A lovely bike around Scotland….

Posted on | November 17, 2010

Another classic from the Danny man….this one is particularly nice. A scottish treat:

Lovely

-j

I’ve been busy, so enjoy some Dr.Who inspired ‘Will it Blend?’

Posted on | November 17, 2010

It’s been a long couple of weeks and I’ve had a lot on, so I haven’t had much time to sit down and continue my thoughts. That isn’t changing this week either.

But life goes on, and the chaps at ‘Will it Blend’ have served up a British-inspired, Dr Who loving, treat for us.

Enjoy:

Brilliant as always. Makes me giggle.

-j

Investment – will it take you where you want to go?

Posted on | November 5, 2010

I’ll put it bluntly. Over the past three months I have met with over twenty companies that are currently looking for investment.

Only two or three have really thought it through.

That does not make me happy.

I’ve said it before, but my company does a lot of work with high-growth companies. These projects range from bringing new products to market to helping them expand into new territories. They all have one thing in common. At some point, they feel it’s necessary to bring on investors.

My question is simple: why?

I’m not against bringing on investors. Not at all. We do most of our business with companies that have active investors. It can be critical.

The problem, as I see it, isn’t the investors. It’s companies that look to investment as  almost knee-jerk reaction. “We can’t get where we want to. Let’s get in some cash.”

That is the wrong reason to bring in an investor.

So is your company thinking about bringing on an investor? Try to remember a few things. They may seem obvious, but at least 80% of the companies I see fail on one of these counts.

1. Don’t forget, investment is a commercial proposition.
   This is vital. Investors aren’t giving you money to make you feel better or to ease your business pain. They are giving it so that they can get back significantly more in return. You need to show them the commercial case for the investment, and you need to make sure, above all else, that this is a commercial case based in reality. You know what happens if it’s not? Really really angry investors who come down on you like a ton of bricks.
2. What’s the point? Where does it get you?
   Investment can be a hugely useful tool in growing your business, but what’s the point? Where does it get you? Where are you trying to go and, more importantly, will this money, expertise and support actually get you there? Investment isn’t cash-flow. You can’t treat it like it’s money in the bank. It should be there to accomplish key commercial goals – it should be there to drive you to a successful financial outcome. The formula should be simple:

   Opportunity + Investment = Growth
   Growth = Return on Investment

   That works lovely. The problem is a lot of companies seem to see it as:

   Opportunity + Investment = Stay Afloat
   Stay Afloat = Goodbye Investment

   Not so good, right? You have to make sure that what you’re asking for is going to lead (as far as you are able) to a solid return. It may not work out that way, but the plan has to make sense.

3. Outline the real proposition.
   Chances are, nobody loves your company like you do. You’re doing things because you love them. You’re doing things because of passion. That’s great. Investors will like that. They need to like that (and to like you). But that’s only going to get you half the way there. The other half is all commercial. That side needs to stand – and stand on its own. Without that, a real investor will look right through you.

As I said. I meet a lot of companies. A lot of companies in this field. There are a lot of excellent opportunities out there. A lot of great Scottish (and British) talent exists and I have seen some really innovate people come up with some cracking ideas.

Now we just have to make sure we get the investment right.

- j

I do what I do when I do it (episode 1 – The Introduction)

Posted on | October 27, 2010

People are always asking me what goes into one of our marketing strategies. A lot of times it’s because they are looking to get as much advice as they can for free, so I don’t normally elaborate too much. Until you pay me, that is.

But lately it’s occurred to me that I should share a bit more. Most people are pretty clueless when it comes to marketing strategy in general, and I think they are always surprised by the depth we go into our clients’ businesses. You can’t create strategy by skimming off the top – you need to go all the way in and really get a feel for it.

Over the coming weeks, I’m going to elaborate a bit more about the areas we look at when we are developing a strategy for a company. If nothing else, I hope it brings a bit more of an insight into the different areas that you have to think about when you’re looking to expand a business.

So. What’s coming up?

In my company, we’ve developed our own formula (which we’re constantly improving and tweaking as we face new challenges with different industries and businesses) for how we go about creating a marketing strategy, and the first step is the research and analysis phases. We normally call this the ‘Getting To Know You’ part of the project, and it involves a pretty heavy amount of external research coupled with a lot of exploration into the company itself. We follow the same formula for every company:

1. People & Personalities
2. Capacity
3. Products & Services
4. Marketing Activities
5. Sales Process
6. Financials

That’s it. Six critical areas that we need to understand about our clients before we can even begin to draft up a strategy for how to move them forward.

Some of these may surprise you. Some of them may seem outwith our remit and, in some ways, you’re right. The problem is that implementing a new marketing strategy isn’t just a case of creating a campaign here or a new brochure there. It’s not about sending letters and phoning people.

Implementing a new marketing strategy into your business is about making wholesale behavioral change in your organisation.

I’ll give you an example. People who know me, know that I’ve been making a very very conscious effort to change my lifestyle over the past year. For lots of reasons (a tough 17-day trek across the Antarctic being one) I’ve needed to lose weight and get back into shape. A lot of people my age say that.

How many of them go through with it?

If you live in the US, you’re constantly bombarded by new opportunities to lose weight. Crazy diet programmes, gastric bands….the list is pretty long. The problem with a lot of these solutions is that they don’t address the route problem – if you want to lose weight and keep that weight off you have to change your lifestyle.

And that’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve changed my eating habits, my diet, my exercise routines…everything. The only way to make a fundamental change stick is to change your behaviour.

And that’s why we look at the areas we do. That’s why we care about the personalities and how they interact. It’s why we care about capacity and systems. There is no point in us developing a marketing strategy that doesn’t fit with how our clients will work. We need to know that.

So over the next little while I’ll expand a bit deeper into the different areas we look and why it’s so critical to our success. And hopefully it will be interesting.

Or maybe it won’t be. But guess what? This is coming to you free so you aren’t allowed to bitch.

(at least not to me)

- j

Great moments in Advertising – Irn Bru Snowman

Posted on | October 25, 2010

I love this advert. I really do. It still makes me smile and still makes me laugh.

Well done Leith :-)

- j

Are your customers stifling your growth?

Posted on | October 18, 2010

When my company is brought in to help a business out, I can pretty much guarantee that the situation will fall into one of the following areas:

1. The business wants to expand to a new location
2. The business needs to launch a new product or service
3. The business wants to grow their turnover and profit but are stuck

Like I said, pretty much.

A lot goes on when we look at creating a new marketing strategy for a company. Our strategies aren’t ‘off-the-shelf’ ’2-minute-marketing-plan’ pieces of nonsense. They are comprehensive. They involve a LOT of research. Of analysis.

One of the other things we do is spend a lot of time in our ‘Getting To Know You’ process. It’s a critical part of analysising a business, and it’s an area that too many marketing companies miss out on. It’s an exhaustive look into the business – the people, the products/services – everything.

And this brings me neatly to today’s topic – do your customers actually stifle your growth as a company?

Weird question, I know, but too often I see businesses whose growth is held back because of the amount of time and commitment they give to their customers. Time and commitment that takes them away from developing new channels of opportunities.

Don’t take this as meaning I am blaming the customers. It’s not their fault. It’s yours.

Don’t take this to mean that you shouldn’t concentrate on giving the best service and commitment – of course you should.

The problem as I see it (and I see it a lot) lies more in managing resources and time within your own company. The last thing you want to do is be fully committed to the work you have, with no room or capacity to get new work. You simply can’t allow it. You need to be constantly looking to increase your pipeline of opportunities, and build in the capacity to handle this new business to the levels you aspire to.

Over the last five years, I’ve seen a number of businesses fall into this trap. It always comes out when we start our analysis sessions. Even more worryingly, it often comes out that the businesses are relying on a small number of large contracts to exist. If one of those contracts goes (and it will) you can be up the proverbial shit creek.

These businesses are letting their customers stifle their growth. Without a plan to tackle it (which, helpfully, we provide), they just keep spinning in the same circle.

One of the key areas we look at when we create a new marketing strategy is how we can manage capacity. That’s not just about execution capacity (ie. the resources you need to do the work). It’s also about sales capacity. There needs to be the right resources on each side of this coin.

- jordan

Junk mail, email spam, fax spam, telesales and now: social media spam!

Posted on | October 12, 2010

Hurrah!

Or alternatively, if you’re anything like me, sigh…

This won’t be particularly shocking to most of you. For those of us who work in the field (well, marketing in general) it’s even less so.

I think we’ve finally reached the point where spam is starting to outweigh the good in some of our favourite social media tools.

I don’t know who first decided that all sales is a numbers game, but if I could I’d go back in time and punch them right in the mouth. I’m sure they meant well. I’m sure they meant to say something along the lines of “you can’t get if you don’t ask” in order to convince people that it takes effort to get sales.

I’m very sure (I say in a “oh please” tone of voice) that they didn’t mean that you should just spam everyone you can see with any old shite.

Why this topic?

In the past four days I’ve had four emails (sorry inMails) through LinkedIn and five twitter DMs that were directly trying to sell me something that is absolutely no use to me.

No attempt at seeing if the opportunity was relevant to me. No attempt to engage me and tempt me to it. Just very easy and very direct spam.

Buy this.

Sign up here.

And what is worse is that these are coming from people I know. People who I have met. People who, for all intent, are part of my ‘trusted’ network.

And what do they do with that trust? They send me spam. They use their network of social media contacts and send out spam.

Guess what the result has been – I delete their message and I evaluate my relationship with these people.

30 seconds of quick spam = serious doubts of a future business relationship.

Is that really the best they can do with these wonderful new tools?

I can sometimes sound quite negative about social media tools. I’m actually a big fan. I love them. More importantly I see how powerful they can be for interaction and relationship building – with your customers, your employees, your public.

And what happens? You devalue it all with a 30 second piece of spam.

If you’re in someone’s network, you have a responsibility to respect that relationship. Regardless of the toolset (be it social or not) you have a responsibility to you network to respect them and build your relationships.

Enough already.

It’s a very quick way to losing a network. It’s a very easy way of losing my business.

(and I’m not the only one)

- j

10:10 campaign – effective or not? Discuss…

Posted on | October 5, 2010

Finally saw the videos this morning (hey, I’m busy). Wow.

For those who haven’t:

Initial thoughts: not effective way to change minds and convince people. Also not hugely impressed by their rationale.

On the other hands – props for starting with the kids!

- Jordan

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

Posted on | October 5, 2010

I have to admit – normally when I hear that phrase it’s in some sort of ‘b’ movie and it’s being uttered by a concerned parent or grandparent to their, somewhat wayward, daughter. But that’s not the story for today.

No, today it’s a perfect summary of one of my pet peeves – doing speculative work. Giving away the milk.

It’s particularly bad in my industry (not so much for me, but for the creative agencies) who have had a lifetime of putting together wonderful pitches, with wonderful visuals they have spent days to develop, only to have the clients turn them away (whilst nicking some of their ideas). It’s a sad, but all to common, fact of our industry.

And I hate it.

I also refuse to do it.

(I have to admit I’m in a much stronger position to do that, since our work involves heavy research and strategy, and that’s not something you pull together in a couple of days. But I refuse to do it on principle anyway.)

I got to thinking about this because I met a fascinating woman yesterday who is in the early stages of her new business. Obviously talented. Obviously successful.

But as we talked, she told me a bit about one of her recent experiences with a potential client. She had done some up-front work for them on faith, only to have them walk away once they got what they wanted. She’d given away some of the milk, and they felt they didn’t have to buy the cow anymore.

The result? No new client for her, and probably a bungled job done by the ‘client’.

A lose-lose situation. Fantastic. This brings me to why I hate speculative work – false pipelines and false expectations.

I’m always slightly surprised how many companies continue to waste their time talking to people who plainly aren’t serious about hiring them. Why do you bother? It wastes your time and, some times even worse, it lulls you into thinking your pipeline is a lot bigger than it actually is!

It’s easy to fool yourself, especially if you’re running your own business. Back when I started, I put everyone down in my pipeline if they seemed remotely interested in hiring my company. How many times did I do that until I learned? Probably a couple of years.

What you find when you do that is that you have a bunch of ‘open’ opportunities that never seem to close. The warning signs? They want another meeting. They want a bit more time. They call back a couple of months later to ‘revisit’ the idea. 95% of the time that’s them trying to get some more free advice. 100% waste of time.

I’m no sales trainer. I’m not an expert on negotiations. On the other hand, it seems to me that one of your core jobs, if you’re selling to someone, is to convince them of your value. You have to get them to believe in you and what you can do.

Giving away a huge amount of work for free will probably get you a lot of interested looks, but my question will always be this: how serious an opportunity are they?

I have some basic rules that I have developed over the past five years in business:

Rule 1 – Two Meetings
I’ll more or less take a meeting with anyone (within reason). You never know how you can help each other and I like to keep an open mind. If it turns into a sales opportunity I give it two meetings to get to the proposal stage. Within reason. If it’s for £100K of work it may take you more, but you get the idea. If we’re not there after two meetings, I put them on the ‘chancer’ pile and focus elsewhere.

Rule 2 – Nothing is Free
When I had a car, I never asked my mechanic to fix it for free to see if he did a good job. We agreed a price and I paid him. The same applies to almost every industry and, chances are, it applies to yours. How much do you de-value what you do by giving away bits for free? How much do you prolong a sales process with people who will never buy from you?

Rule 3 – No Money. No Work.
This probably doesn’t apply to every industry, so this rule can be optional for most people. When I start work with a new client, we always take 50% of the project (depending on size) upfront. Trust works two ways. You need to trust that I can deliver the goods, but I need to trust that you’ll pay me. until we establish that relationship, we’re in unchartered territories and you need to come up with the goods before I start my company moving.

I think they are good basic rules. Simple, clear and effective.

So every time you’re thinking of doing a huge load of work for free, perhaps you should imagine your gran looking down disapprovingly at you as you stagger in at 3AM?

(or just remember the rules)

- jordan

MacBook Pro for sale

Posted on | September 23, 2010

Ok, this isn’t a marketing post, but it’s renewal time for all the kit in my office. With the new iPad taking over my mobile role, I am selling my MacBook Pro.

It’s, well, a MacBook pro. Normal wear and tear applies after three years of love. It was top of the line when I got it (3 years ago) and is still very quick. I’ll wipe it and install a clean copy of OSX 10.6 (I’ll even throw in a copy of iWork 09).

Main Specs:
15.4″
2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo
2 GB 667 Mhz DDR2 SDRAM
150GB Hard Disk
Superdrive
Includes Projector Cable & Power Cable

It cost about £2200 when new. I’ll take a reasonable offer. Collect in Edinburgh.

- j