PetesWeekly

Gravel in the Gold Pan

September 28th, 2011 | by | marketing

Sep
28

Old time prospectors were used to working really hard.

There was the long trip to South Africa, stowed away in the hold of a grimy steamer, followed by the buying of all the kit needed to walk to Johannesburg from the coast, barefoot, and then stealing the spades and pans needed to dig and wash for gold, and all of that was before fighting to find some tiny spot of dirt that nobody else had claimed.

About the only good part of all of this is that they got to leave the wife and kids back home to work in the coal mines.

And then the hard work really started. Digging up a few tons of gravel, then sifting it through a pan, in the vaguest hope that a tiny nugget of gold might remain to pay for tonights gruel.

Contrast this with my new hero, who arrives in our system three weeks ago to do some prospecting through Google. Sitting in his armchair at home he loads up a complete website and advertising campaign, which reaches the front page of Google within a few hours. He has no concept that it took me more than 6 months to begin to understand the complexity of the dashboard that Google offers. Or that the mistakes I made cost me the equivalent of a years worth of Malema’s annual salary (the one from the trust, not the one that he tells SARS about).

And then, a few hours later, prospects start falling into the pan. (They would be the gravel that now needs some sifting.)

Sadly, our hero has staked his claim somewhat out of the territory we would normally find gold. He finds some nuggets of a new metal that nobody yet has a use for. (In his case, he finds leads that are exactly what his new site is looking for, but not what he wants.)

In true modern style he gives up within a few days, demands his money back, and goes back to whatever he was doing before, knowing with all his heart that prospecting via search engines does not work.

Isn’t life wonderful?

Bottom line: If you’re prospecting for gold, remember that you gotta shovel a little shyte before you see the gold. If this was too easy, everyone would be doing it and there would be no space for you and me. Be happy that it needs some effort. That’s why fortunes are made in them thar hills.

It’s also why we have closed our gold mine for a while as we restructure to focus on the winners, and deal with all this talk of nationalising the mines, of course.

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Our Past Takes Up Too Much Time.

September 22nd, 2011 | by | entrepreneurial life

Sep
22

Each time I meet with a person whose business is in trouble, most of the session focuses on what my hero thinks he has done wrong. Or what he thinks other people have done wrong. Or what he thinks the government has done wrong. Or what the banks have done wrong.
Then, having blamed all the guilty parties, most of whom have never heard of my hero, he takes a dark look at the future and frets over what may happen, and how, and by whom.
After all of this, there is almost no time to think about the most crucial facet: What to do NOW. (Most of the time there’s not much that can be done because my hero had no time to do what should have been done 6 months ago.)
I think that one of the reasons we have so little time to do stuff today is because we spend so much of our time mulling over what happened in our past, and fearing what might happen in the future.
None of us can change what happened yesterday. It’s happened. That’s history. Trusting that presidents son in Nigeria, expecting the government to pay on time, arriving home with lipstick marks on your skants, whatever. We can’t change it. We can only change the way we feel about it. So time to let it go, and take control of all that wasted time and emotion.
Most of us spend an immense amount of our time worrying about what might happen next week, or next year. That’s a great reason not to take action today. And that lack of action ensures that what does go wrong will happen even more excitingly. Or not.
In 1926, the treatment for my kind of diabetes was simple because there was just one: Put the kid in a hospice and keep him alive as long as possible by starving him slowly. Most kids lasted about 8 months and died weighing as much as a duvet. By 1929, Best and Banting had discovered Insulin, and that’s kept me alive 40 years longer than if I’d been born in 1918 instead of 1958.
That kind of gives one a gentle approach to life. It allows you to relish each day. And it lets you take other folks issues with a pinch of salt. Mostly though, it lets you get some perspective on the problems others try and foist on you.
I have done some very stupid things in the past. But that was not the person I am now. And, thank heavens, that fellow that will today do something moronic, will not be the fellow that looks back at me from my mirror tomorrow.
I think the essence of life is to make as many mistakes as you can and learn from each. But not fret over them. There’s not enough time.
Although that’s definitely the last time I let anyone tie me to a chair onstage at a bachelor’s party dressed only in my underwear.

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R T F M

September 20th, 2011 | by | applied tech, life

Sep
20

By now I have no doubt you are bored silly with me constantly extolling the virtues of voice recognition software.  And I might have mentioned, on occasion, how little we understand these fine tools that we use?

I must admit to being deeply embarrassed.  I have been using voice recognition software for Windows and Mac for about a decade.  I decided to read the manuals for each a few days ago.  For the first time. I am, to say the least, blown away.  Every single irritation I have ever had is no longer.  The manual explains how to get round every minor vexation.  And I am now even more vexed, because I could have saved myself an awful amount of frustration had I read these blessed manuals earlier.

In the computer industry we have a saying: RTFM. This stands for, “Read The Flipping Manual”.  As you can see, I have had to edit this phrase for more sensitive viewers, and that would include your anti-spam engine.

But here’s the thing.  How many of us take the time to read a manual before diving into action?  Or, at least reading the manual a short while later?

I have lost count of the number of cars I have owned over the years.  About the only time I ever opened the manual was while waiting for my wife or daughter (the older ones, of course) while they were browsing the local mall and I was suffering from terminal boredom.  It’s at this point that you open the manual and study it.  I found this a helpful way to find out where, for instance, the latch is on my BMW to open the bonnet.  And to identify all of those strange buttons and dials on the dashboard.  (This was when I could afford such a car back in SA.)

In one case, in the middle of a snowstorm (and this is not the best of times) I was forced to open the manual  to find out where Citroen had hidden the device to lift the vehicle so that I could change a tyre.

I am sure that you have never had this problem.  I am embarrassed that I am male and this means that I am forced to try and do everything from scratch without any guidance.  Although my wife assures me that I am the only male that she has ever met who is prepared to stop and ask for directions the moment I realise I am lost. But she wishes I would reach that realisation a tad sooner. Before nightfall, for instance.

I now solve the boredom of waiting for my women by always having my iPad nearby. I have yet to read the manual, but it is Apple, so the manual is pretty unnecessary. I have yet to experience a vexation.

Bottom line: RTFM.

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How technology makes us one- eyed.

September 15th, 2011 | by | applied tech

Sep
15

In the land of the blind the one-eyed seem gifted.

Nowhere is this more true than in the field of navigation. (Getting from A to G without ending up on jagged rocks.) A long, long time ago sailors used the stars. This took a lot of training, and could tell you where you were to the nearest 50 miles.

Around 1100 the Chinese started talking about a compass, something to point you in the right direction

A long while later we started using maps. The early ones were about as close to reality as Bart Simpson comics, but still took immense training to create and read. A few instruments appeared, like the sea astrolabe. Now we could work how far North or South we were, to the nearest 100 miles or so. But not how far East or West.

It was only in the mid 1800s that we could accurately work out the West east stuff, to the nearest 10 miles or so. Which was great except in the middle of a storm when a R5 digital watch of today would have saved thousands of lives.

Times have moved on since then. Now, for a few hundred rand, you can know where you are to the nearest 1 metre. And how fast you’re going, and in what direction. Heck, you can even find the nearest MacDonalds in a few seconds. All of this with less than an hour of training. (And if you’re under 12, you’re already wired for it.)

Contrast this with the lifetime of training it took to learn navigation until a few years ago.

Why is this worth mentioning?

It’s taken me 18 years on the Net, and its precursors, huge amounts of money, and 10 hours/day since 1992 messing around online, to know more or less what goes on inside this very large computer we call the Internet. (Think 18 years x 52 weeks x 6 days x 10 hours = 56120 hours of trial and error training.)

During that time we’ve trained folk, and tightened the training, and then automated large chunks of the stuff that used to need training and/or skill. Now we can get a person online, into Google, and pulling quality enquiries with a couple of hours work.

And now, would you believe, these same people are getting frustrated that it takes so long! That’s a bit like my first experience with a GPS.

I arrived in Brisbane very late one night, after a very long flight. I’d booked a car with AVIS. I was too tired to even think of driving, especially in the dark. The delightful girl at AVIS suggested I use a GPS. She even installed it and programmed it for my Hotel: The New Earth Hotel. All I had to do was follow the directions of the voice in the cubby hole. I did, and I arrived at an hotel 30 minutes later. All well and good, but the name on the outside was that of a different hotel.

I re-programmed it and set off again. Around the block. And ended up outside the same hotel. This time, too tired to care, I walked inside, quite happy to book a room here and forego my deposit at the New Earth. An hotel in the hand is worth two in the bush.

I explained my challenge to the receptionist who cheerfully informed me that I was in the right place. The hotel had changed name the previous week.

This Internet stuff is confusing. Too many people yelling that they have the one true path. Rubbish. There isn’t one true path. There are lots of them to choose from. It all depends on where you want to go. I just want to find quality sales prospects.

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Body (Business) Mass Index?

September 15th, 2011 | by | life, marketing

Sep
15

I discovered a few days ago that I was, to put it technically, ‘overweight’. I have a new application on my iPad to control my Type 1 diabetes. The first time I entered my weight it creaked and started playing Jewel’s Fragile Flame (also known as Fat Boy). That’s the delight of high tech. It insults you with style.

But the software gave me an exact number to work with. My Body Mass Index was 28.7. The ‘normal’ range is between 18.5 and 25.

There are 3 methods to resolve this issue. The simplest is to grow 5 cm taller, and then you are back in range.  In my case, that’s quite difficult to do, especially at the age of 53.  Almost as difficult is to lose 15 kg (get my current weight from 95 kg to 80 kg, which seems the appropriate  weight for my height.) So I chose the 3rd method: Do nothing.

There is a business point to this story, if you will bear with me a little longer.

Since I bought this product to get better control, I started measuring the numbers that are crucial to a person with diabetes. There is just one: Blood Glucose. It took a few days to see that what I was eating was not conducive for blood glucose control. So I began to change my habits.

Within a week I had lost 5 kg. (And my glucose numbers now look fresh and smell of lemon.)

Now, before you yell at me because we are all experts on nutrition, having spent so much time fighting with these issues, and you feel I might be losing weight little too fast, and that if I chose the Foster-Alan Synchronised Amino-Apothecary Baltic Sea regime instead, I could do much better, remember that this story is about business, not my personal quest to go to heaven via airmail instead of road freight in a large box.

The simple act of measuring the numbers led me to start thinking about what they meant, and how to improve them. And thinking about them made it easy for me to change what I was doing. This was science, rather than opinion. The fact that these numbers ‘happen’ every few hours remains a constant nudge.

That’s the thing about business that I find so fascinating. Most of us are too busy to measure the numbers vital to our own efforts. There is an apocryphal story about a department store owner in the United States about 100 years ago who famously proclaimed “half of my advertising money is goes to waste, but I don’t know which half”.

Most of us still do our advertising and marketing with that same level of measurement. In the Internet marketing world we have it much easier because we can actually measure results. And we do, ad nauseam. At some point in the next few months somebody is going to call you and tell you that they can get 100 clicks to your website for the paltry sum of R2000 (unless you take today’s discount of R1000)  provided you sign a 12 month contract. (I am being a little cynical, but you get the point.)

A “click” is what happens when somebody is searching for what you sell, sees your advert, and clicks on it, finally ending up on your site. The concept is wonderful. In practice, 100 clicks won’t usually give you better than one enquiry. In fact, most of the time it will give you no enquiries. That’s because your website wasn’t designed to ask for enquiries. Most of our websites are designed to tell people about ourselves and our businesses.

In fact, most websites are about as effective at getting enquiries as my blood glucose software is for controlling bees in the basement.

I am a salesman, not a techie. Clicks are meaningless. Enquiries are a much better measure of how effective your Internet marketing is. But the true measure, the platinum standard, is the number of those enquiries that turn into sales.

Because a sale is not just a one night stand. It is the beginning of a lifetime relationship. And for most of us, the lifetime value of a client is almost immeasurable. It’s not just the money they give us when they buy what we sell. It’s that they continue to buy. And they talk to their friends about us. And if they like us enough they will tell us what we are doing wrong rather than leave and buy elsewhere.

I found this out over the past two weeks when we launched a new venture. We expected to take on 10 partners. We ended up interviewing more than 60, and taking on 42. 41 of these were existing clients, or previous clients, and many dated back to the mid-nineties. Your clients are the only real asset your business has.

Bottom line: If you want something to change in your life, start measuring the right things.

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Your Sales Process?

September 6th, 2011 | by | selling

Sep
06

Most firms have a fast process to handle incoming sales enquiries. And some have a fast process to respond to email enquiries, or enquiries that come from a form on their website. But most firms drop the ball when it comes to the Internet.

A phone call, by it’s very nature, is urgent. An email, which is the way most web enquiries gently flutter in, is much less urgent. (Most website forms will end up in an email.) And that email, like a newly born turtle, has to endure a hostile voyage before it reaches safe harbour.

You may have heard of Spam? This is the word we use to describe  commercial email that we did not ask for. Most of us think of Spam as the daily flow of emails we get to improve our looks, our size, and our chances of winning big.

ISPs (the firms that host websites and email boxes) tend to be a little more assertive when dealing with Spam, and in doing so tend to dump a lot of valid email into the bin, often without telling you about it. So if you ever get an angry message (or Lord forbid, a rabid phone call) telling you that you never respond, then that is probably the problem. Hint: Don’t try and explain that to your newest enemy because sympathy will be in short supply.

If your prospect works for a large bank, then there is a strong chance that their email will not even arrive in your inbox. Spam filters are very sensitive to email addresses, especially those of bank staff. This is because some enterprising web anglers, also known as phishermen, are getting great returns pretending to be ABSA and harvesting your PIN codes.

Some firms assume that a solid response by return email is the right thing to do. They bury the prospect in detail. This might be a huge price list, a PDF document extolling their virtues, and, of course, reminding you that they are committed to excellence. It seems that we all are committed, including the SA govt, every municipality, ESKOM, TELKOM, and every other parastatal.

That does not work. Imagine that you’re relaxing one evening at your local pub, sipping a cool Hansa while watching the sun burn an orange hole in the ozone as it slowly slides across the horizon towards Brazil. You’re young, single, and don’t need medical help as offered by the many emails you discard each day.

A delightful woman sits next to you, orders her own Carling, and turns to face the setting sun.

“Isn’t this heavenly,” she asks rhetorically? Hint: She is a prospect, and she’s just made an enquiry.

There are two responses to her question.

The first is gentle, not overwhelming, simply letting the conversation flow. You might offer something like “It’s idyllic, and that’s why I come here as often as I can. I haven’t seen you here before?”

The second is the personal version of a company response.
“Thank you for asking. The temperature today averaged 31 degrees. The sun is 8 light minutes way, which is about 150 million kilometres away, or 94 million miles if you live in the UK. That red sunset is caused by the light having to flow through more atmosphere which scatters the blue rays. I was captain of the Michaelhouse first 15, chairman of the chess club, and matriculated in 2001 with 8 A’s. I am single, heterosexual, and own my own house. I am very vigorous and, of course, committed to excellence.”

And then you turn back to your drink in the hope that you have earned enough points for her to pay for dinner tonight.

Chances are you will be doing MacDonalds again. Alone. And you won’t be getting much exercise to work off the 1000 calories in your Big Mac, Fries and Coke.

Relationships are like dancing. They need a touch of choreography to make them work. ‘Efficient’ is almost always in the way of ‘effective’ when we humans are involved. And like dancing, personal contact is very, very important.

It’s not efficient to pick up the phone and respond with a call. But it is effective. It builds legends. And it feeds the kids.

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