Start With Good News

I have regular production meetings with my team every day at 9:15AM. It’s incredible what can be accomplished in just 15 minutes. I start these meetings with "good news" from the day before. Who is happy? Who had nice things to say about us? Who approved their designs? Who agreed to their proposed project?

The good news travels fast and it gets us all off to a good start, every day. We have our challenges and we spend more time talking about those issues, but it’s important to recognize success and share the wins with the entire team.

Give it a try at your next staff meeting. The team will appreciate it.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Making Progress On Our Lounge

Thanks to all of you who provided comments and suggestions to my blog on January 22. Our lounge is taking shape and getting better. Take a look at pictures from today -- click here.

I still think there are some aspiring designers and creative types who can provide us with even more inspiration and great ideas. Comment directly, or feel free to email me. I want the space to be WOW! I think we have a ways to go.

Do you have a special space in your office that allows your team to be creative, to dream about the business, to get away and think clearly about how to improve, do things differently, or really change your business to make it “remarkable”?

Walt Disney called this room the “dreaming room.” In this (actual) place, you aren’t allowed to say “we can’t” or “that’s not possible.” In the dreaming room, it's only about "how", and "what do we need to do differently to deliver that goal?".

Try this with your team and let me know how it goes. I would love to get some stories from our fans.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Building The Best Team

We decided that one of our core values is to always work towards building the best team. Lately, that has meant that I spend about 50% of my day reviewing resumes, phone screening candidates, conducting interviews, evaluating candidate projects, and creating competitive compensation packages for the best of the best candidates.

That sure sounds like a lot of work, right? It is, but it’s worth it. Our firm -- and likely your company too -- is only as good as its people. It’s worth the investment of both time and money to find the best and the brightest to work at your company.

As I go from interview to interview, or wonder where the day went, I’m content that the end result will be a stronger team, happier clients, more referrals and overachievement on our sales targets.

While it would be easier on me to simply work with the people we have, it’s not going to get me to my goals, and it won't get you to your goals either. Bite the bullet and invest time in building YOUR best team.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Performance-Based Marketing

Thanks to those who are reading the blog. My webmaster has informed me that 234 people read the blog in January. Of course, my hope is that the information is so interesting that you will share the blog link with your friends and that number will continue to rise.

This, of course, leads us into today’s topic of performance based marketing. Many of our clients have a long history of executing marketing programs without setting, measuring, and analyzing the performance of their programs. This really isn’t complicated, but takes a discipline -- one that could be inherently uncomfortable, but regardless, it has to be mandatory. If you are going to invest in marketing, you have to measure its return and effectiveness.

Before you invest any money or time into a marketing program, follow this simple plan to create performance based marketing programs.

1. Set quantitative goals for the program. These goals can be website hits, number of blog readers, number of PDF downloads, percentage of people who open or click through from an email, phone calls, leads, or appointments.
2. Establish the process, people, or systems to track these numbers.
3. Review the performance of the program daily, weekly, and monthly.
4. Make a decision as a result of the metrics. Continue the program at its current level of investment, reduce the investment, cancel the program or increase the investment.
5. The quantitative results will clearly show you how to proceed.
6. Repeat, over and over again for every program.

Email me your program and I will help you set up some initial goals. Good luck!

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

A Blog Is Supposed To Be Interactive

If you have been reading my blog (and right now, there isn’t any indication that anyone is), you know that I often ask for comments and feedback, and offer to start a dialog with readers interested in my posts. If you read my blog, you know that I started the year committed to writing almost every work day. For the most part, I have held up my end of the bargain.

But something feels missing, and I know what it is. It's readers! It's input from prospects, clients, partners, employees -- an active, healthy thriving blog needs people interacting with the author.

So today, I'm throwing out a challenge: get involved. Square 2 Marketing is creating a lounge for our employees. Given our 2007 theme of Client WOW!, I want the lounge to be WOW! too. I want it to be a place where employees can comfortably work, hang out, and talk with clients or prospects. I want it to be fun and functional.

Right now it’s a work in progress. So I am asking for help. Take a look at our lounge by clicking the links below and give us comments, suggestions, feedback, and ideas. Interior designers, rise up and get involved. Help us make this lounge as remarkable as our newsletter and our consulting services.

Square 2 Marketing Lounge Picture 1 (click to view)
Square 2 Marketing Lounge Picture 2 (click to view)

And help me by getting involved in a conversation with our company via this blog! I anticipate everyone’s comments.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Grading Your Prospects

Sticking to my latest thread -- sales -- I thought it might be interesting to discuss the concept of grading your prospects. Whether you know it or not, not all prospects are created equally, and you need a vocabulary and a process by which your sales people can communicate to you the state of their prospect pipeline. After all, strong pipelines cure all ills.

Make sure your sales people know how to score their prospects. If you don’t have a consistent method to score those prospects, consider this one, called Pain, Power, Fit:

• Pain has to do with the severity of the challenges being faced by the prospect. The more serious the pain, the higher the score.
• Power: the closer you are to talking to the person who can sign the check, the higher the score on Power.
• Fit has to do with the match between what you do and how you do it, versus what the prospect needs you to do.

Pain, Power and Fit all need to score between 0 and 5 points. Prospects with 12 to 15 points should be closing imminently. Prospects with less than 5 points are probably a good 90 days away. Now, sales people can't manipulate the pipeline. Quantitative scoring of prospects keeps everyone on the same page.

Give it a try. If you have any specific questions about how to implement this, please drop me an email.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Marketing and Sales are Tightly Integrated

Wondering why your marketing isn’t working? Check with sales. Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen more and more companies who have improved their marketing without impacting their bottom line. That’s because, most of the time, all businesses have a sales component to them.

If the sales team isn’t working the lead, closing the sale, presenting the value, following up, treating people right, or helping your prospects understand how you can help them, you probably are wasting money on marketing.

Make sure your compensation plan is driving the right behavior, your leads are being distributed fairly, your territories are equally allocated, your sales people are properly trained, coached, mentored, evaluated, and most importantly, actively managed every day, every week, and every month.

If you're missing any of these pieces to your sales strategy, let me know and I will provide you with some suggestions.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Make Sure You Impress Your Employees

We have a new graphic designer starting today. Keeping with our theme of WOW!, I asked our team to make our new team member’s first day a WOW! experience. We created welcome signs throughout the office, an agenda for his first day, and made sure his computer system was all set up and his email and intranet accounts active. We gave the rest of the team a heads-up, and we'll all have lunch with him on his first day. In addition, I plan to meet with him first thing in the morning and again at the end of the day.

The result is a new team member who gets the royal treatment on his first day. If he sees how organized and committed we are to him, he should be (if he was the right hire) equally committed and focused on the jobs we need him to do for our company. While this kind of setup takes a little work, thought and organization, it's well worth it.

Plus, I have done it the other way…and it just sets the tone for an unhappy team member.

Give it a try at your place and let me know how it goes.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Get Out There and Tell People Your Story

Since we talked about Public Relations a bit yesterday, let's stay on that topic today too. I’m sure most of you reading this blog are an expert at something. I know most of my clients are experts at the technical details of their businesses. They understand investments, how to print large format banners, how to manufacture CDs, the details of selling windows, or the best architecture for their B2B software application.

The trick to exposing your expertise to the world, and also potential prospects, is putting yourself in a position to become the trusted expert. Guess what? It’s actually pretty easy. Groups are literally dying for speakers. You just have to introduce yourself and offer your speaking services to the group leaders.

Once they give you the forum, now you have to prepare and be able to talk knowledgeably about the topic. Since most of you have been doing what you do for many years, it just takes a little planning.

Create an outline, practice, use pictures, practice, make changes after you run through it a few times, practice, ask your wife or kids to listen to your presentation, practice, and practice some more. Pretty soon, you will have a speech that can be delivered over and over again.

The result will be people looking at you as an expert and wanting to have your company help them with their issues.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Recognize PR Opportunities

I’m going to switch gears a bit. I realized this morning that even our company, the marketing experts, sometimes overlooks an opportunity to promote our own business. If we overlook it, I bet most of you do too.

Yesterday, Eric Keiles, one of the partners and co-founders of our company, spoke in front of 160 entrepreneurs at the Philadelphia Entrepreneurs Forum meeting in Center City. Today, Eric will be speaking in front of over 200 people at the Lower Bucks County Chamber of Commerce’s Annual Member gathering.

Both of these opportunities should have been capitalized on from a PR perspective and shared with the public, at the very least as press releases distributed to local media and posted to our website.

So, as you look at your business…look closely. Charitable contributions, community involvement, public speaking, workshops, seminars, new services, new stores, new products, special sales, or even a change in hours provides an opportunity for you to talk with your customers and prospects for little or no cost.

Try it out and let me know how you do.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Live Your Theme!

A couple of days ago, I blogged about your theme for 2007. Our theme for 2007 is Client WOW! After just a couple of days, it already has me doing things differently at our company.

First, I resigned from an external CEO group that, while fine, wasn’t providing me the kind of WOW! experience I now expect from my team. I also made the difficult decision to fire one of our team members because she just can’t, despite trying her hardest, live up to our expectations. Those expectations are designed to deliver Client WOW!

I mention these two items because they've both made my last couple of days a bit challenging. I NEVER want to fire anyone, it affects families.

I know that as human beings, it's in our nature to smooth out the bumps, avoid the conflicts, and keep things simple. But our theme of Client WOW! kept me pushing forward, and if I want our company to be “remarkable” in every way, I have to make the tough decisions required to put the rest of our team in a position to deliver that Client WOW!

So, despite the hard work involved in making tough decisions, our theme has centered me and given me basis for keeping our company moving ahead to the benefit of our clients, team members, and shareholders.

Give it a try. And let me know how it works for you.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Corporate Rhythms

Keeping with the theme of planning, organization, and focusing your team for a stellar 2007, I wanted to quickly talk about the rhythm of business.

If you have little kids, you know that they need consistency to feel comfortable. You probably also know that the more comfortable they are, the better behaved. So, when they eat at 8AM, take that morning nap at 10AM, eat lunch at noon, take an afternoon nap at 2PM and head off to bed every night at 7PM, they have an internal level of comfort with what to expect and how to deal with and prepare for those events.

Business works in a similar fashion. Regular meetings and regular rhythms to your business keep your teams focused and working in sync.

To illustrate this very specifically, we huddle each morning with our client services and creative teams to review deliverables for the day, client requirements, priorities, and any major issues that would prevent us from providing excellent client service. We meet with each department head weekly to review successes from the past week, review our performance metrics, and brainstorm on any issues that are keeping us from achieving our goals. Finally, we bring together the entire company every month for a company-wide meeting to review the past month's progress towards our goals, emphasize our core values, and share any changes in overall strategy or direction.

This regular rhythm to our business keeps everyone comfortable and focused, with clear expectations associated with their work day, week, and month. Give it a try! While it might feel a little forced and strange in the beginning, I guarantee that in just a few days, you and your team will quickly find it invaluable.

Let me know how it works for you.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Sticking to your guns!

Okay, so at the end of last year, I committed to blogging almost every business day and maybe even once on the weekends. With all my good intentions, you might have noticed that yesterday was blogless (I might have created a new word there; if so, humor me) at Square 2 Marketing.

This morning, in the shower, I realized that yesterday I was so busy working with clients, meeting with prospects and coaching our team that, unfortunately, I forgot to blog.

Is there a lesson in this? I think so. My expectations were perhaps a bit unrealistic. To go from no blog posts to one every single day might have been a little aggressive. But the most important issue is that my little lapse doesn’t evolve into a complete disintegration of an important goal.

This is relevant to all business owners. We have a lot of clients who are implementing new sales and marketing initiatives in January, and it's hard work. Making changes to your business, doing things differently, and pushing yourself and your teams to be better doesn’t happen overnight.

If you fall off the horse once, or get burned trying something new, or even if you slip into bad habits early on in the process, the most important point is that a little lapse shouldn't keep you from achieving your goals.

So here I am blogging again, and I am encouraging you to stay the course, even if it’s difficult in the beginning. You will be rewarded in the end.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Create a Theme to Focus Your Team

Every day, I ask myself one question:

Did I do enough today to help my team be successful?

At our company, we are obsessed with building the best team, and I am obsessed with making sure our team has the direction and support they need to help us meet our business goals.

To further our goal, this year we created a theme. In Verne Harnish’s book "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits", he talks specifically about this. For us, our theme is Client WOW! I have been thinking about this theme for the past couple of weeks and I am honestly surprised at how much influence it’s had on my everyday thinking.

The concept of WOW! (yes, the exclamation point and capital letters are important) have changed my thinking completely. Everything I have done must be WOW! or it's not worth doing. I want this same change in thought process to be pervasive across our entire company.

Not only does our marketing consulting and graphic design have to inspire Client WOW!, but so do our proposals, team handbook, how we answer the phone, and even the way our office looks! EVERYTHING has to be WOW! If it's not, we have to work harder, or think differently, to make it WOW!

So, whether it's “think big”, “go for it” or “speed kills", I challenge you to think of a theme for the year. Make sure it embodies the core values we discussed in previous blog entries, and make sure it can be applied to every single thing you do inside and outside your company.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Make 2007 Your Best Year by Starting Today

Okay: it's 2007. My resolution is to blog every morning. Let’s see how I do.

Let’s assume you didn’t do too much planning for 2007 in 2006. Like most of the business owners I talk to, planning is difficult to get your hands around and even more difficult to start.

Let’s not give up entirely. Let’s make sure we start working on making 2007 the best year yet -- starting today. Let’s also keep it simple. Believe it or not, there are a couple of things we can do this morning. That will help us achieve our goals for 2007.

1. Figure out how much we want to do in both sales and profit for 2007.
2. Divide it by 12 to create monthly goals.
3. Assign someone or create a recurring task for yourself to document the monthly goals and measure your performance against these goals each month.
4. If you have set sales and profit goals, that means you probably have expense goals too. Manage these weekly, so that you actually come in under budget on expenses.
5. Make sure your sales activities are significant enough to support your sales projections. Sales are a numbers game. The more contacts, the more proposals or prospects interactions, the more sales.
6. The next week or two is a perfect time to reengage with your employees. Schedule a team or company wide meeting and set the tone for 2007.
7. Share your goals, corporate values, and changes in strategy, but most importantly get everyone excited about the New Year.

If you just spent the morning getting these couple of items accomplished, you are on your way to a great 2007. Check back here every day for a tip, tidbit, or story to help your business in 2007.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.