Business media coverage

doesn’t start and stop

  with a news release! 

If your business isn’t getting the kind of news coverage you would like, maybe you’re giving too much attention to what your news release says and not enough to those who decide its newsworthiness.

Whether or not your news release prompts media coverage has first to do with how newsworthy (and UN-self-serving) it is. Second, it will only get meaningful placement attention when you (or whomever you designate) give(s) meaningful appreciation attention. This doesn’t mean fawning over or patronizing reporters and editors. It means appreciating their situations and responsibilities.

In the past 90 days, over 30,000 journalists have changed their jobs, their “beats” or their places of work.

 (Source: www.MyMediaInfo.com)

So regardless of how stellar and airtight your perfectly worded and formatted presentation may be, this is an industry where writers and editors may have other things on their minds besides your news release.

                                                                             

In most cases, you will not break through the clutter with an email or printed page and a half of sensational news about your company’s products, services, activities, or ideas. It will take more than that. The word here is empathy — putting yourself in other’s shoes. Maybe you think you shouldn’t have to do that as a matter of business practice.

But consider that media people (as much as we may justifiably bash the network TV anchors and often extremist editorial board behaviors) tend to be sensitive beasts. They are caught in the middle of the need to balance legitimate value stories with the illegitimate ones that will sell more newspapers and magazines and more broadcast airtime to keep enough revenues flowing to pay their salaries.

Yes, of course there are always online avenues of news exposure. Some of these — for example, www.PRWeb.com and online granddaddy, www.PRNewsWire.com, charge exorbitant fees by comparison with www.MarketersMedia.com, but they have higher “Reach” capabilities. If you don’t need to connect the world, consider MarketersMedia.

Combined with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and other less significant players, these news release outlets can be highly productive channels.

In fact, most traditional journalists now use Twitter on a regular basis. (Source: www.MyMediaInfo.com) But, still, for really big news coverage, many continue to look to major media coverage as the difference between news and N E W S.

Okay, so do you think a single news release delivered to the Wall Street Journal from any lower level name awareness than Mr. Goldman or Mr. Sachs is going to get your new Whiz Bang Production Facility on the front page? On ANY page?

Public Relations requires Media Relations.

The best business coverage only happens 999,999 times out of a million because relationships are established and nurtured.

Like every other industry and profession, there are “tricks of the trade” you need to know in order to make your efforts pay off.

It cost money to learn and apply these secrets. Many PR firms charge $10,000 to $30,000 a month to play the PR game for you, but a good PR Coach (who will help you play the game yourself) shouldn’t be more than $1,500 to $3,500 a month (including writing a monthly release or two!).

# # #

931.854.0474 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

 “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Business or Personal, one small story or a lifetime . . .

“You should write 

a book about that!”

Probably everyone has heard this suggestion at one time or another. Most, however, shrug it off or dismiss it without serious thought.

Some simply don’t think that what they have to say is book-worthy. Others don’t think they have the time or wherewithal to pull it off. Still others just don’t know where to start or how to get good guidance without getting ripped off. A few start and quit.

If you have a story that can hold

people’s attention, you can write a book.

If you or your business has experienced some unusual or inspiring or outstanding pattern or event that prompts tears or laughter, or provokes serious head-nodding or grins of satisfaction, or that serves as a strong example of what to do or not do (failures, remember, teach success), you probably have the makings of a book.

What kind of book? Whatever kind suits your fancy.

Books, contrary to popular electronics

industry hype, are not dying.

Electronic readers are, in fact, most likely to cause an increase in book writing, publishing, and sales as they continue to come down in price. Kindles (now $139) and the like are becoming the new cell phone for a generation that’s now finding its way back to storytelling with this extended form of social media.  

A full-length, hard cover or paperback book serves an important archival value for many, and can serve to spike credibility to new levels of industry or professional acceptance . . . regardless of whether it ever gets on bookseller shelves and earns you a royalty.

A downloadable ebook can have enormous promotional value for your website and social media stardom.

Bottom line: A book is a book is a book.

Can just anyone help you? No. Simply because an individual has written or published a book does not make that person an expert, especially if you are considering some full-length story treatment, and even more especially if business is the subject or a key subject.

It takes considerable writing and storytelling skill to help someone pull a draft together. It takes editing expertise to make the draft work. It takes business experience and know-how for a book-writing consultant to be able to help create a business-based book. 

But securing the kind of writing/editing and publishing help that’s right for you, and the story you have in you, doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. It depends entirely on what you’re looking to accomplish, and how willing you are to commit yourself to the task.

The best place to start is not with a title and dedication page. Start with putting ideas for pieces of your story on index cards or pieces of scrap paper you can shuffle around a tabletop when you have a dozen or so.

Next, organize the individual thoughts into some kind of order or plan or outline or list, then consolidate those that seem to fit or work together or play off one another. This is a good point to start poking around for some experienced guidance on productive ways to put your puzzle pieces together, and to help you keep focused and on target with your message. 

Need an informed, honest book idea opinion that’s FREE to my blog visitors? Try me. I just finished writing my 6th book, hold major writing awards, offer 35 years of business experience, and yes, I am approachable. (See phone and email below) 

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

No matter who you sell for, 

you run a home business!

There’s no escaping the fact that no matter what you sell or who you work for, if you’re a sales professional, you’re also a small home-based business owner and operator.

I’m not talking about the waves of fly-by-night multi-level marketing quick-buck scammers out there. I’m talking about the millions of honest, sincere, hard-working professional sales reps who are fighting their way through this catastrophic economic mess we’re mired in.

Every morning you get up and get on your horse and make sales calls and visits and networking contacts. Every night you come home to run the business that supports your daily sales mission. 

Neither your neighbors nor your dysfunctional in-laws can figure out why you need a home office to sell products or services for existing businesses. Why do you need to duplicate work?

Aaaaacht!

You tell them that selling is just part of the job and that the full sales function consists of 37,462 other tasks that you are required to do and that only you can do, like maintaining accurate CRM records, and expense and travel reports, and scheduling, and on and on.

In many cases, you need to be able to straddle opposite force-field careers, like entrepreneur and corporate rep, and salesperson and bill collector. (How much more opposite could these mindsets be?)

And it’s not just a matter of being a self-starter or having enough capital to support the administrative costs, as I heard some clearly ignorant bank commercial suggest today.

You need to be constantly on the alert to new product/service and market knowledge. You need to shore up your “non-business business” with the right kinds of input and advice and support services and marketing know-how . . . because you cannot any longer rely 100% on the company(ies) you represent to provide all this for you.

So now I’m going to complicate your life even more. If you’re a sales professional and you don’t have your own personal website, you are not making the most of your ambitions or your energy. You are not making the most of yourSELF, and you’re not helping yourself build or strengthen a meaningful reputation.

Why is this so important? Because you may leave or disengage from the company(ies) you sell for, but you will always carry your reputation forward. Your reputation will create new and improved circumstances for you whether you stay where you are or go to the greener grass. Your reputation is what people use to size you up and judge your integrity.

A personal website is the best tool you can have toward those ends because it’s YOUR tool about YOU and not something that belongs to and is manipulated by others. Your website can feature your professional self as well as your personal self. It can give you a place to be yourself in a professional light.

Show off your family, your church, your sports and community interests, your hobbies and past-time interests, the vacation you took, the fish you caught, your dog. And you can write about it all with a free blog in your own words, as often as you like. It gives you a special tool to help you sell yourself (which is mostly what customers and prospects “buy” anyway. 

Imagine a salesperson handing you a business card with her company and logo and contact info. and on the back, she hand-writes her personal website address. Do you think you’d check it out? Do you think you’d think that this person is pretty sharp? And, no, it doesn’t have to cost alot to get your own site up and started. It’s really just an issue of how professional you want to be.  

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

Dear Corporate Guys. . . 

Open minds open doors!

Sometimes, when people and organizations get too big for their britches, they have a tendency to shut down their receiving antennas. They can become especially resistant to the idea of being taught a lesson by the smaller, younger whippersnappers that they once were. But here’s the deal, Neal (Sorry; been writing rhyming verse today). Any entrepreneur will tell you:

You’re missing major sales 24/7

HA! you say, you have a great salesforce, a top-notch explosive website, and wonderful customer service people. That may be true on all three counts, though not likely. Them’s fightin’ words, you mutter under your breath, behind your glimmering smile. That “them is fightin’ words” may also be true. But here…is reality:

You’re missing major sales 24/7

Pick up the phone right now, before you even read the next paragraph, and call (not a number you know) any number for your company that you can find (IF you can find one) on your company website. Start with your homepage and troll around until you think you have a number that could answer your question about what quantity discounts might be possible for major purchases.

Odds are that if you are not put through a barrage of push-this-to-get that instructions, which are unlikely to offer any bulk purchase information anyway, you will be put on hold listening to some imbecilic message wrapped in static, and maybe escape the telltale buzzing followed by: “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.”

Okay, you get past all that. So ask. What arrangements are possible to make if I want to purchase 500 or 1,000 or 20,000 units from you? Who is the person I should speak with about quantity discount options? About custom-designed or packaged versions? Delivery timelines? About how staggered purchases can be when market testing is involved?

You’re missing major sales 24/7

Have you any idea how many sales slipped through the cracks this year because your company only talks user-friendly, but doesn’t leave doors open for prospective customers? Take a guess. Are you willing to admit that customers may have questions that simply can’t be accounted for by a program developed by some geek who doesn’t know spit about how and why people buy what they buy?

I wasted nearly two hours this week calling numbers I had to pry out of websites for three of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies. After battling to get past automated messages and static on-hold music from a company that truly should have offered superb listening, I began to feel frustrated. Hmmm, maybe they don’t want to sell stuff!

Then, after getting seven disconnects from one company and four from another, I finally spoke with stupendously pleasant people who –once they managed to slow down the pace of their speech patterns at my request– turned out to know nothing. Although, one did give me the name of a person to call and email. Another promised to “look into it” and would email me; that was two days ago.

Customer service departments should all be deleted anyway. When all employees are trained right, and accessible, there’s no need for separate (and expensive) customer service staff! 

You’re missing major sales 24/7

Oh, the call number I got, by the way (which I double-checked!), was a fax machine. The email address was answered three days later by someone else who said the person I had emailed was long-gone from the company, and how could I have ever gotten that name? (Instead of: “We screwed up, but what can I do to make things right for you?”)

The calls I made, FYI, were legit. I was representing the interests of a client who was actually considering purchasing a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of merchandise for major promotional use (the purchase of which, alone, may afford another hundred thousand dollars worth of unpurchasable positive publicity for the supplier!), but the client wanted answers now, not days from now.

Did you make that call yet? You might be surprised by what you learn.     

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

You have a business tale

to tell, but no time to

  tell it?. . . or write it? 

     So what’s your story, Boss?

     Is it long or short? Simple? Complicated? Fictional? Factual? Happy or sad? Burning hot? Icy cold? Based on true firsthand experience,  or imaginary, hand-me-down sagas? A story of family or of strangers? Neighborhoods or distant travels?

     Is it manufacturing or retail or distributorship based? B to B or B to C? A story of tourism or industry? A professional practice story? A legal or medical story? A growth or failure story? A partnership or separation story? What is it all about?

     You can and probably already do tell your story in chunks — in website pages, email messages, news releases, brochures, newsletters and interview answers. Or you can tell it (or major parts of it) all in one place that can then BE chunked up.

You can accomplish this with more complete, more comprehensive forays into the land of literature — a series of feature articles, ebooks, position (“white”) papers, booklets, specialty magazines, ongoing blog posts, and full-length books are some examples of what other successful business leaders are now doing.

     There are armies of talented organizations, groups, businesses and individuals standing in line, ready to pounce on filling any and all of the challenging opportunities for exposure — and enhancing credibility and reputation — that are noted above.

     They work on commission. They work on fees. They work on incentives. You can do it cheap or expensive, or somewhere in between.

     You will –as with most things in life — get what you pay for. If you’re happy with your neighbor’s 16 year-old being your webmaster and your new MBA assistant writing your sales and marketing pieces, you will no doubt take comfort in their efforts to represent what’s in your head!

Reminds me of the old Kawasaki Motorcycle helmet ad — “If your head is worth $29.95, buy a $29.95 helmet!”  

     Here are half a dozen thought-provokers:

1) Don’t give up on your business story idea, whatever it is. Instead, start to bullet-point it on index cards or a pocket pad or your laptop.

2) When you know what it is that you seek for your main message, start to scout around for someone with a track-record for the kind of writing you want.

3) Window shop. Check out Bing and Google. Do a little homework.

4) When you find the right person to represent your interests, that individual may also very well have ties to or a relationship with some print-on-demand book publisher-printer types, and be able to steer you in the most appropriate and economical directions. These days, you can print just a few (or even just one book!) copies and be able to order more with a phone call or email.

5) Specialized magazines are also readily available and can be produced as you wish, and individually and personally addressed as you wish.

6) Blog posts can be written in your “voice” so they sound like they’re coming from you (while you spend your time doing other things!) Regular blog posts, incidentally serve to activate your website which draws the attention of search engine spiders and lifts your search engine rankings.  

     Got an idea you’d just like to toss out to see if it could work? Give me a call. No consult fee for blog visitors.

www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America and Our Troops.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

If your business works,

so does Twitter!

     Think of Twitter as one gigantic 24/7 trade or professional show and customer service center up in the sky!

     And start out by just plain dismissing all the “magic secrets” about how to use Twitter to build your business, because there are none.

     Just because social media may be a fairly new avenue for you to be dabbling in for your business, don’t be intimidated by all the crackpots!

     Never a day passes without at least a dozen solicitations attempting to sucker new users into a commitment to get new fans and followers, to learn the magic, the secrets, the steps, the bullets, the actions, the methods, the techniques, the 3 this, or the 7 that.

     If your business works, and you have a respectable reputation, and you know what you’re selling (believe it or not, not everybody does!), then simply use Twitter posts to make provocative, or engaging, or teaser-type billboard/headline-style statements, followed by the website page other Twitterers/Tweeters can click on to learn more.

     But you can’t stop there. . . not any more than you would avoid a courteous greeting up front, or make a sales pitch at a service counter or on a trade show floor, and then not listen to what the prospect or customer has to say, even dumb comments about the weather.

     Be social. This means stepping off your sales pedestal long enough to take notice of what others are posting on Twitter, and to make and post some pleasant response to those you might agree with, and that fit the business image you want to project. Be careful with humor, especially avoid jokes you wouldn’t comfortably share with pre-teens.

     This can include you doing an “RT” (for “Re-Tweet,” same as “repeat”) of other comments and/or quotes you particularly relate to —  no different that a prospect mentioning a name or place or thing or idea that’s on your personal list of favorites, and you commenting back, as you would in any conversation with a friend whose attention you value.

     This is an important ingredient in making Twitter work — being yourself, and pretending you are in a real (instead of virtual) room facing the little (avatar) faces, sharing niceties. If some comment makes you choose to feel angry or upset or overly emotional or cocky or sarcastic or arrogant or pedantic or anything besides pleasant, choose to ignore it and move on to other comments.

     You will not win friends and influence sales by losing your cool or tossing your cookies or acting P.O.’d at some moronic statement.

     People “out there” need to see that you are approachable, easy, and friendly before they’ll pay you any serious attention by deciding to “follow” you (your posts) or to visit the web pages you include with your posts. This is, after all, SOCIAL media first. Those who see and read your comments will allow you the business focus as long as you behave like a good guest at their party. 

     Get yourself hooked up with a free “Tweet Deck” to gain a more useful perspective and to better accommodate your comments. Then take a couple of hours each day for a couple of days (spread out into time chunks is best) to follow the basic flow of people and comments and analyze them as a prospective market.

     Take notes.Pay attention to who’s who:  the rampaging political types, the religious fanatics, the nut cases, the teeny-boppers, the famous quote quoters, the too serious, the too frivolous, the sex-seekers, the weirdos. Get a fix on who you want to visit your webpage and start clicking on their “Follow” buttons. Many will reciprocate and be your followers.

     Decide early on if you want only a selective following or you want to play the numbers and amass big numbers (depends on what you’re selling).

     When you think you see a way to fit . . . fit! Twitter works for those who work at it.  

 # # #

Your FREE subscription: Posts RSS Feed

Hal@Businessworks.US or 302.933.0116

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals. God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

 The bigger they are,

the harder YOU fall

 …but the little guys

can cripple you too!

Here’s the inside scoop on “outside” marketing experts . . . 35 years’ worth of experience and considered judgment for you to chew and digest:

WEBSITE DESIGNERS who claim to have the gift of marketing genius have nada. If they’re older than 14 to start with — even 30-something — they are still probably 14 mentally; and odds are they haven’t a clue about marketing, but have learned to sound convincing about it. Exceptions? Sure. Check my blogroll.

AD AGENCIES know less than website designers. They are heavily invested in winning themselves awards and cornering clients into excessive payments. They have no down-in-the-trenches sense of how to make sales, nor do they particularly care as long as the next big client stands ready on the horizon.

•      They are particularly skilled at song and dance “dog and pony shows” that tell clients how great it’s going to be but that accomplish nothing to write home about, as long as the next big client stands ready on the horizon.
•      If you’re looking for artsy or funny or insulting or dramatic ads and commercials that have high impact but make no sales, go to an ad agency. And the bigger the agency, the more it will cost you and the least likely you’ll get the results you seek.

PR FIRMS do have a pretty good camaraderie with numerous media people and can be effective — depending on whether you pay them $10,000 a month or $15,000 a month — at wining and dining and schmoozing editors, writers, and sometimes publishers into considering coverage for the news releases they write and submit for you.

•      And they certainly know how to play the news release format game, but they rarely if ever are able to capture the essence of your business message and bring about action because they almost universally seem to think they know more about your business than you do. So what comes out is mundane, meaningless babble.
•      Make them write three test releases and explain why the words in them are the best words and who and when they would submit them to and why.

MARKETING GROUPS will tell you they’ve got you covered, yet only a minuscule number actually realize that marketing is the umbrella and that the functions under that umbrella include sales, advertising, promotion, packaging, pricing, merchandising, PR (public relations), industry and investor relations, customer service, CRM (Customer Relationship Management), website design and development, email and social media promotional activities, employee alumni associations, buzz (word-of-mouth) marketing, and on and on.

•      Ask them HOW they “cover” you and see how many of these avenues are mentioned.  

MEDIA. Would you have a guy from the slaughterhouse prepare your meals?

SBA SCORE COUNSELORS. SCORE is Senior Corps of Retired Executives. A lot of the world’s nicest, most well-intentioned people in this organization that provides FREE consulting.

•      Unfortunately, like the federal government they represent, they are completely out of touch with the realities of day-to-day business management, and may as well be on Jupiter for the marketing guidance they provide. Time is money. Don’t waste your time.

     What’s left? Independent consultants and project managers. Probably these folks represent your best choice, but only if you’re careful in your selection. Some of them are just as crooked as many of the others.

     ASK QUESTIONS. Ask for explanations about HOW a candidate thinks about what she or he claims to have accomplished. Ask for examples. Ask why something that worked well worked well and why something that didn’t, didn’t. How confidentially do they offer information? Who are a couple of client types they can suggest for you to contact to confirm.

     Beware of self-proclaimed “experts”

with cookie-cutter solutions!

# # #  

302.933.0116  Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson] 

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

If your search engine sent

you here looking for a fight,

you’re in the wrong place!

     . . . Uh, the post title — that’s “Profiling” as in filling out website subscriber info about yourself and your business.

Sorry. My apologies to all the rest of you (including lawyers of course) who’ve landed here  looking for a bunch of racial slur charges and counter-charges (hopeful no doubt of gathering ammunition for getting yourselves in an uproar about who is subjecting whom to bias and prejudice in which states, and why, and how awful it all is).

You know who you are: Anti-Arizona political types, NPR and network TV news desk occupiers, and fans of “Cops.”

Three messages for you: 1) The truth will out 2) Sorry to disappoint you, and 3) Click off of here and go yell at your search engine.

     Well now that we’ve cleared the air, and have sent the vast armies of contentious network news and incompetent government types packing, let’s get down to business.

     When you fill out a website profile, here are some good rules of thumb to consider that will help you present a more attractive picture of yourself and your business:

• As a matter of PROCEDURE: draft it first; edit it second; edit it third; edit it fourth; save it fifth; cut and paste it into the window sixth. Not much creates instant panic as effectively as clicking “Save” a blink too soon. Take your time. Get it right.

• As a matter of FORMAT: Live with what’s provided. It will be a lot of years before subscriber websites are all up to speed with the latest options for type sizes, line and border spacing and special (color, shadowing, bolding, Italicizing-types of) accent treatments as you may be used to with your PC and Mac text formatting choices. What you get is what you get! When bullet and numbering options exist, use them, but sparingly.

• As a matter of CONTENT: keep it short and sweet. Conciseness counts! Suffice it to ask when was the last time you read a long wind-baggy profile? Don’t try stuffing your thirty-pound resume into some one-pound profile window. Use highlights as teasers to prompt a reader to want to know more. 

• As a matter of INTENT: Keep it honest; if you don’t you have my word it will come back to haunt you. You may even (shudder) lose Twitter Followers and Facebook fans! Think of your profile as a combination of your “brand” and your “elevator speech.” No matter what your intent is about what you say and how you say it, don’t allow yourself room for exaggeration to creep in.

• As a matter of EMPHASIS: don’t try to be cute; don’t write sales or advertising copy; if you have strong credentials, list them but don’t belabor them; if you lack strong credentials, don’t try to make weak ones look impressive. It’s a profile, not a sales pitch! You can deliver that after a prospect likes what she or he sees and decides to contact you. Humor? Doubtful it has a place in 99% of business profiles. If people want a laugh, they need only start hanging out with that other “profiling” crowd mentioned at the top of this post.

 www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America and America’s Troops. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

Okay, before you buy it,

here’s what’s wrong

with our product!

     The smaller the business, the closer it gets to practicing transparent marketing.

     The farmer at his produce stand will tell you that the corn wasn’t picked today, or that the peaches are maxed and need to be consumed within 24 hours, or that the berries may be tart because they’re not quite in season.

     The bigger the business, the more money that’s paid out in fees for ad agencies and PR firms to cover up product and service faults with retouched photos and exaggerated claims. Always intentional? No, not always, and especially not always on the part of the hired creative guns because clients often keep bad news locked up and intentionally mislead their marketing people.

     What kinds of product and service faults? HA! Start with air!

     Soap companies pump air into their bars of soap to give them bulk and make consumers think they’re getting bigger amounts and better dollar value. Note how many more bars of corporate giant soap you go through compared to homemade soap. In the end, the big brand names full of air cost more.

     How about big brand ice cream? Pumped in air? Of course!

     They can fill the containers with less product and make more profit. Do you think consumers ever think about weighing their ice cream? Maybe we should. Guaranteed that volume doesn’t correspond to weight anywhere near as closely as with homemade ice cream (and don’t believe any stories about the big boys using lighter ingredients!).

     And you thought just car dealerships, banks, and hospitals had a lock on dishonest representations?

     How about beauty products? Dense creams used in many big name skin and hair care brands get watered down and sold as “Instant” formulas — as, for example, sprays instead of in jars —  using a fraction of the original thick ingredients from the jar version, and selling it at a higher price because now it’s “Instant.” Uh, that’s “Instant” as in instant profit rewards for adding the water.

     This could go on for a zillion blog posts, but I don’t pretend to be Ralph Nader or Consumer Reports. I’ve just experienced situations like these first-hand and have stories you wouldn’t believe about hot dogs, pickles, bacon, chicken, drugs, doctors, and all the electronic stuff that thrives on planned obsolescence. (And you needn’t go any further than the recording industry on that count!)

     The point is that none of us will ever live long enough to see totally honest transparent marketing (or leadership, for that matter), but the answer is NOT “if you can’t lick ’em, join ’em” because THAT is an evasive political response that’s routinely practiced by dishonest money-crazed government and big business, and WE are small business, right? (No, this is not a rallying cry!)

     We are 30 million strong in America. We are not all honest. We are not all willing to be forthright in our marketing, And we are not all beyond telling some white lies or committing errors of omission when they fit our purpose, but most small business owners are, I believe, basically honest about the products and services they represent and market.

     If you think you need to “pad” the wares you offer or the claims you make or the words that drive your marketing programs, perhaps you should consider re-evaluating where you’re headed with your business and where you see yourself going in life. If there’s not some genuine compatibility evident, you could be setting yourself up for disaster.       

 www.TWWsells.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You. God Bless America and America’s Troops. “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance!” [Thomas Jefferson]  Make today a GREAT Day!

Not getting quality

from consultants?

  This may be why…

     Right off the top, if it’s not a life-or-death surgical, ocean oil leak, or rocket science need to fill, stop with the panic attacks about finding a consultant with industry-specific experience.

     What you need is to find a consultant who can get the job done. Period.

• Give me a guy, for example, who sells railroad cars full of French fries and I’ll teach him what I need him to know about representing my fine linens products (or my precision computer parts, or my insurance policies). And he’ll do better at it than a fine linens (or microchip) manufacturing (or insurance) expert.
• As another example, show me someone who maintains an efficient warehouse operation, and I’ll show her how to manage a shipping schedule better than the head of any trucking company.

     Why? Because sales and organizational skills are lot harder, more time-consuming, and more expensive to teach than the ins and outs of your business.

     Learning how you manufacture and package and sell your products and services is easy. Learning how to think and act like a sales or traffic management pro is not easy because it’s often an issue of attitude.

When you’re outsourcing projects and looking for consultants who can get the job done, don’t be making yourself crazy trying to find someone who has extensive experience in your industry or profession.

     Look instead for someone who has extensive experience in her or his consulting specialty. A good solid marketing person or writer or web designer or trainer or coach, for instance, doesn’t need to have ANY expertise in your specific business or professional practice in order to help you produce a significant difference in sales, sales leads, CRM, or staff development.

The same principles and dynamics that work for selling hot dogs also work for selling precision parts, accounting and legal services, heart transplant specialists, or (aaah, entrepreneurship!) “Silly Bands.”

     The art and insight of writing an effective news release, advertising campaign, or website, doesn’t change in the slightest.

     The target markets change; the media selections change; the technical details change. But benefits are still what need to be emphasized.

     All products and services are purchased because an emotional buying motive is triggered — not because a laundry list of rational features has been presented. Skilled marketing consultants know how to plan and create and activate emotional buying motive triggers that get results.

     Your job is to teach them your business, be a sounding board for their recommendations, and help bring about action.

     You can follow the advice of headhunters and placement services and counselors and job trainers all you want, and puppy-dog behind every leader in your industry or profession, but I’ll put my money on you finding the best outsource consulting service teams and individuals based on your own instincts and your own judge of character and chemistry. It got you here. It works.

Trust yourself.

     The minute you’re able to find people who can fill the role(s) you have in mind, who have a track-record of success in many diverse fields, don’t hesitate to engage her/him/them simply because you think your candy company is so unique that only someone who is a candy business expert can appreciate you and your business enough to do justice to it. A sweet idea, but unrealistic. 

Informed fresh perspectives don’t

    come from clones or ostriches.    

 www.TheWriterWorks.com or 302.933.0116 or Hal@BusinessWorks.US  

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