Next Level Marketing & Website Design Blog

Next Level Marketing has created a new innovative service called Managed Marketing Services that are designed specifically for small and mid-sized business who do not have a marketing professional on staff but whose sales team would greatly benefit from consistent marketing activities.  If this sounds like you, read on.

Uncertain economic times provide the perfect opportunity for you to take stock of your existing customers and to leverage those relationships in order to weather the downturn.  Now is the time to access the fundamentals that drive your business; knowing your existing customers; acquiring new customers; connecting with customers in meaningful ways; and delivering the right solutions to meet customer needs.  But do you have the time or staff to consistently reach out to your customers?  We all agree that marketing activities are investments into the future revenues of the company, but with all the other commitments of your sales peoples’ time, it is often hard to provide the consistency in these activities that are required to be successful. What are your options then?  Well you could hire a marketing professional but their salary, benefits, taxes and related costs may not be in the budget, especially when you realize that they will demand a marketing budget on top of this expenditure.  You could do nothing and hope for the best.  Or you could outsource some of these marketing activities to a third party.  This is where Managed Marketing Service providers come in.

What are Managed Marketing Services?
Managed Marketing Services may be a new concept for most small and mid-sized businesses, but it stems from the age-old concept of outsourcing services.   Managed Marketing Services are recurring services provided either on-site or remotely on a contractual basis.  It is the day-to-day marketing related activities that keep the company in front of customers, prospects and referral source partners in a coordinated, effective and brand-supportive manner.  A managed services provider (MSP), is typically a marketing services provider, who manages and assumes responsibility for providing a defined set of services to their customers either proactively or as they (not the customer) determine that the services are needed.    The basic premise is that there are mundane marketing tasks either not being conducted by your company or that are being conducted by salespeople who should be prospecting instead.  Outsourcing these marketing services to a Managed Marketing Services Provider lowers costs and frees up time for your sales people to work on closing more business.

What’s Typically Included?
A Managed Marketing Services program typically includes 1) marketing planning and coordination with sales team activities, 2) print communications  such as newsletters and postcard solicitations, 3) electronic communications such as e-mail campaigns and blog support, and 4) social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.  Advertising and search engine optimization can also be included.  As a Marketing Services Provider, Next Level takes the marketing load off you and helps you focus your energies back into the core business issues.  We become your marketing team who THINKS and ACTS as YOUR integrated marketing partner.  We help define and put your business strategy into marketing strategy and execute these actions of your behalf.

What are the Benefits?
The benefits of Managed Marketing Services include:

How Does Pricing Work?

Most MSPs charge a small monthly fee on a 12 month contract with an ability to withdraw from the services if needed.

If you would like to learn more about Managed Marketing Services, give Brett Flickinger a call at 630-665-4440.

As you can see from my last blog on LinkedIn, that I am very excited about its potential for generating new revenues.    Last week I conducted a training class for a group of salesmen who wanted to learn more about LinkedIn and how to use it to generate revenues.  Today’s blog will share some of the concepts I presented to them.  In our last blog, we left off talking about adding applications to your profile to enhance your image and add more functionality.  We will start there today.

Box.net Files

This is one of the most useful applications for LinkedIn for salespeople and many others.  Basically, it lets you set up a file folder on your LinkedIn Profile where you can upload files for others to download.  Practical usages include sales brochures, rate sheets, customer service documents, etc.  Anything that you want to share with your connections can be posted here.

Behance

This application allows you to display graphic images and project information.  Mostly designed for graphic artists to show their work such as brochures, website screen shots, etc.  It can be used, however, is a wider variety of ways.  For example, general contractors can highlight a construction project include images of designs, work photos and final results.

Google Presentations

Every conduct a seminar and some people didn’t show up?  Now you can place your presentation on your LinkedIn Profile and invite the no-shows to watch it there.

CardMunch

For the iPhone users out there, the Cardmunch app allows you to place all the business cards you receive into your phone for easy access.  LinkedIn acquired this company and now you can connect LinkedIn contacts to your phone as well using this app.

Microsoft Outlook Link

Now let’s talk about another favorite of mine – the link between Microsoft Outlook and LinkedIn.  This is a great way to expand your LinkedIn network.  At the bottom of the page in LinkedIn, you will see a menu bar area.  Under the Tools link, you can download the Outlook Social Connector.  This connector installs an add-on to your Microsoft Outlook program.  This add-on does three really nice things to Outlook.  First, when you receive an e-mail from someone, at the bottom of the page below the preview of the e-mail’s content, images of the sender are pulled from LinkedIn.  You can quickly determine if the sender is in LinkedIn or not.  You can then add them to your LinkedIn Connections if you want.  Second, all of your LinkedIn Connections get pulled into Outlook.  A LinkedIn folder is created under My Contacts in Outlook.  You can now pull these up, schedule meetings, calls, etc. in Outlook. Third, LinkedIn has built-in restriction on the number of messages you can send and bulk sending is restricted.  However, with the LinkedIn-Outlook link, all of your contacts are now in Outlook and you can use Outlook to mass e-mail all of your LinkedIn contacts if you so desire.

Ok, let’s change gears.  I don’t want this blog to be entirely about applications for LinkedIn.  Leave it to say that there are a number of applications that can enhance your profile with more being developed every day.

Let’s discuss a basic revenue generating function of LinkedIn.  The old school sales approach was to work your personal relationships (at a chamber of commerce meeting, through community or trade events, etc.) to get introduced to a person at a company with whom you wanted to do business.  LinkedIn does the same thing, but utilizes technology to to expedite the process.  Let me illustrate with an example.

LinkedIn has a function that shows you people that you may know, but are not yet part of your network.  I was scrolling through this list and saw a person that shared 10 connections to people we both knew.  The person was working in a company I wanted to get to know.  Using LinkedIn’s InMail feature, I sent her a message listing all the people we both knew and suggested that we should probably get to know each other.  She was curious and agreed to connect.  I followed this up with a request to get some coffee.  At this meeting, we got to know each other better.  After getting to know me and what I did, she agreed to introduce me to the President of the company.  LinkedIn and some old school relationship building, got me the opportunity to sell our services.

Wow, I ran out of space again.  I hope the ideas I have shared on LinkedIn help you  generate more revenues.  If I can be of assistance or if you would like me to put on a LinkedIn training class for your company, give me a call.

Today I am going to attempt to take many of you back to the days when you first started your company and how the spirit and mindset of an entrepreneur should be nurtured within your firm as a means for continuous business development and improvement.

What is the mindset or traits of an entrepreneur?

• They passionately seek new opportunities.  They stay alert, always looking for the chance to grow and profit.  They are hungry for the next dollar. 
• They are innovative and recognize that change can be good as it creates opportunity. 
• They pursue opportunities with enormous discipline.  They act.  They follow-up. 
• They focus on execution.  They don’t over analyze ideas.  They make ideas become reality. 
• They leverage themselves and recognize that they need help from others.  They involve others both inside and outside the company in pursuit of opportunity.

So where does the entrepreneur start?  His customers, of course.  Before an entrepreneur takes his first step, he listens to the needs in the marketplace.  Is there opportunity? Can I make money on these opportunities?  The entrepreneur finds out as much as possible about his customers.  He starts by recognizing that customers don’t care about his products/services.  What they care about is their own needs and how to meet them.  You can discover a great deal about your customersby means of quizzing, a process of asking and getting answers to questions.  For each of your products/services, consider the what, who, when, where and/or how proposition. Who is the decision maker, the influencers? What pain or problem will you solve for them?  How do you recognize symptoms or potential opportunities exhibited by the customer or prospect?

So how do we harness this entrepreneurial mindset and spirit within our firms?  We start by leading by example.  Take a look at your own daily tasks?   How much entrepreneurial spirit shows up in the everyday individual tasks you perform?  If not much, work to change this situation.  Entrepreneurial leaders inspire others through their own personal practices on the job.

The next step is to become an entrepreneurial leader within the company.  Your task is to create a company that continuously looks for and acts upon opportunity.  You will have success when everyone in your company takes for granted that business success demands a continual search for new opportunities. The first area to work on is culture.  The goal is to create a sense of urgency to discover the next opportunity.  Everyone from the CEO to the receptionist must be clear that searching for opportunities is their responsibility.  To foster such a culture,  you need to start behaving as you would like your people to behave, by dedicating a disproportionate share of your time, attention, and resources to business development and customer retention.  You need not be charismatic.  You can have more success by being  persistent in modeling the behavior you want others to adopt.  People will follow your example, but they will not change on the basis of your words alone.

Next, orchestrate your model.  People find uncertainty more manageable if it can be framed,  understood and simplified.  One of your challenges is to help your people cope with the difficulty of determining what to prioritize, and where their focus should be set.  Don’t believe that imposing discipline will stifle entrepreneur creativity.  Most ideas will not lead to business success.  Help your people understand that business development and customer retention ideas must lead to products/services to solve real customer needs, at a sensible price, or they do not increase the value of the company.  Spend imagination before money.  Encourage your people to utilize their own creativity before asking for material resources.  Measure and manage all new ideas.

Finally, be ruthless with respect to priorities.  Trying to do too many things has sunk many business development initiatives.  Dropping tasks that don’t merit your attention or the attention of your people is every bit as important as starting new entrepreneurial tasks.

As an entrepreneur, you will never forget first seeing a customer genuinely respond to your efforts to help them.  It’s also very rewarding to make a lot of money for your efforts.  Add the entrepreneurial mindset into your business model today.

Tis the Season…Christmas Season…Yes, but that is not what I want to talk about in this week’s blog.  No…now is the Season of Opportunity.  As the new year approaches, it’s time to renew and strengthen your relationships with your existing customers because the first step in growing your business is to retain your customers!

In this week’s blog, I will share some ideas on how to strengthen your relationships by doing the little things that mean so much to customers.  Next week, I will share some ideas on how to sell more to existing  customers during the Season of Opportunity.

So let’s get right into some ideas on how to strengthen your relationships with your customers:

Going the extra mile

• Conduct extra stuff for them (free of charge). 
• Improve turnaround time of services provided or delivery of products
• Improve quality
• More documentation, explanation, accessibility
• Reach out to the customer’s other employees and get to know them

 Increasing the amount of customer contact

• Telephone regularly (use your daily calendar system to prompt you)
• Visit at every opportunity
• Schedule business meetings near mealtime
• Invite to your offices/plant/warehouse etc.
• Introduce other people in your company.  Introduce the President is always welcomed. 
• Get more of your people involved with customer 

Building the business relationship (climb the client relationship pyramid)

• Help customers find contacts elsewhere
• Put on special seminars for the customer’s staff
• Volunteer to attend the customer’s internal meetings especially on how they use your product/service
• Offer free day of counseling  or training
• Send customers useful articles
• If possible, refer business to customers

Building the personal relationship (climb the pyramid)

• Social activities
• Remember personal, family anniversaries 
• Obtain scarce tickets
• Provide home telephone number
• Offer use of firm’s facilities for their personal or business uses

Increase knowledge of customer’s industry

• Study industry magazine/newsletters thoroughly and regularly (Get subscriptions)
• Attend industry meetings with the customer
• Conduct proprietary studies
• Go to industry trade shows
• Learn all you can on their competitors

Increasing knowledge of customer’s business

• Read all customer’s brochures, financial reports, other public reports and news releases
• Ask to see strategic plan
• Volunteer to critique internal studies
• Conduct a reverse seminar (their people tell you about their company)
• Subscribe to a clipping service

Increasing knowledge of customer’s organization

• Ask for organization chart
• Ask who client deals with most
• Ask about the customer’s boss
• Ask about power structure
• Arrange to meet other executives
• Spend time with customer’s junior managers

Increasing knowledge of customer

• Find out precisely how the customer is evaluated inside his/her company
• Find out what he/she is unhappy with
• Find out their personal views on life
   

Unfortunately, relationship building takes time.  If you can do all of this for every customer, then prioritize.  Which customer relationships need attention?  What revenues do I need to protect and don’t want to risk losing? 

Don’t forget to leverage yourself.  You probably have internal staff that need the business development and customer retention experience. 

Until next week, remember to do the little things.  A customer relationship is stronger when the customer can refer to a hundred little things you do for them than only one big thing.

Do you remember when you were a kid and you were playing a game with your friends and something didn’t go the way you wanted?  Remember calling a “Do Over”?  Wouldn’t life be better if you could call a “Do Over” anytime for anything?  I could “do-over” that speeding ticket I got for going 65 in a 50 m.p.h zone and drive at the speed limit the second time.  Well in today’s blog I am going to call a “do over”. 

Let’s go back in time to the first year of your new business.  You grew the business utilizing the knowledge, experience and technology you had at that time.  You implemented procedures on how your young business operates.  Over time you have made modifications to these procedures and made some upgrades, but I bet the foundation of how you run your business now is very similar to those procedures established years ago.  Time to call that “Do Over.”

If you started your business today, would you run it the same way?  Would you use the same technologies?  Or would you do things differently?  At Next Level, we call these “do over” efforts, reengineering strategies.  Basically, knowing all you know now about your business and the markets you serve, how could you change your business, its processes and operations to build competitive advantage? How would your business operate if you were that entrepreneur today?

Let’s look at a great “do over” example.  United Parcel Service (UPS) wanted more market share and saw an opportunity to take parcel services away from the U.S. Postal Service.  What they saw was  two things.  First, an inefficient postal system and second, a gap in communications between customers and the postal process.  People gave their packages to the post office and prayed that it got to its destination.  The customer had no way to know when it would arrive nor was it easy to track down lost packages.  UPS’ solution was to implement an efficient tracking system and link this system to the rising use of the Internet.  I’m sure you’ve seen those hand-held devices the UPS delivery people carry and scan your packages with.  Not only did UPS run more efficiently than the U.S. Postal Service, but now customers could feel confident in the delivery of their packages.  They could even look online and check the status of their delivery at their convenience.  The result, well you can clearly see that UPS grabbed a huge chunk of market share from the U.S. Postal Service.

Reengineering strategies, in the marketing use, are the rethinking and redesign of business processes and managerial practices to improve performance in the areas of cost, service, speed or output in an effort to achieve a new level of competitive advantage.  A word of caution.  Reengineering is not easy.  In fact, it’s hard, but its the best way to leap-frog your company to a market leader position and the best way to build lasting long-term competitive advantage…well at least until you call a “do over” again.

For this week’s blog, I thought we would talk about one of my favorite subjects, pizza.  I love pizza.  You have to if you live in Chicago.  We’re talking deep dish, not that flimsy New York style.  If I owned a pizza shop I would have to make it grow or I’d be concerned that I would eat away my profits.  How I would go about doing this is a great illustration of some of the concepts we have been sharing with you here at Next Level.

So let’s assume I bought an existing pizza shop and named it Next Level Pizza.  Immediately, I upgrade the quality of the pizza to be the best tasting pizza around.  Now what? Time to get the word out and grow the business.  Let’s start with our basic growth formula: Growth = Acquisition of customers – defection of customers.  Improving either my acquisition rate or lowering my defection rate will help me grow.  I want to do both. 

Marketers always start with existing customers because getting more revenues and profits from people who know you and like your products/services is much easier than selling to new prospective customers.  I start by looking at the numbers for defections.  How much is it costing me to lose a customer?  Revenue Loss = Average Lifetime Value of a Customer x (Defection Rate x Total Number of Customers).  Next Level Pizza has a 10% defection rate and 1000 customers.  Over the course of a customer’s life they will spend $250,000 on pizza so the total loss to my business from this high defection rate is $25 million. Actually it is less since most customers have already spent part of their lifetime expenditures on pizza, but you get the idea.  Defections are bad.  I need to lower this as much as possible and fast! 

I start with implementing some Customer Touch strategies.  Customer Touch strategies are about moving every customer from a first time buyer to a repeat buyer to a loyal buyer and then to an advocate for my business.  Here we try to “wow” a customer at every point of contact with my pizzeria.  Everything they touch, smell, feel, see, read and hear.  We set out to make buying from my pizzeria such a great experience that my customers not only don’t leave but start telling other people to buy from me too. For example, we install a fan to push the smells of cooking pizza to our pick-up area to make the visit to my store more enjoyable to the senses.  We institute systems to ensure that the public areas are spotless, pizzas are delivered on time and our service is so friendly that it is “fun” to deal with us.  If you arrive early for pick-up, we have bit-sized samples of pizza to snack on.  We develop an online ordering website that is easy to use especially on small screen phone browsers. Absolutely everything is looked at and designed to “wow” our customers.

Another system we implement is to track the tastes of each customer so when they call again, we can ask if they want their “usual” pizza.  We build systems to appear that we know each customer personally.  For example, on a first home delivery, our drivers write down something nice about the customer’s house.  It goes in our system. Next time they call for a pizza delivery we comment something like this ”Oh, sure I remember your house.  Don’t you have some beautiful roses out front?” Most people are proud of their houses.  By tapping into this, we create that warm caring feeling and generate another positive “wow” experience.

We know that many people buy pizza because its a convenience food.  It’s an easy meal when the customer doesn’t want to cook.  Knowing this, we identify situations that create these “take-out/order-in” opportunities.  For example, baseball games and practices during the week often overlap with dinner time.  Next Level Pizza sponsors the local Little League and as part of this sponsorship, we gain access to game schedules and locations.  We send delivery people with bite-sized pizza samples out to each ball diamond.  While the parents and siblings munch on some samples, we hand out menus and coupons and remind them that they can order now and pick up the pizza on the way home.  Besides increasing sales, Next Level Pizza also looks like a strong supporter of our community.

Next week we will continue with our Next Level Pizza story and how I would grow this business.  Until then, I suggest the garlic pepperoni deep dish pizza with bacon on top.