The Marketing Mix | official blog of the Marketing Mentor community

Cold Calling Nightmare Comes True

It's Cold Calling Day. Ugh. I schedule this task about a week after I send out hard-copy materials to people I haven't met but may use my services. Cold Calling Day is never on a Monday and never on a Friday and always between the decent hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. I open up my marketing outreach list and then I open lots of marketing articles and blogs to read between calls and keep my energy up.

Today was supposed to be a good Cold Calling Day because my prospects weren’t really cold. A client who no longer needs my services but thinks I do a great job gave me twenty referrals. Why wouldn't his contacts want my help?

It started out smoothly. I left seven left messages and got one request for materials by email. I thought I'd get another easy one out of the way by calling a gentlemen who might even remember me - I planned his retirement party at the Guggenheim back when I was in-house at his law firm. 

I picked up the phone with enthusiasm, dialed and was confronted with the first wave...the assistant. After I had thoroughly convinced her I was not some loony tune but a viable human being worthy of speaking to her boss, I heard him..."hello?"

Problem Solving: Lessons Learned from an Electrician’s Service Call

I recently had an electrician come out to fix a lighting problem in my kitchen.  In the process I learned some lessons that are important for anyone who gets paid to solve problems – and that’s pretty much all of us, right?

You see, what should have been a 15-minute service call turned out to be a 2-hour one.  I’ll spare you the details (although I do have to relay a few in my points below).  The short story is the guy spent about an hour trying to determine what was causing the problem but ended up having to call in his partner to help.  After the second guy arrived, it took them another 45 minutes before they stumbled across the real source of the problem and then they were able to fix it right away.

As I reflected on what happened, I realized the ways they went about trying to fix the problem were all wrong – and yet, if I’m really honest with myself, I find that I’m probably guilty of using the same methods to address my clients’ challenges.  Perhaps some of these will sound familiar to you:

1.  Jumping to conclusions

What happened:  To demonstrate the problem to the electrician, I used a dimmer switch that happens to be one of those newer dual-function ones (dimmer and on/off.)  The unusual nature of the switch caught the guy’s attention and he immediately pronounced that the problem was probably caused by the switch.  While it soon became clear the switch was not the problem, his initial reaction seemed to bias his perspective for the remainder of his visit.  He kept on returning to the switch, convinced there had to be something wrong with it.

Lesson learned:  Avoid the temptation to think we have the answer right away.

Psychologists use the term “the primacy effect” to refer to the cognitive bias that results from the disproportionate salience of initial stimuli or observations. For example, we are more likely to remember words we’ve read toward the beginning of a long list, for example, than words we’ve read in the middle.  As problem solvers, we might be guilty of allowing the primacy effect to cloud our judgment and lead us down the wrong path.

Instead of jumping to conclusions, we should exercise discipline and conduct a thorough analysis before we offer a diagnosis.

Networking is about quality, not quantity

One of my projects as a solopreneur is to manage a networking group for manufacturing companies in my region. Through a stroke of sheer randomness, a search for manufacturing in Kansas City on Google brings our little humble site up #1, without any formal SEO effort on my part. But do you know who is searching for manufacturing in Kansas City? Not manufacturers; salespeople who want to sell stuff to manufacturers.

While I am happy to talk to anyone about the network, many aspiring networkers seem to think there are shortcuts to crossing the sales finish line. The manufacturing network is just one example, but I seem to run across more of these situations when the economy is slow. In the spirit of March Madness here are 3 situations that could either turn into a foul or a 3-pointer. Which will it be for you?

Foul: Your target market is widget makers. You find an organization of widget makers and think, ‘I’ve hit the jackpot!’ and proceed to make your pitch to all of the widget makers in the room.

3 Pointer: Even if your product or service is the saving grace of every last person in the room, they don’t know you, know your company, and you can’t presume to know their needs. At first, just be quiet and listen to what your prospects have to say. Enthusiasm is contagious, but so is the flu.

Growing Your Business with Marketing, Week 13: Star Wars marketing

This is Week 13 of a 52-week project/experiment in DIY marketing. Armed with nothing but a copy of the 2009 Grow Your Business Marketing Plan + Calendar and my bare wits, I'm applying the skills you need to grow a business in real time, day by day, and reporting on them week by week. You can follow along here every Monday; check in with my companion blog, A Virgo's Guide to Marketing, for additional links and information.

If you're working the Veteran's Calendar literally, you'll be drafting your first press release this week. While I don't doubt the value of press releases nor the wisdom in learning to draft one well in advance of actually needing it, my recent trip to SxSW netted me a couple of huge potential projects that would actually require leveraging the press, and I need to at least get them underway first. Cool? Let's move on!

This week was the first where my energy felt like it was back to something resembling normal. As I mentioned last week, big conferences can be useful—and, if they're South by Southwest Interactive, fun x 10—but they do take it outta you.

For the most part, my marketing efforts this week once again went into the blog: I've doubled down on the posts, in a way, writing more of the personal essays that I like writing, that I'd like to get paid to more of, and that my readers seem to like. In fact, the more the world turns to short-form social media messaging like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., the more I feel that there's real opportunity from a marketing perspective in getting your mother ship (that's the main site or blog you drive all your other social media traffic to) in outstanding condition. Here's how I worked on that this week...

Go ahead, get emotional

Over the last year I’ve been teaching a communication and conflict resolution course for a corporate client of mine. Most of the material in this program comes from the New York Times best-seller, Crucial Conversations. One of the tools that the book teaches is called “Master My Stories”. The idea behind this tool is that how we feel lies in the stories we tell ourselves.  And these stories generate emotions that often lead to actions. We create our stories.

When you think about marketing your business or product,  your goal is to generate action from your clients and prospects. And an effective way to generate action is to tell a compelling story, one that hits your customer’s emotions.  Take a look at your marketing materials, your website, your newsletters, your printed collateral and ask yourself: “What emotions am I hitting?”.  Which feeling will your customer generate when they see your stuff?

If you look at the majority of service companies (especially in the creative industry), the common story is all about who they are and what they do best.  If I’m the customer, why would I believe them? What would compel me to trust that they really know what MY problem is? What my needs are? No feelings are generated and I will pass over them without a second thought.

As you are creating marketing materials to promote your business ask yourself the following questions:

   1. What are your clients' hot buttons? What’s not working for them?
   2. What is the outcome your client is asking for (not the specific thing they need from you)?
   3. Is your story creating an emotional reaction with your client?

So think about the stories you can create with your marketing. Stories that will generate a feeling with your client. A feeling that will inspire them to pick up the phone and call you. Hit their emotions and they will respond.

Tools for Organized Travel

When I’m in my office, being organized is easy. When I’m on the road, not so much.
 
Since I became self-employed, traveling has always been frustrating for me for one reason or another.  I didn’t have everything I needed, my computer wasn’t working properly, I couldn’t connect to wireless networks in hotels, I couldn’t find things, I was missing phone calls, etc… 
 
I hate being disorganized, and my past travel experiences have caused so much aggravation that I’ve been scared to leave again.
 
But staying tied to my desk is not realistic—and one of the reasons I started this business was so I could have more freedom and visit home often.
 
This past week I was in New York for a few days, and I realized there’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to be as organized when I’m working from my parents’ house, my friend’s office, or Starbucks, as I am when I’m right here in my office.
 
I just had to figure out how.
 
To be organized when traveling, and to avoid driving myself crazy, I need to have the right tools.  Here are the ones that helped me on my most recent trip:

Find a problem, solve it and charge them

This is one way to come up with a business idea for yourself.

And according to a recent article from the New York Times (the “most emailed” at one point too), lots of people are doing it, instead of wasting their time looking for jobs that aren't there. Here are a few of the more innovative examples I’ve read about (all from the NYT):

Safeguarding Valuables

Problem: People visiting prisons can’t bring their cellphones or other electronic devices inside, but can’t leave them in the lockers either. What to do?

Solution: Robert Williams (aka The Phone Man) will literally hold the items while they’re visiting.

Charge? $3

Read all about it here:

Avoiding Commuter Hell

Problem: There’s a delay or obstruction on your route to or from work but you don’t find out about it until it’s too late and you’re stuck.

Solution: The Clever Commute, a free service that distributes updates sent by riders about train and bus delays that they are witnessing firsthand.

Charge: free (but you can donate). (Josh Crandall, former IT guy on Wall Street, aims to turn the site into a business that can earn real money through advertising and the sale of traffic and transit information to local media.)

Check it out here: http://www.clevercommute.com/ or read all about it here:

For more inspiration about people starting businesses right now, check out Brian Lehrer’s show on WNYC from March 19: (Thanks to Carrie Hamilton of Kismet Design for sending along this link and see my comment on this exact topic!)

What problems do you see out there that someone could build a business around solving?

Introducing: Guest Post Tuesdays

I love the way things are constantly changing and evolving in life, and in particular, in this business.

Take the Marketing Mix Blog, for example. I used to post once a week and it was sometimes a struggle to get that material together.

Then, little by little, we started expanding and put the word out that we are looking for guests, other voices contributing their own experiences to the blog. Before long, every day had its own blogger and even its own "identity" (maybe you noticed). Now there are not enough days in the week for all the people who want to contribute, which we love!

So today, we're initiating "Guest Post Tuesdays" -- we'll post all the guest posts we have in the queue on Tuesdays. Today we have 3 for you. Patrice Robertie of Acorn Advertising writing about her 15-Minute Miracle Marketing Strategy; Tom "TNT" Tumbusch of Digital Dynamite on why he doubled his prices in the middle of a recession (and why you should too) and Luis Maimoni about how to bring more of you into your brand.

And if you want to be part of this lineup of guest posters, send your ideas to me at ilise at marketing dash mentor dot com.

Here is Patrice's post, called The 15-Minute Miracle:

One day recently, I was struggling with making my marketing calls.

All morning, I kept thinking to myself, “I just don’t have two hours to do that right now.”

At about 1:30 in the afternoon, still struggling and still not having made the two calls I promised myself I would make, an idea came to me out of the blue: I’ll use a timer.

You see, I have a digital timer I use when I’m writing - a trick I got from Ernest Hemingway for breaking up work on big projects into manageable chunks.

It occurred to me that I could use a variation on that technique with my cold calls. I decided to give myself 15 minutes to make the calls and - however far I got in 15 minutes - that was going to be good enough for that day.

Have You Done Your Rate Math?

At the beginning of this year, I decided to take a novel approach to the much-hyped financial crisis. I raised my hourly rate.

This isn’t a number I share with clients. It’s a guideline I use when I calculate project rates. Effective January 1, I increased this rate by 12%, pumped up my annual revenue goal by about the same amount, and felt pretty proud of myself for having the chutzpah to do it.

Until last week.

That’s when I read the “What Should I Charge?” chapter of Ilise and Peleg’s book The Designer's Guide To Marketing And Pricing (that’s Chapter 8 for those of you who, like me, are a month or so behind on the Marketing Plan + Calendar’s reading list). Here I found everything I needed to factor into my hourly rate, including my overhead, my estimated taxes, and even my own salary.

At first I figured I was doing fine, but a little voice in the back of my head suggested that I should run the numbers just to be sure. After 7 years in business I’ve learned to trust “the voice” without question when it talks to me.

On this particular day, it was screaming.

Deepen Your Differentiation

You’re very good at what you do. You’ve got the right skills, plenty of experience, and a sweet portfolio. So, why doesn’t more business come your way?

Maybe you’re not standing out from the crowd.

The structure of the creative industry (thousands of small firms rather than a few large ones) means that many firms are targeting the same people you are. And, to your target audience, it’s hard to tell the difference between you all.

You’ve probably already chosen a target market, or chosen to market a particular skill set. A web designer is more specific (and therefore visible) than a graphic designer, and a motion graphics specialist is more specific still.

You know all that, and so you’ve already differentiated yourself as much as you rationally can.

Maybe it’s time to look at differentiation from a less rational perspective.