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Category: Leadership

Event Marketing – The Key To Reaching New Customers May Be Through Their Stomachs

If you own or operate a service or manufacturing business, one great way to show your leadership of your industry and in the local business community is to host an event. There are many benefits, little downside, and if successful it can be scaled up or down or repeated again and again.

There are some basic requirements for a successful event:

1) Guests! Getting enough participation by the right participants is key. Market the event extensively, but create exclusivity by sending actual paper invitations – not just an e-mail announcement of an open house. The invitation requests and begs an RSVP, so that you can get an accurate head count for food and beverage, space planning etc. You want the room to look full but not crowded, and you’d like current customers to mix and mingle with prospects, so they spread the word about the work you do for them.

2) Refreshments – This is a tough part for many people to get right. Gauging the amount, level and type of food and drink to serve a very diverse guest list can be difficult, but there are some guidelines to follow to make it easier.

a) Let the time of day for the event guide your choices. For afternoon events, light appetizers and soft drinks may be appropriate. For a after-hours cocktail event, more substantial appetizers and passed hors d’oeuvres and beer and wine selections might be more appropriate.

b) For a dinner event or awards presentation, a buffet style will facilitate networking, but a sit-down dinner will allow guests to be more comfortable for a longer period of time, and form fewer but closer relationships with table-mates. Get the highest quality food and most sophisticated beverage choices you can afford – these are your guests and customers, doubly important to let them know you care enough to serve the best.

c) Drinks – for open bars, plan on 2-3 drinks per person, average, and keep key brands of each spirit on hand, along with plenty of mixers. For gatherings of over 20 people, hire a professional bar tender, you don’t want your guests being over-served because your staff feels generous when pouring for their favorite customer. Keep plenty of ice on hand, about 2 lbs per person is a good rule of thumb.

3) Venue – if you are a manufacturing business, you have hard assets to show off – an open house type should include a “plant tour” of your production areas and equipment. Clean up extensively beforehand, remove trash, scrap and waste, remove any unused or non-functional equipment, sweep and mop floors, remove signage or decoration of questionable taste from walls, re-install any safety equipment, cover or hide proprietary customer work in progress. If you’re a service business, there may not be much of interest to show visitors, cubicles look the same pretty much everywhere. Consider having the event in your building lobby if it is impressive, or at a nearby hotel.

4) Entertainment – unless this is strictly an open house to greet customers, there should be some additional component to the event to warrant attendance by the guests. If you seek to be a thought leader in your industry or local business community, consider a brief presentation by your top management, including slides or video. Show off your new service or new capabilities, show your point of view and strengthen the reasons for your guests to work with you rather than your competitor. Another avenue to consider is to hold educational seminars, which would highlight how your firm provides solutions to well-known or recognized problems in your industry.

5) Amenities – make sure the guests feel welcome and thank them for their participation. The little things make a difference when creating an impression. A small parting gift, even if its a branded item (your brand, of course)is fine, but make it a high quality piece. Make sure there is a place to put coats if it’s in the winter, offer umbrella escorts from the parking lot if it’s raining, valet parking if you have a city location, and other niceties will make a big difference in the overall impression.

6) Follow Up – all the entertaining in the world won’t make your business grow (unless you’re a caterer) unless you connect with those prospects both at the event and afterward, when they are back in their own environment and in decision-making mode. A nice Thank You note to all attendees with a personal note in each will do the trick, along with a follow-up e-mail later that week, highlighting some of the advantages and benefits you presented them with at the event should help cement your company in the correct place in their mind for future.

Using events to promote your business and generate new customers is a time-honored tactic that works when you pay attention to the little details and you make it look easy. If you’re not comfortable with all this, maybe have a dry run for your staff a week before to work out the bugs before getting in front of customers. In general, quality will show you off to best advantage, so work with the best caterer, best beverage supplier, produce a high quality presentation with some production value and take advantage of the opportunity and follow up, and your business will grow before your eyes.

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May 22, 2014
Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-Up – Don’t Forget That Last One!

Usually I focus on marketing strategy, tactics and practices in this forum, but I wanted to touch on a more sales and management-oriented topic that has been rearing its ugly head recently – Poor sales personnel practices.

If you’re in sales as a profession, there’s a few simple adages that pave the road to success.

1) Know your market, know your customer, solve their problems, don’t create them

2) Under-promise and Over-Deliver

3) It’s more effective and less expensive to keep your existing customers than to find new ones

4) Always make that last call of the day, no matter how tired or late you are

5) Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-up

If you can keep those things in mind as you go about your daily interaction with customers and prospects, you probably won’t go too far wrong.

Where most less-experienced folks tend to drop the ball is on numbers 2 and 5. Most new folks are so eager to make the sale, they will tell prospects virtually anything to close them, and then when it comes time for the order to arrive or be fulfilled, the customer is left disappointed or worse, feels cheated. At extreme levels this amounts to bait-and-switch, which is a prosecutable offense. You may get a few orders this way, but there won’t be any referrals or recommendations, and the gravy train will grind to a halt fairly quickly, especially in the age of Internet postings, blogs and rating sites for every business imaginable. Word will get out even more quickly and nobody will touch you after that – bad idea.

Number 5 is sometimes a function of time management, sometimes of lack of training, sometimes lack of personal responsibility. The Show up and Suit up portions, most have down, although I’ve spoken with many business leaders in the last few months who say they can’t hire staff that can manage to do even that on a consistent basis. It’s the follow-up that eludes most people, and the one’s that discover this little secret are going to move to the top of the heap rather quicker than his or her competitors. Just because someone was not in a position to buy when you left them last, (some more hardcore folks would say you failed to effectively close them the first time) doesn’t mean that they never will have a need for what you’re offering. Your odds of them calling you when the time comes has much more to do with top of mind awareness and initial impressions than of product quality or benefits.

Effective follow-up must be gauged carefully and is different for each prospect. The tone, medium, frequency and content of your follow-up is critical to maintaining that tenuous connection and reinforcing that initial, hopefully good, impression. The more personal and more specific you can make that follow-up, regardless of the medium, whether by phone, card, letter, e-mail, or visit. General, automated, non-specific stuff will not have the impact or make the connection you need to encourage that prospect to pick up the phone when the time comes. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a hand-written note – it takes about 5 minutes of your time and you’d be amazed that impact it has on the recipient. sometimes a mix of media is appropriate, depending on the volume you need it to cover every week or the type of sale. The only constant you can count on is that if you don’t do it, your sale with go to the guy who does. Sometimes it’s trial and error, but you have to use common sense, especially having to do with timing and frequency. You really don’t want to overdo it – an e-mail every other day is likely overkill . . .

Consistency, reliability and accountability are the keys to good sales practice, and the follow-up should be part of that – if the customer feels you’ll be there before the sale, think how much they’ll appreciate you being there after the sale.

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May 9, 2014
Negotiation – the Spirit of Give and Take

Everyone negotiates, almost every day, on some level, even with themselves in some cases. The idea is to weigh two opposing ideas against each other and give up something one side needs to get something they want from them – simple, right?

Lawsuits are negotiations, divorce settlements, business contracts, even social gatherings (ever try to decide on a restaurant with a group of six people?). Everyday situations require at least some skill at negotiation, and really that’s a good thing. It forces you to define your position on a given situation, to clarify your personal dividing line between “need” and “want”, and forces you to devise rationale to defend your choices. Is it any wonder that decisive people are often the best negotiators?

One helpful hint in successful negotiation is to remove any emotion from the equation. This is difficult to completely accomplish, but the better you are at it, the more likely you are to get what you want. Emotion tends to cloud judgment, makes us do things for reasons other than logic or material gain, and to give in out of pity or caring for the others’ well-being, even at risk to our own.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t be nice about it – nice isn’t an emotion, it’s a social convention. You can be civil and still not back off of your position and get what you want without emotionally wounding the other party. No need to be mean, just be firm and accommodating and civil, but stand your ground.

Above all, to be a negotiation, there has to be a spirit of give and take on both sides, some accommodation to the other side’s position, some give in order to get. Without that willingness to cooperate, to lead the proceedings down a path to mutual agreement, then it’s not a negotiation, it’s an ultimatum. A this-is-it, take-it-or-leave-it approach will not produce the results either side wants. It engenders ill will between the parties and creates a very adversarial atmosphere that is counter productive.

Sometimes, the situation just isn’t conducive to negotiation. When one side holds all the power, all the cards, leaving the other side no real room to get and has little to give, negotiations will be strained and of limited value. Job interviews or evaluations for a pay increase are like this – the employee has little leverage in most cases, unless they are absolutely irreplaceable. The best they can hope for is to make a good case, show their value in a persuasive way, and hope the boss is feeling generous or sees potential in keeping the employee happy and productive. The one time where the employee has the whip hand in this relationship is during the initial salary negotiation after the offer is made. Market forces create variance in how much power the employer has, but the odds are always in their favor.

Successful negotiation requires knowledge – knowledge of self, knowledge of the opposition’s position and wants, needs and desires. The better you know your own position, the more strongly you can negotiate it, because you have the surety of knowing where you draw the line, you have a picture of what you can live with, and anything above that is a bonus.If the other side’s line is somewhere near yours, everybody wins at the end. A smart man once said “If both sides feel like they lost a little bit, it’s a good deal” remarking to the spirit of willingness to give up something to get something else.

As you go through your week, take special note of situations that require you to negotiate – you might be surprised how many of them there are – and try to gauge how you might have used knowledge to improve your own position and get a better outcome . . .

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May 6, 2014
Self Promotion Is Not a Crime

A lot of business start-up executives I encounter in my practice have an odd feeling about marketing. They seem to think that promoting themselves is somehow unseemly or impolite, simply not done. I can only thank my stars that this isn’t the case, or I’d be out of a job! Self-promotion of your business is vital to it’s growth and continued viability. So where did the guilt come from?

I think it comes from the image of a blowhard, always talking about themselves and exaggerating their prowess and bragging about how they are the biggest, best, whatever they do. We’ve seen them, we know of them, and we try to avoid them. But there is a distinct difference between promoting your business endeavor and bragging about it’s success. Done properly, self-promotion allows you to get the word out often enough, and generate enough business that your satisfied clients will do the bragging for you, so you don’t have to.

Small or especially start-up businesses need to promote their existence rather heavily, and it comes more naturally to some entrepreneurs than others. Most we’ve met are extremely passionate about their business and very proud of their accomplishments, and rightly so. For those to whom this is a natural occurrence, they not only make it look easy, but have come to a point where it can be very subtle and low key and still be effective. That’s the mark of a master, and admittedly, few reach that level. Fortunately, some come to the realization early that this is not their forte, and they hire someone to do it for them – they’re called clients at that point, and bless them all!

To be a small business owner, one thing it’s difficult to be and still be successful is shy. You gotta get it out there and let the public know you’re there, and by doing it a few at a time, you might not ever reach critical mass needed to make it a viable business. So a strong marketing strategy, including some form of outreach promotion and advertising is usually in order. Often it’s something simple, a small ad, even a classified ad is a start. Maybe a postcard to the local area, or a short letter to the neighboring zip codes. Maybe it’s a little league soccer or baseball sponsorship. But at the heart of it, it’s the business owner’s personality coming through all of it, selling hard and showing that passion for their business that makes it all work.

If you’ve started a business in the wake of a layoff or change of life status due to the recent recession, you’re in good company. SBA is reporting a record number of applications for funding and loans, and services that support small business start-ups like insurance, permits, licensing and other things are having a good year. You’re off and running, congratulations!

Now it’s time to turn to marketing to make that little kernel of an idea grow and flourish. If you haven’t done so already, decide how much you want to spend, and start saving now to fill that budget line. There is no hard and fast rule for how much to set aside. Some businesses spend over 20% of their gross income on marketing expenses, some as little as .5% – it depends on how you spend it, and what your goals are. The important thing is to get started, do something, make it happen, so the results can start working for you!

Don’t be shy about self promotion, it’s not a crime, but if you just can’t bring yourself to tell everyone about your new endeavor, hire someone to do it for you – it’s the best money you’ll ever spend.

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May 2, 2014
Human Resources Are Your Finest Resources

We get asked for advice and guidance by firms large and small every day, and when reviewing whether or not to work with a new client, we try to do our due diligence and determine for ourselves whether this going to be something beneficial for both client and consulting firm. One of the unspoken, immeasurable, but over-riding factors we consider is: “Do we like working with these people”. The human factor is an “X” factor that is hard to quantify, but is crucial to a successful outcome.

How do you find, and keep those “Good” people in your organization, the ones that are loyal, hard working, dedicated and passionate about their work? Top talent requires top treatment, but how do you craft an incentive program that keeps them challenged, interested and passionate? What kind of carrot do you dangle in front of those talented executives to keep them in your stable?

According to some of the region’s foremost HR experts, a one-size-fits-all approach to benefits, incentives and retention is no longer viable, and I tend to agree. If you think about it, as marketers, we know that you can’t expect great results by sending the same package to wildly different audiences. So why would you expect great results making the same offer to a broad range of employees? Internal segmentation is just part of the story. If you dig deeper, you’ll find there are other elements that add to retention that you might not have thought of. Transparency is a tough issue that many private or family firms struggle with, but that can make a huge difference in your retention of top senior executive talent – they are savvy enough to want to know where the money is going and how decisions are being made that affect the future of the company. The lower- and mid-level employees should share this access to information, but for them, some more intensive and extensive education is coupled with the information, so that they can understand what they are seeing and how to interpret the data accurately and draw reasonable conclusions.

Most of the experts agreed that while retention is an issue, making good hiring decisions in the beginning is the single largest factor in keeping good talent on board. Some suggest pre-employment screening tests and inventories of various stripes, but most agreed as well that any single instrument should not be weighted too heavily, and certainly not weighted above the interviewers insights and impressions, background checks and due diligence. In general, their feeling was, skills can be taught, attitude can not, and that those with the right mindset that will fit in culturally with the mission and goals of the organization will do better long-term than those with top skills but behavioral issues.

What does any of this have to do with marketing? It strikes me that there are parallels between how you select and retain employees, and how you attract and retain customers. Aside from the obvious connection that the marketing department are crucial hires for your organization, and often some of the highest turnover ones. Good marketing talent is difficult to find, even at a point where double digit unemployment is quickly becoming the norm. If you find such individuals, you should strive to assess their needs and hold on to them using any means necessary, because they can make or break your company faster than any other department. Marketers can do more damage with a slipshod approach than any embezzler or bull-in-a-china-shop manager.

Spend as much time on hiring your marketers as they do segmenting their customer lists and researching the target market, and all will be well. Spend time to get to know them, make sure they’re compatible with your mission. Don’t worry if they seem a little “off” in a couple of social areas – these top talents are trained to think way outside the box, to innovate, to be renegades, not to be the round peg in a round hole. Don’t hold that against them in the hiring process, for these are signs of their future success . . .

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April 29, 2014
Marketing Leadership Means Asking the Right Questions

Ever wonder how market leading companies got that way? Ever wonder who lead the way and how they knew to veer in the direction they did? Based on our analysis of hundreds of business cases, we’ve determined that there are some key decisions that top marketing executives make in common with market leadership, the result of which is moving that company to the next level of market penetration.

5) Select Partners Carefully. Ask yourself this question: Would i want to do business with this company regardless if I made a profit or not? If the answer is no, then it’s probably not a good fit. For a partnership to work, both sides have to support the mission equally and enthusiastically. If you don’t enjoy your interactions with the partner and they’re not tremendously fruitful, cut your losses and dissolve it before things get bad.

4) Know When To Call it A Day. Ask yourself: Is this effort as effective as it was the week it started? If the answer is no, is it fatiguing and lagging due to lack of support, saturation, market shift or getting stale? It may be you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, and the ROI of continuing it is no longer viable. If that’s the case, you’re throwing money away, just pull the plug and initiate another effort. Clinging to a failing program costs you more than you imagine in lost opportunity, time, and it’s negative effect on your audience, staff and company morale has a measurable value.

3) Have a Purpose. Ask yourself: Why exactly are we doing this again? If the answer resembles something like “we did it last year”, or “our competitors tried it,” or “The Boss wants it that way” than it might be time to rethink the effort from the beginning. Legacy programs whose rationale have changed due to altered circumstances can be doing damage to your brand, losing you money, and wasting time. If the purpose no longer exists, don’t do it!

2) Are We Winning, and If Not, Why Not? One thing most market leading companies use as a mantra is that they have to be in the top 1-2 positions in each market they compete in or changes need made. They feel a need to lead, and they do everything in their power to lead their particular category for every product or service they offer. A quick analysis of the leader will tell you what you’re doing wrong, and you have to make a decision whether to fix it or bail out. The Cost/Benefit analysis should be performed regularly, and a market scan produced quarterly with ruthless honesty.

1) Where Do We Go From Here? Market leaders don’t often have to ask this question, because they think 8-9 moves ahead and plan strategically each move and have three contingencies based on research and market intelligence. They ask “where do we go” long before they get there! Draw the roadmap before you leave the barn, leave room to be flexible to respond to unforeseen challenges, and stay the course, and you’ll be surprised how far you’ll go. The control and discipline it requires to do this is what separates the men from the boys, but you can bet that market leading companies spend more time planning than executing, and spend significant time asking “What if?”

If your company wants to be a leader in their market, it comes down to asking the right questions, and probing until you get an answer that satisfies your needs. Keep digging . . .

For more great questions you should be asking, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

April 29, 2014
Sometimes the Question is More Important Than the Answer . . .

There are times in a marketer’s career when asking the right question spurs the next great idea that turns into a campaign that turns the corner on profitability and launches a whole new direction for the company or the product.

Having the curiosity and the courage to ask that question – although to you it might seem obvious, so obvious in fact that you’re sure someone else must have thought of it, analyzed the result and discarded it as unworkable – is what good marketers do. How many times have you been in a meeting and another employee asks a seemingly innocent question, and suddenly the room is on fire with ideas, and more importantly, positive feelings and agreement to trying the idea immediately. Have you kicked yourself for not asking the same thing? Why didn’t you – because you thought it was too obvious. It was obvious to you, because that’s the way you were trained to think – but most of the other people in the room were not trained that way, and that’s what makes you special!

Think it through quickly, end to end, and go ahead and bring up the obvious – you’ll be surprised at the reaction you’ll get. Curiosity and courage linked together will get you a long way in marketing. A famous marketer I know is fond of saying that there are no bad ideas, just those that don’t work under the current circumstances. His approach is to try almost anything that appears viable, and if 6 out of 10 of them fly, he’s a winner! Indeed the margin on a good idea is pretty high, so it doesn’t take much for a good idea to bring in far more than all the bad ones waste. Remember the old campaign,”Try it, you’ll like it”? Not a bad mantra in these tough times. Businesses are desperate for good paying customers, and ideas that will attract them are in short supply.

Step up, state your idea, and let the chips fall – you’ll likely be applauded and the chips fall your way – if not, at least you put something viable forward, and if it doesn’t work now, circumstances will forever change and it might work at some other time.

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April 19, 2014
Internet Not The Only Media – Yet

In a recent study of college freshmen, it was revealed that the skills we once assumed to be vital for business success – research using books and journals, proper grammar when writing letters, crafting informational documents or publishing and the like – are now obsolete, and that over 90% of college freshmen don’t possess them. They also noted that e-mail communication is already deemed “too slow” by today’s college freshmen, who have no concept of television with less than 250 channels, having been born in 1992, long after the cable expansion and the introduction of satellite TV.

These same freshmen have never possessed a record album, or conceivably a pre-recorded music CD, having come into their teens after the original MP3 file format was introduced. Fax machines are obsolete antiques, land-line phones passe, and with them phone etiquette similarly out the window. Pay phones are a mystery, a story told around campfires . . . you get the picture. Technology, especially in the communication world, has accelerated at a remarkable rate, leaving behind what seemed to be perfectly viable formats and forms of communication.

These same college freshmen, who don’t know from cassettes, will be entering the workforce in four short years, and a small percentage of them potentially taking on tomorrow’s marketing challenges. By that time, full media integration that has been trumpeted as the be all and end all of communication technology may be in place on a national or global scale, and there will essentially be one, web-driven media, all played wirelessly through whatever monitoring device happens to be handy, be it a plasma TV, the screen in the car, or the front of the refrigerator. Everything will have an IP address, from the phone to the washing machine. Everyone will have to be a web producer, a video producer, or designer, and every speech or form of communication will be measured in megabytes or terabytes, not in pages or words.

Grammar is already slipping at an alarming rate, with proper forms of English dropping off the cultural map like electronic flies, to be replaced by slang, initials, acronyms and emoticons – we’re slowly sliding back to early Egyptian hieroglyphs. How do you diagram the phrase “LOL :)!” ?

The ads of the future will only have to be produced for electronic consumption, and will be a mix of images and scrolling, hopping, swinging and fading text, compressed down to the smallest file size possible and distributed through 3 big outlets. Print will be an anachronism, copywriting a dead art, direct mail reserved for senior citizen newsletters and billing inserts in large print, with ads flashing on big, wall sized screens in all the retirement homes, which will automatically change to match the information emanating from a chip in their forearm as the seniors walk by, ala Minority Report. Well, maybe not that last one in four years, but you get the idea.

With only one medium to consider, media buying will consolidate into a government function controlled by the FCC, and time will be bid on in auction style on E-Bay. Marketers will no longer have to consider paper stock weight, envelope size, postal rate case, number of sheets on a billboard, magazine doubletruck gutters, facing page competitors, color fidelity, dot gain, screen density, and a host of other routine, mundane production detail-oriented skills required by the marketers of yesteryear. Freed from those details, will the ads be more persuasive, more effective, more targeted, more efficient? They will certainly be trackable, which is an advantage, but my guess is that how that tracking can be used will have to be heavily regulated to prevent rampant abuse.

I’m not much of a futurist, but I am a student of history, and you can easily compare the current communications integrity status to that of the latter stages of the Roman empire – I’m breaking out my fiddle as we speak . . .

If you liked this and found it valuable and would like to read more like it, subscribe to this blog and receive it weekly in your inbox. Don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

April 17, 2014
Networking Events Can Produce Results, But Common Interest Cements Relationships

We’ve all been there . . .

You go to an event, be it a conference, a seminar session or annual meeting, and you meet different business people, discover some common ground outside the theme of the event, and you keep in touch for a while after the event, but unless you work at it and nurture it, that relationship fades into the background, not serving either party. Occasionally, you run into someone that really has a lot in common with you, has some business reason to stay in touch and that relationship grows and flowers and produces solid business gains for both sides and lasts years. What made the difference?

I have a theory, and statistics gained in our work promoting events will back this assertion up to a certain degree: “The more closely aligned the business goals of the parties are, the less likely they are to form a longer-term relationship.” On the surface that may seem counter-intuitive, but keep reading.

What drives business relationships is gain – profit, cash flow, commerce. Each side has to have a clearly defined role and those roles need to be complimentary, not unidirectional, for the relationship to be productive. Gains are made and money moved when something is sold or bought. Seven times out of ten, what drives that relationship is the desire to sell to the other guy! Two salesmen can get together and banter and share a beverage, but chances are that relationship will develop a competitive or adversarial nature. But if one is a salesman and the other is a mid-level executive in another role, something can be sold there, business moves, transactions done, and the relationship works for both.

Two top executives can get together and share common issues, maybe even work on the same committee to solve an industry problem, and if there’s no chance of them being in a competitive situation, and with nothing personal underlying it – tough conditions to fill – that relationship might come in handy from time to time, but it probably will not be terribly productive. No chance to sell to the other one! No chance to beat the other one, either.

Networking meetings in general have been overused and relationships forced upon business people for a long time, and they still serve a useful function, especially for those new to an area or industry. But without the quantity of time required to care for and nurture those relationships, and a good business reason to do so, in today’s superficial and time-starved environment, most are short-lived and unproductive. The way to get the most out of networking meetings is to introduce yourself to a few key people, or better yet, have someone else introduce you to a few key individuals, and take the time to investigate them further, see if they are worth pursuing, and take the lead in keeping them fresh and alive.

If you meet ten people and stay in touch with just one really solid business individual and keep that relationship growing, you can consider that meeting a success. At that build ratio, you’ll need to attend a significant number of meetings to start a functioning network from scratch. But if you put in the time, make the investment in your own business future, you’ll find it pays off in spades over the years.

The best technique that we’ve seen success with is to let such relationships develop naturally through outside interests other than business. That fellow soccer coach, that neighborhood association committee member, that dinner companion of a college friend, that last-minute fill-in in your golfing foursome, that guy who has season tickets right next to yours at the stadium or the theater – that’s how relationships get started, and have no surface business purpose, but after getting deeper into them, you find common business ground if you’re open to discovering it. It’s old-school, but it works! It’s less contrived, less forced, more comfortable for everyone, and you don’t have to go out of your way, or wear a name tag for them to be productive!

Next time you’re at a networking function where the specific reason for attending is to meet other people to do business, think back to other similar situations and count the number of people you regularly do business with, and ask yourself how many of them you met at such an event. The answer will likely be Zero! Now examine those same people you regularly do good business with, and ask how you met them initially. The answer is usually that you were introduced by someone you both knew from somewhere else.

Try this at your next social outing or sporting event: try and steer the conversation you’re having so that it includes no clue about what your job is or what business or industry you’re in. You’ll be amazed how difficult it is, and how intriguing it makes you to others. But think of the information you’ve gathered.

Now you know more about them as people, and can make a more informed decision about whether to pursue that relationship further, and find some common business ground. My guess is that the resulting business relationship will be stronger and last longer than the one derived from the forced, contrived situation at the hotel.

Write to me with your networking stories, we’ll compare notes . . .

If you found this helpful, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog and get more weekly right in your inbox. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

April 16, 2014
Five Things About Branding We Can Learn from Geek Squad

I’m always in search of particularly effective branding efforts, just to enjoy a job well-done. Knowing how hard it is to carry out brand development on a daily basis, and how important the initial thinking is in springboarding the brand forward, I’m always looking for those that put in the effort up front and got it right.

This week’s winner is Geek Squad, the computer service firm that operates out of Best Buy stores. These guys thought about EVERYTHING, and live the brand every day. I’ve had the opportunity to try these guys out several times in the last year, and they are nothing if not consistent.

Each technician is called an “Officer”, and they always come in full uniform, including a badge and ID card, and arrive in a branded car, usually a white Volkswagon Beetle with black fenders and the logo on the doors – further reinforcing the quasi-police image. Their delivery is rather police-like, definitely gentle, but no-nonsense, they are extremely respectful of the customer’s home and work-space, touching as little as possible, asking few questions that are not directly related to the job at hand, and get right to work. They solve the problem or make a recommendation to repair at more extensive facilities or replace the machine, they come armed with a full bevy of software diagnostic tools, all branded, and get the job done, transact payment, and disappear to the next jobsite.

There was so little variation in my three experiences it was spooky, like I said, these guys are consistent. Given the labor pool from which the company draws for this position and the human factors that have to be accommodated in any national company, I’m still astounded how well they carry the brand. I know when I see those little cars on the road, that they’re on their way to help some other poor computer-illiterate victim of Microsoft, and the feeling associated with the brand is always extremely positive.

They set out with a good idea, they went full tilt toward fleshing it out, and they train the employees to clearly live and transmit the brand effectively with EVERY interaction. That’s why they’re this week’s EFFECTIVE BRANDING AWARD winner. Write to me about effective brands you’ve seen, and I’ll share them . . .

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April 14, 2014