September/ October 2005

Greetings

In this Geewiz News you'll find:

• Election Marketing
• The Better Than Yesterday Challenge
• Can you walk away?
• Is Your Vision Understood?
• Surveys
• New Book
• Coming Seminars

Whether you like it or not, there are only 12 effective business weeks between now and Christmas.  That's on the assumption that the last couple of weeks before Christmas are not necessarily new business generation, they are more relationships.  So, the questions must then be asked; Have you prepared yourself for the Christmas break?  Have you identified amongst your customers who is going to get Christmas thankyous and rewards?  And what strategies have you got in place to pick up your revenue now that the election is over?

Election Marketing

As you can see, election marketing was all about educating the customers and then delivering what the customers wanted.  The interesting things in looking at the marketing of the political parties were how many of them managed to focus on the end objective, and how many of them were able to not descend into personal attacks on the people who were involved (even though the marketing was about focusing on the people).

A fascinating thing in the New Zealand case is that the minority parties were carefully communicated to by the voters, in that they indicated that they were not prepared to support some of the specialty interest groups. Yet, it's those minority parties who will team up with a major party, with probably an undue influence of power, to make the necessary changes.

How would you have coped, and what would you have done differently in the marketing of those political parties? 

What was exciting was the extensive use of the web, internet, viral marketing, and some of the innovative media usage, all of which gives us lessons as to how we could use these in our general sales and marketing.

The Better Than Yesterday Challenge

As many readers of Geewiz will know, my  'Better Than Yesterday' concept is a practical concept that allows you to do just one thing better each day, and look at the cumulative effect at the end of the week, at the end of the month, at the end of the quarter.

Now I challenge you in the 12 weeks until Christmas - what can you do to have a look at your own sales results, customer service results, and do something better each week in the next 12 weeks to lift the result.

Some useful things to have a look at are:

• The number of face to face visits
• Reducing the number of emails you send instead of communicating
• Asking for referrals from existing satisfied customers
• Looking for new target segments that are more profitable
• Looking at your A, B, C customers for opportunities to grow
• Making one more call per day
• Asking for the decision timeframe
• Identifying the decision the customer has to make
• Giving multiple copies of a quote or a tender, according to the number of buyers
• Planning more of your calls
• Following up those direct marketing letters with a phone call asking for an interview
• Focusing on your time management quality, rather than quantity

As can be seen, it's not too difficult to come up with ways to improve your effectiveness if the willingness is there.  Will you be able to do something better than yesterday?

Can you walk away?

All too often in today's business strategies, we overlook the warning signs in market segments or customer segments that we are either not targeting it correctly, or not delivering the right message to be able to help the decisions, and we keep hammering away at the brick wall trying to extract some revenue.

Frequently I see companies continuing to chase customers that are not really interested in changing, continuing to focus on a market segment for too long after profitability has gone out of it, or continuing to focus on lots of C category clients instead of developing some new As and Bs.

Often distribution channels change their skills and their customer bases, and they are no longer relevant.  If you have a look at media choices, some of the media currently are not delivering for certain kinds of customer bases, but if you keep on with that media all you're doing is wasting your advertising spend.

Even the geographic spread of customers around New Zealand can reflect wonderful sales for some companies, and yet for others it's a real struggle. 

Take a good, hard look at your customer base, your prospect base, your market segments, and if you've got an opportunity occuring that you can't see a way to fix it in the next three months, that is 12 weeks, perhaps you'd better be making the decision to stop before you throw more good money after bad.

The three-month cycle is chosen because these days businesses are running on three-month reporting, and if at the end of three months you cannot see how you can further a market, further develop a customer base, or further develop revenue in that segment, then stop.  Don't spend any more time or money, go on and develop another segment, or a new segment. That at least gives you four plans per year, and with a 50% success ratio, you will increase your results.

Is Your Vision Understood?

One of the most exciting things I've done recently is listen to some good business leaders talking about how they have managed to enlighten and develop a vision for their people who work in their companies that is easy to understand, easy to focus on, and easy to deliver.

It strikes me that too often the vision seems to have got translated into something different by the time it's reached the customer, down through several layers of sales and marketing good intentions. 

As a company manager or owner, when you need to communicate the vision to your team, don't communicate it for 12 months' ahead.  Rather, break it down into "This is what we need to achieve in the next 12 weeks", and then focus your team on the small tasks they can do each week to actually achieve that vision.  Then release another part of your vision for the next 12 weeks, and at the end of the year you will be amazed at how successful you've been at getting people to buy-in to what you felt should be achieved with the skills involved.

A vision is able to be understood, and if you use the acronym S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timeframe) your team will very quickly grasp what needs to be done.  Then the manager or leader's role is in coaching the team to develop their full potential to deliver the vision.

It's easy to cloud the vision with volume sales, boring sales meetings, marketing strategies that don't communicate, and forget that features and benefits are essentially what this is all about.

Surveys

Recently there have been a number of surveys about where the public perceives sales and marketing people in relation to trustworthiness, honesty, and perhaps even in jobs they'd like to do.  As a general rule, in the profession of sales and marketing we seem to get hammered and not considered very highly up the list.

But a recent salary survey indicates average salaries and packages of sales and marketing people have increased substantially over the last 12 months, as companies come to appreciate the value of the customer interface.

A recent survey indicates the following average packages:

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