Business Owner/Leader Stuff

Crisis communications – don’t wait to create a plan

February 6, 2012

Does your organization have a crisis communications plan that you could actually put into action at this very moment?

All of the hubub surrounding the Susan G. Komen decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood and then their reversal of that decision following a 72+ hour firestorm of public outrage should have scared the bejesus out of you.

If an organization as large, powerful and well respected as Komen can get into that much hot water — and is that ill-prepared to handle it then what in the world would happen to you if there was an accident on your job site, if your CFO embezzled funds or if made a mistake that cost your client a huge sum of money?

Don’t be so naive to think your organization is immune to a crisis that would put you in the crosshairs of the media and the public.

Odds are you are not well prepared.  You don’t have a real plan.  You aren’t ready to respond.  Can you say, Danger Will Robinson? (a reference for my 40+ crowd)

One of the presentations I am often asked to give at conferences etc. is on this very topic.  I decided to share it with you here so you can liberally steal some ideas that will help you get your organization prepared. (email subscribers — click here)

In the presentation, I outline the 5 key elements to a successful crisis communications plan.

1. Be prepared – you can’t wait until you are in crisis.  News today is spread in seconds, not days.
2. Listen and monitor – be on the look out for trouble before it hits.  Put out the single flame before it becomes an inferno.
3. Be human and humane – everyone makes mistakes.  But you’ll be judged by how you handle the mistake.
4. Over communicate — silence or “no comment” don’t fly.
5. Create community – build supporters and advocates before you need them.

[slideshare id=11418636&doc=crisiscommunications-120204101816-phpapp02]

We’re doing a lot of this sort of planning with clients today.  But most companies will choose not to invest the time and energy, thinking it will never happen to them.

Don’t be that foolish.

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5 questions to define your 2012 game plan

December 30, 2011

Define your 2012 game plan

Over the past month, I’ve been posing what I hope have been some head scratching, thought provoking questions to help you get ready for 2012.

If you can answer these five questions — I think you’re going to have a solid foundation for your marketing efforts moving forward.

In case you missed one, here are the five questions (with links to the whole post):

1. What do you really sell?
2. Who is your ideal customer?
3. What’s the lifetime value of your customer?
4. What’s your marketing foundation?
5. What’s your legacy sentence?

So — have the questions changed your plans or focus?  Narrowed things a bit?  Or were these all a slam dunk?

Happy New Year and here’s to a very prosperous, joyful 2012 to you and yours!

Stock photo courtesy of www.BigStockPhoto.com

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Marketing insights question: What’s your legacy sentence?

December 28, 2011

What’s your legacy sentence?

Over the next few weeks, as we head towards 2012, I want to get you thinking about your business in a new/fresh way.  I’m going to ask a single question in each post — but I’m warning you, these aren’t slam dunk questions.

I’m hopeful that as you ponder my question — it will give you some ideas for making 2012 a break out year for your organization.  If nothing else — this exercise should fine tune some of your marketing efforts.

What’s your legacy sentence?   If a customer/potential buyer was going to describe your business in a single statement, what would it be?  Imagine yourself at a networking event and someone says…what do you do?

You can either say, “I’m a financial planner” or you could say, “I help women in transition get on firm financial footing.”

The first option tells me your profession.  The second tells me 1) who you serve, 2) how you add value, 3) what to ask you next (as opposed to just saying, “oh, that’s nice.”)

Which one would you want people to repeat as they introduce you to someone new?

Whether you’re talking about your personal brand/reputation or your company’s reputation — the rule is the same.  You need a single sentence.  Mary Stier wrote a blog post about this and she quoted Dan Pink‘s book Drive, saying:

“In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, one of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. ‘A great man,’ she told him, ‘is a sentence.’

Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: “He preserved the union and freed slaves.”  Franklin Roosevelt’s was ”He lifted us out of the Great Depression and helped us win a world war.”

Luce was worried that Kennedy’s attention had been splintered and he wouldn’t be able to solidify the nation’s definition of his presidency.

How about you?  Are you marketing messages laser pointed to a single sentence or are they scattered all over your features, benefits and copy hyperbole?

What single sentence can you use in person, on your marketing materials, in sales proposals, and in all of your sign offs and signatures?

 

Stock photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com

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Marketing Insights Question: How are you building your marketing foundation?

December 20, 2011

How are you building your marketing’s foundation?

Over the next few weeks, as we head towards 2012, I want to get you thinking about your business in a new/fresh way.  I’m going to ask a single question in each post — but I’m warning you, these aren’t slam dunk questions.

I’m hopeful that as you ponder my question — it will give you some ideas for making 2012 a break out year for your organization.  If nothing else — this exercise should fine tune some of your marketing efforts.

How are you building your marketing foundation? We’ve talked a lot about the know • like • trust model.  If you remember, the final leg of that equation is that consistency creates trust and trust leads to sales.

How do you generate that trust?  By building a marketing foundation.  And here’s how you go about that.

You do one thing on a regular (daily, weekly or monthly) basis that will add incredible value for your prospects and customers.  This is something that, if you stopped doing it or skipped a week — they’d not only notice the absence but they’d actually miss it.

What is the one thing?  It’s going to be different for every one of us — depending on our industry, our clientele, our position in the market place, our bandwidth and our organization’s culture.

It could be as simple as an enewsletter or as complex as a podcast where you interview leading experts in your field every week.  It might be a cartoon or an ongoing video series.

No matter what form it takes, it must meet these criteria to qualify:

• It’s scaleable so as your audience grows, you can include many more people
• You are 110% committed to honoring your consistency pledge
• It is not a sales piece — this is you creating incredible value
• It is shareable (people can pass it along to colleagues somehow, even if that means tacking it up on a bulletin board)
• It should be unique to you.  Either no one else in your competitive set does something like it or you do it so differently that it stands out

This is going to require some creativity on your part. And some discipline.  As soon as an idea starts to sound at all like a sales tool or gimmick, smack yourself.  That’s the kiss of death.  And it is the mistake 90% of all organizations make.  They just can’t resist hinting at or outright asking for the sale.

If you truly adopt this effort — you will create long lasting relationships with clients and prospects.  You’ll also create a word of mouth marketing machine, as your audience shares your offerings far and wide.

Start with that first building block…and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ve built something worthwhile.

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Marketing Insights Question: Calculating the lifetime value of your customer

December 12, 2011

What is your customer worth to you?

Over the next few weeks, as we head towards 2012, I want to get you thinking about your business in a new/fresh way.  I’m going to ask a single question in each post — but I’m warning you, these aren’t slam dunk questions.

I’m hopeful that as you ponder my question — it will give you some ideas for making 2012 a break out year for your organization.  If nothing else — this exercise should fine tune some of your marketing efforts.

What’s a customer worth? I’m always surprised when people don’t know the answer to this question.  If I said to you “for every $100 you give me, I will give you a client” – is that a good deal for you?  How about for every $1,000?  $5?

The truth is, most business owners have no idea what a customer is worth to their business.  If that’s the case – how do you know how much you can afford to spend to get one?

Why does this matter?  What kinds of decisions do you think you’d make in terms of acquiring new clients if I told you that over the lifetime of your relationship, every one of them is worth $500 in profit?  How would your choices change if I said each one is worth $10,000?

How do you figure out the lifetime value of a customer?

You need to know this number.  (Want to bet that your ideal customers are worth a heck of a lot more than your so-so customers?)

Not sure how to calculate the lifetime value?  Check out this great infographic (from kissmetrics)which does a nice job of modeling how you can get a good ballpark figure.

Once you know that….you know what you can do to earn a customer.  And what it costs you when you lose one.

Lifetime value of a customer infographic

 

Stock photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com

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Do you know how to hit the peak?

December 11, 2011

Get your team and company to peak!

I read a book that seems to fit perfectly with some of the questions we’ve been asking as we think towards 2012.

Peak by Chris Conley (click here to buy*) is a book about deciding what matters.

After climbing to the peak of the hospitality industry, Chip Conley—CEO and founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality—was rocked to its foundation and suddenly undercapitalized and overexposed in the post-9/11 economy. This situation made Conley reconnect with psychologist Abraham Maslow‘s iconic concept of the Hierarchy of Needs and rely on Maslow’s theory of human motivation to help his business flourish once more.

In his book entitled Peak, Conley explores how he applied translations of Maslow’s ideas to his company’s business practices and brought it back to the top.

Conley looks at a company from three perspectives.  The employee, the customer and the investor.

From the employee’s POV:

People want to work for a cause, not just for a living. Conley, suggests there are three kinds of relationships someone can have with work: You can either have a job, a career or a calling.

Meaning in work relates to how an employee feels about their specific job task. It is the achievement of meaning at work that realizes transformation. So how can meaning at work be achieved? Conley believes an employee must align intrinsically to the mission of the company. If the company can identify its higher calling: what philanthropic, strategic or humanistic mast it “pins its colors to” – then the employee can in turn find meaning.

From the customer’s POV:

The greatest risk facing a company?  Getting comfortable with purely satisfying customers rather than delighting them. When a company’s leadership is focussed purely on meeting the expectations of their customers, the company can become a sitting duck for a surprise competitor with a new mousetrap.

To address the unrecognized need of its loyal customers, companies need to find a way to give them what Conley calls “an identify refresh” – some status, some belonging. How do you do that?

The first step is to be willing to ask: What business are you in? (much like we asked ourselves — what do you really sell?)

Like Apple or Harley Davison, can we offer something beyond the product?   What are the unrecognized needs of our customers? Apple positioned themselves at the top of the pyramid bysuggesting to customers that with an Apple product you can do anything –technology is the byproduct.

Harley Davidson, through HOG owner groups created a social connection.

How can you do it? Help your customers meet their highest goals. Give your customers the ability to truly express themselves. Make your customers feel like they are part of a bigger cause. Ultimately, offer your customers something of real value that they hadn’t even imagined.

Conley’s book is loaded with thoughtful, educational stories and counsel for entrepreneurs as well as Fortune 500 managers, taken from his own hard earned experience as well as other business books. One of the best features of the book are Conley’s numbered lists sprinkled throughout the book.

I think you’ll find this one both inspirational and actionable.  A good year end read! (want more inspiration?  Check out Conley’s TED talk.)

 

 

*Amazon affiliate link

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Marketing insights question: What do you really sell?

November 29, 2011

What do you really sell?

Over the next few weeks, as we head towards 2012, I’m going to write a series of posts that are designed to get you thinking about your business in a new/fresh way.  I’m going to ask a single question in each post — but I’m warning you, these aren’t slam dunk questions.

I’m hopeful that as you ponder my question — it will give you some ideas for making 2012 a break out year for your organization.  If nothing else — this exercise should fine tune some of your marketing efforts.

What do you really sell? Do you understand what your customers are really buying?  Odds are, it’s much more than the “thing” you sell, whether that be a pair of glasses or accounting services.  Look beyond the tangible or what you list on an invoice.

Do you really sell peace of mind?  Or a competitive edge?  Are your customers’ buying the reassurance of your years of experience or your ability to nudge them out of their comfort zone?

Before you can effectively help someone buy – you need to actually understand what you’re selling.

If your honest answer is “I’m not sure” then it’s time to break out the trusty telephone and invite some of your best clients (the ones you’d like to replicate all day long) to lunch.  Ask them why they buy from you.  What is the ultimate value you provide to them?  Why would they tell your competitor “no thanks” even if they offered a bargain basement price?

You will be amazed at what you hear.  We’ve done this over the years at MMG and heard things like:

• “Because I know you won’t have your hand in my pocket all of the time.”
• “You don’t just preach social media, you guys actually do it.”
• “I don’t think they’d care as much about our business as your team does.  You all act like you own the joint.”
• And one of my favorites was “Because I don’t just need an agency, I need a thinking partner.”

Can you see how those answers would alter the way we market our agency?  Do you recognize some client worries/fears in those responses?

You’ll find your clients’ answers to be even more insightful because you’ll get to have the follow up conversation as well.  Listen so hard it hurts.  The learning will be huge!

And in the end, you will know exactly what you sell!

 

Photo courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com

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Don’t have the time to do marketing

November 2, 2011

I don’t have time to do marketing

If there’s a common theme in the conversations I have with business owners, it’s that they don’t have the time to consistently market their business.

We might be talking about  sending out a customer e-newsletter, participating in social media, attending an important trade show or updating their website.  The specifics don’t matter.  They just simply don’t have the time.

I get it.  The whole 24 hour in a day thing.

I ask them if they have time to serve their clients.  And they say, “of course… I have to do that to stay in business.”

I ask them if they have time to send out bills to their customers.  And they say, “of course… I have to do that to stay in business.”

You find time to do what’s necessary.  If it has to get done, it gets done.

Ahhh.  So it’s not that you don’t have time.  It’s that you don’t consider marketing a necessity to stay in business.  Now that’s a very different conversation.

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Accept credit cards with 0% hassle!

October 31, 2011

Accept credit cards hassle free!

Many small businesses struggle with the desire to accept credit cards but the hassle factor or the costs make it seem impossible.

I wanted to share a solution that we’re using at McLellan Marketing Group with great success.  It’s called Square.

Square is an app tied to your iPhone or Droid (or iPad).  When you sign up for the service, they’ll send you a credit card reader that fits into your smartphone.  You can either take credit card charges via swiping the actual card or by manually entering the data into the touchpad of your phone.

10 minutes after downloading the app and filling out some information so they can get the funds into your bank account — you can be accepting credit cards.  It really is that simple.

In terms of fees, you’ll pay 2.75% if you swipe the card and 3.5% if you enter the charges in manually.

No long term contracts, no up front fees, no waiting to be approved.  The only downside to Square is that, unlike PayPal, they don’t give you the tools to automate accepting credit card payments via your website.  But odds are — if you are making that many transactions — you need a more robust tool anyway.

This isn’t the solution for everyone.  But especially if you are a service based business who doesn’t have a daily need to accept credit cards — but when you need to, you’d like to do it quickly, easily and affordably — Square just might be the ticket.

 

 

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The iPad case that keeps me organized

October 28, 2011

The removable divider on this awesome iPad case

As you know, I am all about how spectacular the iPad is for business use.

It can literally replace your laptop computer without you skipping a beat.  I love to use it in meetings — to take notes, to hop on the internet if that’s helpful to the conversation or to demo or to review creative with a client.

The iPad has been awesome from the get go. But I’ve struggled with finding a way to transport it.

I couldn’t find a case that allowed me to stay organized.  My messenger bag (which I use for my laptop) was too big but just carrying the iPad loose wasn’t cutting it either.

So when my friend Mike Colwell (from here in Des Moines) said he had designed one specifically for business people — I was more than ready to try it.

You can go to the website (www.CaseSimple.com) to read about how it’s made in Chicago, the material and how it super protects your iPad etc.  What I want to show you is the element that makes this a must own tool for me.

There’s this removable center insert that is made from a very rigid material but covered in a soft fabric.  On the divider are a series of pockets made from a very tight elastic so everything stays put snugly.  I love that I can take it out of the case itself to re-pack the contents.

For me, this means I can literally head out to a meeting with just this case.  Inside, I can put my iPhone, some pens, business cards, my car keys, a jump drive in case clients want to give me some digital files, ear buds and my moleskin if I need to quickly draw something out.  My point is — it’s all self contained.

I know this is going to sound a little crazy — but this case has changed how I go to meetings.  I feel more organized and I’ve got everything I need to conduct business.  It’s also awesome on a plane (fits right into the pocket in front of your seat) with boarding passes etc. added to the mix.

There’s plenty of room if you use some sort of cover for your iPad too.  I use the ZAGGmate Aluminum case with a bluetooth keyboard (which I love!) and it fits just fine.

You know I don’t usually promote products — but this case, I really want you to know about this case.  It makes owning and using your iPad for business the cat’s meow.  (Yes…the cat’s meow.)

Note:  Mike did give me my case for free.  He didn’t ask me to write about it.  I just want you to know.

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