The Transparency of Real Leaders

Every Business Owner I’ve worked with closely has spilled some beans to me about his or her business challenges, sometimes personal challenges. Beyond the important conversations concerning their markets, we often get into the confidential internal issues at the company that deal with employees, contractors, and vendors. We share personal stories.

While I’m certainly no coach or counselor, I appreciate it whenever clients trust me enough to open up and tell me what’s really on their minds. I’m happy to listen in confidence and respond in kind. Perhaps surprisingly, these deeper conversations can be crucial to strong brand development and better marketing executions.

Every business has some nuanced or even bold advantage that helps it differentiate value from its competition. Those unique attributes need to be understood by the market or the brand loses equity to those competitors that communicate better.

Do you know what clearly differentiates your product and service quality from your competition? Have you driven those points home to your marketing director or agency partners, and do they know how to execute in your particular market?

Availability, openness and transparency with your marketing advisors clear a pathway to full understanding of your value proposition and how to craft your messages to attract new business. A trusted confidant who gets to know the company’s leadership personally, and thereby fully understands the firm’s culture, can do a better job as your marketing partner. They’ll know how to differentiate your singular distinction to attract the kind of customers you can best serve.

And, if you’re really serious about achieving positive results from your marketing campaigns, there is one crucial thing for you to do.

The Secret of Marketing Success

Risk being a pain in the butt. Does a laissez-faire attitude cut it when overseeing the most critical functions of sustaining and growing your business? A true leader leads the single most important function in the company: marketing!  Why? Because marketing makes up your products & services, prices, distribution and promotion efforts. And promotion includes advertising, public relations and personal selling. Quite a lot to marketing, isn’t there!

As owner and CEO, you must get involved and stay involved in your campaigns. It’s your responsibility to keep marketing and sales at the top of your business priority list. How do you do this? In short, by communicating more. Here’s what that looks like:

• Clearly articulate your cultural values and your firm’s USP – unique selling proposition.
• Lead or attend marketing meetings on a regular schedule.
• Attend every meeting that includes campaign pitches.
• Do not delegate your leadership. Provide your knowledge and ideas directly!
• Provide key insights and feedback from your industry.
• Freely give of your specialized expertise.
• Provide resources for photography, video and other crucial assets as needed.
• Hold yourself and your team accountable for following through.

Over the years, I’ve repeatedly observed successful sales and marketing campaigns yield sustained business growth. I’ve also seen great ideas and creative energy come to nothing because of lackluster leadership and effort. The common factor in most successful campaigns has been the CEO’s time, leadership, commitment, and support.

Every Team Needs a Head Coach

A team needs its head coach on the field with them if they expect to win.

Your team will only perform to the level they perceive you expect, and guess what? They’re human. You need to remind them of your expectations and provide guidance regularly or inertia will set in and cause efforts to go stale.

Your sustained enthusiasm for building your brand and growing your business is the energy that’s needed to fuel your campaigns. And when your team feels your energy and support behind them, they’ll be moved to perform. Let them show you and the market their best stuff!

The post Are You a Marketing Leader? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Does your company sell mostly to individual consumers? If so, your customer targeting can get complicated and may require a high degree of personalization. Consumers’ tastes and preferences in features/benefits run in multitudinous different directions and with choices at their fingertips, you need to build customer personas and tailor multiple sets of messages to different groups or individuals today. That is if you want your brand to stand out and lead your consumer category.

Does your business sell mostly to other businesses? Then your target audience is easily defined! You sell to the CEO or the business owner, often the same person. Simple. And how nice that is for helping you determine your branding and positioning strategy!

This approach is fundamental to having an authentic and effective brand in the business products & services (B2B) world. But some salespeople and even some business owners argue that end users of equipment, software or services highly influence decisions and must be sold first. Engineers, specifiers and purchasing managers are the ones who do all the “shopping” and make the final recommendation and therefore, can seal the decision – or so you may think.

The target of ALL B2B marketing is the CEO.

CEOs and senior executives have a unique mindset and language. CEO’s don’t think like everyday consumers when making business buying decisions. They wear a very different hat for that. Business buying decisions are just as emotion-based if not more so, but for very different reasons.

Think of the business meetings you’ve had with CEOs present. They cut through the minutia and get to the key points fast (even when being patient with others out of courtesy). They are starved for new information that can guide their decisions.

Consider what a respected millennial digital marketer, Miranda Casey, has to say. “Working in the tech industry and targeting CEOs, I’ve come to understand the importance of getting to the point fast and ‘proving the why’ as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s not every day that a company decides to make a thousand or million dollar decision…”

Additionally, the CEO may have his or her own personal motives for choosing a supplier for their business, and nobody can know exactly who else the CEO knows or what else could motivate their decisions. Remember that “blood runs thicker than water” and relationships make a difference, sometimes all the difference — all things being equal, or even not so much. The lesson here is to take the time (and be patient) to build relationships with the CEOs in your target market.

Talking with End Users only FEELS like sales work.

Seasoned B2B salespeople know that top-down selling works much better than the bottom-up approach. Business owners and executive leaders are constantly on the lookout for the best suppliers and partners to help improve their companies and gain competitive advantages. Sure, they are loyal to proven providers but keep an eye on the consistency of quality and value received. If it’s clearly demonstrated to the CEO that replacing a supplier can solve real problems and increase profitability, the old one gets the boot and the new supplier celebrates a business win

Marketing:  Your Intangible B2B Sales Force 

The same principle applies in B2B marketing. Position your brand only for the CEOs in the industries you serve. Don’t try pushing your list of features. That’s a consumer-based commodity approach! Explain, rather, the actual and differentiated results your solutions provide clients, maybe even their competition.

As your messages get through to your CEO targets with the ringtone of relevance, your brand will begin to develop a subtle (even if at first subconscious) mental interest. Then a natural value-focused curiosity will make learning more about your product/service part of their to-do list.

With a continued consistency of strong messages, your pricing and business model will be investigated or directly inquired of – your opportunity to close new business.

Demonstrate category leadership to your target company CEOs and they will wonder if they should be doing business with you.

The post CEOs and Consumers Decide Differently appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Famous 20^th Century industrialist John Wanamaker made legendary his quote, “I know that at least half of my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Image by Moma, Sao Paulo, Brazil

This was true of most advertising all the way up until digital technology and the Internet started to dominate how we broadcast marketing messages. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still a relatively new way to advertise although it’s been around since Google and other search engines have commercially operated (no pun intended).

Buying space in print and time on broadcast networks is largely a “spray and pray” method whereby you can begin to narrow down channels that your target audience may be more likely to see/hear your ad. But if you’re like most businesses, only a small fraction of the audience you pay for will have any interest in your offer. Even if your message is in front of an interested prospect, you rely on his or her whims at that moment. An unknown distraction can divert the attention of someone intending to respond to your ad and, poof! The prospect forgets all about you.

Now there’s a way to assure that every dollar you spend buying advertising will be the direct result of physically engaging a person with your message online based on keywords, phrases and questions they are typing into search fields. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has given you control over the type of online shoppers you would attract and exactly how much you will spend to reach and engage each single prospect or customer. Analytics programs such as Google Analytics will track and measure the direct results (clicks and website interaction) of your advertising campaign in real time. John Wanamaker would be impressed! He might say, “Now I know exactly what my advertising dollars are doing. I just wish online shoppers weren’t so fickle!”

Google is the dominant search marketing giant and wants its customers to get results. To that end they’ve put together a nice best practices guide which this article will encapsulate.

We’re curating the basics of SEM success directly from Google:

1. Keywords – Effective keyword management helps you reach the right customers and grow your business. Your keywords should reflect all of the different types of user queries that could help someone find you when they’re looking for something you offer. Keyword research and analysis is a fundamental step you must take initially to make sure you reach your target audience searching online for your products & services.

• Negative Keywords – Words or phrases that allow you to filter out who your ads will be served to in the search results page. Upon deciding that a term is irrelevant to your campaign, you can add that term as a negative keyword. Whenever someone searches on Google with that term included, depending on match types, Google will refrain from showing your ad and you won’t waste money paying for an irrelevant click. To help you determine negative keywords for your campaign, here’s a free negative keyword tool.

2. Your Ads – One of the most important things to get right in your search ad is “the Creative” – the key message you put into it. Creative relevance drives more qualified clicks. Make your ad relevant and resonant to pull qualified click through engagement.

3. Your Advertising Budget – Google AdWords lets you set daily budgets for your campaigns with the flexibility to change them at any time. A key benefit of developing and fine tuning an SEM campaign is your ability to measure, adjust and actually begin to control your response rates within a spending limit. This helps you manage your growth and marketing administration costs.

4. Reporting & Analytics – AdWords and Google Analytics together offer insights into the performance of your campaigns and those insights help you become a better marketer. By carefully measuring, analyzing and making adjustments to your keywords and messaging, you will continually improve the ROI performance of your SEM campaign.

There is more science to the practice of Search Engine Marketing than this overview reveals. Within each of the four major components of SEM listed above, there are entire sets of best practices with various tactical options that will help you customize your campaign to generate the best results. For more in depth education, go to PPC University.

If you would like a free evaluation and consultation regarding an SEM program for your business, feel free to contact us at 603-345-7223.

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According to the SBA, over 70 percent of registered American businesses are sole proprietorships. The vast majority of these businesses have one employee, the sole proprietor himself or herself. They are the self employed. The “one man band” industry is big, and more lucrative than many sales people may realize. It may be more accurate to refer to this group of small businesses as an economic sector, rather than an “industry.”

The variety of services and products this diverse set of entrepreneurs provides puts them in a class of business consumers that’s impossible to define narrowly. They fall into no vertical market category. The only common denominator among this group is the number 1. They work independently but not alone. They have dynamic organizational structure in the form of a network. Their relationships are necessarily strong for them to sustain their businesses.

Successful solopreneurs tend to be trusted advisors to their clients and therefore have significant influence in the market. Some examples:

• An independent management consultant could make recommendations that influence major industrial contract decisions. Winning his approval could be required to land a huge sale.
• A local real estate agent could be the connection you need to sell software to the largest mortgage company in the region.
• The busy carpenter you meet at a Chamber mixer could be your first bookkeeping or CPA client.
• A freelance writer working from home could bring you a couple of your largest website clients.
• The self-employed professional (with no recent pay stubs) could grow to become a solid commercial banking client.

The moral of these bullets is that you just never know who’s who until you find out whom they know and work with. There’s a type of customer referred to in old sales jargon as a “sleeper.” A business person you discover working from home or from a small office with no staff could be assumed to have no real budget behind their humble operation. While there are many struggling start up solopreneurs who seek freebies and might waste your time, you can’t tell by appearances alone whether they offer opportunity or not. You need to have a conversation and hear what they do. Check out their business network and work history before deciding whether it’s worthwhile to engage in business. A real “sleeper” could end up being your best customer or referral connection.

Small Power!

The solopreneur sector is growing out of the necessity of “the new normal” – the economic conditions that have stifled growth and permanently eliminated many corporate jobs. Highly talented and skilled people have, in record numbers, discovered they can put their ambition and talent to work in a newly frugal marketplace that welcomes smallness, simplicity, low overhead, nimbleness, cost effectiveness and independence.

When people suddenly get laid off without another job lined up, most of them file for unemployment compensation and start looking for a new job. There is a perceived dependency on steady income, healthcare benefits, vacation time and a regular work schedule. The organization feels like a safe and comfortable place to work and becomes almost like a parent provider for the family. The prospects of starting a business with no immediate income and predictable stream of paying customers is horrifying to most people with a mortgage, college loans and car payments. I know this feeling intimately because I’ve been there. The aspiring entrepreneur with high family expenses and no start up capital needs to believe it can be done. They need faith in something bigger than themselves because no unaided person can build an organization by himself.

Economic modesty is privately disparaged by some in the professional community. Nobody wants to admit they can’t afford to replace an old car or take a trip whenever they feel like it. It’s a cultural thing. Some people with means may perceive that those who haven’t yet turned the success corner probably never will and should be avoided as time wasters. Body language often conveys this attitude. Thankfully for entrepreneurs, there is usually a curious person with an open mind somewhere in just about any crowd.

An Untapped Niche?

I’ve personally seen distressed individuals lose jobs and take the leap to start a business. They came across as a bit needy at first. They persevered through the startup struggles during the first few years and now operate vibrant, growing businesses, buying all kinds of products and business services to keep running. A few of my compatriots fit this profile and we can tell you our stories.

For the start-up solopreneur, there is nothing more empowering than other solopreneurs or small businesses willing to mentor and provide affordable needed services. Here, relationships are better than cash. Money, once spent, can’t keep providing anything. Strong relationships and mutual collaboration are the wellsprings of business sustainability and growth.

Every bootstrap business founder in the world can look back to the early relationships that saved his butt and provided springboards to profitability; profitability that today is reinvested through the purchase of capital assets as well as operational supplies and services. Many of these business owners like to remain small, nimble and independent. They don’t usually have the visible trappings of other businesses but they do have money to spend and colleagues to recommend.

In some cases, it’s a good idea to help support the one-person startup business that has a need for your services by loosening firm prices, waiving tight credit terms or spending a little more time with him or her. As their company grows, so will your business as they remember who their real friends are.

The post Tapping the Business Network of One appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

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We can all understand why some executives need to protect themselves from interruption and time wasters. But anyone in sales, which includes most CEOs, should be accessible because the public at large includes all potential customers and other opportunities. A company to remain nameless lost my potential referral this week and a smaller, more approachable competitor will get it.

Big companies that fold ultimately fail for one reason. They become irrelevant to their customers. They can do this many ways. One big way is failing to make 2-way communication easy or deliberately making communication one sided, pissing off customers and potential customers. I see you nodding your head.

We’ve all experienced frustrating web forms that attempt to gather too much information or corral us into areas we don’t want to enter. We’ve also called for service or questions only to the dead end of non-options offered by the auto-assistant.

A percentage of customers may accept this unacceptable kind of relationship but a juicy, potentially lucrative portion of the market will bounce off the web page or hang up as soon as they sense a programmed waste of their time. They will make a beeline for the nearest competitor with a friendly agent ready to help them (buy something) and serve up a great experience!

The accessible business that lets the public speak with real caring people wins every time in the long run.

Aside from utilities and sometimes limited options, I choose to do business only with companies willing to have a relationship with me. I know they primarily want my money, but they are willing to keep earning it by taking time to help customers and potential customers – giving us a good reason to send them new customers.

Here are a few ways to avoid the false efficiency of limited service options and auto-attendant call processing.

• Answer the phone! Always let callers have the option to talk with a person. Make it the first option.
• Require only the minimum needed information on web inquiry forms.
• Respond to voicemail and web inquiries fast! 24 hours max.
• Fire customer-facing employees with bad attitudes. Fill in for them yourself if necessary.
• Hire only smart “people persons” in those jobs.
• Go the extra mile to delight or satisfy every customer for every dollar they spend.
• Don’t worry about the clock when you are providing excellent service. It’s not a zero sum game!
• Manage growth. If new business actually threatens your quality delivery, make that very clear to the prospect. Some might even get on a waiting list if you’re known as the best in the market.
• Be creative with add-ons and freebies that cost you little but are valuable to customers.

If any of the above sound like too much labor or cost, just think about what you already do when presented with vendor choices. Read the list again. The Golden Rule is so amazingly simple, isn’t it?

The post Make things easy for customers and they’ll help you grow! appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Guest author Stacie Andrews gets the credit for this brilliant question: “What can you give your audience that is relevant to them and still relevant to what you stand for?” 

That, my friends, is exactly what I focus my business practice on and it requires honest self evaluation from leadership. At an agency I previously worked for, principal Haden Edwards called it “matching promises with priorities.” That is, how your company – as guaranteed in your brand promise – helps meet the priorities (wants) of your target market.

It’s a remarkably simple strategy that too few businesses execute well. Steve Jobs seemed to understand his consumers’ priorities instinctively which is why he went against rigid conventional corporate thinking. He got fired from the company he founded, was pulled back in, allowed to keep innovating, and built arguably the most successful company in the world. 

Jobs knew that his customers wanted dazzling tech products that operated the way humans like to live and work – by intuition. He ardently stuck to proprietary platforms for Apple and his detractors despised those tactics if not the man himself. Jobs persevered in wowing customers and Apple products deliver on the company’s promise to meet the priorities of the computing and device-wielding public. Apple’s products perform as expected and give authenticity to their brand identity.

So how do you go about making your brand’s real value relevant to what your target customers really want from a business like yours? The answer is in your positioning. How do you position your brand for success?

Writing your positioning statement will bring you more long term success than just about any other strategic exercise you can do in business.

A positioning statement is your unique promise to customers that differentiates your business from the competition with honesty, relevance and value. It should be one or two sentences and crystal clear. You should articulate it in numerous ways that are natural in both writing and conversation, keeping it real for people.

How to write your positioning statement:

Dr. David Shore of Harvard University developed a positioning methodology many years ago that my previous employer, Tracey/Edwards, taught me.

1. Clearly and narrowly define your target audience.
2. Define your general business category (manufacturer, retailer, law firm, college, home builder, consultancy, engineering firm, etc.).
3. Determine their priorities with your own research. (Suggestion: spend some hours with clients who use your product/service and really understand how they get value from it – or not.)
4. Determine your statement of need fulfillment – what of value will you deliver?
5. Provide the reason to believe with relevant support.

I’ll use my own positioning statement, based on this model, as an example. It covers all of the above in one concise statement which my company strives to live up to every day.

(1) To Business Owners, Organization Leaders and Marketing Directors:

Chuck Sink Link is the (2) communication firm that (3, 4)) creates ideal messages for your target audience because (5) we reveal the authentic value of your brand and convey it with relevance and clarity.

Notice how all 5 listed elements are contained in one brief statement? All of my marketing messages stem from this positioning statement and they’re working. Every week, people I’ve never met introduce themselves and already know who I am and what I do. I have successfully built a strategic brand and now my leads are inbound and the referrals are warm.

If you still struggle with working the numbers cold calling or trying to blitz your prospects because things are slow, I would suggest you take time now to strategically position your brand for success. Highly profitable inbound business will come your way if you communicate the same message with consistency and deliver what you promise.

Your brand positioning is the nexus where your stated brand value meets the needs and desires of your audience. It’s the fulcrum point where your marketing messages gain the leverage of consistency for broader reach. When you consistently reinforce your company’s positioning, you become well known in the market – “for the reasons you want to be known!”

We’re redesigning our website now to better reflect the company’s evolved brand value. I made this decision in part to practice what I preach and more importantly to fulfill my own brand promise to my own business.

It’s vitally important to work ON your business as you must also work IN it. This carpenter’s online house will soon be rebuilt, true to it’s brand positioning. So please stay tuned in the coming weeks for the unveiling of our new site!

The post Brand positioning – Your success sweet spot appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Engaging your audience is easy when you know what motivates them. You can grab their attention, hold it and then persuade them to take action with more ease if you use one or more of The Six E’s of Audience Action.

Way back during the dawn of social media marketing development (like around 2010) I worked for a marketing agency that talked about the “3 E’s of social media engagement.” They were Ego, Entertainment and Education. I knew there was more to it than those 3 things so I’ve been striving to come up with a short yet comprehensive list of motivators that would cover all or most of what moves us humans to take action, and maybe even buy things.

Striving for simplicity, so I can understand my own concepts, I wanted a simple guide or formula that could make business communications resonate with target audiences. I wanted a set of guiding principles which work across a broad spectrum of constituencies and media. Serendipitously, the 6 best keywords I considered happened to start with E. Therein is the simplicity of my new guide to audience engagement.

When you examine each of the motivating factors that move people to action, you’ll see that each one fulfills a strong human desire or need. Beyond basic survival (food, clothing, shelter) these motivators are all part of our instinctual nature. In a manner of speaking, we were born to respond to them, and so they are very effective when used for strategic communications. Let’s take a look at the 6 E’s:

Ego

Empathy

Education

Enrichment

Enthusiasm

Entertainment

These are not in any particular order other than making a word pyramid, but Ego being at the top is actually quite helpful. We all have an ego! To discount it’s power over the individual would be remiss. Everyone loves to be recognized and we love hearing our own name called out in a positive way.

So, let’s look briefly at all 6E’s of Audience Action:

1. Ego – You make it happen. Thank you!
2. Empathy – I totally identify with you and know exactly how you feel.
3. Education – Understanding this material is the key to your success.
4. Enrichment – This will bring you security, comfort, fun and enjoyment.
5. Enthusiasm – You are delighted by my energy and excitement.
6. Entertainment – You will enjoy passing the time this way for hours.

• Egos aren’t stroked by manipulation.
• Empathy can’t be faked. You have it or you don’t.
• Education should edify or it’s meaningless.
• Enrichment can’t be given if you don’t have value to offer.
• Enthusiasm can’t be put on or faked because it’s an internal gift.
• Entertainment is the result of real talent, creativity and skill.

The post Motivate Your Audience with E’s appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Goals are fine but I gave up traditional goal setting awhile ago. Then I started surpassing some of my goals. Similarly, I realized sales forecasting is no more than a snapshot of last year with a wish list on top.

Maybe you’ve heard, “When setting your goals, aim for the stars, and if you miss, you’ll at least hit the moon.” Are you setting the stars as your goal this year, hoping for the moon? Maybe you should allow yourself another 9 – 10 years because that’s what it actually took an entire country following JFK’s lofty national goal in 1961 of landing a man on the moon.

If your sales were $200,000 last year and you make your goal $1,000,000 this year with the same apparatus, your’re probably just seeing pie in the sky.

My opinion about business goal setting is that it’s overrated. Time spent on calculating goals, also known as “guestimating,” could be better spent executing a disciplined work process day by day, week by week. Valuable (billable) work leads to business goal achievement.

Here’s the raw deal with goals: They are attempts at predicting the future and controlling outcomes. Those of you who practice the habits of predicting and controlling know well the feelings of restlessness and discontent. You cannot control the motives and actions of others and we all need others to assist us in accomplishing our goals. Therefore, no matter how well you conceptualize, strategize, plan and execute, you may be just as likely to fall short of your goals as to achieve them. The whims of the marketplace and dynamic nature of the future will largely determine where you will be in the next couple of years.

As the future is unpredictable, so is everything that happens between the time a goal is set and it’s future deadline. There is a way to take advantage of this reality. Let one of your major goals be to positively participate in your market’s dynamics every day.

Let’s say you spent the day setting the precise numbers you want to achieve, conceiving a detailed picture of the exact tangible results you desire, setting and scheduling time limits, developing strategies and creating detailed master plans to accomplish your goals by the specified dates. Oh yeah, you would also need to spend some time on forecasting, planning and devising your key metrics. Then each week or month you took time to analyze your progress and adjust your strategy. I could spend that same day and the subsequent time actually performing work that generates revenue. At least for that day and those follow up times, I’d be advancing toward my goals while you were just thinking about them (even if writing it all down). I’d be taking advantage of and learning from the dynamics of the market while you were trying to formulate the future according to your desires (or your boss’s).

As you learn new things each day from participating in your business, you can use this information to make nimble adjustments that help your customers or allow you to touch more prospects. This process is known as a feedback loop and it can be very powerful.

What is your system for success? More emphasis should be placed on your system according to a leading fitness coach and personal trainer in Denver. Click to read a superb article on the subject.

Systems versus goals. What is your system for producing successful results? James Clear makes my points clear. In a recent article he explains the difference between goals and systems:

“What’s the difference between goals and systems?

• If you’re a coach, your goal is to win a championship. Your system is what your team does at practice each day.
• If you’re a writer, your goal is to write a book. Your system is the writing schedule that you follow each week.
• If you’re a runner, your goal is to run a marathon. Your system is your training schedule for the month.
• If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal is to build a million dollar business. Your system is your sales and marketing process.

“Now for the really interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still get results? 

“For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results?  I think you would.”

Mr. Clear goes on in the article to explain how too much focus on goals can have negative consequences on one’s outlook and mood. Mr. Clean clearly agrees.

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