Archive for Business

11 Aug 2010
Business

Create Great Feelings

BNET featured a post titled “No Budget? No Problem. How to Do More with Less.” The post highlighted an interview with adjunct professor at the Yale School of Management, Nancy Lublin. She retold a story about a time that President Lyndon Johnson visited NASA headquarters. While there, the President had a brief conversation with a custodian, who said, “I helped put a man on the moon.” Ms. Lublin suggested that organizations that want to create that same feeling in employees not underestimate the power of believing in something. She suggested that corporate goals be tied to whatever your company does best, whether it makes the fastest, cheapest, or the only product or service of its kind.

Is it time to solidify those great feelings about what your company does best with a direct mail piece?

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09 Aug 2010
Business • Saving Money

Saving Money on Air Conditioning is Good for Productivity Too

An ergonomics study at Cornell University found that warm workers work better, chilly workers made more errors. When the office temperature increased from 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit, typing errors fell by 44 percent and typing output jumped 150 percent.

This strategy makes sense especially this summer as we all are trying to save wherever we can. Can we show you how we use this sensibility to help you save every possible cent on your direct marketing too.

Special code: G3RCVE6X8DZH

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04 Aug 2010
Business • Buying Behavior

Too Much Contact to Businesses Can Hurt

The Harvard Business Review featured some results from a McKinsey & Company study that found that the “most destructive” failures of business-to-business sales reps are too much contact with customers (35%). Customers want to be contacted, not bombarded. The upside of getting things right is significant: A primary supplier perceived as having a high-performing sales force can boost its share of a customer’s business by 8 to 15 percentage points.

Chart of Ways Customers Are Turned Off

The methods of “bombardment” are in person, by phone or via email. Postal mail is not listed. Use direct mail to stay in touch with business customers without making them feel inundated.

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19 Jul 2010
Advertising • Business

The “WOW!” Number

A recent Harvard Business Review Blog asked, “What Surprising Number Will Change Your Business?”

Numbers are the universal language of business. We use them to win approval for product introductions, to attract investors for our startup ideas, to make the case for expanding into new markets or entering new categories. In other words, numbers, when used well, tell a compelling story.

Marketing and advertising is about big ideas. But it is also very much about numbers: budgets, ratings, impressions, ROI. Which brings us to the search for the “Wow!” Number, and why one piece of data may be worth a thousand words.

Here are a few such numbers.

  • 70% of teens who abuse prescription drugs get them from home.
  • 80% of women plan to exclusively breastfeed; only 20% actually do.
  • Many are in front of whiteboards 4 hours a day, but only use them for 4 minutes.
  • 80% of people age 45+ consider changing careers; only 6% actually do.

Why do these numbers tell a story? Because they’re simple and easy to understand. Because they’re human and easily relatable. Because they surprise us, and/or capture the gap between intentions and actions.

And how do you get to such numbers? Juxtapose: “Put related numbers together to create new information.” Try different contexts: “What’s the social angle? The green angle? Put it in terms of time, or length, or volume.” Turn them over: “2% one way might not be as interesting as 98% the other way.”

However you choose to rethink your approach to numbers, it’s an important way to address a huge missed opportunity. Business isn’t just a battle of products and services. It’s a battle of ideas about priorities, opportunities, values, and value. Ultimately, those competing ideas get reduced to competing numbers. So, if you can arrive at numbers that matter, you’ve got a better chance at winning the battle of ideas.

We have told you some surprising numbers about mail in the last few months:

More than 70% of Gen Yers (born 1977-1994) and Gen Xers (born 1965-1976) sort their mail immediately

76% of internet users were directly influenced to buy an item or service thanks to direct mail

78% of email recipients do not open the message, so that means that 94.1% of email recipients are not clicking through to landing page

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24 May 2010
Business

Tips for Giving Advice

What is the best way to give advice and feedback? Why do you want to get better at the art of giving good, old-fashioned advice. It is less about the quality of advice and more about the way it’s delivered. The way advice is given can inadvertently increase the receiver’s resistance to hearing it or acting on it, which is a shame, because that undoes the best of intentions. You want the advisee to come away with good advice, rather than bad feelings about the advisor. A post on BNET offered four tips on how to give advice well.

  1. There is a difference between solicited and unsolicited advice. Both are fine ways to be helpful, but remember that the unsolicited variety may not always be welcome, so the recipient might be more vulnerable to a bruised ego if you push the advice too far.
  2. Say thank you first. This applies to solicited advice. Before offering any of your wisdom, express some gratitude for being asked. After all, it’s flattering to be seen as wise and helpful. We don’t know anyone who doesn’t like being asked for advice. In fact, doing so is one of the best ways to deepen a relationship, because it’s a mutually gratifying human interaction and flattering without being obsequious.
  3. Make sure you understand the limits of the question. There’s nothing more annoying than asking for advice on one thing (like “What do I need to do to get a promotion?”) and getting advice on your marriage and your vacations plans, with a few golf tips thrown in. Stick to the subject at hand, unless somehow there’s a connection.
  4. Be confident, but not arrogant. This distinction is blurry for some. There really is a difference between coming across as authoritative (presumably the solicitor wouldn’t be seeking your advice if they didn’t think you knew your stuff) as opposed to authoritarian (using your power to compel someone to follow your advice, or being pathologically certain that you’re always right). Being authoritative can be done with humility, like saying “I’ve seen a lot of situations like this, and I’m concerned”. An authoritarian way of giving the same advice might be, “Look, you have to do this now, or I’ll do it for you.” The latter is obnoxious, off-putting, and not helpful.
  5. Give the recipient an “out”. This is related to No. 4. While there’s plenty of room for passion in the giving advice, a bit of humility also helps. You can say, for instance, that you’ve seen such-and-such approach work for yourself and for others, but it might not be for everybody. Or you can preface it with a turn of phrase like, “I’m not sure about this, but I think you could benefit from doing x, y, and z.” Or my personal favorite: “Have you considered…?”
  6. After giving advice, ask how it sounds. Often the best advice is created in an iterative way, rather than being delivered from on high. So after you’re done expounding, ask the recipient if that makes sense, or how they might feel about acting on your advice. Their reactions can help you refine it together and make it even more meaningful.
  7. Ask for follow-up. Not only does it show you care if you ask your advice-seeker to let you know how it goes, but it also conveys that you have a stake in giving good advice. Whether or not they take you up on the offer, it will leave them feeling even better about you and more confident in acting on what you’ve shared.

Giving advice is one of life’s great gifts, especially when it turns out that we were right. We are also grateful for all the good advice we’ve received over the years.

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17 May 2010
Business • List

Business to Business Sales Leads

Marketo provided the inspiration for these tips. They propose a process for growing business to business sales leads.

1. Nurture. Lead nurturing is the process of using many channels including the mail, phone, web, email, and other channels to build relationships with qualified prospects who are not ready for sales efforts. Many leads are still in research mode, so communication and offers should provide best practices, statistics, research, etc. to help the customer frame their research.

Lead nurturing:

  • Builds relationships with prospects
  • Creates understanding of needs
  • Facilitates lead scoring

2. Frame the research. Lead nurturing is not sending a newsletter to your entire database, or calling prospects every few weeks to see if they are ready to buy yet. B2B purchases are, by their nature, complex. Buyers need help to see possibilities and issues they wouldn’t think about on their own. If you can help frame the discussion, you will be seen as a trusted advisor and thought leader. This will help buyers believe that your company understands their problems and knows how to solve them. Lead nurturing is your opportunity to demonstrate the value you can provide and to position yourself as a resource.

3. Define what makes a lead “ready”. Work with your sales team to build criteria that determine the steps prospects should take before they are ready for a sales call. Criteria could include:

  • Demographic information – Geographic location, company size, etc.
  • “Push” actions – What have you done to interact with the lead, what have you told them?
  • “Pull” actions – What has the lead done to pull information to them? What pages have they visited? Have they downloaded special information?

4. Score the lead. The prospect is in control of the buying process. Monitor their efforts to pull information and interaction to know when they’re ready to move to the next stage. Interest level should be defined not just by their words but their actions. Actions speak louder than words. Track all the actions and update scores accordingly.

5. Provide detailed information to sales when leads are determined to be “ready”. Don’t just toss the lead over and leave it up to the sales rep to create a continuous experience for the customer.

  • Let sales know what marketing activities the prospect has responded to, and indicate which product the prospect is most likely to purchase based on responses to date.
  • Create tools such as templates, qualifying questions, and call scripts to guide sales reps during their initial contact with the lead. Be sure to refer to the marketing activities they have responded to.

6. Track follow up. Work with sales to create the scoring criteria to build goodwill with them. After that, regularly analyze the leads that were determined to be sales-ready to further refine your lead scoring criteria.

  • Adjust lead score thresholds based on business conditions.
  • Make sure sales follows up with leads and reassign leads that don’t get contacted.
  • When leads aren’t closed by sales as expected, recycle them back into marketing for further nurturing.

7. Track every marketing activity. Tracking every marketing activity is critical to understanding which marketing programs work. What programs directly contributed to sales? What programs generated the highest quality leads? Which programs had the greatest influence on the sales pipeline? You need to know the impact of all the programs.

8. Understand prospects needs. As you build a relationship with your prospects, you should also be learning more about their needs. Every campaign the prospect responds to tells you about their interests. Every page they visit on your website tells you about their interests. Every link they click, and every piece of information they fill out on a form, tells you more about them. Be clever with your forms – don’t ask prospects to enter information you already know, and use the opportunity to find out something new!

9. Track all traffic and tie to new leads. Simple code on your Web pages help you track prospects, whether anonymous or known. This helps tell you which companies are interested in your products. As anonymous prospects complete forms on your website or landing pages, any previous web visits can be automatically attributed to the new lead. This is important to determine the sales readiness of new leads, since you know the entire history of the relationship with that prospect – including which campaign helped them find you in the first place.

10. Data quality standards, including de-duplication. Demographic analysis has long been a part of the sales process, and the Web makes it easier to collect this information. Certain information such as company size can help you determine the lead score. With many demand generation and lead nurturing activities running concurrently, automatic deduplication is imperative. Forms which auto-complete if the visitor is recognized not only help your prospects but can also facilitate the collection of additional information for profiling and scoring.

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10 May 2010
Business • Marketing Strategy

Mission Statement in One Sentence?

BNET posted an article about clarifying your corporate mission based on a post from a Harvard Business Review blog.

The idea began with a story about Clare Booth Luce, the playwright, journalist, and Republican Member of Congress. In 1962, Luce met with President Kennedy, who was, at the time, pursuing an ambitious agenda domestically and overseas. She worried about his diffuse priorities. “A great man,” she advised him, “is one sentence.” President Lincoln’s sentence was obvious: “He preserved the union and freed the slaves.” So was FDR’s: “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.” What, Luce challenged the young, impatient president, was to be his sentence?

Here are some examples of simple clear corporate sentences:

Google: “We organize the word’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

NASA: “To understand and protect our home planet, to explore the Universe and search for life, and to inspire the next generation of explorers.”

National Geographic Society: “Increase and diffuse geographic knowledge while promoting the conservation of the world’s cultural, historical and natural resources.”

Virgin Atlantic: “To grow a profitable airline where people love to fly and where people love to work.”

Toyota North America, pledges: “To attract and attain customers with high-valued products and services and the most satisfying ownership experience in America.”

This statement says nothing about what the company actually sells — cars and trucks — but puts customer satisfaction at the heart of everything it does. Time will tell if this pulls Toyota through its current troubles.

The ideas are simple, is it enough to be pretty good at everything? You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colorful, the most responsive, the most focused. This is a potent thought, should you test your own company’s mission against it?

Dean’s Mailing & List Services: To help organizations save every tenth of a cent on marketing costs with our experience and expertise because we care about people.

How would you express your company’s mission, values and aspirations — in one sentence? Talk to us, we are great at asking the right questions that lead to answers and new solutions.

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03 May 2010
Business • Marketing Strategy

The Plan for Those Who Don’t Plan

BNET recently offered these ideas about business planning. The premise started with the observation that during the last twelve months, the business and economic landscape has continued to change and no one can predict what’s next. So why waste time with five-year plans?

One of the most prevalent rules for entrepreneurs is to create a long term plan! But in 2010, small businesses are learning that it’s more important to be agile and flexible. Plans are unhelpful when they restrict your thinking or don’t allow for deviation or reinvention.

That kind of thinking can give you the edge in the market. Liberating your company from traditional business planning may mean you can be both more enterprising and more robust for survival in difficult times. Here are four tips for navigating your way through the unpredictable business landscape without a big strategic plan:

  1. Think fluid. Don’t get stuck to a rigid strategic plan. Instead, see where the water flows and trust your instincts — not your spreadsheet — in pursuing new options. Make sure your business is agile enough to react to market trends or new innovations in technology. If you spot a new opportunity, you don’t have to check it’s on the plan first — just go for it.
  2. Prototype. Test your ideas in the real world. Better to launch beta versions of your website, so you can evaluate and tweak as you go, rather than trying to perfect the model before you launch. Otherwise you might never get the site off the ground.
  3. Reinvent. Learn to love change and be prepared to rethink what you do and how you do it. Maybe your business feels a bit stale, a bit stuck. You might need to shake up your organization so your clients start thinking differently about you. Re-energize your organization by taking your team on an ‘away day’ to brainstorm new ideas; think laterally about how you can re-engineer your offering to grow the business.
  4. Think goals, not plans. Set objectives for the year: deadlines to meet, products to launch. It’s important to know what you want to achieve — if not necessarily how you’ll get there. This allows you to think big without initially worrying about the details. A goal may be “I need to get a new client every month.” Perhaps you don’t have a strict linear plan for how you’ll actually achieve that — you just start off the instinctive way: word of mouth, social networking, client meet-and-greets, and so on.  You can’t chart this activity on a graph, but mentally focusing on the goals will help you reach your desired outcome.

A timeline or a spreadsheet can’t capture those opportunities that arise from serendipity and random meetings. If you remove the traditional business planning mindset, you’ll be liberated to grow your business in line with how the world really changes — not with what it says on a spreadsheet.

How can we help you test a new idea or be fluid in your marketing?

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29 Apr 2010
Business • Marketing Strategy

Cameron and Jobs: Passionate Leadership

To celebrate the release of Avatar on DVD we thought we would share some similarities offered by BNET of two innovative leaders by looking at traits which produce incredible innovation. In fact, following any of these styles could get you fired — unless you have the inspiration genius that can deliver results like Cameron and Jobs.

Bonding Through Innovation

Cameron. “Breaking new ground is Cameron’s raison d’être — nothing interests this man unless it’s hard to do,” wrote Rebecca Keegan on HBR.org. “But innovation has also become a way of bonding his teams… For Cameron, a sense of exploration isn’t just personally enriching, it’s a crucial tool for motivating and uniting his teams.”

Jobs. When Jobs created the original Macintosh team in the early 1980s, he moved the group to a remote building on the Apple campus, raised a pirate flag above the roof, and moved in a popcorn machine to give his people a sense of esprit de corps. Today, management experts prefer you unite your groups rather than pitting them against each other, but they also love the idea of inspiring your team with sense of purpose they can rally around.

More Perfection, Please

Cameron. On Avatar, Keegan reports, “Hours were spent on the smallest details, like getting alien sap to drip precisely right…. It’s hard to argue with Cameron’s nitpicky style, however, when audiences thrill to immerse themselves in the richly detailed worlds he creates.”

Jobs: Just weeks before launch of the original iPhone, Apple decided to replace the plastic touch screen with optical-quality glass. The change not only delayed the introduction, but caused its screen vendor, Balda, to reconfigure parts of its assembly line “causing a material impact on financials,” according to AppleInsider. For Jobs, however, the aesthetic of the product would have been ruined by an inferior screen.

Inspiration Through Fear

Again, not a great trait you’d teach to MBAs, but both Cameron and Jobs are stern taskmasters who demand the most of their employees, and occasionally cross the line to get it.

Cameron. “Many Cameron alumni will share a story from their first film with him, a day they were sure they were going to be fired, almost hoped for it. But Cameron rarely fires people. ‘Firing is too merciful,’ he says. Instead he tests their endurance for long hours, hard tasks, and harsh criticism. Survivors tend to surprise themselves by turning in the best work of their careers, and signing on for Cameron’s next project.”

Jobs. “”It was probably the best work I ever did,” former Apple designer Corsdell Ratzlaff told Inside Steve’s Brain author Leander Kahaney. “It was exhilratating. It was exciting. Sometimes it was difficult, but he had the ability to pull the best out of people.”

If these men, both brilliant in their own fields, managed by the book, they may not have been nearly as successful. What they share is passion for the work, and their management styles both demand and instill passion in the people that work around them.

How can we help you be passionate and innovative with your marketing?

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26 Apr 2010
Business • Marketing Strategy

Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy

This is classic business strategy information. We thought you would appreciate an opportunity to think about competition and profitability in different ways.

The Harvard Business Review is selling an article by Michael E. Porter that updates a 1979 article.

The article suggests that to sustain long-term profitability you must respond strategically to competition. Naturally you keep tabs on your established rivals. But as you scan the competitive arena, are you also looking beyond your direct competitors? Four additional competitive forces can hurt your prospective profits.

  • Savvy customers can force down prices by playing you and your rivals against one another.
  • Powerful suppliers may constrain your profits if they charge higher prices.
  • Aspiring entrants, armed with new capacity and hungry for market share, can ratchet up the investment required for you to stay in the game.
  • Substitute offerings can lure customers away.

Commercial aviation is one of the least profitable industries because all of the about forces are strong. Established rivals compete intensely on price. Customers are fickle, searching for the best deal regardless of carrier. Suppliers—plane and engine manufacturers, along with unionized labor forces—bargain away the lion’s share of airlines’ profits. New players enter the industry in a constant stream. And substitutes are readily available—such as train or car travel.

By analyzing these competitive forces, you can gain a picture of what’s influencing profitability in your industry. You identify game-changing trends early, so you can swiftly exploit them. And you spot ways to work around constraints on profitability—or even reshape the forces in your favor.

By understanding how these competitive forces influence profitability in your industry, you can develop a strategy for enhancing your company’s long-term profits. Porter suggests the following:

Position Your Company Where the Forces Are Weakest

Example: In the heavy-truck industry, many buyers operate large fleets and are highly motivated to drive down truck prices. Trucks are built to regulated standards and offer similar features, so price competition is stiff; unions exercise considerable supplier power; and buyers can use substitutes such as cargo delivery by rail. To create and sustain long-term profitability within this industry, heavy-truck maker Paccar chose to focus on one customer group where competitive forces are weakest: individual drivers who own their trucks and contract directly with suppliers. These operators have limited clout as buyers and are less price sensitive because of their emotional ties to and economic dependence on their own trucks. For these customers, Paccar has developed such features as luxurious sleeper cabins, plush leather seats, and sleek exterior styling. Buyers can select from thousands of options to put their personal signature on these built-to-order trucks. Customers pay Paccar a 10% premium, and the company has been profitable for 68 straight years and earned a long-run return on equity above 20%.

Exploit Changes in the Forces

Example: With the advent of the Internet and digital distribution of music, unauthorized downloading created an illegal but potent substitute for record companies’ services. The record companies tried to develop technical platforms for digital distribution themselves, but major labels didn’t want to sell their music through a platform owned by a rival. Into this vacuum stepped Apple, with its iTunes music store supporting its iPod music player. The birth of this powerful new gatekeeper has whittled down the number of major labels from six in 1997 to four today.

Reshape the Forces in Your Favor

Use tactics designed specifically to reduce the share of profits leaking to other players. For example:

  • To neutralize supplier power, standardize specifications for parts so your company can switch more easily among vendors.
  • To counter customer power, expand your services so it’s harder for customers to leave you for a rival.
  • To temper price wars initiated by established rivals, invest more heavily in products that differ significantly from competitors’ offerings.
  • To scare off new entrants, elevate the fixed costs of competing; for instance, by escalating your R&D expenditures.
  • To limit the threat of substitutes, offer better value through wider product accessibility.

Soft-drink producers did this by introducing vending machines and convenience store channels, which dramatically improved the availability of soft drinks relative to other beverages.

Does this information inspire you to craft a new marketing message? Can we help you reach some customers with Direct Mail?

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