I wish I could LIVE in a Ballard Designs catalog! REALLY!

Yes, yes, I love their furnishings, just love them, yet that isn’t my focus for YOU!

The creators of the catalog really stepped into some brilliance with something they did this month in their catalog, bravo!
This is probably how the idea came about: A Ballard Design team was sitting in a meeting and someone says “Why does our prospect most often NOT make a purchase? What’s stopping them?”
Someone else replies “Maybe indecision?”
Everyone chimes in that this is a likely reason. Hence, they decide to create a tool for prospective buyers to use in choosing items for their homes. Ah, and here, my friend, is the result!!!

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They took a photo of a fantabulous living space and then they broke down the main components and gave you the price, description and item number. It causes you to very quickly see those items, in your mind’s eye, in your space. I would bet this has been a successful addition to what was previously beautiful catalog with an average success rate.

So, how can you use this? You are thinking, “I don’t sell furniture, have a catalog or a team of people to brainstorm like this. What does this have to do with me?”

Ok, lesson 1. Know thy customer and why they DO AND DO NOT purchase. If you are a retailer, this could be that you don’t have an attractive store front or your store is not well-known. OR it could be that your store clerks have been rude or the store isn’t merchandised well.
Lesson 2. Build a smoooooth chute for your prospects to slide through on the way to the purchase (make it very easy to go from being a prospect to a buyer/client/customer). Make it clear how to interact with you or your company, don’t allow indecision to be a factor because of your indecision in creating a package or other offer choice. Question what the sticking point is… ALWAYS. Where are your prospects getting stuck in the funnel?

It might be that your clients look into what you offer, but then stop. Ok, then figure out how to make the decision easier and faster.

OR maybe they are purchasing the first time, but not ever again (this is a problem if you make little margin on the first purchase, your customer acquisition cost is high, or the like). This has been one of my client’s problems and it has been quite an evolution to transform, ah but I regress…

So, check out how Ballard Designs has done this in these photos of the catalog pages.

Let me know if you figure out how to apply these lessons to your business. AND let me know if you don’t.

My best as always to you,

C

Waiting for your fairy godmother (venture capitalist/ investor) to save you?

There are no EASY ways to do business. When talking with a client today, I realized something I had never really admitted before, BUSINESS IS TOUGH!

There is no magic bullet, no get-rich-quick. It’s about something much more.

Now, that’s not to say SOME people may find success by being in the right place with the right thing at the right time, but those times are far and few rather than the norm.

Expecting that fairy godmother to come and make all of your dreams come true is a great way to feel like a failure!

THE SMARTER AND MORE SURE WAY TO SUCCESS? FOCUS! Focus on the right things at the right time. Focus on serving your current clients/customers/patients better! Focus on making loyal followers, die-hard fans. (See my post earlier today about Facebook fans and their worth, if you are using social networking as part of your plan.)

Here’s another way to think about it, to quote our man, Seth Godin, “Delight the audience you already have, amaze the customers you can already reach, dazzle the small investors who already trust you enough to listen to you. Take the permission you have and work your way up. Leaps look good in the movies, but in fact, success is mostly about finding a path and walking it one step at a time.”

SOOOOOOOOOOO? How will this change your day, your month, your year?

C

Typical Media is dying, what can you do about it?

The last flight I took, I browsed the shelves of the magazines. I LOVE MAGAZINES! I had my own magazine, once! I published, wrote and LOVED it!

As I browsed those shelves, my heart lurched, I ached to work with magazines again. My brain slipped right into working with a magazine, marketing a magazine, designing a magazine, the possibilities!

But, I then moved through the thoughts and jerked back into REALITY! In reality, magazines are dying! As are most brick and mortar versions of media! Unfortunate as this is, IT IS TRUE, whether you admit it or not!

So, how can you deal with this shift if you are a part of brick and mortar media?

OR even better, how can YOU benefit from the shift? Because SOMEONE WILL WIN! Someone will succeed! You can be part of that or not…

Seth Godin has a BRILLIANT take on this, basically, he points out that the opportunity is there for you to take! The opportunity is that YOU can reach and build your fan base with micro-magazines!

“There’s room in the market for 100,000 profitable micro-magazines. Why not have one about Aruba, for example? If all the people who vacation in Aruba could read about the island in detail every month, read about restaurants, resorts and politics, for free, in an easy to share format… Multiply this by every destination, every interest group, every type of profession (how about a micro-magazine for ethnobiologists?)

Surely you can think of a group of people that share a demo- or psychographic, that are appealing to an advertiser base and want to learn and share what they learn… for free.”

Here is how he defines an ideal magazines:

• Being digital (probably a PDF), that’s free to ‘print’, fast to make and easy to share. (Newsweek spends seventeen million dollars a year on paper.)
• Having subscribers, either by email or RSS
• Focused on issues that appeal to some, but not all
• Having a very specific audience (call it a tribe)
• Enabling that tribe to connect by sharing the ideas in the magazine among them, as well as supporting it with a forum or blog
• Containing ads that are relevant to that audience
• Being longer than 140 characters or even a blog post, so significant ideas can be exposed in detail.

So, what group could you target?

How could you use this to your advantage?

What will this change, improve, create for you?

C

Contest to WIN Tony Hsieh’s Book – Delivering Happiness, before it is even released!!!!!!

Delivering Happiness and the Zappos mentality that I SO adore, is all about delivering happiness to customers, employees and the world!

Obsessed with the subject of Customer Loyalty?

Read Daniel Pink’s book Drive?

Love the Zappos mentality?

I am pleased to announce that I am hosting a Book Club all about Culture Creation and Customer Loyalty AND I am having a contest. Enter to WIN a copy of Tony Hsieh’s book before it is even released!

Join the Book Club and be entered into a drawing to win a free copy of Tony’s book! ONE will be given out each week for the next three weeks!

To join, either place a comment here and tell me your #1 struggle/question with creating your company’s culture OR join my LinedIn group called Zappos Insights Mastermind Group OR re-tweet my tweet about this on twitter! My twitter name: christiescott1

Look forward to brainstorming with you on our Book Club calls!

C

Retailers keep the customers from buying on the net! HOW to win the WAR?

If you are in retail, then you are at WAR! The internet is always going to have a cheaper, faster, better resource for your prospects to buy from. So, how can you compete?

You can offer the one thing the internet cannot, the environment, the smells, sounds, what will keep buyers coming back. See how a bookstore competes with giants like Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and Books-A-Million.

http://tinyurl.com/MontagueBookstore

How can YOU take this concept and WIN?

I want to hear about it!

Your coach,

C

Why companies/marketing/tactics fail!

The reality of the world today is harsh, whether we will admit it or not. It’s a killer situation for many businesses, destined to FAIL!

Why??????

They simply are not good enough! Average is not praised, noticed or bought anymore.

Seth Godin puts it well: “The biggest mistake companies make is that they chicken out.  If your idea doesn’t become a virus, it’s most likely because it didn’t deserve to become a virus.”

I blog and rant about it all of the time, if you aren’t innovative, you will not make it in this economy! So once again, I implore you, stand up, be counted! Be deserving!

Your coach,

C

Give gifts to recieve! Happiness, more revenues, loyalty…

I regularly recommend to my clients that they give gifts freely. Seth GOdin ahs a brilliant explanation that really gets us thinking in the right direction with this giving!

Read here, his post:

If I sell you something, we exchange items of value. You give me money, I give you stuff, or a service. The deal is done. We’re even. Even steven, in fact.

That’s fine, but it doesn’t explain potlatch or the mystery of art or the power of a gift.

If I give you something, or way more than you paid for, an imbalance is created. That imbalance must be resolved.

Perhaps we resolve it, as the ancient Native Americans did, by acknowledging the power of the giver. In the Pacific Northwest a powerful chief would engage in potlatch, giving away everything he owned as a sign of his wealth and power. Since he had more to give away, and the power to get more, the gifts carried real power, and others had to accept his power in order to engage.

Or we resolve it by acknowledging the creativity and insight of the giver. Artists do this every time they put a painting in a museum or a song on the radio. We don’t pay for the idea, but we acknowledge it. And then, if it’s particularly powerful, it changes us enough that we become givers, contributing to someone else, passing it along.

Sometimes we resolve the imbalance by becoming closer to the brand or the provider. We like getting gifts, we like being close to people who have given us a gift and might do it again.

When done properly, gifts work like nothing else. A gift gladly accepted changes everything. The imbalance creates motion, motion that pushes us to a new equilibrium, motion that creates connection.

The key is that the gift must be freely and gladly accepted. Sending someone a gift over the transom isn’t a gift, it’s marketing. Gifts have to be truly given, not given in anticipation of a repayment. True gifts are part of being in a community (willingly paying taxes for a school you will never again send your grown kids to) and part of being an artist (because the giving motivates you to do ever better work).

Plus, giving a gift feels good.

So, here is my favorite place to order gifts for , they will even wrap it for you and ship it with your special note! Shipping and the gift are under $10!

I can even get you a discount, if this is your first order and you are one of the first 12 to order with this Blog code, get a dollar off of each gift! Coupon good till Feb. 28th, 2010 – Code to enter at checkout: Blog0210

www.LittleSomething.com

Think about gifts you have received from companies, unexpectedly… how did it make you feel? Did you refer more often? Spend more money with that company?

Wouldn’t you like to create raving fans of your own?

I would love to hear your stories and about what you sent!!!

C

Seth Godin’s TWO approaches to How to Respond to the “Bad Economy”

So, the economy has affected us all. Many companies are looking to cut expenses, payroll, budgets, everything and anything that will lessen the outflow to attempt to balance the lack of inflow!

BUT, is this a SMART business strategy? Well, if you would like even less customers, revenues, clients, then yes.

If you want to grow your business, NO.

Seth Godin illustrates this well today:

One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That’s actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.

No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings… what’s the point? No sense being kind, looking people in the eye, being open or welcoming or grateful. Doing the least acceptable amount is the way to maximize short term profit.

Of course, there’s a different strategy, a crazy alternative that seems to work: do the most you can do instead of the least.

Radically overdeliver.

Turns out that this is a cheap and effective marketing technique.

So, how should you respond, as the business leader? How can you overdeliver? How can impress the socks off of your current clients, customers, patients?

What will that create in referrals, word-of-mouth, and media attention? Whether in your marketing videos, on twitter, facebook, face-to-face with your clients/customers/patients, how will that change the interaction and the reaction and the after affect?

Look at Tom’s Shoes or other companies who seem to just give, give, give! Do they suffer financially? Absolutely not!

So, whatcha gonna do about it?

C

www.christiescott.com

One Email and You Lose a Customer/Client for Life!

Ah, yet again, this one comes to bite someone in the butt! I have seen it before, I will see it again. It seems so simple a fix to me, yet, so many do not enforce this and they pay the nearly Ultimate Price – Lose the client, tarnish their reputation, risk public embarrassment.

NO AMOUNT OF social media marketing, book writing, PR, or business education can stand up to this problem.

Today, I received an email that tore up my belief in the company with whom I had previously purchased from. I can guarantee, I will not buy from them again! Why? They showed me how unethical they are, without trying. How? I don’t want to defame the company but…

Let me tell you a similar story! Imagine a customer service rep receives an email from a customer, the email has a complaint in it. The rep does not know how to reply, hence he forwards the email to his superior. The superior reviews the complaint and writes a reply to the rep for him to use in communications with the customer. He also directs the rep of what NOT to do in the email, i.e. do not tell the customer what REALLY happened, give the customer this excuse. Communications may have involved others in the company, there were 3-5 forwards to get opinions of how to handle the situation, referring to the customer as “hard to please”, “waste of time” and a “pain in the butt”. Eventually, the rep gets the response back and clicks to send the customer an email in response, but he doesn’t start a new email, he simply clicks forward and writes his reply.

This SHOULD send off alarm bells for you, the owner of your company, you should see the failure here.

If not, let me spell it out to you.

The customer receives the email response and scrolls through the email, seeing all of the internal communications between different people in the company. He reads that the customer service rep is to withhold information from him, to make up an excuse, and quickly gets infuriated at being lied to and called names, when all he wanted was SERVICE!!!

There are MANY mistakes here, you should have a policy that no one call customers names in any communication type, I agree. But, many things that are internal that NEED to be communicated should not be seen by customers. HENCE, the answer here, my friend, is DO NOT FORWARD EMAILS! I have a policy with companies I work with – NO FORWARDING EMAILS. If you want someone to see or understand a communication, IF they are your superior, under SOME circumstances this may be neccessary, but even then, I would be skeptical. If you forward emails, forgetting that some email strings are quite long, there is much to be forgotten in them, you will forward something and incriminate someone soon enough.

So, you should implement a policy of NO forwarding of emails, unless the string is only one email long and you are forwarding internally.

You need to address this, I want to hear about it!

Hey, I would love to hear your horror stories about the WORST thing that has happened when an email was forwarded. Worst story I receive will get a FREE PRIZE! Make a new policy and enforce it, you get a different type of prize altogether

Get to it,

C

www.christiescott.com

Marketing – Let me Light Your Money on Fire if You Don’t GET this!

Most of us have experienced great marketing. We have wanted products that were SOOOO magnetic that we actually BELIEVED we NEEDED a new widget, dohicky or app thingy. In reality, we don’t NEED these things, but we buy them anyway and we are excited to have them. The connection is emotional, we rationalize it logically (or so we coerce ourselves to believe).

For products  the path of marketing the item is clear, or at the very least in most circumstances the budget and steps to be taken are understood. HOWEVER, I work everyday with service industries because what they do is MUCH more difficult. Marketing a service is like marketing air, there is no tangible product to rationalize. The Call Girl Effect is in action here, which means that as soon as the service is rendered, the value of said service diminishes rapidly!

Hence, the attrition rate for service industries is usually detrimentally high. You can very well lose clients as fast as you acquire them, that is exhausting and expensive, could be ultimately detrimental!

Marketing is important but what’s between the marketing? What is outside of what you market yourself or your company as providing? How much attention do you give to what is outside of the service you provide? What experience do your patrons have when YOU aren’t around?

Seth Godin talks about this:

Marketing is what happens in between the overt acts of the marketer. Yes you made a package and yes you designed a uniform and yes you ran an ad… but the consumer’s take on what you did is driven by what happened out of the corner of her eye, in the dead spaces, in the moments when you let your guard down.

Marketing is what happens when you’re not trying, when you’re being transparent and when there’s no script in place.

It’s not marketing when everything goes right on the flight to Chicago. It’s marketing when your people don’t respond after losing the guitar that got checked.

It’s not marketing when the smiling waitress appears with the soup. It’s marketing when we hear two waiters muttering to each other behind the serving station.

Don’t miss the point, yes, you must spend money on marketing. BUT, you must pay more attention to what is outside of that. What goes on that tears your marketing investment to shreds. What a waste! I have said many times to clients, just send me your money, I will make an entertaining YouTube Video of me burning it for you. But, you know what? If you refuse to better utilize the investment, then let’s send it to the people of Haiti instead, no you won’t get more clients or revenues that way, but SOMEONE WILL put it to amazing use, it may save a life.

How will you plan to start changing this today? If it doesn’t change, then you are wasting your time, make a plan, stop the madness!

Your coach,

C

www.christiescott.com