Collecting Business Cards for Profit

Most networkers collect business cards. Some people index the cards they collect. Some follow up the contacts they have made. Very few have a structured approach to collecting, storing and long term follow-up of the contacts they make.

We all know the value of referral marketing. So why do so few of us make a real effort to index and categorise the most valuable information we collect when we are business networking?

What to Do

Scan

Start by scanning the cards you are given into a digital format that avoids the need to manually transcribe all that contact information. There are a variety of ways to do this. Some Smart-Phones have applications available that instantly transform a photograph of a business card into a contacts entry. Business card scanners are available at modest cost.

Import

Import this valuable data into your CRM system. If you use spread-sheets or if you use one of the available CRM tools, the rules are the same. Import data into your CRM system and classify the cards based on the information you wrote on each when you were in front of the owner.

Classifications

The categories you use to classify business cards will be function of your business. Some people will be useful to know for one reason or another, others less so. Think in terms of your business and the type of people you want to meet. Here are some suggestions for classifications to consider:

• Suspect - somebody that you suspect might one day, with careful nurturing, turn into a prospect.
• Prospect - a person you meet who will be buying services like yours sometime soon.
• Referrer - those people you meet who are most likely to be looking for a business like yours to complement their own operation. These are the gold standard businesses who regularly have opportunities for you which they share out.
• Supplier - when you are networking, be on the look-out for good quality businesses which have little or no overlap with your own business and to whom you can easily pass referrals.
• Resource - knowledgeable individuals who can help your contacts with information and advice.
• Card collector - we have all met these. These people attend a myriad of networking events wasting everybody's time. Be careful though. Your card-collector might be my prospect.
• Salesman - Too busy pitching and selling to take any notice of the people they meet.

Plan Follow-Up

With a classification for all these cards, you can now plan and implement your follow-up in a timely manner. And you can start to keep the promises you made when you collected the cards.

Still Struggling

There are a lot of articles and information on the web to help you become a better networker. This blog post is not designed to help with your networking skills. Rather it is concerned with the systematic approach to information collection, collation and action points.

Sack Bad Customers

We all have (or have had in the past) a bad customer. Do any of the following attributes ring any bells?

• Only pay after the third reminder
• Consume all our time
• Expect something for nothing – constantly
• Continually change their minds
• Fail to plan and then expect us to work miracles to sort things out
• Cause problems and then expect us to fix things for free

Options

• Sack Them - If you have a customer who is costing you a disproportionate amount of time and/ or money – get rid of them. You can then spend more of your time on customers who appreciate your services and who then go on to provide you with testimonials and referrals.
• Increase Their Price - You might not be in a position to sack your recalcitrant customer – depending on their ability to damage your reputation or the degree to which their income is critical to you today. However, it may be feasible to increase their price.
• Change Terms - Change them from all inclusive to price per hour or start invoicing extras.

Things to Think About

• Reputation - If your bad customer is going to tell 25 of your prospects about shoddy service, you may have a problem. If you sit down with them and speak honestly it is more likely that they will move on gracefully. If you are sacking 20 customers, you might want to take professional advice on the PR elements of the project and announce your “change of strategy” before your sacked customers damage your reputation. Some customers damage your reputation – just by being your customer.
• Profitability – Customers who are killing your business can do what they like to your reputation. As long as you keep your existing profitable customers – and publish new testimonials as a follow up to your changes – any reputation damage will be minimal – and the positive impact on your profit could be profound.

Before You Quote

In your Opportunity Review process, it pays to ensure that you really understand what you are taking on. If you predict that a customer will turn out to be painful to deal with, consider one of the following options:

• Price accordingly
• No-bid
• Refer them to a competitor

7 Symptoms of Sick Businesses

Here is my list. You may have your own factors to add to my 7.

1. Blame
2. Meetings
3. Politics
4. Sloth
5. Arrogance
6. Macho Planning
7. Deck Chair Syndrome

I am often asked if I would go back into employment. I could probably earn a great deal more money than I do at present, so why not leave independence behind and return to the corporate fold? My answer is the same as most of the strong minded independent business owners I meet. There would have to be something special about a business to attract me back into a world that I left behind 4 years ago.

Seven of the things I do not miss about large businesses are symptoms of a sick business - things that the very best businesses aim to eliminate.

Blame
A lot of people talk about eliminating a blame culture - few actually achieve it. The response to a problem is more often "whose fault is it" than "how can we help". One of the jokes often cracked by experienced project managers is that old chestnut:

"No project team is complete until we have appointed the PTB - (person to blame)"

When things go wrong, how often do you start asking questions that are aimed at isolating a blame recipient? And how often do you defuse things by making it your own fault then working on the recovery plan in support of the team/ supplier/ customer as appropriate?

Meetings
Internal meetings will continue to be run in this way until morale improves. Effective Meetings - Not. Are your meetings painful, unstructured, rambling affairs where you tell everybody how it is - building momentum as you go so that all the debate is a pointless charade and the decisions all get made in a blinkered way?

One of the dangers of the meeting culture is that, instead of canvassing opinions and capturing the best ideas, a "pack mentality" emerges where everybody jumps to the same conclusion without pausing to review data or to check facts. If your business is regularly sorting out the impact of the unintended consequences of poor decision making then you would be wise to seek help with making your meetings more effective.

Too Many Meetings
If you have created a culture where middle and senior managers are spending more than half their time in internal meetings - you may have a problem. If these same people are spending a further 20% of their time preparing reports for these internal meetings you have a big problem - especially if these reports all contain similar information re-formatted for different audiences. 50% + 20% = 70% - leaving 30% free to drive the business forwards. I am not saying that your meetings are not driving the business forwards some of the time, but your external facing senior people should be spending more time with customers. At the levels I am conjecturing, you are paying for 10 people to get 3 working with customers. Hardly efficient!

Politics
Some form of internal politics is inevitable in any organisation - humans work on relationships and success in any large organisation is a function of your power-base, aptitude and effectiveness. As leaders in an organisation, you have a duty to ensure that you are promoting and supporting your best people - those who are most able and who are most effective. If you fall into the trap of only promoting those with the widest power base or best grasp of internal politics you run the risk of creating a culture of mediocrity. You run the risk of losing your best people as they become disenchanted and move on.

Furthermore, your senior management team is not always going to be the people who are best able to support or develop the business strategy. As a leader, you are most effective when your support team is effective - not populated with people who agree with most of your ideas.

Sloth
Indolence and sloth are the results of the slow decision making and lack of drive that, in turn, arise from a lack of alignment in the business. By alignment, I mean that the objective setting and performance management systems in the business are not aligned to the strategy and possibly not aligned to delivery of the short term change programme.

Arrogance
Routine benchmarking and the proactive seeking of external inputs are marks of great businesses. Sick businesses, or even the slightly poorly, are guilty of :

• Assuming their business is totally unique and incapable of benefiting from any external input;
• Not-Invented-Here-Syndrome - unless they created it, it must be sub-optimum.

Unless you establish business processes to benchmark competitors, to actively seek best practice and to measure and capture customer feedback, your business is guilty of a supreme arrogance. Over time, that arrogance will allow you to fail to plan or to develop an adequate strategy. These failures will damage the business performance - possibly not in the short term but performance will be damaged.

Macho Planning
Is the biggest danger to your business the white-board or flip-chart used in your planning meeting? Stretch targets can be motivating - as long as they result in substantial action plans. Unrealistic plans run the risk of leaving you with a demotivated team. Worse still, your shareholders and other stakeholders will lose faith if you consistently miss your targets. Realistic plans - which should be stretching - should be based on:

• Facts and data;
• Buy-in throughout the business;
• Alignment of goals and objectives;
• Balanced measures;
• You creating an environment which facilitates execution of the plan.

So, if you are tempted to "just add another 20%" on to a target without any realistic assessment or change programme. Think in terms of the market, the power of your proposition and of your business' ability to deliver - do be careful!

Deck Chair Syndrome
The corporate mantra surrounding many re-structuring projects is "Re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic". You may not be guilty of anything quite so dramatic, but if your business is resorting to re-organising reporting structures on a regular basis, you could be ignoring the root causes of the issues you are trying to resolve. As a rule of thumb, and assuming that there are no disasters or major people changes inflicted on you, any re-organisation which is not part of your strategic plan should be questioned. Just as major changes in strategy on a regular basis are themselves symptoms of problems, your organisation structure should be matched to the strategy. A military leader will deploy forces in line with the tactics derived from the strategy. Refinements will be made in response to the changing situation but major changes in resource deployment or strategy are usually indicators that there have been mistakes in the original strategy.

Summary
How many of these symptoms can you identify in your business? Your suppliers? If you can identify 2 or more of these symptoms, it is worth starting an improvement plan - but beware creating yet another initiative that prompts more meetings and more poor behaviour! Good luck.

Idea Testing

In our businesses, we are often in the position of planning a change - either an expansion, a change of direction or some other variation on our current business.

The accepted wisdom in such circumstances is to plan the change, make the changes, measure the results and then make refinements.

• There are situations where a variation on accepted wisdom can make sense. Major changes to small businesses can prove expensive, especially if the changes damage established lines of business that are relied upon for income or for profit to re-invest.
• Some ideas are so radical that many small businesses put them off - usually forever. These radical ideas often have merit and can be tested at low risk - with a well thought out test plan.

You can start your testing by discussing the idea with trusted advisors - although it does pay to avoid the 3 F's (Friends, Fools & Family). If your discussion based testing does not throw up any substantial obstacles, you can then move on to a test implementation.

Your test will be dependent on the nature of your idea but could take the form of a market test where you offer the new product/ service/ process/ ... to selected customers or prospects away from your main markets to test reaction. For a limited period, you operate the idea at lowest possible cost or disruption. Only when the idea is proven do you invest fully in all the items costed into your business plan. Until then, you operate on a shoestring. This does not mean that you are unprofessional, just that you keep extra costs & disruption to a minimum.

Areas to think about:

• Print business cards only
• Microsite linked to your existing web-site instead of a complete change
• Short term property rents - which is a lot easier at present than in a boom- instead of long leases or purchase
• Creative thinking everywhere instead of major investment

When you know what works (and what does not work) - then you can start to scale things up - taking bigger risks with the existing business as you become more confident in the new idea.

When the Hype Bubble Turns to Indifference

As part of the generation that grew up through a series of hype cycles - from clacker balls through Deeley Bobbers and Rubik's Cube to iPod and on to iPhone and iPad I have an observation.

Hype and hysteria always peak and then turn to indifference - leaving the former hype subject to a few enthusiasts.

Here in the UK, Line Dancing was once the most popular exercise for millions with classes and events advertised everywhere. Now there a few thousands of loyal people continuing to enjoy their hobby and the hype grazers have moved on to other passions.

So, why do people move on? Will the current Apple hype cycle peak and burst?

Consumer based hype cycles are nothing to worry about - the vast majority of the people who are sucked in to the wave of hype and part with 2 to 3 times the price of a nearest competitor can afford it.

What about the hype cycles that spawn thousands of small businesses though? Where honest hard working people are sucked in to packing in jobs and re-mortgaging houses. Magnets, herbs, creams, solar panels - there are countless examples.

If you are considering a business based on a hype trend, it pays to think carefully before you bet your financial security on it. You need to look at the people who are desperate for you to buy a franchise or a license. Where do they make their money? Is it from selling you an expensive license or initial stock? Or is it from your long term success? Take advice. Listen to Accountants, Business Advisers and to your bank. Business professionals have seen these things many times before - they cannot make your decision for you but they can at least make you really think through the realistic potential of your business dream.

The only people who make money out of hype cycles are those at the beginning and those at the top.

When a hype cycle turns to indifference, make sure you are not left with a garage or industrial unit full of Deeley Bobbers (or the 21st century equivalent).

And there are some lessons for large firms too. In many industries, it has become fashionable to surf a wave of hype. Voice communications was all about IP 8-10 years ago. Now it is on the Unified Commmunications hype bubble. Electronic security systems are in the middle of their own IP wave. In each case, some of the products aligned to the hype bubble are warmed-up versions of previous generation products with a few extra features and an expensive re-brand. Intelligent buyers can see through these distractions. Be careful not to alienate your customer base - especially if your products are not quite "hype ready" - or whatever the term is in your industry.

Trust

One of my tweets, which was quite complex for 115 characters (leave 25 for the re-tweet!) was copied last week – by one of my followers. As I follow back, and was early for a meeting, I spotted the transgression – which was identical down to the last dot. This reminded me that it is a long time since I looked at Trust in the business environment.

We all spend a lot of our time working on our business image. We do this in order to:

• Generate awareness of ourselves and our businesses;
• Build trust with our target audience;
• Demonstrate that we are credible suppliers who can be trusted.

Before people will deal with us, they need to trust us. Just how much they need to trust us will depend on the nature of our business.

Things to think about:

• That trust upon which we depend has to be earned. It is not ours by right.
• It takes time to establish trust with a new contact.
• Our social media interactions are an important element in our marketing and have to demonstrate the same integrity as all our other marketing activities.

How much Trust is Sufficient?
Any new contact will have their own perception of just how much they need to trust you before they will confirm a transaction. Both the trust required and the time to achieve it will be a function of several variables:

• What is at stake;
  - Cost;
  - Non-financial impact of failure;
• Complexity;
• The contact’s own knowledge and experience.

Credibility

To be trusted to do something is to be a credible supplier of that product or service. Credibility is derived from:

1. Truth – you portray the best possible image of your business but do so honestly.
2. Behaviour – you keep your promises and you behave in the same way at all times – not showing one character in public and another in private.
3. Caring – you care more about the outcomes for your customers and the quality of your work that contributes to those outcomes than you do about other factors.
4. Skills and experience – you can prove that you have the skills and abilities that you are selling. This means promoting your strengths as they suit the opportunity – not promoting the skills you would like to have in order to win a piece of work.
5. Responsibility – you take responsibility for the outcomes of your work and you make sure that problems and issues are rectified.

Further reading:
Stephen M.R. Covey with Rebecca R. Merrill, The Speed of Trust, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-10: 0-7432-9560-9

Note: No politicians were harmed in the writing of this article

Ask For Feedback

How often do you seek objective feedback about the service that your business is providing? And I do not mean the equivalent of a waiter in a restaurant: “Is everything OK with your meal?” – just as you have a mouth full of food – on these occasions there is only one expected answer – which is the one they get 99% of the time. They are not seeking objective, honest feedback when they interrupt your conversation and your meal with a closed question.

You might think that your customers are telling you what they think of your product or service. But very often they are not, you need to ask. And you need to ask open questions at a time when people are prepared to be open and honest with you, not when they are just getting to the important part of their own conversation.

By asking for feedback in the right way at the right time, you will get an honest review. Then you have the opportunity to improve service delivery and to resolve minor issues before they became major problems that may result in a lost client.

Ask for feedback. You might not always like what you hear, but it is much better to know than not know. If you do not know about a client’s issues, you won’t have the opportunity to do something about them.

And most important of all, once you have their feedback:

• Take Action – and let your customer know you took their feedback seriously by improving the things they told you about.