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If increasing revenues and improving cash flow is important- YOU MUST BE here.
Don’t miss John Lankford’s Marketing and Sales Workshops Designed Exclusively for Entrepreneurs, Thursday, February 16, 2012.
During these workshops you will build an actionable plan to attract more qualified leads and close more deals faster. John is a RESULTS GUY, you will get results.
Clients have experienced double and triple digit revenue growth using his system.
I am very pleased to be able to bring in nationally recognized, 4 time North American Business Coach of the Year, John Lankford, for just one day to share his Marketing and Sales workshops.
In the morning: 12 Marketing Keys of Successful Entrepreneurs, for only $595 two people from your company you will have an actionable one page plan to attract more qualified leads.
In the afternoon: A Sales System that Works, for only $595 for two people from your company you will have an actionable one page plan to land more customers.
Sign up for both for $997 and enjoy lunch with John between workshops.
Conveniently located at the offices of Olsen Thielen at I-35W and County Road C, 2675 Long Lake Blvd, St. Paul, MN 55113.
For more information, click on the links below, but all you need to know is you will learn how to attract more qualified leads and land more customers.
If you want more leads or want to close more deals, sign up for these Thursday, February 16, 2012 workshops.
Space is limited. To sign up email Jeff at jredmon@redmonlaw.com or call at 715-386-0100.
WHO – Who is the core customer of the enterprise. This defines the potential customers most likely to buy the product or service in the quantity required for optimal profit.
Is your juice box customer the 4-year-old who drinks your product or the 25-40 year-old, well-educated, internet savvy mom? Robert Bloom helped Nestlé move from an ‘also ran a juice box company’ to #1 by recognizing that Mom was their customer and targeting the well-educated, health conscious Mom in all their marketing.
Personalize Your Customer
Bob Bloom, author of “Inside Advantage,” is the grand master at helping identify the ‘Who.’” The key is to personalize your customer. This is more than understanding your target market; it’s about putting a face, name and persona on your customer. “Getting to know your customer by thinking about her or him in human terms – not as a statistic – will help facilitate a positive sales outcome, ” says Bloom.
- Start with the demographic attributes of your core customer.
- Move to the psychographic characteristics.
- Then, make it personal. It’s ok to stereotype here, we’re looking for the 80% not all 100%.
- What are their likes and dislikes?
- What other interests do they have?
- Are they comfortable on the internet or are they the low tech?
- Is there something truly unique about your buyer that might distinguish them?
Curves is a classic “Who” study. A middle aged woman, ready to be fit, not too athletic, hates spandex, little or no exercise experience. With this “Who” in mind, Curves not only shaped their marketing but shaped the entire customer experience. The Curves workout is a set of easy to follow stations that fosters social interaction. Understanding their “Who”, you won’t find the classic exercise mirror wall in a Curves. Curves knows it’s Who.
80% Ain’t Bad to Define Your Core Customer
Inner Circle founder Norm Stoehr often talked about his restaurant experience with a house dressing that 80% of his customers loved, 10% thought it was too spicy and 10% thought it was too bland. Our tendency is to fiddle with our 80 % approval rating to satisfy what may simply be outliers. Do not mess with success. The 80-20 Rule is alive and well when it comes to your Who.
Figure out who your “Who” is, keep it dynamic, and let it evolve as you sharpen your understanding about what motivates your best core customers.
Who the Heck is Harry Anyway?
In nearly thirty years practicing law and sharing countless books with clients, friends and business owners, I have seen more impact and received more positive feedback from a book that has nothing to do with business but everything to do with enjoying prosperity. Younger Next Year was written a number of years ago by a retired Wall Street lawyer, Chris Crowley and a family doctor, Henry Lodge (“Harry”). The book has been transformational for me and for the many who have decided to follow “Harry’s Rules.” The book shares in an easy to read memorable way why and how these rules work, both practically and scientifically, but just seven simple rules can help you be “younger next year.” As we look at 2012, more of us should take heed and follow Harry’s Rules.
Harry’s Rules
- Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life.
- Do serious aerobic exercise four days a week for the rest of your life.
- Do serious strength training with weights two days a week for the rest of your life.
- Spend less than you make.
- Quit eating crap!
- Care.
- Connect and commit.
Younger Next Year shares that aging may be inevitable but decay is a choice. It is easy to do, unfortunately easy not to do. Forget New Year’s Resolutions, commit to being younger next year by slowing, if not reversing, the decaying process. Read the book to get the jump start you need.
May 2012 bring everything you are hoping for and may you also be “Younger Next Year”. Happy New Year!!!
Is your organization grounded on a solid foundation with an articulated Core Ideology: Core Values and Core Purpose? Core values are those essential guiding tenets that define the enduring character of your organization. Core values provide the base against which all decisions can be tested. Is this action consistent with our core values? Your purpose is why your organization exists and it’s not to make money, that’s too easy. When found, your core purpose describes your passion.
Core Values embody what you stand for. Zappos is well known for living their core values. Number 1 on their list is Deliver WOW through Service. They say if something is worth doing it is worth doing with a WOW. A signature story which exemplifies their core value is the customer service person who took four hours to help a woman who had a problem with the shoe she had recently bought. Four hours is pretty impressive but then you find out she didn’t even buy the shoes from Zappos. Another Core Value they live by is create fun and a little weirdness. One has to wonder where the little weirdness line is? To shape your core values, start with the list you think represents your core value then test them. If circumstances caused this value to pelanize your company, would you change it or stick with it? Would you fire an employee who violated this value? What if she was your #1 sales person? When you have true core values identified, you will celebrate signature stories and ask who will create the next signature story.
Core Purpose defines why you exist. For 3M it’s Innovation, for Nike it’s Competition, Disney, Happiness and Starbucks, Escape. This is a hard one to nail down. Most often the answer is to make money. Jim Collins suggests that you ask that most important question, why, at least five times and then maybe you will be getting closer to the answer. In a recent session, it became apparent that for the company I was working with the passion was about solving problems. Not necessarily market place words that will drive customers to the door but truly what was driving their organization and success.
As the holidays approach it’s a good time to remember that the small stuff is just the small stuff and it’s easy to fill our life with small stuff because it’s ubiquitous and there is so damn much of it. We should take stock of the important stuff, the Big Rocks.
Stephen Covey introduced us all to the jar that represents our life. If you don’t put the big rocks in first but instead allow your jar to get filled with less important small pebbles and sand there will be no room for the big rocks. By putting the big rocks in first, your family, friends, the most important tasks at work, self reflection, education, your God, you will find room to fill in the spaces with a few pebbles, even a bunch of sand. So identify your big rocks in your life and put them in your jar first. Once all the dry rocks, pebbles and sand have apparently filled your jar, you will find there is still room for a cup of coffee or a beer to fill in the air space not visible to the naked eye. Because no matter how full your jar, there is always time for a cup of coffee or a beer with a friend. Here’s a link to a Stephen Covey video asking a woman to look for a new paradigm with her jar of life http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VDxKLSyksI Have you identified the Big Rocks in your life?
As in life, in your business do you know what your Big Rocks are? What are those things that are most important? What are those things that will have the biggest impact on your business? Take inventory and sort it out. The Big Rocks matter so be sure you have room in your jar for them.
Nine seconds is all you get to fascinate a person enough to get their attention. Our attention span used to be 20 minutes but the internet has had a slight impact, it’s now down to 9 seconds. Sally Hogshead, in her book, Fascinate, shares the seven triggers that we use to become fascinating: lust, mystique, alarm, prestige, power, vice and trust. By activating the right triggers, Hogshead suggests you can get others to fall in love with your ideas.
On her website, www.FScoreTest.com you can take a test to identify your dominant trigger. Once you understand your unique combination of triggers, you can start creating more fascinating ideas and messages.
Here is a summary on how to trigger a response:
By understanding your personal brand of natural triggers and putting them to use, you can create the most fascination with your ideas. How can you make someone fall in love with your next message? Hogshead is worth watching check out her book, Fascinate, or her website, www.sallyhogshead.com.
No the toilet is not the answer, it’s trust and sharing. Sounds simple enough but in business everyone seems to be looking for a way to monetize their social media. More common is simply the question why should I spend the time? Selling through social media is not the answer. Those of us who have spent a lifetime building our network of people who see us as a go-to person who can solve problems cannot now shift gears moving to what we see as impersonal media. How could that help build personal relationships?
Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks has repositioned his company in a way that recognizes relationships actually still do matter. He suggests using social media to leverage your time to build and support trust and sharing with a broader audience. It is not about selling.
How many of us have met someone you would like to stay in touch with but just never seem to find the time. Social media provides a tool to stay in touch will relevant information. In a business context, does anyone really care about who you had lunch with this afternoon? Rather, what are those things you would share in a one on one conversation with a client, prospect, referral agent or network contact? You now have ideas what to tweet on The Twitter or post on your Facebook page.
This is not something easily delegated because if this is to be an extension of you, it needs to be authentic. If you are using social media to build trust and sharing ideas and insights it needs to have your voice and sense of authority. If you were a plumber, you probably should share things related to the area where you are trying to build trust. Can you share details of your new digital camera that snaps pictures of game in front of your deer stand? Absolutely, if it speaks to your target market and you would share that same information over lunch. How about pictures of you in a tutu at your father daughter dance recital? Probably, not so much.
I am not an early adopter of social media. I have worked hard all of my professional career to build personal relationships and to be seen as a trusted advisor to business owners. I have more names in my Rolodex (some of you will remember what that is) than I could ever stay in touch with in any meaningful way. Social media may just be the way I can continue to reach out to those who want to listen. The beauty of social media is the receiver can choose to turn it off. So I am imposing only if they choose to listen. Schultz encouragement to use social media only for trust and sharing resonated with me. I finally found a useful purpose for social media.
Our remedial society focuses on improving our weaknesses. Over 70% of parents when asked which subject they would help their child with if they could only choose one where the child got 2 –A’s,1-B ,1-C and 1-F chose the “F.” However, our greatest potential for growth rests in our areas of strength. The late Don Clifton, co-author of: Now Discover Your Strengths spent a lifetime at Gallop testing people regarding their strengths. He got the idea when he was testing speed reading programs. In his study he found readers who read 90 words a minute improved to 150 wpm but those who were strong readers at 350 wpm improved to an amazing 3,200 wpm with the same instruction. The moral of the story is we can spend an inordinate amount of time to get from terrible to downright horrible in our areas of weakness but in our areas of strength the potential is almost limitless.
During the 1984 Olympics, the Chinese Table Tennis Team dominated. Their coach indicated they spent all of their practice time focused on their areas of strength, because that is where they could show the most improvement. Their number one player could not hit a back hand, period. Every opponent knew his weakness but he was still unbeatable because his forehand was so strong and overpowering. His strength more than covered for his obvious weakness.
Peter Drucker, the father of modern management said, “The idea that there are “well rounded” people, people who have only strengths and no weaknesses…. is a prescription for mediocrity if not incompetence.” Tom Rath, grandson of Don Clifton has written a more recent book on strengths, Strengths Finder 2.0. With the purchase of this book, you receive a code to go to the Gallup Strengths Finder website to take a 15 minute online assessment. From this test you are provided your top five Talents from a list of 34. After testing literally millions of people this test has shown to fairly identify those 5 areas where you have innate talent and where you have the greatest potential for growth. Like the speed readers, by spending more time on your areas of strength, more growth is possible.
People report that working in their area of strength you can hyper focus as time seems to stand still. When finished you may be tired but there is a sense of exhilaration and accomplishment. Strengths Finder 2.0 has a chapter on each of the 34 strengths with detailed examples of how you can best exploit your strengths. The first 31 pages are interesting but if you take the test all you need to do is read the few pages for each of your strengths.
It is the rare individual who has the luxury of only working in your areas of strengths. Try going to your boss and suggesting I just read this great book that says these 5 things are my strengths where I should spend all of my time so I’m not doing all of those other things I’m not so good at. See how that works for you. Rather, see if you can spend a few more minutes each day in your area of strengths. Reframe a task to an area of strength. We have all seen that extraordinary engineer who gets promoted to management for more money and responsibility but just ain’t a manager. That organization failed not only in its management promotion but probably lost one of their top engineers. There is ample evidence that strengths-based leadership is outperforming traditional practices.
Buy Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath and take the test. Discover your strengths, read the chapters on your five strengths and put them in to practice.
Mike Maples, venture capitalist extraordinaire, has introduced a concept that we should all consider, The Pivot. The Pivot is that extraordinarily courageous risky change in business direction that leaves behind your prior committed strategy. Even if it’s one that you have given your all to for the last few years, The Pivot bets the farm in a new direction. He describes three Pivots: Pricing, Product and the Whole Company. The Pivot is not a new iteration, not that small change every business does in any changing condition. Rather, the Pivot is a strategic change in the Business Model to achieve product market fit, where your product can be offered to the market in a scalable profitable way. The best way to describe these Pivots is with Maples’ stories.
The Pricing Pivot. The Pricing Pivot involved an early game sold as an app on the emerging Smart Phone. The Business Model involved selling this well-received app at $10. When other apps came to the market for free or $0.99 there was little hope of selling a $10 app, so the Pricing Pivot decision was made to sell the app at $0.99.
The Product Pivot. The Product Pivot example involved a team that had invested several years of programming to develop localized want ads for university campuses. Shortly before the product launch, Facebook began allowing free classified ads, and a product shift was made. Cheggs.com was formed to rent college textbooks. Their business model involves buying books at wholesale and then renting them to poor college students at near wholesale prices, again and again and again. Not a bad return on investment.
The Company Pivot. Another team had worked for years to build an audio blogging site for people to post short audio files. Then along came YouTube with video. One might think their investment was lost, but they would be wrong. After offering to return their investors money, these entrepreneurs focused their energies on a new concept of short micro-blogs not longer than 144 characters. Welcome Twitter.
Think about how courageous these entrepreneurs must have been to bet their last dollars on an untested idea. Rarely would I recommend watching a 45 minute video but Mike Maples is worth the 45 minutes. Watch this video.
Mike Maples – You Have to Be Willing to Throw It All Away
Are you driving looking through the windshield or watching the rearview mirror?
Leading and Lagging Indicators
Leading indicators are items that project end-result performance, driving looking through the windshield. For example, labor productivity is a leading indicator of job profitability. Lagging indicators are where the rubber meets the road but is necessarily driving using the rearview mirror. Leading indicators give you a chance to correct a problem before it kills the lagging indicator. Leading indicators allow you to be proactive. Lagging indicators, by their very nature, force you to be reactive. Leading indicators tell you how a part of your progress is going.
Here are some examples for each:
Lagging
- Revenues
- Margins
- Net Profits
- Support Costs
- New Customers
- Turnover
- Accidents
- Cash in bank
- Project over budget
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Leading
- Gross Profits
- Orders, Forecasts
- % Revenue From Recent (Higher Margin) Releases
- Defect in First Customer Shipments
- New Customer Visits, Demos, Proposals
- Customer Satisfaction
- Wage rates
- Safety Meetings
- A/R Aging
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Do you know what your key indicators are?
Are you using the key indicators to improve performance?
Jeffrey A. Redmon
Founder, Redmon Law Chartered and Inner Circle of St. Croix Valley
jredmon@redmonlaw.com
www.redmonlaw.com
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