Business Networking in the Time of COVID

 Many are finding that the normal in-person networking events, even if permitted, are risky for themselves or their customers. In the service business, there are two “types” of business networking that are critical to business survival, despite the current pandemic:

•       Networking to find new customers
• o   Networking to remind friendly contacts and customers that you are still ready to service them.

If you’re looking for new customers, it’s a great time to sharpen your social media skills and open yourself up to new possibilities. Consider a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which gives great access to lead lists that fit the profile of customers you are already serving . You can also use blogs and social media content (combined with options like Facebook’s Boost  to help get fresh eyes on your business content and ideas. Both of these can provide great intros to new contacts. Further, careful audience selection will allow you to titrate your ad investment to the preferred customer location and profile.

“With all the new electronic (touchless) lead generation, I remind people not to forget the older techniques. Postcards to a tested list, and joint venture outreach with trusted professionals serving the same market can be highly successful,” says Service for Profit’s Tom Pencek.

But what about reaching out to friendly contacts? Well, it turns out that it’s easier than ever to do that while staying home – especially if you have the contact info of the people you’re trying to reach. In this case, it is all about choosing a method of contact that is most convenient for your audience.

I’m a big believer in periodic emails that are tailored for your target audience. I recommend MailChimp for this, as it is free for smaller lists (<2000 names). Podcasting is becoming more accepted as an outreach method for some customers as well. Walking with earphones and listening to recorded content seems to be common these days in Silicon Valley. Google has stepped up to create an educational series on Podcasting, and provides new podcasters training on how to get into this outreach method .

Bottom line, some contacts prefer a light touch. It’s a good idea to make an initial contact and ask permission before routinely sending them an ongoing series of emails or other content. Once that’s done, you can use anything in your newly expanded toolkit to effectively market your services and connect with customers.

Planning for Success: Business Re-Visioning

Ask Questions to Re-vision your business

If I talk to you about “strategic planning,” you might nod your head sagely and admit that it seems like a good thing for big businesses to attempt. But many of my clients also believe that they can’t afford the time or money for such a process.  So when I talk to clients about “business planning,” I call it “Business Re-Visioning” because it sounds more affordable in time and money . . . and actually it is. The process I recommend can be completed by most business owners over several days in about four 1-hr sessions.

No one has a crystal ball, but at least once a year everyone should take the time to review assumptions, align resources, and communicate goals. A process that I like to use with my professional services clients is sparing of their time; helps them size opportunities, risks, needed investment and marketing campaigns; and positions them well for success. I have put together a presentation on this process. 

Taking Stock

When I went out for Chinese food today with friends, my “fortune” in the dessert cookie was an interesting piece of wisdom:  “The keys to a successful future lie in the past.”  Sometimes those slips of paper in the cookies are silly; this one was right on.

How did the previous period—year, quarter, whatever—turn out? What revenue, profit, or unit production/sales did you experience? What segments accounted for that “market activity”—who are you selling to? If you invested in your business (or spent money), how did you spend it? When?

A SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats) analysis is useful for pulling together information on the status quo and for organizing all bits of information in a single place. We’ve already written about the utility and value of SWOT for business planning   

Positioning and Segmentation

Who are you currently selling to? Why are they buying from you?  Answering these questions will tell you how you are positioned in the minds of your customers. Is this the positioning you want?  Do you need to tweak your message or how you’re delivering it to create a better impression in the minds of your customers? How does your product or service compare with similar product or services offered by your competition?  Are there unique aspects to your offerings that distinguish them from your competition? 

One of my clients told me about his recent process in selecting a caterer for an event. Three vendors were identified that had similar offerings and pricing, and the vendor was selected on the basis of its superior food,  which my client felt would make a positive lasting impression at his event. Do you know what criteria your customers will use to evaluate you and other service providers in the year ahead?  Are you sure your differentiating elements are ones your customers truly care about?

Are there additional services/products that your existing customers would buy from you if you offered them? Are there some services/products you could offer that would help you acquire NEW customers, who might then also become customers for your existing products and services?  Keep in mind that you don’t have to make or originate the service or product you sell. 

Setting Goals

This is the most important step of your re-visioning process. Everything you do going forward is driven off your goals for the future of your enterprise. What is your vision for the future of your business? How do you want to grow it or change it in the months ahead? What is your vision for what you will sell, to whom and for what price? Who will you partner with, and from whom will you buy services and products? How will you become more efficient, more profitable, and better known in the months ahead?

Your thinking process may begin with identifying some trends, but to be able to determine if you successfully achieve your goals, those goals must be measurable, specific, and achievable and linked to a timeframe.  I like to discuss my business goals with my colleagues, business mentors, and even my family. They all have contributed to helping me refine my goals and avoid “pot holes” en-route.  

Market Intervention

“Wishing doesn’t make it so.” I think that might be a song lyric, but it is certainly a truism in marketing. If you want to change the status quo, you must intervene in the market in some way. Now that you have goals and a clear idea of the directions you want to move in, how will you effect the changes you want to make in your business and its market?

I look at the mix of marketing interventions as being particularly relevant for service marketers. Again, we have written about the importance of planning for and investing in a mix of marketing interventions.

Scheduling, Measuring, and Tracking

You have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish in the next year. You have completed a marketing plan and have confirmed that you have the financial and staff resources necessary to move forward.  Now it is important to create a unified “marketing and Business calendar “that will function as the central place where you book all of your planned initiatives. Since you will be engaging in many simultaneous activities, coordination is essential. 

And everything will perform as expected, right?  Nah. There are bound to be hiccups and problems.  I recently redid my website .  We used data collected from Google Analytics   to refine our key words and adjust many features.  When I do email marketing, my provider, www.swiftpage.com can tell me what phrases used in headlines or subject lines are more effective in getting readers to click on the content and read it. They can even tell me which “targeted readers” interacted with the content more than others, and which ones I should call to follow up with.  

If you invest in some kind of marketing interventions—email marketing, new website, postcards, telemarketing—carefully consider and set up a process for measuring what works and what doesn’t.

You’ll need this information next year when you take stock of your business and “Re-vision” your future.

Don’t Shoot Yourself in the Foot When Using Powerful Marketing Tools

When I opened the envelope, a crisp $10 floated out. Yup, it was real and completely spendable. The letter from one of those survey companies wanted a few minutes of my time and was willing to pay in advance for it.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketing and Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing are different realms. But both are slaves to customer expectations.  To be successful, they need to adapt their customer overtures to what customers expect and will tolerate.  Of course, giving money away is a great way to initiate prospect relationships!

Consequently, I was predisposed to be patient when a few days later the survey company phoned me. When I look back on it, my surprise was how quickly I lost confidence, interest, and patience with this firm and metamorphosed from being a “booster” to being “completely dissatisfied and disinterested in further contact.”

So what happened? I think that the mistakes this firm made in managing our relationship are all too frequent and bear examination. Company X--I won’t embarrass the firm—is a leader in compiling usage data on American consumption patterns of mass media.  Owners of radio, TV, and cable channels depend on accurate data about their audiences in order to set ad rates, confirm programming decisions and directions, and acquire other information to guide their business. This data is provided through a process of statistical sampling, a specialized function provided by a few companies that constantly revise their collection methods.

When Company X called, I was ready and willing to talk with them. Asked if I would be willing to join their panel, I said, “Sure.” “Not so fast,” they said. “First, we have to qualify you to confirm we are talking to who we THINK we’re talking to.” (Ok, they paid me $10 for some time. I will give them the benefit of the doubt).  We then launched into a fifteen minute question-and-answer session with increasingly probing questions.  When it developed that my wife would also need to participate and that she would need to give her approval in person, a follow-up call was requested. When the agreed-upon time came and went, I was unable to successfully call them to finalize things. When they finally called back and attempted to “requalify” me, I lost patience and called a halt to everything.

I’ve thought about this episode and believe it offers important learning for marketers in B2B and B2C roles.

1.  Customers expect consistency in their communications. Paying someone in advance for their time sets an expectation that you have their interests in mind and that you have a keen awareness of the value of their time.  Once you position yourself or your company as having a specific belief or attitude, consistency assumes an even greater importance

2.  Companies often confuse processes designed for their convenience with customer-friendly processes.

3.  Proper segmentation is important to marketers. But needlessly enlarging your prospect pool to make up for prospects who become disaffected before they can become enrolled is also expensive – and can have indirect brand-impairment consequences.

Companies like Company X have outsourced the prospect segmentation process to low-cost call center personnel whose freedom of action is tightly controlled by a script and process designed to minimize errors. “In an effort to screen large numbers of prospects in a cost-effective manner, many call centers utilize low-wage team members with minimal discretionary authority and tight performance metrics, “ says Kerry Elkind, call center trainer and change management expert.  While this might help the bottom line and make the “segmentation process” more predictable and cost-effective, prospects who feel steamrollered by these processes may well opt out before the enrollment or sale can be concluded.

The direct effect of unfriendly processes is a needless enlargement of the prospect pool.  That means more people in the initial mailing, more expensive enclosures, and more prospects to process. But the indirect cost can be significant, too. I have told many people about my negative experience.  Multiplied by many times, that is a lot of negative reputation impact.

According to Elkind,“Call centers are powerful vehicles for transforming prospects into customers and repeat customers.  To achieve this goal, though, call centers must meet (and exceed) customers’ increasing expectations and demands for a level of professionalism that can be implemented only through training and a careful analysis of contact procedures.  This can only be obtained through implementing and maintaining a double-feedback loop which listens carefully to the voice of the customer.”

The moral? If you are going to use powerful marketing techniques to get attention and introduce prospects to your company, service, or offering, be careful. Consistency, customer orientation, and professionalism will pay off and in the long run, it will also be less expensive.

Lumpy Mail – Secret Weapon or Dud?

"Tom, if you’re not using Lumpy Mail, you are missing a great opportunity.”

The speaker was Jim Cecil, founder of the Nurture Marketing institute, and a lecturer at a marketing conference I attended in 1993. Jim had been talking about some amazing results he had obtained using regular mail, with an enclosure large enough to make the envelope “lumpy”. When doing a B2B mailing for a large software company based in Washington State (!!) he achieved a 63% open rate. (In direct mail circles, that is considered REALLY good).

Since that time I have used lumpy mail from time to time, where the value of new relationships was high enough that it made sense to do anything we could to make a connection with a target. As a matter of fact, I am working on two such programs now for a couple of clients. They work because, as one happy customer put it, “With [lumpy] mail pieces I've experienced as much as a quadrupling in response rate over "flat" letters and postcards. There's just nothing like dimensional mail...it's like being a kid again, ripping open your mail to see what the surprise is inside! ”

If it is such a great technique, why isn’t every B2B solicitation “lumpy”? Because the other side of the coin (pun coming!) is cost and lead quality. The cost per lead makes this technique an unprofitable one if the Lifetime Customer Value is not greater than $500, in my opinion. And then there is the cost of the “enclosure”. I got a piece of lumpy mail last week with a pen inside. I opened it, kept the pen, and threw out the mailing piece. You want to avoid buying the lead with an enclosure that is too valuable.

Howard Sewell, of Connect Direct Inc., a highly successful direct mail firm that focuses on high technology businesses, advises his clients to ask these questions before embracing lumpy mail for a lead generation campaign:

• Is my goal maximum response at any price, or is it minimum cost per lead?
• How much is a lead really worth to our company?
• What qualifies a prospect as being a genuine lead, and will this campaign generate those kinds of prospects?