PetesWeekly

In 1992, just 20 years ago, I had to close my firm. As you might already know, I lost everything, as well as a lot of money I hadn’t yet earned. After a few months of trying to find another job I realised that there were none left. (This was during that uncertain period as SA made the transition from apartheid regime to rainbow nation.)

I was faced with starting up again. I won’t bore you with the details. But, marketing back then was a mere shadow of what it is now, and much, much slower. Sadly, most of the books I read still reflect the thinking back then. The single exception is “anything to do with the Internet“. And, frankly, the amount of hype about the web is beyond belief.

I have driven down almost every marketing road, and for a small business owner most of these are cul-de-sacs. I was thinking about this as I meandered through the south of Spain over Christmas. This was not as exciting as you might think. We were, after all, staying at the home of Mrs Carruthers’s mother. You get my drift.

Anyway, a bunch of shops were vacant, on every road, in every shopping centre, in every town. Like me in 1992, they’d run out of clients. And it got me to thinking about how starting a business is almost the same as finding a job. In both cases, all you have to do is find that first client. (Employee is formal-speak for a business owner who sells all of his 160 hours/month to a single, hopefully long term client.)

In essence, about the only difference between starting a business and finding a job is that the aspirant entrepreneur just keeps repeating the process, while trying to produce the actual goods, while trying to employ the staff, while trying to keep the govt happy, and so on. The employee, he with the one client, focuses on doing whatever makes his employer happy.

I browsed around Spain with my trusty wordprocessor – the pencil and notepad version I first learned to use in Mrs Kettley’s kindergarten class in 1963 – and I realised that, for all my focus on writing efficiently last year,  I hadn’t actually written any of those words down in a form that might add any lasting value. (I had dreamt of writing a book on startups and jobs, but hadn’t quite gotten the first page out.)

So, this year, one of my goals is to help you find more clients, even if it’s only one client you were looking for. I am not going to try writing it all down, else it will be Groundhog Year, all over again. So, next week on Tuesday evening at 8:00 p.m. – South African time – I’m going to present a gratis one-hour seminar online – a webinar – on Marketing – the 1992 version versus what you can do in 2012, and how to effectively find one or more clients.

Whether you are looking for a job, looking to startup a business, or really grumpy about the number of new clients arriving at your current business each week – you are welcome to join me. It’s gratis.

When you book your “seat” I will ask just one extra question – whether you are looking for a job, whether you are a start-up looking for your first client, or whether you are an existing business looking for more clients. Just so that I can better tailor the evening. It does not matter what age you are. My clients these past 20 years have mostly been between 18 and 81, however.

You will need to be in front of your PC at about 7:40 p.m. This will allow enough time to download the snippet of software you will need which will automagically convey my screen and voice to you. Your PC will need to be connected to the Internet via a connection that is at least 300KB. The event will use approximately 60 MB over the hour. You will need to be running Windows or Mac OSX. We can’t see you, so you may sit in your pyjamas. Heck, bring your girlfriend along as well. (That was not a sexist comment because I am not presuming that you are male. Just so that we can clear the air.)

I think that it is challenging times like these which bring out the best in us. We are inspired to find other, usually better ways of doing things. I’d like to help. You can help too, by sharing this invite with anyone you know who fits the spec outlined above. They will thank you. So will I.

Please book your seat here.

How do you tell somebody that his website sucks? One of my partners asked me this question this week.

It is a question salespeople face each time they talk to a prospect about buying a new service or product. There is the belief that they must deep-six the status quo to get action.

The simple answer is that you don’t.  The key is to get some context: Find out what the reasoning was behind that first effort.

Nobody offers their worst efforts on purpose. But often the results don’t turn out quite the way we expected.

Which reminds me. My email last week prompted a stream of emails asking if my wife really had left me. I think it was making mention of my office being left on the porch. Mrs Carruthers has asked me to assure you that I am still welcome in her bed, but that Steve, Linus, and Bill cannot join us any longer.

As for that website we were talking about earlier? Every website has parents. These are the designers who built it and the owners who commissioned it. And they did the best they could with the resources they had. At worst we can suggest that it might have been built as a corporate brochure rather than a tuned sales instrument.

At Sales Motor we put your products and services on the front pages of search engines so that you get streams of great prospects. I think we are the only agency in SA that guarantees enquiries, and we even train clients to convert those enquiries into sales. Most firms don’t think beyond the clicks.

That means my partner does not have to say anything about the present site. We won’t be using it anyway. All he has to do is ask how many enquiries came from that site last week, and how many of those prospects turned into clients. And then, of course, tell a few true stories.

Like how one of our clients asked us to do a campaign three weeks ago selling meat based food products. And how they sold 25 tons of it to Angola from just one of the first responses. And how they cleared the shelves of the factory outlet by the second weekend. For less than the cost of a single small ad in Farmers Weekly.

Or how a client selling office space made R100,000 in countrywide commissions in the first ten days of starting with us. For less than the price of a single ad in a single newspaper for a single day.

Or how a plastics factory has taken 123 enquiries worth more than R60 million in the past three weeks. (Over 150,000 units x R400 each). For somewhat less than they pay the top half of one of their drivers.

As a salesperson, telling somebody that what they did in the past sucks is a really bad way to inspire them. We have each done a bunch of things in our past that we would rather forget. Mapping out a future with great prospects is a much better way to share ideas.

Finally, if you are advertising already, the 40 partners at Sales Motor would love to talk to you about getting a hell of a lot more bang for your buck. Please go to Sales Motor and tell us what you sell, where you’re advertising right now, and where you are based. One of us in your area will get back to you fast. (Having partners countrywide also means that we can accept payment in almost any form.)

Or check out the activity at some of our clients sites here. (The lines highlighted in green identify enquirors, rather than just searchers (clicks)).

Whenever I talk to some intrepid entrepreneur about finding clients, often a few months before I talk to them about closing their business, they assure me that they don’t need to do any marketing because all of their clients arrive by word-of-mouth.

This is a prime example of a problem known as confirmation bias.  Of course all of their clients arrive by word-of-mouth.  That’s because they’re not doing any other marketing, so there is no other way for clients to arrive.

Just in case this isn’t obvious, it is very unlikely that a person will call in response to the wireless ad that my intrepid friend did not arrange, or the magazine advert that he didn’t place, or the flyer at the traffic light that he did not hand out,  or the website that he doesn’t have.

That’s not the way he sees it.  Rather, he interprets the results to mean that he is so darn good that his past clients are referring him.  It is easy to make this mistake.  After all, 100% of his new clients are indeed the result of word-of-mouth, even if there are not enough of them to cover the watery soup and gruel he has come to enjoy.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m not the kind of guy who, at the dinner table, waxes lyrical about the service I have received from a plumber, ISP, car salesmen, or   bespoke PHP coder, unlike, it seems, women using OMO. That’s often because their service is nothing to write home about.

Facebook has added a new high-speed layer to the concept of word-of-mouth, not that any of my interviewees is using it.  But, frankly, I must admit to having a few problems with Facebook at the moment.   It was once a superb place to stay in touch with my family.  Now I am bombarded by word-of-mouth messages that have been engineered by Filipino copywriters for every man and his poodle, including Coca-Cola and Weetabix.

I am not sure that I want my clients and partners to know that my granddaughter is expecting triplets sired by a passing swagman, especially if they hear about it before I do. Facebook is very good at that.

No matter where I look I am prompted to “like” something, which apparently gives the “likee” the right to assail me with yet more Filipino writing.  And, Lord forbid that my finger innocently slips onto an advert for a dating site which Facebook has put on my front page. Within seconds, all of my friends see that same advert with a picture of a good-looking young man, and a note at the bottom assuring them that Peter Carruthers likes it.  I might do.  But not him. I just do not want quite that level of word-of-mouth sharing.

Relying on word-of-mouth is, I think, a dreadful way to sell your services and products.  Especially at a time when the world economy is tightening, and the competitors are getting a lot hungrier.  I think this is the universe telling us to bring our First Team to the market.

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.

May I be direct?

Your service is not excellent. Your offer is not unique. You are much like the rest of us – struggling to make sense of commerce and fighting the same demons. (The past few months of testing service and sales response levels in SA have shown us at Sales Motor how awful almost all of us are.)

Maybe, after a few years of banging your head against the coal face, you will build some great habits that your clients will like enough to give you money for.

Even then, if you tell us how good you are, we will not believe you. The SA government uses the phrase “service excellence” 15,100 times on their websites. In their case it is more hope than real, like my relationship with Cindy Crawford. The phrase now means as much as “Ja nee.”

More than 28,100 SA sites talk about their “unique service”. That too no longer means much. “Eunuch service” would be more truthful.

I think it is time to stop talking so much about it and start doing it a little. Now, that is something people notice. And it is almost easy!

Over this past month some of my clients have made great sales. And a bunch have not. They differ in just one respect: All the clients who get the sales phone back within 30 minutes of a web enquiry.

When a person sends you a request via your website they don’t quite know what to expect next. Folk in SA have lost hope that much will happen. And, indeed, very little does.

In Norway, if you ask a plumber to visit on Monday at 10am, he will arrive between 9:59 and 10:01. In SA, if you ask five of them to visit on Tuesday at 10am, the only guy to arrive, at 1pm on Thursday, will get the job.

So, when a prospect gets a phone call back from a real person, within thirty minutes, there is a stunned silence, often followed by “Fok me, I have NEVER had such service before.” (Women will often say “Wow” instead of the more robust male response.) I know this because we’ve been testing it for the past 12 months.

At this point you do not have to talk about your service. You have just shown it off in all its shining glory. That memory will stick. Folk offering great service don’t have to mention it. The rest of us do.

This past week I helped a few of my clients work through their own sales processes to adjust to doing it this way. Their sales results improved overnight. (When so few folk in SA offer any service at all, it is not hard to stand out!)

We test our clients after a few weeks, to see if their follow-up is any good. At the same time we test the firms competing with them. And the really great news is that they are all so slow, and so bad, that it really is easy to be better.

A fast email is much more efficient, but not nearly as effective. The call starts a dialogue that your prospect needs so that they will trust you enough to give you money. In a world with so much technology we sellers forget that our clients want relationships.

May I suggest that it might be a good idea to be the first in your field to look at this issue, rather than the second?