To those of you who have been with me since the beginnig I want to thank you and let you know that this site has been moved to http://www.bauermanagementgroup.com. The content is all the same but the flow should be much smoother. This move allows me to manage one less url so that I can help you all work on your business.
Cheers,
Jeremi
Filed under Uncategorized
Part 2: Ineffective Sales and Marketing
By: Jeremi Bauer
Many business leaders, especially business leaders of small and medium sized companies, think like this: we have a great product/service, we have differentiated our offering from the competition, and, quite frankly, our sales team has years of experience … people will buy our products/services so we don’t need to worry about all that sales and marketing hocus pocus.
Alternatively some believe ‘we don’t need a sales training program, we’re a small company and not only is sales training for bigger companies, it’s wicked expensive and we’ll never see a Return on Investment (ROI).’ I know this to be true because these statements came from the mouths of some business owners I have personally worked for in the past! YIKES!!!! Needless to say, that’s flat out not the way to think if you want to stay in business for the long haul. Part 2 of this eight part series deals with ineffective sales and marketing.
You might be thinking ‘OK, you’ve made me curious now’. So what is effective sales and marketing?” GREAT QUESTION!!! Let’s start by referring back to the first part in this series: effective sales and marketing stem from planning. I’ll discuss sales and the sales planning process first, since most business owners believe this will grow their business the fastest. Looking back to Part 1, planning begins with research. For sales planning, this process takes a granular approach, starting first with your prospect or your existing customer and can go up to 30,000 feet depending on your business and sales cycle.
I have been following an organization by the name of Sales Sense Solutions since 2007. The CEO, Mike Krause, has an amazing program geared specifically toward increasing sales through proper sales planning. Mike has a great video blog series available on Vimeo with short tips and strategies to increase sales effectiveness. Mike hosted an online talk show aimed specifically at effective selling strategies, including guests such as, Mike Brooks, Wendy Weiss, Mike O’Neil, Jeffrey Gitomer and Lori Ruff to name just a few. Mike is also the author of a breakthrough new book “Sell or Sink” that brings sales planning and process into the 21st century. I have included several links to Mike’s great work and encourage you to visit his organization’s websites (www.SalesSenseSolutions.com, http://www.SellorSink.com) to learn more about effective selling.
OK, so now you’re probably thinking, ‘so you’ve put a plug in for a friend, what am I supposed to do, figure out your message by visiting his site?’ Well, yes, if you want every important detail and to get acquainted with a great sales coach to help you increase revenue. After all, he is the expert! However, I will give you a hint at what you’ll be learning by visiting Sales Sense Solutions. As I mentioned before, effective selling starts with research. You should be able to answer questions such as:
(a) Who is my target?
(b) Who is the decision maker(s)?
(c) What is the decision making process?
(d) How do they buy?
(e) Who are the influencers in the decision making process? (you may be surprised by this answer)
(f) Who are my competitors?
(g) How do they sell to this prospect?
(h) What are my prospects pain points?
(i) Do they have the budget for my product/service?
(j) When do they plan to make a decision?
… and a score of other questions that will enable you to learn as much information as possible to effectively sell to this prospect/customer.
Mike has said before, and I agree with him completely, that the worst thing a sales person, or organization, can do is to be unprepared for a selling engagement. By answering the above questions, and many others, you are preparing for those engagements and you will start down the path to effective – and successful – selling.
‘OK, so what about effective marketing, how do I accomplish this? I figure that my brochures and my sales people are my best marketing pieces!’ Not if we’re talking effective marketing versus ineffective marketing. To be sure, your sales people will get the word out about your products and services; and your brochures can reinforce your message with your prospect if they were written correctly. But these tools are selling tools and not marketing tools per se.
‘What’s the difference?’ you ask. Well, marketing is what you do to reach your prospects and persuade them that you are the right company to solve their pain. Sales is everything you do to complete the transaction once the prospect’s interest has been established. Marketing, again, begins with research by answering questions such as:
(a) Who is our target audience?
(b) What are our target demographics
(c) What geographical area are we targeting
(d) Can that geography be profitable
… and many more.
The idea in this first part is to get quantifiable, granular, information to make sound strategic decisions. The next step is to conduct a SWOTT analysis, I spoke about this in the first part of this series and I have placed a template in the business tools section for your use. Now it’s time to identify your COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE (CA). Your research will give you a clear idea of your unique selling position (USP), the message that you will want to convey to your target audience. After you have gone through these processes, you can then choose the method through which you will convey your message. Your marketing methods could include:
(a) Traditional print in a magazine (preferably one that your audience reads)
(b) Email campaign
(c) Telemarketing
(d) Website redesign
(e) Social media page (see my earlier post about, “The State of the Internet”
(f) Radio and television spots
(g) Search engine optimization (SEO) and others
The point I am trying to make here is that too many small and medium sized businesses rely on old, outdated, and ineffective sales and marketing strategies to promote their businesses. Or they have jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon by starting a half-hearted social media page only to discover that their ROI is wanting.
If you plan your sales and marketing efforts properly, you will be successful, I guarantee it! If it’s in your budget, work with a professional sales training consultant, such as Mike Krause with Sales Sense Solutions. If working with a dynamite consultant is not in your budget, make sure you do your research and plan thoroughly before you start making calls. If you don’t research and plan first, you won’t have a budget to worry about, because your customers will choose your competition. OUCH!!!!!
If you have any questions or comments, please leave them here and I will get back to you.
All the best,
Jeremi Bauer
Filed under Sales
Filed under Uncategorized
JESS3™ / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.
Filed under Social Media for Small Business
Part 1: Lack of Planning
By: Jeremi Bauer
This is the fist, of an eight part series, to help business leaders identify and course correct before their business enters crisis mode, or worse, FAILS! In this series, I will discuss eight areas that cause most businesses to fail and solutions to help avoid entering crisis or even stagnation. Part One deals with the lack of planning; no I am not talking a full blow business and marketing plans, although these two formal plans are recommended. I am just talking about simple plans like, how are we going to penetrate a market, how are we going to win a customer, how can we improve our manufacturing process, and the like. Most business leaders go about these situations in an ad hoc fashion, sort of a fly by the seat of your pants and make it up as you go practice. This is highly ill advised.
According to former President of the United States and Army general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Plans are worthless but planning is indispensible”; the concept behind this quote is that a plan is only good up to the first hint of resistance. At this point, the plan is worthless because now you have to make real time decisions that may alter your original direction or intention. This is where the ‘planning’ takes over and is used as a guide in these real time decisions. See, planning, when done properly is based heavily on research; research about your company, your competition, your market(s), your customers, and most importantly, trends that may affect the way you do business in the future. Graduates from business schools, and readers of business literature, know this process as the SWOTT analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats, and Trends.
The SWOTT analysis is a great tool for evaluating your organizations internal (strengths and weaknesses) and external (opportunities, threats and trends) realities at any given moment in time. I recommend to my clients that they do this exercise at a minimum of twice a year, with quarterly being optimal. However, this exercise should be taken to the next level and be done for each of your top five competitors. When done properly, you gain an understanding of your opponent at a very intimate level. With this level of understanding, you’ll know what they are up to as they’re up to it, and potentially before they are! There are some of you saying right now, I don’t care what my competition is up to, I am going to run my business and let the better company win. The problem; is that the better company is the one that does this, and if that happens to be your competition, you LOSE!
I know this is a thought process of some leaders because I was in this exact discussion with a business owner a few months back and this was his position. His logic, according to him, was that sports teams work up their game plan around their teams strengths and when they hit the court (field, rink, gym, etc) they play their game and make the opponent change their plans. The flaw with this logic is that it presupposes the team did not study their opponent. Now, as a former college athlete, I know this is just not true. Coaches at all levels, peewee, high school, college, and pros watch hours upon hours of film about the team that they are playing to learn their strengths and weaknesses. From this information, these coaches put their game plan together. Nevertheless, just as I mentioned above, as soon as the coach realizes that his or her plan is not working they change their plan and make real time decisions. However, they are still able to use the information from the planning process to make informed real time decisions.
To sum it all up, business owners and leaders need to make planning (working on your business) a part of their everyday activity. They need to step away from the micromanagement of the daily details (working in your business) and let the people you hired do their jobs. This leads us to our next topic on why businesses fail, lack of employee management, which will be coming in a few days. In the business tools section I have provided a template for a SWOTT analysis for you to use in your organization, free of charge. If you have any questions or comments fell free to leave them here and I will get back to you.
Jeremi Bauer.
Filed under Leadership
By Jeremi Bauer DBA (c), MBA
Many business leaders look at their business and say to themselves, “We’re not in the commodity business.” No matter how it is said, the real question is how does one determine if their product is a commodity or not? I got the idea of the commodity continuum from the wise words of legendary CEO, Jack Welch. He did not describe what the continuum was, he merely hinted at it as he was describing how to place people within an organization. His suggestions were about getting strategy right, and to do so depended upon matching people with jobs (a condition I am a big fan of, more about this in a latter post). He continued by saying that this matching of people with jobs largely depended upon where the business was on the “commodity continuum”.
So, what is a commodity? A commodity is simply a good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. A commodity has full or partial fungibility; that is, the market treats it as equivalent or nearly so no matter who produces it. For example, if someone lends another person a $10 bill, it does not matter if they are given back the same $10 bill or a different one, since currency is fungible. Ok, now that we have that out of the way, what is on the opposite end of the spectrum? Well, besides a completely new product that has never before been seen or used (i.e. the first light bulb) the continuum moves across various levels of differentiation into total differentiation. (See the figure below)
Somewhere on this continuum is where your business will fall. Once you have determined where it is, the next step is to determine which direction you want to go. Most will choose the direction towards ‘Total Differentiation’ others will choose ‘Commodity’ in either case you will have some changes to make in your organization to remain competitive. Lets look in brief at these two directions below, assuming your business lies smack dab in the middle.
Move Towards Commodity
Things you will have to consider:
Let’s talk about point 3 since the others are pretty much no brainers. How will your organization have to change? What type of change are we looking at? How much will it cost to change in this manner? Who will be affected by such a change? These are all questions a business leader must ask themselves and their advisors or executive staff before deciding to move in this direction. The answers will provide the needed guidance to ensure successful execution. Once the questions have been answered, and the decision has been made to proceed 3 things must take pace immediately.
Move Towards Total Differentiation
This is a longer and more arduous path because many leaders believe they have achieved ‘Total Differentiation’ only to lose business to a competitor because they were cheaper. That’s right, I said it, they were cheaper, period! This is how you know you’re still in the commodity side of the equation. If a customer, client, patron, whatever, cannot tell how you differ from the guy down the block, then they will make their decision the only way they can tell the difference, PRICE. Unless you’re moving in the commodity direction on purpose; PRICE is a terrible place to compete. I can guarantee you that someone else out there is willing to go out of business faster than you because they believe they’ll make it up with volume. What a load of malarkey! If you sell at 10% below your cost it doesn’t matter how much you sell it’s still 10% below your cost! Anyway, how then do you move towards ‘Total Differentiation’? Here are 5 steps to get you going:
Here is a little formula I picked up from John Jantsch, author or Duct Tape Marketing and it’s a simple one to drive home the idea.
We (verb) + (Target Market) + (Something that matters to the target market)
It is the last part of the formula that people forget about, just because your firm hires Ivey League engineers/lawyers/doctors, does not mean that it matters to your customers. You have to tell them why this matters to them to help them out. The best course of action would be to ask them what matters to them and then differentiate on that point. I know, you’re saying, ‘but who has time to ask our customers what matters to them, we’re busy selling them…’ What, a commodity???
There will most likely need to be some changes in your organization to go all the way but this 5 step process will get you started and the formula will help you create a value proposition…oops I said VP didn’t I….more on this in a later post. Ultimately this will get you out of the commodity business and into higher profits.
Until next time….
Jeremi Bauer
Filed under Leadership
While at the LBM Expo I ran into an old client of mine who taught me an interesting lesson regarding the use of Twitter as a sales management and territory management tool.
For those of us who use Twitter, we know that as we tweet our records are stored chronologically with a date and time stamp. Well this individual looked at this as an opportunity to have his team use twitter as a replacement for their daily and weekly call logs. I mean WOW, talk about profound. He totally reduced the amount of non-value added work his team was doing.
Ok so here’s how it works, when someone tweets it’s an almost instantaneous representation of their actions. This person was able to see exactly what his team was doing and if they needed help he was able to take a proactive position to provide his team with solutions in real time. He could also verify that his team was doing their job, not to micromanage, but to create consistency for their customers.
He also commented about a time when one of his customers called and complained that a sales person had not interacted with him in several week. He was able to pull up the twitter results righ there on the spot and confirm that his rep was in fact at the account. To which the customer replied, ‘well he didn’t spend that much time with me.” Please tell me I am not the only one besides this individual who sees the implication of this tool in the managers toolbox. This totally allows sales managers and territory managers to be proactive in a traditional reactionary environment.
Many thanks to you Mr G. for the insight and recommendation.
Can any of you think of other technologies that can be used to increase productivity and customer satisfaction beyond traditional CRM suites?
How many of your organizations have a social network presence? (more on this topic to come in future blogs)
Let me know your thoughts.
Until next time,
Jeremi
Filed under Uncategorized
It was nice to head back to the LBM Expo hosted by the Northeastern Retail Lumber Association, I got to reconnect with some old colleagues, interact with some constituents, and meet some new people to add to my network of professionals.
It is this last class of interactions that gave me pause, “a network of professionals”, think about it for a minute, we all have a network that spans (depending on your age) thousands of people over your lifetime. As I pondered this classification I began to think, does my network add value to me, personally and professionally? Does that matter? Then I thought even deeper, do “I” add value to my network?
WOW! talk about a reality check. Then I remembered a book I read a while back titled “Little Black Book of Connections’ by Jeffrey Gitomer, in this book Jeffrey laid out four questions that we should all contemplate regarding our network/connections.
1) Who do you know? Who you know encompasses who you can readily connect with easily and obviously.
2) How well are you connected? Think about the term “Six Degrees of Separation” and then apply that to who you want to know/meet. How well you are connected will allow you to determine how many degrees it will take to meet this person. And the more value you add your network (see #4) the more likely you will have that opportunity.
3) Do you know how to make a connection? Now for those of us sales people out there I know what you’re thinking, “Of course I know how to make a connection, I couldn’t make a living if I didn’t”. To that I would say you are partially correct and would challenge you to ask yourself, if you truly knew how to make a connection could you make a better living?
The next question is, in my opinion, the most important!
4) Who know YOU! This ties back into the value statement I lamented earlier in this post.
In business, we have a strategic term called a “Value Proposition” which is the fundamental reason you are able to compete in your marketplace.
By the way, if your organization does not have a tangible, quantifiable, and monetary value proposition you might want to check out our website for help, you could be missing opportunities.
Ok enough of the sales plug, back to the value you provide to your network. What is your value proposition to your network, not from a competitive perspective vis-à-vis another person in your network, but from an actual value perspective. How valuable are you to the people in your network? Bottom line, if you keep asking others to connect with you and you do not get any/many people asking you to connect with them, readdress your value proposition to your network. If you have put yourself out there as a person of value, people will want to connect with you!
Until next time,
Cheers
Jeremi
Filed under Uncategorized
Forecasts for 2011-2025
World Future Society
The Futurist (magazine)
1.Water Becomes the New Oil
2.WiMAX Creates Countrywide Wireless
3.By 2025, the Worldwide Average Life Span Will be Increasing by One Year Per Year
4.The Race for Genetic Enhancements Will Be What the Space Race Was in the 20th Century
5.Bioviolence Becomes A Greater Threat
6.The Holy Grail of Computers Becomes a Reality
7.Green Gold: Algae’s Huge Potential As Biofuel
8.The Coming Automation of Invention
9.New Oil from Old Wells
10.Nanotechnology May Alter the Value of Diamonds and Other Precious Commodities
11.Consumers will Take Active Roles in Inventing New Products and Services
12.Electric Cars Become Fully Practical by 2020
13.The Millennial Generation Becomes the Next Great Generation
14.Quantum Computers Revolutionize Information Around 2021
15.Breakthrough Doubles Solar Energy Output
16.Genetic Research May Soon Conquer Most Inherited Diseases
17.Japan Dominates the Race for Personal Robots
18.Virtual Education to Enter the Mainstream by 2015
Filed under Leadership
I have spoken to many business leaders over the past couple years and many are frustrated with their sales numbers. Rightly so; this recession has hit us all very hard. However, this common theme got me thinking, is the slowdown is sales a sign that these leaders are losing market share, i.e. the size of their slice has gotten smaller; or is it a matter of the whole pie has gotten smaller.
My belief is that the whole pie has gotten smaller and that only the organization with a plan for the recovery will make it out of this without starving. see, in common marketing parlance, market share is figured by dividing up the overall market (the pie) into portions that each enterprise occupies (the slice). As the size of the pie goes from large to medium to small (pizza analogy) each firm can retain its slice it only gets smaller. Larger organizations or ones that have strong leadership can manage this smaller portion for a longer time and eventually gain more as the ill prepared throw in the towel.
Therefore, my advice is, before you go and toss blame to those individuals and departments trying to keep and gain you more business for the lack of sales; look at your plan, understand your competitors, and take action. You may just like the results!
Filed under Sales
Bauer Management Group 
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