Maybe It’s Not All About the Benjamins When it Comes to Small Business
You own a small business. Are you in it for the money? If you answered “yes” to that question, it may be time to do some soul searching. A recent study from Manta, an online small business community, and computer maker Dell found that money is not the driving force behind most small business success. Personal achievement — with a response rate of 37 percent — topped the list as the biggest motivational factor on the road to being a successful small business owner. It makes sense. When we start a business, there should be something in our minds that we want to accomplish. When that goal is met, it gives us a sense fulfillment that money alone cannot provide. Human needs This need for personal recognition and fulfillment is reflected in other survey results. Almost 30 percent of the respondents said that when their business received its first award was the proudest moment in their professional careers. Similarly, 37 percent identified winning their first repeat customer as the most important milestone for their business. Achievement tops money. Long after the money has been spent or reduced to numbers on a balance sheet, the inner sense of worth that comes with achievement lingers. I would suggest that even business owners who frame the first dollar they earn don’t do it to celebrate making money; they frame it and put it on the wall as a reminder of fulfilling a significant goal in their lives. Being and doing We ask children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Perhaps a better question is, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” The people who we grow up to “be” is certainly an important question on many fronts. But what we “do” with our lives is important in its own way. What we do drives the economy and creates opportunities for others, and as this survey found, it is the driving factor in how we feel about ourselves and our efforts. It’s not “he who dies with the most toys wins,” the truth is that “he who realizes his dreams wins.” So do you have goals you must achieve? Look beyond today’s cash flow to see what you want to accomplish tomorrow. And if your goal seems too big and too distant, find some bite-sized goals you can achieve in the shorter term. Work hard to check them off your list and then each time sit back for a little while and enjoy the moment....
read more4 Ways to Follow Up Without Getting Slapped With a Restraining Order
When everyone in your business is an expert in the art of follow-up, you are a long way down the road to success. Follow-up is one of the artful skills and required tasks that cuts across several aspects of your operation. Follow-up is required: * With prospects considering a purchase, * With customers after they have made a purchase, * With customers after they have made a customer service request, * With existing customers between purchases, and * With previous customers you seem to have lost. The essential quality of your follow-up is that it must be seen as informative, efficient and sincere. It cannot be perceived as pesky. Here are ways that throughout your company, follow-up can boost customer loyalty, satisfaction and overall sales. 1. Make follow-up timely. I know a very successful plumbing company that diligently calls every customer the day after a plumber has been out to do a job. They simply and politely ask if everything went well with the service call. It happens like clockwork. Getting a call a week later would not sit right with many customers. 2. Make follow-up personal. Going back to the plumbing example, the caller identifies his or herself and asks one question. The voice is pleasant and the tone of the conversation is upbeat. I’ve had other companies follow up with a survey. That immediately makes it impersonal. There may be a time for surveys, but it’s not right after a service call or sale. When you’re following up with customers between sales, make sure that your communication is personal. Don’t send the same email to existing customers that you sent to prospects. You want your customers to feel like they’re getting insider information and preferred deals. You can also take advantage of “anniversaries” to follow up with special communications and offers. 3. Hit the right level with your follow-up. If you sell big-ticket items or services and have lost a valued customer, a personal visit from the owner would be the right level of follow-up. However, if you’re in a commodity business, a juicy coupon via email might be sufficient to win back the customer. If you sell a technical item, a follow-up from a tech-savvy customer service employee might be better than salesperson follow-up. 4. Hit the right number of follow-ups. Every customer is different. Some enjoy an ongoing banter with sales reps. Others only want infrequent contact. When cultivating new customers, ask them how often they would like to hear from you and their preferred mode of communication. Customize your company’s relationship with each client. If you publish a “newsletter” you will be viewed as informing, not touting and it won’t count against the number of contacts your customer prefers. This is one reason content is so important today. It allows you to maintain contact without rubbing your customers the wrong way. If your small business is expert at follow-up and lead generation—and you have a top quality product or service—you are virtually guaranteed...
read moreThe MarketMeSuite Story, Part II: From the UK, to Co-Working, to Incubator and Beyond
We’ve seen how Tammy Kahn Fennell and Alan Hamlyn combined their talents in marketing and programming to take a small, simple desktop app and develop it into the user-friendly MarketMeSuite social media management platform. Tammy and Alan have a good feel for what small businesses need, they listen to their customers, and they’ve taken an incremental approach to developing and refining their product. These strategies have worked great for MarketMeSuite and they are just as useful for any small business. However, that development didn’t happen in a vacuum. Every business grows—or fails to grow—in an environment and in a culture. And the path MarketMeSuite took offers some good insights on opportunities that are available to start-ups today. Wrong side of the pond If you’ve read the first part of this story, you know that Tammy and Alan were initially located in England. But that changed. “It started with a question: What are you doing there?” recalls Tammy. The man asking the question was Alec Stern, vice president of strategic market development for Constant Contact. Tammy had been doing work for Constant Contact and Alec had become a good mentor and encourager. Alec was really asking why were they still in England when their real customer base was in the United States. It was a simple question, and expatriate Tammy’s initial answer was just as simple, “I don’t know. I don’t know how to get home!” Nonetheless, the pair made the move back across the Atlantic and landed in Cambridge. Going from a less intense setting of the UK’s Galston in Norfolk—where they shared a building with a hospice organization, among others—to the fast-paced environment of the North East business world, was something of a culture shock, plus they weren’t yet plugged in with anyone. College days redux “It sort of reminded me of the first day of college when I went from Wisconsin and moved to New York. I remember arriving at college. I picked up the phone and didn’t have anyone to call!” Tammy says with a laugh, adding, “I kind of had that same feeling when we came here.” Tammy and Alan found a great way to start making contacts—they settled into a co-working space. “Being in that co-working environment was pretty amazing. We started to see other companies that were at the same stage as us, some that were much further and other companies that were behind us,” she recalls. They soaked up a lot of ideas and energy from that co-working environment and eventually moved to a second co-working environment, where some pretty heavy hitters had set up shop, including the Boston Facebook team and the Constant Contact innovation team. Constant Contact’s incubator Again, the ability to network, see what others were up to and ask for advice, proved invaluable to the development of MarketMeSuite. Through their relationships with the Constant Contact innovation team, they learned about its new incubator program Small Business InnoLoft. “We got to talking with the innovation team and said, ‘Why don’t we pilot it for you?’” Tammy says. They spent two weeks working with the program and it proved to be immeasurably valuable to the development of MarketMeSuite. Today, CEO Tammy and CTO Alan have their own space, but there are still other start-ups around in their building. By moving...
read moreThe MarketMeSuite Story, Part I: From Desktop to Platform
“The need to constantly innovate applies to product, strategy, marketing, and every other facet of your business.” Often when we’re introduced to a killer app, we ask ourselves, “Why didn’t I think of that?” But that’s not the right question to ask. A far better question is something like, “Why didn’t I take that cool little idea I had some time ago and keep working on it until I turned it into a killer app?” The initial idea that evolved into what is now MarketMeSuite wasn’t much to look at, but today, thanks to originators Tammy Kahn Fennell and Alan Hamlyn, the social media management platform is poised to make major inroads with small businesses everywhere. Making social media easy The platform greatly simplifies how a small business manages its social media presence and gives it a lot of tools to do some terrific marketing without spending a lot of time and effort—attributes that are always appealing to small business owners and managers. One key component of the platform that I especially like emulates an email “in box.” That gives users a tool that they’re already familiar with and helps make MarketMeSuite more intuitive. TIP: When you’re creating something new, finding a way to incorporate an interface users already understand solves a number of problems before they even become problems! The journey started outside of London—more on this chapter of the story in Part II—where Tammy (a marketing professional) and Alan (a tech guru) worked together on projects. But when Tammy encouraged Alan to leverage social media to grow his web design business, Alan wasn’t immediately on-board with the idea. Help for the unsocial “He said, ‘I’m an engineer, that means I’m not a social person, so I’m not sure how I could use social media,” Tammy recalls laughing. She took over his social media accounts and started to manage them “the old fashioned way.” It helped Alan build his business and as they realized how well it worked, they started to wonder if there could be a better and more convenient way to work with social accounts. They aimed to create a proof of concept and the result was DeskTweet, which enabled Twitter users to tweet straight from their desktops. “That was the first iteration of what we built. It’s still kind of special to me because it was our first stage. It wasn’t even a product. It didn’t cost money, we just wanted to see if we blogged a little bit about it, would people start downloading it, and how can we help small businesses,” Tammy recalls a bit wistfully. Build it and they will download “And it worked, because people started to download it!,” she adds. They quickly included a cool feature that allowed businesses to add their business location to their tweets. Alas, since then Twitter has stopped putting locations in tweets. But at the time, it was a great little feature for businesses. Tammy says they have always had vocal users and have welcomed their comments. They have helped them guide the development of their platform. When they really got serious about the project is when they decided that the goal should be to create a platform that would do everything Tammy had been doing for Alan “the old fashioned way.” That led to adding...
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