Business is Personal

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Today’s guest post is about a couple of tools that I thought you might find handy.

Slither over to David Seah’s blog and you’ll find 2 pretty handy tools to make you more productive: The Printable CEO Series and The Compact Calendar.

photo credit: ericmcgregor

As you might expect, I think the more planning and scheduling you can do - the more productive you will be - assuming there’s a dose of self-discipline in there as well. Look at it this way, it’ll give you lots more time to watch American Idol on the TiVo - on YOUR schedule :)

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If you’ve been reading this blog for long, you’ll have read a few posts about the value of measurement.

photo credit: Looking Glass

Measuring marketing response is the primary thing you’ll find, but as a CFO friend of mine says, “That which is measured will be managed”.

Seth starts off talking about the green marketing but ends up making a very good point about why those things we measure are better-managed.

Bottom line: They’ve got a number.

Got something that’s important to your business? Keep score. It matters.

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photo credit: Arkangel

Apologies to Monty Python with that “run away” thing, but it’s a good example of the talk in some business circles this week.

Once again, I hear people talking of abandoning direct mail. You know, because of the 1 cent postage increase. 1 cent. A 2.4% increase.

Tell me…for 42 cents, where else can you get something delivered to the home or office of a specifically qualified prospect, without running afoul of anti-spam laws, anti-fax laws and so on?

If you aren’t taking the care to segment your mailings and send them only to the most qualified people for your offer, then you deserve to be pouring Forever stamps down the drain. Just remember, you didn’t learn carpet bombing direct mail tactics from me:)

Honestly, I love it when I hear others in my market talk about the “expense of direct mail”, because I know they are cutting back on it, leaving another gap in the market for my clients.

Wendy over at the Wall Street Journal brought up the postage increase this week and asked what businesses were doing about it. Some got it, some didn’t. One commented that the costs could add up. Sure. So can the return, if you know what you’re doing - and testing. And measuring response.

Over at the Huffington Post, a reader pointed out someone making fun of direct mail as an out of style waste of money for political candidates. No question: BAD direct mail is absolutely a waste of money, whether it’s sent by a business or a political campaign. Most political direct mail is horribly done (but not all of it).

However…Done right, direct mail is still incredibly effective, but hey, don’t listen to me, keep thinking about that extra penny.

Somewhere in heaven, Dick Benson must be shaking his head with disdain.

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New York state’s legislature recently passed a law declaring that any company with affiliates in New York must collect sales taxes on purchases made in that state, effectively inventing sales tax nexus out of thin air. This was the budget balancing brainchild of now humiliated former Governor Spitzer, and unfortunately, his successor pushed the bill along and got it passed.

Under this law, Amazon or Ebay or whoever must collect and remit sales tax, and file the appropriate paperwork for every sale they make to a New York state resident/business. Given that every town, county and who knows what else has their own little sales tax, keeping track of this and reporting it is a nightmare.

Numerous pundits on the net predicted that companies with affiliate programs would start tossing out all the NY-based affiliates. Some thought those predictions were a joke, but it was clear to me that it made perfect sense. Plus it would be a great way to tell NY where to stuff it.

So this week, Overstock.com became the first (known) major internet commerce site to terminate the contracts of all affiliates in New York State.

The law of unintended consequences is one that misguided legislators cannot help but violate.

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photo credit: Lee Jordan

On last Friday’s radio show, I asked my listeners the rhetorical question: “If your business disappeared, would anyone notice?”

Perhaps a more realistic question: If a “Closed” sign was in the window tomorrow, without warning…would anyone really care?

Or would they simply drive down the street to the next business that does what you do, and go on with their lives?

The ideal answer is that there would be rioting in the streets, but let’s be realistic:)

Would they notice? If they noticed, would they care?

If you can’t answer ‘Yes!’, what do you think makes them stop at your business now, instead of driving a little bit further to someone else’s place?

If the road in front of your business is torn up for the next 3 months due to state road work, would people be determined enough to do business with you that they would deal with the detours and hassles of driving in a construction zone?

This sort of thing happens to restaurants, retail and service businesses all the time. Many close because they aren’t doing enough to make their business a habit for their clients. Or they aren’t being imaginative enough to find a way to deal with the construction.

If the state started working on the road in front of your building and continued to do so for 3 months - what would you do to get prospects to deal with the construction hassles and dust, solely to do business with you?

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photo credit: xiaming

Yesterday, we talked about making it easier for your clients to do - whatever it is that you make them do, hopefully not making them do it at all.

But what about making it easier to do the things that you can’t eliminate? One example is making it easier to reorder from you. You already know what your clients buy, right?

What do you do to remind them it’s time to refill, replenish and reorder? Since you know what they ordered, it should be easy for you to do this.

How do you know? It’s in your order database, point of sale (POS) system or online store order history.

You know how long it has been since they’ve visited your store or ordered online.

Is that number of days getting close? Shouldn’t you send them something (or call) to make it easy to order?

Has that number of days already passed? Shouldn’t you be contacting them to make sure all is well and that they haven’t run out of whatever they buy from you?

Do you have a system in place to get regular reorders pre-authorized by your clients? Makes life easier for them and more fruitful for you.

If you have automated reorders in place, isn’t it that much harder for a competitor to steal your clients from you? And aren’t your clients that much happier with the way you’ve added a little non-stick Teflon to their day to day lives?

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While I never met Bruce Barrington, one of the reasons I really admire him is something he said long ago about the things that programming tools make you do when building a program.

Bruce said:

Anything you have to do every time shouldn’t have to be done at all.

photo credit: babasteve

Frankly, I think you can apply this to a lot of things in business - at least systems and processes-wise.

Here’s an example: Last Friday, I’m logging into Aweber to add a new message to my email newsletter. At the bottom of the list, I notice that my last message had a SpamAssassin score of 0.4.

Call me anal-retentive (or fastidious, whatever) but I don’t like seeing those scores on my emails.

Not. Even. Zero. Point. One.

So I click the SpamAssassin score link, which is supposed to show me which parts of the message caused the score to result. When I click the link, Aweber’s system tells me this:

There was an error in processing your SpamAssassin score. This is usually due to the message having lines that are greater than 80 characters long. If you still get this error message, then please contact customer support.

Tell me this.

Why in the world do I need to contact customer support? If you’re aweber (whose service I really like), wouldn’t you want to know *every single time* that this problem occurs?

Assuming that’s true, they already know who they are and how to contact themselves<g> and they already know who I am, since I’m logged into Aweber and working on my emails. So why don’t they have their system automatically open a support case on this issue?

I simply shouldn’t have to do this manually.
What do you make your clients do every day, every time they do business with you, every time they use your product, service, software or what not…that they shouldn’t have to do?

Fix it. Get started today.

It’ll make your clients appreciate you more because you’re saving their time.

It’ll make your business stronger and more productive because your stuff will have that much more value, and it’ll be easier to use.

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photo credit: Boss Tweed

Earlier this week, we talked about small business events and the value of paying for someone like Donald Trump to show up at your event.

Case in point: http://www.arkansasbusiness.com/article.aspx?aid=105098.54928.117227

PS: Happy Mother’s Day!

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Today’s guest post is from Seth Godin. Earlier this week Seth was talking about the choice businesses must make when deciding what market they are going to serve: a passionate group or a mainstream one.

photo credit: sherseydc

Are you the local cafe that serves coffee, or are you the best place to get the best, gourmet coffee anyone can find within 100 miles?

Do you sell any old religious item that can be found in any store, or do you sell only high quality items that aren’t made in China?

Do you sell mountain bikes that someone can find at Wal-Mart, or do you sell only the finest Rocky Mountain custom mountain bikes to people who wouldn’t dream of buying a bike “off the rack”?
It’s an important choice, especially given the things we talk about here.  One of those markets requires you to be a lot more personal, to have a much stronger relationship with your clientèle.

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Yesterday, I received an email from someone whose clients are video stores. Because they subscribe to my print newsletter, I asked them to put me on their email list.

Part of today’s email to their video store clients included this comment:

I had a customer ask us how to compete with RedBox (emphasis mine). I’ve been doing some thinking and asking questions about this. I’ve watched people in our Albertsons store waiting in line to get a $1.00 movie from a machine. I kept thinking how impersonal it was.

So xxx went down and rented at Redbox to see how it worked. He rented a movie. Then when he got home, he got a receipt for the movie in his email. When he returned the movie, he got a receipt again in his email. Later on he got some offers for a free movie and information about new releases soon to be available.

I *love* that they noted right off the bat that this kind of rental was impersonal and created a line - but also noted the smart things RedBox does as well.

photo credit: fabbio

2 strikes against RedBox, right off the bat. Impersonal. Lines. Every store has lines now and then, but will people stand in line to wait for a machine? Maybe an ATM, but a video dispenser? Time will tell.

If 10 people are in the video store, think about how 10 of them would mill around a RedBox machine (it’s about the size of a Coke machine).

I’m sure you can think of some things to pick on regarding Netflix - while noting that you (you being the video store owner) can clearly see their primary advantage (no late fees).

What’s easy to overlook is the primary advantage to Netflix: No matter how many videos you watch, they get their monthly fee, month-in, month-out. As I’ve noted in the past, you should be looking for ways to implement this model in some part of your business.

Our goal is to give you the tools to compete with RedBox, Netflix, Blockbuster, and anyone else. But, there is one thing you have to do… use the tools!

No doubt. Kinda like all the things we talk about here.

Implement them. Otherwise your time here is largely wasted, don’t you think?

I was listening to Gary Vaynerchuk on Donny Deutsch’s The Big Idea last night and he repeated what Dan Kennedy says regularly: “Money loves speed.”

He means speed of implementation. Do it today. Not next month or next quarter, or “someday”.

P.S. I’m testing Windows Live writer to write posts for the next few days (it works on WordPress blogs too) so if you see anything funny (other than that photo of me up on the right), please let me know.

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