ONE MINUTE OF MARKETING

September 24, 2016 Louise Thomson

ONE MINUTE OF MARKETING

I’m yet to fill out the ‘1-page plan’, however, I have already started implementing this book’s processes which promise to get new customers, potentially make more money and stand out from the crowd. Watch this space!

This book was a random purchase selection on Kindle ($4!) however you know that there are times when things are meant to happen. In particular, receiving pearls of wisdom which Allan shares throughout the book has already made great sense to me (refer to my last book review) as a business operator.

An important read for business operators.

Its target reading client is anyone who owns a business – any size, any sector and it doesn’t matter what is sold.

I was still reading, The 1-Page Marketing Plan yesterday when I applied an ‘OMG, that’s such a great idea’ to some marketing of my own and fingers crossed it pays off. The lesson was: don’t discount (ever) just offer more value. This has been my key take-away from Allan’s book, and there are many many other lessons – so many that I highlighted half the book on my Kindle!

Here are my top 25 lessons:

¯ While no one can guarantee your success, having a plan dramatically increases your probability of success.

¯ Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics is absolutely key to marketing success.

¯ To be a successful small business marketer you need laser-like focus on a narrow target, sometimes called a niche. (This is so challenging for me.)

¯ When you know your niche consider what is the ONE thing they crave above all else?

¯ Unique Selling Proposition (USP) – Why should I buy from you rather than from your nearest competitor? What positions you differently, so that prospects are forced to make an apples-to-oranges comparison.

¯ We live in a sound bite, we’re living in the MTV generation – craft your message so that it’s immediately understandable, impactful and important.

¯ Can you explain your product and unique benefit it offers in a single short sentence? E.g. Apple’s iPod – 1000 songs in your pocket

¯ What can you do in your business that’s remarkable? Your clarity around this will have a huge impact on the success of your business.

¯ Fear, especially the fear of loss is one of the most powerful emotional hot buttons you can push. (Talk to the Amygdala part of the brain. If you’re not familiar with this … that will be another book I read for us!)

¯ Make your business name understood – if you confuse them, you lose them. Choose clarity over cleverness.

¯ Exchange value, not products. Become a welcome guest when you communicate, don’t become a pest. (E.g. constant email activity with no value.)

¯ Stop selling and start educating, consulting and advising prospects about the benefits your products and services deliver.

¯ Customer Relationship Management system – got one? Must be more than a spreadsheet or filing system. (I’ve already starting looking into this system.)

¯ Your pricing strategy should be simple: Standard and premium – don’t confuse people.

¯ Close down your Sales Prevention Department – do you have this department?! Make it easy for people to buy from you. (One of my pet annoyances … a handwritten sign “Only cash sales”)

¯ Build a tribe of raving fans – sell people what they want and give them what they need – help customers all the way through to achieving results from what you’ve sold them.

¯ Seek out or become a Voice of Value – you need to have valuable ideas and these can be founds from Thought Leaders, Mentors, Coaches and successful peers.

¯ Products make you money, systems make you a fortune – this is taken from Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth (I must re-read this book.)

¯ Business systems start with documented procedures and processes that allow your business to run with-out you.

¯ Customers can be divided into four categories:

o The Tribe – raving fans, supporters, and cheerleaders – they help you achieve growth

o The Churners – they can’t afford you and you spend too much time trying to attract them which can turn ugly if they leave you when they realise they’ve made a mistake.

o The Vampires – you can’t afford them, they consume all your resources and terrorize your team and suck the blood out of your business!

o The Snow Leopard – whilst you make most of your money from them, they are rare and don’t create growth.

¯ A more formal metric is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is based on one question “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” (There are books and courses on managing the responses to this questions!)

¯ Fire customers who consume your time and don’t pay on time! In other words, ensure you have a strategy for your different types of customers. If you only have a limited supply you can be selective.

¯ Think of your business as a person – consider its attributes and describe its personality - create an avatar to bring it alive.

¯ A small business must focus on sales and then turn them into a tribe of raving fans which will enable you to establish your brand.

¯ Marketing is a process which needs attention daily to deliver massive value to your customers.

¯ Time is not money, value is money. Time is just one of the inputs it takes to deliver value to the market.

Leading my boutique consultancy practice, I found this read so worthwhile. With my one minute of notes, I feel more organised to get my marketing process into a daily system. Whilst I’ve shared my notes, I suggest you read this pleasurable commentary by a local Melbourne guy who’s written his book out of passion for marketing success.

Allan also offers numerous tools on his website which is of course, his value add and encourages you to receive his newsletter to help you become a raving fan … that might well be me! (1pmp.com)

I’m almost a quarter way through my reading challenge and I’ve gained so many insights in many areas of personal and professional development. If you’re looking to increase your performance, let me help you achieve your goals I have so many experiments for you to complete. Let’s connect.

I’m endeavouring to read 52 Business/Professional/Personal Development books in 52 weeks. Yep, that’s one a week. As I read each book, I’ll share my thoughts, learning and recommendations. If there is a book that you’ve been meaning to read, let me know and I’ll read it for us!

Are you Making Sense?

September 17, 2016 Louise Thomson

ARE YOU MAKING SENSE?

According to The Institute for the Future, the top skill required for 2020 is Sense-Making. This is defined as the ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed.

In Lynne Cazaly’s words, it’s about your thinking, connections, visualising stuff, communicating that and being able to act on it and iterate it where needed.

Too easy! Or is it?

Leaders can choose to add value by doing three things: uncomplicate matters, enable decisions to be made and help make sense of complex issues. In my world, my common client issue is distilling information to communicate to others for decisions to be made. So, it would make sense to build the capability of ‘sense making’ as it’s the entrée to decision making.

Thankfully there is a book to help managers and leaders. And when a book immediately captures your attention, you hope the author keeps flexing this style. I wasn’t disappointed and read it within 3 days. Lynne’s humour made it enjoyable and she knowingly helped us retain the information. My daughter picked up the book wanting to know why I was laughing and asked immediately “why has this book got WTF in it?” Thanks Lynne!

Lynne presents in ‘Making Sense - A Handbook for the Future of Work’ her reasoning and a collection of other ‘Thought Leaders’ of the same subject, why we need to help our people make sense, how to go about it and offer, on a platter, tools to kick-start the sense-making in your leadership capacity.

It’s a leader’s manual which should become dog-eared quickly given the number of gems included. It’s spiced up with some fair dinkum language which we all need given the amount of procrastination and inaction in this territory (that is, in Australia and the field of sense making).

Anyhow, back to the action held within the rows of text and to my delight, the pages of visuals. Yes, my inner desire of ‘please just draw a diagram of what you mean’ has been fulfilled and I get it.

Lynne creates, immediate context for the need to make sense by introducing the cute Aussie sounding acronym VUCA. It’s because of VUCA that we are in a state of panic and feeling overwhelmed.

Volatility – the unknown in an ever changing environment, in particular in organisational systems & structures

Uncertainty – when you freeze or feel you’re in a holding pattern … struck with a personal unknown feeling

Complexity – in the middle of change humans intervene and add their interpretation creating layers of information

Ambiguity – where more questions are asked to answer questions and everything is clouded

And here are some simple yet powerful points:

DON’T do these things …

Use PowerPoint – we know they are not appreciated and people make them too complex and when people ask for a copy (this means they didn’t get it)

Use bullet points – it’s an excuse for leaving out the detail which is need to make sense of what you’re communicating

Remain quiet – there is so much going on that you need to be the toddler and ask “why?” to make sense

And more importantly start doing these things …

Create a new habit– realise that making sense is a capability and a behaviour … so it has potential to become a habit

Evolve – leaders need to keep learning, changing, and taking on different experimental roles

Set standards – don’t allow clichés or wafflers in your meetings

Educate – this is learnable, teach it in schools and develop it with adults

Dots – join the dots for your team and others

Map it – like google maps, draw a route to help people find their way

Move it on – stop the folks who are stuck in the past, help them resolve their issue to enable movement

Use templates – help make it easier to make sense by drawing templates which visually make sense

Share techniques – there are 21 to experiment with, practise and share in your team

Meaningful meetings – make your gatherings and meeting meaningful and purposeful

The crux of the book is a great model: Think, Map, Act – it simplifies what we should be doing to make sense of what’s going on. Thinking encourages visualising, mapping is creating our version of what we think and acting is practising our thought out version. And this is cyclical, it doesn’t stop with one attempt!

This is a must read and reference book for leaders.

I work with teams who are experiencing conflict which is when individuals’ values are being challenged by other people’s behaviour about an issue. In Making Sense, Lynne identifies when we are aiming to make sense, we need to make sense of the wider world (it = market, industry), the outer world (others - organisation, team), and the inner world (you – your mind)

This is another great model, this time helping leaders to depersonalise conflict; using a new language to work through and make sense of what’s going on. Leaders who demonstrate leadership will guide people to minimise their feeling of conflict by making sense of what’s going on. They’ll use this handbook with its: 40 thought starters, 10 thinking tools, 32 templates and 21 techniques for making sense.

Enjoy exploring stuff, thinking about it, talking about it, mapping it and then definitely acting on it.

Don't let this linger any longer. Act on it and get help if you require guidance. Connect now.

ENABLING IMPRESSIONABLE MEMORABLE MOMENTS

September 10, 2016 Louise Thomson

On a quick trip to the USA, I returned to my seat, after a stop in Auckland NZ, to discover that my book was missing. Feeling helpless and vulnerable (someone had invaded my space) my attentive flight attendant returned with a bundle of brand new first class magazines; this kept me busy all the way to LA!

I have retold this story for 17 years and it mirrors the impression created in the opening story of this week’s book’s first page.

Lurking in my office library, I uncovered my tenth book to review; the infamous, Moments of Truth. It’s stood the test of time, erect, although gathering dust, aging and slightly discoloured, however, it’s retained its status as the bible for anyone wanting to seek a customer driven business to compete in the service economy.

As a consumer of products and services, our service expectations have heightened in this era of instant global communication. Never before, have we bought more, ordered more ad travelled more. And boy, do we love our ‘service’ stories. We gravitate to amazing service endeavours and congregate and compete with our bad experience stories.

Today, we expect ‘moments of truth’ and have the mechanisms to communicate if we do … and if we don’t. Given the intelligence available we can be remarkably surprised and delighted. However, as Jan Carlzon, author of Moments of Truth and at the time, President of Scandinavian Airlines, reminds us that it’s the people who make the moments of truth happen for others.

Rereading this ‘service bible’ was pleasurable– following Jan’s storytelling – travelling together as he reversed the balance sheets of not only Scandinavian Airlines but two other companies. Talking to us from pages typed almost 30 years ago, how he set strategies, restructured teams and how his teams implemented changes; the why, the approach and how it all eventuated – successes and failures.

It’s a short easy read. No frills, no ego just straight to the point. (I think it’s unScandinavian to have ego and to belittle each other.)

What popularised this book when it was released is that it’s written in the days of ‘command and control, where engagement of staff was limited, and the competition was around creating the tallest organisational pyramid structures furthering the executive from the frontline, opposed to enabling the decision making by those ‘touching’ the client who demanded speed, service, decisions and delivery.

Fabulous moments in the book revolve around exploring the role of a leader ensuring that their staffs’ ideas were implemented, that women should be on the executive team, given their blend of leadership traits (different to men), that the horizontal level of management should be removed unless they were ‘on the floor’ engaging with the customer enabling the frontline team to create great service and moments of truth.

Enabling impressionable memorable moments

If you still don’t know what a ‘Moment of Truth’ (or MoT) is, it’s about memorable impressions formed and created when you come into contact with a business – this can be negative and positive. I recall doing work at the NAB, identifying with teams, all the touchpoints where impressions could be made. This in itself makes you realise that customer service is really customer intelligence!

The philosophy of Moments of Truth still has potential in 2016 and beyond. And I wonder why so many are yet to implement it. Yes, it’s ambitious and still conflicts with those ingrained views that authority and command equate to leadership however with the help of the likes of Patrick Hollingworth* who climbs mountains and focuses on flattening Business Mountains aka pyramid vertical styled organisation structures, we might see more change over the next 30 years.

I’m sure we have all created our own moments of truth but more importantly, what are you doing to enable your staff to provide these moments. Empowering them with the accountability to make decisions, using funds or their intuition to potentially save multiple funds in the long run.

This book reeks of leadership. Jan clearly articulates the responsibility of leaders and the accountability bestowed to staff to make the decisions often required of their managers to treat customers with the respect they expect and deserve ensuring they receive the service which people will talk about for 17 years.

Let me know if you choose to read this book – I’d love to discuss how to bring it to life in your business.

*I listened to Patrick Hollingworth speak at The Future of Leadership event this week – such a coincidence that I was reading MoT’s ‘Flattening the Pyramid’ chapter that same day. Check his website www.perterhollingworth.com