimed in the pitch (which is quite long and includes pop-ups trying to get you to buy a $97 course) is likely erroneous too. While marketing pitches are not always known for their accuracy, they do try to avoid flat-out lying.

Marketing is meant to draw people in, to lure them with the promise of something big, whether income, or a change in a formerly routine task. However, they should not be lying to people, because once the sale goes through, the truth will come out, and you’ll have some upset customers. (While some businesses thrive on negative publicity, it usually is not a recommended course of action.)

So, if you’re planning on creating a marketing pitch, make sure it’s accurate to reality. If it isn’t, someone will find out, and they may then decide to send some negative publicity your way.

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These are common spins on how to set your business apart from the competition, but we wanted to take this a step further. Eventually, we landed on offering a custom service that would be given to her clients at no charge, for as long as they were her clients. In the short-term, this might have reduced the amount she could charge each client, but it would also ensure that clients would stay with her for many years.

Working in IT, I went to determine how complicated it would be to build the web application we envisioned. I came back a day later and realized that the application itself, what we had considered to be a unique value proposition for one business, could actually fill a void in the market. That is, many of her competitors and non-competitors (i.e. people offering the same service to a different geographic market) would love such a service, and would likely pay to use it.

The assessment continued to the point where a price could be placed on developing the application, as well as sales models for it (usage and membership fees), as well as marketing angles (it’s a B2C service, so market it to other businesses). The whole business could actually be run in conjunction with her existing business, taking little effort to set up new users on the system (most of this would be automated), but would require significant effort upfront.

What ended up happening is that a business was created for the sole purpose of giving a unique value proposition to ONE client. However, anyone who wanted to use the business, even competitors, could do so – but for a price. That is, we found a way to get the competition to pay to be the competition.

When looking at a business, and its approach to attracting customers, sometimes it will be discovered that something that was added to the business to make it more appealing is actually part of another business. When that’s the case, it might be smart to spin that part of the business off into its own entity, so that you can charge your competitors for using what you give away to your clients.

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As an example of this difficulty, someone showed up at the office about an hour later than expected. Asked for a reason, the person responded that it was personal. Later on, the boss found out that it was because of a dental appointment. Not terribly private, one might think… except the employee thought that it was.

This is a case of not knowing someone else’ boundaries. I might not think a dental appointment is a big deal to be talked about by others, but that’s just me. My lines, in terms of what’s okay to discuss in the open and what is not, lie in one place, which are unlikely to coincide with the boundaries of the people I talk to on a daily basis.

Additionally, complicating this is the fact that over time, people move their boundaries. Someone I met yesterday might have one set of boundaries now, but a year from now, topics that are currently taboo may be part of our normal conversations.

In the case of working with the boundaries of other people, be aware that if you aren’t sure if you might be going over the invisible line, that you might be, and adjust your conversation accordingly. Tactful people in general are more sensitive to the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) clues people emit when lines have been crossed. But anyone can learn to turn on their radar, simply by understanding that their boundaries are not the same as those of other people.

Appropriateness of conversation is not dictated by one participant alone – it’s dictated by the boundaries of all the people involved, relative to all other people involved. The strictest rules apply – if one participant would find the conversation taboo because of a single other participant, then that subject is off limits.

If you’re not aware of what boundaries exist between two other people, then holding a three-way conversation can be difficult. If potentially sensitive subjects need to be discussed, try discussing them one-on-one first, which will assist in detecting the lines that have been drawn. Additionally, if personal issues are to be discussed, they should never be brought out in public unless you are absolutely positive that no boundaries will be crossed.

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First, though, I should explain what I mean by being a magnet. If I attend a networking event, I’ll meet people with businesses larger and smaller than my own. Chances are, at least a few of these encounters will result in second meetings over a cup of coffee. Or, I’ll hire someone on contract to do a bit of work for me, and the next thing I know, we’re sitting down to discuss opportunities for development.

It’s not just that I attend these events, though that does lend itself to making it easier to meet people. I think it’s more about the attitude toward meeting people at an event.

At this stage of my business development, I will often have more to gain from a networking associate, who may be more established in their business, and therefore able to offer more. However, one of the things I’ve learned is to never ask for the help, but rather, educate your network on what you do and the types of people you would like to meet, and the introductions will follow.

The second part of this is how conversations flow at these events. I try to express a genuine interest in what other people are doing with their businesses, and what they might need. This knowledge helps me in that for most of my business needs, I can find an answer with a couple emails or phone calls. I know who’s out there, I know what they can and can’t do, and much of the time, I also know who they know, or are connected to.

This ability to link people together makes people want to be in your network – they want to know you, and are happy to share their network, because they are aware that I do the same in return. The benefits are rarely aligned, but it is a large cycle, and most people intuitively know this.

Apparently, they’re also good at spotting such people. I can think of several people who would likewise describe themselves as a magnet, and I’ve discovered that they are taking the same approach as myself toward meeting people.

That, I believe, is one of the cornerstones of building a solid network.

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A day later, I checked the delivery estimation for the system, and discovered that the estimated date of delivery was a month later. While I understood that the delivery estimation was exactly that, it bothered me that a completely standard item would take so long to reach the consumer, and I vented:

My carrying case arrived, but still no laptop, and no change in the estimated date of delivery. Following a phone call to customer care, I was told that they were backlogged with orders for that particular system, and that there was nothing to do but wait. While their support was pleasant, they did not actually solve my problem, and I vented yet again on Twitter, this time naming the company:

Finally, my computer shipped, though there was still no change in the estimated delivery date. This implied that Dell fully expected the delivery company to require 3 weeks to ship something from Mississauga to North York, something patently false. Amused, I posted once again to Twitter, this time as a joke:

What I didn’t expect was to get a response, seeing as I had not been contacted the entire time I was complaining about Dell. However, to my surprise, I was contacted by someone from Purolator, the company named as the shipping company being used for deliveries from Dell:

I responded to Jeremie, if only to see whether or not there was a person behind the post, or if this was another automated responder that saw I had mentioned Purolator:

Minutes later, I got a response, indicating that it was, in all probability, a real person managing the account:

I was intrigued that despite knowing my issue was not with Purolator per se, but rather with the manufacturer, they still offered to make sure that my delivery was made promptly. While the manufacturer was ignoring me, Purolator wanted me to know that they would ensure that they would do their best to create a happy ending.

In case you’re wondering, Dell is quite active on Twitter. A quick search reveals about 20 accounts, most of which are being used to market their products. A few are devoted to other interests, such as following members of the Dell team. There’s an account claiming to belong to Michael Dell (though I would be surprised if it was actually him). But they aren’t listening and responding to the complaints.

Contrast that with Purolator – I had no idea if they were on Twitter, I named them once in conjunction with a complaint about a different company, and they responded anyhow. Once I clarified that I had no issue with Purolator, I did not expect to hear that they would check the order for me – there was no need for them to do that, but they reached out anyways.

Perhaps this was because they realized that I could and would vent about poor customer service, but I think it goes beyond that – they actually care. They want to make sure that the end of every customer’s experience is a happy one, and they’ll reach out in order to be able to do that.

Purolator figured out what Twitter is all about. Dell? They’re still in the world of paper, radio, and TV.

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1. Twitter Brings Business – and Loses Business
2. Show That You Care
3. Twitter – Boon or Bane of Business

While I thought the book was quite good and made sense, it didn’t really hit home with me until I did a product demo for one of my clients. At the demo, I was showing their main salesman how he could present the product I had built for them to his prospective clients.

I made a first presentation in which I outlined the technical merits of the product, and how it satisfied all the needs of the client. I showed how it addressed both the needs and the wants of the prospective buyers. However, while the salesman listened patiently, he clearly could not use my presentation as the basis for his own sales pitch.

After a break in which we discussed other aspects to the product and project, I decided to present the pitch again, and this time, I presented on the basis of emotion.

I touched on the problems, the pains, the established feelings of existing products. I discussed the concerns, the wants of the eventual users. I talked about the people involved in the decision. Finally, I demonstrated the answer in the newly developed product.

I didn’t get involved in the facts (what are the margins, cost of distribution, market size, IP), because marketing doesn’t care about the facts, at least, not during the presentations. Marketing should be concerned with the story. If needed, the facts are available to back up the story, but it’s not part of the pitch.

How are you selling yourself and your products? Are you continuing to throw the facts at your prospective market, or are you connecting with your audience and telling them stories that happen to involve your product?

Related posts:

1. The Difference Between Marketing and Sales
2. Know Your Audience
3. Sales in the Online World

What many people fail to realize at such events is that not everyone is a [potential] customer, but that does not mean they are not worthy of your time. The next big lead for your business can come from anywhere or anyone.

Once you realize this fact, though, your approach to networking may change significantly. Instead of trying to push a product or service, you might try to inform. Instead of trying to sell, you might start to listen and have conversations.

Networking is about establishing connections that will endure long beyond any short-term benefit. As an example, you might be able to close a sale with some aggressive marketing for a few cans of paint to someone who just moved into a new house. If you spent time to connect with that person, though, they may have referred you on to their contractor, who would continue to buy from you for many years. Does that mean that you should not sell to anyone who could use your service?

Not really – it just means that your approach might need to be fine-tuned. Listen, connect, interact. Eventually, the sale will come. If you provide paint, as in my previous example, then the person who moved might ask you if you sell privately, or only to contractors and professional painters. Not only have you opened yourself to the possibility of referrals, you have managed to close the immediate sale as well with far less effort.

Oddly enough, many people are well aware of this sales technique, and yet they persevere with the bullhorn approach to networking. Perhaps this is because when they enter the events, they are seeing other people behave this way, and they immediately try to fit in.

From personal experience, though, I’ve found that you’ll actually make more of an impact if you use the soft-sell approach – you’re at the event not to sell products or services, but to meet people. When you tell others this, they will be initially surprised, and try to find the ulterior motive. But if there truly isn’t one, you’ll have made great progress is establishing new connections that will have the potential for huge returns over the long-term.

Related posts:

1. The Right Time to Network
2. Post Parnasa Fest Toronto II
3. Are You Magnetized?

When the most recent request for articles came in, I decided to run a basic calculation of what that article would cost me, and whether or not it is worth my while to write for yet another site. Essentially, I was trying to predict what the return on my investment, or ROI, would be based on the new exposure.

The first part of this was fairly simple. Writing an article for another site, once I have a topic or subject selected, takes me about 15 to 30 minutes on average. Writing one such article a week puts the cost of the article at about $50 of my time, considering that I will also have to spend some time thinking of a topic to write about. For a given site, I would write about one article a week, which translates into an annual cost of $2,500 worth of my time.

The second part was harder – how do I compute my conversion rate for my site? As mentioned above, the purchases made on Amazon are negligible, and so do not factor into the equation. What I needed to determine was how many people would contact me, via my site, for more information about a service that I offer, and how many of those would eventually become clients. Additionally, since some projects are really small, and others fairly large, determining the average revenue generated by a single client is a fairly complex task.

Additionally, many of the clients I’ve acquired via my site have required additional work on my part, and have actually been driven to my site by my efforts elsewhere on the web. Gaining additional readers on my site might have a measurable value, but without direct interaction, it could have no value at all.

The question bothered me – how can you calculate the potential ROI for gaining additional exposure for a site which has no direct revenue model, and is being used almost exclusively as a networking tool to gain introductions to new people?

Through discussions with several other people, I determined that the question I was trying to answer had no simple answer – it was asking what value I place on an introduction, and what value I might place on getting thousands of introductions in a short period of time. Does this have value? Absolutely, but perhaps not one that can be quantified.

The value of my time, therefore, could not be measured against the potential return, since there is no metric available for this purpose. As a result, I decided to take the opposite approach, and determine my potential loss if I did not write additional articles.

In this case, the loss would be exposure of a non-quantifiable value, but I would gain 30 minutes per week. Since I don’t have additional writing to do, I would also reduce any associated stress. I could focus on writing articles for this site, which would improve the quality of content here, thereby increasing the likelihood of gaining introductions to my readers.

As such, the case was closed – for the purpose of marketing, I didn’t really need the additional exposure, and so would not, in general, write more. For other reasons, such as supporting a cause, I might write, but it would not be for the sake of additional leads.

I value my time higher than those abstract potential returns.

Related posts:

1. Persistence is Required
2. Business and Social Media – Part 3
3. Milestones