You know how there are times when someone else can not only say something much better than you could have, they’ll say something you wouldn’t have said in a million years because it would have sounded really cheesy coming from you?

That’s what this post is essentially about – so why not listen up and see what you can take away and use …

There are a bunch of us who’ve been blogging away, mostly just about things that interest us, on a site since the beginning of the year.

It was the brainchild of the redoubtable Sarah Arrow (who manages and co-ordinates this blog site alongside co-running a courier business, a menagerie and being a mum to three girls) and some chums a couple of years ago. It finally came to fruition in January this year when Birds On The Blog made its debut.

I knew some of the ‘Birds’ from various online platforms and social media activity over the last few years but others only though their blogs on BOTB. I mentioned this recently to Sarah and said that I was going to make more effort to get to know the other regular contributors.

Sometimes some of us share tips related to our experience on what we do for a living, others never mention that and are instead more into social issues, news/ topical events and recipes (I kid you not – but the last are rare and backstops for quiet days when nobody can think of anything else and no, you won’t find a recipe from me).

Back to the plot

So Sarah said: Interview them then write up the interviews in a series of blogs for BOTB; so that’s what I’ve started doing. It’s the individual’s choice of subject matter and we’ve so far found out more about:

Emily, a Creative who took the plunge and set up on her own eight months ago
Elaine who’s taken her direct marketing experience and not only built a successful “all-things-kitchen” business direct over the past eighteen months but is now also opening up the opportunity for others wanting to go into business for themselves without having to start from scratch, and
Ann whose company has just come up with some rather whizzy software that sorts whole bunches of complex mangled data rather efficiently and swiftly.

Why not go check them out?

The point of sharing this?

Everyone knows we are in a recession. Some people say that’s a time of opportunity for those prepared to take it.

The interviews, of which only a few have so far been published, have all been business-focused: that was the choice of the interviewees. The ones published so far are about feisty women who are either creating or seizing opportunities.

Yet we all get a little bit stuck every now and again and we can all benefit from brainstorming and input from a different viewpoint, one that helps us broaden our own perspective, see additional opportunities and/ or alternative solutions.

Each has said her interview has provided that.

They got to concentrate on what they felt was important to them in business without feeling self conscious: question how much they enjoyed it or, if not ‘it’, what ‘it’ enabled them to do that they did enjoy; expand on that and where it was leading.

Do yourselves a favour: brainstorm with someone whose business experience you trust. Check whether you’re focusing on where your real value in business lies. It should be something you thoroughly enjoy and could talk about for a thousand and one nights if necessary and never get bored !

Not suggesting you should – just that you could because that’s when your joy is likely to be infectious…

More resources for small businesses at SellingForBusiness.co.uk

PS, an added bonus: Perfect and Princess, twin Ugandan 5 year olds have a chance at education through adverts on and donations via BOTB

Do they buy

• IT equipment & support?
• Management consultancy?
• Marketing services?
• Accountancy service?
• Legal advice?
• Courier service?
• Web design?
• Web SEO?
• Sales training?
• Sales & marketing communications training?
• Business coaching?
• Widgets?
• Plumbing?
• Clothes?
• Shoes?

If your customers are buying any of the above from you, you are providing a commodity; they’ll buy on price and convenience and will be wooed by the next temptress who comes along…

You might as well learn from my experience and save yourselves the aggro of having to go through it. It took a very good client who would put any new sales person through one of my courses to remove the veil from my eyes a couple of years ago:

“I could buy sales training from any number of sources.” (Boy! That hurt!)

“I couldn’t easily get elsewhere what you bring to my business…”

Round about the same time I explained what I did to a savvy business guy:

I provide blended learning, tailored sales & marketing communications courses primarily for small businesses where the in-house expertise was in the core offering (often technical) of the business rather than the ’soft’ skills that are also essential to grow the business.

He then swiftly burst my bubble and explained what I’d got wrong:
“Fabulous idea. Great service. Trouble is these people won’t value it at a price that’s worth your while: Wrong price. Wrong market.”

These people don’t want courses on how to sell ethically: That’s fine down the line when they’ve grown sufficiently to employ dedicated sales reps and/or telephone sales people: They’ll buy your courses or somebody else’s for them. What they want is help on how to make it easy for people to buy from them.”

And do you know what? Not only was he right, it was actually so much easier! They didn’t need to learn all those sales techniques I’d put together, with examples of how to use them, tailor them for their business and make them work.

Now we invest time getting the basics right and the rest, with a bit of effort, slot into place relatively easily.

My savvy business friend’s advice to me was FREE. So I’ll do the same for you:

Email me: desk (at) smallbusinesstraining (dot) co (dot) uk

Or pick up the phone (office hours, 9 – 5, Monday to Friday, excluding Bank Holidays) for a FREE 15 minute consultation on what your customers should be buying from you…

She had a permanent workforce of fifteen people and about thirty-five part time outworkers who all relied on her for their income.

Then the bottom fell out of the market and the only way for her and the company to survive was to change direction. The car, her pride and joy, was the first to go along with the dining out and theatre.

She had enough good clothes to still ‘look the part’ and they’d last a while. But, as time went on, employees became disaffected, morale was low and she was losing confidence in her own abilities to successfully ride the storm.

Could she do it?

The answer at this stage was: Possibly. Yet she was smart enough to realise she’d reached a point where she was ‘too close to the wood to see the trees’ and couldn’t do it on her own.

She didn’t wheel in a business coach with a track record running companies; she approached someone who would help her think differently. And, together they got results within weeks:

• After a get together of the core workforce fourteen were totally ‘onside’ and the remaining one, who clearly wasn’t, left the company.
• She was made to follow up a potential contract that had gone suddenly quiet: She discovered there’d been a misunderstanding that was about to scupper the deal. She was able to clear it up and get an order that immediately put £25,000 into her company’s funds and not only considerably eased the financial pressure but also boosted her personal confidence.
• She was made to ‘go play’ with those who still owned the make of car she’d had and found they automatically regarded her as one of them – whether she happened to actually own one at the moment or not.

She and her company did ride the storm; she got another dream car, a second home in Europe, where she now spends much of her time…

The ‘moral of the tale’ is in the story – what’s your view on what it is? Post your thoughts in the comments here

Regular visitors will notice changes to the look and feel of this site over the coming days.

We took a long hard look at the theme and had to admit that what seemed really cool before quite frankly had become dated. And it didn’t allow us to easily add the exciting extras you want and we want to provide you .

So, sleeves up and revamp time.

Most of the changes will go on offline behind the scenes until the changeover is ready. However, there may well be some components that need to alter first – as part of the Work In Progress… so it would be great if you cut us a bit of leeway!

2 more things:

1. Are you 100% happy with the way your own business is represented on and offline? We all need all the advantages we can get in this economy…
2. What specific business issues would you like to see covered here?

Let us know what you’d like to see featured over the coming weeks

We’re talking to owners of all different kinds of small businesses, asking what the main issues are right now.

Here’s your opportunity to flag up the ones facing your industry – and have a chance to get answers here – so go for it!

It’s not just the 400 workers at this plant and their union representatives who understandably view Kraft’s actions as a “cynical ploy” and “cruel manipulation” purely to gain public support for what was from their view an unpopular bid – though the PR from that angle would be bad enough in itself.

Lord Mandelson has joined the fray by pointing out that Kraft’s CEO would have known a week ago what the announcement would be and should have been straight.

Let’s say Kraft is willing to take the employee and union backlash on the chin. What message does the company think it’s sending out to the business world? That it’s a company of its word? That you don’t have to ‘count your fingers’ after shaking hands with one of its representatives? That it actually cares what anybody thinks of it?

I have no idea what Kraft is like as a company to work for or do business with but I know what impressions it’s giving me – and I can’t be the only one thinking it’s actions are more than a little tacky.

It may have got its way in the short term but I wouldn’t be surprised if this comes back to bite it in the you-know-where down the line.

Moral of the story for the rest of us?

Business is business and it’s not all warm and fluffy – we know that. What I can’t understand is that Kraft seems to have ignored the fact that it takes time to build and nurture a reputation and only seconds to demolish it …

What are your thoughts?

A client we ran this exercise with recently said:

“I now have a much better idea of how to allocate my time and energy to get to where I want to go.

The funny thing is that where I want to go is also clearer. This tool will
be something I will continue to use to review and evolve how my
purpose, passion and process are aligned.”

Worth you having a go?

By the way, regular visitors and followers will see we’ve just added the Tweet gizmo and applied it to earlier posts, too – it’ll be interesting (for us, anyway) to watch – and it adds colour to the site …

Background

A land line went down here the other day and I was having real hassle getting through to the telecomm provider to report it.

• The recorded service I got through to (using a cable line) said it couldn’t run the test on the faulty line as it was busy… and suggested I call back…
• The form on the website accepted all the details I inputted then wouldn’t process…
• When I finally got through to a human being, English wasn’t her first language and she insisted on trying the web route again on my behalf – only to discover it wouldn’t register the fault…

I was eventually transferred to someone in the UK who manually logged the necessary information and started the process of sorting it out. From then on, I must admit in all fairness, it all happened pretty quickly.

Meanwhile, the interesting bit

Half an hour into this malarkey I was really getting hacked off, so I tweeted about it on Twitter, naming the company. Within about a further 20 minutes I had a direct tweet from its Care team inviting me to email them the info and they’d get on the case!

I did email them and thanked them for spotting my dilemma and offering to help. I also suggested they get the ‘powers that be’ at their (blue chip) company to phone in with problems/ use the website to try and solve them and see how they get on see how they like the experience.

Even when I received a follow up call the next day to check that everything was okay I still felt that they were playing catch up from a customer service viewpoint:

The competent human interaction should be there right from the first contact.

Now a question for You

What happens when a customer phones your company with a complaint?

PS: You Plc coming soon – Customer service happened to be more topical for me right now

Will she decide to go off and have babies?
If she’s already a mother, what happens when one of her children is sick?

Some years ago I needed to recruit people (admittedly on a temporary basis) for a telephone marketing research project. It was my first in that role for the company and I decided to opt for 10 part timers rather than 5 full timers (there were good reasons for this – contact me direct to know more) and I was going to be a ‘model’ employer : The best 5 males and the best 5 females would be taken on, trained and have a two-week trial period.

It was a tough one that entailed a) identifying and b) conducting a 45-minute telephone interview with plant directors/managers in specific industries across 3 European countries. The first stage was with English speaking participants though the team had the language capabilities to cover all 3 countries for the roll out.

As it turned out, none of the males ‘made the grade’ whereas all 5 females (including an artistic ‘resting’ film director and a down-to-earth mum of three who had never worked in an office before) were retained and went full time on the project, were introduced to the client and really ‘got into’ their part in the aims of the research. They bonded well as a team with the ‘mum’ naturally herding and taking on additional responsibilities, and each went on to work on further projects as and when their skills were required and they were available.

That didn’t mean that I never took on some smashing blokes to work on later projects, rather that my focus should have been on the best 10, regardless of gender, in the first place.

The point to this?

People will move on; their priorities will change, as will their circumstances. Employers can’t predict when and why. We can only willingly take the opportunity to work with the best as and when it presents itself to us, for as long as it lasts.

I want to give credit to a post I saw earlier today that started off this particular stream of thought: Is it too risky to employ young women? and suggest a mosey over there would be worthwhile – you’ll see input from different and interesting angles and viewpoints…

Enjoy!

Next up: I think it’s time to look at You Plc (unless something extremely topical alters my tack… )

Toyota car recall hits US, Europe and China pulls no punches and shows the far reaching ramifications not only to Toyota but, by implication, the impact on its workforces and their communities in several countries around the world.

In contrast, when small businesses get it wrong, ‘it’ can often be contained, kept under the radar and fixed with minimal brand damage.

The good thing about the Toyota situation that we can and should all take on board is:

There’s not the slightest element of “Not our fault” or heads in the sand from the company. It’s “Let’s get this sorted out.”

Putting ourselves in the customer/client position: What kind of company would we be inclined to stay with?

Well there’s a surprise ! It went on to say:

“A recent survey we carried out at Made Simple Group clearly showed that marketing, and specifically improving visibility to generate new business, were key concerns for many.

In the face of this, it is indeed a surprising, if not extraordinary, statistic that fewer than half of all such businesses have a web presence.

Furthermore, of those small entities which are online, it is estimated that a large proportion are failing to promote their businesses properly.”

Making the most of your website presence is one area where the Davids of the business world can successfully compete against the Goliaths, so why shouldn’t you? It’s far less down to how much money you throw at it than how wisely you invest whatever budget you have. Your ‘budget’ is going to be a mixture of your time and maybe some money to be most effective:

• What do you want your website to say about you to whom?
• What do you want it to do?
• How will the people you want to visit know it’s even there?

Regular visitors will know we don’t as a rule promote business services here. Yet today we’re making an exception, mainly because this particular one gives so much away upfront and proves that the team behind it really knows its stuff.

There’s a lot to read up on and try for yourselves at nikkipilkington.com, so you may want to bookmark it and come back to it several times…