Monthly Archives: November 2017

Four Modes of Business Communication

When business-owners think about how to improve their marketing, they usually focus on products or services.  Marketing is more complex, covering many aspects of business and its context.  Here are four modes of communication to consider:

How do You Get the Word Out?

Imagine a graph with two axes.  They cross and so form four quadrants.  Each quadrant covers one of four different modes of communication.

The first axis – fixed versus variable costs

A fixed cost is not related to the number of people who use or encounter your offer.  So, if you write a book, the costs are the same (time and money) whether it is remaindered or a best seller!

Variable costs relate to the number of people who use them, an example would be pay-per-click ads.  Variable costs include things you must pay every time someone makes a purchase or shows interest.  So, if you hold an enrolment meeting and buy the coffees, that’s a variable cost.

The second axis – media versus user experience

This axis is about what you invest your costs in.  You can choose to invest in media; the businesses you pay to help you get your message out.  These include not only investments such as a photographer, website designer or video producer but support such as your ISP, website host, a conference venue, etc.

User experience is when you invest directly in the people in your market.  It is the money and time you invest in building your tribe and the quality of the service you deliver.

Using The Four Quadrants

Sketch the two axes on a sheet of paper and consider your recent marketing activity.  (Some activities inhabit more than one quadrant.  The aim is to help you think critically about your marketing, not to put everything into tidy categories.)

1. When you consider your recent marketing activities, do they fall mainly into one quadrant or are they distributed between all four? Or somewhere in-between?  What do you conclude about your marketing?
2. Consider what you know about your competitors’ marketing. Where do they fall on the four quadrants?  Are you using similar or different approaches to your competitors?
3. Taking all this into consideration, what new things might you try?

What are the Four Quadrants?

Media with Fixed Payments

These are products produced by professional media people.  The focus here is on publicity, how you get the message out using some medium, eg a video, website, advert, book.  The real challenge is content, if you are to invest in high fixed costs, it is essential to know you have good content.

User Experience with Fixed Payments

This focus is on your story, values and relationship with your customers.  This is something you prepare.  To build a tribe, you must offer something they value.  You may invest a lot of time listening before you act on what you hear.  The important dimension is your marketing design, so you know the message to get across in every situation.

Media with Variable Payments

This covers approaches such as pay-per-click ads.  Any activity where you target a particular group according to their demographics and psychographics.

User Experience with Variable Payments

The emphasis here is quality of service.  It is what you invest to make the user experience as positive as possible, so the message gets around by word of mouth.

You may find as your business grows you are active in all four quadrants because all deliver value for money.

Following this thirteenth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Moving from Self-Centred to World-Centred Business

There are five movements in Intentional Business Development.  The first moves from self-centred to world-centred business.

Here and Now

The focus is upon here and now.  It is not about looking to some idealised past or a fantasy future.  There is no business in paradise.

Perhaps our greatest problem is solipsism; the belief I am my sole concern and the world revolves around me.  The traditional way to deal with this is to encourage focus on God, not self.  Solipsism assumes a primitive understanding God.  God, understood as a man above the clouds, is a childish image many carry into adult life.

The danger is we get bogged down in a debate about whether God exists. Perhaps it is better to seek common ground; appreciation of here and now.

Solipsism presumes some idealised past or future.  Take a popular idea “Make America Great Again”.  This slippery slogan can never deliver for these reasons.

When we turn attention inwards, we lose touch with reality, here and now.

Paying Attention

This is not to say we should avoid inner work.  Inner work avoids fantasies and teaches us to focus on here and now.  Religious traditions have many tools for this.  Prayer and meditation connect with what is real.

Let’s take it away from religion and strip paying attention down to basics.  What’s your relationship with silence?  Can you abide in stillness?  Listen to your breathing, feel the sensations in your body?

Are you adept at stilling thoughts?  Are you even aware of the clamour of your thoughts?

Do you reflect on your day or your life?  How do you express gratitude?

You can do this by keeping a daily journal where you note concerns, gratitude and anything else that’s on your mind.  Or take a walk and allow your thoughts space to develop in response to the reality around you.

Discernment

How do I know what is fantasy and what is reality?  The act of telling truth from self-deception is discernment.

If paradise is truly the place where all our needs are met, then we know there is no need for business or indeed any form of relationship.  This is why many religious people do not believe in paradise.  We have need of one another and it is reaching out to the other that makes lives worthwhile.

Business is one expression of that need we have for each other.  Business conducted with integrity is the glue that holds communities together.  It depends on relationships of trust, keeps money circulating and contributes to all those activities that cannot generate income themselves (eg health and social care) from its wealth.

When we contemplate the world around us, we discover the needs of our fellows and develop the products and services to meet them.  Of course we don’t get them right.  This is why small businesses are important.  They are the people willing to try something at their own risk.

Many factors lead to successful business but the key factor that underlies all the others is: Do we have a viable business?  A viable business is where through discernment a business-owner identifies a real need.  They may not be competent or they may be outmanoeuvred by competitors, who have more capacity but if it isn’t viable it won’t survive the long-term.

This is the second in a sequence about intentional business development.  It’s all a part of Market Together.  Sign up below so you don’t miss a post and visit my new website by following the link.

The Reasons People do not Choose You

This is the point.  Your marketing is effective when you take on board the reasons people do not choose you.

You’re in a Market Too!

It is easy to forget that as an entrepreneur, you are in a market too.  There will be marketers only too keen to sell you their method or approach to marketing.  Let’s assume they sell tried and tested techniques.  Why don’t they work?

I’ve said this time and again and it is bad news for any entrepreneur.  Most things don’t work.  Why?  Because most things solve the wrong problem.

Choose the wrong technique, implement it efficiently and you are motoring away from the solution you seek.  Several months later, you have spent time and money on an approach that doesn’t work, you have to recover lost ground and then find the right method.  You must understand the problem you face, to find the right solution.  There’s no point in putting yourself in front of people, if your problem is they don’t trust you.

Just as you seek to solve your market’s problem, you need to name your own problem, to find the best way to promote your business.  Your market is as aware of the risks of investing in the wrong message as you are.  Think of your own experiences and ask how you can reassure your market that you can meet their needs.

What’s Your Problem?

1. Does your market know you exist?
2. How do you know you really understand their problem?
3. How can you know your market trusts you?

Most Things Don’t Work

It is important to understand your problem not only because it is difficult or impossible to sell while you have your problem:

Most business-owners are aware they have issues they need to consider, even though they may not know what they are or be mistaken about them.  It is essential you take time to name your problem and find the help you need to solve it.

Following this twelfth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

What is Intentional Business Development?

I’ve based this sequence upon a talk I heard recently about intentional faith development (IFD).  As I listened, I found the points made mapped onto my understanding of business.  And so I invented this new phrase, intentional business development.

Everything I do relates to my Methodist faith.  Some posts in this blog are for those who share my faith or at least have sympathy with it.  This sequence is not part of that spirituality theme.

When I asked at the end of the talk about IFD and business, the speaker said he had drawn a lot from business.  This is no surprise.  Faith and business have a long history together.  However, my focus is on business and how insights from religious faith can help businesses understand what they do.

Understanding Intentional Business Development

Isn’t all business development intentional?  Well, yes and no.  In one sense anyone who sets up in business does it intentionally.  They may stumble upon some insight or product by accident but the decision to go ahead is intentional.

The real issue is keeping it intentional.  Your aim is to grow your business.  You may have stumbled upon something that offers immediate profit but then what?

In the next five posts, I shall explore five movements that apply just as much to business as it does to faith.  Before I outline the five movements, allow me to make a few points about faith.

What is Faith?

Faith does not mean belief.  I may believe in God but that does not mean I have faith.  The meaning of faith is more akin to trust.  Setting up in business is always an act of faith.  More usually we talk about risk.  You take a step into the unknown and cannot possibly know in advance your venture will work out.  You will never know if you don’t try it.

Therefore faith should never be confused with superstition.  If you believe the earth is flat, you are choosing to believe something in the teeth of the evidence.  All the evidence points away from the earth being flat.

Faith is in something that is not proven one way or the other.  To start a business venture is always an act of faith because there is no way of knowing in advance the venture will be successful.

Faith, Politics and Business

The reason so much political activity is not faith-based is many politicians are ideologues, believing their view is absolute.  We see this in politicians who believe Brexit will be a massive success.  The evidence mounts that it won’t.  The need is for politicians who are ready to find a compromise that works, even if it pleases no-one.

The truth is the only sand we have to build on us shifting.  This is as true for business as it is for politics.  The only certainty is change.  When we set up a business we seek to change things in a world already changing.  Without faith you are either moribund or absurd.

Faith is a Christian word and other religious traditions have their own words.  The five movements describe what intentional business development might look like.

Five Movements

1. From self-centred to world-centred. The key word for this movement is discernment.  To be successful in business you need to focus on your market and their needs.  You seek mutual benefit out of self-interest and not self-centredness.
2. From individual to collaborative. The key word for this movement is listening.  To go into business is to move from the private realm to the public.  As well as seeking mutual benefit between your business and your customers, it is also possible to work in partnership with other businesses.
3. From technical to adaptive. The key word for this movement is transformation.  Being in business is never simply applying proven tools to a given situation.  The businesses that succeed are those ready to adapt without necessarily knowing the outcome.
4. From cognitive to behavioural. The key word here is embodiment.  A successful business demands commitment from the whole person: mind, body and spirit.  It is not solely about what you know.
5. From theory to practice. The key word here is Praxis (action / reflection).  An alternative key word might be learning.  No-one has ever learned from experience, they learn from experience reflected upon.

What Next?

There is no guarantee these five movements result in a successful business.  Perhaps some people have been successful through serendipity and never paid attention to any of this.

However, perhaps on reflection some would say: “Yes, actually these five movements were important.  I didn’t realise at the time but on reflection, I followed most of these movements.”

This is the first of a sequence about intentional business development.  It’s a part of Market Together.  Sign up below so you don’t miss a post and visit my new website by following the link.

The Social Dimension to Your Market

People with shared worldviews tend to cluster together and become sensitive to what is new in the group.

The Social Dimension

Let’s think about your market and how they relate to each other.  Are there places where they meet?  The aim is not so much to go there yourself, although it may be a good place to develop business relationships.  The aim is to work out how the group develops and maintains its worldview.

They police new ideas, behaviours or products.  If you offer a solution to a problem they share, they must find your solution acceptable.  Some groups may be open to change and so to give something new a try.  Others may resist change, preferring old views to changes that might threaten their interests.

Groups willing to try your approach may move quickly to decide it is not for them.  Others reluctant to try at first, may find it is for them and adopt it wholeheartedly.  You can’t control what happens but you can be aware of what is happening.

 Defining People Like Us

1. Where do your market meet? Socially or for business?  Online or in-person?
2. What do they need, fear or desire?
3. Are they likely to try new things or resist change? How likely are they to stick together when welcoming or resisting change?

Cultural Change

How do you, as an entrepreneur affect cultural change?  You may wish to look back to your promise.  You aim to bring change to your market and this means changing the groups within which your market associates.

It is tempting to think groups never change.  But isn’t it likely they have never encountered an opportunity to change?

Is it possible you are not courageous enough to offer them what they really need?  One day, someone will have the insight and courage to do just that.  Could you be that person?

So, review your offers and ask yourself whether you have an offer that fully addresses the needs of your target market.  Are you playing safe or offering a genuine radical alternative?

Following this eleventh post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

Your Lifestyle Purpose in the Wider Community

Trade has always been at the heart of community.  Some say prostitution is the oldest profession.  But humanity must have established trade for all professions to emerge.  Professions emerge to meet needs and wants from the wider community and so trade is normally closely related to community.  Lifestyle purpose in the wider community is relevant and important.

Think Global, Act Local

People used this slogan during the eighties as globalisation moved centre stage.  We have seen massive changes since then in the way we understand trade.

The silk roads across Asia existed for at least 1000 years, probably a lot longer.  They link China to the Mediterranean Sea.  They still do, or would, were it not for conflicts in Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq.  Plundered wealth from the New World added a new dimension to world trade, as Europe found a new source of wealth.

Mostly, people bought from merchants who lived close by and so localised trade.  Those merchants traded with other merchants and so brought more exotic products to local communities.

What has changed is not that the world has started to trade between far-flung countries but control of that trade.  Large corporations centralise power over the markets.  They accumulate wealth by controlling the products on the market.  Local traders must find a small niche to help them find their place in the economy.

My aim here is to suggest trade happens anyway; we do not need corporations.  Any small business helps create space where local economies thrive and adds value to products and services.

The Agora

The agora or marketplace, is where the local economy happens and note it is the core of any community.  Community does not create wealth, wealth creates community.  Look at what happens to neighbourhoods that do not have an economic centre.  They become estates where people live with little autonomy.

The wealth of a community offers freedom to its members.   With more money in circulation, there are more opportunities for small businesses; capacity offers niches for new enterprises.

Everything else that is public or Negotium, takes place in the Agora.  This is the place for government, for law courts, places of worship, news, debate, entertainment …  It is where people bring what they develop in Otium and  use it to build community, usually through business.

Practicalities

It is hard to see a way forward in the present day.  With too little wealth in the economy, we do not see the Agora as a whole; we compartmentalise our lives, fully assisted by electronic media.

The world is on the brink of massive changes as climate change increases and competition over resources becomes more pressing.  We need to look to the past to inform how we exist in the future.

For now, remember the way you use your time is important to you, your family and friends.

Communication is currently easier than it was throughout history and we should use it while we have it.  At the same time, it is the human mind that transforms information into value.  That value is not solely monetary, it is in the relationships that trade properly depends upon.

Ultimately the outcomes of our business are not financial so much as relationships, the common causes we make together.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Using Worldviews and Avatars

To define your market you need three things: their problem, your niche and their worldview.  This post will help you understand worldviews and avatars.

Your Market Definition

Let’s review each of these in turn:

1. Your market’s problem – this is the problem you solve and so your market is the people with the problem! If there is no problem, there is no market.
2. However, there will be competition for this market and so you need to decide your niche. Your niche is external factors you impose on your market to narrow it down to something you can target.  For example, you might choose to market those with the problem who live locally to you.  The factors you choose for your niche are sometimes described as demographics.
3. Perceptions of reality differ. Your market’s worldview is their perception of reality.  Their problem may reflect a perception that needs to change.  Your marketcomprises people who share perceptions and your task is to name just what it is they have in common.

How to Identify Their Worldview

1. Consider your market and ask: what are the perceptions they hold that might reinforce their problem? How must they adapt to solve their problem?
2. How does your choice of niche help you understand your market’s worldview? Or does it hinder your understanding?
3. Is there anything else they have in common that might help them view your offer positively?

Market Avatars

A clear understanding of their worldview is likely to give you an edge over your competition.  It helps you speak from heart to heart and move them to find out more.

It is a good idea to create one or more avatars.  You should not have too many but perhaps your market divides into a few distinct groups.  Your avatar shares the problem, belongs in your chosen niche and experiences their world through their worldview.

Give them a name and be specific.  You may include details that are not strictly relevant but help you relate to the avatar.  You address your marketing copy to this person as you write it.  This helps you bring warmth or humanity to your copy.  Anyone reading the copy will pick up on the warmth without being aware of the avatar behind it.

Following this tenth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.

How Your Client Benefits from Your Lifestyle Purpose

And so we move from work in private (Otium) to the public dimension (Negotium).  Here you find opportunities to deploy not only the skills of trade but also your private passions, interests, skills and enthusiasms.  So, let’s consider how your client benefits from your lifestyle purpose.

Your Coaching

It may not be obvious how your life-experience, passions and interests benefit your client.  They purchase your services because you have expertise or experience.

Remember the way your life-experience informs your work is most likely implicit.  For example, someone who offers health therapies may find conversations with business owners easy because they already use conversations to put their patients at ease and help them open up.

The key lies in preparation for each meeting so that you know what to offer the client as they struggle with a particular issue.

The implicit promise made by coaches is they listen to their client to free their speech.  This is valuable because most offers on the market assume the client needs a proven solution to a known problem.

There are benefits to the business-owner who can automate their offer.  It saves time and increases the number of clients they can handle.  It is difficult to automate coaching.  Actually it is impossible to automate coaching, although it may be possible in part.

Preparation is crucial and we see Otium‘s importance.  The coach must prepare for each meeting, reviewing their client’s records, preparing questions and suggestions for the client to consider.

Types of Question

It may help to have a set of questions to use for all clients.  These move the sessions with the client forwards.  They change slowly, through experience.  Without such structure, it is likely the sessions will never move forward.  They decide what you consider.  It helps get everything relevant on the table.

The coach may prepare subsidiary questions for the client, based on their answers so far.  The client will act between sessions and so it is important to discuss their actions and results.

And there will be questions formulated and asked during the sessions, in response to what the client says.

All these stages of preparation can and should engage the whole person.  What can the coach draw on from their experience to help their client?  This will range from directly relevant experiences, eg work in the same industry; common human experiences, eg family life; through to unique experiences that introduce a new perspective.

Stability

Knowing the coach has a lifestyle purpose is one way to decide whether the coach can deliver.  A coach overly focused on profit, for example, may be prone to burnout, stress, loss of perspective.  A coach who turns up for meetings tired or rattled does not present the best opportunity for the client to make progress.

Also, a coach aware of their own lifestyle purpose will be sensitive to the need for a similar purpose in the client.  There is no problem where lifestyle pervades business, especially for self-employed people, where marketing themselves is their business.

Large companies may frown upon employees bringing their own lifestyle purpose to the workplace, perhaps undermining the company’s consistent message.  But this is not true for the self-employed, they are the message and if they can find an approach that draws on what they enjoy doing, their enthusiasm will communicate.

That sense of being at ease with business and life is a big draw to people; to communicate that ease to their clients increases trust.

These benefits extend, of course, beyond the client to the wider world.

Visit my new website, Market Together to sign up to my list so that you don’t miss any posts and hear about the exciting plans I’m working on to promote an alternative approach to marketing.

Please comment and let me know what you like about this post.  What would you like me to write about further?

Do You Need Market Research?

Marketing has changed so much over recent years and so you almost certainly don’t need market research.  You do however, need something else.

What’s Wrong with Market Research?

By market research I mean things like demographic data, focus groups and statistics.  These are not without value.  If they are to hand they may help but I would not go out of my way to find them.  Why?

This means selling for money without caring no longer works.  You must care about your customers.

Caring for Your Customers

1. How do you practice curiosity about your market?
2. How do you show your market you care about them and their problem?
3. What insights about your market do you have that give you an edge over your competitors?

Walking in Someone’s Shoes

The key to this is to learn to practice empathy.  Can you see the world through the eyes of someone different from you?  Think of someone who is different, the more different the better.  They need not have anything to do with your market.  Spend a time consciously viewing the world as they might see it.  This should ideally be several consecutive days.

The aim of this exercise is to learn what it is like to walk in someone’s shoes.  Can you do the same for your own market?  They may be more like you than the subject of the exercise.  Do you find this makes it easier or harder to empathise?

Following this ninth post to encourage coaches to reflect on relational marketing, take this opportunity to sign up below.  You get a weekly round-up of my posts and a pdf about how to make sure you are charging what your business is worth.  Most weeks you receive an email with helpful news or pointers to how you can tackle these questions.