Tag

branding

Managing a Personal Brand

By Communications

5524408188_08c33f123c (1)When I’m not running a reputation management business, serving client needs in communications, public relations and social media, I do other stuff. Yes, I’m a human being. I live in a house, I have a dog. I am a mother. I have friends. I have blogged, personally, and in recent years, a lot about my hobby of competitive pie baking.

The pie baking has become a big part of my personal brand. People gravitate toward it. It’s interesting, in that not a LOT of people are competitive pie bakers, or even pie bakers for that matter. It’s easy to understand and it’s not particularly controversial. (Although, I’m told, some prefer cake.)

The “pie thing” is a good aspect of my personal life that I can share freely online. It’s not private, or so intensely personal that I’m not willing to let people know about that part of my “off the clock” time.

Once, in invaded a client conversation in a way that made me uncomfortable. Once. It was in the middle of a new business conversation with a potential client who, in one breath was asking for a proposal, and in another, encouraging me to bring a coconut cream pie to the meeting to win the business. NOT COOL.

It’s fun to go down the road of talking about pie, or what I do or am personally, but that can’t be a detour from the business at hand. While I am comfortable sharing the human side of me and my business, let’s stay on communications, or get back to it, while we’re working together.

I’m glad to have an outlet outside of work. Everyone should! But I’ve had to be careful not to let the “pie thing” overshadow what I do professionally.

Your Brand is Often Your People

By Marketing

In a client meeting, we were working to identify what makes our client really stand out in its industry. They referenced their collective experience, the deep level of knowledge some team members possess and overall, that the individuals within the company are what make the company different from others that do the same thing in the same market.

Huh.

So what you’re saying is, your people define your brand?

Exactly.

dentalhealthpartners

The dentists of Charlottesville Dental Health Partners

What image do you think your customers have when they think of your business? A logo, or the person (or people) who represents that logo to them?

The team at Rebecca's Natural Food

The team at Rebecca’s Natural Food

Yeah, but we’re really a business-to-business organization. We don’t serve consumers, so …

So, the people who work here don’t have relationships with one another and with the people at the businesses with which they work?

The HemoShear team

The HemoShear team

Right.

 

Your brand is your people. Share your people with your community.

PHOTO CREDIT: the inimitable Sarah Cramer

What Social Data Really Tells Us

By Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Uncategorized

This is a VERY interesting infographic from the geniuses at Pivot, presented by that other genius Brian Solis.  It highlights what Brian likes to call The Perception Gap, or the difference between what marketers THINK their customers want versus what the customers actually TELL us they want. It’s a fascinating link worth checking out. While I wait.

OK, now that you’ve seen it, here is what I took from it:

Businesses, regardless of how much they blab about wanting to use social platforms to really get to know their customers, still operate from a blind spot oriented towards their own best interests. 

Which is to say, they OVERESTIMATE customers’ interest in things that are easy for these businesses to provide, like “product information,” and woefully UNDERESTIMATE for things that are more difficult or expensive to provide, like discounts and rewards and exclusive content.

What’s the upshot? USE THE DATA, MR. MARKETER!!! Don’t hide in the sand, own the reality and give them what they actually say they want, not what’s easiest for you! That’s how you’ll get them to become loyal to you.

Happy marketing!

Want More Sales? Trust in Me!

By Corporate Strategy, Marketing, Media, Social Media

So I’ve been thinking a lot lately about sales and how social platforms and processes have affected them. Sales, in case we’ve all forgotten, is the mother of all ROIs. No matter what marketing or business development efforts you engage in, the rubber meets the proverbial road at sales. Did all our effort generate more closed business, or didn’t it?

The social, mobile web has unleashed a torrent of attention deficit issues. There are so many “opportunities” thrown at us everywhere, so many chances to “connect” and “share” anytime that it takes a LOT to get our attention, and the usual cold call or marketing drivel just doesn’t make the grade. At all. As soon as we see an ad, we’re out. To make matters worse (for the seller), we can get most of the information we need to make a decision online these days. To rise above the crowd, companies need a serious advantage, a serious leg up. So what is that leg up?

Trust.

Trust? Wow, OK. So how do you build that with perfect strangers when you’re under a lot of pressure to close new business from the higher-ups? Well, it’s not simple, but it’s well worth the effort. The good news is that one really great feature of all these amazing new social, digital and mobile platforms is that they provide an unprecedented opportunity to LISTEN and absorb conversations that may be taking place around your brand, industry, and process that were never previously available. That means that if you choose, you can start anticipating your customers’ needs by paying attention the conversations they are already having without you. It’s like 24-7 market research that helps you know when and how to interact with a potential customer so that your abilities are aligned with his needs.

Will this chair fit in my office? When’s the payback on that power purchase agreement? Do I need seven or eight generators to run my office? What’s the best way to select a delivery company? When you couple listening with a decent content development strategy, you can become the go-to thought leader in your space because you listened to these questions and created content to proactively answer them. Trust can be further established, often with people you haven’t even talked to yet.

So when you DO finally choose to engage in a sales call, you might have already provided the answers to a potential customer’s business problem via some other process like a white paper, tweet or an online referral. If you offer those solutions freely, in a consultative way, even more trust can be established. You have the proper context at the right time to sell successfully. At that point, it’s not even selling—it’s helping.

To win business these days, you have to be engaged in a lot more places, and over a longer period, to establish trust. Trust is the only way to hold a prospect’s attention in the attention deficit world.

Dad’s CRM was named Shirley

By Communications, Corporate Strategy, Marketing

Growing up, I remember going into the office with my dad just about every Saturday morning. My grandfather started a kitchen and bath company back in the 60s, and it was a family business with my dad as Vice President of Sales. The office smelled like burnt coffee, printer ink and cigarette smoke. I’d tag along with my dad and draw pictures for the secretaries while he read through his messages and checked on construction schedules. File cabinets lined the back wall of each office, and the sounds of those metal drawers slamming, printers chugging along and faxes coming in created a background drone that I will forever associate with “business.”

After I graduated college and started my first real job, I remember asking my dad how he stayed in touch with all those suburban developers, construction crews, potential clients. “Whatd’you mean, hun?” he asked.

“How do you remember who to stay in touch with? And how often? What their upcoming projects are and when they start?” I asked, feeling overwhelmed by the volume of clients I was learning to manage.

The thing is, he just knew. He’d been working with the same clients for 20 years. The relationships he had with those guys were developed on the golf course and over dinners spanning dozens of projects. Plus, his secretary handled all the files. I think her name was Shirley. She’d talked to clients’ secretaries, and they set up lunches when it made sense. All those metal filing cabinets were filled with the details of every client and project since the company began, and those secretaries’ existence depended on knowing what was happening and when.

When I told him about the first Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) I was working with, you can imagine his reaction. “Hmm, I guess that’s a good idea”.

I think the idea of a program telling you who to call just didn’t jive with a guy who knew his clients’ kids personally. Plus, collecting everyone’s sales numbers and projections to report at the end of each month was part of his job. How weird for it to be done automatically? I think it seemed a bit like a robot replacing his secretary. I can’t really argue with that. Over the years, I’ve used a few: ACT, Recruitmax, ZOHO. They are what you make of them. For me, it’s a nice reminder to have a conversation with someone. I follow clients on LinkedIn and Twitter to hear how they’re doing.

But oh! business before computers and smart phones and the internet, when secretaries greeted you with coffee and your schedule for the day. Have we lost something? How do you manage your clients? How do you keep in touch without sounding like a robot?