Episode 6
with Simone Douglas
Hidden wins and missed opportunities.
This week, Simone will be looking at what opportunities do you have to increase purchase frequency, upsell, cross sell, or diversify to grow your wallet share with your customers?
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Chris Irving 0:10
Welcome to the confident networker podcast with your host Simone Douglas. In each insightful episode, Simone does a deep dive into the strategies, tactics and tools that will help you be a confident networker.
Simone Douglas 0:32
For the next hour you are tuned in to seriously social with me Simone Douglas, author of the book by the same name and the recently released book, the confident networker for the download on all things seriously social and digital marketing head to my website, digitalmarketingaok.com.au and drop me a line or better yet book in a coffee. There’s no such thing as too much caffeine. There are several hidden revenue opportunities also known as revenue moments that farmers in a sales organization can pursue if they know where to find and exploit them. Failure to recognize and replicate your best customers will cost you dearly. So come along for the ride today. And let’s get down to the business of identifying who these people are, what makes them tick and how you matter in the process. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to build stronger relationships with your customers and identify the key indicators that allow you to increase share of wallet with your best customers. For consumers, there’s no shortage of choices. But there’s a limitation of money people pick and choose brands they rely on and will allocate portions of their budget to companies they trust. This metric is called a share of wallet and it helps brands determine how popular they are amongst their competitors. By the end of this show, today, you’re gonna be able to understand what share of wallet is as it applies to your business, how to calculate yours and strategies you can put in place to increase it. It’s easy to get distracted by all the noise in the business world at large. But jump day is your chance to settle in and work on your business in ways that allow you to make the most of your opportunities today, tomorrow and forever. Today, we’re going to be turning to a more transactional focus with the long term effects of the economy unknown. Many consumers are feeling the financial impact while others are looking for opportunities resulting in a transformational shift in spending. Some businesses are experiencing decreased or paused marketing budgets and you may be concerned about making the right decisions in your effort to grow the share of wallet right now. In this day and age, I prefer the term share of requirements to share of wallet because I think it encapsulates what we’re trying to achieve, which is to fulfill as many of our customers requirements as possible within our business. The purpose of today’s show is to understand the source of market share in terms of breadth and depth of consumer franchise, as well as the extent of relative category usage. So heavy users, larger customers versus light uses and smaller customers and how they all kind of fit together. The evaluations you undertake now are more important than any you have done in a while getting this right and connecting with those that matter to both customers and referral sources in a meaningful way is something you can build on and replicate for the rest of your business evolution. Just like good old compounding interest, the steps you take here will pay dividends of increasing value over time. But first, we’re going to need to identify what our best customers need and want before we’re going to be able to deliver any of it for them. So what are the key issues from an owner perspective here, so failure to recognize and replicate your best customers will cost you dearly? Alright, so we need to work out what makes them tick and how you matter. We need to identify our current share of wallet with our best customers. So how many of our customers still have money in their pocket or problems or challenges that we haven’t solved but have the capacity to solve? So getting some clarity around where they’re potentially spending with your direct competitors, instead of spending with you and what the difference is, so why are they choosing to do that is going to be really important. We also need to identify our at risk best customers. So these are the wobbly ones that we thought were perfectly okay. So this is where net promoter scores come in. And it becomes increasingly important that you are routinely surveying and talking to your customers in a way that gives you solid data that you can make real time business decisions based on so you know, a great example of that is with digital marketing AOK we always do our net promoter score surveys in November, because we know that coming into the Christmas break traditionally that’s where we’re at most at risk of churning even our best customers because they evaluate their marketing spend. I make some decisions about whether they’re going to bring things in house or maintain working with an outsourced agency. So those Net Promoter Score
All surveys give us a fairly good indication very quickly about the customers that we need to spend some more time having conversations with in the lead up to the Christmas break. So clarity around these things becomes super important. As you can see, we also need to understand does our portfolio or service offerings satisfy an adequate number of our customer that needs and wants are we at risk. So likewise, if we look at the marketing agency, many years ago, we were solely a social media agency. So we specialized in that space. That was all that we did. So we were very, very good at social media advertising in particular, and content managed solutions. However, more and more our customers were looking for a provider that could provide them with Google AdWords, management and campaign management, as well as social media marketing, they wanted people who could provide copywriting services. And so we were losing some of our clients based on the fact that we couldn’t satisfy all of their needs and ones. So from there, we expanded our team. And we added on those services slowly in a way that meant that we maintained our brand equity in the marketplace as a solid provider of good results. But it meant that our retention rate for our customers continue to increase. And our portfolio and our service offering increased to a point where it was adequately satisfying our customers needs and wants, which is where we want to sit all the time. And then if we do still have gaps we need to work out are the gaps that we have able to be covered through white labeling solutions where we maintain control of the relationship. So one of the things that we don’t do at digital marketing AOK, for example, is we don’t do web design. Okay, but we do have some fantastic providers who are brilliant at user experience and implicit structural Search Engine Optimization when it comes to building websites. So we have the opportunity then to white label or even to proactively just cross refer, so that we project manage those things for our clients in a way that makes their lives easy, but ensures that they get outcomes that are consistent with their service expectations from our business, because we’re kind of moving across. So it doesn’t matter where you are in your business right now is definitely the time to be taking a solid look at exactly where you are and making some realistic decisions about where you want to go in the new year. By the end of our time. Together, you’ll have a clearer understanding of how to focus on the primary factors to identify your best customers identify at risk customers and save or refresh the relationships, you’ll be able to start cross selling and upselling at the transactional level and expand at the portfolio level whilst leveraging the power of pricing. If this is your first time listening, welcome to the world of seriously social sales and marketing where relationships win you the sales. If you’re a returning listener, thanks for being part of my seriously social Global Business family. We are shortly going to take a two minute break. And when we return, we’re going to dig a bit deeper and talk about how you can evaluate your customer base and grow it from the inside out the best kind of way to grow your customers.
So let’s dig a little bit deeper and talk about how you can achieve an increase in your wallet share or share of requirements without breaking the bank, it really all comes down to knowing your customer base, and where you’re at risk and where you can find the hidden rewards. So we need to work out who our promising accounts and customers are. So your first step is to find your happy, satisfied customers. This is your loyal base, the real foundation of your business. And there are many ways to go about identifying these accounts. But I recommend focusing on a few of the primary factors. So first up span of customer lifetime. The longer you’ve had a customer, the more they value your company and its offerings. This means they’re probably willing to purchase more from you based on trust in additional value if they have a need and you can identify that need and show them how you can fulfill it. So start identifying who are the customers that fall into your three year mark your two year mark, it’s almost like you should know when your customer Anniversaries are instead of sending them happy birthday presents and cards maybe you should be sending them happy birthday for 12 months with your business 12 months as a customer two years as a customer, you know, when they get to 10 years, what is it that you send them then span of customer lifetime? That is a really important thing to be aware of. We also need to look at average price paid the better prices your customers pay the more trust they have in your value propositions. In other words, if a customer won’t sign on the dotted line without discounts and rebates, they’re probably not a loyal customer. They’re motivated solely by by price. So where do your customers fall into that average price paid or into that retainer bracket so if we know that we have stepped retainers for argument’s sake in a service business like mine, then obviously, we have clients that are on either a bronze or a silver or a gold or a platinum package depending, and we probably need to get some clarity around average price paid as well as profitability that sits. So sometimes our biggest customers are not our best customers. And we need to know that because often, our biggest customers take up the most amount of our time, so they cease being profitable if we’re not very careful. If they’re chewing up sales teams and customer service teams time, we need to also look at volatility resistance if your customer went through a couple of bumps, with your products or services, pay close attention to the customers who stood by you and patiently waited for things to come down. COVID is such a good example of this. Okay, so we need to have some clarity around these loyal customers, okay, because if they think that your offering was worth the weight, that means they have a higher chance of purchasing another product or service at its peak. loyal customer accounts are the best place for your share of wallet growth campaign to start, they clearly value your company’s offerings, and are more willing to try the other high quality product and services you provide. So compile this list and then move on to the other side of the customer equation, which is to look at struggling accounts face that you probably have a few customers who are considering jumping ship for a competitor right now. No one likes to hear it. But it’s definitely true that his customers are the biggest threat to your company, because it can cost 25 times more to replace them to retain them, it’s a lot less expensive to just figure out why they’re leaving and find a way to hold on to them. That’s why these accounts are perfect targets for increasing share of wallet, you just have to figure out why they’re considering leaving in the first place once you fix that issue. If you can, then they’re ripe for account growth. So to identify churning customers, review your sales transaction for three major red flags, decline in spending by account decline in purchase of a specific product across all accounts and complete customer loss. So where are we completely losing customers on a regular basis. Once you’ve got a list of at risk accounts, it’s time to figure out how to convince them to stay or in the case of her complete customer loss, you need to try and win their business back before it’s too late. Your customer retention efforts should remain a long term strategy and component of your share of wallet efforts. Therefore, take time now to educate all customer facing teams on how to keep customers happy and engaged. And we’ve certainly talked about that a lot this season. How do we plus one the relationship? How do we surprise and delight our customers, all of these things are going to become critically important in a business environment where the rules change almost on a daily basis, often outside your control. So we need to just keep across all of these things and get really sharp on the basics at this point. From there, we can start cross selling and upselling at the transaction level. So now that you have a list of customers to target, we can start expanding their accounts. Okay, but deciding which additional products to pitch to each customer can feel pretty daunting, especially if you have a huge selection of products or services. The fastest and easiest approach to cross selling takes place at the point of purchase. Your customers are already in purchase mode and you don’t have to spend outreach time to get them on the phone. Simple sales analytics uncover commonly purchased combinations of products or services to suggest complimentary additions to a transaction. More complex versions can operate as algorithms used by companies like Amazon. They evaluate factors such as customer segmentation past purchase history, and account specific other variables to suggest items for cross selling. Your greatest challenge though is to deliver recommendations at the point of sale to your sales team. So that they can instantaneously identify right we’re talking to someone from this vertical is likely that they’re also going to need these add on products, even though they’ve only just come and asked us about a single product or service, you know, and a really obvious one for us is we always try and bundle social media ads with Google ads because it works throughout the funnel. And those things are kind of important. So then we can move on to expanding the portfolio level. So your goal here is to prove your value and become the preferred provider for products or product groups. We have minimal traction right this second so now it’s time to think bigger. The transaction level approach to cross selling focuses on the short term goal of getting more revenue from your customers sooner rather than later. The portfolio approach focuses on the opposite. This strategy stresses the importance of growing your business with customers over time. Okay. Your goal here is to prove your value and become the preferred provider for products or product groups where you have that minimal traction, so if we start by identifying these products and take a look at low volume sales across your product or service lines. From there, you need to define your purchasing profiles across the customer segments or verticals and uncover customers who fit the profile for specific products but aren’t purchasing them, then you need to find significant gaps between expected and actual purchases based on these customer profiles. Okay, for example, clothing store might determine that men between the ages of 35 and 45 in athletic apparel typically accounts for 10% of total spent. If an individual customer filling the profile only spends 1% of his total. On athletic apparel, the model flags the opportunity to approach him and capture the remaining 9%. These three areas are good starting points for a long term strategy delivery is less critical for this portfolio level approach sales reps have time to review the information and prepare before engaging the customer. Your goal should be to find the five biggest opportunities for each customer and work on capturing them, then identify a new set of opportunities, keep your ambitions reasonable, particularly at the outset, don’t let perfect become the enemy of good just because your model is not as robust as Amazon’s does not mean it’s unsuccessful. A model that takes your cross cell ratio from 15% to 17% is still a win, you can continue to perfect and hone your model over time. And then we need to take a look at leveraging the power of pricing. So the key to increasing your share of wallet by customer is to make the transactional pricing so tempting that they can’t pass up the deal. And attractively priced product mix strategy makes all the difference. Now I’m gonna throw a wrench and things of course, in a few of the steps above, I’ve stressed the importance of value your customers should value your product, you should suggest products that they’d value and you should build share of wallet based on the promise of long term value. But at the end of the day price does play a major role. If your customers find your price is too high, they won’t want to increase their spend. If they’re too low, they’ll assume you tacked on product offerings of little worth the key to increasing your share of wallet by customers to make the transactional pricing tempting and correct in the middle of the market range. Unless you benchmark yourself as being top of market, you can convince customers to purchase additional products with the following strategies, you can offer an older product version at a discounted price, you can sell a second product or service at a bare bottom price for a limited amount of time, you can add an inexpensive byproduct into the transaction, or you can bundle products so that each is cheaper within the offering than it is by itself. So all of these things will give you that opportunity. And again, at its simplest, I often find that from a pricing perspective, the staged pricing works best if you give people pricing that is let’s say, keep It Simple bronze, silver and gold. Nine times out of 10 people are gonna go for the silver in the middle, okay, depending on where their budget is set. So when you’re in a service based business, often that stage tiered pricing model is used to particularly also across SAS businesses or your software as a service business. But you can do the same thing in all sorts of different settings. So again, evaluate where the pricing is out in the rest of the market, what are they doing? How are they bundling their things, do some robust competitor analysis before you start trying to leverage the power of pricing know exactly where you sit what you’ve got to offer so that you’re going in well informed so that you can answer your customers questions. And because if you if you fall down somewhere in that process, you’re going to lose the opportunity, you won’t lose the customer, you’ll just lose the opportunity to increase the share of wallet. So just bear that in mind. We’re now going to take a short two minute break. And when we return, we’re going to cover off on what you need to do to action the key elements contained within these topics.
So where are we at? And realistically, what is it that we need to do? Well start off by focusing on primary factors to identify your best customers. So have a look at your customer lifetime, who are the people that sit in that I always say three years is the sweet spot. If you’ve retained customers in a customer service environment for three years, particularly in business to business, they are definitely in a place where they value your business and what it is that you’re providing to them. But you know, have a look at where that lifetime sits as well because if you’ve got customers who have been with you for six months, they may well be ready at this point to up their spend or to evaluate what other products or services you can provide to them that is going to support their business goals and their business growth, okay.
Like I said, we need to review average spend. So where does average spend sit in your business from a risk perspective and an opportunity perspective? Okay, so again, mapping these things against your verticals or your industry segments that you service is kind of important. Because you need a holistic view and approach, it’s not going to work if you’re just taking a view that is not broad enough to pick up everything that’s happening for you at any given time. Okay, we also want to review your sales transactions to identify those red flags that indicate danger of churn. So decline in spend to client in purchases of specific products, declining communication, and customer abandonment. Now, there’s one thing in here that’s really critical decline in communication, generally speaking, is a good indication that the relationship is not going well. I know for myself, whenever we’re actually at risk of churning a customer, the customer will go really quiet, they may stop responding to emails, they may not be returning your calls, all of these things are fairly good indicators. So one of the things that’s really important to put in place, touch points to avoid these things, and multiple touch points. So we’ve talked a lot about that this season as well. So where are you the business owner, ensuring that you’re just popping up into your customer’s field of existence, by just popping in here and there, you’re gonna get real time feedback about what’s going on for a customer at any given time. And this is really important, because you will start to identify well ahead of time, where those opportunities are, where those red flags are. And it will means you’ll avoid customer abandonment, which is really what we want. But if you’re seeing customers who are reducing their spend, start putting together a plan of attack or something that is automatically activated in terms of workflow for your customer service team and your sales team to make sure that all of these things are addressed, okay, in a timely fashion. So as spend is reduced, they are we starting to service them more rather than less. Because often what you’ll find, particularly in my industry, so when we’re talking about ad spend is one of the first things that gets reduced. So as we watch clients pair things back then we need to start identifying where the different opportunities are to re increase their share of wallet more than anything else. So once we’ve done all of that, we need to start looking at identifying the add on opportunities and create a process to ensure that the question is always asked. So simple sales analytics will uncover commonly purchased combinations. We’ve talked about that and suggest complimentary additions to a transaction. Now, forever ago when I worked in hospitality, and managed hotels for Foster’s, one of the simplest things that they identified was that by asking people and it’s such a McDonald’s catchphrase, having worked for McDonald’s when I was a teenager, anyone that came through the drive thru was asked, did they want any chips or any ice? Okay, so you’re coming through the bottle shop, you got asked immediately chips or ice, they worked out that that put 10% like a 10% increase on their sales by just making sure that the staff were asking that question every single time, right, 10 percents not insignificant on a bottle shop that’s turning over a couple million dollars a year. So if you think about it from that perspective, what are the chips in the ice in your business? And how have you empowered your teams to ask the question, you know, again, likewise, in the pub, we make sure that we have the dessert menus are on every single table. It’s a really simple one. Would you like a garlic bread with that? And when it comes to digital marketing aok, we you know, our chips and ice in a social media agency, would you like us to also while we’re onboarding you, would you like us to conduct a review of your personal LinkedIn profile? Would you like us to refresh all of your Facebook page infrastructure to make sure that it’s in line with the current rollout and Facebook changes, you know, there are all kinds of chips and ice examples that you could identify in your business, they’re definitely the low hanging fruit and keep it sometimes those low hanging fruit are the things that will keep a customer with you. So work out what those things are. Okay, and, again, empower your teams also empower your referral partner. So this is something that I always find really interesting is when I sit down with a business owner, and I’m having a conversation with them about their business, and I say to them, what is the question that I could ask that would open the door for you? And they haven’t thought about it much. I spent a lot of time telling me what they do, how they do their business.
But they’re they’re never empowering me with the questions that I need that will allow me to open the door at a barbecue at a networking event. So what’s the question I could ask that would open the door, and then what is the response that I should be looking out for that would allow me to then generate a referral opportunity for you are meeting opportunity. So as you’re sitting there and planning out, you know, how you do these things, think about how you’re empowering not just your teams, but also your referral partners to do the same thing. We also want to then health check your portfolio against your market. So your goal is to prove your value here and become the preferred provider for products or product groups, we have that minimal traction. So you do this by defining those purchasing profiles across the customer segments, and uncovering customers who fit the profile for specific products but aren’t purchasing them. So this comes down to you actually really understanding your sales base and where it comes from. Now, some businesses make the mistake here where they haven’t actually broken down their products or service lines in any meaningful way. So the businesses out there that are a stage three that literally just have, you know, sales and other revenue, and something else in their accounting lines, this is not going to help you right now. You know, for example, we have 26 sales categories that go through my accounting software, so that we have budgets attached to those. And we can readily identify which verticals are doing what, so that then when I sit down with my general manager and have a conversation about these things, we’re having an intelligent conversation that says, right, well, we actually need to grow this segment, we need to start selling more of this product or this service, because it’s an easy add on, and there’s space to grow. So having clarity around your portfolio is really important. And again, having some clarity around, were you missing things and not making the most of it. So just you know, go back, list it all out, bundle it all up. And then health, check it with some of your customers in terms of getting some key questions that you can ask that will uncover things. Once you’ve bundled everything up, you need to health check your bundles and your pricing. Remembering that an attractively priced product mix strategy makes all the difference. So we need to make sure that that’s what we’re doing. This is not the time of the year to be top of market. And we don’t want to be bottom of market either. So again, understanding where your pricing falls, by comparison to your competitors, but also cultivating a niche in a market where you don’t compete on price is going to become really important. So a lot of the conversations that we’ve had this season so far have been about the fact that the customer experience is now the key differentiator. So as much as I’m talking about pricing today, you could have the best pricing bundles in the world. If your customer experience is terrible. You can insert whatever exploitive here you like, but if your customer experience is terrible, you are not going to win the war. Okay, you’re not going to climb the mountain. So go back to the previous episodes in this series and get some clarity around that as well if you haven’t listened to them already. So we’re making sure that our bundles and product mix strategy work. And then we need to plan to spend some time putting lessons learned and aha moments into practice. Okay, so by the time that you’ve actually worked through all of this, it’s important to act, nothing changes if you don’t set aside time to make it happen. So once you’ve worked out what you need to do, start putting those timelines and deliverables on your action plan. Get clear on what you want your customers to feel, what actions you want them to take and what pain points you’re here to solve for them. Because at the end of the day, smart business owners document their processes, they document their strategies, and then they act on them. They use SMART goals to ensure that those things happen. And they make sure that someone has ownership over every single task. So as you’re reviewing all of these things around increasing wallet, share, and making the most of it, you need to go back to your sales teams and your customer service teams and give them their key deliverables and actions. Maybe it’s their job to go away and identify all of those ice and chips, examples all those add on moments and questions that they can ask to make the most of everything. We’re now going to take a short two minute break. And when we return, we’re going to bring it all together and look at why any of the things we’ve covered so far matter, and what the direct impact can be to your bottom line.
So we have covered as usual an epic amount of content and need to tie it all together. So let’s take a look at your key actions for this week. Remember the questions that we needed to be able to answer who are our best customers and what is our current share of wallet? Who are our at risk? best customers? Does our portfolio or our service offerings satisfy an adequate number of our customers needs and wants? Or are we at risk, and are the gaps we have able to be covered through white labeling solutions where we maintain control of the relationship? The challenge in any market or environment is making the most of your customers as a resource once you have them and retaining them as much as humanly possible. Here’s the simple to do list I apply in my businesses to maximize that result. So we need to start off with the NPS question. I mentioned that earlier on in the show, have your reps, call your all your clients, or if you’re in retail, have an automated email or text message. And just ask the question, on a scale of one to 10, how likely are you to recommend our business to your friends and family, make sure you act on the results. So having clarity and understanding the Net Promoter Score and how it supports your business decision making processes is important. If people fall into the detractor bracket, so they’re in that 123 score, you really, you’re about to lose them, in fact, you’re going to have to put a lot of effort into retaining them. So you need to be able to evaluate that and act quickly. And often why it’s best to make a phone call, rather than than just sending an email when it comes to your best clients. If they’re in the promoter score, what have you got on the list of things to surprise and delight them. So if they’re sitting in that eight to 10, bracket, you know, or even the seven to 10 bracket, these guys are your promoters, they are likely to recommend you to people if you open the doors for them and given them the opportunity. So have you empowered your promoters to promote you? Or are you just assuming that they’re going to be able to do that without any training, or support whatsoever? So act on those net promoter score results? If people are sitting in the neutral box? That’s where I would have looked at their customer lifetime? So how long have they been with you? And they just in the process of getting to know you, or if they’ve been with you for a long time, and you really not impressing them that much, okay, because if we’re in a neutral position, you haven’t broken it, necessarily, but they’re not that excited about working with you. So something needs to change or shift if you want to move them into the promoter level, evaluate your service offering and your product mix. Where are you falling down? And how do you fix it. So again, if I go back to the story we were talking about at the start of the show, when it came to Digital Marketing AOK, our product mix was falling down, because as digital evolved, we had to keep pace with it and add additional service offerings on to our dashboard, so to speak, so that we could sell them. So a missing opportunities. If you’re in that service based business to business market. Should you be out there talking to people who you can collaborate with. So are there opportunities to cross refer with the people who fill the gaps for you? Have you identified other specialists who are aligned with what you do, but not competitive with what you do? These are the people who should be your best friends. Because if you can work effectively together and maintain the relationships with your customers, you will also be able to access a whole new market based on the fact that you can now collaborate and cross refer to each other and leverage off each other’s audiences. So all of these things are going to be really important. Make sure that you identifying the roadblocks and green light signals, that means stop or go on expanding or rescuing a customer segments. So what I mean by this is you need to set some benchmarks and parameters. So you’re empowering your teams to be able to act, okay, and to expand those customer segments or rescue them. But we also need to know when to let go. So sometimes you’ll have customers that you really just can’t rescue. And a great example of that is, you know, we used to do all of the digital advertising for dressed for sale. So they’re a home styling home staging business, very successful. And you know, we really love working with them. They really love working with us. But what happened was another agency in the market, reached out to them and promised to do all the things, not just the digital advertising. So they said we can do photography for you. We can do videography, we can do web design. We can do search engine optimization, so they solved all the problems for the client. And that means that we lost the client even though the client loved us. In fact, the business owner took me out for dinner to apologize for ending the conversation. There was no way to save that client because I hadn’t identified that one of the real big issues for them was that they wanted a level of expertise across their entire marketing portfolio. But I will give be the hot tip, you only lose a customer like that once. Okay, and once you’ve lost one of those, if you smart, you really do identify what else should you be able to offer? Or should you be able to pull in to solve people’s challenges? And so we also, I think, at this point, need to actually start putting together a bit of a questionnaire for our customers. Do we have an inbound onboarding questionnaire? Do we have a six month questionnaire and a 12 month questionnaire that is really just about identifying and looking for these green light signals? In terms of expanding? Okay, so what are your current challenges with the marketing right now is a really basic question. But it’s going to identify what else is available that we can help them with, if there was a problem or a challenge we could solve for you. What might that be? You know, all of these questions are really good in terms of identifying what else you can do. And then utilize your social media marketing to educate your customers on your offers and your value ads. Never assume that your customers and your market actually understand everything that you can do. In fact, even better, don’t even assume that your family understand these things the amount of times, and I’m a fairly good communicator. But the amount of times that I’ve had a family members come up to me now eight years in to having an award winning digital marketing agency, multi award winning and having written two books, and yet they turn around and go, so what, what is it that you do again, like you do that Facebook stuff, you know, could you just help me with like, and they’ll ask me some really basic question, which is fine. But it’s a great indicator that I haven’t educated them at all, because we don’t tend to And yet, these are our biggest promoters. So whether it’s our family, whether it’s our best customers, we need to get into the habit of storytelling all the time, and sharing those stories across our digital channels. So if we go right back to the front of the season, where we were talking about your six word story, getting clarity around that, and then adding to that sentence by sentence chapter by chapter, when you look at your social media channels, what you need to do is actually break down what’s the story that I’m telling which of the customers that I’m looking at, what is the bit of the wallet that I’m trying to expand, and then expand it. Okay, and we expand it by routinely adding things to our LinkedIn profiles, definitely our personal profiles, we need to make sure that we’re harnessing the power of the people that we’ve got within our organization, and empowering them to share content across their different channels. But LinkedIn is a huge opportunity, depending on which market you’re playing. And then you know, have a look at Instagram and Instagram TV. So if you have stories that you can tell, and case studies that you can share by video, and we’ve established that every single business on the planet needs to be doing video at this point. So you know, tell those stories, put them on Instagram TV, put them on Facebook natively, start thinking about how you’re going to push those advertising messages out there. Again, not just hunting for new customers, but farming your existing customers, making sure that they feel important, and make sure that they know what’s actually going on at any given time. So how do you measure up what you need to do is go away and test against the basics that we’ve covered today. And lastly, a final word on where to from here. Remember that successful brands are not built in a day, a lot of perseverance is required to build a successful business and at the heart of a successful business are always its customers. Okay, so we need to always come back to having clarity around what it is that our customers want. But more importantly, what it is that our customers need. We should never assume that we know what that is. Because assumption is the mother of all mistakes. So get right away from assumption, start asking the questions, ask the questions of your referral partners reach out to them start strengthening relationships. In a post COVID economy or in the middle of a COVID economy, we really need to make sure that relationships are at the heart of everything that we do. Because the stronger those relationships are, the more effective our businesses are going to be and taking care of our businesses so that we can keep paying our staff, okay, and navigate whatever the new normal is going to be critical in terms of our success. So at stage three, we’re learning how to cement our customer and referral relationships through our messaging, our sales collateral, and our people are in the process of leveling up. And that means fixing our gaps, refining what’s there and playing the long game in terms of our marketing. There’s always a few quick wins to be had. But the reality is that right now in the current economic environment, it really is the long game and the hard yards that’s gonna get you to stage four.
So, That means we have to do the work. Next week’s show, making new friends and building relationships. So we’re going to be talking about how it’s time to identify who else is out in the market that we haven’t reached, and who’s floating in the adjacent markets that we need to talk to. So this is not just direct sales, but referral relationships, and we should be building and accessing to future proof your pipeline. So we’re going to be having a really solid look at that and making sure that we’ve identified who are the critical job titles and or industries and or businesses that can supercharge your referral pipelines. Okay. So I’m going to run you through my proven system for doing those things, and how I’ve gone three businesses off the back in the very beginning of a credit card to a point where they’re cashflow comfortable and positive. So I look forward to talking to you about that. Next week, making new friends and building relationships.
Chris Irving 40:59
Thank you for listening to the confident networker. You can find more episodes and information at bnian.com.au/podcast
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