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Word of Mouth – Marketing that Works

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There are at least three major challenges in marketing our enterprise services:

  1. More than 90% of the population does not see what we do as relevant to them – when it comes to enterprise they are pre-contemplators
  2. Getting our messages through – what are our key messages and how to we get them where they can be heard – by the people that matter?
  3. Giving people the confidence, conviction and commitment to act on the messages – to give us a call, to come to a workshop, to make an appointment, to have a conversation

Now the default setting for the VAST majority of enterprise projects are these:

We won’t worry about the pre-contemplators – we will target those who already have ideas they want to act on or already have the belief and the conviction that they can make progress.  This makes it easier for us to hit our numbers.

Our core messages will be:

1.  we can help turn your dreams into reality (if you don’t have dreams don’t call us)

2.  We can turn your business ideas into reality (ignore the fact that the ‘Dragons’ mash up and humiliate most of the poor saps that go to them – with our help you can’t fail)

3. It is quick – and relatively easy – (if you haven’t got the skills we can teach them to you) – you can be up and running in just weeks or months.  10 000 hours to master a field – forget it – who is Malcolm Gladwell anyway? 3 half day workshops and a bit of one to one on the business plan will “see you ‘reet”. (Glad no-one is measuring survival rates on our projects!)

4.  To get people to take action we will lure them in by hinting at the availability of money, childcare, bouncy castles and food.  We will even pay them the bus fare (yes, it costs a lot to administer but – what are we to do…?)

5.  We will spend a lot of money on marketing collateral, leaflets, web sites and e-mail marketing campaigns (digital exclusion! – you mean some poor people don’t have e-mail accounts – never mind they could never become proper business people anyway – they are not our target group).

6. We will attend every possible event and push our services hard – just like those guys who sell SKY TV and Credit Cards in the Merrion Centre – “You mean we shouldn’t be selling enterprise like any other commodity?  Why not?”

We know that these approaches:

  • are expensive
  • have very low hit rates
  • attract a whole load of people who just want to get the money without putting in the work
  • attract people easily seduced by the idea of a quick fix – rather than composing a life and a livelihood
  • elicit more suspicion, frustration and cynicism than enthusiasm and engagement
  • provide us with very high customer acquisition costs.  (interesting that most entrepreneurs are very interested in this number – yet most projects funded to support entrepreneurs don’t worry about their own cost per customer acquisition at all – ‘We are below targets – lets throw some more money at marketing then!’).

What about looking at marketing approaches that work.

Word of mouth.

Reputation building, seeking referrals and recommendations – based on the fact that we are bloody good!  That we do inspire, transform, care and coach.  That we are more than interested in people and their passions.  That we are with them for the long haul.

Worrying more about what every customer says about us to their mates, in the pub, in the clubs and on the streets, rather than some abstract and easily manipulated percentage that represents ‘customer satisfaction’ – YUK!

Being the kind of people and the type of service that our customers can’t wait to recommend to their friends.

Once we start to spend time and money on developing marketing and enagement strategies  based on:

  • reputation management
  • referrals
  • introductions
  • social networking
  • gatekeepers, and
  • the needs, interests, cultures and values of the communities we serve (rather than policy goals and outcomes)

we would start to see the basics of our own businesses transformed.

  • 10% of customers influence the purchasing decisions of the other 90%
  • 91% of customers are “likely” to buy off of a recommendation
  • 92% of customers “prefer” a word of mouth recommendation

Powerful Question or Cliche?

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Interesting post over at SAMBA blog about the power of the:

What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?

question.

Does it make you a powerful life transformer – or just another cliche ridden life coach?

There is no doubt IMHO  that this is potentially a life changing question.

It IS also a cliche.

What makes the difference is the nature of the relationship that you have with the person who you are asking.

If you have respect, credibility and trust – then the question will be taken on board.

Ask it too early though and you will be just another cliche ridden life coach.

For me, enterprise and entrepreneurship are great processes through which people can ‘find themselves’ and allow their true identity to emerge.

Done well this is a thing of beauty.

I have written more about this topic at http://tinyurl.com/djxwsx and http://tinyurl.com/aqgweq

The art of ‘enterprise coaching’ is not just about having great questions – it is also about having the relationship that permits you to ask them.

And we should never be afraid of asking the BIG, SCARY questions – but we must have the right relationship first.

Enterprise Lessons from Frazer Irving

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Had the privilege of attending my first Creative Networks event at Leeds College of Art.  Frazer Irving – a wonderful illustrator talked about his career – from which I took the following:

  1. the seeds of your (your clients) future are often sown early – go back to the early years to see if the basis for an enterprise were sown then
  2. just because it sells does not mean it is good – heroin is not better than tofu – even if it does shift more units – selling stuff is not the be all and all – truth and beauty matter too
  3. provoke, invoke, evoke – apparently John Lennon said that – not a bad JD for an enterprise coach either
  4. 5 years of crappy jobs and being on the dole – being on the dole were the ‘happy days’
  5. ‘ideas burning on the inside’
  6. managers/editors can leave you with tears streaming down your face and your soul ripped out and thrown on the floor
  7. the bad times provide the fuel and drive to allow the good
  8. an incessant streak of optimism helps – on being rejected by judges in a portrait competition Frazer chose to believe it was because he wasn’t important – ‘although it might have been because, then, I wasn’t very good’
  9. it takes a lot of time, training, passion and life experience to really master your subject
  10. great technology combined with great passion and skills produce remarkable, beautiful and important results
  11. sometimes you need someone to say ‘chin up – you will be alright’
  12. sometimes when your art is ripped off it gets you great new gigs – life-changing breaks…
  13. be a slave to the muse – let the story dictate the style – if the story is trivial don’t expect to get great results
  14. it is really about finding out who you are and what you can become – enterprise is about the emergence of identity – the process of becoming…
  15. treat me as a ‘pencil monkey’ and you will get mediocrity
  16. in the comic world a lot of bad product is there because of poor management – comics and every other industry on the planet – management is perfectly designed to get the results it gets
  17. if it is bad it is (nearly always) because the managers/editors have put the wrong people on the job
  18. if you have recruited the wrong people then forcing them to compromise WILL lead to mediocrity
  19. recruit great talent carefully and then trust it to deliver on its own terms – not yours
  20. when your hobby becomes your job – you get another hobby
  21. musicians jam and sometimes the results are great – what is the jamming equivalent for you?
  22. be careful about your reputation – one person saying you might not hit a deadline in a public forum can be a killer
  23. sometimes it is best not to claim the credit for all your ideas
  24. it really is full of ups and downs – but you come out of the downs with even more resources – psychological and technical if not financial

This was a great networking event – convivial atmosphere – great facilities – good food – great speakers and good management.

If only all networking opportunities were this good!

Fighting the Recession – ‘Buildings and Others’ or Social Capital?

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So Dundee is looking to get an outpost of the V&A museum, housed in a  new £42 million building – with a business plan that suggests it could feature local strengths in illustration, comics, animation, interactive media and computer gaming.  So much for  jam, jute and journalism.

It appears to be part of a longer term strategy that the city has been following based on the thinking of Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class).

Florida suggests that urban regeneration depends on a city attracting enough of the right kind of people – the creative class – to create businesses and jobs.  And the way to attract the right kind of people is to have the right kind of buildings – good housing stock, excellent public parks and other amenities. At its hearts appears to be a belief that if a city is failing it is because it does not have enough of the right kind of people.

This is an expensive strategy, and there is a real risk that it widens the gap between the haves and the have nots.  There is a reliance on trickle down and a hope that some of the magic pixie dust of these creatives will rub off on the locals.  And even if it doesn’t? Well they constitute a ready made supply of willing labour for the creatives – its better than nothing

I got to visit Dundee several times in recent years as I helped the Sirolli Institute to set up an Enterprise Facilitation™ Project in the City.  The project had a relatively modest investment requirement.   The investment was in building social capital, a group of local people who believe in the potential of local people and the power of enterprise as a process and a discipline to help them to transform their lives.  They recruit and manage a person centred coach whose sole job is to facilitate the hopes and dreams of local people.  To hep them make progress on their projects on their own terms.  It is based on a belief that the City already has all of the resources that it needed to manage its own regeneration.  It is an approach that recognises that the best hope for a good economic and social future lies in the long term development of local people – not in attracting outsiders and depending on them to deliver a better future.

Yesterday I got the chance to visit UrbanBiz in Leeds.  They have a small, poky office on the main road through Chapeltown.  Poorly designed and basically equipped; it is hardly a ‘signature building’.

Yet it was jumping!

People waiting to use computers, to talk with advisers to make something happen for themselves.  The centre may not win any design awards – but it is convivial.  It is ‘of the people’.

Regeneration does not depend on buildings to attract outsiders.  It depends on the engagement and sensitive but powerful facilitation and co-ordination of local people. On the development of social capital.

Losing the fixation with buildings and others – and knocking a couple of noughts of regeneration budgets (the people focused approach is so much cheaper) might just be the way forward.

Getting the right enterprise clients

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I recently received an e-mail from a friend and customer of mine who is managing a size-able enteprise project:

“Mike

I am using the training that me and the team have had from you to inform a business plan.

We are identifying an issue with people coming to us wanting funding for safety passports, fork lift truck licences etc. We are letting them apply straight away, but then they go away and we don’t hear from them again. 

To ensure we have more impact and build the relationship I’m going to look at solutions like using a minimum number of outreach sessions before unlocking other opportunities e.g. funding.  Where we have a relationship with the client we find out more about them, including often that they don’t really want what they are asking for in the first instance and rather something else, or that there are bigger issues holding them back. Also this process can weed out those people who can really afford to pay for training themselves – if we pay for them we are changing nothing about them or the world.

I don’t want to go down the Jobcentre route of the client having to be out of work and desperate for at least 6 months or 3 months to access any support but I think if word gets round you have funding then you get overrun with people, not all of whom have many barriers, which is what we’re finding.

I think this sends me back to thinking about who and how we really want to help and work with and to what end.  I think a lot of it is in the contracting that you describe in the Enterprise Coaching cycle.  Having the opportunity to build rapport with the client and really set out what you are both bringing to that relationship.

Yours…”

This outlines a number of challenges that are faced by enterprise support projects – which few have the courage to tackle head on – because it might make “the numbers” look worse.

As soon as you start to offer funding or direct opportunities to people, you start to attract a lot of the wrong kind of client.  Well, perhaps the right kind of client – but with the wrong motivation – and with a fundamental  misunderstanding of the power and potential of  your offer to them.  People motivated by a desire for handouts or quick fixes, rather than those that really want to work towards long term and sustainable progress.

You really want to ONLY attract people who come to you because you can help them by being kind, compassionate, caring, supportive and challenging.  ie the ONLY thing you offer is life changing transformational coaching. 

All the other transactional stuff (skills, money, training, premises etc) is available elsewhere in the system. Our job is to build the desire/commitment/hunger to help people to use it. 

I don’t think the answer is to delay helping people to access what they think they want.  Although we should know that most of our clients will initially present us with what I call ‘A BIG LIE’.  Very few clients will present us with their truths until we have earned their trust and repsect. 

They nearly all tell us a big, fat, safe lie to begin with. 

The answer is to help them to get some of that stuff (otherwise they will see us as useless and hard to work with) and challenge them as to what they REALLY want to do with it – and will it give them what they are looking for? 

This is all about being able to be acceptant and confrontational – which I also cover in the enterprise coaching training.