David Barker - Inspire

18/03/2020

I received an email last night and just knew I had to send it on.

It’s written by a friend and colleague, Mark Creaser - I consider him the ‘Jeremy Clarkson of Business Consultants’!

Take a few minutes to have a read. I hope you find it useful...

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How to keep your business out of the black hole and leave this s**tstorm stronger than you started.

We get the media that we deserve, there’s no point in blaming them, the poor hacks.

There are no good news stories because we don’t want them. Not yet.

We’re in a malaise, we await bad news, we want it.

Bring it on.

The conspiracy theorists sit behind their keyboards and join distant dots. The media is hysterical, the media is to blame. The governments started this, it’s a man-made virus. We’re all going to die and it’s because of Breakfast, or Boris, or whatever.

Business owners and leaders soak it up. Information is power.

We need to be informed. Need to understand what’s going on and how it’s going to affect us. We demand more updates from Boris. Increased transparency. Daily briefings. Minute-by-minute newscasting.

The all-powerful algorithms mean there is no end. Finish reading one post and a new one takes its place. The algorithm gives us more of what we want, and our appetite is insatiable.

We are so busy keeping up with events that are swirling around us, that we stand still.

We do nothing.

There is so much going on, so much happening right now, that we slow down. We let ourselves be overtaken by events.

And if you’re a business owner, you cannot afford to let that happen.

Stand still and you will be overtaken. Not only by events, but by the businesses who are making plans and implementing them, by the leaders who are galvanising their teams and doing the things that will make a difference in a few short weeks.

I’m not an expert in infectious diseases, but I do know that this isn’t the end of the world.

The situation has got darker and darker over the last few days, but we’re not falling into a black hole, we’re simply entering a tunnel.

And the light is visible on the other side, our friends in China prove it. We were living our best life in February, doing whatever we wanted to, shaking hands with gay abandon and only buying as much toilet roll as we needed.

Now it is China’s turn to watch us.

They are coming out of the tunnel, closing down their temporary hospitals, taking off masks and opening up factories. All 42 Apple stores in China flung open their doors last week, a month after shutting up shop.

While the media keeps most people focussed on how dark it is, we must not get pulled into their black hole of bad news.

Yes, the news is bad. No, it’s not going to be better tomorrow.

But it will be better, and quickly.

Just as fast as the lights have gone out, they will be back on.

And the media will change its tune just as quickly.

It’ll start slow. A flight route opened up again. FTSE up slightly. West End shows on.

We’ll read those and share them. The algorithm will kick in and editors will demand more good news stories.

Suddenly, our newsfeeds will be wall to wall positivity.

Outside, the sun will be shining.

This dreamy utopia isn’t months away. It’s just around the corner. A few weeks if we’re anything like China, a couple of months at most if Boris’s boffins have misread their model.

Our world will quickly return to normal. We’ll be standing around in pub gardens drinking bottles of Corona making terrible virus-related jokes all summer and then it’ll be done and dusted. As relevant as swine flu by Christmas, relegated to pub quiz answer, maybe a ‘what happened next’ on A Question of Sport.

That is what’s coming down the line. The short-sighted are pre-occupied with what’s happening today and might happen tomorrow, leaders building long-term success have got their heads up, they’re focussing on what’s coming next.

And what is coming next?

Well, in most markets, Coronavirus is a bottleneck, not a cork.

Stuff isn’t being cancelled; it’s being postponed.

Brunch 2020 has become Brunch 2021.

Smaller events will be pushed back towards the end of the year. An event we were going to with a bunch of clients this month looks like it’s going to be in December now.

Easter Sunday is now scheduled for 28th June.

I’m joking about that one.

But the point is that nobody has pressed stop. We’re on pause.

People still have hopes, dreams and plans for the rest of the year, and as soon as we’re out of the tunnel they’re going to start work making them happen.

The couples who have been saving for a new kitchen or car this year aren’t going to get it done in the next few weeks, but they will still want to get it done by Christmas.

Divorce lawyers aren’t going to have a busy month because everyone is staying home, but after a few weeks of couples locked inside the same house, they might yet have a very busy year.

Venues who are completely empty this month will struggle to find dates for every postponed event that needs to happen during the rest of the year.

And so on.

So as a business owner, what’s the best course of action?

What should you be doing right now?

Well not what most people will be doing, that’s for sure.

Most people will be running scared, they only see what the bad news media is pumping out and they’ve mentally shut up shop already, resigned to a future of s**t hitting fans.

There are businesses behaving like this is the new normal, and it isn’t.

Some businesses are noticeable by their absence. They’ve spent years building and nurturing relationships, and then they’ve suddenly stopped.

These are mistakes. If you’re making them then you need to take stock and lift up your head.

We are not entering a black hole. We are going through a tunnel and when the light arrives, you need to be ready for it. Things will have changed, in psychology and balance sheets, in changed business models and new customer habits.

Your competitive landscape might well have changed too. Old competitors might have left your market, new ones may have arrived, your position in the pecking order might have changed.

Some businesses are already preparing. They know that when the light arrives, it will arrive swiftly and with little warning. Phones will start ringing, who will answer them? What will they say?

There are three main phases to consider when it comes to creating your plan.

Phase 1 – The Tunnel

This is where we’re at right now. Hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. Buying pasta and toilet roll. Awaiting the daily updates, waiting for more direction.

Phase 2 – The Light

Like China, we will race out of the tunnel. We don’t know when, but we know we will. We will return to our old routines, football fans at football matches, theatre goers going to theatres.

Phase 3 – The New Normal

Some industries will be changed forever, the way that many of us work might well be too. We’ve been able to work from home for years, but many haven’t embraced it, preferring the familiarity of an office. We’ve been able to hold meetings really effectively using technology like Zoom ages, but we have chosen not to.

Will this be the catalyst for change? Fewer commuters, less business travel?

Planning for phase 3 doesn’t need to happen yet. Planning for phases 1 and 2 is critical. You can’t lead without a clear vision and plan, and even though we’re living in the middle of a s**tstorm, it’s much more important that you have a strategy for what happens at the end of the storm than spending your time understanding what colour the s**t is today.

Every business will need a unique plan, there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ here, but as you pull your plan together over the next few days, here are four areas to consider:

1 - How Should You Be Working?

The technology is there for us all to work differently. Online, at home, collaboratively, not just within our teams but with our customers, clients, patients and partners too.

Which are the right tools for your business to be using right now, are they the right tools for you to use in the longer term?

2 - How Should You Be Communicating?

People like to do business with people that they know, like and trust. That’s not going to change, and that’s why increasing your communication right now is the right thing to do.

Your team needs to understand what’s going on, they need to know that you have a plan and what their part is. They need to be led, and they want you to lead them.

Your customers need leadership too. They want you to tell them what they should be doing. They want reassurance, they want transparency. They do not want unanswered calls and emails.

If you’re going to springboard out of this, then you’ll need to maintain your relationships with your suppliers and partners. You’ll need their help soon enough. Lots of businesses won’t be paying suppliers or communicating with them, those trusted partnerships will be worthless very quickly. This is your time to show what a trustworthy, open company you are to work with.

3 - How Should You Be Marketing?

Whether you’re dependent on new customers coming into your business or repeat sales to existing customers, most businesses don’t market now for immediate customers, the marketing they do today creates customers next month, next quarter, next year.

Taking your eye off your marketing right now won’t hurt you today. You might not feel it for ages, but just when you need them most, you won’t have prospects to sell to, your customers will be buying from somebody else.

You need to plan to keep generating leads, and for most businesses, expect a low conversion rate while we progress through the tunnel. Double-down on nurturing them instead, build relationships, build trust, and be ready to convert them in a few weeks’ time.

(Some businesses, and some clients of ours, are generating MORE leads, more easily right now. The temptation is to ease your foot off the marketing gas, but that might not be the right thing to do, the competitor who has mashed their marketing pedal to the metal is eating your lunch.)

The businesses who grab a load of new customers this year will be those who have built and maintained relationships with their lists, have offers and sales material ready to go, and have their websites sharp and up to date.

They’re ready for business, they’ll win.

4 - How Should You Be Changing?

Businesses make money from creating value, the best entrepreneurs find ways to add value to their customers (or somebody else’s customers).

In your planning you should consider what you can do as well - or instead of – what you’ve been doing. What else do your customers need? What would they value? What would they pay for? How can you deliver it?

Summary

When shocks like this happen, problems and opportunities are both created. Most businesses readily see the problems, but the opportunities are unseen.

If yours is a local business, for example, reliant on your customers coming to you or meeting up in person at local events or meetings, and one of the outcomes of this shock is that people get used to not attending events, to online meetings and one-to-one video calls, then your value proposition is significantly changed.

Stay with the old model and you’ll lose customers. Embrace the change and you could reduce costs and deliver value to customers from all over the world.

Strategic planning is particularly hard to do when you’re under pressure, and much easier for someone who is at least partially detached from your business, with enough knowledge to ask the right questions, but not so involved in your day-to-day that they fail to think strategically enough. If you can find that person, then you stand a good chance of creating a better plan.

Focus your planning around a small number of critical areas, rather than a list of Action Points that could easily have sat in last year’s strategic plan.

Most of all though, create the time over the next week or so to craft and tweak your plan, to sense check it and polish, and then to start work.

When the water is calm a half-decent plan will get you to where you want to go, but when the storm is thrashing around you, you need to get crystal clear on your strategy.

14/11/2019

I finally changed my windscreen wipers the other day.

In truth, they’d been deteriorating for some time now - doing less and less of the job they were designed to do.

But over the summer, during that generally good weather, it was a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ - I didn’t need them, so I didn’t consciously notice just how bad they were.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that their condition really shone through

I was driving to Hertfordshire for a couple of hours, and had heavy rain all the way, with the return journey even worse.

It’s fair to say that at that point, it really hit home that my wipers were not fit for purpose, and I resolved that I’d change them the very next day.

However, the next day brought bright, brilliant sunshine, and after a quick check of the forecast, it looked like it wasn’t going to rain for the next week.

With a million things on my ‘To-Do List’, a special trip to Halfords wasn’t hugely desirable - it was tremendously tempting to put it off. After all, it wasn’t going to rain for a week, so I wouldn’t need them anyway.

In the end though, I resolved just to do it – I drove to Halfords that evening and acquired a new pair of all bells and whistles Bosch wipers.

Job done.

As it turned out, the forecast wasn’t as good as suggested, and later that week I found myself in torrential rain again, this time with a pair of world-class wipers expertly clearing the windscreen. (Picture smug face 😉)

Had I waited until I ‘needed them’ - i.e. when the rain began - it would have been too late; I’d have been subjected to another journey with less visibility and more risk.

But because I’d got organised ahead of time, I was in the clear, while the sky was anything but.

And this principle of taking action before you need to is hugely relevant when it comes to marketing.

The truth is, that a lot of local advertisers only get around to focusing on their marketing when they need customers this month.

Your message to them should be clear - Marketing for the imminent future is simply not an adequate way of advertising.

And the reason why is simple: with so much competition around, the only way to come out on top, is for them to be in their potential customer’s consciousness well before they decide to buy.

Advertisers would be well-versed to subscribe to this principle…

Become known, before you’re needed.

By marketing consistently, regardless of how full the order book is, they can fill up their sales funnel with people who know who they are, like what they offer, and trust what they say … all ahead of time.

Waiting until the rain comes is a sure-fire way to for them to miss out on a considerable proportion of potential customers. And if they’re serious about building a profitable, sustainable business, that’s the last thing they want to happen.

https://www.inspire-media.com/blog/a-cornerstone-of-marketing

03/07/2019

I was having dinner with a friend of mine last week, chewing the fat about all manner of topics.

My friend’s name is John, he’s a lovely man, and – among other things – he’s a mortgage advisor.

And inevitably, we ended up talking about business, and about the various different marketing strategies we’re both deploying to get more customers and grow our businesses.

One of the things that became really obvious during the conversation was the truth of what’s known as “Pareto’s Law”, otherwise known as the 80:20 rule.

Pareto was an Italian economist, and his proposition was that – in life as well as in business – roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.

If we contextualise this for your media business, you’ll get something along these lines:

80% of your profit comes from 20% of your customers
80% of your sales come from 20% of your sales team
80% of your product sales come from 20% of your products.

And so on, and so forth.

Anyway, when it comes to marketing, John’s recognised Pareto’s principle at work in his business:

He’s done a lot of marketing over the years: leaflets, Adwords, Facebook, email, flyers, the list goes on and on, but 90% of his customers come from ONE thing – three testimonial videos on his homepage.

I was so staggered by these statistics that I just had to share them with you, and there’s a simple reason why – when you discover something in business that has such a disproportionately positive effect, it simply doesn’t make sense not to implement it personally.

Video testimonials WORK, and here’s why:

#1 People trust customer testimonials more than anything you can say about yourself.
#2 Video is hard to fake or stage, so they’re viewed as much more reliable than text-based testimonials.
#3 It’s much easier to be emotive in video, and as we know, we buy with emotion and then justify with logic.

Long story short, if you haven’t got video testimonials from customers who’ve had a great experience with you, that needs to change.

And the best place to put them?

The page with the most amount of traffic, which in almost all cases is your homepage.

05/06/2019

We media people don’t always have it easy these days, do we?

We’ve been around for longer than most of the new media platforms put together, and that should tell you that we’re doing something that works.

However, in a world where business owners worship ‘the new’ at every turn, it certainly feels like familiarity can often breed contempt.

I speak to many business owners about their marketing, and what’s clear is that with the advent of Facebook and Google and other platforms that allow you to target people very specifically, ‘old media’ is often regarded as ‘too broad’, even old hat.

Which – you and I both know – is about a million miles away from the truth.

So, how do you convince your prospects that it’s worth investing their advertising budget in so-called ‘old media’, especially when they’re convinced that they’ll be able to ‘target’ their prospects more effectively with digital media?

There’s no easy answer. People love ‘new’, and always will. But in my experience, this line of reasoning generally works well:

1. It’s called ‘mass media’ for a reason. What’s the reason? Well, it’s a media that reaches the masses. And by definition, reaching ‘the masses’ is not ‘targeting’ – how could it be? Further still, within the masses, and the decision-makers and their all-important influencers.

2. There’s also a good reason why ‘mass media’ has stood the test of time. The reality is that whatever the marketing gurus tell you, mass media works. That’s why it’s still going, while many new media have come and gone.

3. Targeting costs more for less reach. What the people recommending new ‘targeted’ media don’t tell you, is that you’re paying a premium for the privilege of specific targeting, when you could have reached those people anyway with mass media.

4. Mass media still allows you to send the right message to your target audience. While radio or TV advertising usually doesn’t allow you to filter down an audience, you can still ‘choose who to lose’, by selecting the right ad copy that filters out the customer you don’t want and attracting the ones you do.

Long story short: targeting is expensive, and you can get the same result (if not a better one) with mass media.

Essentially, it’s not about what’s old; it’s not about what’s new. It’s about what’s a good deal, using a relevant and proven platform, to communicate my message to my decision-makers and their influencers, en masse.

Try this out in your next sales conversation, and let me know how you get on…

15/05/2019

I was in Denmark last month.

Not to take in Legoland or the Tivoli Gardens, but I did have a couple of very enjoyable days with Radio ABC Group, delivering sales training to help stimulate their advertising revenues.

I usually try and keep my training sessions collaborative, rather than boring presentations with fifty million slides, and on this occasion, I’m very glad I did.

You see, one of the best takeaways of the workshop came from one of the delegates, Tina Sørensen Strangholt.

A couple of weeks earlier, Tina had been to a networking meeting, which was definitely – to use a football analogy – a game of two halves.

Before the meeting, no one was particularly interested in talking to her.

Maybe they had bigger fish to fry, or maybe they weren’t interested in advertising. (We’ve all been there, right?)

Either way, it seemed like they left Tina standing awkwardly next to the croissants.

But then the meeting kicked off, and by the time it had finished everything had changed.

The person chairing the meeting was a local restaurateur, and just before he called the meeting to a close, he made a point of telling everyone in the room, that if they were serious about using advertising to get more leads and sales, they needed to speak to Tina.

He went on to say what a valuable advertising partner Radio ABC had been for his business and urged all the business operators to go and speak to her afterwards.

Which they did, with Tina collecting eight business cards, which soon after resulted in eight new business appointments.

What other people say about you, particularly people who have wide spheres of influence, matters A LOT.

You see, everything you say about yourself can be seen as marketing or advertising. However, when other people say things about you, it’s instantly regarded as more trustworthy.

What are you doing to increase endorsements and referrals, and build relationships with influential figures and organisations in your area?

Or, are you just leaving this to chance?

10/04/2019

I’ve been in media sales for a long time, and I’ve seen more than my fair share of media sales operations.

And over the years, I’ve come to a realisation:

One of the biggest problems with media sales is that it’s too often focused on short-term initiatives, that there’s not a solid enough strategy that delivers positive and dependable results.

The result of this short-term effort is that the sales activity is not effective as it could and should be, because all it focuses on is getting the next sale over the line, by hook or by crook.

I’ve been in media sales for a long time, and I’ve seen more than my fair share of media sales operations.  And over the years, I’ve come to a realisation:  One of the biggest problems with media sales, is that it’s too often focused on short-term initiatives, that there’s not a

27/03/2019

I’ve mentioned one of my mentors – Nigel Botterill – a couple of times before, and there’s a good reason: he really knows his stuff.

And today I just wanted to touch on one of his ‘rules’ for success:

‘Your most valuable asset – bar none – is your database.’

When you think about it, it’s incredibly accurate…

I’ve mentioned one of mentors – Nigel Botterill – a couple of times before, and there’s a good reason: he really knows his stuff. And today I just wanted to touch on one of his ‘rules’ for success: ‘Your most valuable asset – bar none – is your database.’ When you think about it,...

15/03/2019

In my view, a really interesting and valid perspective on the recent developments in UK local radio.

When this broadcast model was introduced in New Zealand twenty years ago, despite the arguable social and community impact, it quickly proved popular with local audiences and was therefore profitable for media owners.

Towns and cities across the country are losing their radio shows. Who will tell their stories now? asks Guardian columnist John Harris

25/02/2019

The growth and fall of the world's leading brands in 7 years!

13/02/2019

Not so long ago I had a conversation with a guy called Paul Smith, he’s the Station Director at Signal 107 in Wolverhampton.

He told me a story that I just HAD to share with you, so here it is…

Not so long ago I had a conversation with a guy called Paul Smith, he’s the Station Director at Signal 107 in Wolverhampton. He told me a story that I just HAD to share with you, so here it is… Read more →

31/01/2019

I’ve always believed in the power of learning, no matter how accomplished you already are.

One of the people I’ve been learning a lot from recently, is a guy called Grant Cardone. You might have heard of him – he’s very American, very salesy, but he’s got some really excellent stuff to say.

In his book Sell or Be Sold, he makes a terrific point that hit me head-on…

I’ve always believed in the power of learning, no matter how accomplished you already are. One of the people I’ve been learning a lot from recently, is a guy called Grant Cardone. You might have heard of him – he’s very American, very salesy, but he’s got some really excellent stuff to say...

09/01/2019

I had an interesting response to my email on Jose Mourinho last month (which is highly topical now that the ‘Special One’ has been dethroned at Old Trafford!).

It was from Neil Gough, Sales Manager at WLR FM in Waterford, Ireland. He expanded upon the point I’d made about Mourinho making the best of the squad he had, his first time around at Chelsea.

Here’s what Neil said...

I had an interesting response to my email on Jose Mourinho last month (which is highly topical now that the ‘Special One’ has been dethroned at Old Trafford!).   It was from Neil Gough, Sales Manager at WLR FM in Waterford, Ireland. He expanded upon the point I’d made about Mourinho makin...