Are you striking deals or forming strategic relationships?
Language – if we listen carefully –reveals a lot about the changes happening in society, and business is, of course, an important part of our society. That’s why I was fascinated by a short exchange between an interviewer and the CEO of a company that curates clothing and sells it on a subscription basis over the Internet. The host asked if the company had deals with various big name labels. In her answer, the CEO said that her company had strategic relationships with all the major fashion brands. A shift in thinking Shakespeare famously wrote in Romeo and Juliet that “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” – but sometimes a change in terminology reflects a change in how people are thinking. Traditionally, we have “deal makers” in the business world. Today, I think “relationship makers” are more important. Deal makers would often focus on negotiating a price and other tangible attributes of a product or service that would suit both parties in a sales contract. I don’t want to downplay the importance of those elements, but with multiple channels of communication and with consumers vested with increased power and knowledge today, other, less tangible, elements are increasingly important. What’s important today In broad terms, raising your profile in Cyberspace, may, in the long run, be as important as the per item price you negotiate today. I think the example of the online subscription clothes business illustrates this point. Imagine you’re a major maker of jeans. What problem are you facing right now? I think it’s safe to say that you’re watching your traditional brick-and-mortar outlets close locations one by one. Someone like this online seller comes to you and wants to do business. In the old days, you may have simply insisted that the company commit to a certain volume each month to guarantee a certain price level. However, that would be taking a very narrow view of the situation. Your bigger problem is to get your legacy buyers and new buyers to recognize your brand as a brand that can be easily and reliably purchased online. Therefore, in addition to any pricing you negotiate, you may want to agree to cross promote each other’s brand in your social media, mention both brands in newsletters, and establish landing pages on one another’s websites, for example. Why some are struggling I believe it’s safe to say that some legacy businesses that are having difficulty coping with the evolution to a dominant cyber-world have failed to adequately address the bigger picture in their strategic plans over the last five to 10 years. Think beyond price and volume when you’re sitting across the table and negotiating with a company, whether it’s a vendor or a customer. Look at where your industry is going and think about how you need to be positioned to be among the leaders. Try to put pieces of that puzzle in place in every negotiation. Don’t merely strike deals, form strategic...
read moreNFL vs Trump: 5 lessons for business leaders
Not too long ago when we started to sense fall in the air, we could depend on certain seasonal institutions to take their place in our lives and foremost among them was the kickoff of the NFL season. This year, however, political machinations, public protests, and social media have come together to create a perfect storm whose winds have blown fall traditions out the window. The events themselves and reaction of the various actors involved in creating the events have starkly illustrated some truths about human nature and the current social condition that wise business leaders will digest and use as they guide their organizations forward. Here are five lessons on public life that you must learn and apply. The symbolic can surpass the real. It was just a week or two before the NFL-Trump kerfuffle that Hurricane Maria virtually erased Puerto Rico’s human life supporting infrastructure. This is a real tragedy that is costing lives and billions of dollars. However, once the back-and-forth started between President Trump and NFL National Anthem knee-takers, the human tragedy in Puerto Rico was pushed off the front page. No matter what you feel with regards to the NFL protests, the actions they take in the five minutes before the opening kickoff on Sunday afternoon games don’t change the living conditions for anyone of any color. However, what government and private agencies are doing – or failing to do – to help Puerto Rico will result in lives saved or lives lost in the coming days and weeks. Business leaders need to understand this from two points of view: Symbolic gestures can be used to promote their companies and symbolic gestures made against their companies can be difficult to recover from. Emotions beat logic. When people become emotional about an issue, the ability to think logically and reason well are lost. You can’t put out a dumpster fire with superior reasoning. When emotions are running high people will not listen to those on the other side. Team members at all levels of your company must understand this because it’s key when dealing with customers and coworkers. The first thing to learn is how to avoid emotional escalation. Preventing situations from becoming emotional is one of the best skills you can have in business and in life. This means you need to sense when a situation is turning in that direction. You must be sensitive to others and know their limits. And, when emotions begin to overrun a situation, you must be able to take the right action: either step back and let people calm down or step away and bring in another person who hasn’t been associated with the elevated level of emotions. Being “right” doesn’t always matter. As I’m writing this, public opinion polls say that people generally agrees with the points President Trump made about the Anthem-Flag protesters. However, these polls aren’t getting a lot of attention in the media. If you’re a business owner, dissatisfied customers can cause you a lot of grief even if their complaints are unjustified. The media focuses on the negative and people tend to remember the negative. There’s a principle that it takes 10 positive comments to counterbalance one negative comment and that holds true with publicity. Also, when allegations against your business are made...
read moreAre you making this common SEO link building mistake? Here’s the easy fix!
Despite all the changes Google has made in its algorithm over the years, one thing has remained constant: Developing quality backlinks is great for your search engine optimization (SEO). The best way to accomplish this is to publish articles on high quality websites. I get dozens of requests every week from website owners who want to publish a guest post on my site. Many of these are good. However, the ones that are bad often make the same mistake. I want to share that mistake with you and explain how it can be easily avoided. Follow this advice and it will greatly improve your odds at placing an article on another website that includes a link to your website. Let’s take the example of a company that leases jets to businesses. It wants to build links back to its site for SEO as well as bring some prospects into its site. Someone within the company’s marketing department writes a general article on business travel. Included within the article is the option of leasing a corporate jet and within that paragraph is a link to the company’s homepage. Analyze the situation Let’s look at this from two points of view: the company’s and the editor considering the article for publishing. When the writer passed the draft around for approval, company officials looked at the link and said, “Great, this gets people to our website and will also be good for SEO.” When the editor looks at the link within the article, the reaction is different: “This link doesn’t add any value or information to the article. It’s there simply with the hope of generating business.” Being able to see your submission through the eyes of the approval editor is important. Good editors won’t tolerate solely self-serving links within the articles they are considering. Here’s the way a publisher thinks: If a company merely wants to send people to its homepage, it should buy an ad. Do it the right way Fortunately, there’s an easy fix; don’t send people to your homepage – send them to a blog, infographic, or other content (audio or video, perhaps) within your site that delivers valuable information to the reader. In the case of the jet leasing company, it could create an infographic that compares time saved via different modes of transportation, or a blog on the value of the increased productivity achieved when executives have the benefit of more flexible schedules. If you want to get a little more strategic, be sure to add something to the page such as a “Get More Information” form, or a link to a targeted landing page or squeeze page. Ask yourself this question, “When XYZ publication sends someone to this piece of content, where should they go next on my website?” Be sure it’s easy for them to get to where you would ideally like to lead them. They can, of course, decide to bounce after they have scanned your content, but you want to at least give them the opportunity to begin building a relationship with you or buy from you. But here’s an important warning: Don’t make any of these other elements the main focus – that will sour the approval editor. Keep them subtle and secondary to the value-add content you are providing to...
read moreDiscover this new free tool to maximize your cash
Cash is king. That’s one of the important lessons Jeff Bezos the wizard of cash flow – has taught the business world over the last decade or so. But to maximize cash flow and other key performance indicators, you need to understand how all the moving parts of your company’s financial ecosystem are working together. When you can see and understand this bigger picture, it puts you in a position to make small adjustments that payoff with big improvements, which, by the way is the overriding theme in my book, The One-Percent Edge: Small Changes That Guarantee Relevance and Build Sustainable Success. By the way, this is an affiliate link, which means I receive payment if you make a purchase my book using this link. When he announced the release of the tool, Sageworks product manager Alex Pan said that the company is “providing small businesses a solution that shows them how much additional cash they could generate by making small changes in their financial metrics and how to go about doing that in their specific industries.” Because I believe this strategy is so important in today’s business climate, I was elated when Sageworks made its CashSage tool available for free to all U.S. small business owners. The tool provides three critically important insights for small business owners; it: Shows how changes in six key financial metrics impact cash flow, Benchmarks your company’s financial picture against your industry averages, and Gives you monthly industry-specific recommendations on how to improve each financial metric. To give you these insights, the tool paints the financial picture of your company based on these six key metrics: Revenue Growth Operating Cost Growth Profit Margin Days Until Your Business Gets Paid Days Until Your Business Pays Vendors & Employees Days Your Inventories Are On Hold And, if you use QuickBooks online, CashSage will use your Quickbooks data to sync your monthly financials. It’s not often that small business owners are given a free tool that provides as much utility as this one does. You could build a spreadsheet that gives you this information, but with CashSage, all you have to do is move sliders around to get an immediate “cause and effect” overview of your financial situation. This provides you with the power to quickly and conveniently play out all kinds of “what if” scenarios to discover the easiest and fastest ways to put your business on a better cash flow and profitability footing. That will make you the cash flow wizard of your...
read moreTo improve your cybersecurity, go phishing!
I don’t think there’s any question that the world is getting more dangerous every day, if only in the fact that due to our reliance on technology, there are more ways the bad guys can get to us. If people and companies with incredible resources, like Sony, HBO, and the DNC can get hacked, what chance does a small business owner have? Frankly, because of your size and your ability to monitor and communicate with your employees, I think you have a better chance to avoid cyber-disasters than bigger operations – if you are proactive about protecting yourself online. Types of phishing scams It seems that the biggest vulnerability right now are the phishing emails. These are emails designed to look legitimate and lure the recipient into clicking on a link. The link may download malicious computer code or trick the user into entering personal information on a bogus – but legitimate appearing – website. In the case of the download, the users may believe they are receiving a Word file, an invoice, or some other document that is typically sent via an email attachment. In the case of entering personal information, users are often told that their bank account, PayPal account, or some other entity needs them to verify information or their account will be suspended. Employee training, regular reinforcement, and updates are at the core of your ability to protect your business. Not long ago I directed you to a couple of online cybersecurity quizzes that can help you get your team up to speed on the basics. Checking, testing, and monitoring your employees must be an integral part of your strategy. Send simulated phishing emails Given the current dangers, one of the best things you can do is to set up a program that sends simulated phishing emails to your employees to train them as well as test their knowledge and vigilance. There are various free and paid services that will send these faux (phaux?) phishing emails to your team to see how they react. (I have a list below. Note that a few require good technical knowledge.) You need to tell your employees that they should expect to receive these testing and training phishing emails as part of your cybersecurity program. The simple expectation of receiving these emails will heighten the awareness of your employees, which is one of the best benefits of the strategy. You need to have a company email where these phishing emails can be forwarded to; employees need to have an “action” they can take when they suspect malicious online activity. Further, you need to examine and discuss these phishing emails in meetings. When you do this, the activity begins to act like your body’s immune system – you develop protection against each phishing email style and strategy. Your “immunity” builds and becomes stronger over time. Paid and free phishing simulators Here’s the list. Some are DIY and free and have a fairly easy user interface. Other DIY applications require more technical know-how. Finally, several companies are offering simulated phishing emails as either a stand-alone service, or part of a cybersecurity training package. Terranova (paid) Wombat Security Technologies (paid) Phishing Box (paid) Sans Securing the Human (paid) KnowBe4 (paid) Lucy (paid) SecurityIQ (free personal starter account) Gophish (free open source software) Phishing...
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