Guest Marketing Post-Succeeding with Video
Filed under: Fresh Voices, Marketing, Marketing Yourself
Note from Art: Whether you work inside the walls of a corporation or you make your office wherever you can grab a good connection and a great cup of coffee, chances are that you will come face-to-face with the need to appear on camera at some point in time. For many of us, the thought isn’t exactly a welcome one.
I had my first video encounter to promote the launch of my essay collection, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development, and while painful, in the end after the self-induced stress wore off and the almost-expletives cleared the air and I had regained my ability to say, “action-packed” versus the now classic line captured as “action-paction,” it was fun and I believe beneficial. So much so, that I’ve agreed to start a monthly videocast.
I’m not alone in my video-phobia, and in comparing notes with many of my colleagues, it seems we all struggle with the same issues. We also agree that the benefits of building a video presence strongly outweigh any of the personal reasons for avoiding this. To support our efforts, I encouraged Amber Wallor and Edgar Mourans, the two pros behind Left Hand Marketing and the drive to help small business owners and even hapless actors like me build a video presence, to offer us some guidance.
Like everything else these two great people do, they went above and beyond the call of duty, offering a free e-book filled with tips and brief video clip to show that they are willing to face the camera as well! Use their advice wisely, and of course don’t be bashful in reaching out to them for help. Did I mention they are entrepreneurs! Enjoy the resources and good luck in your small screen careers!
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What causes you to freeze up, mispronounce words, suffer from memory loss, and blabber senselessly about ideas that are normally second nature to you while watching your every move? A video camera!
We are passionate about the effectiveness of video marketing. Video is a powerful tool for businesses and individuals looking to gain an edge against competitors.
Video allows you to showcase what differentiates you while giving people the feeling that they already know you before ever doing business with you. It goes with the old cliché, people like doing business with people they know, like and trust. More so, video brings increased exposure and higher search results. YouTube is owned by Google and is one of the largest search engines; so naturally, Google favors websites with video in its search results. In fact, videos are 53 times more likely than traditional websites to receive a first-page ranking on Google.
Nevertheless, being on camera is easier said than done. We haven’t had one client who hasn’t feared being recorded. For the majority of people, being in front of the camera is quite an unpleasant feeling to say the least. It’s like hating the sound of your own voice but ten times worse!
Here’s Some Help:
To help you with overcoming that fear, we have been inspired to create a mini e-book (and we had fun creating the pictures on the cover) that will guide you in the right direction.
Watch your confidence grow with our list of helpful tips on preparing yourself when it’s time for the lights, camera, and action (or “action-paction” as Art has been known to say)!
It’s truly an amazing sight to watch our clients transform through the camera lens, some even begin to enjoy being on camera! If you find other things that work for you, we’d love to hear from you and add them to future revisions of our e-book.
P.S. We’d like to thank Art for being so great to work with and for being a good sport about action-paction!
In writing a post on the importance of video, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to release a video of our own about the e-book. Hey, we can all use the practice!
Midweek Marketing: Delta Builds Customer Experience One Detail at a Time
“Success is the sum of the details.” Harvey S. Firestone
I’ve been an unapologetic critic of the money losing and seemingly customer hating airline industry for many years. Anyone who has flown a million miles or more has a good view to the workings of this flying bus business (with apologies to bus companies), and the view is mostly unpleasant. (Not always, just mostly.)
Imagine my surprise when I deviated on my return trip from my normal dealings with United, and flew Delta, and I actually enjoyed the experience. I checked my calendar and it wasn’t April Fools Day or Halloween, so all of the truly good-natured, helpful and smiling Delta employees might have actually meant it.
With more than ample time on my hands in two airports, I decided to go on an anthropological expedition of Delta operations. Here’s what I saw:
7 Details that Made the Delta Experience Delightful:
1. Happy, smiling employees serving customers. From gate agents to the flight crews, I didn’t run into a single Delta employee who didn’t smile and offer help. Yes, I used the “s” and the “h” words here. These people seemed genuinely happy to work with customers. (Related post: Smiles, Sales and Leadership.)
2. A lack of grumpy employees. Yeah I know this is redundant with my first point, but I’m still kind of shocked. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve observed the crews from other airlines (mostly United) bad-mouth their firm when they think no one is listening (sorry, I was walking behind you), or just visibly show the world that they didn’t give a damn. My favorite was the United flight attendant who wore a button that said, and I quote: “This airline sucks.” While some people accuse me of dreaming that one up, I almost needed to go into therapy after seeing that display of callous disregard for firm, clients and self.
3. Readily available help. Traveler help was everywhere, including an abundance of small kiosks offering: “Missed Your Connection? Scan Your Ticket Here for Alternatives.” Getting help when things go bad is one of the more stressful elements of flying, and here was an attempt to ease this burden. Nice. The ground-agents waiting to greet passengers and offer personal success were always there…and always smiling.
4. Easy access to the necessities of travel life. The world of business travel survives and thrives on plug-ins for power, internet access, good food and clean restrooms. A+ in the Delta terminals for these critical travel comforts.
5. Company Pride on Display! Every Delta plane sported a decal indicating that Delta had been named one of the World’s Most Admired Corporations (tops in the airline industry) according to Fortune. OK, a little chest thumping is OK if you can back it up.
6. Employee Pride on Display! Every plane had a decal on it under the Fortune banner indicating an employee who had excelled at their job. Nice…what a badge of pride if your name hits the list. (I seem to recall that this is a long-standing practice, and if so, it’s still a good idea.)
7. Pleasant flight crews who seemed to enjoy their jobs. The banter by the pilots seemed extraordinarily friendly and the rest of the flight crew engaged with customers in way that only Southwest seems to have ever cared about.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
While I’m not certain that my two terminal/two flight experience offers a valid sample set, the experience with Delta yesterday was noticeably different than the gross majority of my other airline experiences. Someone seems to be paying attention at Delta. It almost sounds like good leadership and excellent marketing… and great execution…concepts sorely lacking in much of the rest of this industry. The great experience is most definitely in the details.
I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to see if I was lucky or if they’re truly good. And for executives and marketers everywhere, It behooves you to give your employees reasons to smile and serve. The customers are watching.
Smiles, Sales and Leadership
Filed under: Career, Customer Service, Leadership, Management Education, Middle Management, Performance, Social Commentary, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management
The smile may be the single most powerful sales tool ever.
I enjoy observing how the help in stores engage with their customers. What you see and hear speaks volumes about the leaders they work for.
Want to know how people feel about their jobs and their bosses? It’s on their faces. Employees mirror the treatment they receive from their leaders. While this theme begs some additional reading in the emerging field of social neuroscience (Goleman et. al), it really comes down to common sense.
My Experience in the Big Box: Welcome to Zombieland!
Walk into some big box stores and spend a few minutes observing people. The cashiers don’t make eye contact with their customers and a smile is a rare sighting. The few available floor clerks seem to head the other way when a customer with a puzzled look on his face enters the area. You get the impression that some transformation has taken place, sucking the joy of life out of the employees.
Seriously, for people to be so socially cold, they truly must hate their work, their boss or whatever fate brought them there. Evidence wasn’t far away during a recent, rare visit, as I was able to observe someone in a suit (probably corporate) dressing down a small team of employees (in front of customers) for clearly not following some arcane procedure somewhere. The employees were staring at their shoes, while this creepy, arrogant little reject from leader school attempted to showcase his authority.
I couldn’t wait to get of out that store, and I wondered why it was that compelled me to walk through the doors in the first place. The bosses own responsibility for creating that hell-like, night of the living dead atmosphere.
A Little Honey, A Little Vinegar on Main Street
Once I recovered from the big box experience, I continued my holiday rounds on our community’s Main Street, where I experienced both the good and the bad from small business leadership.
I visited one of my wife’s favorite shops and shop owners, where I was greeted with a handshake and personally walked through the process of selecting items that I have no qualifications to select. I spent at least twice as much as I intended and left feeling great.
The treatment was fantastic, and it appeared to be the de facto standard for everyone who walked in the door. The employees dealt with customers in the same happy, respectful and helpful fashion as their boss, and the cash register was clearly ringing.
Now, I needed one more item, and this great shop owner sent me down the block to another Main street merchant, where once again, I was back in retail leadership hell.
I walked into the brightly colored store (good) and observed the owner and an employee huddled over something that must have been really important. I said “hello” and received two clearly annoyed stares followed by a curt and unsmiling greeting. Intrigued, I mentioned the shop owner that had sent me this way, and this time was met with silence. I milled around a little, found what I was looking for, and decided that the lack of interest on their part was mutual. I set the item down, went home and ordered it on-line. No smile, no interest, no sale.
As an aside, all of you sales and marketing pros, contemplate what just happened in this last incident. A customer with need and money (highly qualified), was sent to the store (a referral) by a store owner (high credibility, high probability of making a purchase) , and all of that hard work was flushed down the toilet of indifference. Repeat that a few times over every month and one might bet (hope) this store is no longer around next year. A qualified lead and a valued referral…all retail road kill due to indifference.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The greatest selling technique ever, might just be direct eye contact and a smile. Leaders, send someone out to shop in your stores or visit your place of business and observe how employees are dealing with customers. The results might truly frighten you. And then do something about it!
And leaders, in what parallel universe do you come from where “not giving a crap” about your customers is a good plan? I don’t care if you’re the general manager of a Big Box or, the owner of a small retailer, know that one of the unarguable rules of the universe is that happy employees make happy customers.
Give your employees a reason to smile, and they’ll make you smile at the top and bottom lines.
10 of My Favorite Dumb Ass Management Mistakes
Filed under: Career, Leadership, Making Decisions, Management Education, Marketing, Performance, Sales, Strategy, Surviving Lousy Leaders, Talent Management
Note 1 from Art: this one is rated something or another for strong language and emotional intensity.
Note 2: In the spirit of my post, “At Least 20 Things to Stop Doing as a Leader,” which has grown well north of 50 thanks to a deluge of reader comments, I’m back with a list of some insanely stupid and all-too-common management mistakes. These focus more on the decisions, actions or inactions that contribute to creating even bigger problems. While I’ve remained on the positive side of the law here (felons, you’ve had your day!), some of these mistakes are truly criminal. Please feel free to chime in with your additions.
1. Locking the corporate strategy in a drawer. Hey, I’m all for security, but this wasn’t just protecting important documents. This executive didn’t bother to share the strategy with employees either. It was a secret.
2. Not rolling out the sales compensation plan until late March. The sales team was on a calendar year. Hmmm, what did everyone do for Q1?
3. This one is epidemic…sucking the value out of an acquired company by folding, spindling, mutilating, disrespecting, vanquishing and otherwise conquering and plundering the target. We’ve got a mountain of evidence of this, and still, dumb a@@ executives focus on the deal (the easy part) and forget the real work of properly and positively managing the new relative. Welcome to the family! Now bend over and cough.
4. Looking for cause in the effect. This is a daily occurrence in many businesses, where managers run around trying to explain the drivers behind company, competitor and market outcomes. “Hey, our competitor keeps putting up great numbers. They’ve gone to a formal dress code at the office. It must be the clothes.” OK, that’s a little far-fetched, but I double-dog dare you to find a few instances of misguided cause and effect in your workplace today.
5. Losing sight of the core issues in the heat of argument. The decision making process is complex. Add in a group of high powered and big ego managers and you’re certain to be pressured into a dumb a** decision. My favorite evil tactic, “Take of your (insert function) hat and put on your business hat.” You might as well have a lobotomy prior to making that decision, because that’s what your evil counterpart is essentially asking you to do.
6. Letting marketing define its own key performance indicators. Hey, I’m a lifetime marketer, and I still rankle at this one. If the marketing activities don’t specifically connect to the key levers that move the business forward, they are interesting to some but useless to many.
7. Sliding down the slippery slope of consensus decision-making. Everybody doesn’t get a vote unless we’re talking about ordering pizza. We’ve all seen the cartoon that indicates in a series of panels what various functions wanted in a new product development effort. The Rube Goldberg outcome looks nothing like what the customer wanted. Start looking for the moves away from smart and good in the consensus-based decisions on your teams. It should frighten you.
8. “It’s sunk cost. We can’t worry about what we’ve spent, we need to keep moving forward.” Ha! This rationale has derailed careers and destabilized nations. For the love of all this is good in humanity, quit burning money when all the signs say “Stop!”
9. Daily occurrence in this economy: failing to acquire the right talent because of cost controls. Yeah, let’s fix this one once we’re making money! (For 20 bonus points, identify the insane and inane thought processes that went into that last statement.)
10. Annual occurrence: putting a group of managers in a room one time per year and expecting that out of the collective group grope, market winning strategies will emerge. “Hey, great meeting. See you next year.” We’ll maybe…unless our competitors leave us for global road kill.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
The common denominator in all ten of those very real mistakes is that they are controllable. We can decide to not make these mistakes. The sales comp plan can hit the street with the new year. We don’t have to throw good money after bad, and we don’t have to engage in practices like the annual strategy planning retreat (it’s a process!) that are just stupid. If you can’t go out and get the talent that you need now with what’s walking around on the street, you’re either not trying hard enough or you need to find some other people to work for.
Instead of thinking deep thoughts about making good decisions as part of your New Year’s Resolutions, why not resolve to simply not make the same bad old decisions over and over again. Now that would be progress.
Marketers: 4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need
Filed under: Innovation, Making Decisions, Management Education, Marketing, Product Management, Strategy
The article, “The Felt Need” by Dan and Chip Heath in the November, 2010 issue of Fast Company is worth the price of the annual subscription for it’s reminder value alone.
The Heaths tackle a topic that just about all of us involved in selling, marketing or strategy have succumbed to at some point in our careers: the felt need versus the burning need.
“If entrepreneurs want to succeed…they’d better be selling aspirin rather than vitamins. Vitamins are nice; they’re healthy. But aspirin cures your pain; it’s not a nice-to-have, it’s a must have.”
The article speaks to our tendency to become enamored with our own ideas and offerings, and to make the leap that because everyone can benefit from this (a vitamin), they will jump at the opportunity to buy. They provide a number of great examples from the publishing and technology arenas.
In my own experience, technology businesses do this all of the time, often as they race to either out-feature competitors or to blindly reflect the input of customers. Not that beating competitors or listening to customers are bad ideas, but both can lead you down blind trails if you’re not careful.
I know better than to fall victim to “The Felt Need,” yet, I’ve produced a number of vitamins during the past few years. On several occasions, I’ve invested considerable time in creating programs that I would take a bullet for as offering career-critical content. While no one disagreed with me on the importance of the programs or the value of the content, they responded to them much like people respond to their gym membership in February.
4 Ideas to Avoid Falling Victim to The Felt Need:
1. Measure and monitor the success of your new offerings. Are they selling like vitamins or, are they selling like aspirins. If you’re listening to your clients properly, they will tell you loud and clear what level of pain that you are addressing.
2. Evaluate new offerings and investment ideas with the filter of “The Felt Need.” It’s not difficult to assess if your marketer, developer or product manager can substantiate true audience pain. Ask tough questions. I love people that are passionate about their ideas, however, I still advocate a “trust but verify before investing” approach.
3. Quality-check your “Voice of the Customer” processes. Many a well-intentioned firm or product manager has listened carefully to customers only to find out that the requests, while valid, were not material. Too much blind followership leads to a bad case of The Innovator’s Dilemma.
4. Cultivate the practice of social anthropology. Ensure that your people are out in the market and in customers’ businesses observing. Ask someone a question and you will get an answer, but watch them in their own environment and you will learn something about them.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Read the article and spend some time looking at your own mix of current and planned offerings. While as the article indicates, you might end up with some vitamins, you better have a good number of aspirins to address burning pain points. Make certain that your primary strategy is not “follow the competitor” or, “the customer’s need is our command.” You need good systems and great people to observe, translate and mostly uncover true pain points that merit a cure. And remember the Heath’s warning about building a better mousetrap. Most people aren’t interested in a better mousetrap. They simply want a dead mouse.
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