I know we’re all guilty of being deeply immersed in the doing of stuff that makes money. That means it can be terribly difficult to put time aside to work on your business.

You may be terribly busy, rushed off your feet, going from meeting to meeting. Or maybe simply making things happen so you can deliver your product or service to your customers.

And yet…

What if there’s a better way to achieve your customer sales?

What about if you could reduce the cost of the item you manufacture by 25%?

What if you discovered a better way to market your service?

What if you found a way to recruit the very best sales people?

What if there’s an informal way of doing things by one staff member that could be used by everyone which would massively improve sales, operations, marketing or brand recognition?

What if there was a better way of managing your own and staff time?

What if you found a way to get more attention and sales through social media?

Unless you allow yourself to think strategically about your business these sort of questions may drift to the top of your conscious mind from time to time. And unfortunately you’re too busy to give them the attention you know they deserve. And even then thinking tactically means you don’t always see the wood for trees.

Sound familiar?

Answering these questions strategically means that everything you do supports everything else you do. It means that you’re squeezing the last drop of effectiveness out of all you and your company does. So why don’t you do it.

Having been a business coach for a long time now and coached clients from Australia to Denmark, from the UK to Japan and points between it’s amazing what happens to a business that takes the time to really look at their business from a strategic viewpoint. Provided they use a good facilitator and coach to get to the real question.

So rather than asking the tactical question “how to we get more sales?” the strategic question could be “how do we get more sales from the following sectors: x, y, z, whilst positioning ourselves as experts, as friends of the community and supporters of business enterprise in the UK and Singapore and building close relationships with our prospects and clients?”

So do you have the time to think more strategically? Or do you waste the time you have by working harder and harder and pushing your people more and more?

He’s just released a transcript of an interview he did with Troubleshooter, Sir John Harvey-Jones, in front of a large audience of entrepreneurs.

It makes very interesting reading and I thought I’d share just two of the many nuggets I came across.

Company growth in the UK is handled badly

Sir John Harvey-Jones notes that in the UK we don’t tend to grow our companies very well and he says,

“Our problem is that below the very large companies, we have not been very successful in starting up enough high-ambition, high-aspiration, small to medium sized companies, and even worse than that, we have been appallingly bad at growing small and medium sized companies into medium and large-sized companies. And unless we can reverse that trend, we are going to go on down the slot.”

Company growth needs to be handled strategically, so that you know where you’re going to end up. And I know from the companies I go into that most, if not all, have no idea where they want to get to.

I’ve lost count of the number of business people I’ve met who want to get rid of their business because they want to start another, or want to retire or to move abroad and who can’t.

And the reason they can’t is that they are the business, they’ve had no strategy, they’ve not grown to the point where the business can operate completely without them.

Don’t let that be you. As I keep banging on about choose a strategy to follow and then choose your tactics. That way you’re going to arrive at your goal, usually sooner rather than later.

Different Thinking Works

And at the end of the interview Sir John Harvey-Jones says to Jay Abraham:

“We badly need your thinking, because we badly need to get a new injection of new thinking, and rather more risk taking, if we’re to even begin to achieve what, despite your depression the government, I still think you all count.”

And as I use Jay’s strategies and techniques myself I know they work. In fact I’ve been using them for a long time in my work with my coaching clients.

I used to be so enthusiastic about helping business grow that I used to give everything I knew, or had learnt or had worked out away for free. However, I’ve discovered that if you don’t pay you don’t pay attention so the only thing I do that is completely free is this business blog.

And I’m still deciding whether to make this blog a split site. One part with my normal business content and opinion and then a paid for premium content part that really works on specific areas of business in the way I do with my clients. What do you think?

And yet that isn’t obvious to an ambitious, or desperate, business owner.

Many times a business owner wants to have a quick hit that boosts sales now. Like a punch drunk boxer they’ll grab hold of anything that seems to promise to support their sales and give them a breather.

Using Yellow Pages

A business advertises on Yellow Pages because:

1. Everyone else in their market sector does
2. The salesman was very persuasive
3. They just felt “they should”

And often when it comes to renew the advert they will. And yet their advert is usually pretty much like most other advertisers in their section of the directory.

They become just a “me too” and then have to fight on price with all those other advertisers.

Running Pay Per Click Campaigns

PPC, or pay per click, campaigns are highly effective at driving traffic to a web site.

However, if no thought has gone into what the business does with the arriving traffic the vast bulk of the traffic is likely to be wasted because only 3% of people are buying now, this minute.

If they’re starting a new campaign their traffic immediately goes up (assuming correctly targeted keywords) and so do their sales. And the business owner never realises that their sales could have been much more than they’re getting for that pay per click cost.

Advertising in Their Markets Trade Press

Some companies who are thinking about their market may choose to advertise in their trade press magazines.

There tends to be 2 problems here:

1. businesses don’t stick with an advertising campaign
2. Adverts don’t have any call to action

The results are that few people respond to the one-off adverts that appear or even to those adverts that are part of a campaign if they’re not asking the reader to do something.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is often seen as a black art and businesses tend to shy away from it and outsource to specialist companies to do their SEO for them.

The problem here is that like Pay Per Click (PPC) if you don’t know what you want to do with the traffic you get it will simply click away to another site. And even if you do know what you want to sell them what do you do with the ones that aren’t buying now?

The other point is that if you’re not different in some way from your competition like a Yellow Pages listing you can become involved in a beauty competition that you’re not even aware of and lose the potential business to a competitor with a “better” web site.

Strategy Wins Every Time

The reason many people don’t use strategy is that unless they do use it they simply don’t realise just how many potential clients they lose by using a tactical approach.

I’ve listed some well known different tactics of getting business above.

If the businesses had worked out before hand things like:

1. how to handle non buying prospects
2. how to ensure they captured more of the Yellow Page eyeballs
3. made sure their site stood out and ensured that people signed up for more

The business would have got more sales. More sales they wouldn’t have had to chase. More sales means business becomes less about chasing any sale and more about chasing the right sale for your business.

That’s a more profitable and strategic position to be in.

Interesting…

Internet marketing has radically changed the way we all do business. Social media is one component of that. It’s the newest and it too has the ability to change the way you do business.

And it’s not by joining Facebook or hanging around on Twitter. Just doing that wont give you value in terms of sales, more sales and, much though I hate the word, Branding!

You need to know what to do. What’s the point in having to make the mistakes that us early adopters did. Yes I’ve got over 6,000 followers on Twitter.

So what? It doesn’t matter a hoot if they don’t make money for your business.

So think about this…

Have you a strategy to include and integrate social media into what you’re doing? Because if you remember it was only a few years ago that people were saying you didn’t really need a website.

And now you’ve got people making a very decent living from a business that sells purely through a web site. I’ve several clients who do exactly that. Can I improve what they do.

You bet!

Often people just don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what others have successfully tried either.

Even if they’ve been on internet marketing courses, or “how to do SEO” courses!

I conducted a social media course this month and this company has Facebook, a blog and are on Twitter. They were amazed when I showed them one very common technique that changed the way they looked at some of the Internet marketing side of their company.

So if that training can cause such a change in outlook why is there no funding to help business do it?

And by the way this isn’t a particularly small company. They’ve got real passion behind their business and want to do it well. But it’s still a case of you don’t know what you don’t know.

Do you know what you don’t know?

Social Media Marketing or social marketing

Social marketing also covers blogging, which only really started in December 1997 and started to take off much later around 2003/2004. Similarly Twitter started in March 2006 and continues to gain followers.

Social marketing experts tend to be people who are self-taught and usually have an Internet marketing and geeky background – guilty on all counts!

Why use social marketing at all?

Firstly, there are some companies that don’t even need it.

However, for the vast majority social marketing is a very worthwhile experiment. Be careful though as it does have a time cost and if you’re not careful you can lose your way.

So the most important thing to recognise about social marketing is that it must be integrated into your overall marketing strategy.

Using such an approach means that you can combine your use of social marketing with advertising, customer relationship building, customer service, sales, pr, telesales – you name it!

So social marketing can increase the number of times you interact with your prospects and customers. It can also increase your speed of response, which can defuse critical customer service problems more rapidly.

Your first forays into social marketing should be viewed as experimental and changeable as you need to find what works for your company.

Social Marketing Working For You

It’s easy to get started with social marketing. But it’s important that you work out your goals first.

Do you want to position your company as one of the experts in your field? Maybe you want to be seen as a thought leader? Perhaps all you want are leads or to handle customer service?

Whatever your goals are, they should be written down and agreed before anything else happens.

Then  look at your customers and prospects. What social tools do they use? Which ones could you encourage them to use to talk with you?

Then look at the social media you want to use. Find the appropriate tools that make lighter work of social media. For example there are offline blogging clients that make blogging easy. Or Twitter clients that make customer service a snip.

Above all, don’t be afraid to find some help on social marketing. Some of us have been through the learning curve and can help evolve a social marketing strategy and advise on tools to assist you.

The important thing is not to re-invent the wheel and to make a decision about whether social marketing is right for you right now.

They often expect me to say, “more sales staff” or “increase your marketing” or “increase your sales activity.”

The truth is, you need to really look at your whole business and view it as a sales and marketing machine. That way you can implement processes that will peg the sales you’re getting now and enable you to refine those processes to increase your sales.

There are at least 10 steps to increasing your sales.

The 10 Steps To More Sales

Obviously you can have as many steps as you like to get a sale. What I’ve done is try to summarise the key ways of making sure you’re maximising your business’s efforts to get sales.

• 1) Create a business marketing strategy which covers the products you sell and the people you want to sell them to
• 2) Decide which companies, people, markets you want to sell to
• 3) Make sure your personality, ability, uniqueness appears in every communication you have with your market
• 4) make sure your web site works for you and not against you
• 5) When asked to meet prospects listen, listen again and then decide whether you can help them – do not simply sell because you’re there
  6) Implement a sales process with stages that can be measured or estimated
• 7) Testimonials, testimonials – get lots, get good ones, get them published
  Continue to build relationships with current clients
  9) Find out why previous clients left and (depending) get them back
  10) Sack customers you don’t want

Is it that simple? Yes and no…

If you truly want a bigger business you just have to take a step back and see what you’re doing now.

If you’re not getting the business growth you want there’s a good reason for it. Go through the 10 steps, preferably with someone who’s been used to doing exactly that.

When I talk to businesses the number one reason why these steps are rarely addressed is often time management. People cram so much into their day they don’t leave anything for improving their business, and their life!

After I deliver training on time management (see working as a project director paid off) companies really start to focus on what needs to be done and not just fire fighting all the time.

And unfortunately there really is no magic lamp you can rub to make your proposal suddenly appear neatly bound on your desk.

Typically the bid manager leads the proposal preparation, review and delivery. Often this person is usually the project manager. And it’s vital that the bid manager is involved right from the beginning of the proposal process.

Once most of the clarifying questions have been completely answered the bid manager calls the proposal team together and goes through the Request for Information(RFI), or Invitation To Tender (ITT) and agrees:

• who will write answers for which which section
• who provides details of the solution
• what further materials are required and who is responsible for getting them
• the deadline for submission of all materials
• the review date for the proposal draft

Mid Size Software Consultancy Proposal

Taking as our example a medium consultancy the bid manager might expect something like the following to be produced:

• The prospective project manager – produces project plans, risk register and change control strategy
• The application development managers for each application provide software background and answers to specific questions in the RFI or ITT
• The application development managers also provide expected costs for software changes, implementation and ongoing maintenance
• The accountant provide annual accounts over 1,2 or 3 years (depending on whether they’re requested)
• Sales staff write the proposal summary with the bid manager
• Sales staff to provide marketing collateral to support the proposal
• Experts in the conversion of existing data provide details of conversion, what is covered and, crucially, what is not covered
• Planned hardware provider provides upfront and maintenance costs and availability dates for hardware
• Technical architect to provide overview of solution
• Optionally proposal team to create a presentation for delivering the solution

Small Company Proposals

Small companies still need to provide the same information that a medium sized company does. The only difference is that there’s likely to be, at most, two people getting materials together and writing the proposal.

Any smaller company that intends writing a number of proposals would be best advised to ensure that they get together material and put it in one place so that proposals can be written more easily.

Delivering The Solution

Finally, once the proposal has been written it must be reviewed.  The solution must be carefully checked for feasibility and cost. In addition it’s important to ensure that the solution is “good enough.” Sometimes software can be developed that actually does much more than the client wants or needs. That is a complete waste of time and money for both parties.

Look once more at the RFI, or ITT and check what method of delivery is required. Do they ask for 3 bound copies? Maybe they want the document emailed or sent on a USB stick? What ever method make sure that you provide the proposal in that form.

And lastly, during the whole process, make sure you keep backups as you alter each part of the proposal.

Next time I’ll talk about who should deliver the proposal and when it needs to be delivered.

However, the unexpected amounts of snow meant that it was totally impossible.

I was looking forward to helping people decide whether Social Media Marketing was right for their business. And then if it was showing them strategies to use to make the most of it, whilst not taking all their time.

Why Use Social Media Marketing?

Firstly most businesses already use one form of social media marketing, also known as business networking. Where you go to meetings to talk with other people.

The reason you should test whether social media marketing is right for you is because it’s become another marketing channel and people may expect you to use it.

The Problem With Social Media Marketing

There are so many different ways to get involved with social networking. As I’ve said before, just some of those ways include:

1. LinkedIn
2. Blogging
3. Squidoo
4. Hubpages
5. Digg
6. Facebook
7. Reddit
8. Stumbleupon
9. YouTube

And on, and on…

So how do you decide what to do, when to do it or even how to do it?

Funnily enough my audience would have discovered exactly that!

The What, When And How Of Social Media Marketing

The first thing to is to decide what you want this type of marketing to achieve. That’s part of the what. Remember it’s internet based but can be used in every other marketing channel you have too.

The next ‘what’ is decide what you want to say, and who you’re going to say it to to meet your goal(s).

And the final part of the ‘what’ is to decide which tools can communicate your message most effectively.

There’s much more to it than that but for the moment let’s go on to ‘When’. The question that arises is when should we do this type of marketing. The simple answer to that is when you have something to communicate with your chosen audience.

Notice that I’ve been saying “with your chosen audience” and not “to your chosen audience” and the reason is that your audience is in a conversation with you. And they have the ability to simply stop the conversation dead.

If you simply broadcast stuff to them all the time it’s not a conversation.

Lastly we come to ‘How’ to communicate with them. This comes down to having a social media policy, choosing who will use social media on behalf of the company (ideally all of your employees) and then working out the most effective times to do it and the expected amount of time people should invest in working with social media.

Yes, it’s a way of developing a conversation, yes it’s a way of improving rapport and yes it’s possible to display your expertise.

However, without making sales, or promoting sales the whole exercise with social media is pointless and a complete waste of time.

Remember business lives and dies by the profits it makes. Not because profit is bad but simply because a business needs profit to invest and grow.

There are 5 simple steps you can take to ensure you get your social media marketing efforts working for you. And I’ll come to those shortly.

Social Media Can Easily Waste Your Time

I’ve now officially lost count of all the people who claim to be social media experts. Just like I’ve lost count of all those that claim to be marketing gurus.

And that’s because there are now so many facets to social media, for example:

1. The Twitter Phenomena
2. Blogging, still going despite attempts to stifle or kill it
3. Digg, Stumbleupon and Reddit still keeping people up to date with good sites and news
4. All the blogging sites in all their various blog forms, like lenses, hubs and the like
5. Forums
6. Article directories
7. Business networking sites like LinkedIn and Ecademy
8. Mixed personal and business networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo
9. Second Life

And on, and on and so many different ways to take advantage of it all

You really could spend all day, every day “doing” social media.

The 5 Simple Steps To Win At Social Media Marketing

So how do decide what to do?

Social Media Marketing Step 1: Realise that if you’re in your own business and you’re unlikely to have the time to experiment with or understand all that is available in the social media arena.

Social Media Marketing Step 2: Understand that it’s better to ask for some training to give you an overview of what can be done.

Social Media Marketing Step 3: Once you’ve got an appreciation set-up a social media strategy that delivers the experiences you want your clients and prospects to get from your business and which lead to more sales!

Social Media Marketing Step 4: Work out a set of social marketing tactics that can deliver the strategy.

Social Media Marketing Step 5: Ensure you get value for money from each tactic employed by constantly measuring results. If you get little or no results tweak until you do or until you see that it’s obvious that particular social media tactic wont work for your business.

Creative Credits aims to help Manchester SME businesses get creative input from other businesses registered on the Creative Credits gallery on their web site.

The way it works is as follows:

Creative Credits As A User

Initially eligible users register on the Creative Credits site. There is a deadline after which no more companies can register.

Then there is a lottery and a certain number of companies is awarded “Creative Credits.” What that means is that NESTA (the organisation funding this) will pay £4,000 of a £5,000 creative bill if the user uses one of the companies registered on the creative credits database.

What NESTA say on their web site is:

We’re inviting Manchester-based small businesses from all sectors to apply for ‘Creative Credits’ worth £4,000. These can be used to purchase services from a local creative firm. All we ask is an investment of at least £1,000 and we’ll top it up with £4,000.

The first wave of registrations has finished and the next wave will be February 2010. So remember to register.

Creative Credits As A Supplier

A web design agency, marketing coach, PR company, graphic designer or other sort of creative company registers on the Creative Credits site as a supplier of those services.

Then they wait to be approached by businesses who can browse the online gallery to choose a supplier to work with.

It does seem like a very good idea for businesses who would benefit from creative input but who really can’t justify the cost of a campaign yet.

And of course I’m registered as a supplier, see my creative credits gallery