1to1 Connection Tips & Tools (22)
January is over, but business boot camp isn’t. Is your business feeling fit yet? This week we’re teaching you to slim down – teaching you how to get your business lean and automated – just like ours. So let’s get connected!
Just like cutting out junk food, tabloid magazines and junk mail, we’re going to get your communications in order, streamlining everything from social media to websites to newsletters. The best way to succeed is to get your message heard. The goal of this step is to gather your Unique Content and put in a place where your market will get your message.
Do you “connect” to your market on the internet? Like really connect? Look at what’s evolved in this area in the last few years, and the social media “treadmill” you’re trying to keep up with:
- Facebook: 500 million users most of whom log on every single day
- Twitter: 190million users (unofficial data) sending 65 million tweets a day
- LinkedIn: 90 million registered users, 21.4 million unique visitors every month
- YouTube: Hosting 14 BILLION videos as of May 2010
- Flicker: 32 million users and 5 BILLION images as of September 2010
Of course, there are all sorts of other places online: Orkut (100 million users), Reddit, Digg, Myspace (mainly musicians now), specialty services like Last.FM and Hype Machine… not to mention all the content sharing and blogging platforms like Blogger, Tumblr, Wordpress, and the specialty social networks like Active Rain (real estate), Medscape (doctors), Martindal-Hubbel Connected (legal professionals), DeviantART (artists), the INVITE ONLY social networks like aSmallWorld and the millions of RSS Feeds out there filled with unique, interesting content…
How do you keep up, and how on earth can you make money while spending all this time on social media?!
That’s a lot of communication spots, and this list is abbreviated! If you want to get really overwhelmed, look at the Wikipedia list of social networking sites (and don’t forget that Wikipedia itself is a hub of social activity for its editors…)
If it’s a challenge to keep up with Twitter and Facebook, what about the specialty networks that speak directly to your market? How do you control all of this data? More importantly, if you’re saying something, how does your customer know where to go and see you?
In a world this connected, keeping up with EVERYTHING is impossible. It would be like trying to run up a downward moving escalator that is constantly increasing in speed - even if you’re trying to stay in shape, eventually you’ll end up flat on your butt! So how do you get off the treadmill of trying to connect everywhere, and move smoothly through the spaces that are really important?
What if all of the critical spaces were organized, in a hub? Posting content there would be like doing your fitness routine in the gym (not just updating - there are plenty of tools to do that already), but a hub that actually put all your content together for your market, fans, customers and viewers in one place!
That’s why we developed 1to1Social Space Hubs - Social Spaces for short. We were sick of spreading our content across the web and just hoping people would see it. Visit our Social Space to see what we mean. Our Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn profile, YouTube videos and blog are all together. With a Social Space you can aggregate your own content and even curate together the content you want to see from other business as well. Soon, when you have a Social Space, you’ll be able to follow other companies as well.
With Social Spaces, there is finally one destination for you to manage connections and communications with your customers and prospects. Those connections and communications fuel “Conversation Marketing” - the kind of marketing where people find out what your business stands for in your “social” voice. Conversation Marketing isn’t about advertising; it’s about engaging and connecting. Putting your Unique Content where people can see it, read it and follow it to get a holistic view of your business makes it much easier to engage your audience.
Too often social media is like throwing bait into the pond, without a fishing line or fishing pole. Putting everything together in a 1to1Social Space Hub is like upgrading to a commercial fishing boat. Your Social Space creates a net for the interested fish to come right into.
Sound good? What could make this sound better? How about free? You can sign up for a free trial of 1to1Real™ and set up your Social Space right now, no charge to you. You can have your own hub for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, your blog… whatever you want to create, and however you want to connect – your unique content will be in one place, ready to connect you to your market, and to success.
Happy Connecting,
Tim
PS: See you next week for Boot Camp Step 4: Collaboration Workspaces – making effective, secure teamwork happen for your business, instead of endless email chains! We’ll explore this in more detail next week when we focus on getting your market, your team, your business fully engaged and connected to one another.
Image: Sinkdd
I returned yesterday from a meeting of some thirty plus entrepreneurs from all over the world - we had a stimulating discussion about technology and how tools in “The Cloud” will change our business. As I listened to the list of technologies many of these entrepreneurs are using, I couldn’t help but envision a world of entrepreneurial CEOs flying their businesses “in the cloud” with no control tower.
Any experienced pilot knows that the best flight is not in the clouds but above them. Imagine a bunch of aircraft (like businesses), soaring through the sky, constantly in the clouds without ever breaking through to get a clear view. Have you ever been in a plane when it breaks above the clouds to see an endless expanse of blue sky and sunshine? That’s what CEOs must do to be truly successful - get above the clouds to soar above and beyond the competition.
Instead, I feel like I’m watching as entrepreneurs fly around, using solution after solution trying everything to see if it works for their businesses... The process looks to me like airplanes flying without any navigation equipment. The whole business world seems to be up there, but almost nobody knows how to fly... Worse yet, some have a "few hours" into technology and are calling themselves expert pilots - and many CEO's are hopping on board!
In order to break out of the clouds you need to organize your "Business Brain" and carefully plan what you actually need to do to get your business data in order (rather than jumping from cloud platform to cloud platform!) The Connected Market Coach™ always starts with the bottom line data on your business – we take the lessons that have allowed your company to be successful from your processes and data, what you actually have done (your best practices) - before taking your business above the technology "cloud" into the Connected Market Space.
Why is this the only way to fly? Ask yourself this: would I jump in an airplane willingly, knowing that the guy in the pilot’s seat had only the most basic idea of flying? Would I try to fly the plane myself even if I didn’t know how? Most wouldn’t risk their lives with an inexperienced pilot. So why risk the life of your business?
Your customer data and how that relates to your business processes is like the cockpit of your organization. Once you know what to look for, how to relate to the indicators and how to plan for takeoff, it’s not much to turn on the throttle and head down the runway. However, if you don’t take the proper steps and understand what “instruments” of technology you need to fly and how all of these work together to make your business soar, you’ll end up in a downward flat spin, crashing just like an inexperienced pilot.
The advent of cloud based computing is going to push the pace of business faster than ever before, but relying entirely on cloud computing is a very different way to manage data, security and the processes that keep your business running. You'll need to get onboard with an experienced pilot and start to fly right, to get your own business wings.
So – how can you tell your pilot know what he’s doing? First, how many hours does the pilot have in technology applications for business? In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 Hour Rule: to be an expert at anything, you must put in at least 10,000 hours of practice. (Rather like how pilots need to certify by how many hours they’ve flown...)
So, if you’re going to send your business up into the cloud (which you’ll have to do eventually, as that’s the direction technology is heading) you’ll need a pilot to take you there that has a minimum of 10,000 hours of experience in implementing cloud based business technology.
I did a personal calculation of how many hours I’ve spent during my career in the development of The Connected Market Space, 1to1Real™ and now to release the Connected Market Coach™ program. Here is my score card:
This summer I was invited to sail on the aircraft carrier, the USS Eisenhower. After seeing 61 Super Hornet fighter jets deployed from the deck of the carrier - breaking through the sound barrier just off the deck, it’s pretty clear that the right technology and the right pilot has a lot of power and can soar well above the crowed “clouds” with pinpoint accuracy to hit his target. This is what every entrepreneur needs to do as we rocket forth out of the economic war we’ve all had to face. We became enterpreneurs to "escape the surly bonds of earth ..." to experience the freedom of creating something that we envisioned.
When I reflect on how we, as enterpeneurs, have faced and begun to recover our business jet streams - how, once again we will soar with our business on the wings of this new technology frontier, with every company we bring into the Connected Market Space cloud, I can't help but recall, and relate to this poem from the American pilot who flew for the Canadian Air Force in World War II (this poem is even more meaninful to me as I, as an American, am becoming a dual citizen next week in Canada):
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Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, John Gillespie Magee, Jr. 9 Jun 1922 - 11 Dec 1941 |
If you want to go to the cloud with your technology, you’ll need a pilot – visit the Connected Market Coach™ and we’ll help your business soar.
Tim Vasko
Founder & Inventor 1to1Real™ Entrepreneurial Technologies & the Connected Market Coach™
Image: John Gay
Every month, every day, I hear about or am invited to use a “new tool” my business can’t do without. Personally, I’ve had ENOUGH with this gluttony of software. We have enough software to run the planet right from our iPhones and Blackberries! All these programs are doing is distracting us from what should be our primary task – running an efficient business.
What happened? How did we get into this mess? Firstly developers love to, well, develop. It’s fun, exciting and enthralling to develop new gadgets. However, too many of these gadgets are just technological junk food - they fill up your system, but they don’t really do anything for you. Just like real junk food, these programs don’t give your business real ‘nutrition’ and if you indulge in too much junk food you get bloated and sick.
So, the first thing we’re doing for Business fitness month? Cutting out the junk and untangling your technology!
Just like we have the four food groups, there are Four Pillars of good tech use that lead to Connected Success. I’ll introduce you to the Four Pillars of Connected Success next week. (Just like going to the gym, business boot camp won’t get you fit in one week. You’ll have to keep coming back!) For now however, let’s look at the typical diet of technology that most entrepreneurial businesses are eating in one form or another to manage their business: tracking and speaking to contacts, working as a team, that sort of thing.Abusing these programs is basically like eating too many candy bars – initially satisfying, but not a good way to stay productive or healthy.
1. CRM (Salesforce, Sugar, MS CRM Dynamics, etc) These programs are all full of features, but are you actually using them? Do they really add value to what you need to do to, or are they just empty calories?
2. Email Marketing (Constant Contact, Mailchimp, etc) Ah yes, generic emails and mailing lists. Not only are we doing badly as managing our own flows of email and information, but we’re pushing too much onto our clients and contacts. Email marketing is great – when it’s personalized and relevant, but spam isn’t good for your technology or your diet!
3. File Storage (Dropbox, etc) We have a huge need to share files and information online, but if you can’t connect files to the people who need to have them and you need to use one program to share the files and another to collaborate, you’re not working very efficiently.
4. Notes (Evernote, Onenote, etc) Once again, notes are great, but connecting your notes to contacts, files or discussion groups is time consuming. Notes aren’t collaborative either, which means you’re back to using several tools to do one job.
5. Project Management (Basecamp, etc) Project management is a huge part of business today – especially since you need a project management tool to keep track of the notes and files you have to share among your team…
So what we have here are 5 sets of tools. The problem is that these tools all do a small part of the one job you actually need them to do – manage contacts, collaborate and share files and notes… Each type of program has a clear single function, but none of them work together. Instead of eating one sandwich to satisfy your business needs, you’re eating 5 different candy bars. They fill you up when you’re hungry for a function, but there’s no long term nutritional value for your business.
A well place set of integrated tools is like a well balanced diet. It keeps you lean, mean and energetic. Putting the right nutrients into your body is a huge part of being a high performance athlete, and using the right programs is what it takes to be a top performing business – lean, efficient and successful. To be successful today management, marketing and messaging are all equally important. It’s a well rounded, holistic approach that recognizes it takes more than sales to drive an efficient company. We call this the M3 of CRM.
So, when we designed 1to1Real™ and the Connected Market Coach™ solutions for the “cloud” we decided we’d be like a well established gym. A “circut” of business and training tools that you need to stay in top shape and get into the zone; focusing not just on one small aspect of what a business needs to do, but the whole picture.
So what’s Step 1 for 2011? Trim down the disconnected tools, and get your business technology “mind” in line with your core business body – look at what you do, and how that’s different from what you need to do.
Next week we’ll cover Step Two: Organizing your Business Brain.
Picture: Candy and junk food might be delicious, but they're not what your body, or your business needs! Photo by Snippy Snippy Crab Kristine.
It’s always a bit melancholy to say goodbye to the holidays - helping put away the decorations while thinking about all the family, friends and smiles that make this time of year so special to us. This past year my family received more cards than ever from our loved ones – cards about triumphs, about struggles in work and health, but all laced with hope, strength and love.
Many of us have been faced with challenges from the economic downturn for a few years now. In our family, like so many others, health struggles surprised us and added to the stress. For me, connecting with family, friends and associates during the holiday, and finding the time to reflect on the things we thought we wouldn't have been able to handle, yet did, provides a great source of personal growth and strength. The year past always seems to have many more bright spots than we saw at the time. Perhaps this is why December always seems like such a wonderful month - the holidays let us reflect and anticipate.
As a lifetime entrepreneur I always find reflecting on these close connections, along with the holiday cheer and food to be a great springboard for new ideas, innovation and transformation. This is the time of year I look back at our business and the businesses we support in the Connected Market and say - “what can we… should we… will we do better, differently, more effectively in the coming year?” It’s resolution time.
This year I’ve decided to create the first annual Business Fitness Month – after all, fitness resolutions shouldn’t just be about eating too many Christmas cookies! Get Ready for Business Boot Camp with the Connected Market Coach!
Here the seven exercises we’ll work through together over the next few weeks as we drive the “resolution challenge” to get your business and our Connected Market Solutions to you. 2011 is the year we get on track, in business and in our personal lives (I’ll be running, stand up paddling and working out every week to get myself into great shape along with our businesses.)
Let’s get started - here’s our work-out schedule, the 2011 seven step Connected Market Ladder!
Step 1: Trim Down your Technology Tangle
Businesses across the board have a glut of unneeded technology tools clogging up their system and reducing efficiency. Like high cholesterol, we’re going to show you how to get the good stuff into your system, and connect the “mind” of your business with the “body” of your team. The goal of this step is to stop wasting time and duplicating work.
Step 2: Organize your Business Brain
Your customer data is like the internal organs of your business. The problem with internal organs is that if you ignore them, eventually they’ll wear out. Data that is poorly handled, cluttered, hidden or disorganized won’t just hold you back - in today’s Connected Market it could kill your business…
“When data is sitting in pockets, and not transparent to the whole organization, decisions are not understood that well. If everybody has the same data, they’ll generally come to the same decision.” Jack Welch, former CEO GE
The goal of this step is to help you understand why your Data Depot is the most critical part of your unique position in the market.
Step 3: Cut out the “Junk” and Focus on the Good Stuff
Just like cutting out junk food, tabloid magazines and junk mail, we’re going to get your communications in order, streamlining everything from social media to websites to newsletters. The best way to succeed is to get your message heard. The goal of this step is to gather your Unique Content and put in a place where your market will get your message.
Step 4: Get your Business Body (your team) Fully Engaged and Connected with your Core Value Proposition (your customers)
Buddhist philosophy calls this being mindful: Two Feet, One Mind. How your “mind” of technology works either for or against your business will ultimately determine the effectiveness of your connections to your market and your success. The goal of the he Connection Analyzer step is about changing your business “perception of reality”, i.e. getting focused on building and driving success.
Step 5: Get Away From Bad Habits and Create Great Habits
What are your business habits? Like everyone, you’ve probably developed a set of both good and bad habits - some of them are your best processes, and some are outdated, repetitive and bloated; simply put, they’re overweight. The goal of this step is take a step back, trim, streamline and focus how you work, and develop healthy new automated, connected processes to replace the old broken ones.
Step 6: Embrace Communications and Find your Friends
Where do you stand in the constantly evolving Social Hub of communication as a business? Can you manage all your connections and your presence, or do you find it cumbersome and difficult to understand? The goal of this step is to work with you to clear all messy communications with solutions and structure that flows perfectly toward your business and lets you get your message heard.
Step 7: Constant Improvement for a True Transformation
Becoming number 1 in your market… even becoming number 2 or number 10 won’t just happen easily. Nobody gets six pack abs or have more energy after going to the gym once. Getting your business fit – getting more customers through your door and more productive, profitable operations – is about constantly working at it, and finding ways to improve. The goal of this step will be to set up a constant feedback process – to help you continue to improve your business fitness and master your market.
So, welcome to the Connected Market Coach 2011 Tim’s Boot Camp. We’ll be here every week if you really want to focus and get going call The Connected Market Coach and start shaping up your business.
Happy New Year,
Tim, The Connected Market Coach Team, PedBot and 1to1Real.
According to most sales experts, no matter how many leads you receive only 2% of them are ready to buy right away. At least 25% of your leads will turn out to be no good, and the other 73% will need a whole lot of nurturing, coaching and maybe even cajoling to get them to a point where you’ll know if they’ll convert to sales.
Do you suffer from MBI - Management by Inbox? Are you addicted to your inbox, or are you tethered to it like a wild horse that wants to run free, but can’t…- When you wake up in the morning do you just go straight to your iPhone, BlackBerry or computer?
- Would forgetting your phone at home give you more jitters than missing your caffeine fix?
- Do you send your staff, customers and prospects constant emails - then review the “sent box” to see what you’ve been doing to manage your business?
It’s great to get back to blogging after being “disconnected” for 10 days. I want to thank Kathleen for keeping information flowing on the blog and the 1to1REAL and PedBot Team for their work at staying connected while I was unwinding.
Note: This blog post has been adapted by the CMAEON staff from notes our CEO Tim Vasko wrote for his upcoming book.
If a business considers its entire market (i.e., the unique values it business brings to a transaction that earns and keeps customers) – it quickly become apparent they have to go beyond CRM and the sales force, and start thinking long term.By definition, the sales force sells and then leaves - until there is something else to sell. For example, they sell razors and leave the production of the razor blades, the customer service, and razor blade user support to the rest of the team. Every business knows that the repeated value of the razor blade is what creates long term prosperity for the firm - the lifetime value of the customer and the firm – they want people to keep buying your razor blades. This means creating a connection with customers that isn't just a sales based relationship. Creating a connection with a market deeper than selling, is going beyond managing leads – it actually creates qualified sales leads. How? Slowly, surely, and over time as companies and customers connect and build a relationship.
People actually want to connect. People search, use social networks, save and sort information, speak, select and stick only if they go through the entire cycle themselves – we call this the "self discovery" market. Google is a very helpful tool for people to connect – it helps people sort information through search and PPC ads, and save information with bookmarks, social spaces, email, and other information management systems.
However, not everyone is searching and saving at the exact time they want to purchase something. This is where a typical sales cycle starts to fall apart. Sales people and the companies they work for don’t want, or more likely can’t afford to wait for a year to get a sale or commission. The problem (especially in a “buyers market”) then becomes, if a business can’t get a buyer at the exact time the leads are searching the lead is worthless, contact is lost, and the company moves on. Not a good strategy for building a business or a solid set of connections. A potential customer might want to buy a house next year, after they get married, but it doesn’t mean they’re not going to start looking for information on loans, mortgages and markets now.
Therefore, a business has a need for a consistent process of market participation and conversation marketing. A successful business will want to provide information for as long as it takes for the leads to mature. When a business does this, it's building a deeper connection and creating that qualified group of connections in a market space. However, would it be too time consuming to provide that level of service to every customer that comes in the door with a vague request for information? Not necessarily.
What businesses need for is a marketing robot. Robots are not pushy and they are not emotional, they are informative and repetitive. They can handle high volumes of people, can watch and learn and understand new things and create the right "space" for buyers and sellers without leaving the connection behind because the timing is wrong. Robots can help create a conversation that can be revisited at any time. No sales force, marketing team or single person can do that - no matter how good they are - nor will they if they are compensated like most sales people - in commission. Effectively, this is how search engines started and still exist; however, a search engine is a one way cycle and is manipulated through "optimization" and a code set that decides what is relevant.
For a successful connection, humans should decide what is relevant to them, and then find that information. Nobody ever feels like Google helps them make an informed decision – it just gives them information they specifically requested and leaves them to make the decisions themselves.
This is why conversation marketing and social networking is taking off so rapidly. People trust and talk to other people. People start by searching, but then they start narrowing down what they were thinking about and begin asking real people. In short, they make a connection and follow it through. In reality there is nothing about Google that makes anyone stick, other than sheer size of the search market. Once a lead comes through Google, a business still has to start that conversation!
That is where a robot can help for a clever business. When people search and don’t get information or a meaningful connection, they will search again. So if a business can catch those searchers the first time, providing information to real people and in answering questions, it will be associated with the most valuable information about its market, and it will start to have engaged conversations with searchers.
That is unbeatable - if a business can get in the conversation, and staring helping to drive the conversation, it becomes a focal point, and more and more people will join in. Real people. Interested people. People that are buyers. A robot helps because it grows and is patiently waiting and capturing and responding. It doesn't lose interest or "move on" like a salesperson will. It will cultivate and till the fields of prospects and create conversations and referrals and a community of people interested in a product or service.
There are hundreds of millions of people on the internet. A business only needs a few hundred or a few thousand of those people to decide that it is the expert, and the destination for solid, real useful information to be wildly successful, highly ranked on Google, and drive more success from natural brand advocates and community members than it ever could from PPC advertising or paid search.
So how can a business create its robot? How can it start generating real conversations and connections?
Contact us. We can help.
Are you inclined to take blind leaps of faith when making important business decisions? You would think most companies wouldn’t do that in a million years, but the answers are surprising.When choosing CRM solutions, many companies do make leaps of faith. Every day a business decides on a CRM system without identifying their key products and services, analyzing their market, or thinking about how to best reach their customers.
Businesses like this think automating their sales force will automatically create qualified sales leads. Making blind leaps like this aren’t the mark of a successful business, but most businesses aren’t successful when they implement CRM.
Over 55% of CRM installs fail to achieve results or even go live (HBR 2001), because most businesses get caught in the technology tangle; implementing solutions that don’t solve problems but instead create new ones. If the new technology doesn’t talk to the all the old technology, and doesn’t connect to what it should be connecting to, this “automated marketing solution” is probably failing to deliver growth.
That’s why CMAEON has created the BIPED® process –good business solutions are not just about lead generation. BIPED® is about analyzing connections, gathering the content that makes a business unique, creating a single place to keep that information, connecting existing business processes and bringing everything together to create a tool that and speaks to customers in the way the customers want to hear.
The result is beyond CRM – BIPED® is a system that automates lead management and automatically creates qualified sales leads because it adapts itself to your system and how you work, not the other way around.
So take charge of your business and stop making leaps of faith. Run your business the way that’s best for you, not according to a CRM system.
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