Is Your Business Irresistible?

“Mystery, sensuality and intimacy are the future of successful businesses! Businesses must be irresistible to be successful.” – Kevin Roberts, Worldwide Executive Chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi

Remember when you fell in love? Think of the emotions you felt at that time.

You probably loved the mystery, the unknown aspects of the person you fell in love with. Those slowly unfolded as you got to know them better over time.

Do you remember loving hearing their stories of life before you? Then you became part of their story, and they became part of yours.

What emotions were activated when you fell in love? Was your breath taken away?

Did you feel like you couldn’t imagine life without the person you’d fallen in love with?

How about intimacy? Ahhh, those moments of pure pleasure!! Remember them?

“What an idiot” or “She’s fallen off her rocker” – is that what you’re thinking? – Why write about falling in love, when this is a business blog?

Well, I’m being totally sane….and very serious in my comments.

Business is so competitive these days. Everything is branded. A brand is the new commodity or the new normal, therefore there’s nothing special in being a brand.

What we need in business is “brand loyalty beyond reason”, according to Kevin Roberts. “Loyalty beyond price, beyond product, beyond design!” We want to create brand love; we want to be irresistible to our customers.

Apple is not irreplaceable, yet it is irresistible!

How does your business measure up? No business is irreplaceable. These days, due to the internet, we’re all a ‘dime a dozen’ – another business like ours can so easily be found.

So, we need to be irresistible to our customers. Kevin calls it becoming a ‘Lovemark’. Be a Lovemark not a brand. “Create mystery, sensuality and intimacy with your customers and target audience”, says Kevin.

It’s about creating a movement of people who connect with you and your brand – your Lovemark.

So how do we do it? Firstly, look out for the interview I did this week with Kevin Roberts (it’ll be in your inbox on Sunday, 12 July) where we discuss these topics at great length.

But to get you started…

Create mystery with your customers by telling and sharing stories. People want to be part of stories, so let them. Create opportunities for your community to create and be a part of your story and the evolution of your business.

Create sensuality. As Kevin says, we live life through five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. Most businesses use two of them when marketing – sight and sound. How can you use all five senses with your community?

Create intimacy through empathy and give your customers what they never dreamed possible. Go beyond their expectations. When the industry norms are ABC, do XYZ instead. Stand out, get noticed. Get to know your customers, their dreams, aspirations, needs, wants, and their fears. Understand your customers, add value to their life, and wow, you’ll become a Lovemark for them.

Now you may be thinking: “What a load of rubbish – this Lovemark stuff is for big business”.

No, it’s for everyone – big or small. Fail to understand this and you’ll be left behind as other players in your industry are doing all this.

I love Kevin’s winning company quotient. IQ + EQ + TQ + BQ wrapped around CQ.

IQ – is hire well. Recruit the best as you need them to compete.
EQ – create an emotional vibe across your business. Value your people and your customers.
TQ – make technology work for you; let it be your slave.
BQ – be ‘bloody quick’ as business changes fast and you need to too. Be agile. Be willing to change.
CQ – is customer quadrant. Wrap IQ + EQ + TQ + BQ around your customers are you will be a winner.

So, let’s all focus on becoming a Lovemark for our community. That’s what I focus on in my businesses and with my clients. I help them to achieve brand love with their customers and community. It’s really exciting stuff.

Stand out and be proud. Be irresistible. Be a Lovemark and have a legion of cheerleaders who are loyal beyond reason. Now, that’s a successful business in my mind.

ACTION: I’d love to hear more about how you create irresistibility for your business in your community. How are you a Lovemark for them? Please leave a comment below and share your story.

Could some guidance from me be helpful to you? If so, please arrange a free 30 mins Skype strategy meeting with me. Here’s my calendar to book a meeting. I’d love to support you in some way to gain ‘seductive clarity’ in any aspect of your business or life.

What is Business Marketing?

What is business marketing? How do I market my business? How do I market to get more customers?

A lack of understanding in marketing is the most prevalent reason why many of my clients seek coaching assistance in the first instance. They don’t have enough customers to sustain their business, and they don’t know how to address the issue. For many business owners, marketing is not understood or is an anathema. Often business owners are scared of marketing.

I have created the 8Cs of LOVE Marketing Mastery™, which is one of the pillars in my mega/high performance business coaching framework.

All marketing needs to be about LOVE. For me, LOVE in the context of marketing means:

Lucid (clearly expressed)
Outstanding (exceptionally good)
Veracious (truthful)
Effective (achieving intended results)

Then there are the 8Cs of LOVE Marketing Mastery™. The 8Cs are:

Customer Avatar
Channels to Market
Capturing Leads
Communications Strategy
Conversion Rate
Cash Value of Sales
Customer Continuity
Creating Customer Referrals

Let’s briefly look at each one in turn.

Customer Avatar
This is about understanding the perfect customer for your business. To work this out, what do you know about your current customers? Which ones are the most profitable for your business? What is the lifetime value of your current customers? Customers are an asset and MUST be looked after. Start looking at your current customers, and that will help you work out what type of customers your business works well with, and therefore, what types of potential customers you should start looking to build more business with.

Channels to Market
With the development of social media, there is now a myriad of ways to market to potential customers, and to start building relationships with them. What channels to market best suit your business? It is not a case of selecting all channels to market. Select the channels that best suit you and your personality and your targeted audience. For instance, if you are targeting retired people, then it is unlikely that you will find vast numbers of them by using Twitter as your key marketing channel.

Capturing Leads
Just because you are ready to sell to your potential customers, it doesn’t mean that they are ready to buy from you. When you receive basic information (usually name, phone number, email) for a potential customer (or lead), how do you capture the lead and keep the information safe and in an automated system so that you can regularly communicate with your existing and potential customers, keeping them up to date on your business?

Communications Strategy
What is your communications strategy? If you are a retailer, you can’t ring your customers to update them on what’s happening in your business. All businesses – big and small – need a communications strategy that effectively updates your existing and potential customers on a regular basis on offers you are making, and also how on you are an expert/authority in your industry niche.

Conversion Rate
The conversion rate is the percentage of leads you have in your leads pipeline that become customers in your business. Do you know your conversion rate?

Cash Value of Sales
Do you know what the average cash value of the sales you make in your business per customer is? It is easier to keep existing customers and sell more products and services to them than it is to continuously look for new customers. In your business, how can you increase the cash value of sales to your existing customers by selling more to them? With new customers, how can you include ‘up/down and cross-selling’ opportunities in your offers to them?

Customer Continuity
All businesses should be aiming to have their customers become the business’s cheerleaders and customers for life. Are you losing customers? If so, why? There are two main reasons why customers leave a business: a) They don’t feel special or important to the business, or b) there is unresolved conflict. While you might think that customers leave due to pricing, in many research studies undertaken it has been proven over and over again that of the customers that leave a business, only 9 percent of them leave due to getting a better price elsewhere.

Creating Customer Referrals
If you are doing great work for your customers, why not ask them for testimonials and referrals? If they are your cheerleaders, then they will be delighted to assist you to grow your business.

Which of the 8Cs can you influence?
The following chart shows you how the 8Cs link into making money within your business. Which of the 8Cs can you influence to assist your business to grow?

As business owners and entrepreneurs, we can control and influence: the channels to market; how we capture leads; and how we communicate with potential and existing customers. If those tools are effective, then our conversion rate will be higher, so we can influence that too.

Sadly, we cannot make a potential customer buy from us. That is their decision. But get all the factors leading up to that right, and they will want to buy from us. We cannot influence whether our customers will give us testimonials and referrals, but treat them brilliantly and specially and they will want to help us.

We can influence the cash value of sales made to the business and how many of our customers continually buy from us. Plus we can influence our gross margin. Get all of those factors right and we increase our customers, we increase our sales, and we increase our gross profit.

So what is business marketing? Business marketing is understanding the 8Cs of marketing; creating strategies and systems for the elements of marketing we can influence and control; and implementing them with LOVE. That is business marketing.

Other articles on Branding, Marketing and Pricing:

Do You Compete on Price? Bad Business Decision!!
Is Customer Service YOUR Key to Business Success?
Creating Superior Customer Value – do you do that in your business?
Which are Your Most Profitable Customers?
Finding Customers via LinkedIn
Using YouTube for Finding Customers
Who Wants High Customer Retention?
What is a Customer?
Increase Your Prices & Make More Profit
What’s your Personal Brand?

Increase Your Prices & Make More Profit

If your prices are too low, your market will label you a low-end player and you’ll attract bargain hunters who will invariably try to get you to discount your products even further. Lower prices also make it unlikely your business will build long-term relationships with such customers, who by their very nature will shop around to get the best prices on a product or service, not staying loyal to any one business.

Higher pricing raises customers’ expectations of a business, which can be a challenge. But if you constantly deliver on those expectations your business will usually enjoy customer loyalty, and you will attract a better quality customer that is willing to pay more for quality customer service.

Everything I do with my clients is about helping their businesses make BIG Profits. Remember, there are only two ways in which a business can grow its profit:

Increasing sales
Reducing expenses

Let’s take a look at the impact a price increase could have on the profitability of a business. For this simple exercise, business XYZ has 200 customers. The average value of a sale is $1,000 and the cost of goods sold for each product is $300. The business’s fixed costs are $90,000 per annum. The table below demonstrates the impact of XYZ increasing its prices by 2 percent, 5 percent, and 10 percent.

In this example, when there is a 2 percent price increase, the business profit increases by $4,000 per annum or 8 percent in one year. With a 5 percent price, increase the profit increases by $10,000 or a 20 percent increase. With a 10 percent price increase, the profit of the business increases by a whopping $20,000 or 40 percent.

With all things being equal, increasing your prices by a small amount results in a compounding increase in profit. It is important to note that increasing prices has no impact on cost of goods sold, which is based on quantity of products sold not the sales price.

When considering whether to increase your prices, ask yourself, “Am I likely to be losing customers?” If your answer is ‘yes’ or ‘I am not sure’, then your customers are only thinking about leaving as they do not understand your value proposition for them, or you do not deliver enough value to your customers to justify the price increase.

It comes down to branding. What does your business, your brand stand for? What is the promise you make to your customers? Branding is about building a relationship with your customers, and over time they expect certain things from your brand, as that is what you have promised them.

What is your branding saying about you and your business in the market? Is your business delivering on its promises to its customers?
Dr Michael LeBoeuf, international business consultant, focuses a lot of his work on how to win customers and keep them. He created a matrix based on extensive research on why customers leave a business.

Based on that research, of those customers who leave a business, only 9 percent leave due to pricing, whereas 82 percent of customers leave because they are not treated as special or there is an unresolved conflict. In essence, they leave due to a lack of customer service.

Therefore, key to the success of your business is not worrying about the price you charge your customers, but concentrating on the customer value proposition you deliver to your customers to keep them happy and returning for more. It’s about going beyond the call of duty to provide value and service to your customers. It’s about creating customer cheerleaders, customers who will be loyal to your business for a long time, and at the same time, will refer their family and friends to your business .

Think about this second question: “If you do increase your prices, will you be the most expensive business in your industry?”

Your answer is highly likely to be no. If the answer is yes, then you are at the premium end of your industry serving the most discerning customers, and therefore price is unlikely to be the most important factor in their decision making process. Even if you are at the premium end of the market, there is a strong argument that you should still raise your prices, making sure your customer service remains second to none, as it is the value proposition your business offers your customers that they will be most interested in.

My approach to pricing is: charge what you and your business are worth. Don’t undersell yourself. Brand your business, deliver on the promise, and you will be able to easily increase your prices and no-one will notice as they will be rapt with the way in which your business delivers value to them.

It comes down to a simple equation. For every $1 you charge your customers, make sure you are delivering more than $5 in value to them. Consistently do that, regardless of your pricing in the market, and you will not lose customers…. and you will grow your business as your reputation for excellent value will precede you as your customers will become your cheerleaders.

Sound like good business practice? I think so. It is a win/win business strategy.

Other articles on Branding, Marketing and Pricing:

Do You Compete on Price? Bad Business Decision!!
Is Customer Service YOUR Key to Business Success?
Creating Superior Customer Value – do you do that in your business?
Which are Your Most Profitable Customers?
Finding Customers via LinkedIn
Using YouTube for Finding Customers
Who Wants High Customer Retention?
What is a Customer?
What is Business Marketing?
What’s Your Personal Brand?

Do You Compete On Price? Bad Business Decision!!

The price a business owner establishes for the sale of their products and services is arguably one of the most important business decisions they will make. And yet, pricing is one of the most feared elements in managing a business.

One of the many conversations I have with business owners is on pricing, and those discussions usually start with me saying, “Your prices are too low.” They look at me in shock and often respond with all the reasons why they cannot raise their prices:

I’ve lost jobs because I was too expensive.
I’m more expensive than some of my competitors.
I’m barely making enough profit as it is, and I can’t afford to lose customers by raising prices.
You have got to be joking— put my prices up in this depressed market?

Responses like that generally indicate those business owners don’t understand the impact pricing has on a customer’s perception of their business and its branding in the market. I have a business mantra: “Never compete on price”.

If your prices are too low, your market will label you a low-end player and you’ll attract bargain hunters who will invariably try to get you to discount your products even further. Lower prices also make it unlikely your business will build long-term relationships with customers, who by their very nature will shop around to get the best prices on a product or service, not staying loyal to any one business.

A brand can turn something that is pedestrian or homogenous into something that is unique and that stands out from the crowd, regardless of the market. If a business is branded it can set you apart from the rest. A strong brand builds respect, loyalty and retention, and allows a business to set its pricing strategy accordingly.
Dr Michael LeBoeuf, international business consultant, focuses a lot of his work on how to win customers and keep them. He created a matrix based on extensive research on why customers leave a business.

Therefore, key to the success of your business is not worrying about the price you charge your customers, but concentrating on the customer value proposition you deliver to your customers to keep them happy and returning for more. It’s about going beyond the call of duty to provide value and service to your customers. It’s about creating customer cheerleaders, customers who will be loyal to your business for a long time and at the same time, will refer their family and friends to your business too.

Pricing is not an arbitrary decision; all businesses should have a pricing strategy. When determining your business’s pricing strategy, the key is to determine your value proposition for your customers, rather than pitching your business against your competition and attempting to undercut them to win more customers.

Get that right and your brand will create an impression in your market, and you can price your products and services according to that positioning.

Never compete on price. That is a business decision that will see you, your business, and your staff and suppliers lose in the end. Why? Because, if you are prepared to discount your price once, you will do it again and again. At the beginning, in order to maintain your profits, you can create increased operational efficiency within your business to compensate for reducing your prices. If you continue to reduce your prices, then eventually you will need to reduce your staff numbers or their pay (or both), and no doubt you will also be asking your suppliers to reduce their prices to you. Do that for long enough, then your staff can’t afford to work for you and your suppliers won’t be able to afford to supply your business, so you won’t have a business. It is a lose/lose business strategy.

A brand is a differentiator. A brand is an image. A brand is a promise. A brand is an experience. A brand is a perception. A brand can move a business or a person from the ocean of obscurity to the river of relevance and riches. Focus on building your business brand, and the need to compete on price will be a thing of the past as will the fear of making pricing decisions.

Other articles on Branding, Marketing and Pricing:

Is Customer Service YOUR Key to Business Success?
Creating Superior Customer Value – do you do that in your business?
Which are Your Most Profitable Customers?
Finding Customers via LinkedIn
Using YouTube for Finding Customers
Who Wants High Customer Retention?
Increase Your Prices and Make More Profit
What is a Customer?
What is Business Marketing?
What’s your Personal Brand?

Which Are Your Most Profitable Customers?

I regularly ask my coaching clients the following three questions:

How many customers do you have?
Which customers are the most profitable for your business?
Which customers do you enjoy working with the most and why?

The last question is the easiest for my clients to answer because they can give me an emotional response rather than a fact-based response. The first two questions require analysis of their business, and most of my clients have usually not done that prior to meeting me.

I find that most businesses I work with have never actively thought about the profile of the customer they would like for their business. In pondering this issue, I devised a four quadrant approach to customer profitability and management. I call it my ‘L⁴ Customer Profitability Quadrant’.

Understanding the L⁴ Customer Profitability Quadrant’s power in relation to your business will require spending a bit of time working out the numbers. The gross margin for each customer needs to be calculated as follows:

Customer Gross Margin = Total Customer Sales – COGS for Customer/ Total Customer Sales x 100

So for instance, if Customer 24 buys $2000 of services in one year, and the cost of goods sold is $900, then the equation is:

Customer 24 Gross Margin = 2000-900/2000 x 100 = 55 percent

Using my example above, the customer gross margin calculation means that with the combination of products and services sold to Customer 24, the gross margin is 55 percent.

Another way of stating this is that for every $1000 of sales made to Customer 24, $550 contributes to the business’s gross profit.

We then rank all customers for enjoyment with 1 being low enjoyment and difficult to work with, and 10 being very enjoyable and easy to work with.

Once this information has been determined it is plotted to create the L⁴ Customer Profitability Quadrant as depicted in Table A.

Table A

Customers fall into four quadrants.

In the bottom left quadrant are the customers that are low in profitability and enjoyment, so I call this the ‘Lose Them’ quadrant.

In the top left quadrant we have highly profitable customers, but the enjoyment factor is low. I call this the ‘Look Out’ quadrant.

In the bottom right quadrant, are the customers that are really enjoyable to work with but they are not very profitable to the business. I call this the ‘Lift Up’ quadrant.

In the top right quadrant are the customers that are highly profitable and are highly enjoyable to work with. I call this the ‘Lots More’ quadrant.

‘Lose Them’ Quadrant
I wonder how many businesses have customers that are really hard going and not very profitable to the business? This type of customer sucks the life out of the business. Because this type of customer is difficult to work with, they will also often be time consuming to service. Having to work with customers that fall in this category is a waste of time and energy. That time and energy would be better spent working with enjoyable and profitable customers and finding more profitable customers for the business.

‘Look Out’ Quadrant
Customers that sit in the ‘Look Out’ quadrant are a challenge and risk to a business. They are highly profitable, but they are not enjoyable to work with. As this is a high risk quadrant, personally I don’t think any business should have too many customers sitting in it. Rather, they need to be moved to the ‘Lots More’ quadrant or out of your business.

The challenge with these customers is the profit they contribute to your business, notwithstanding the low enjoyment factor. If these customers were to leave your business, it potentially results in a major impact on profitability. Yet, because the enjoyment factor is low, there is a real chance they may not be loyal to your business, so there is a flight risk; they could find another supplier at any time and therefore impact the turnover and profitability of your business anyway.

‘Lift Up’ Quadrant
Customers in this ‘Lift Up’ quadrant pose a quandary for your business. They are good customers to deal with and service, and are probably highly loyal to your business, yet they are not very profitable. Often, because these customers are good to deal with, your staff will ‘over service’ them in order to maintain the interaction, because it is enjoyable.

This is actually an easy dilemma to resolve. These ‘Lift Up’ customers are already wedded to your business, so given the opportunity the chances are very high that they will want to buy more from you. Often customers are not aware of the full range of products offered by a business, or the business has not considered the full requirements of the customer in making offers. Depending on your business, the easiest way to address this situation is to find out more about what your customers do and what they might need from your business, and make offers.

‘Lots More’ Quadrant
These customers are your goldmines, and should be treated like kings and queens. They are highly profitable to your business, and they are enjoyable to work with.

The key here is to analyse what makes them enjoyable to work with: is it the company; the industry; the type of products and services they buy?

Once you have analysed this for your business, you can start working on targeting more of the same types of customers to your business.

Finally…
If you would like to read more about my L⁴ Customer Profitability Quadrant and how it could be applied to your business, then please go to www.adelemclay.com/free-resources and download the FREE E-book entitled: Who Are you Most Profitable Customers? This resource will help you to fully understand the nature of your customers and find ‘Lots More’ highly profitable and enjoyable customers for your business.

Other articles on Branding, Marketing and Pricing:

Increase Your Prices and Make More Profit
Do You Compete on Price? Bad Business Decision!!
Is Customer Service YOUR Key to Business Success?
Creating Superior Customer Value – do you do that in your business?
Finding Customers via LinkedIn
Using YouTube for Finding Customers
Who Wants High Customer Retention?
What is a Customer?
What is Business Marketing?
What’s your Personal Brand?

Supercharge Your Profitable Business!

Many small business entrepreneurs enter the world of self employment with a technical skill that they learnt, while generally working for someone else. When they decide to take the leap and become an entrepreneur, they are in the sea of unknown. Will they sink or swim?

I believe that it is now the time of the small business entrepreneur. Worldwide, small business success is the key to all economies improving. Across the world, if we had highly profitable and successful small businesses employing people, how different would the economic world be right now?

To have a profitable business, I believe there are 10 key strategies, that if implemented, will transform a small business. So what are they?

Mindset – if the small business entrepreneur has a dream for their business, believes they can achieve it, they will move mountains to achieve the success they dream of. A positive mindset is critical to success.

Lifelong Learning – I believe we can never know enough. If an entrepreneur is constantly learning new business skills, and importantly, implementing the new knowledge, they will achieve the business success and business profits they are seeking.

Cash Flow Management – My favourite saying is: Turnover = Vanity; Profit = Reality; Cash Flow = Reality!! By having effective cash flow management systems in place to ensure the business remains in positive cash flow, the small business entrepreneur will have a viable business. While cash is not profit, if it is not collected, it will never become profit, as it will be written off as a bad debt.

Monthly Financial Management – do you know the difference between annual financial accounts and monthly financial management? Get effective management financial management systems in place, and your business will never be the same as you will ‘tweak’ your business performance and profitability throughout the year.

Product and Service Profitability – Do you know which are your most profitable products and services? Understand this, and your promotional campaigns will be driven around your most profitable products and services. All that leads to more profitability.

Customer Profitability – Do you receive any and all customers that come your way? Many businesses do. Understand your existing customer profitability, and strategically seek out more of the same types of customers, and you will watch your business profits soar.

Cross, Up, Down, Frequently Selling – Many businesses do not make further offers to their customers that support the original sale, and nor do they have strategies in place to sell to their existing customers more frequently. Get this right, and you will be selling more and more frequently to your customers, resulting in more profit in your business.

Pricing – My favourite subject in business. Your customers will pay for what they value, yet pricing is one of the scariest subjects for small business. Get your value proposition for your customers right, and you can charge more.

Finding ‘Lots More’ Customers – Most small business entrepreneurs do not have marketing strategies in place to identify, market and communicate with potential customers. Did you know that it takes approximately seven interactions with a potential customer before they will buy from you? Many businesses (big and small) do not invest enough time and resources to continue marketing to their potential customers.

Systems, Automation and Outsourcing – Another of my favourite subjects. Does your business have a systemised and automated approach to business or is it a ‘random’ experience that your customers have when they buy from you? Get this right and a business is scalable upwards. Similarly with outsourcing, as it provides many opportunities for the small business to ‘look’ bigger than it actually is simply due to outsourcing some of the activities that the small business entrepreneur cannot or should not be doing.

If you would like to learn more about finding more profitable customers for your business, please download any of the FREE resources that may be helpful to you at www.adelemclay.com/free-resources

Other articles on What Makes Successful Entrepreneurs:

Seven Secrets of Super Successful Entrepreneurs
Entrepreneurship vs The Meaning of Life
Mega Entrepreneur Defined!
What Makes Great Entrepreneurial Leaders?
All Work + Little Play = Boring!
Entrepreneurial Success without Fulfilment: Who Wants That?
Millionaire Mindset
NZ Entrepreneurship Success
Leadership Qualities
7 Secrets of Business Success
Sir Richard Branson Asks…
Ordinary vs Game Changing
Thriving within the Juggling Act
Business Success and Cookie Dough
What Ice Cream Flavour is Your Business?

Finding Customers Via LinkedIn

Are you using LinkedIn proactively as a tool to seek out potential customers? Many users are not. They merely have their profile loaded, and that is it! Yet, if you are serious about growing your business, then in my opinion, LinkedIn must be considered as a key marketing tool in your armour.

Let’s look at some statistics.

LinkedIn’s ambition is to have 3 billion users on the site; it currently has 277 million users… it has a long way to go, but that is already a lot of professional users to engage with. Two hundred countries are currently represented on LinkedIn.

As of the date of this blog, there are some 3 million business pages, and 2 million groups on LinkedIn. Eight thousand new groups are started each week, and there are approximately 187 million monthly unique visitors to LinkedIn.

Forty percent of users check their LinkedIn account each day, so there must be some benefit to them in checking their accounts that often.

Finally and phenomenally, in 2013, 5.7 billion searches were done on LinkedIn. That is a lot of people seeking out and building relationships with others.

So how about considering your level of engagement with LinkedIn? Are you an active or passive user of it? If you are active, how active? Can you improve your visibility and credibility within LinkedIn in order to attract the people to you that you are seeking?

If you are a passive user, and you are keen to grow your business, how about learning more about how LinkedIn can support the growth of your business?

Back to Basics – Your Personal Profile

Remember that before someone does business with you, they are now very likely to check you out on LinkedIn. So what is your profile saying about you at present? Is it complete? Is it professional? Based on what you see on your own profile, would you do business with you?

Your name and headline are really important. Please ensure you put your full name into your profile – first and last names… many people do not. Then consider the ‘keywords’ you want to be found by as your professional headline is searchable. For example, I want to be found as a business coach or consultant, so I have those words in the headline of my profile, along with other words and phrases. Your keywords should also be repeated throughout your profile.

The rest of your profile must be an accurate reflection of you, including all the roles you have had and companies you have worked for; your uniqueness; your interests; other organisations you are involved with; awards and achievements. Also, remember to list your areas of speciality as they are searchable too.

Using LinkedIn to Build Business

While I am not a teacher of LinkedIn, I am a reasonably advanced user of the tool, and I believe in continuing to use it to build my visibility and credibility so that when I am ready, I can make approaches to people I would like to ‘link in’ with, in the hope they will be impressed with my professionalism and background, such that they connect with me, and we can begin to build a business relationship.

LinkedIn has an excellent advanced search function for seeking out people. Let us assume you are an architect in London, and you want to build relationships with landscape architects in central London. By using the advanced search function you can narrow down using keywords and location parameters to locate all the landscape architects in the local area that you want to build relationships in. You can then communicate with those people, by joining the same groups as them, or asking for introductions to those people if people in your network are connected to them in LinkedIn. Once you are connected to them, you can begin building a business relationship, that may well result in business opportunities.

If you are interested in knowing more about how to become a proficient user of LinkedIn for business, then how about seek out an expert who can support you in getting your profile right on LinkedIn so that you can maximise the business opportunities.

The key for your business is to use LinkedIn as another marketing tool to grow your business. As both the Forbes and Fortune Magazines have said, LinkedIn is the ‘Number one social media tool on the planet.’ So go, to it. Embrace LinkedIn and watch your small business grow!

Other articles on Branding, Marketing and Pricing:

Increase Your Prices and Make More Profit
Do You Compete on Price? Bad Business Decision!!
Is Customer Service YOUR Key to Business Success?
Creating Superior Customer Value – do you do that in your business?
Using YouTube for Finding Customers
Which are Your Most Profitable Customers?
Who Wants High Customer Retention?
What is a Customer?
What is Business Marketing?
What’s your Personal Brand?

Millionaire Mindset

Guest blog by Dr Jane Cox

Today, we live in a world today that is extremely fast paced and ever changing. We live in danger of getting bogged down in the rat race. The time equals money trap.

Wealthy and/or fulfilled people have a different mindset – a millionaire mindset: they operate on the same clock, they too have 24 hours in their day, but have an abundance of free time to use as they please.

How do they do it? Because they have the right mindset – a millionaire mindset. T he right mindset is key

The body achieves what the mind believes!

For most people the challenge is for them to change their beliefs about money and their own worth.

The struggle for most people is that our beliefs tend to be generalisations about our past, based on our interpretations of painful and pleasurable experiences. Most of us do not consciously decide what we are going to believe. Instead; our beliefs are often misinterpretations of past events.

But the mind is like a garden; if you want to change what grows you have to first change the seeds you plant.

A great way, in fact the only way, to start a change in ingrained beliefs, i.e. our current mindset, is create real clarity of purpose.

Knowing exactly what you want will change the way you think, feel and act at any moment. From the moment you gain a strong sense of clarity for a task, you will create focus. Focus means that you are in control and putting your life in the direction that you want go.

Happiness and wealth come from clarity; when you know what you want and you are moving towards your target. These dynamic movements create happiness and wealth. People who fail to gain or maintain clarity, lose track of time, suffer from confusion and feel like they are constantly playing catch up.

People with a millionaire mindset ANTICIPATE, they don’t REACT.

The best first step to developing your millionaire mindset is to ask yourself these questions:

What is my vision?
What do I really want?
What is my mission?
What is my purpose?
What specific actions do I need to take?
What will happen if I don’t do this?

Without (honest) answers to these questions you can’t begin to develop clarity and without clarity you can’t even begin to develop a millionaire mindset.

My 10 top “shortcut” tips to a millionaire mindset.

Change your thoughts and you change your world. Realise that you have as much ability to make money as anyone else.
Keep your mind open for opportunity. Read, listen, observe, and take note of where business gaps exist, or opportunities for investment may be found.
Step outside of your comfort zone.
Be prepared to put in the work to make the money.
Recognise that money is a tool, and tools are there to be used.
When you lose your fear of money, money loses its fear of you.
You might not feel able to make a million, but you could well make £100 one thousand times. It’s the same thing.
Get into the habit of spending less money than you make.
Know your strengths and abilities. They are worth a lot of money to you.
Keep learning. The more you educate your mind, the more knowledge you have to share and utilise.

Dr Jane Cox is a business psychologist, who works with large corporates and entrepreneurs, supporting them on a range of business issues, including leadership, communication, performance improvement, and much more. Dr Cox and Adèle McLay are business partners, having created the Millionaire Entrepreneur Business School that is launching in 2015.

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Is Customer Service YOUR Key to Business Success?

‘The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.’ – Jerry Gregoire, CIO Dell Computers

I believe that delivering exceptional customer service is the ultimate key to business success, whether you are a large or small business. After spending a lot of time and money winning a new customer, why waste that effort by not looking after and nurturing them so they stay loyal to you forever? In the competitive market that most businesses operate in, customer service often becomes the differentiator between businesses.

I admire the success of the Wal-Mart company. Sam Walton, the Founder of Wal-Mart, said: ‘The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary’. I wonder how many companies focus on ensuring their customer service is legendary?

Often it is the simple things:

Acknowledging your customers.
Following up with them and treating them as individuals, not a ‘number’.
Admitting it when things go wrong and quickly fixing the problem.
Asking for feedback, and actioning where appropriate.
Going beyond the call of duty in small but noticeable ways.

Lee Resources in 2010 said that attracting a new customer costs five times as much as keeping an existing one. That is a scary and costly statistic, and if true, will directly impact the bottom line; if you are losing customers and having to spend time gaining new ones, your profit will be reduced! Another relevant statistic is from Customer Thermometer, where in 2012 they stated that companies that prioritise customer experience generate 60 percent higher profits!! That is money to spend in more productive ways in your business, or perhaps to take as drawings from your business to support you in the lifestyle you want to have with your family.

In all the businesses I have owned, managed or coached in my career, superior customer service has been the cornerstone to success. It has always been ingrained into the psyche of all team members too. After-all, customer service, to be successful, MUST be delivered consistently throughout all activities across a company.

Let me share a recent personal experience I had, which demonstrates now NOT to do customer service! My husband and I are property investors in the UK, and we needed to purchase appliances for one of our newly renovated investment properties. As long time customers of CurrysPC World – a major UK appliance retailer – we visited a local store and bought the required appliances (£1300 in cost). Throughout our time at the store the customer service was excellent, such that we opened an account to make our purchases easier in future. The appliances were delivered to the investment property a few days later, and while delivering, the delivery company significantly damaged walls, carpet and vinyl. I notified Currys that afternoon, and was told I would hear from someone within 48 hours to address the issues. I began tweeting my dissatisfaction with Currys after about five days of waiting, and it was only then that their social media people made contact. Eventually I got an email from Currys two weeks after the initial complaint, telling me that their outsourced delivery company was responsible and would make contact with me within seven days. As you might imagine, I emailed Currys back telling them I expected Currys to resolve my complaint and not the delivery company, and that I would continue to tweet my experience until they had paid me approximately £350 so I could get the damage repaired. As of today, I am still waiting, so I will continue to use social media to complain. In the meantime, we have spent £1500 buying new appliances with John Lewis (another UK appliance/department store) for yet another investment property. Currys has lost our business forever, and I am telling everyone about my poor experience!! Ironically there is a very successful appliance company in New Zealand (where I am from) whose mantra is: ‘It is the putting right that counts’…. shame Curry’s doesn’t have the same approach to its business.

So, my message to you is to focus on delivering superior customer service all of the time to your customers and you will enjoy long time customer loyalty and more profit in your business. If and when things go wrong (which they will do from time to time), sort them out quickly and respectfully, and you will continue to retain your customers.

Finally, from Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com ‘If you build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is powerful.’

If you would like support towards your business success, please visit www.adelemclay.com/free-resources and download all/any of the free resources are of interest to you.

Other articles on Branding, Marketing and Pricing:

Increase Your Prices and Make More Profit
Do You Compete on Price? Bad Business Decision!!
Creating Superior Customer Value – do you do that in your business?
Using YouTube for Finding Customers
Which are Your Most Profitable Customers?
Who Wants High Customer Retention?
Finding Customers via LinkedIn
What is a Customer?
What is Business Marketing?
What’s your Personal Brand?

Using YouTube For Finding Customers

Is YouTube relevant for Small Business Entrepreneurs?

I am a recent (and initially reluctant) convert to using YouTube as a way of marketing my business – Small Business Huge Success™ to the worldwide population of small business entrepreneurs that I am seeking to attract to my online business.

However, I have learnt that, if done correctly, YouTube supports all my other marketing activities by helping me to build ongoing Visibility and Credibility with my target audience. Audiences can be highly targeted via YouTube – did you know that? You can market to a very local audience if your business is local rather than national or international. YouTube is the marketing engine of the future, and the exciting news is that it is still in its infancy, so early adopters will reap the benefits. Let me explain.

Here are some staggering facts about YouTube.

What YouTube Itself Tells Us

YouTube has more than 1 billion unique users visiting it each month.
Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube – that’s almost one hour for every person on Earth!
100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!
80 percent of YouTube traffic comes from outside the USA.
YouTube is localised in 61 countries and 61 languages.

What Marketers Say About YouTube and Video

One minute of video is equal to 1.8 million words.
One third of all online activity is spent watching video.
One in two consumers say video has influenced a purchase decision.
87 percent of online marketers use video content.
Inclusion of a video in an introductory email can increase the ‘click-through’ rate by 96 percent.
60 percent of visitors watch the video before reading the text on the same webpage.
68 percent of the top 50 internet retailers use videos on their websites.
YouTube accounts for 28 percent of all Google searches.
The brain processes video 60,000 times faster than text information.
Consumers will stay on a webpage seven times longer if it has a video.
YouTube is the Internet’s second to largest search engine.
41 percent of consumers are more likely to share product videos than product content.
80 percent of internet users can recall a video they watched last month.

These are staggering statistics, which heavily influenced me to explore YouTube as a marketing tool. How are you feeling about marketing your business via YouTube? Scared? Don’t know where to start? Not relevant for you?

I can promise you I have experienced all those emotions, yet I have also overcome them. So, I strongly urge you to seek out the professionals and learn more about how you can use YouTube to gain online Visibility and Credibility for your business.

Marketing for business and the ways in which businesses will be finding new customers is going to change markedly, and soon! The Internet and search engines are how consumers are starting to find their service providers and this approach to finding service providers will increase markedly very soon. As a small business entrepreneur, that means you need to be asking yourself:

How am I going to find customers for my business?
How is my business represented on the Internet?
Can my business be found on the Internet?
Is my business building its Visibility and Credibility via the Internet?
How can my business embrace YouTube as a technology of the future?

Please embrace having your business represented online via YouTube. It is the technology of the future. Be prepared to learn, and to be outside of your comfort zone. Push through your discomfort, and you will be rewarded. ‘Feel the fear and do it anyway, and the death of that fear will be certain.’ Be prepared to teach a lot of content for free via YouTube about what it is you do in your business. Help your audience understand how good you are at what you do.

I promise you, if done correctly your business profits will soar over time as you will be attracting or finding more customers for your business. How great does that sound?

If you would like to learn more about finding more profitable customers for your business, please download any of the FREE resources that may be helpful to you at www.adelemclay.com/free-resources

Other articles on Branding, Marketing and Pricing:

Increase Your Prices and Make More Profit
Do You Compete on Price? Bad Business Decision!!
Creating Superior Customer Value – do you do that in your business?
Which are Your Most Profitable Customers?
Who Wants High Customer Retention?
Finding Customers via LinkedIn
Is Customer Service YOUR Key to Business Success?
What is a Customer?
What is Business Marketing?
What’s your Personal Brand?