Don’t neglect face-to-face marketing!

A few months ago I explained that I had started working on a marketing campaign to promote my business that involved signing up to many of the well-known social networking websites. And recently, with the launch of my new business website I’ve been investigating ways to attract to attract more visitors to it (and, hopefully, more new clients) by developing a web marketing strategy. As a result, I’ve been overwhelmed by the amount of material, advice and tools there are to implement such an Internet-based marketing campaign.

However, according to a recent survey carried out by Vodafone UK, face-to-face meetings are still the most effective way to secure new business. Apparently, only 33% of those surveyed have won business solely via e-mail or Internet marketing, compared with 57% who used the traditional method of face-to-face contact. About 20% of managing directors wouldn’t do business with anyone they hadn’t physically met, and over a quarter of them would refuse to buy from someone they hadn’t at least spoken to on the phone.

About 47% of business people expected to be treated to lunch, 25% preferred to discuss deals over a round of drinks and 10% said they were happiest building a commercial relationship with a prospective client on the golf course.

It seems that online marketing is most popular with younger people – almost half of those in their twenties prefer to do business this way, whereas two-thirds of all business people prefer to network with others face-to-face.

Therefore, the results of this survey seems to indicate that it is important for you to mix old methods of networking with new ones, or else you could be missing out on obtaining that vital contract you were seeking. This also probably explains the popularity of business breakfast clubs such as Business Network International, 4Networking and The Business League, but so much could be said about that it could be the subject of an entirely new blog. So watch this space!

What’s your favourite business buzzword!

As a writer, I have a passion for words. I also enjoy networking. So, imagine for a moment that your favourite business networking organization (mine is The Business League) was run by management consultants, and that you all talked in management speak.

Instead of a business breakfast meeting you would have an “early morning enterprise-synergy bacon-and-egg scenario”. And the main advantage of having just one member per profession in each chapter or branch would be that “we marginalize our sector rivals to a point where they are almost nil as a potentially competitive market factor, which means that we can dominate, in a total way, all the marbles”.

Instead of finding ways of passing referrals and doing business with your fellow members you would “innovate front-end methodologies to empower inter-commercial deliverables and thereby maximize your mission-critical schema”.

However, if you are faced with this sort of mumbo-jumbo in your company literature, perhaps you ought to be employing an editor (like me!) to make sense of it all.

I’m sure that you’ve all got your favourite examples of management speak or business buzzwords. Perhaps you could share them with me and we could all have a good laugh! Just send me a comment listing them and I’ll collate all the ones that I receive. I look forward to reading your contributions in due course.

It Might Look Quiet – But From Over Here It Isn’t!

You may have noticed that my last post was over two weeks ago and may have thought that nothing was happening on the Lockyer front. On the contrary, I have been very busy. During the first week of March I was editing articles for three different journals for Intellect and was out every evening either socializing – it was my birthday last week – business networking, attending committee meetings or dealing with entries for a local road race I’m the director of.

In addition, for some time now I have been looking for ways to increase the number of visitors to my blog. As a result of reading a very interesting article by Jack Humphrey of SocialPowerLinking.com recently I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time putting together a social marketing campaign. So, over the past week I’ve been signing up to join the various social media sites, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Propeller and Mixx, as well as the blog communities at MyBlogLog and the BlogCatalog. The results have been almost instantaneous – within a few hours I have had half a dozen e-mails from other bloggers wanting to be friends and one very complimentary review of my blog. I had already signed up to Facebook and MySpace so my next job in this compaign is find my existing friends (in the physical world) whom are on these sites and start interacting with them in cyberspace.

Finally, I suppose I ought to start writing articles for this blog. I’ve already got a few ideas that need to be worked on – so watch this space!

BNI – All Gong and No Dinner?

In July 2006 I joined the local Lowman Chapter of Business Network International (BNI). I was attracted by the attitude and enthusiasm of the members of the chapter and the local leadership team. The BNI ethos is that ‘Givers Gain’, whereby members that you’ve given business to will naturally want to reciprocate and find or give you business in return.

The idea is that members of each chapter act as a virtual sales force trying to find business for each other. I was warned at the beginning that it was not a quick fix, and that I would have to gradually build up the trust and respect of my fellow members and ‘train’ them to know what to look for in terms of potential clients over a period of perhaps two years before my investment (i.e. the money I spent on membership and meeting fees) would bring the desired returns. To quote from the BNI Training Manual, the process ‘is more about farming than it is about hunting. It is about the cultivation of rewarding relationships within a structured environment, for the mutual benefit of all’. So far so good!

However, what they don’t tell you at the beginning is that the BNI business model predicts that each chapter can expect to lose, on average, one member per month (i.e. 12 members per year). In other words, a chapter that has spent a lot of time and effort growing to 20 members can expect to lose up to 60 per cent of its ’sales force’ over a period of a year. Surely this scenario is unsustainable! How are you expected to cultivate a lasting and beneficial relationship with another BNI member if that person is likely to leave in a few months’ time?

In order to grow, businesses need stability. They need a loyal and reliable workforce who are willing to put all their effort into producing the goods for clients over a sustained and lengthy period of time. No business can afford to lose 60 per cent of its workforce each year – it is inordinately expensive to recruit and train new members of staff. It is far more efficient and effective to encourage existing members of staff to remain with the company for a period of several years. BNI claims to be the most successful business referral organization in the world. So why are people leaving it in such numbers?

Perhaps, when they joined BNI they were attracted by all the promises of extra business they would receive from their fellow members of the chapter, but they needed some concrete results in order to retain their confidence in the organization. Admittedly, some people do very well out of it – each referral on average is estimated to be worth £330, based on the figures produced by BNI in the United Kingdom, but I’m sure that if some people or firms are picking up business worth, for example, £26,000 or even £100,000, there are plenty of others who are picking up naff all! And if those others don’t pick up enough business in the first year to justify paying approximately £1,000 in membership and meeting fees, then they’ll give up BNI as a bad job and move on to something more rewarding, more lucrative or less expensive.

Other people may find it difficult to attend the regular BNI breakfast meetings every week because they have clients or other work commitments that they need to meet in order to earn their living. BNI is very strict when it comes to attending meetings – members are are allowed just three absences in six months. If you miss even just one meeting without sending a substitute in your place you can expect a phone call from a member of the chapter’s membership committee asking why you were absent. Any further absences on your part trigger the sending of a formal letter – and it really is a case of ‘three strikes and you’re out!’ That’s right! A fair number of the members who leave BNI are in fact expelled for ‘poor’ attendance! You can also be expelled for not bringing enough referrals or enough visitors to meetings. In other words, you are expected to grow the BNI business or else you are asked to leave.

Speaking for myself, I don’t mind bringing visitors to a meeting if I think that it will be of benefit to them, or give referrals to people if I think that person can do a good job for someone who needs that service, but I would far rather be spending my time growing my own business than trying to grow the BNI business. ‘Givers Gain’ is all very well if we lived in an ideal world but in practice I’ve found it a bit like ‘pie in the sky’. I think to myself, do I really want to depend on other people to promote my business when they are all probably very busy running their own businesses? Are they simply passing ‘referrals’ to other members of the BNI chapter to ‘play the game’ and avoid being shown the door for not ‘contributing’ to the chapter? Everyone in the chapter is in the same position – they almost certainly know their own business better than they know mine, so I’m probably the best person to find clients for my own business.

Eventually, I left BNI because I was being asked to invite guests to our meetings as part of a recruitment campaign but I felt that I could not, in all honesty, recommend it to some one else as a viable business proposition. At the time, during the middle of October, the Lowman Chapter had fewer than ten members on its books, from a high point of over twenty, and during the past month at least five other members have left.

But no matter! I have now joined the Business League, which is growing rapidly in the South West of England, and which seems determined to do everything possible to retain members rather than drive them away (and seems to be full of ex-BNI members!). But that will be the subject of another post!

Sell Your Services in Sixty Seconds!

A couple of days ago I received an invitation to attend a workshop on how to give a better 60-second sales presentation, all for the princely sum of £147 plus VAT! With the popularity of networking clubs that are springing up all over the United Kingdom right now, I suppose the person offering this workshop is hoping to fulfil a need – or are they just jumping on the bandwagon?

But you don’t need to spend that sort of money to learn how to sell your services in 60 seconds. I’ve been doing it for more than a year now at my local chapter of Business Network International (BNI); the technique is fairly simple and readily available if you are prepared to look for it. In a nutshell, this is how you go about it.

The first thing you do is tell your audience who you are, the name of your business and what service or product you provide for your customers. Keep it as simple as possible: it should take you no longer than 10 seconds. For example, one person I know simply stands up and starts by saying, “I’m Susan Grafton and I’m a bookkeeper.”

In the next 15 seconds you should tell people why you are so good at what you do and why they should refer business to you rather than to any of your competitors. Don’t be afraid to brag at this stage. If one of your clients is a blue-chip company or a well-respected person in your community be sure to say so. And if you’ve received a testimonial from somebody tell your listeners about it and offer to show it to them afterwards. All this will add to your credibility.

Next, you tell your audience what your target market is – who you want to work with or have as clients – and describe the problems that you can solve for them. For example, I work with publishers, graphic designers, web designers, advertising and marketing consultants and even would-be authors; in fact, anybody who has a problem with the written word. A particularly effective phrase to use here is “Who do you know who…” and describe the problem that you can solve for them. This should take no more than 20 seconds.

Then, use the next 10 seconds to be very specific about who you want to do business with. In other words, if you want to be introduced to the sales manager of a specific, named company, then say so. He or she might be in the audience listening to you, or somebody else in the audience might know that specific individual personally and be able to put you in touch with them.

In the final 5 seconds of your presentation, remind your audience of who you are, the name of your business and use a short, pithy phrase that describes what you do. In BNI we call this a “memory hook” because it helps people remember what you do if they meet potential clients who could use your services or product. For example, my memory hook is “Making what you write even better!”

To make your presentation as effective as possible, write down what you want to say a few days beforehand and practise saying it out loud to make sure that it is not too long. If it is, edit it so that the timing is exactly right. I normally work on the basis that a 60-second presentation should be no more than 165 words long. If it’s any longer than this, then there is the danger that you’ll be counted out or interrupted by the network club’s timekeeper before you’ve finished what you want to say.

Finally, try to learn your presentation off by heart. It will be far more effective if it sounds as if you are talking naturally and off the cuff to your listeners than if you are merely reading from a script parrot-fashion.

If you want more information on how to give a more effective 60-second sales presentation, post a comment on my blog and I’ll get in touch with you.