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If you recognise that for most customers to be able to phone on a freephone number will increase your response rate by as much as 7 times. These numbers only cost a few pence to run each month and the best place to get them is resource utilities
I’ve been in business for several years now and have the privilege of working alongside some of the brightest minds in business.These are people who have real experience of doing things that lead to success. I remember one lady Louise Fowler, who I worked with for 2 years and who to my knowledge built 2 £1/5 million businesses, who said “the fortune is in the follow-up” and it took me a while to really grasp what she meant. Follow-up is often talked about as part of the marketing process but in reality it is far more about building relationships and enabling people to trust you.
Follow-up can be broken down into two areas Active and Passive:
Active Follow-up might include:
OK those of you who know me, and I mean really know me, know that there are some things that I really love. Apart from food and wine and beer I love things that are free and help people communicate and develop relationships. I started using Skype about 8 years ago in its early days and immediately fell in love with the concept – free communications over the internet. I hated spending money on phones and calls and Skype seemed to be a gift from God. Today Skype is much more than a simple way of making calls over the internet – it allows you to build relationships in business, in family and all sorts of other really neat ways. In fact I’d go so far as to suggest that if you are in the business of talking to people then Skype is probably the best way to go. By the way I don’t just use Skype – its just that i love the way it allows you to see when people are on-line and that helps build relationships.
Let me give you a real example that occurred just yesterday (names changed to protect the innocent). I have a friend and business colleague in a middle eastern country who suddenly dropped of the scene, I knew she was moving house and she had 4 children so had her hands full. The months went by and e mails were returned and then – she popped up as on-line on Skype. A quick text message via Skype and we are back in contact – she’d changed her e mail as well. In my book the ability to see when someone is on-line is priceless.
Needless to say Skype is a cornerstone of our business and personal lives and helps us keep in contact. By the way I love Twitter but thats another story.
on this morning’s call we talked about the Niche Market phenomena – any successful company today is operating in a niche market. In fact I would go so far to suggest that any company holding it’s own or growing in this current environment must be operating in a niche market. Find me one that isn’t and I’ll eat my words. A few examples of company’s operating in niche markets being:
What Niche are you operating in – if you don’t know what your niche is – better find out fast.
Secondly we talked about how to get customers/potential customers to stay on your sites for longer and a few ideas came up in discussion:
By the way this is not difficult to set up and it takes less than 10 minutes.
I saw this article on the New Economics Foundation Website and thought it made some real sense. The banks seem to think they are not only above the law but also above control. The idea that their function should be split 3 ways , personal customers, business banking and securities dealing, makes such common sense and give control back to the people that use their services. That a bank should be for profit for me runs against the grain – there is something just not quite right. That brings me onto the whole subject on money – is it real or is it a myth.
If we all went to the Bank of England and asked to exchange a £10 note for £10 in cash – we’d get a big surprise. The statement on bank notes ” I promise to pay the bearer on demand…” – has gone. So what is the currency of money – does it even exist? If you like philosophy just google the phrase ‘does money exist’ and see what comes up.
I’m very interested in the concept of micro finance as practised by several organisations in Africa – I wonder if that could be a model for the western countries so devastated by the banking system collapse.
Break up the banks to restore lending and revive the economy from the bottom up, says think tank
Economic rescue efforts – including quantitative easing – will not work until the fundamental problem that Britain’s banks have become “unfit for purpose” is addressed, says nef (the new economics foundation).
In a report published today, Tuesday 10 March 2009, – the day the British Bankers Association chief is to answer to a parliamentary investigation of banking supervision and regulation1 – nef argues that the shift in the shape and business model of banks over the last generation helped both cause and perpetuate the present financial crisis. Continue Reading…
If you are in business today you have probably realised the need to have a web presence but what about how you get connected to the WEB. The battle between copper wired and fibre optic connections continues to develop. Anyone serious about need ing high speed connectivity has to opt for fibre optics. BT has made some very strong statements about having plans to roll out a fibre optic system but Virgin media already has one – don’t miss out – check it out.
BT aroused a fair bit of attention yesterday when it announced 29 locations that would receive its ‘super-fast’ fibre-optic broadband next year.
However, Virgin Media is already offering similar speeds to those promised by BT in a number of areas and so looks to have a significant head start over BT. It’s also predicting speeds of up to 150 Mb/s in the not too distant future.
Ok – now I know that to talk about business cards might seem a little like teaching granny to suck eggs but there is far more to having and using a business card than you might at first imagine. So what should your business card have on it:
So take some time and make your card work for you. One last tip never give out your card without getting one first!
Vista Print do some of the best cards you can get and very often all you pay is the postage
Paul Barton
‘helping you create what matters’
If you’ve ever been in the position of having a happy customer bring or refer a friend or relative to you and your services then you’ll know just how good it feels. Conversely we never find out how many people have a less than satisfactory experience with our businesses and then go on to either tell no one or worse still tell 10 people how poor your service was. In may cases bad customer experiences can break a business – but that’s another story.
Imagine having one customer who goes out and tells one person in the next 12 months how good your service and product are. Now just stop and look at what that would do to your business over the next 12 months – it would have a small effect. What would happen if one in 5 customers did just that – your business would grow by 20%.
Imagine if every customer referred one potential customer a year to you – the business would double in a year. The truth is that many satisfied customers would happily tell others about your wonderful product and service every day.
My Point is this in these days of recession and downturn the companies that will remain and even prosper are those that provide outstanding service and who recognise the value of referrals. So what is your strategy to get referrals?
OK the customer referrals are rather nice and take a while to develop but they alone can save your business. What if you knew the ‘type of person or business’ you’d like to be referred to. What would a customer/client be worth to you? I remember a colleague who received a referral from a carpet cleaner which turned out to be worth £2 Million in the next 12 months. Now that’s the exception but it illustrates the point.
OK lets look at a couple of real examples. If I’m a mortgage broker I might make £2000/mortgage I arrange and i can write 5 every month on average. But the customer is also likely to want the services of other tradesmen so lets have a look at some of them:
The list could go on and on but the initial business was worth £2000 but the spin off referrals could be worth many times that amount. Have you ever noticed that once one house in the road has a new driveway laid the same people then often do the same for other people down the road. The same goes for roofing – one does a good job and gets several referrals from friends and neighbours.
The Mortgage broker (if they are any good) will often have a very close working relationship with solicitors, insurance specialists, estate agents and business that naturally refer people to each other. So the big question is what would your ideal referral be? What would they look like, what sector would they be working in?
I’m in business to help people set up their own businesses and very often those people are looking for a change in direction, they are looking to make the best use of their time. The people I’m looking for fit into one of several groups:
So how do you put that into words to tell people? Let me give you an idea of what I might say or have in the back of my mind.
If I had a product oriented business I might ask my customers the following question?
It’s been said that we all have roughly 200 contacts, people we know relatively well, and its those people that we know that are the potential customers that we can refer others too. So if you are part of a group of 10 people who all subscribe to the ‘business by referral’ principle then you have indirect access to 2000 potential customers. One word of warning if you are referring someone to a close or very valuable client then take care if you’ve not used the services of the person you are referring. Say something like “I’ve not used their services personally but they come very highly recommended” or if you are unsure say “I’ve not used their services but I thought you might like to explore if they might be of value”.
Unless you know what you are looking for in terms of referrals then you are in the realms of hoping that you get one or two good ones. Why not learn to be specific and ask people for the choicest referrals?
I use twitter to follow many people and today I was checking a couple of tweets and saw one that made me want to look further. The site is all about people’s experiences of getting laid off or made redundant and is well worth a look. It recently was featured in the Wall Street Journal and I sadly note that in many states in the USA unemployment is running at 10% or more and that’s only the beginning in my opinion.
We have to become more supportive of the people we know who have or are struggling with being laid off and offer them hope. That’s what this site and the community behind it are all about – offering hope, support and the belief that there is a better way.
Don’t forget you can always contribute and join the community and in doing so we may well be able to offer to give you or people you know the lift up in life they need to get back on their feet – Don’t forget our Free Web Hosting offer for those who deserve it.
www.pabarton.com – doing business a better way
Ok – its been a long time coming but what started out as a simple monday morning call with some freinds who shared a common goal (health in this case) has become something much more. Start Something Today is a beginning that might just lead anywhere – It depends on what we want to do and what we want to start – hence the name.
In todays economic climate we have recognised that we need to be proactive and actively create what matters to us. If we don’t do that we run the risk of getting stuck in a passive state where we watch the hurting world pass by and do nothing about it.
The key categories we have put in place ( we can add more later on) are the things we talk about most often. So here we are at the beginning of what I hope and Trust will be a wild ride where a few people get together to make a real difference and have a lot of fun in the process.
We will have some editorial guidelines to put in place but we have to start some where.
Paul Barton – excitedly
