There are times when enforced time pressure and driven creativity can be very helpful for a business. Read the last
Facebook IPO - pix 02 (Photo credit: k-ideas)
paragraph of the Economist’s appraisal of the Facebook IPO.
Mr Zuckerberg’s social-ist manifesto also made clear that Facebook would stick to what he calls “the Hacker Way” – a nod to the “HP Way” which encapsulated the ethos of the founders of Hewlett-Packard. Facebook has hitherto been able to focus on fostering an innovative culture that encourages employees to move fast and take risks. new programmers are encouraged to push out code onto its platform in their first week on the job and the company regularly holds all-night “hackathons”.
This was echoed in a campaign we ran for a client this week for “Waitangi Day“. This is the New Zealand national holiday remembering the signing of the treaty between the white settlers and the Maori natives. Our campaign, like the Waitangi Treaty, was a rush job – we scoped the campaign quickly but getting 5 collaborative partners from other businesses on board in 4 days was a challenge – but the team pulled it off and delivered outstanding metrics.
The focussed work ethic and time urgency meant we all over-performed and the results were very pleasing. We noticed an enhanced teamwork feeling of collaboration and mutual support as well.
Challenges for my business and for yours
- Why not set up a focused time-pressure deadline for some of your work once in a while?
- Can you create something akin to a ‘hackathon’ to drive value and deliver rapidly?
- What meaningful goals can you set for new employees?
Related articles
- For Facebook ‘Hacker Way’ is way of life (goerie.com)
- Mark Zuckerberg, the Hacker Way and the Art of the Founder’s Letter (wired.com)
- Waitangi Day ‘a time for reflection’ (nzherald.co.nz)
Creativity in business is a good thing.
The idea is brought home to us every day: creativity will benefit our careers and personal goals. We all have to think outside that box. Those of us who are not ˜creative by trade, whether visually or in the written word, will all see and recognise this, wherever we personally think we may be on the creative spectrum.
So, why is it that within the creative agency world, there is little similar reflection about deploying business techniques and processes?
Of course, agencies grow from small seeds and acorns into flourishing shrubs or trees, not by sheer creativity alone. We all know that tending to our own internal business needs is important “ that stimulating and measuring effectiveness within any organisation, especially within the service industry, requires this.
But why is it that, in 2012, so many smaller concerns, which predominate in the creative industry landscape, which want and need to grow, are not employing the proper business sales techniques in order to do so?
Note, no use of the term ˜business development’ a sanitised phrase for the agency world. In fact, this I believe is the root cause of the problem (as well as a serious lack of sales skills).
For if you truly believe that your agency will standout purely on the face of your work alone, you are mistaken. And ˜business development and ˜new business? They wont get you there without you fundamentally embracing what ˜sales means first.
Lets face it, sales,is still a dirty word
To admit that, in life, we are all selling something to someone else is hard. But we do sell, each of us, in every communication we make. Whether the stakes be conveying a particular point in a meeting to gain a desired response or negotiating your next trip away with your loved ones, we are each selling.
Selling is about need and fulfilment.
Selling and buying are fundamental to gaining food, a roof over our heads and warmth in the home.
The stereotype of a sales person is a used car salesman, or a double glazing cold caller. The negative associations of these images still exist within the agency environment. Often large agencies will employ a ˜business development and marketing team but wont understand how to measure effectiveness or set realistic targets in the first place. All too often this is because the process is little understood and is simplified into sending out mass mailshots and slamming out phone calls, which is a fundamental mistake.
The whole dirty sales process is misunderstood, seen as necessity, somewhat sordid, beneath the agencys shiny creative output.
The effects of denying selling for an agency
Sadly, what this does is remove the knowledge-gathering, in the form of empowering the whole business with sales techniques, and just engenders an ˜us and them feeling within an agency: ˜me creative, me accounts person, you sales monkey.
Until the murky mystery of ˜how to sell is unravelled and embraced within a business, that business is not going to effectively sell itself. In fact, most creative concerns can benefit from as many client-facing roles being fully versed in sales techniques as possible.
Key truths about selling
Here are some skills to acquire and engender throughout the business:
- Selling is about building trust. So it is not a one-off push for a meeting, it is about relationship building. To sell, you pull, you dont push. You build up a dialogue to get into the privileged position of listening, then diagnosing the problem and then suggesting a solution.
- Research, planning and preparation are key to developing a true sales pipeline because whilst you are selling services not widgets, understanding your marketplace rather than selling your own talents will provide more new quick wins.
- Selling is intrinsically connected to marketing and the two teams should be as versed in PR and creating marketing tools as they are using those tools across all new and traditional platforms.
So, what does this all mean for your agency?
Most important of all:
Showing off your work is not enough.
Whether a stunning show-reel, something funky on Facebook or worthy on LinkedIn or beautiful in print, or with gravitas in a brochure¦ it is not enough.
You need to join it up.
Its the SO WHAT? factor. It ultimately comes down to effectively understanding that your offer is brimming with ˜features but your clients will buy benefits.
To discover the benefits your clients truly want, you need to apply the above methodology “ research, listening and planning, in order to sell. With your head held high, you will have uncovered the benefits that your clients truly need, indeed desire.
To learn more about making the above a reality within your business, contact The Hand, we offer bespoke business development services and training workshops for sales and account management teams.
This is a Guest Post from The Hand – a tailor made business development and marketing service.
Related articles
- Improper sales techniques (practicebetterbusiness.wordpress.com)
- Top B2B Franchise Shares Best Techniques for Turning Cold Calling into Warm Calling (prweb.com)
Getting reliable answers from your customer research is important – but getting short cuts by asking the right quesions is more than half the battle.
We got a great set of four questions in the mail today.
4 Questions for customer insight
- Why did you (sign up to our mailing list)?
- What made you nearly not (sign up)?
- What would make you spend more with us?
- What’s your biggest question about (our product or service)?
What an awesome list.
Why these questions are golden
Why did you sign up? – give you real understanding about what the customer thinks drove them to click that button. Remember, you can cross check this against your stats to see if this aligns. And you might learn a lot from what the customer thinks drove them…
What made you nearly not (sign up)? – again, understand the principal thing that nearly stopped your desired action happening. Can you affect that or influence it in future? You betcha – this could be the insight that leads to the biggest improvement in your CTR.
What would make you spend more with us? rather a forward question – but you never know. Some people may just need a tiny nudge. Or they may perceive your pricing versus features incorrectly. It may not be a matter of switching budgets or reducing your price. Listen hard to these answers.
What’s your biggest question about (our product or service)? Great insights come here from your user because this shows where mis-understanding or mis-communication has occurred. Could also give you ideas for new features or products for the future.
Do this for your brand
Don’t use a check box or pick list for this. Free text answers will give you the best insights.
Adapt the questions to suit your situation. The words I’ve put in brackets can be adjusted to suit your situation.
And figure out the best place to do the work… on the blog, in a newsletter, when someone unsubscribes or subscribes…. Let us know how you get on.
We got a question from a customer reviewing the Brands Seeking Agencies service. And so let us answer as many of the questions as we can:
Where does your information come from?
It is simply from visitors targeting our website in searches – we rank high for several key search terms in branding, pitching, advertising and marketing
Tracking the source URL of the searcher tells me someone at that company is searching for that exact phrase.
Why does this work for new business development?
We find that these searches are ‘early stage indicators’ of business development activity – i.e. in the ‘research’ stage for the brand. When a brand manager is considering new marketing activity, s/he will oftentimes do an internet search to find out more before writing a brief for a pitch, for example.
Why are some leads for contest ideas?
This is because of the search terms that our site gets found for.
You will notice that we frequently reveal the name and URL of the brand who wants a contest idea – let us explain why we do this.
- We want to give new readers who are not yet ready to subscribe a chance to see the quality of brand names that our service uncovers
- Many agencies find that using a contest idea as an “introduction” is a great way of ‘opening doors’ for a new brand who does not yet know your agency.
A majority of brands are not from USA
This outcome is a function of three things –
- We originated in the UK and have a lot of British companies who read the blog.
- The internet in native English is read by people in US, Canada, Australia, UK, South Africa, New Zealand and several other countries where English is the native language.
- Our site attracts readers from around the globe – many of whom use English for search because the results are richer than in their language.
How can I get more leads suited to my agency?
At any one time, we cannot predict the industry, country or type of leads that we uncover.
We fully understand that these are unlikely to suit every agency all the time. You may be a niche specialist in high tech B2B while another subscriber agency works with clients from Florida or Denmark across many industry groups.
To assess whether our Brands Seeking Agencies leads may suit your agency, we suggest you read back through the ‘history’ of Brands Seeking Agencies blog posts and see how many on average look likely to match your expertise and specialism.
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A gentle browsing led me to a new website that matches brands and agencies, Digital Agency Expert.
Checking it out… will let you know more after registration information comes back from the organisers.
]]>I bought a Mac, but switching is causing me HELL… I have had to take up intense coffee drinking again!
My list of Mac failures from today:
- Setting up tabbed browsing – a pain to do. Can’t work out how to open new browser and default to tabs.
- Shortcut keys – had to search for how to do home / end / page up / down
- Lack of a forward delete key – shortcut only. sadness.
- How the FREAK do you get a document to “save as”… I got save a version but it won’t let me create a new folder to save it in.
- Once a program is open full screen (Mail, iTunes) how on earth do you close it… where did that red button go?
- Qlock.com – my favourite timezone marker software doesn’t work on Mac.
- Spell check on this blog has reverted to US spelling. GET LOST.
- Printer drivers for my Epson printer just fail to load. “Sorry there are no matching downloads for the Epson Epson Stylus TX550W”
- Click in a browser address and it doesn’t highlight the whole URL – wrist strain begins here.
- So how do I synchronize Google calendar with Mail calendar?
Good things
- Nice keyboard – though keys are offset to the right of where I’m used
- Print to pdf is helpful
Image via Wikipedia
Robin from PromoManagers writes about the ultimate agency nightmare client. His firm acquired the business but the client doesn’t listen to the agency advice. The relationship has been going downhil.
But they are stuck because the agency needs the income but they also recognise this client won’t ever be a huge success with the campaigns they run and won’t make them rich due to the lack of follow-through.
He says
I’ve been part of a team of people working on “the problem child” account for almost a year now. The short of it is that (a) they need more than just marketing to grow their business and (b) they blatantly ignore our recommendations and then complain that they’re not getting results.
This is clearly a failng relationship.
His article was prompted by an Entrepreneur article where the commenters all suggest their ‘best decision’ was to actually fire the customer – interesting that Robin didn’t feel he could do the same. But maybe he’s not the decision maker in his agency.
Symptoms to watch out for – Nightmare Clients from Hell
- you complain to your co-workers A LOT about them
- nearly everything they say annoys you
- you find it hard to think of something positive to say
- when you see them the first thing that jumps into your head is negative or sarky/snide / negative
- you have to struggle to be enthusiastic about your work on their brand
Any others? What do nightmare clients from hell make you do or thing?
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Our new client is Contegro, a content management system (CMS) for business websites – we are working with them on social media, PR and blogging.
Delighted that within two weeks of starting work, we got their story picked up by the leading magazine about New Zealand creative business, Idealog. Read the article about Contegro hitting the Top 30 CMS list in the world!
Reading John McTigue’s lovely rant about How to shop for inbound marketing services made us smile. He is a client side marketer. He says all the catch phrases we spout “partnership” and “lasting relationship”. But read carefully and agencies cna learn how best to present themselves to a new client.
He writes
The companies and people who seek our services are woefully unprepared for the relationship building, which starts at the first conversation.
Think back to your most recent meeting with a new prospect. What do you ‘normally’ do at that event to start building a relationship?
John’s advice is “Listen to your partner.”
Back in the day, every marketing manager loved using an RFP or a competitive pitch as a way of gathering free ideas that they could implement themselves – sometimes without hiring the agency. But it’s different now.
If you’re serious about winning new business through RFPs you, as the agency, must also learn to listen for the real briefing.
Hearing what the client is saying
John continues in the blog, writing
“They should be telling you roughly what it will take in manpower, time and resources to achieve your objective. They should be able to tell you a range of monthly expenses you will need to get there and what the process will look like”
What this means is you, the agency, knowing exactly what it will take to get the client to the marketing successes he craves – be honest. Tell them the real cost – and do it before you ask about budgets.
Do you?
My check list for first meetings
- I need to know how experienced a buyer the new prospect is – I want to know whether s/he really knows what marketing communications can do and can deliver or if it’s just a ‘catch-phrase’ with little real understanding behind.
- How well does the client know what s’/he wants? Can they articulate real business goals and what do they know about the different inbound marketing techniques that will achieve the goals?
- Do they have a realistic idea about the time, effort and costs it will take to achieve those goals?
So, next time you go off for a first meeting – take a little check-list with you and evaluate your own performance!
Good luck
]]>We did a seminar today at Otago Southland Employers Association about How to migrate your marketing online.
The Resources and additional material which add to the slides are:
- Blog post about website keywords and how to test for their use
- Reverse IP Mapping Explained – and download the free e-book
- Leads Explorer and DomoDomain are examples of companies offering IP lookup services
- How to do B2B leads research guide slide deck
- The Word of Mouth marketing website - this is the Otago/Dunedin page, there are many others
How to use these resources:
Check out the original slide deck; then review the Reverse IP Mapping document – it includes a case study done on our own website about visitors, lastly review the slide deck B2B leads research because this shows how to use the reverse IP mapping in your business development methodology.
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