Getting the First Meeting

YOUR MARKETING HAS resulted in a stream of interest from prospective clients. The phone is ringing off the hook. The switchboard is jammed with requests for meetings. The first available time on your calendar is two weeks from Wednesday. As great as this may sound, it doesn’t happen. It’s not unrealistic to imagine someone attending your luncheon seminar coming up to you afterwards and saying “I’m interested in learning more about this, can we get together?” It’s also possible you receive a response from a contact marketing email from someone wanting to meet once they return from their business trip. These do occur – but for most of us, this is not enough to meet our business development goals.

From Trends to Business Opportunities

WHETHER YOU CALL it product development, strategic planning or sales forecasting, in the end, it comes down to the same thing: to be successful over time, businesses need people who can see the future. They don't have to be geniuses or visionaries in the mould of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford or Bill Gates. And they certainly don't need to come up with vacuous "vision statements" about having a passion to serve customers and be the best. What every business does need, and always will, is individuals who can see what's coming next. On one level that may amount to little more than functional foresight. For example, right around the holidays, planes will be overbooked, shopping will be intense, and any production services needed will be slower than usual. Base any plans around any of those factors and you won't go far wrong.

Building your Value Proposition

WHAT IS A value proposition? It seems like a straightforward question. However, ask any number of sales and marketing executives to define their product's value proposition and often they have a hard time coming up with a clear, concise and compelling message. Sure, they have a number of colourful and dynamic PowerPoint presentations that explain the unique selling point, how the product is different from the competition and the benefit the customer will receive, but this is only part of a value proposition equation. Put simply, a value proposition is the promise that a product makes to a customer that outweighs its total cost. "That outweighs its total cost" is the part of the value proposition that most people overlook. This is important, because many products offer great value, but value is relative to the cost, risk and effort required to make a product useful.

Emotional Self-Management

A LEADING COMPANY held its annual conference to review performance and map out future strategy. During a breakout session on the second day, groups drawn from different departments were given time to brainstorm about an assigned topic, after which they were to give a short presentation summarising their ideas and conclusions. Each group consisted of people of varying levels of seniority in the hope of sparking creativity and stimulating the participants to come up with new perspectives and not just recycle the same old thinking.

Developing a Vision

AN EFFECTIVE LEADER has the ability to present a vision with which team players can connect emotionally. Such a vision is not a business strategy or a five-year plan, but a broader concept that has the power to unite people and rally them around a common cause. Such a vision can be used to define the future, influence interactions between colleagues and inspire employees to higher levels of achievement.

Promoting Your Company

ASK ANY OF your clients why they appointed you. Chances are you will hear words like understanding, trust, compatibility, rapport. The words you probably will not hear are the ones related to your marketing efforts - advertising, website, public relations, press release, newsletters, or seminars. In professional services, clients buy individuals. People buy people. This doesn’t mean that marketing is not important. Quite the contrary, it has a very important role. But this role needs to be clearly defined. Marketing is not about selling your service; it’s about motivating the clients to want to meet with you.

Emotional Awareness of Others

SOMETIMES A BOSS has to deliver bad news. It is not part of the job description, but it is part of the job, and the way it is done says a great deal about the leadership style and overall competency of the person in charge. Depending on the organisation and context, what constitutes bad news can be one of many things. It might be about an impending corporate restructuring with anticipated company-wide layoffs, a move to less convenient office premises, or the non-payment of discretionary bonuses. Whatever the case, one thing can make all the difference in gaining acceptance and maintaining staff morale - the way the message is delivered.

When Coaches Communicate

DO NOT BE surprised if you find a sports coach attending your next annual meeting or sales conference. It has become common for leading companies to invite successful coaches to give motivational speeches on leadership. If you think about it, the principles of leadership and team building are the same, whether on the sports field or in the boardroom. The vocabulary – competition, winning tactics, team spirit and motivation – is virtually interchangeable.

Screening Your Best Prospects

IF YOU HAD a blank sheet of paper and the task of developing a list of prospective clients, where would you begin? For most of us, the first step would be to pull out some of the hundreds of name cards collected over the years and select the most likely prospects from among them. If asked to explain why those particular firms were chosen, your answer would probably be that they are big and have potential, have a large budget for professional services, that contact has already been established, or that some business has been done with them in the past.