small business and Related Posts

Knowing Your Audience: Do You Have A Customer Profile?

December 10, 2015 By Matthew White 3 Comments

“No phone calls?” I asked, surprised.

“Maybe two a day,” my friend responded.

“But you’ve got trucks all over town, driving around with the phone number plastered on them.”

“People don’t want to talk with a human being – they want to type everything.” She added, jokingly, “Don’t you know that?”

Yes, that’s a phone. And, this phone could still be one of your best sales tools. Or not. How do you find out?

I agreed half-heartedly. I certainly would rather type than talk for most tasks and problem solving – ordering a book, researching a new car, arranging grocery delivery, solving a tech support issue . . .

But, what surprised me most is that her business is a more traditional residential and commercial services business. And, it’s a successful one still growing at a healthy rate.

There are some assumptions I’d like to see tested (more about that later), but I was surprised that either:

a) The phone plays such a small role in lead generation, or

b) The online component is responsible for so much more.

Different Strokes, Different Folks

There are of course statistics to support the idea that people are emailing more than they are talking on their smartphones. No surprise there perhaps. However, it stands to reason that certain markets and market sectors would be more phone-friendly than email-friendly (and vice versa).

Without a doubt, different businesses and niches have their unique requirements. The nature of the business, the market’s demographics, and other factors all play a role. These unique requirements – and nuances let’s call them – impact the messaging, marketing tactics, and strategies that end up being successfully employed. Very simply put, this is called knowing your audience.

Knowing Your Audience

Without building a customer profile, you’ve got an empty picture frame.

If you’ve fielded sales calls, responded to questions, or spent any time in customer service, you’ve developed a sketch of who your customer is. And, subconsciously you can make a lot of decisions based on your picture of who that person is: They do or do not like a follow up email, for example. Or, they tend to respond to certain phrases and avoid others. Their eyes light up when you ask certain questions.

This is a customer profile. And, we’ve all developed them – some with more research and analysis, some with more nitty-gritty hands-on experience.

Why The Customer Profile Is So Valuable

The problem is that many businesses do not make as many decisions as they should based on this profile. Individually, they may know the profile. As an entity, it’s often the policy, bureaucracy, and warring agendas that cloud the business’ decision making.

However, lots of answers to common problems can be discovered simply by bouncing it off of your customer profile. Here are just a few of the things a customer profile can help you determine:

What kind of blog articles, social media posts, and social media channels deliver information they actually care about.
How they want to pay, when they want to pay, and how much they want to pay.
Methods for follow up – such as email or phone – and the timing of that follow up.
Is a referral program a good idea? If so, how should it be structured?
How big an issue is reputation management and what channels should we be monitoring?

Building A Customer Profile

There are a number of ways to go about building a customer profile, and as you can gather from the above, you probably already have a start. An outside perspective is very helpful however because you can avoid some of the biases that confuse the process. In addition, there is a great deal of analysis and some metrics that should play a role.

We can help. Share your thoughts below or reach out for marketing and sales help for your business.

In our next article, we’ll continue the topic with more thoughts on knowing your audience and some related pitfalls.

Leadership and The Necessity of Inaction

September 22, 2015 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.
– Miles Davis

While finishing and reflecting upon a recent post exploring leadership and the necessity of action, I was reminded how often the converse is true: There is also the necessity of inaction.

Plenty of thought leaders and big thinkers have written of the power of the subconscious including Tim Ferriss, Malcolm Gladwell, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and others. The fact is we are working on solving problems constantly – we’re just not always aware of it.

For entrepreneurs and good business people, their passions are part of who they are. Sitting down to debate and discuss an issue or strategy is productive (as long as that time allowed for it is limited). However, most often, the real problem solving occurs outside the meeting and maybe even while you’re asleep.

Very early in Robert Grudin’s Time and The Art of Living, comes this passage:

Fast drivers can see no further than slow drivers, but they must look further down the road to time their reactions safely. Similarly, people with great projects afoot habitually look further and more clearly into the future than people who are mired in day-to-day concerns. These former control the future because by necessity they must project themselves into it; and the upshot is that, like ambitions settlers, they stake out larger plots and homesteads of time than the rest of us. They do not easily grow sad or old; they are seldom intimidated by the alarms and confusions of the present because they have something greater of their own, some sense of their large and coherent motion in time, to compare the present with.

More often than not, the fire drills of the day can wait. Or better yet, they have a way of taking care of themselves without you. We are becoming conditioned increasingly to act, rate, respond, and generally do, when that doing may or may not play a part in the something “greater.”

Knowing When to Act, Knowing When Not to Act

If you’ve started a new marketing initiative, for example, you have to wait until you get a good and reliable data set to know your next steps. If you’re tracking a prospect that looks promising, you have to know when you’ve done everything you can for that prospect, then wait – patiently and respectfully.

Acting for the sake of acting, doing for the sake of doing, and mistaking busyness for business lead to nothing productive. And, those paths are usually counterproductive.

After all, deciding upon inaction is a conscious decision to not take action – a form of action in and of itself.

Leadership and The Necessity of Action

September 1, 2015 By Matthew White 1 Comment

The line for coffee was brutal this morning.

Donuts and decision making can teach a lot about leadership. — Why not try one variety, then a better informed variety next week?

In front of me were two neatly dressed guys from the same company. Let’s call them Dink and Duff. The attendant (barista?) double-checked Duff’s order with him. Hilarity ensued:

Attendant: That was a medium right?

Duff: Yes, medium.

Dink: I heard you say large. You ordered large.

Duff: Did I? . . . No, I ordered medium.

Dink: You ordered large.

Attendant: Here you go . . . handing him a medium coffee.

We’re not even to the donuts yet. They ordered two dozen. It took a while for Dink and Duff working together to construct the perfect variety. The attendant was working as efficiently as humanly possible.

Suddenly someone behind me in line spoke up to provide input on the donut selection, and I realized that Dink and Duff had another three colleagues in line behind us.

Once the order was placed and paid for, one of the colleagues offered to carry the donuts to the car. Dink handed her the single box of donuts though he was only holding his coffee. The handoff necessitated either Dink or Duff to hold the door for her. This went on all the way to the car, leaving meanwhile two more colleagues in line to presumably order their coffee.

What’s frightening is that this is likely how this team will operate the rest of the day.

Small Teams, Leadership, and Decision Making

Something I had to learn early is that in a small business, you rarely have the luxury of huge teams with the added benefits of blame shifting and diffusion. Decisions have to be made, and there often isn’t enough time or resources to spend on being extra sure about those decisions. In reality, this is an advantage, though at times a discomforting advantage.

Of all the mistakes and failures I’ve made in various lives, I can honestly say that the negative effects of the related choices never outweighed the benefits of finding out sooner what doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, as teams grow, there is a tendency for the decision making process to last longer, pushing the benefits of new information further off. A larger team doesn’t always mean proportionally more expertise or know how. This doesn’t always have to be the case of course. Volumes have been written on leadership, team sizes, and their relationships to success. For example, there is Dunbar’s number, mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point.

Consensus Leadership

One nasty result of the unholy union between growing team size and political correctness is the rise of consensus leadership. Sometimes the long road to positive results requires a smaller team making a lot more mistakes. Screw up, learn, improve, then screw up some more but make more improvements. Of course, the key is avoiding repeated screw ups without improvement. This spirit is at the heart of the lean startup movement, and teams of all sizes have something to gain from the insights.

Sure, experimentation gets tiring and failure can even be demoralizing. But at the end of the day, unless you’ve got hard data, what’s the difference between two more chocolate glazed and two more Boston cream glazed?

A Search Engine Optimization Tip: Don’t Forget The User

July 7, 2014 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Organizations pay countless amounts of money and time on search engine optimization. For years, the results justified the investments. As the search engine optimization field changes however, the best search engine optimization tip may become this simple one: Don’t forget the user.

Search Engine Oriented vs User Oriented Content

As previously discussed here regarding search engine optimization and business blogs, the landscape continues to change dramatically for the search engine optimization industry. Recent developments in search algorithms are putting more pressure on the quality, quantity, and timeliness of content. Meanwhile, many search engine optimization strategies produce content that isn’t user oriented but instead search engine oriented.

Search engine optimization tip: Optimize for your search engines and your audience. — The best search engine optimization tip may now be this simple one: Don’t forget the user.

What does that mean? The optimized content results often include repeated use of target phrases carefully calculated in relation to the total word count of the page. Links are often added not in a logical order that would be attractive to an actual user but instead aimed at criteria that the search engines find attractive. Content often isn’t readable, appealing, or actionable.

This isn’t always obvious to web site owners that are happy about their newfound search engine traffic. Sure, search engine attention is great, but what happens when the content isn’t useful?

Leveling the Playing Field

Like Google or not, I do believe that their efforts are well intentioned when it comes to search algorithm updates. Weeding out lesser quality content in searches is a good thing. The intention is to level the playing field for content creators while producing more meaningful search results.

Unfortunately for those invested in the search engine optimization industry, “overly optimized” content is falling into this lower quality category more and more. Therefore, many smaller businesses who have invested in optimizing content find that they are being hit with the cost and hassle of re-optimization in order to keep content fresh and timely. For them, the playing field can’t be leveled enough, soon enough.

Looking at the timing and impact of algorithm updates such as Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird, the quality of results will continue to improve but are still far from ideal.

Discoverability vs Usability

For many who have used search engine optimization services, they’re left with a web site people can find but that people don’t want to use. That’s a problem.

The key to benefiting from our basic search engine optimization tip here is understanding the differences between discoverability and usability.

As much as I would like to believe it’s all about the content, it isn’t. There are still many search engine optimization tricks that can (and perhaps unfortunately) must be employed. However, content usability and future growth should always be taken into account first. Optimization can be done later.

The user must come first. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Leveraging This Simple Search Engine Optimization Tip

In the interest of supporting our single “don’t forget the user” search engine optimization tip, here are some ideas to keep in mind:

Search Engine Optimization Services Are Fine, But . . .

Be clear upfront and vigilant throughout the process that the quality of your content comes first. Many of these organizations sub-contract work to contractors whose primary language may not be the same as your end user’s.

Establish Logical Site Structure Early

Understand what logical structures your audience might seek while on your web site. Do you offer products and services, for example? How are those listed separately in different areas of the site? Identifying this early can actually help both discoverability and usability. Layering content on later as an afterthought can produce disastrous results.

Know the “Must Have” Content Your Audience is Seeking

What are the things that your customers and potential customers must get from your site? Keep this in mind throughout any optimization process.

What Actions Do You Want Your Audience To Take After Engaging Content?

Search engine optimization helps get your audience to your site, but then you must engage them. And, ultimately, you want them to do something. What is that? Do your search engine optimization efforts hinder them in any way?

Remember: The user must come first.

Is this a good search engine optimization tip? Disagree? Got a better search engine optimization tip?

Insights on CRM for Small Business

March 30, 2014 By Matthew White Leave a Comment

Considering CRM for small business was once like taking on a massive enterprise project – a project with more zeroes than a lot of small businesses wanted to deal with.

CRM Confusion

CRM for small business means software or cloud based tools. — This doesn’t cut it anymore. CRM for small business no longer means a spreadsheet or pen and pad.

I’m still always amazed at how much confusion there is regarding CRM. A top search on CRM is actually “CRM meaning.”

And, just in case you don’t know what CRM stands for . . . it’s customer relationship management.

It seems simple, but it’s really a big idea to get your head around. Customers are the most important thing for any revenue generating enterprise. There are few things as important as the tracking of customers and measurement of metrics related to them. Yet, many small businesses do a better job tracking other metrics in their business – like employee vacation time or lunch breaks, for example. That’s a huge mistake.

There is no reason any longer to use a spreadsheet to track your customers. Even worse perhaps are situations where salespeople have a secret spreadsheet outside of their company’s CRM tool. That points to a bigger problem and a whole other blog topic.

What CRM For Small Business Can Mean

Small businesses and the people that own or manage them are notorious for pinching pennies and making do with the resources at hand. I have no problem with that. What is problematic though is the amount of time and money lost because customer trends, events, and behavior go undiscovered. Time and money go wasted because processes are inefficient. The systems and processes in place to manage, track, and measure trends among customers directly impact the bottom line.

Think about it: Those same systems and processes also impact customer satisfaction. Inefficient, poor tracking and management of customer information is painful to both customer and employee.

A major payoff with CRM for small business comes when new trends and insights on new potential customers result from the freely available information on your existing customer base. You start to notice that customers of a certain type close in 90 days while another group tends to close faster. You find that phone calls are more effective among customers that meet certain criteria while emails to those same customers go unanswered.

In the end, CRM for small business isn’t just about keeping track of customer information. That’s the easy part – especially for small business. CRM can automate common tasks and communication, giving small businesses advantages that only big business previously had.

A Recommended CRM Tool for Small Business

Finding a tool to provide CRM for small business is difficult because there is a lot of noise out there. In previous experiences, I’ve used several CRM tools. All of them are now inadequate by comparison or extremely painful.

In contrast, recent experiences I’ve had with Zoho have been very positive. As with any CRM tool, there are countless decisions to make regarding customization and other aspects of the implementation. Plan on significant time to learn and customize it. The good part I’ve found is that most customization is completely doable in-house with little-to-no advanced technical expertise or any kind of code. The pricing is also surprisingly attractive.

And, if you find you’re even wrestling with the idea of software versus a cloud-based (or web-based) solution – go cloud. Trust me.

Even with the time investment – one you will experience with any kind of CRM for small business anyway – the payoff is exponential.

So what do you think? Goodbye, spreadsheet?