Now that 2011 is behind us, I can reveal some insight into performance results for tactics offered this past year by so called (and usually self proclaimed) online marketing gurus. Several marketers I’ve met this past year consider themselves to be entrepreneurs and with this role in mind, they paid for and followed the advice of a few amiable marketing gurus. I put a simple spreadsheet together last week to tally up the results and see if any guru advice added to their bottom line. To make this a measurable and manageable exercise, I focused on one single piece of advice and used the cost to acquire this advice in my calculations. The learning was interesting; here is my short summary:

If you are a bear, you are a bear. If you are a dog, you are a dog. If you are a marketer, you are NOT an entrepreneur.

OK… now the longer version.

Marketing is about numbers and can be highly opportunistic in that, if something doesn’t work after a reasonable amount of testing, try something else. The numbers dictate the next action and thus, marketing (especially online marketing) is a very tactically oriented approach to success. Also, wrt online marketing, a marketer can jump from one product to the next quickly and easily by creating new lists of Customers and even by cross pollinating these lists.

The entrepreneur, on the other hand, is out to change the world with his or her vision. The best definition I’ve ever read on what an entrepreneur is, was written in 1975 by a professor at Harvard named Howard Stevenson.

“Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”

This is categorically different from what marketers are tasked with. Marketers need resources that they can control or at least manipulate in order to achieve their objective. Entrepreneurs are strategic thinkers whereas marketers are tactical opportunists. This may sound a bit harsh but, please bear with me because my marketing oriented colleagues who see themselves as entrepreneurs have just gone belly up.

I’d like to help you avoid making a similar mistake by drawing your attention to one of the not so obvious yet, really poor recommendation made by these guru screwballs in the hopes that you heed my words of caution and can improve your business results at the same time.

The gurus stated as recently as December 2011 that entrepreneurs should put Customers to work to help improve the product and thus increase sales. They pitched ‘Ask Customers what they want, build it, deliver it and become fantastically wealthy in the process’. Fellow entrepreneurs and dear friends, this sounds easy enough and basic enough but it is a sure way to entrepreneurial failure. It is however a wonderful marketing tactic when used properly.

After a few years of sitting on the wall watching people act on such advice, we have come to the conclusion that this is a recipe for entrepreneurial business failure. There is one exception and that is the case where you wash, lather, rinse and repeat this cycle in as many different niches as possible. By our definition, this is not an entrepreneurial business model but rather an opportunistic approach to making money with slick marketing tactics. As a marketer, you can change direction as many times each month as you desire and you can continue to use process to drive your opportunistic fishing expeditions. If you catch a few thousand fish, you win and if your bucket is empty, you move on to the next hole. THe thing is that you do not build a sustainable business with this approach. You do however, have the possibility of earning a boatload of cash for yourself and your buddies until that niche dries up and you need to start all over again.

If an entrepreneur were to follow the guru’s advice, that business would very likely fail. The reasons are simple – part of every entrepreneur’s job is to invent the future. If you have a vision of improving a business model through the introduction of a new product or service, it is likely based upon your unique experiences in that industry. Your Customers have a tough enough time doing their own jobs. They don’t spend time trying to reinvent industries or improving how jobs are performed. Sure, every now and then you come across an exception. But you can’t bet the company on finding such a person within your Customer base.

Even more important to remember is that Customers typically don’t see the value in or need for a new product or service until they can either compare it with something that they use and know (perhaps a competitive product) or until they see a new product in action.

That means that if your firm is dependent on Customer feedback for innovation, you will always be behind the curve because Customers are only aware of a small sampling of what exists today. Resources and brainpower that could be applied to “inventing the future” at your firm will instead be used to catch up with features that lock the company into the past.

Your Customers can tell you about things that are broken and how they want to be made happy. Listen to them. Make them happy. But don’t rely on them to create the future road map for your product or service. That’s the takeaway here.

Since entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled, get out there and do your homework, create that vision and then build a business that adds value to a specific niche of Customers that are willing to pay for that value.

Every time you want to make any important decision, there are two possible courses of action. You can look at the array of choices that present themselves, pick the best available option and try to make it fit. Or, you can do what the true entrepreneur does: Figure out the best conceivable option and then make it available. Don’t ever ask your Customers where you should be headed. Just get up and lead instead.

This is fabulous technology that one of our partners has come up with during the past years and now, it has reached a level of maturity where the start to finish cycle of initiation to delivery can be as tight as 3 weeks. The more desirable and considerably less stressful, planned implementation is a 5 to 6 week cycle. In order to deliver such a project, we need quite a bit of information, often local government approval and a firm commitment from each of our Clients and their sponsors but the end result is an audience gasping for breathe as they witness something 3D that defies explanation and gives fresh meaning to the phrase “you had to be there”. Today, not even Disney is doing this sort of thing but, we expect them to catch up very quickly.

Have a look for yourself,
It’s pretty amazing stuff.
Here is a collection of projects that our team Nuformer delivered.

Here’s a simple recipe for QR code success.

If you are going to implement a campaign using QR codes, be sure that the codes
- are displayed in locations that have reasonable cell phone reception
- are clear and easy to read using a variety of devices including low resolution cameras

Instead of linking directly to a youtube video, consider creating a mobile friendly site or web page with the video embedded and a backup option with text instructions and images in case the video refuses to load.

Be sure to track those clicks and put analytics on your landing page to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign and the browser / device breakdown of people pinging the QR code.

Remember to include a couple of simple social media sharing options and you have the makings of a great mobile & social media campaign without too much effort.

We are often asked about the definition of Marketing vs Sales.

I don’t know how the confusion started and you can look up the definitions in any dictionary if you are so inclined…  our preferred definition goes like this:

Good Marketing Is Like
Getting The Needle To Jump Out Of The Haystack
Sales Is The Fine Art Of Sewing

Defining a budget for software development projects is something of an art form. Most cost projection tasks are the result of Client requirements, guesswork, gut feel and estimations that have little bearing on reality. Our Clients demand fair prices and solid proposals that they can go to their boss with for signature knowing that a reliable partner is standing by, waiting for the green light. These proposals need to be based on realistic estimations of our costs and our risks for delivering the level of quality that our Clients desire at a rate they can afford and in a time period that they want. Not many people are willing to discuss the topic but, the fact is, it has become a real challenge to deliver both a competitive quote and high quality result for Clients this past decade. The primary reason seems to be a lack of serious, responsible, dedicated and reliable individuals that are skilled in providing services on time, on budget and at the highest level of quality. One of our good fortunes is to have a strong team of A players already on board but a key component to delivering results that make our Clients happy is to deliver within 5% of our estimate.

Since hourly rates for coding, additional costs for rapid development and pricing of tools and other resources can fluctuate based on circumstances beyond our immediate control, we offer the following guidelines to help you create a consistent and justifiable budget that is also realistic.

The Basics
A budget is one of those pivotal tools that is used to make decisions in many areas of a company. When creating budgets please keep the GIGO rule in mind and input quality data as often as possible. For developers, budgets dictate the amount of time they can spend on specific areas of an application. For the project manager, it’s a baseline used to determine if the project is on track. For our Client, the budget correlates directly to the success of the effort. Regardless of circumstance, a number of basic philosophies can help your budgeting immensely by protecting it from subjective review. By understanding the basic concepts, and making sure that everyone involved understands them as well, you’ll be on the right track toward an accurate projection:

Identifying project costs 

When you’re identifying the costs of development, stay as close to reality as possible. Look at performance of the team members on past projects to get a feel for how long it will take them to program a given amount of code. Consult with your lead developer. Watch out for braggadocios estimates & consider multiplying your developer’s estimate by 3 to pad for your risk assessment stage. Remember to include costs for integration, meetings, security certificates, license fees, quality assurance, debugging, documentation, material costs, testing, deployment and planning time are all areas that need to be included in your estimate. Whether we will be billing our Client for these items or not, they are all valid and substantial expenses of a project. Including them will help you accurately measure the profitability of the solution down the road.

Be sure to itemize estimates for features that were not included in the specification. These are items that you suspect will be requested later on or those that would be beneficial to the final product. List these as options in your proposal and budget for them. Another good thing to up-sell is developer support time for about 60 days after launch. Often when a project is rolled out, support groups aren’t in place yet and thus many questions get deferred to the developers – plan for this eventuality.

Once you’ve got your costs outlined, it’s time to look at the probability of staying within those boundaries.

Risk
Risk assessment and assignment is very important to a successful budget. Without it, the crises that occur regularly and are an inherent part of any project, will affect your bottom line. Values in your estimate need to have this padding built in – it should not be considered a part of sales mark-up. Risk represents actual costs incurred over the course of development. Risk line items should include things like development team experience (or lack thereof), obscurity (supportability) of the technology used, planning time shortages, number of development teams, location of development teams, number of modular components, proximity and availability of the project driver, product dependencies such as databases or third-party software, server side technology, hosting configurations (cloud etc) and any unknowns.

Once you’ve determined your risk items, assign a scope and percentage to each. For example, if one part of your application is to be built in C and another in PHP, and your team consists mostly of C programmers, the PHP component may have a higher risk assignment under the ‘developer experience’ line item. The percent assigned should be applied only to the relevant portion of the project.

All projects have a certain amount of risk involved that can be attributed to human nature. People get sick, take vacation, disappear without notice etc. No one is an expert in everything. I always assign a percentage risk to this area – in addition to other considerations. Here is a sample of how we assess risk: An average 10-developer, 6-month project justifies a risk assessment of 7 percent of the total project costs. For longer projects and smaller teams, it will be higher; for shorter projects and larger teams, it will be lower. If your overall risk assessment is between 20 and 30 percent of the total project cost, you are within our operating norms.

Your actual total risk percentage will depend on your experience in evaluating the team and the pending effort. If, after calculating an estimate, your numbers are coming out too high, look at other projects delivered by your company. Did they actually fall within their budget? If not, your numbers may be justified. If so, you may be giving your team too little credit. Rectify project-to-project discrepancies before presenting your estimate to the project driver.

Regardless of how close you come to reality, a Client will be much happier if your project comes in below budget rather than over it; however, too high a risk value can create sticker shock, revealing inexperience and creating misgivings about your management abilities. By following the guidelines we’ve suggested and applying some common sense, you are more likely to deliver your upcoming projects on time, on budget and meeting your Client’s quality expectations. Remember that Time, Quality and Cost are interrelated. If you modify one of them, it will more than likely impact the others.

Having assessed and coached hundreds of executives including over 100 CEOs and presidents over the years, I have an idea about what ticks them off. One of their daily irritants is the way many people choose to communicate with them. The top three are stalling, withholding information and offering too much detail. Can you guess which one of these three has the highest potential to get an employee fired?

Communication allergy number one is Stalling.
When a person responds to a CEO’s question they should try to refrain from using phrases such as “It depends” and “I’m not sure but..”
The truth is that when a person responds in this manner, they state the obvious and then confirm that they either really don’t have a clue and can’t actually answer the question or that they don’t necessarily want to tell the truth.

If you want to keep your CEO happy, give a direct response in one to two sentences. Be honest, brief and intelligent. If your boss wants more of an explanation, they will ask for it.

Communication allergy number two is Withholding Information.
Your CEO is there to help solve problems and manage risks. If you decide that you know what you’re doing and deliberately try to solve a problem with a key account before involving the CEO, you are probably going to be looking elsewhere for employment and perhaps a bit more education. It’s amazing how many managers actually do this, risking their jobs and reputations at the same time.
Why would someone hide important information from the CEO? Simple, they know the CEO will blast them with questions: “Why didn’t you anticipate this? Why didn’t you do X, Y, and Z to prevent it? Why haven’t you done A, B, and C to fix it?” If you want to keep you CEO happy, summarize each situation that presents adversity, do a PPA on it and seek input from your boss – perhaps there is something that s/he can do to influence the outcome of this threat. A successful Swiss CEO that I know well used to have a boss who would send an army of analysts to question the team if he suspected that one of his directors was not telling him the whole truth. In order to put a fire out before it even got started, this successful CEO told his former boss during the first month of his employment at the firm: “I hear that you don’t like negative surprises, so I promise to keep you in the loop within a few hours of identifying and verifying that we have a problem. Please give me a day or so after that to investigate why it occurred and then I’ll get back to you with what we believe to be the most probable cause, what we’re doing to get back on track and how we plan to prevent it from recurring.” My friend and current CEO of the very same firm, was never was visited by that army of analysts.

Communication allergy number three is Too Many Details.
CEOs typically guard their time vigilantly so try not to waste a single moment with details on ‘how’ you plan to do something unless you are asked for such details. Use your time wisely and come to the point as quickly as possible. Never use suspense as a tactic when delivering information or responding to your CEO’s queries. This may sound like a no-brainer but it is amazing how many people choose to bore CEOs to death with details rather than getting straight to the point delivering information directly, honestly and succinctly – yes, even bad news. The folks that wish to justify their verbal output in some way before actually responding to a question are primary targets during downsizing cycles… need I say more?

So in summary, don’t stall, don’t withhold information and don’t bury your boss in details. Just prepare in advance, do some careful thinking prior to the meeting and then present your case concisely so that you encourage input, guidance and a solid basis for decision making. Feel free to test the above with Clients as well… it could possibly improve your closing rate.

After overhearing some totally off base comments regarding twitter today, I thought that I’d do some community service and publish a few helpful Twitter definitions

Tweet
A “tweet” is a post on Twitter. It is 140 characters or less.

Twitter Search
Twitter has a search function that allows you to search for words, phrases, people and more within Twitter. This finds Tweets that have been published as recently as the past minute and as long ago as Twitter has been around – it’s like using a real-time search engine!

Hashtag
A hashtag is a series of characters preceded by the # symbol. It is used to tie posts from multiple Twitter users together on one topic or event so that you can track them (or at least view them easily)

Hashtags make searching for information about products, events, companies and other topics easy – just search for the hashtag, and all related posts are shown.

To create a hashtag, you simply start using it and encourage others to use it as well. Try  typing your hashtag into the search function at Twitter before starting to use it, just to be sure that its not already in use. Also, remember to keep it short… you only have 140 characters for your post!

Replying/Commenting/Recognizing
To tweet publicly (where your followers can see your tweets) to another Twitter user, just use the “@” sign in front of their username. For example, to get our attention, tweet: @tedbox and well be sure to see the tweets!

Direct Message
If you want to reply to someone – but don’t want your followers to see what you say, simply direct message the user. Instead of “@USERNAME”, youll use “d USERNAME” (the letter “d”, a space and then the username).  This will go directly to the user and be hidden from other users. Just remember that you can only DM your followers.

Want to learn how to get Twitter to work for you by helping you generate leads for your business? Just get in touch with us and we’ll explain the process.

In order to make sure that your meetings are both effective and efficient, here are a few suggestions that have worked well.

1. Create and distribute an agenda in advance and be sure that the meeting’s objectives are clearly stated.

2. Begin on time, end on time and stay focused to accomplish your goals.

3. Increase retention by eliminating distractions -require that email and other forms of text messaging be turned off during the meeting and do not tolerate distractions caused by mobile phones – simply turn them off and use voicemail.

4. Respect attendees time – If a person is only needed briefly – no need for them to sit through the entire session.

5. Accomplish the primary objective during the meeting’s allotted time.

6. Use technology. You have a phone, you have your agenda… set the phone to vibrate every 10 minutes so that you have a physical reminder that the meeting needs to move forward.

7. Have a person take notes and follow up with distributing the meeting protocol.

That’s it folks… it doesn’t get much easier than that.

I decided that NOW is the best time to invest…
and you can quote me on that one.

Hey, it beats the heck out of Clients calling to cancel projects because they decided to act like
blinded deer at night standing in front of a speeding truck full of ‘industrial disease’.

I don’t care what anyone says… now us the time to invest… if not in the markets, then in ourselves.

Get out there and learn something new.

shameless plug: we give exciting courses on how you can dramatically increase your sales even in slow markets – hack, we even back it up with proof from our Clients and a money back guarantee… are you brave enough to challenge yourself?

Hey there,

Why is it that most people in business think that they are going to sell what they have by delivering a list of features along with a few reasons why someone should buy their product?

The truth is that there is a much deeper psychological process behind making a decision to buy something than most business people realize.

When selling to Consumers, the pitch must appeal to a buyer’s emotions or the sale is simply not going to take place. When selling B2B, keep in mind that the buyer is still a human being with needs and a strong desire to succeed – a benefits oriented approach has been proven to be more successful than any other technique we tested during the past 20 years.

If you’re ready to sell something, we are ready to help you create a winning pitch.

The first step is a bit of homework so grab a pencil and some paper and get ready to answer a few questions:

• Write down a list of your competitors and their websites
• Write down what they’re doing, what they’re offering etc.
• List their product’s benefits

Ahh, now we come to the core purpose of this article…

Do you know the difference between features, advantages and benefits?

A feature is what a product has. In essence, the core components of your product or service; sometimes referred to as the bells and whistles or buttons, knobs, levers, switches, format, platform etc.

An advantage is what the product does or how it performs against a competitive product. A vacuum for example, is a product that might have the advantage that it doesn’t need bags. Another advantage would be that it can clean the floor in a room without you being present. In a services business one advantage would be the number of years of experience you bring to the table or your level of certification. Some common advantages include words like fast, easy, simple, cheap and good.

A benefit is what a given feature means to your prospect in terms of emotion and passion. A true benefit goes really deep and says something about how it makes you feel – a really great benefit gets a consumer excited because it means something special to the buyer.

Here’s a good B2C example. One of our Clients sells a facial cream online and she called it something like, microderm abrasion emulsion – essentially it is a cream that helps reduce wrinkles.

On her website she listed several features such as ‘it reduces wrinkles’, ‘it comes in an easy to use home care kit’, ‘it is pH balanced’ etc etc etc.

When she came to me to help increase sales, conversions and traffic… I asked her to:
Take a piece of paper and create three columns.
List as many features as you can in the first column.
In the second column, list what you believe are the top benefits.
She wrote down ‘because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger’ and ‘because it comes in a home care kit, it is easy to use at home’ and the third one was ‘because it is pH balanced, it’s gentle on your skin’.

As politely as possible I let her know that those are really advantages not benefits so we continued the exercise and I asked her to list in the third column what she felt the ultimate end result for her Customer was going to be – in other words, ‘the ultimate benefit’.

Here is what she wrote:
‘If it makes you look younger: then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will know your true age, you’ll fall in love all over again and you’ll be able to attract that person you’ve had your eye on.’

‘Since it’s easy to use at home: you won’t suffer embarrassment by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home.’

‘Since it’s gentle on your skin: there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like surgery or those harsh chemical peels people usually buy.’

We had arrived…
These were descriptions of how Customers would feel before, during and after they used the product. They were a few of the true benefits this product offers its Customers.

In a very short time she was able to list several of the true benefits her product offers to her Customers. She took this piece of paper and changed her website to reflect the benefits. She also adapted every piece of marketing material including all advertising (online and offline), all landing pages, sales letters and Customer communications and within two months her sales doubled. One month later sales doubled again. Then she adapted the packaging to reflect the new text and sales doubled again. Sure we did some work on conversions and six months later, she was not able to buy as much traffic as she wanted – not even from Google ,Yahoo and MSN combined… Folks, this stuff really works!  I’ll let you guess if I am referring to the creme or the marketing process here.

Remember, real benefits go deep. They live within the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person wanting or using your product. In order to increase your sales you will need to tap into that sweet spot and then use the real benefits in everything you produce to help sell the product.

Begin by figuring out what your prospect’s current emotions are regarding the things that your product addresses. Understand which of those emotions are the strongest, most compelling, most “dominant” in his or her life. Then identify the benefits your product offers that will most effectively enhance your prospect’s strongest positive emotions and/or resolve his strongest negative ones.

People buy for emotional reasons far more often than for merely rational ones. If you want people to act on your copy and buy your product, first determine how your prospect is likely feeling right now . Then, use your benefits as bridges to activate the emotions that will compel him/her to buy!

Now, let’s venture into the world of B2B with a comment or two and some real life examples. First my comments; B2B has specific demands that don’t apply to the B2C world. Most of the time these demands orient themselves around the concept of ROI. A few of the thoughts running through the heads of many buyers include: How will my business benefit if we were to buy your product or use your services or implement your widget? If you can orient your sales message around the benefits that your product offers to your target market then you have a much higher probability of closing a deal over your competition – and you will probably be able to reduce your sales cycle at the same time. Here is one of the best B2B examples I have ever read:

“Amazon S3 is based on the idea that quality Internet-based storage should be taken for granted. It helps free developers from worrying about how they will store their data, whether it will be safe and secure, or whether they will have enough storage available. It frees them from the upfront costs of setting up their own storage solution as well as the ongoing costs of maintaining and scaling their storage servers. The functionality of Amazon S3 is simple and robust: Store any amount of data inexpensively and securely, while ensuring that the data will always be available when you need it. Amazon S3 enables developers to focus on innovating with data, rather than figuring out how to store it.”

Notice that they are not listing bells and whistles here… this text is crafted specifically to get the business buyer emotionally involved. They decided to use the concept of freedom to achieve their objective. If you were a developer, wouldn’t it be nice to be ‘free of worry’ regarding at least one mission critical component of your site that has the potential to shut down your online business if your product suddenly becomes an instant hit?

As I encounter more brilliant examples like this, I will add them to this article. If you have a submission that you’d like us to review or even add as an example of how to do it, be sure to let us know by filling out our contact us form.