Business Leads UK

Hi, I thought I’d share these top-tips from my presentation on Attractive Marketing, at the November Online Marketing Magic Event.

It’s often tricky to find time to do this but running through the checklists below will really focus your mind and make your marketing more efficient.

Attractive Marketing is… translating your unique offer into marketing that finds and keeps your customers.

Your Attractive Marketing checklist

• Who is your ideal customer?
• What do they really need?
• What are you offering to meet their need?
• Why should they buy yours?
• Who else is using yours?
• How happy are your other customers?
• What’s the price?
• Why should they buy yours…again?
• Where do they find yours?
• PS – Why not?

Top tips when packaging your unique offer…

• Make it an OUT-STANDING offer – unique, compelling and highly visible.
• Keep your CUSTOMER CENTRAL in all your communications
• Inject your Brand PERSONALITY, that’s what they’re buying
• Add Value to DIFFERENTIATE, don’t just discount
• Offer a free TASTER for new customers
• Make it INTERACTIVE, online and in-store
• CONSISTENT Customer Experience everywhere
• ENGAGE with your customers through all possible media
• ENCOURAGE early-bookers with a sweetener
• Make ONLINE a Unique experience

Good luck with your Marketing activities.

If you do need some extra help managing your marketing activity then please leave a comment below or email mark1harris@talk21.com.

The FSB, who represent over 200,000 small businesses are asking for Lord Alan Sugar to be fired ... what's you're take on this?

Mary Flavelle, FSB East Berkshire Chair said ”Lord Sugar has shown that he is completely out of touch with the small business community. I am very pleased that the FSB has made its opinion clear about the unacceptability of Sir Alan remaining as Enterprise Tsar. I see absolutely no evidence at all to back up his claim that “85% of the small businesses applying for bank loans were more in need of a bankruptcy adviser”.

You're Fired Lord Alan Sugar story in full

Unbelievably after requesting that Bartercard cancel our account and going through the necessary procedures, we have been charged again ... this has gone on for 12 months!!!!

Since they know we wanted to cancel, a process we started back in November 2008, is their extracting of funds from our bank account fraud?

I published a story in early August entitled:
An example of poor customer service - Bartercard

The following day, because they are tuned in to Google alerts, I got a call from a nice young lady who took the detail and promised to process through her senior manager … I had been hoping for a £200 + rebate but was just relieved last month to be off their direct debit … or so I thought.

Then today I get a statement from Bartercard stating they had taken more money !!!!

Are Bartercard committing fraud or is it simply just piss poor customer service??

Team members understanding and respecting the roles that other team members play in teams can make the difference in performance, and create the resilience that will see companies through in dire times.

Good teamwork throughout organisations creates a sense of wellbeing which, in turn makes groups handle adversity much better that their counterparts who ignore the importance of teambuilding. 

Much has been written about teambuilding, most significantly in my view, by Dr Meredith Belbin in the 1980,s.

Some updated thoughts about this were printed earlier this year in the Sunday Times by psychologist Honey Lancaster James who claimed that in gloomy economic times British business should take teambuilding much more seriously.

She said that, in recent times, leadership and leadership development has been given more emphasis than answering the question, "what makes a good team?" Team roles cannot be a secondary issue!

You will have heard people referred to as good team players, this implies that there is some standard type from which all teams should be constructed.

Generally people repeatedly exhibit similar patterns of behaviour in similar situations and, too many people of the same type in a team can create unnecessary conflict or, clog up the decision making progress. The best teams are comprised of people who between them, exhibit a wide variety of roles.

What these roles are and how they are defined depends on who you talk to and they come with a negative as well as a positive influence.

Recent research by Mori suggests that nearly a third of people like to see themselves as realists, the bringers down to earth; the negative side of this is that they often appear to be naysayers.

Few people perceive themselves as the group enthusiast but find this behaviour as the most motivating.

Often under rated as team members are those who actually grind out the detail, make things happen and provide special skills and knowledge, they sometimes do not participate until late in the day when the team has gorged itself on enough new ideas to have shaped it's solutions.

Someone will have kept the score and coordinated the effort, and someone will have been on hand to pour oil on troubled water and tended to any bruised egos.

I have avoided using the word leader in touching on these roles; many companies identify this as the most important role in a team and do not feel comfortable without the perceived control that goes with having a strong leader in the team.

The real value of true teams stems from the fact that there is enough space for the different role players to exercise leadership at the times when their contribution is significant. Powerful leaders often need to curb their instincts and operate at the level of ringmaster drawing out the views of the less powerful.

When team balance and team dynamics is addressed, when work is done around self-awareness, when team members recognise and acknowledge their strengths and weaknesses, you get lift off.

LMI®'s Effective Team Dynamics® programme is designed to enhance and improve the effectiveness of a department or project workgroup.

Call 01628 400 665 or mail <a href="mailto:dkl@lmi-uk.com">dkl@lmi-uk.com</a> for the programme details.

Check out this site http://www.businessinberkshire.co.uk/lmiberkshire/index.html for more on leadership.

I recently carried out a survey of over 60 companies that asked which marketing tools are best for acquiring new customers. In #1 slot was Face to face networking. In #2 & #3 slots were Partners & agencies and Articles & white papers.

Many prospects use their perception of Relationship, Expertise and Trust (RET) to help select suppliers. The top 3 certainly help support this view.
By comparison the bottom three marketing tools were: Call centres, Price cuts and Cold calling. None of these are very likely to help anyone’s RET rating.

 
We carry out RET customer surveys for individual clients and while results do vary the results of this multi company survey are pretty consistent. I can certainly see that RET is becoming increasing important to prospects as the economic environment becomes harsher. Hence the increased drive to be more customer focused in everything that we do.

To read more about the survey results on the best marketing tools visit www.simpleplans.co.uk/7.HTML   Be interesting to hear if you get similar results.

I think that we all "worship" customers at one time or another. For example when they have just given us a big order or perhaps even helped our business survive by staying with us. The secret is to do the "worshiping" when the customer is not looking.

Malcolm

Innovation is anything that makes life better for customers, easier for staff and cheaper for the business. Real success is doing all three at once.

One of the largest challenges for Customer Services is to convince their senior management of the importance and impact on customers of what they do. Many companies talk about customer being their top priority and delighting customers but often its just marketing blah blah and has no substance.

Customer Services often need help to get the right level of investment, support and recognition of what they add to the business. I've found that one of the most effective ways to do this is to get senior managers to spend half a day in Customer Services listening to calls and speaking to customers. I've also used other methods such as analyzing why customers leave. This type of research and factual customer feedback often has a major impact in identifying issues in other parts of the company that can be improved or have to be fixed to stop customers leaving. The 2009 goal for a Customer Services team is to be recognized by top management as the function who knows most about why customers really leave and why others stay as customers.