Don’t push when you can pull

May 21, ’12 5:07 PM

Author Tony Robinson OBE Categories Business Marketing, Business Service Professional, Business Startup, Cloud CRM Software, Customer Service, Small Business / SOHO, do customer service, grow your business, market and sell, not to do it!

No selling required

There is a better way of winning new customers than pushing you and your B2B offer at them. Customers love it because they’re buying rather than being sold to. You’ll like it because it feels better than selling and you’ll get more long term business from it. Using social media well has made it even easier to do. It’s also a great way of testing new products, services and even a new business. I call it, and please if you call it this too mention me and my company, ‘BRIDGING‘.

For over 25 years my company, the Business Advisory Bureau Limited, has been helping executives go it alone as independent consultants, trainers, coaches, advisers and freelance B2B professionals. We don’t let these new micro business owners out of our grasp until they’ve learned and practised the skill set which will allow them to bridge.

No-one buys from a desperate business owner

You may have heard the story of why we came up with a process to help B2B professionals win more business and keep their customers/clients satisfied and providing referrals. It bears repeating:

As a trainer and coach I was using video cameras on a key account management (sales) programme I was running. I was demonstrating something in a role play and to my horror when I saw the playback I realised I was pushing my offer down the throat of an intimidated, and fortunately mythical, client. What had gone wrong was that my own win-win influencing skills had deserted me.

The reason they’d deserted me was that, in real life, we’d just started a new business and I was desperate, really desperate for clients. Frankly, we were only months away from not surviving. My over zealous need to get the sale in real life had spilled over to a role play in a training room.

I realised that not only hadn’t I fully understood what the client wanted and needed but I hadn’t established any credibility to allow the client to feel it was the right thing to buy from me. Seeing how bad I’d become at ‘selling’ on that TV monitor saved our business.

Alligator soup

Think of two people, you and your prospective client, at opposite sides of a rope bridge. Both you and your prospective client are safely on dry land. The bridge is wobbly and underneath is a river with alligators waiting to gobble up those that fall. What can you do to draw your prospective client to meet you in the middle of the bridge so that you exchange something they want (e.g. your service) for something you want (e.g. your fees).

Why social media and all forms of cloud communications can help you is that by the time you arrive at your side of the bridge your client should already have decided that you are credible and have the solution or can provide the opportunity that they are looking for. In other words, they’re interested in you and want to meet you. Hint: check your networking skills and your LinkedIn profile to see if you can do this.

Then when they’ve got to the bridge you’ve got to pull them to you by asking questions, listening, summarising and influencing or negotiating so that they really want to meet you in the middle. You both fall in the river if you feel or they feel that you are selling to them.

A bridge too far? Never

The art of B2B marketing, including using social media (no excuse with WinWeb in the cloud services), is to get more days in every month when you have a prospective client at the end of the bridge that you can solve a problem or provide an opportunity for. Then you need the ‘pulling’, (just don’t tell your spouse or partner that’s what you’ve been doing!), skills to win the business.

Find out more at TonyRobinsonOBE.com and join the greatest Micro Business Owner community in the world, free, at EnterpriseRockers.co.uk

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To take on a senior employee in your own biz – or not.

May 7, ’12 7:55 PM

Author Tony Robinson OBE Categories Business Marketing, Business Startup, Contractor, Customer Service, Employment, Freelancer, Getting Things Done, Micro Business, Red-Tape, Relationships, Small Business / SOHO, Social Entrepreneur, be successful, bootstrap, do customer service, grow your business, manage your time, motivate your staff, recruit the right people

There is a better way of building your business than taking on a senior employee. Unfortunately, this better way is risky and certainly is not possible for all types of micro-business. My preferred options/alternatives to taking on a senior employee are:

Option 1. using independent contractors/freelancers/other micro-businesses
Option 2. taking on partners or if you’re a limited company or social enterprise, other directors.

OK so I know that my two preferred options fly in the face of government advice, guru advice and business school advice which urges you to grow your business by taking on employees, particularly qualified business managers and leaders, but to me it is all a question of risk. My two options are risky but I believe, if negotiated and managed carefully, are not as risky as taking on a senior employee.

As my businesses have always been B2B service businesses my main worry and focus has always been winning and keeping customers. In over 26 years of starting and running my own businesses I’ve got a better track record of winning and keeping customers using my two alternative options than I have with employees, as executives and managers, however well trained. Most are fine but it’s the ones that are not fine that have proved deadly to our customers, our income, our profitability and most of all our own morale.

The main advantage of option 1 – independent contractors is that you retain total control of your business, it is flexible, it is a service agreement which is easier to manage in time and money than an employment contract with the associated regulations and it is a tap of skilled resource that you can turn on and off dependant on your workload and you don’t have all the associated on costs of employees including purchasing equipment.

Because most contractors/micro businesses want to continue being contracted in the future I find they become like partners of our business and we grow our businesses together. For example I have worked with the same contract trainers and the same designers and developers of learning media for over 20 years. We all pay each other on time too – as soon as we possibly can.

The main disadvantage of this option is that it can play havoc with your margin. However if you go for a very high quality and unique service you may be able to ensure the price you charge covers using contractors and remains competitive.

The main advantage of option 2 – taking on partners/directors – is that it is bootstrapping par excellence. Let me explain; I recently entered a business ‘to what do you owe the secret of your success?’ competition. My answer was ‘my business partner of 26 years, Clare Francis’.

We both invested time and money in our business, we’ll work whatever hours, whenever, in order to succeed. When times were hard we didn’t take money out of the business. We never needed status perks like employees ask for.

We are equally passionate about our customers and our offer to these customers, so much so than many are now friends too. We have complementary but different skills and most of all we trust each other – so implicitly that we don’t have to waste time overseeing each other.

I just love successful business partnerships and believe they are responsible for more successful start ups growing into substantial micro businesses than any other single factor.

My business partner Clare and her husband, Charles, also managed a very successful family business. Indeed, many of my successful micro business owner friends, who say they are going it alone aren’t really. They often, have a spouse or partner, beavering away in the background supporting the business and often holding down a job in the early stages of the start up in order to bring in family income.

Partnerships are my preferred option but it is as tough and careful a decision as deciding to live with someone.

Trust and passion is everything, in my opinion, to success in your own enterprise. This total trust and passion is there with my co-founder of the Enterprise Rockers, Tina Boden, and all the wonderful band leaders of our movement.

We trust each other so much and share the same passion that we’re all putting our own biz money and time, for no return yet, into making it all work.

So, before you do as the gurus recommend and take on a senior employee, do consider whether you’d be better using independent contractors or taking on a partner.

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We may have got the T shirt but it’s still to be earned.

Mar 28, ’12 7:32 PM

Author Tony Robinson OBE Categories Business Ideas, Business Marketing, Business Mentoring, Business Service Professional, Business Startup, Development, Development, Development, Entrepreneur, Getting Things Done, Marketing/PR, Micro Business, Small Business / SOHO, Small Business / SOHO, Small Business Support, Social Entrepreneur, be successful, do a reality check, grow your business, handle problems, market and sell, start-up in business

We don’t know what we don’t know

I always chuckle to myself when big companies that sponsor awards to start up and existing small business give, as part of the prize, mentoring or advice from a senior executive in their company. Perhaps it is no laughing matter.

Firstly, it’s arrogant to assume that starting and running a micro enterprise is so easy that someone without any experience of doing it, just because they’re a top corporate executive, can offer useful help. Start ups and micro enterprises are not boiled down versions of corporates!

Secondly, because the fledgling micro business owner doesn’t know what is good and what is bad support they could implement something that turns out to be the kiss of death to their business.

A colleague, Robert Craven, has just written a blog describing how a potential start up lost their redundancy money to unscrupulous ‘support’ providers. How were they to know that they were being conned? One of the reasons we founded the Enterprise Rockers movement is that we felt that a massive community, ‘the power of plenty’, of micro business owners could be self sufficient and we could sort out the wheat from the chaff.

It is important that we do sort out what’s good and valuable from the vultures and the ‘well intentioned but dangerous’. The right micro business to micro business support will lead to 80% of start ups surviving over 3 years with 6% becoming substantial, employing businesses. Essential enterprise skills and know how make all the difference to success. So, it is worth seeking help.

We should encourage prospective and existing business owners to continue to learn and to continue to seek support.

We never know all about enterprise

Twenty four years ago when my business partner, Clare Francis, and I were nearly two years into our business we learned something that saved us from the scrap heap. It was incredibly simple and it was learned by watching videos of our influencing, selling and presenting.

Not only was our product and service offer usually wrong we were often presenting offers without having really found out what our potential clients wanted. Frankly we were desperate to make a sale and no-one wants to buy from people as desperate as we were. We weren’t unskilled. We’d both done postgraduate business courses and we’d both been at Director level in UK subsidiaries of American multinationals. We’d been superbly trained but not on how to start and succeed in our own business.

What I learned this week-end

This week-end I was at the FSB Annual Conference in Scarborough. On top of my membership fee I paid another £100 to participate in the events during the day. My prediction is that these two days were worth thousands of pounds to me in future earnings and hundreds of hours saved of wasted effort.

The three things I learned were:

1. How to improve my use of Linked In so that I can influence someone I wish to make contact with to speak to me. I learned this from the brilliant presentation of Andy Lopata.

2. How it may be worth resetting your goals in a different way if you get stuck in a rut and are not improving your performance. I learned this from the inspirational Roger Black, former Olympic silver medallist, who got silver by focussing on running his perfect race rather than seeking to beat his competitors.

3. This third one is a bit of a cheat because I didn’t learn this at the Conference. On the Saturday lunchtime, co-founder of Enterprise Rockers, Tina Boden, and I met the supremely wise, Andy Peers. Andy is one of the foremost experts in setting up and running social enterprises. I’m certain that everything he advised Tina and I to do will mean we do get over 500,000 micro business owners in our Enterprise Rockers movement. We will make Britain a fairer and better place for micro enterprise.

So, maybe we ‘get the Enterprise T shirt’ for having started and run our own business, but we never truly have fully earned it. That’s because we must keep learning from others and seeking the right kind of support in order to survive and thrive. .

It’s motivating and good fun too. Keep learning.

———- ENDS ———-

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Focus more of your marketing on customer retention

Mar 21, ’12 8:27 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Marketing, Business Psychology, Marketing/PR, grow your business

In my previous post (The Questions I Would Ask If I Were Marketing Your Business – Comment and Part 1) I posed two questions:

How much of your current business comes from existing clients and how much comes from new clients?
How much of your marketing efforts are focused on generating new clients and how much is focused on generating repeat business from your existing clients?

Now, I would wager that if you have an established business then the answer to question 1 will be that most of your business comes from existing clients and that the answer to question 2 is that you spend most of your marketing budget and resources on generating new clients.

Right?

This is a situation that I come across a lot when speaking to all sorts of companies. I think it’s driven by how we think we should market our businesses and, in some respects, how we are educated to run and market our businesses.

Where, for example, have you seen customer retention and loyalty taught in business education programmes even the ones at top business schools? Trust me, it’s not taught at many as you would think as I have done the research.

“But”, I hear you say, “I pick up ideas about my business from business books I read”.

Well, the same situation exists in the books that are published. Here’s the results of some quick research I have just done on Amazon. If you go there and search for marketing you’ll get around 168,000 results.

If you then search for advertising you’ll get over 57,000 results.

A search for direct marketing produces 16,000 results.

However, if you search for customer retention you’ll get around 6,000 results, whilst searching for customer loyalty produces just under 14,000 results.

But, just because customer retention or customer loyalty doesn’t get a lot of attention in the education or publishing worlds does not mean that they are less important.

In fact, looking after your existing customers, I would argue, is as important if not more so than looking for new customers.

So, if the majority of your new business comes from existing clients but you spend most of your marketing budget and resources on finding new clients don’t despair as I think it presents an opportunity.

Just think how much more business or referrals you could generate if you changed some, not all, but some of the focus of your marketing budget and resources onto your existing customers.

After all, much of your marketing spend that is focused on winning new clients will be about trying to build enough trust so that that any new customer feels like trying you out. However, when you already have a relationship with your existing customers when not leverage that relationship and trust to try and do more for them or to help them introduce you to others that they know who could benefit from your help.

Who’s for taking a new look at who they focus their marketing on?

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The Questions I Would Ask If I Were Marketing Your Business – Comment and Part 1

Mar 12, ’12 10:01 AM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Marketing/PR, Small Business / SOHO, grow your business, market and sell

About a month ago I read the following post: The Questions I Would Ask If I Were Marketing Your Business on the MarketingProfs site. It’s a pretty interesting article and worth a read, particularly where it pushes for more data and real examples to be used to back up all the advice and information that gets bandied about concerning marketing most of the time.

However, there were two other things that struck me about this article:

It talks about marketing in the title but only refers to social media marketing in the post. Let’s be clear. Social media marketing is an element of the marketing tools and tactics that are available to us as businesses but it is not the whole thing.
The post spends most of its time analysing and commenting on the folks that are writing about and marketing their marketing services and less about marketing end producer/consumer businesses.

I understand that the MarketingProfs site is mainly targeted at marketing professionals but, even so, I felt that there was a disconnect between the title and the content.

But, this post is not all moan as the original post did prompt me to think about the title and what would be the questions I would ask if I were marketing someone’s or your business.

I thought about this for a while and came up with a long list of questions but then boiled them right down to two questions that will tell you everything you need to know to start with:

How much of your current business comes from existing clients and how much comes from new clients?
How much of your marketing efforts are focused on generating new clients and how much is focused on generating repeat business from your existing clients?

Answering those questions will give you a set of numbers that will help you understand quickly the marketing make-up of your business, start to identify what is working and where things can be improved to generate better results.

Do you have those numbers to hand?

In my following post(s), I’ll explore what I think those numbers can tell you about your business and what you can do with them.

Til then.

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Gurus with Forked Tongues

Mar 7, ’12 2:56 PM

Author Leonora Soculitherz Categories Balderdash, Business Books, Business Startup, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur, Freelancer, Freelancer, Home Business, Lifestyle, Small Business / SOHO, Small Business Support, Work/Life Balance, be successful, grow your business, manage your time, not to do it!, start-up in business

Today, I want to offer some advice to all my start up and micro-business owner fans on what advice not to take from silver tongued experts and gurus.

I’m on the train. I’ve been at my publishers in London checking on new cover designs for the third edition of ‘Stripping for Freedom’ and before that I attended an entrepreneurship conference. Unfortunately, I’m with my co-author, the hopeless Tony Robinson OBE. This accounts for the unusual over garments I’ve put on for the train journey. These include a sou’wester, a plastic mac, gloves and plenty of loo paper covering my shoes.

Regular readers will be pleased to know that I’m all French today. Namely, I’m dressed by Jean-Paul Gaultier and accessorised by Louis Vuitton. I’m shod, red soled, by Christian Louboutin plus I’ve a few random dabs of Chanel – pour la bonne chance.

The first reason I’m now covered up is Robinson will at some time try to open the Dairy Stix for his coffee and later, he will open his badly shaken bottle of Diet Coke. The second reason is that when he gets bored of watching YouTube videos of himself he will want to play his favourite ‘Buzzy Bee’ game with me. This involves him telling me to say to him ‘Buzzy bee, buzzy bee, have you any honey?’ He’ll then take a few mouthfuls of Diet Coke, holding the liquid in his mouth. I’ll say ‘Buzzy bee, buzzy bee, have you any honey?’ He’ll then spray Diet Coke all over me.

Now, back to my advice on what advice not to take from the many so-called small business experts and entrepreneurship gurus you may encounter at events:

1. Ignore anything that you cannot immediately see how you could make it work for your business. There is lots of advice, purported to be useful for ‘SMEs’, 99% of all businesses, which is clearly nonsense and straight from corporate gibberland. The advice doesn’t work for the 70% of all businesses that have no employees at all and 96% of all businesses with less than 10 employees where the owner just wants to earn a decent living and does all the important work themselves.

2. Ignore anything that sounds expensive. Serious entrepreneurs with serious businesses seem to make serious investments in all sorts of things that could leave you seriously overstretched. Most start-ups and micro biz owners risk their own money in their business but have no intention of building a major corporate entity, taking on major bank loans with guarantees and/or sharing their business with outside investors.

3. Ignore anything where the speaker is not telling you ‘how’ to do something but rather is advising you to pay someone just like them to give you some good advice. It seems to me that some of the entrepreneurs speaking at events actually make their money from advising businesses or from their celebrity and investing in others’ businesses. There seems little evidence that they know how to start and run their own micro-business.

Google the speaker’s name before you attend the conference. If they aren’t credible at knowing what it’s like to be doing what you do then skive off to Harvey Nicks – it’ll be a much better use of your time.

Finally, remember the Golden Soculitherz Rule, which I understand has been adopted by those crazy #Enterprise Rockers @EnterpriseRocks: ‘If you’re starting and running a micro-biz only take advice from someone who has started and run a micro-biz or is employed by someone who has started and run a micro-biz’

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Collaborate to Accumulate

Jan 26, ’12 9:57 AM

Author Lorraine Allman Categories Entrepreneur, Small Business / SOHO, Small Business / SOHO, grow your business

There’s no denying times are tough for small business. Competition for customers is fierce, overhead costs are rising, and although there is much talk of ‘going global’ the reality is for many small enterprises the costs of breaking in to new markets are often prohibitive.

Yet there is a way for small business to remain competitive, increase capacity, enter new markets and secure new customers with expansion costs being kept to a minimum – collaborate. In its’ simplest form, collaboration involves two or more people working together with a common goal to improve their position. In many cases this will involve sharing knowledge and planning how best to use the joint resources (client lists, technology, networks, investments etc.) to achieve the goal or goals for each party.

Technological developments means your list of potential collaborative partners no longer needs to be restricted geographically, so the opportunity to share the development costs of entering new markets, taking on larger clients, and securing new customers is open for all to take. There are also plenty of ‘tools’ available to assist your collaborative efforts from the simplest of email and telephone, to web conferencing and the increasingly popular document & calendar sharing, social media, and web forums. The majority of these tools cost little or no money to use so the ‘barriers to entry’ for collaborative working are minimal.

My own company actively works in this way with a number of projects on the go with different collaborative partners, some over 300 miles away! We speak regularly, have plans mapped out (Gantt charts can be useful for time sensitive tasks and identifying responsibilities), keep an eye on shared costs, and are clear about what we each want to achieve from the collaborative effort.

Tips for a successful collaboration

Think carefully about your collaborative partner(s). They may be a company you already have a relationship with, in which case consider whether a collaborative project would enhance or be detrimental to that, but if not then take the time to research who might be suitable. Some basic ‘due diligence’ in terms of trading history, previous successful collaborations, and general reputation is a good idea.

Consider how the collaboration may be viewed by significant others in your business e.g. customers, suppliers, shareholders if appropriate. If there is any question that this approach will not be positively viewed, have a re-think.

Be clear and put in writing the objectives of the collaboration, who is responsible for what and when, costs and how these are shared (who pays for what), and crucially be clear about ownership of Intellectual Property.

Be clear from the start about what you want from the collaboration in terms of furthering your own business objectives and make sure that these are complimentary (they don’t have to be the same) to the company you are partnering with. The whole point of collaboration is to achieve a very specific quantifiable goal (e.g. secure a public sector contract, increase client numbers) rather than just a general mutually agreeable relationship with no clear focus.

I’m a keen advocate of collaborative working and have been doing this myself for many years. I’m not, however, saying you should just hop in to bed with the next business that comes along! Collaboration for collaboration’s sake is unlikely to be successful, but you may be surprised where opportunities arise. Keep an open mind as to whom you could partner with, including those you currently view as competitors, to achieve greater recognition and success.

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The Best Biz Mentors Can Be A Tad Crazy

Nov 23, ’11 2:30 PM

Author Tony Robinson OBE Categories Business Ideas, Business Mentoring, Business Startup, Business Trends, Entrepreneur, Getting Things Done, Home Business, Micro Business, MumEntrepreneur, News, Personal Business, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, Self-employed, Sole-Trader, Start-Up, be successful, grow your business, start-up in business

My Dad

I reckon my first business mentor was my Dad. He started his own business, working from home, because, like many people I know, it was the best way of earning a living. His health was very poor so he had to pack in his job. In the five years between me being 13 and 18, when he died, he built a very big business. It was always a micro business, like 95% of the businesses today in the UK.

It became big in income but never had more than six employees. It was a sales agency in the wooden box and pallets industry. Many years later, when I started my own business, I realised that nearly everything useful that I’d learned about enterprise had come from my Dad as my business mentor.

He was an unlikely ace business mentor. My Dad left school at 14, picked everything up as he’d gone along, and was a complete eccentric, a showman and a storyteller who instinctively turned anything formal into a party. At football, Hull City, he had a seat just behind the Directors’ box so that he could hurl abuse and one-liners at them from start to finish. I wouldn’t sit with him.

Corporate Crackers

The point is that what I’d learned in Senior Management, even Managing Director, at two major American multinationals didn’t help me much in my own business. This was despite having received the very best business training and completed two Post Graduate Diplomas in HR Management and Business Administration. All this was next to useless in my own micro business as against the valuable help I gained from my mentors.

My business partner of twenty five years, Clare, felt the same thing. She hadn’t realised it at the time but her corporate jobs and training hadn’t prepared her for running her own business but what she’d learned from her Dad, who had his own property business, was invaluable.

No surprise then that we decided to have a mentor, another micro business owner, for our first couple of years in business. We gave him our corporate contacts and in return he asked us wise questions which stopped us doing many of the foolish things we were about to do. No money exchanged hands although a heck of a lot of money went behind the bar during our, frequently scheduled, mentoring sessions.

Sitting or Standing Up Mentors?

One of the many theories I have, which perversely academic research and government policy has yet to pick up on, is that if you’ve got a primarily ‘standing up’ business you’re best to have a mentor that has a ‘standing up’ business too. ‘Standing up’ businesses would include most building trades, cafes, shops, blues bands, chocolate makers, ice cream makers and micro-breweries.

Similarly if you’re in a ‘sitting down in an office’ type business then choose ‘a sitting down in an office’ type mentor. I’m definitely not saying only get a mentor from a similar trade or industry, only government and BigBiz think in sectors, but do get someone who really understands what you have to do each day.

Oh and beware of men in suits if you’ve got a ‘standing up’ business’ or you’re a woman. I’m sure there are exceptions to these rules of mine for choosing a mentor but there won’t be many.

Sir Jimmy Fixed It for Us Every Day

Wrestler, DJ, marathon runner, TV presenter, volunteer hospital porter and the greatest charity fund raiser of all time, Sir Jimmy Savile, died recently. He was buried in Scarborough, where I live. Thousands turned out to acknowledge his real achievements for the people of Britain both at his service in Leeds and his burial in Scarborough. He was truly a man of the people, an inspiration to many of us, and the very same person on the telly as he was in the cafes and streets of Scarborough.

He made us feel better about life and he genuinely helped many thousands of people through adversity. He was eccentric to the last. He was buried in one of his trademark track suits, in a gold coloured coffin placed at an angle in the grave, so that he ‘could see the sea’. He was also a highly successful micro business owner, millionaire and a cracking volunteer biz and personal mentor.

Two of his proudest possessions were on his mantelpiece in his Scarborough flat. They were individual letters from Princess Di and Prince Charles thanking him for his help to them, as an informal mentor.

Lots of my business owner friends seem a bit crazy. The craziness is often just appearance and behaviour that shows we’re our own boss with our own values, passion and beliefs. Some can wrongly view this, like Sir Jimmy Savile was viewed, as not professional or not to be taken seriously. We are passionate about what we do and it’s bloody hard work doing it but we can be very useful business mentors too.

Get Mentoring

My businesses have benefited a great deal from the handful of business mentors I’ve had down the years. Most of the mentoring I’ve had is over the phone or nowadays by Skype. I usually contact my mentor when I’ve got a problem or see an opportunity that I want to talk through before taking a decision. I’ve also had a great time and learned a lot as a mentor to others. I have had some training on being a better mentor and I’m going to do some more shortly.

There are lots of places around at the moment where you can find a mentor or get some training to become a better mentor yourself. One such place is the Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs, which I help run, and you can find out more here about Get Mentoring – free mentor training and free mentors.

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Building better relations with your customers starts at the end

Nov 18, ’11 12:11 PM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Ideas, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneur, Failure, Generation-Y, Generation-Y, Personal Business, Relationships, Relationships, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, SOHO/SMB/SME/Micro, grow your business

Today, I want to tell you a personal story of doing new things, taking risks, being innovative and being willing to fail in the quest to create something of value for my business, the people that I know, the small business community and my customers.

View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify

We live in changing times. We live in times where the power of the consumer is rising and it is changing everything. We live in times where harnessing the power of relationships with our customers and our employees is becoming more and more key to our future growth and innovation.

Therefore, the onus on business leaders to learn, share ideas and network is rising as we think about how we grow our businesses.

There are many events in existence for businesses but these can be:

Either for large or very small businesses;
Organised by professional or trade associations and vendors of some sorts;
Filled with talks/speakers that talk for around an hour that are ultimately trying to show you how smart they are or are trying to sell you something; and
Don’t offer enough time for attendees to network, talk about and debate the issues that are presented.

Therefore, we thought it’d be great to develop and deliver an event for established small businesses, especially those with growing teams, across sectors.

In order to do this and to try and create a truly different event, we first started by describing the customer experience ie. what did we want the potential attendees to feel after they attended our event.

Here’s what we came up with:

Imagine this.

An event where you get to the end of the day and your attendance has solved a number of your most pressing problems, you have heard some great people speak, you have met a number of great contacts and your head is full of ideas for the future of your business. So much so, that when we hold the next one that you’ll want to bring a number of business contacts along it was so good.

Does that sound good?

Why did we do it this way? Well, rather than being lead by the features of our products or services, we started with the end in mind as we believe that is a better way to create something that will have an enduring emotional connection and value with our customers.

With that in mind we developed RARE Forum (www.rareforum.co.uk), an event that is:

A place to share ideas, experiences and to discuss and debate the issues of the day;
Not focused on selling anything (although there was be a price to attend);
Filled with with a number of punchy 20min speaker slots (TED style) centred around a theme;
Full of facilitated networking and debate;
Where the whole day will be recorded (video) and made available via the website to the attendees for them to watch again at a later date or share with their team and contacts; and
Where the output of discussions and answers to Qs posed by speakers will be collated and made available via a digital resource.

All this thinking and development was done earlier this year and I am pleased to say that on the 3rd November at The Drill Hall in Central London we held our first RARE Forum under the theme: ‘Business is Personal’. Talks over the course of the day covered subjects like:

Business is personal and why it’s getting more so
Unearthing killer customer insights
The world is changing fast, how can we keep up and change with it
How you can use your customers to help rally your troops?
Creating a customer centric business
What does being a leader mean in this new world?
Generation Y and Z and the future of the talent pool
What will our customers want in the future?

The day was a great success and was the first of many, we hope. We are now busy making plans for what happens next.

One of the things that we promised to do was to capture the ‘story of the day’ afterwards so that we could share that with the attendees as an aide-mémoire and as a way of capturing the essence of the day. You can check out the ‘story’ by following the link below. You really should take a look it as it includes all of the slides that the presenters used, pictures from the day, some sketches from our artist in residence and a whole set of tweets from our twitter hashtag: #rareforum. It’s also been done on Storify which means it looks pretty cool even if I do say so myself.

View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify

For the team involved and myself personally it was a huge learning experience. Both exciting and scary in equal measure. What it did teach me, however, was that starting with the potential attendees, my customers, and what sort of experience and feeling I wanted to create for them helped give us a better understand of not what to do. But, more importantly, what not to do. Once we understood that we had a great platform to build from.

Another big lesson that I learnt is that if you want to make your business great, if you want to stand out from your competitors then you have to be willing to fail in public. However, done with the right intention and in the right way the actual risk of failure gets much, much smaller.

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Content Marketing: Create, Repurpose, Recycle, Curate

Oct 19, ’11 10:00 AM

Author Adrian Swinscoe Categories Business Marketing, Marketing/PR, Marketing/PR, Online Marketing, grow your business

I was with a client yesterday morning running a future thinking and strategy workshop for their directors. In the workshop we discussed how the creation of content is becoming increasingly important to help us get found, to get recommended and to build credibility in the world that we know live. It’s becoming an increasing and essential part of any effective marketing plan.

If we think about how we buy and research things, this is never more important than on the internet where great content in the form of blogs, articles, testimonials, newsletters, case studies, success stories and lessons learnt stories etc can be great ways to build credibility with your customers current and potential.

This is also backed up by data and research, which according to Marketo, 93% of B2B buyers use search to begin their buying process (http://bit.ly/9O6pix).

Going back to the workshop, the clients that I was working agreed with this but then started to voice concerns about the content creation process with statements like:
•   What do we have to say?
•   I’m not a great fan of writing
•   How much can we say about our industry?
•   etc
•   etc

These are common issues that I hear from many companies that are not used to creating new content for their marketing.

However, here’s the key to all of this: Your marketing does not always have to be about you.

Telling stories about your clients’ successes, interviewing people that your clients would find interesting, sharing and commenting on articles or resources that your clients would find useful……all of these ideas and others are not about you but about other people.

Also, the key is also not to think one-dimensionally about content. For example, if you are going to interview someone that you find interesting and think your clients would to then video it. Why? Well, because you can upload a video, strip out the audio to create a podcast or transcribe the interview to create the content for a newsletter or blog post.

For me, the trick is not to think that one piece of content can only be served or used in one way and at one time. What we must remember is that we are all different and consume our information in different ways according to our own preferences and how we best learn. We also need to remember that assuming that old content will get found is a big assumption. So, refreshing and redistributing your old content from time to time is really helpful for you and can also be really helpful for your customers current and potential.

So, if you are thinking about creating content to help with your marketing (and you should be) then think about these 4 words: Create, repurpose, recycle and curate.

Do that and you’ll be off to a flying start.

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