How I Took a Cruise to Get Away From it All and Still Learned Marketing Lessons

Our family spring break vacation this year was a Caribbean cruise. It was wonderful. It was great to get away from the cold, gray Ohio winter. And I really needed the time to disconnect, spend time with my wife and kids, and just plain relax.

But try as I might, I couldn’t help but notice that the Holland America cruise line had mastered a number of marketing techniques. They combined customer service and marketing into a seamless experience. They worked at a remarkably sophisticated and effective level. And they did things that every business should be doing. Maybe you should take a cruise and label it as “marketing research”!

Here are some of the things I noticed:

• When we boarded we were a little early – but they were ready for that. They took charge of our bags and directed us to a special brunch. There, a waiter greeted us and he told us his name and then asked for each of ours. Now here’s the special part: this waiter didn’t serve us for the remainder of the cruise, but he made a point of greeting us by name any time he saw any of us. He was friendly and open and really made us feel comfortable. I even made a point of searching for him and tipping him when we left. And when I got home, he had sent me a Facebook Friend request!
• The next morning at breakfast we noticed that the Captain was seated next to us. He was friendly and open and really set the tone. You could tell that from the Captain at the top down to the waiters and the room stewards, everyone was well-trained to focus on the customer and make our cruise a terrific experience. Sitting there next to him, I could see that he was very much like a Fortune 500 executive – he had 2,000 employees and they each had the goal of not just making our trip special, but to plant in us the desire to travel with them again. AND to spread the word (like I’m doing now!). From the waiter to the Captain, this open, friendly attitude cost them nothing, but created an atmosphere that made the trip memorable. Do you and your employees show the same thing to your customers?
• Here’s a terrific idea: the cruise line offered a $500 discount on our next cruise if we signed up for one while we were still onboard. It was a significant savings and timed for when we were most relaxed and receptive. That’s a great idea. Are you offering your customers discounts and upgrades on future purchases while they’re still fresh from their current purchase?
• And after we were home, the cruise line has continued to check on our satisfaction and send us e-mails, reinforcing the positive experience and setting the stage for a future trip... excellent follow-thru. Are you following up?
  

One of the key things that I noticed is that this cruise line understood that they already had our money and we were captive. They could have done the minimum and pocketed the profits, waived goodbye, and headed for the bank. But they recognized that we represented more than just the price of the current cruise: we were potential future customers AND all of our family, friends and acquaintances were also potential customers. To capitalize on that rich potential, they needed to make the current cruise spectacular. Are you doing this? Are you thinking beyond the current project or deliverable you have for a customer? Are you marketing to your customers AFTER you make the sale? How are you convincing them that they made the right decision to purchase from you? How are you reaching the people that might not have made the buying decision, but are being effected by your product our service? Are you making it natural and easy for them to spread the word about your company?

Do just one thing today: find out how the lowest person on your corporate totem pole works with your customers. Are they anything like our waiter on the cruise? Do they make your customers feel special and welcome? And what about you? Do you make sure that EVERY person in your organization is focused on the customer experience and understands how their job also includes marketing? Have you given them the sales tools and training to make that possible? I’d love to talk with you about how you can put these lessons to work for your organization. I’d be happy to talk with you about applying these approaches. And I can show you our vacation pictures!

Sales Motivation Techniques from Great Literature – Captain Ahab, Sales Manager

Have you read Moby Dick? If you haven’t, you’ve probably seen the movie with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab. While Ahab is often used as a metaphor for crazed obsession, few people realize that he was also a terrific sales manager.

One of the key scenes early in the story shows Ahab taking a gold coin, a doubloon, and he calls the crew before him and gives one of the great sales motivational speeches of all time.

“Whosoever of ye raises me a white-headed whale with a wrinkled brow and a crooked jaw; whosoever of ye raises me that white-headed whale, with three holes punctured in his starboard fluke--look ye, whosoever of ye raises me that same white whale, he shall have this gold ounce, my boys!"

Afterwards, he nails the coin to the mast where all can see it.

The gold coin represents a small fortune to the crew, and they soon share Ahab’s obsession for finding the white whale. The sight of this coin reminds them every day about what they’re looking for and what the real goal of the voyage is. They continually drive themselves to a higher and higher performance without the captain having to repeat himself or punish them. They motivate themselves with the sight of the coin nailed to the mast.

That’s the key. Your team has to catch your excitement and obsession about your goals. I don’t recommend driving them “round perdition's flames before I give him up!" However, it is critical that you find a way to motivate your crew. It might not be money – and often it’s not. But what is important is excitement and clear goals. Ahab certainly set that out for his crew. What have you done to excite and direct your team?

Although Ahab’s voyage ended badly, it wasn’t from lack of motivation.

At Minds On we have a lot of experience in building internal marketing and sales motivational campaigns. I’d be delighted to tell you about them and talk with you about how you can find something to nail to the mast and motivate your crew.

Marketing to Your Internal Audience – Tools and Motivation for Your Team

With so much focus on getting the word out and creating new customers, it’s very easy to neglect your own team especially if you have more than one location. I’ve seen companies with distributed sales teams scratch their heads about why one region does terrific and another completely bombs.

But it’s not a mystery. Does everyone in your sales team have access to the same information? Are they getting the latest intel on what works and what doesn’t? Are they seeing the latest successes, all of the materials that are leading to sales, and all of the training that drives success?

Your first audience for marketing is your internal one. This needs that same, continually updated flow of information that your prospects and customers do. In addition, it needs even more detail, more assistance, and more tools. It would be easy to blow your entire marketing budget just on internal marketing and systems.

How are you keeping your team up-to-date?

We’ve had success doing this for our customers here at Minds On. One of the best approaches is to use an intranet – a full-service internal-only portal of information, materials, and tools. A big component of your intranet should be an internal blog – or even a series of blogs. This lets you communicate directly to your targeted internal audiences and keep them all on the same page. If you tie in an online forum where your team can share what it's seeing and experiencing, you can help to distribute that experience to your whole organization. In the ideal world, all of your department heads would be blogging on what they’re doing to reach the company goals and keeping all of their materials and information updated. You shouldn’t be responsible for absolutely everything.

One exciting Minds On innovation is an online store for all of your sales materials. Imagine this: A salesperson in a remote office has an important meeting with a big prospect. He/she goes to the e-commerce marketing materials store on your intranet and reviews the available materials. There are PowerPoint slide presentations, product sales sheets, white papers, even model proposals. He/she can select the materials needed and even customize them with the prospect’s name, logo, and specific requirements and needs. Then, he/she can download the customized electronic versions or order professionally printed copies. You can even assign print budgets to sales offices or individual staff.

This approach offers several advantages. First, it puts the latest materials in all hands and they have up-to-the minute materials available to them. Next, it keeps your sales staff from “going rogue” and creating their own materials. You never know what the quality of those will be – and often they’re very bad. It also allows you to control your branding and imaging. This is a critical component that’s often overlooked in sales materials. Every time you “touch” several prospects, you want to reinforce your brand image and strengthen their perception of your company. By providing customizable materials to your staff, you also control what they can’t change. That’s a very good thing.

The key is this: Get the latest information to your staff all the time. Just like you need to keep communications open with your prospects and customers, you need to do the same for your staff. The payoff is big. If you can keep all of your team completely up-to-date, you have a much greater chance at sales success.

I’d be happy to talk with you about how you can inform and motivate your sales staff. I’ve got some great customer examples I can share with you, so give me a shout!

How to Waste Your Marketing Budget – 5 Ways to Spend Money and Receive Nothing in Return

Before we founded Minds On, I spent years “on the other side of the desk” working virtually every job in corporate marketing. I know what it’s like to be responsible for the bottom line. I know what it’s like to be responsible for results. I also know what it’s like when budgets are tight.

I also know what happens if you don’t manage your resources well. It’s so easy to blow your budget and not get anything in return. Here are five ways that I see businesses wasting their marketing budgets today:

1. Spend on Google Adwords and online campaigns without a targeted Web site to capitalize on the clicks. Online advertising is so attractive. It’s cheap (sometimes) and it’s trackable. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, and then it’s usually only pennies; however, what too many don’t realize is that it doesn’t matter if they click on your ad – it only matters if they become a prospect or customer. That will only work if the customers click through to your site and find a clear message that connects with them. Don’t start a campaign to create traffic until you’ve updated and focused your site on capturing their interest and making it easy for them to become a customer.
2. Pay for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) before you have a clear and up-to-date Web site. SEO is the new form of black magic that everyone is anxious to invest in having. We’ve got to improve our Google Rankings! But just like point #1, if you don’t have a Web site and focused campaign to take advantage of increased traffic, it is a waste of your time and effort. The fact still remains – you can improve your rankings by providing focused content and updated frequently about your products and services.
3. Buy a list. It’s so tempting to buy a list of names and titles and e-mail addresses, but unless you’re planning on going the full-blown direct marketing route and blast out to tens of thousands of names, you’re unlikely to stumble across any potential customers. Do you want your sales people trying to call on a thousand cold leads or ten hot prospects? You can do more to build your own lists and get more bang for your buck.
4. Blow your budget on a single marketing effort. This may be the most common error I see. A company only has a limited budget, so they plan one big mailer, or one trade show, or one e-mail blast. It’s the Hail Mary pass of marketing, and it rarely works. What do you do next when you don’t generate enough leads for the whole year? Even with restricted budgets, you need to find a way to have activities and actions that reoccur. You need a plan that lays out a full year of marketing. Going “all in” is rarely a good idea outside of a poker game.
5. Go dark. Hold onto your money in hopes that sales will pick up. Yes, you are wasting your budget if you don’t spend it! I’m surprised I have to still bring this up. If your sales are down and the budget is tight what should you do? If the answer is “cut marketing and enter a death spiral” you might want to rethink that. When sales are down you need to INCREASE marketing. You only cut back when sales are through the roof. Marketing is your sales lifeblood. Seriously, if you cut your marketing, what do you think will happen to your sales?

I think you should always be cautious with your marketing spending, and the best way to do that is to have a clear strategy and plan. When times are tough and money is in short supply, don’t just hurl the ball down the field and pray. Get a plan. Experiment. Try something new. But don’t waste your money.

I’d be happy to talk with you about building a year-long marketing effort and how to use whatever budget you have to achieve your sales and business goals.

The Webmaster’s Dead! Long Live the Content Managers!

I’ve been designing, building and managing Web sites since 1993... almost twenty years now. Back then, there was usually one person responsible for everything in a company Web site, the mysterious and powerful “webmaster.”

However, things were simpler back then. Web sites were only a few static pages. Most of them were very crudely designed, and there was very little interactive content. One person could handle a little design, figure out the technical basics and how to wrangle a little HTML – one person could handle it all.

It didn’t take long for things to become much more complex. As design quality improved and the technical side became much more complex, it got so that you just couldn’t find all of the talents you needed to run a complex company Web site in just one body. Webmasters became the technical talent buried somewhere down in IT. Unfortunately, they also became the bottleneck and gatekeeper. It seemed like it took weeks for the smallest change to be made to a site.

For a lot of companies it’s still this way. That’s a shame because it doesn’t have to be. Distributed “content managers” or “subject matter experts” can manage a well-designed, modern site. By using technology like Content Management Systems (CMS), departments can create their own content or update existing pages in seconds, all without disturbing the site design elements or without any technical training. The simplest type of CMS is the type of thing you see with most blogging engines, like Google’s Blogger or Wordpress. You can have this type of thing built right into your blog to manage every page and piece of information.

Fresh content is the key. There’s a lot of information that should be on your site, and it should all be updated frequently. View “What’s In Your Web site?” to see the types of information that you should have on your site. If you have to wait for a webmaster down in IT to update your product data sheet, it might take weeks to happen. That’s valuable sales time lost.

In order for this to work, you need to have a clear structure and a plan. You have to determine who is responsible for each type of information on your site. You need to establish standards and guidelines for writing styles, and you need someone in each area to act as the editor – that final line of defense – before anything is published to the Web at large.

At Minds On, we have customers who have to update their websites on a near daily basis. They couldn’t keep up if we didn’t supply them with tools so that they could do it on their own. Most small and medium-sized companies don’t even have a technical staff. That means that their existing employees, the ones who already have a plate-full, will be the ones maintaining their site. If you don’t make it easy for them, it’s not going to get done.

So while the term webmaster may be dead, you need to think about all of the content managers you have or need in your organization. You have to supply them with the tools to manage their sections of your Web site, and you have to provide them with quality guidelines and the goals and expectations for creating new content and updating what you already have. If you want your Web site to be a successful part of your sales and marketing efforts, this is the approach that will pay off for you.

If you’d like to learn more about content management and how we do this for our clients, get in touch. I’ve been doing this for nearly twenty years now, and I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned and continue to learn about building and maintaining killer Web marketing efforts.