Warm Summer - Cold Winter ?

It’s all too easy to lose track of goals and time during the summer, particularly a good old fashioned English summer of warm days and balmy nights. Now the kids are back at college and the roads are jammed with school runs, commuters and more white vans that ever before I realise that I’ve taken my eye off the ball.

Perhaps this was Tesco’s excuse. In trying to be all things to all shoppers, taking Lidl on at one end, Morrisons in the ‘market street’ middle and borrowing quality ideas from M&S at the top. Now, of course they have ‘borrowed’ basic financial husbandry from Marks & Spencer as Alan Stewart moves into his new office (same title) as chief financial officer at Tesco.

Why?

Well, instead of paying dividends to shareholders as promised during the heady heat of the summer, Tesco in fact opened their tills to find they were short a cool, almost chilling £250 million – or to give it its full breadth of zeros; £250,000,000. In simple terms it appears that they accounted for income not yet presented and ignored costs due.

In short, Tesco stock crashed 11.6% off the market value that flew off the shelves on day one. Now one egg short of an omelette they, like many businesses across the country, wish they had paid more attention to basic business detail.

These are the words of Penny Power OBE, entrepreneur and development coach, written for the preface of a new book – ‘Thinking Profit – the journey’ that I read this summer (get a copy on Amazon).

“The growth of new businesses across the world reflects how easy it is now to register a company, build a website and begin trading. This is fabulous, however, the growth in failures is a poignant statistic. Starting a business is easy, growing a business is the tough part. Over 90% of global businesses employ less that 9 people which in many cases is through choice, but in a large number is due to the skills in building a business that can export, scale, withstand competitors and knows how to manage itself through turbulent times.”

I underlined the key part: ‘Starting a business is easy, growing a business is the tough part.’

Because it’s tough and because it is all too easy to take your eyes off the ball – whether you are Tesco or the corner shop – you should take nothing for granted. Step back (try sitting on the opposite side of your desk, it offers a great perspective), take the phone off the hook, grab a sheet of paper (not a tablet, paper) and jot down the pivotal factors of your business.

Pivotal factors are key events that individually can swing business one way or another independently of other events.

What are the key (basic) elements of PROFIT:

£SALES X FREQUENCY = £INCOME    

£INCOME - £COSTS = £PROFIT

£PROFIT - £TAX = £NET INCOME

Now bring in the fulcrum for each event. QUESTION:

1.     How much can you increase the price of your goods / service to clients without affecting SALES?

2.     How do you increase the FREQUENCY? Is your marketing effective/ Are you communicating clearly? Could you articulate your proposition better?

3.     Is the COST of each SALE as good as it could be? Could you ‘buy better’ or do you need to buy your office inventory at all?

4.     Is your Accountant doing their job? Could you be more TAX efficient in the way you manage your money?

I hear you. There’s nothing new here. But how often have you been to a business seminar, read the agenda, raised your eyes to the ceiling in despair at the thought of wasting a whole morning here - then rushed back to the office after lunch inspired by the three bright lights that taking time out to consider even the basics, just lit in your head.

Each of the above, particularly SALES and FREQUENCY can be broken down further to identify their own pivotal events.

If you do nothing else, grab another sheet of paper (if only to doodle - you know who you are), identify three fulcra for SALES and three more for FREQUENCY and consider the effects of change on each.

It’s an exercise worth doing to avoid a cold winter.


To find out more about intime PROFIT:

our One-to-One,

our Seminars and

our Marketing support services –

write to intime@intimeprofit.com or

call us on 08456 437 497.

www.intimeprofit.com

 
    

Is your website fit for purpose?

This month we want to consider websites – is yours fit for purpose? Indeed – is ours fit for purpose? To fit the intime PROFIT’s 3 Step premise (and promise) of Review, Plan, Action, this month’s FREE Marketing Report is intended to help you to review and build a website that ‘attracts business’. For your own FREE report, click here: intime@intimeprofit.com.

The report is intended to help those who wish to build their own sites from scratch, using template-based online design sites. Such sites have a purpose for which they are fit, but the templated structure is not right for everyone. They enable a simple, well-structured service presentation which is fine for simple business propositions.

If you have a creative flair, you can push the advanced options to their limits to round the otherwise boxy corners that are inherent when filling templates.

What the report is particularly good for is to help review the structure, content, support and efficiency of your existing website and to structure the ‘wish list’ when considering a re-build or re-brief.

What today’s blog intends to add to this, is the broader consideration of a website review –? Has your website grown (as many do) by simply ‘bolting on’ additional messages, services and whims so it resembles what was once a desirable suburban residence, now spoilt by random, unsightly conversions and extensions?

When you last closed the office door and took your phone off the hook to read your website (what do you mean you don’t review it?) did it say the right thing, in the right way, in the right order, to be clear to an audience you’d be pleased to do business with, so they can action the right levels of contact?

Let’s consider those key points again:

Does your website say the right thing;

We all spend time reviewing and refining the corporate message – from a succinct elevator pitch, to finely tuned correspondence, e-mail marketing, advertising, corporate literature and blogs. But is the message on your website still singing from the same hymn sheet?

In the right way;

‘It’s not what you say but how you say it.’ For those of you  who have been on an intime PROFIT seminar, you’ll know from the sales presentation parts of the itinerary the presentation – tone, style, posture – are as if not more important than the content. In the same way, tone and structure can add enormous power to the words you say on screen. Line breaks, paragraph lengths, column widths, font, colourways and … punctuation. Is your message written in such a way that the viewer will be able to actually read it.

In the right order;

This is crucial to a website and there are two sides to this coin. Imagine yourself standing by the podium about to present your business, services and ethos to a room full of prospects. You start with a sensible summary of what’s to come, then move logically through the process from one theme to the next, ending with a closing summary and chance for the floor to ask questions. So, that’s the home page, service development ‘chapters’ and contact call-to-action.

 

The flip side is that we do not know which page the viewer will start at or where they will go next. Because of this, each page must have its own start, middle and end with a clear, single-proposition opportunity to act and make contact.
 

To be clear to an audience you’d be pleased to do business with;

 

It‘s really very simple. Your web copy, structure, content and style should be built with your audience profile, needs and authority in mind – as should any corporate message and language.

So they can action the right levels of contact?
 

For the viewer to confidently click that all important contact button, the benefits they’ll gain by doing so must be clear and appropriate. We know what we want them to do and how, but how do we impart what they will gain and why? What’s in it for them? Again we need to properly understand our intentions and our audience needs. If we are just list building then perhaps free gifts, information and discounts might be appropriate. But if we are talking to senior decision makers for mutually beneficial corporate benefits then it’s the ‘benefit to need’ clarity that counts.
 

This, like each of the points above, is a massive subject in its own way.

 

To begin the process of clarifying

your proposition to build your business,

say hello to intime PROFIT today:

 intime@intimeprofit.com.

 

 

Getting the best from e-mail marketing

E-mail marketing is a cost effective way of canvassing various elements of your prospective audience; headlining a message; developing the proposition; and calling them to a specific action.

In many ways, the approach is no different to planning a direct mail campaign; re-soliciting to your prospect or customer database (CRM); running an advertising campaign; planning a joint venture even.

·         You need to understand who you are talking to;

·         what message you want them to take on board;

·         how you are going to say it so that they understand the benefits in their terms;

·         how you are going to headline it;

·         how might you visualise it;

·         and what you want them to do as a result of reading it. 

 

The process of applying each of the above to the selected medium then varies medium by medium. You can’t just take the advert your agency designed and paste it into an e-mail – although many do … wrong.

The content and style of your e-mail should fit the purpose. If you are writing to existing customers to announce an event – a sale perhaps – your audience is already warm to you and the style can reflect your mutual awareness. If you are renting and mailing cold data on the other hand, you are intruding on already busy screens alongside other market intruders all vying for reader time (and money).

E-mail marketing is easy to implement, low cost, scalable, accountable and most certainly worth a bash. But, even for a low volume, low-key start or test, it’s important to set it up properly. There are many ways of setting it up to do yourselves which are perfectly fine particularly if you have the time and inclination.

Set up an account up with a reputable server to take on the data, set the mailings up and action them for you. They can deal with matters of compliance, manage your unsubscribes, handle the data, and provide the analytics to help you assess the next step.

Building, renting, sourcing, selecting the data to be mailed is the next big step. It is true that because of the lower mailing costs involved in e-direct mail, you can afford to canvass greater numbers. We strongly advocate fine tuning your targeting through careful pre-selection though. If every player in the market put the effort into pre-selection, messaging would be more relevant, responses would rise (on an industry level) and spam e-mail rejection would fall.

Good news all round.

The whole concept of building an efficient database is a massive subject in its own right and one we will be covering at a later stage. (If you want advice in this area sooner though – please just ask: intime@intimeprofit.com).

Setting up and sending your e-mail is the fun part. What are you going to say? How are you going to say it? There are no real rules but, as you might expect, plenty of opinions.

 

If you are mailing a hot customer base with a fabulous offer pre-selecting the data by what you know them to have purchased before, then you can make a big, visual, simple flash  - YOUR FAVOURITE JEANS HALF PRICE. SAVE £20: CLICK HERE. Or something like this:

 

This is fine in B2C marketing.

 

There is a school of thought that in B2B, particularly when selling a business service to a broad, colder database, the closer your e-mail resembles a normal e-mail from Jane in Accounts upstairs, the better will be your Open Rates. Open Rates in e-mail marketing are like possession in rugby – if they don’t open the e-mail (possess the ball) there’s no chance of them responding (no try, no score, no point).

 

So, we do everything we can to lift the open rate

 

·         Soft, ambiguous, friendly subject (don’t mention ‘sale’ ‘offer’ ‘free’ … spam’s favourites);

·         Explicit, benefits driven opening line(s);

·         Bold, relevant development paragraph;

·         3 bullet points – max;

·         Clear, single call to action.

 

If you are going to use logos, branding, images etc, minimise the number and insert them after (yes, after) the message and call to action. Remember, not everybody has the same browser, so design your message to the lowest common denominator, a browser that does not show the pics without specific instruction to do so. If your message relies on an opening image or you are leading with brand images, your reader opens to a number of empty boxes with an x in the corner – delete.

 

 

Testing copy against copy; offer by offer; format against format is easy and cost effective in e-mail marketing. As well as your response and conversion rate you can and should measure your open rates. Even measure your unsubscribes and bounce backs. Imagine being able to drive round to the 100,000 recipients of your last direct mail campaign, look in their dustbins and count how many envelopes there were opened and unopened.

With e-mail, the analytics tells it straight. The knowledge is power and the power delivers better results each time you mail.

To receive your own 26 page E-Mail Marketing Guide, please e-mail: intime@intimeprofit.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Make the 90 Day Promise – and let your business grow

We want to tell you about some quite radical changes being made to intime PROFIT’s Business Development Seminars for 2014. They’ve been very well received throughout the past year and feedback has been most encouraging – with just one exception.

The most common comment from regular delegates is that, despite knowing they need to take time out to work ON the businesses rather than simply IN it, the commitment of a full day is rather too much. We listened, considered and – presto – from 13^th February 2014 intime SEMINARS will gather over lunch for a sharp, focussed, business growth agenda in the afternoon only.

So, a half day rather than a full day in which to listen to and learn skills and ideas to lift your business and its profitable outlook during the year ahead.

It does mean that we need to sharpen up our delivery, but thanks to the team behind the seminar programme that’s not as difficult as we initially thought it might be.

The seminar content is intended to develop a practical, deliverable collection of skills, observations, tasks and techniques all designed to help grow profitable sales. Learn:

how to create more leads and enquiries;

how to convert more of these to high value sales;

how to improve sales margins and extend client relations;

how to generate referrals and exploit joint ventures – all this and much more.

So … Make the 90 Day Promise!

By taking just a half day out of the office each month to join other like-minded business owner managers, you will make a big difference to the business you run.

In the first three months (that’s just 90 days) of the exciting year ahead:

1.     Learn skills and techniques to generate more leads;

2.     Build and write a finely tuned USP;

3.     Follow a methodical path to improved conversion rates;

4.     Build systemised sales procedures;

5.     Discover simple, sustainable ideas to increase sales values;

6.     Empower business networking with a revitalised ‘perfect pitch’.

…and that’s what you’ll cover in just the first three of seven seminars.

Something else that’s new for 2014 is intime PROFIT’s Foundation Seminar.

The Foundation Seminar is for new delegates and may also be attended by past attendees wanting a refresher. It is held on the morning of the main seminar day and covers the vital details of the 7 Key Profit Multipliers that become core deliverables for the main seminar programme.

The Foundation Seminar introduces the 7 Keys and the subsequent seminars develop techniques and skills to multiply each one.

What’s more – your place on the Foundation Seminar is FREE

There are two Foundation Seminars planned for Kent, one in Chatham Maritime starting 09.30 on 13th February and the next in Maidstone at 09.30 on 13th March. Tea / coffee is served mid morning and we close over a sandwich lunch during which delegates meet, greet and share Kentish business opinion and opportunities. You’ll also meet regular attendees as they gather ahead of their afternoon seminar.

Well, the bottom line is ultimately down to you and how much you want or need to grow your business and unlock the hidden profitability within it. If you want to generate and convert increasing numbers of quality enquiries and to turn more of these to profitable business sales and / or relations, then these intime PROFIT Seminars will equip you with the tools, the plan and the energy to go back to your desk and make it happen.

For more details and to confirm your FREE place please call 08456 437 497

or mail intime@intimeprofit.com.


To find out more about intime PROFIT:

our One-to-One,

our Seminars and

our Marketing support services –

write to intime@intimeprofit.com or

call us on 08456 437 497.

www.intimeprofit.com