Get Your Entire Team
Involved in Marketing
O kay, we’ve come to a pretty significant juncture in the process of laying the foundation for truly sticky marketing. If you’ve completed a number of the key exercises and suggestions so far, you’ve begun to collect a set of very powerful marketing assets. These assets will allow you to venture out into your market and confidently declare, “Come and get it!”
The next section of this book is dedicated to the act of lead generation or getting your prospects to contact you. This is all about turning your stickiness into a system that works for growing your business. But before we move to this next all-important step, it’s vitally important for you to take the foundation you’ve built in these last few chapters and share it with your team—even if that team is only one other person.
This chapter suggests several ways to infuse your entire staff with a firm understanding of the core components of your new marketing business and to excite them, perhaps for the first time, about playing a role in the launch and growth of your marketing business.
Marketing Is Everyone’s Job
If you accept that your business is essentially a marketing business, it’s not much of leap to grasp that marketing is, to some degree, everyone’s job.
Most of the time, small business owners completely disregard the idea of what might be called “marketing training.” But then they wonder why no one in the organization gets pumped up about providing over-the-top service. Or why no one really has a clear picture of who and what makes an ideal client. What if everyone if your company was made to understand that part of their job, no matter what else they did, was marketing? Can you imagine an organization with a culture like that?
Here’s the scary part. Everyone in your organization that comes into contact with your clients or prospects is performing a marketing function. The question is whether they are performing it with a marketing intention or not.
Conference Calls Unlimited, a telecommunications firm in Fairfield, Iowa, did something that set them apart from their competitors, not only in the conferencing industry, but also in most retail operations. They focused a great deal of their marketing education efforts on inspiring their employees and contractors. By focusing on employees, they ensured those employees would be inspired and enthusiastic with each interaction with a customer. They worked on making the workday day fun, productive, and inspiring.
They streamlined everyone’s responsibilities to focus on priorities: 1) making the customers happy, 2) making the prospects happy, and 3) making each other happy. The goal for the employees when answering the phone was to give callers more than what they asked for and to play nice with each other. Everyone focused on the objective, not their personal convenience.
They found that this employee-based focus worked wonders! For the customers, their calls or e-mails were answered promptly, which translated to a consistently fun, productive, and inspiring experience when they called (www.conferencecallsunlimited. com).
Marketing Is Mostly Your Job
Before I can dive too far into the idea of a systematic marketing training program for your staff, I’ve got some bad news. No amount of training for your staff will help if you don’t take responsibility for owning the marketing function in your business. You’ve probably come to realize that your staff will do as you do more readily than as you say.
The only way you can sell your internal clients—your staff—is if they recognize that you actually believe in and enact what you are selling. What have you done to really light their fire about what your company does, about how it is different, about the unique value you can bring to a service relationship?
So now that you know who the first target market is, your marketing purpose needs to get out there and start pounding the aisles, cubicles, break rooms, and conference tables looking for prospects who are just dying to be sold on the vision you have for the business.
If you meet resistance to this notion, it is because you have not made it a priority in the past, and people will always resist change. The key is that you make sure they understand that this isn’t just another chapter from the latest business book you read. You must make the newfound emphasis on marketing an expectation and a requirement.
Create a Marketing Roundtable
While the primary marketing function may necessarily fall to you or some other person in your organization, you need to raise the level of marketing awareness systematically through focus, emphasis, and education.
One tool that many small businesses have discovered is something I call a marketing roundtable. A marketing roundtable is a formal internal committee that meets to review and move marketing decision and actions forward. Part of this roundtable’s responsibility is to also raise the overall level of internal marketing awareness.
Routinely Educate
The only way to keep the internal marketing message alive is to keep the message in view through routinely scheduled education practices. Every member of your staff must receive an orientation in the foundational marketing steps presented earlier in this book:
• Your ideal target client description. They must fully be able to picture who you work with and who you want to work with. From a practical standpoint, this will make them much more prepared to spot a potential new client.
• Your marketing purpose. What would it mean if they really understood and then found a way to connect their purpose to this?
• Your Talking Logo. Each staff member should be able to use this tool by connecting their function in the business to the ultimate marketing function.
• Your Core Message. This is everyone’s Core Message.
• Your marketing kit. Your marketing kit provides so much information that it is likely to become one of your best hiring tools.
Part of the Hiring Process
Make marketing education and the emphasis on marketing part of your hiring process.
Put It on Business Cards
What if everyone had a supplemental title that addressed marketing functions? Think “vice-president of operations and customer service fanatic.”
Employee Manual
Make your marketing Core Message and story a chapter in the employee manual. Put your marketing materials in your employee manual.
Quarterly All-Staff
Hold quarterly all-staff meetings, and allow your marketing roundtable members to share current marketing initiatives and results. Ask one member of your staff to deliver a presentation on one element of your marketing kit. This will take some pushing on your part, but people learn best by teaching. Keep at it!
Talking Logo Practice
I find that each staff member will connect to the idea of a Talking Logo in different ways. For some, using the company version will be uncomfortable because it may not feel authentic, depending upon their job. A printing press operator may not be able to deliver the exact same Talking Logo as the sales manager. It’s vital that each member of your team have a Talking Logo that allows them to tap the marketing message but feels right for them.
Break your team up and facilitate some sessions that will help them create a “company approved” Talking Logo, and then help them practice using it.
Picture this: Your head of operations is at a cocktail party, and someone asks him what he does for a living, and instead of this: “I’m the head of operations for a small electrical contractor,” he utters these words: “I make home builders look brilliant.”
Or what if a field technician was confronted with a problem and instead of passing that problem on, she saw to it that the problem was addressed? Then she called the client back and made sure he was happy and offered to send the client some movie passes for his trouble.
Telephone Training
The telephone is often the portal to the prospect world for the small business. Everyone who answers the telephone for your organization should be trained to do it in a manner that represents and communicates your Core Message. This may require a script, practice, patience, and a zero tolerance policy, but it’s that important.
External Marketing Training
Often, small businesses must rely on a series of contractors or vendors to deliver the results their clients expect. For instance, an office furniture dealer uses an external installation staff, or an advertising agency uses a courier service to deliver proofs to a client.
Guess what? Those outside or external partners are performing a marketing function on your behalf, no matter what the logo on their shirt says. While your clients may allow you some leeway due to the circumstances, they won’t put up with shoddy service or bad manners consistently.
Kevin Lankford, The Authentic Success Coach, feels that the biggest aid to his business has been organization through documentation. He has developed his own operations manual that explains on a step-by-step basis the objectives for his business. The manual is broken down according to Administrative, Sales and Marketing, and Production tasks.
The manual also includes a page called “This is how we do it.” It’s a step-by-step guide for those times when he needs to hire external help. It’s better than a to-do list!
It’s imperative that you choose vendors and partners who share your definition of customer service, but you can and should take it one step further and include them in some formal training. In some cases, it can be as simple as outlining and communicating your expectations. Over time, this simple step will help you define and attract your ideal strategic partners and vendors.
I worked with a remodeling contractor that hosted quarterly meetings for subcontractors to present actual scenarios of how to handle situations that might occur on a job site. Expectations and processes were presented as well. In order to be considered for projects, the subcontractors had to attend these sessions. Field managers also graded each subcontractor on a set of performance expectations. This contractor was more performance sensitive than price sensitive. Needless to say, he attracted only the subs, and his business and profits soared.
Your New Marketing Business Kick-Off
If you’ve been in business for any amount of time and have finally decided, by virtue of reading this book, to commit to a marketing point of view for your business, your staff will be in for a shock. After all, you’re changing the rules.
I have found that one of the best ways to accomplish the kick-off of your new marketing attitude is to make a big deal out of the announcement of your marketing training and education program. Depending on how much change you are prepared to ask your team to make, you should do everything you can to make sure they realize you are serious about this initiative.
You should consider holding an all-staff meeting off-site, for a designated period of time. Create a packet of materials, hype the event, and build an air of expectation. Make sure that you have completed most of the steps presented previously in this book so that you can “roll-out” the new look, new message, new logo, and new attitude in a stunning way. Treat this meeting as one of your most important sales calls for your new marketing business. Think balloons, T-shirts, cake, and logo apparel. Paint the new picture, outline the new future, present the new expectations, and commit to the next steps in this education process. Most of all, commit the resources to launch powerfully.
A Marketing Board of Directors
Another very powerful marketing education tool is a marketing board of directors. Many times small business owners feel they don’t have access to strategic thinking resources, that much of the work within their marketing world is tactical in nature. The focus is spent on writing the ad, ordering the list, or working with the designer.
A marketing board of directors, made up of members who can offer a strategic perspective to your marketing business, can be a great way to get outside advice to help drive your marketing decisions. Create a board mixed with clients, vendors, partners, and a community member or two, and ask them to commit to a quarterly meeting with the intent of reviewing and commenting on your marketing plans and progress.
The benefits to this approach make it well worth the small amount of work it may require to recruit your board. Clients of mine have found that a marketing board offers several benefits:
• It gives them someone to hold them accountable—most notably, the quarterly report of results drives them to focus on achieving goals.
• It provides creativity beyond what the owner or staff could muster while working in the business.
• It creates a loyal group of external champions—board members often feel compelled to champion a business they become this deeply connected with.
A Game Worth Winning
Finally, find a way to turn your marketing into a game. If you can find ways to motivate everyone in the organization to help grow the enterprise, think of what a machine you could create. This motivation may take the form of goal setting, score keeping, incentives, and a significant commitment on your part.
If you find that you have people that don’t want to play the game, do them a favor—let them seek other opportunities. Let your folks know from day one that they are part of the marketing team.
Action Steps
1. Create a list of people who could serve on your marketing board.
2. Complete the core marketing exercises in the first six chapters.
3. Plan an all-staff marketing kick-off.