Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

Successful Business Women – are YOU one or WILL you be in 2012?

December 20th, 2011 Linda Mattacks

Let’s find out! Some of the traits of ALL Successful Business Women are that they:

  1. Know the precise space or niche they occupy
  2. Know who their target market is
  3. Know what their target market wants/ needs and will, if necessary dig deep to pay for it
  4. Know how to reach that target market
  5. Know what to say to that target market
  6. Know how to say it
  7. Know when to say it
  8. Know what results they want and how to get them

If only it were that simple – but it’s not. Let’s be aware that there are TWO types of Successful Business Women. The first are

HAPPY Successful Business Women

HAPPY Successful Business Women say things like:

“I LOVE virtually all aspects of what I do”
“I’m good at it and it contributes hugely to my all-round enjoyment of life and of those I care about”
“I’m getting a good/great returns”
“I just want to expand and build on them”

Happy Successful Business Women ask things like:

“What next, how can we innovate?”
“Who can I work with?”
“How can we help each other?”

TRAPPED Successful Business Women

These women are often ironically bound by their very own success :-(

They are likely to privately think things like:

“I don’t particularly enjoy much of what I do any more”
“…Though I’m good at it…”
“And it gives me a return that enables me to do things I DO enjoy with people I care about”

And they ask themselves questions such as:

“Do I stick with this and ‘safety’?”
“Or do I ‘break out’ and take a chance doing something I really enjoy?”
“…And what guarantees will I have that I’ll be able to keep and build on the benefits of the success I already have and don’t want to lose?”

And there’s another category we need to address:

Struggling Business Women

Theirs is a tale that’s heard all too often in this crazy economic climate. Their self-talk goes something like this:

“I LOVE what I do”
“I think I’m good at it”
“BUT I’m not yet (or no longer) getting anywhere near a good enough return to live the life of my dreams”

The Struggling Business Woman is asking questions like:

“Where am I going wrong?”
“Should have just stayed in employment and not struck out on my own?”
“What can I do about it?”

And, finally for now, there may well be some women whose changing situations mean they now need to consider how they’re they’re going to earn money:

  • They’re suddenly made redundant
  • The volatile market means their savings are no longer enough to live on
  • The main bread winner has lost his/ her job
  • The kids are now in school and are costing more and more to feed, clothe and ferry around

The list is potentially endless… and there may not be any jobs around that these women can just ‘walk into’. They may well be thinking:

Do I have it in me to be a Business Woman?

And you know what?
These women probably have the most untapped potential of any of the groups!

The purpose of this post

We help nobody by playing ‘small’. So I’ve enticed Jackie Dunn, the ‘Make Friends With Money’ lady (a money coach with 20+ years experience of working primarily with high earning women) to join me for the day in London on Friday 13th January 2012 – that’s right, Friday 13th, just over three weeks from now – to work play with a group of just 20 Business Women who will be from a combination of all four categories above.

We ask what you want out of the day – and that you be as specific as you can be – upfront. Then Jackie and I work our socks off with you to make sure you get that – minimum! :-)

  • We are going to have an absolute ball using all the sales & marketing experience and techniques I’ve accumulated over the past 25+ years to knock into shape and refine the 9 traits of Successful Business Women for every woman present…
  • Jackie will completely blow away any existing negative or limiting concepts about money and share ways to find it, grow it and put it to best use…
  • That will go hand in hand with some mind blowing techniques from both of us that, if you’re stuck or struggling, alter your perspective on what’s possible for you to achieve, and if you’re already flying will help you soar even higher…
  • All of you get to contribute…
  • You’ll meet like minded women – some of whom may well become good friends…

And this is just for starters…

Your investment?

One day of your total presence and engagement and £60* that includes light refreshments to stave off hunger pangs!
Arrive 9.30ish for start at 10am prompt
Jackie and I will lead/ facilitate/ coach where warranted and probably generally cause mayhem along the way at times! :-)

We anticipate working/ playing straight through until around 4pm.

Then the choice is yours. You can dash off if you need to at that point though we fully expect some of you will elect to stay and get to know us and your fellow delegates better informally for another hour or so.

*Jackie has told me of a way of payment and receipt generation that means you can offset your investment against tax – if you’re not yet making enough money to pay tax then that gives us an area of focus…

What should you do next?

20 delegates plus Jackie and I is an ideal number for everyone to get maximum return for her investment so I’d say “Don’t hang around if you want to be with us on January 13th!”
Call me:
Tel: 020 7209 1284
M: 07879 628 367

Or email me:
linda(at)lindamattacks(dot)co(dot)uk

To register and reserve your place.

Posted in Business, Marketing, Sales 13 Comments »

Looking for something a little bit special this Christmas?

December 6th, 2011 Linda Mattacks

Are you tired of the same over-processed Christmas cards that everyone sends at Christmas? Are you looking for something a little bit different, something with the personal touch? Do you think your customers might just love that?

As you’re probably only too aware, I’m always banging on here about knowing why you’re in business, what you do for your customers and what that’s worth to them.

Every now and then I come across somebody who just so has it cracked, I’m humbled to witness it and I want them to take the world by storm! Anita Hunt, designer extraordinaire of original cards (and more!) is such a ‘find’ and I was tempted to keep her all to myself – but that’s selfish and this is a season for giving – so I relented and you’re the potential beneficiaries! :-)

You can have a quick sneak peek here but come back before you decide to buy anything so that, if you do, you can claim just a bit extra – why not?

By the way, if it had been down to me I’d have removed “a little bit” from the post tile – but that’s Anita for you! Her own words convey the raison d’être of Nita Joy Designs, and the fire that ignites that creativity that enables her to come up with her beautiful work, far better than I could. So I’ll hand you over to her and, at the end of this post remember you’ll see our own little “thank you” for those of you who decide to share her joyful creativity with your customers (or mates, or loved ones… anyone who’s a bit special).

Anita’s message

I began my business with the aim to brighten someone’s day. I love nature and making cards and saw how much receiving a card with a personal message meant to those going through a hard time, or who were lonely and not able to get out much due to ill health.

With the unfortunate tendency of Christmas starting earlier and earlier each year and credit cards maxed out, the season is hard for many and it’s easy to become jaded.

I’m very much aware of how Christmas can be seen as an unwelcome expense – so how can greeting cards, specifically Christmas cards, be seen in a positive light instead of an unnecessary luxury item?

Many people such as the elderly love receiving a card; many don’t have access to a computer so an e-card isn’t going to be appreciated.

2011 has been a difficult year for many; so hearing your letter box struggling to cope with the avalanche of Christmas cards from friends and family always brings a smile, people feel remembered at a time when many feel disillusioned and worried about the future.

Every time you walk into your lounge and see the variety of cards lining up on shelves, over fireplaces and hanging across your walls really adds to the enjoyment of the season.

This is why I love what I do; it’s a privilege to make personalised Christmas cards that convey the joy that Christmas can bring – thanking someone for being a valuable customer – not selling to them just thanking them speaks volumes, thanking someone for their kindness, letting someone know how much they mean to you…

I have kept numerous Christmas cards over the years as the message written either on the front or inside the card meant a lot to me. Knowing that someone has taken time out of their busy schedule to sit and think about and write to me, is something I treasure.

Someone once said to me that they used to buy bulk packs of cards in the supermarket, hastily throwing them into the shopping basket, with their other food items, scrawling a hurried message, before flinging them in the post, but thought about what that said to the person who she was sending them to… so decided to spend less on gifts and more time on cards to write a special note.

One of Nita Joy Designs customers said

“You have now become my own personal card designer”
“I have just received the cards, they are beautiful!!!! I can’t stop looking at them; they are all so different and gorgeous. No one else will be buying the same, so that makes these really special. I know who to come to in the future for unique cards!”

Back to Anita

Yes we have Facebook, Twitter and e-cards to send a quick message to people at Christmas, but they don’t decorate our walls, we can’t feel them in our hands or keep them as a treasured memory.

If you would like to bless someone with a smile this Christmas, or to thank someone for their valued custom, I would love to make a set of special Christmas cards for you. I can add an insert with your special Christmas message, or add a message to the front of the cards at no extra cost. (Linda’s comment: Do I need to confide in you that this great woman is a new pal and not my client?)

My packs of Christmas cards are available in packs of 5 or 10 :-)
Send a Christmas card, brighten someone’s day!

Special offer for UK readers of Small Business Training

If you purchase a pack of 5 Christmas cards and add the code SBT11 in the message section at the checkout, you will receive 6 cards for the price of 5.
Post and packing is free.

The need to act

This offer must end 18th December 2011 – not to do with the usual hype of “only x number remaining” – so much as December 25th is looming fast and there’s the postal time to take into account, too! So do you fancy being that little bit different this year? Do you want to offer your customers a small token of appreciation that says “We value you – you’re not just a number…

So, if you’re serious, best nip over to ‘Nita’s place now… :-)

Posted in Business, Marketing, Sales 12 Comments »

Email Marketing, Blogging, Presenting, Networking – But school’s nearly out!

October 25th, 2011 Linda Mattacks

By the morning of Day 3 of Warren’s excellent Grow Your Business retreat I’d more or less had enough brain-wise and was extremely glad that ‘School’s out!’ was just around the corner. That was a shame in a way because, as I was to discover, some of the best stuff (in my opinion) was yet to come!

I recall little of the inevitable networking aspect that came with breakfast. Maybe because by then it was more like sitting down with some friends and making some new acquaintances.

Email Magic?

The first session of the day was with Lee Callender, the MD of Mail Magic.

I thought he was impressive both as a potential supplier who would take the trouble to understand a client’s real needs. Just one unsexy yet vital example: He’s one of the few people I’ve come across in many years who understands the fundamental necessity of knowing your target market and being able to clearly and concisely describe those identifiable characteristics to a data provider – get that bit wrong and you might as well forget the rest! :-(

He admitted that things don’t always go perfectly and I loved the ‘get out of jail card’ he created whilst giving him and his staff the time to work on how to put any wrongs right (ask him…). He seemed the kind of person I’d enjoy doing business with. I found his hour’s stint thoroughly interesting and informative.

I’m annoyed with myself that I seem to have misplaced my notes but you can bone up somewhat by having a look at the Hints and Tips section of his company website.

Zero to Blogger

Next, having played with the sheep and boned up on LinkedIn, I finally got to see my mate Sarah Arrow in action with her Master Class on Blogging.

I may well be biased as I really prefer the ‘take-me-anywhere-and-just-give-me-a-flipchart/whatever’ approach that Sarah uses and perhaps because I also happen to feel more comfortable delivering. I believe the content can be on-the-hoof adapted to be more relevant to the audience and the value is therefore potentially much greater than the more stylised PowerPoint or equivalent presentations.

This session also bought home that, really valuable though the information, tips, what-tos and what-not-tos are that Sarah shares, it is so much easier having your own mentor, whip cracker, puppeteer, whatever name you give, who knows what they’re doing and will devise, orchestrate and run your campaign(s) for you:

I don’t know about you but I get it in principle – it’s the keeping up to date with everything and the elegant and successful execution that flumoxes me! :-( It’s one of those things I somehow reckon are, in my case anyway, much better outsourced to experts.

Presentation Skills Masterclass

We were back to mainstream sessions now and this one turned out to be totally unlike anything I was expecting. It delivered to brief yet it was refreshingly different in the way it did so.

Lisa van den Berg used a mixture of a particularly poignant story that may have been real or from her own imagination, together with anecdotes from her own personal experiences… that maybe many of us could have identified with!

To me, it was as much an exercise in Use Your Own Experiences to Make a Real, even if only brief, Connection with Others. Anyway, to find out a bit more, our Sarah nabbed Lisa pretty sharpish for a guest post on Birds On The Blog so, have a mosey over there rather than me repeating or rehashing it here!

Lunch! And, er Networking…

This was Dave Clarke‘s opportunity to share with us how NRG networking lunches work. I’ve met Dave on several occasions over recent years and must say his approach is definitely of the ‘relationship first’ mode.

What was a particular eye opener for me was the fact that we had once again been joined by the Inner Flame contingent of teenagers – whose organisation chief was responsible, together with Warren Cass, for this event coming about.

I cannot imagine that I, as a teenager, could have sat with business people like Jo, Steven Andrew and me and talked about what was important to me, what I wanted to achieve, ideas I had about doing that and so on in the way that Megan, Laura, Lauren, Charlotte and Simon – go there and hover a bit :-) – did at our table.

Event Summary – What did I get out of it?

I may have missed nuggets by having to leave early on that third and last day so somebody else who stayed the full course might wish to pick up baton?

As it was, and seems to be more and more usual for me, it was the unexpected and probably not obviously business oriented moments that were the most value – the sheep and teenager encounters were priceless!

Having said that, I’ve made contact on line and/ or by phone with people I met there or were made aware of – and others have done similar with me. It’s so far impossible to gauge the ultimate value of attending the event.

So let’s take it right back to basics:
Did I have fun and enjoy myself? I’d say. largely: Yes :-)
Was it worthwhile in terms of the parameters I’d set in advance for it? Um, oh oops, can I take the fifth, please?…

Posted in Business, Marketing Tags: , , , 8 Comments »

Do you know YOUR ideal client? 95% of companies don’t!

August 15th, 2011 Linda Mattacks

If you think that’s an exaggeration, not so according to Murray Smith, successful businessman and author of the New York Times best seller ‘The Answer’. Before you switch off, perhaps thinking “This will only apply to the American market”, why not stick with it because what he was talking about was, I strongly believe, generic, not country- or culture-specific.

In an interview I saw recently the host introduced a budding entrepreneur businesswoman to Murray Smith and asked her what would be the one gem she would like to learn from him. The answer was how to get more clients – no real surprise there, then and Mr Smith opined that there are two things that apply to all businesses:

  1. They all want more clients and more income
  2. They each recognise the belief they’re different and unique

He took the second point first and asked the guest to describe what she did in order to help him decide his strategy for her.

Defining the offer

Without going into detail his incisive questioning enabled him to elicit from her that, over and above being a business coach – which anyone could claim to be – and improving interdepartmental communications in larger companies – which she started out by saying, what she actually did enabled her (business/ corporate) clients to ensure that not only did they have the “right people on the bus” but also that they were on the right seats on the bus. Now that, Mr Murray said is crucial for an organisation’s success and growth.

And that positions her work squarely under the heading of profit centre as opposed to cost centre and already distinguishes her from 99% of business coaches… The host admitted that whilst she’d known her guest for some time only now did she really ‘get’ what she did!

How do you describe what you do?

Who do you do it for? AKA your ideal client…

Now this guy has worked with some big Fortune 500 companies and this is where he dropped the killer clanger – that 95% of them don’t know their ideal client. :-(

To illustrate this he tells the story of an American restaurant company with a failing Canadian franchise. They’ve spent millions of dollars over three years targeting 25 – 40 year old males, trying to improve custom. Mr Smith discovers within minutes that the decision makers (in Canada, anyway) were in fact 35 – 50 year old females… and the story has a happy ending of reversal in fortune :-)

Returning to our budding entrepreneur, Murray Smith next asked her to describe her ideal client, which she happily did, drawing on a current one, using traditional demographics such as company size, industry and location.

A perfectly acceptable approach except that the company’s psychographics were much more important and relevant to her. Murray Smith redefined her ideal client for her roughly as follows:

A solid, successful company, affected by the economy; wants to change; looking for innovative, creative ideas – and will pay…

As she could currently only handle another one or two clients, he said he wouldn’t even consider demographics.

How would you describe YOUR ideal client?

As Murray Smith says – the sales process is unique and different in each case but for our budding entrepreneur it’s pretty simple:

CEOs and executives know other CEOs and executives… She should go to her current client and ask for referrals… 😉

Would the budding entrepreneur have got there on her own?

Not easily and maybe not for years, if at all. Yes she is a business coach but her expertise is self-admittedly not in getting clients! Can just anybody do what he did? No 😉

I’m a firm believer that we all need help with different aspects of our business from time to time, and struggling alone with the likes of the two key issues addressed here just doesn’t make any kind of sense to me…

PS
The video of the interview is Simple Steps to Business Success on BraveheartTV.com


Your comments on this post and/ or the interview, as always much welcomed… :-)

Posted in Marketing, Sales Tags: , , , 5 Comments »

Write to Sell in the 21st Century

July 27th, 2011 Linda Mattacks

Writing to Sell and Writing for Social Media are different!

Social media readers and followers are, by and large, very forgiving of misspellings, commas in the wrong place and so on because we like the fact that the writer is maybe thinking aloud rather than giving a pre-prepared speech.

It can be a costly mistake to expect the same leeway from a potential buyer – someone who expects certain standards to be met…

Getting the right there, they’re or their … pear, pare or pair … doesn’t seem to carry much importance nowadays. But it still means a lot to me and probably to anyone else who went through schools in the education system that made you feel like a right – yes that’s right, not rite or write 😉 – plonker if you got it wrong…

So when I sent off for a write-to-sell programme, with a price tag of over £250 a few years ago and found my intake was constantly being interrupted by glaring and more and more intrusive grammatical and spelling whoopsies on every single page… :-) I complained. The author of the course said words to the effect of: “Whoops! Okay. Keep it. We’ll return your money and please can we have your proofed pages?” Fair enough deal to me.

There was some good stuff there though I found it a bit annoying that much of the content and examples were gleaned from America despite the fact that the course creator was born and based in Ireland. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t have used the material without making it UK-market friendly first. (I wonder if nowadays you could watch a series of Mad Men and learn just about as much? Nah! Silly thought…)

Surprisingly (to me) much of the information was along very similar lines I’d learned way back when I was a classified advertising telephone sales person and then as a trainer in the 1970s and 80s:

When the only discounts we sales people could give were those printed on the rate card, we learned how to add value in other ways – i.e. become mini copywriters for the column we worked on and help our advertisers ‘sell’ their wares.

Anyway, here’s the headline stuff that would seem never to really change… and it’s still based on a mate that’s been around for years: A.I.D.A…

Attention

  • 90% of the reason anyone responds to a sales message is because of what’s in the headline or opening statement
  • An effective headline can bring in up to 17 times more response than an ineffective, weak one, even if the rest of the copy is the same?

Your headline / first line of communication should include at least one of:

  • Self interest
  • Curiosity
  • News

Combine this little lot and you’ve made a cracking start – remember, tempting though it may be, you’re really not trying to attract the whole world!

Interest

Now you’ve grabbed the attention of those potentially in your market you need to hold onto it and really start to address the “What’s in it for me?” question.

It’s estimated that only 20% of people who are initially attracted by a headline actually continue on to read the rest of the message. So what’s going to hold me once you’ve grabbed me?

  • Blah, blah, blah experts … join the ranks of our elite…
  • Blah, blah, blah expertise/ training/ consultancy, as used by… offered…
  • Fabulous… for discerning …

Start filling out your spiel with the information that typifies what your best clients/ customers or potential employer (s) were looking for when they first came to you.

Make your readers feel comfortable – that they’ve come to the right place…

Desire

If YOU can’t get any enthusiasm going you might as well forget the idea of whipping up any from a potential punter!

This is where your presentation of offer comes in. The ‘Gurus’ all agree “Free is good” here – it may sound corny but it works a treat for many 😉 …

  • FREE trial
  • FREE estimate
  • FREE audit
  • FREE demonstration
  • FREE delivery
  • FREE information
  • FREE survey
  • FREE report

If FREE doesn’t work for you, or you have something really different to offer, you could lob in alternative or additional sweeteners for good measure…

  • Unique benefit
  • Unique guarantee
  • Etc. – get creative…

Action

This may sound incredibly obvious but it’s nothing short of criminal how many of us fall at the final hurdle by simply assuming that our buyer will know what to do next… and don’t bother to tell him or her.

So make it clear what the next move should be :-)

You can add a P.S. (and a P.P.S.) to inject some urgency into the action you want the recipient and reader to take. In my opinion, I’d say be a little bit wary of how you use the P.S and P.P.S .and avoid the P.P.P.S: They were done to death in the late 90s – don’t knock it – some of the people around then will be recipients of your current masterpieces…

Finally

This is just the start – the words. There’s tons more to consider with regard to making creations look good: layout, typeface, sub headings, strap lines, images (logos, pictures, etc.) and colour.

And you’ve got to make sure your masterpiece gets to the right people…

With a message that resonates…

Hopefully catching them when they’re prepared to listen/ read…

But we’ll leave that till another time …

Linda

P.S. Let us know what you think… 😉
P.P.S.

I contributed the bones of this post first as a guest on another site back in June.

Since then I’ve had several comments and compliments about how down to earth and helpful the information has been to people in vastly different walks of life and businesses. So it was obvious in retrospect that I’d goofed: I should have posted it here so that our regular readers, many of whom have been with us since 2006 when we first started this site, could easily see it.

So I decided to put that right…

I altered the title – it’s now actually much closer to the one I originally gave it but somehow got changed by the time it was published, so it’s as it should be on its “home” territory! And I beefed up the content for you… :-)

It’s a bit longer than most of the posts we publish here but it’s very meaty so you may want to bookmark it so you can refer to it when you want/ need to…

Posted in Marketing, Sales Tags: , , , 1 Comment »

Why Do Customers Leave?

July 4th, 2011 Linda Mattacks

Do you know why customers leave? And some, even before they ever ‘come aboard’?

The biggest single reason is the way they feel they’ve been treated.

Not the way they’ve actually been been treated. The way they feel they have been treated.

“Customer service” and “Customer Relationship Management” have to be way more than trite phrases or marketing-speak to help you convert and keep customers once you attract their attention.

Here are three very different examples…

Years and years ago American Express sent me a letter inviting me to become a customer. I was naive, flattered and delighted and happily applied. I was turned down.

To be fair, it was in the early days of direct marketing in the UK and they probably got their profiling/ targeting a bit wrong or the list they bought wasn’t quite up to scratch, I wasn’t earning enough, I may even have been legally too young to hold their card – whatever – the single fact I remember is that they invited me then refused me.

I have no idea how many missives I’ve received from American Express in the intervening years entreating me to join their ranks of customers and I’d guess the company has no idea that every single one of them goes straight in the bin or why. Whilst I am probably slap bang in their ideal target market nowadays and have been for many years, it is highly unlikely that I will ever be their customer because I remember that feeling of being made to think I wasn’t good enough.

My mobile phone

I’ve been with the same mobile phone air time supplier for years. I realised recently that I’d had the same mobile for rather a long time and other people’s phones seemed much more whizzy than mine, with more features and definitely more 21st century looking. Actually, if I’d bothered to get my head round what’s on my old faithful I’d probably have found it was pretty advanced for its time, but that’s another story…

So I decided to upgrade and that’s where the trouble began…

I nipped up the road to a local store to see what my options were and that’s when I realised monthly payment had been taken out of my account that day – so another 30 days to decide phone, plan, etc – plenty of time. I thought I remembered that with the previous upgrade I’d got a better deal by going direct on line so thought I’d suss that route as well. That’s when I discovered that it would be an ideal time to renew… just switch from the current to the new payment plan from midnight and get the new phone the next working day…

We are eleven days on from that fateful day and, although I have a new contract (that differs from what I agreed to by phone in three major areas) I still don’t have a new phone that works – I’m still using my trusty old Pebble…

Developments

I had a phone call from the company’s Customer Services department yesterday (Sunday) from a guy who, unfortunately, was in possession of just one of the 3 emails I’d sent to their complaints department over the previous nine days (on top of countless telephone calls I’ve had with various representatives).

Poor s*d really came in for it a bit… :-( I wasn’t rude but I left him in no doubt that I was less than impressed with the service I’ve received thus far and would switch suppliers in a heartbeat if there was another with as good coverage.

He’s already promised to put right the three major discrepancies on the agreement in my favour and is due to phone me back this afternoon to sort the matter out for good. So we’ll see whether the company takes this classic opportunity to turn around a complaint and secure me as a loyal customer for another few years or lose me to the competition in 20 days time :-) …

One person who got it right! This wasn’t the company, it was purely down to one individual.

I popped into the tanning shop on our High Street the other day and fancied a ‘lift’. I knew I had some time in credit from a block I’d bought ages ago but fell out of the habit of using.

Turned out I had quite a lot but it was from over a year ago and therefore wasn’t valid. Gang on a minute – there didn’t use to be a time limit… An employee showed me a card with T&Cs on it and there it was in black and white – any treatment or batch of treatments have to be taken within 12 months.

But I wasn’t informed – and, as my custom over time predated their computer system (which they’ve now had for a few years) I’m fairly sure it predated their current T&Cs too!

I recognised one of the employees and she me and she said “Go and have your treatment, we’ll sort something out.” I came back to the reception desk thinking that I may have to do battle only to be informed by the lady I knew that they’d restarted my credits from that day and the time would now be valid for a further year.

Now that‘s service!

How do YOU compare?

Do you often get it wrong from the off? Do you lose good customers because you don’t make them feel wanted? Or do your customers love you to bits and recommend you to everyone who may need to your products or services?

Posted in Marketing Tags: , 2 Comments »

Networking the Easy Way – 1 ‘what’ and 9 ‘who’

June 23rd, 2011 Linda Mattacks

With so many business networks to choose form – and each set up as a business to make money for its founder – it’s not always easy for a newbie networker to know where to start.

And here’s a heretical thought: Maybe you don’t need to invest in becoming a member of any of them until you’ve got into the swing of things and worked out what type of networking suits you…

Why is it that when we start doing something new to us we often make it a lot harder than it need be and don’t look on our own doorsteps?

Firstly, what do you do for a living?

  • Do you have the best bakery in the area?
  • Provide the best IT service?
  • Run the best recruitment service?
  • Are you a brilliant web designer?
  • Do you give unparalleled coaching/ training in a specific area?
  • Are you a great Independent Financial Advisor?

Spot the adjectives: best, brilliant, unparalleled, great?…

BIG TIP for the ‘what’:
Drum up some enthusiasm about your business or you’re likely to end up ‘dead in the water’ :-(

It doesn’t actually matter what you do. What does matter is that you’re passionate about it and know you’re darned good at it. I believe this is a classic and crucial test of the integrity of every one of us who networks.

  • If we can’t get excited about how we help people (and we’re not talking zealots here), how do we expect anyone we know to be even slightly enthusiastic?
  • If we’re not genuinely convinced about the value of what we have to offer, how can we, in good conscience, allow them to buy from us, recommend or refer people they know to us?

Some HAVE to make their networking work

Let’s take a quick look at IFAs, who aren’t allowed to be zealots.

If you were looking for advice on money matters, would you feel happy picking a name from a local directory or would you rather talk to someone you know or has been mentioned to you as a good ‘bloke’ by a person you trust?

Independent Financial Advisors can buy in ‘leads’, details of individuals allegedly wanting financial advice, from specialist companies but they’ll only use this service when business is slow. That’s because they know that the leads are often of iffy quality and they are also well aware that friends, referrals and recommendations provide virtually all their business.

Because of all this, and increasing legislation on what they can and can’t do/ say, they also understand the value of building lasting relationships and trust: They can’t ‘go over the top’ in their dealings without running the risk (literally) of ending up in jail.

So all good IFAs build and carefully protect their reputation and personal ‘brand’ as they’re only too aware that it is crucial to their survival and success. And that reputation can be further enhanced if they’re able to introduce people who could help each other, without any obvious or immediate personal gain to the IFA.

Now that’s the ultimate asset value to strive for in networking!
It also keeps us focused firmly on the fact that people do business with people…

The ‘who’

Get ready to start naming names and be prepared for a nice surprise on just how many you can think of first time round with our little nudge list to help!

  • Work/ business: Former employers and co-workers, and people who provide or have provided services to you might like to know what you’re up to nowadays – you might be able to refer business to them or provide a service for them or vice versa
  • Your local community: It’s not by chance that the two buildings you could guarantee to see by the traditional English village green were the church and the pub/inn – one looked after your soul, the other your stomach and circulated news brought by travellers taking a break!
  • Your neighbours
  • Your relatives and any of their friends that you know
  • Old school mates – What do they do for a living? Could you help each other, collaborate or provide contacts or referrals?
  • Co members of golf/ cricket/ tennis/ football etc. clubs
  • Team sports members: If you play a team sport you are gradually bound to get to know more about your teammates and what line of work each of is in.
  • Your local gym – After exercise it’s not unheard of to repair to the bar (even if it’s a coffee and juice bar in the case of a modern sports centre) where it is acceptable to strike up conversation with like-minded souls. Then, if you ‘click’, it can just be a matter of time before the subject of what each of you does for a living crops up. Bingo.
  • Hobbies – any that involve contact with other individuals would be a great way to help you to spread your net over time, whether you are a member of a card club, writers’ group, a musician in a band or orchestra, regularly go to your local art gallery or museum…

Here’s a quick sum to spur you on

Not all of the above are going to apply to everyone but enough will to allow anyone to drum up at least 50 names for starters – how many people do you think each of these 50 know who aren’t already your mutual friends or acquaintances?

If each of these 50 knows 10 people who are currently not in your circle… that’s potentially 500 additional folk who you don’t know yet could know about you and what you do in time!

…And what about the people they know?

It may be a while before have time and you need worry about joining any of those business networks… :-)

Linda
PS Take a look here if you want lots and lots on ‘how to’ on networking – even the newest, shyest networker will find something that only stretches their comfort zone a little bit :-) !

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