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Brand Building: Deliver the Promise

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Can we agree that data driven decisions produce the most favorable outcomes? The mega database of customer info compiled by the World Advertising Research Centre of New York City, USA and London, UK has since 1985 provided powerful information to business leaders and enabled them to develop marketing strategies and campaigns that attract the attention prospective customers and persuade them to try a product or service or persuade existing customers to become frequent users, meaning repeat customers, of a product or service. WARC data points to a product’s brand promise as the definitive ingredient of successful marketing and brand-building campaigns. The right brand promise, one that target customers perceive as memorable, valuable and deliverable, has the power to influence the purchasing behavior of your target customers and convert them to buyers. WARC data also indicates that a well-crafted brand promise not only translates into purchases and sales revenue, but also provides a blueprint that can be used to devise successful marketing strategies and campaigns.

In other words, the key to successful brand-building is a clear and specific brand promise that target customers feel can be fulfilled. Such a brand promise has been shown to result in marketing campaigns that positively impact sales revenue and also help to shape effective marketing strategies and campaigns.

Commit to the brand promise

WARC research shows that brand promises that target customers trust and believe will be delivered result in sales of the product or service. Roger L. Martin, a former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (Canada) and author of A New Way to Think (2022); Jann Martin Schwartz, founder and Senior Global Director at the LinkedIn B2B Institute and Mimi Turner, head of Europe, Middle East, Africa and Latin America operations at the LinkedIn B2B Institute teamed up to more closely examine the question of effective marketing—how can business owners and leaders make it happen?

Martin, Turner and Schwartz sought to understand the active ingredients, if you will, of a marketing campaign—what makes it successful? The team recognized the potential appeal of the brand promise and they began by classifying WARC marketing campaign data according to whether or not a verifiable brand promise was made to customers. They found that of 2,021 campaigns analyzed, 40% (808) included an obvious brand promise and 60% (1,213) did not.

The first noteworthy finding of their research was campaigns that included a verified brand promise were more persuasive than campaigns with no brand promise in nearly every instance. In measures of brand perception, brand preference and purchase intent, 56% of campaigns offering a brand promise reported improvement. Market penetration increased in 45% of brand promise campaigns and market share increased in 27% of brand promise campaigns. The only metric in which a brand promise did not triumph was in generating social media buzz, where 55% of successful marketing campaigns omitted a brand promise.

Anatomy of a brand promise

As noted above, Turner, Schwartz and Martin started out by confirming the presence of a brand promise the the marketing campaigns; next, they categorized the type of brand promise made in campaigns where one was present. Most (89%) brand promises fit their definition of one or more of the following categories:

  • Emotional.

The researchers were surprised that a feel-good brand promise was the most popular category, with 35% assigned to this type. An emotional brand promise communicates the good feelings that will be experienced by customers who buy and use the product or service. A highly successful example of an emotional brand promise is the famous De Beers “A diamond is forever” marketing campaign brand promise that since 1947 has promised that the endurance of a diamond confirms the permanency and satisfaction of the marriage.

  • Functional

In 32% of the research sample, the brand promise stressed the reliability and functionality of the product or service. The FedEx “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight” campaign brand promise of 1978 was so powerful that it resulted in the creation of a new verb—to FedEx. The campaign’s brand promise can also be said to convey an emotional brand promise as well: customers don’t have to worry, because it’s FedEx.

  • Enjoyable to buy

Some companies (22%) took the unusual stance of portraying the enjoyment customers will experience as they shop for and buy a product or service. A good example an enjoyment-based brand promise is provided by the paint maker Sherwin-Williams; the company won the 2022 B2B Grand Prix at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival for its campaign based on an artificial intelligence tool that allows customers to create and choose a paint color by using voice to describe it (“a turquoise like the sea in the Maldives,” for example). Designers and architects swooned and prospective customers were convinced.

After the research team categorized the types of brand promises companies tend to make, they examined factors that make a brand promise strongly appealing to customers. Again, three features dominated successful campaigns:

  • Memorable

Surprisingly, making it known that a company is not the top seller in the marketplace can be highly persuasive. “We’re Avis and we try harder” was the slogan of the second-largest car rental company (after Hertz).  Within a year of its launch, Avis went from losing $3.2 million a year to earning $1.2 million a year. Advertising executives called the campaign the most brilliant of the 20th century.

  • Valuable

Customers must want what the brand promise offers, especially when the promise is communicated and perceived as an upgrade from circumstances that are perceived as unsatisfactory or lackluster. Prospective customers must feel that the value is relevant.

Deliverable

A defining characteristic of a brand promise is that it represents a guarantee; the customer must be able to recognize that the brand promise can be fulfilled and the benefits from its fulfillment will meet expectations. For that reason, making a brand promise is a risk. The research team’s assumption was that brand promises made campaigns were generally fulfilled, based on the success of the marketing campaigns studied.

Brand promise becomes strategy

The insight that effective brand building is anchored in a promise to the customer can do more for a company than just help it invest wisely in marketing. The promise can serve as the guiding principle of the marketing strategy, able to inform all promotional activities. A well-crafted and communicated brand promise is your North Star; creating and executing a brand promise is, the foundation of a strategy. From that brand promise/ strategy, you can understand how the company will beat its competitors, the value that customers see in your products and services, understand how the company position itself in the marketplace.

Below, Martin, Schwartz and Turner leave you with a five-step template that your company can use—a go-to-market brand promise development guide that also functions as the foundation of your marketing strategy. Furthermore, the study provides guidance about resources the company should dedicate to the various aspects of brand building, including which information sheds the most light on customer preferences, how to ensure that the most highly preferred aspects of the brand promise are delivered and how to effectively and efficiently communicating your brand promise.

  1. Step One is to understand customers well enough to know what constitutes memorability and value for them.

2. That understanding leads to Step Two, the development of a brand promise, expressed in a simple but compelling and memorable statement.

 3. In Step Three, your company publicly commits to the brand promise by launching the marketing campaign.

4. In Step Four, your company must communicate the brand promise to the target audience: If it isn’t received by way of the right channels, it can’t be effective.

5. Finally, in Step Five your company must fulfill the brand promise, or the promise will be largely worthless.

This cycle provides guidance about the resources the company must dedicate to the various aspects of brand building. How much should it dedicate to understanding customers? How much to designing and issuing a brand promise? How much to broadcasting and communicating it? And how much to ensuring that the key aspects of the brand promise are delivered? As the company repeats the cycle, it learns more about its strategic challenges and how to account for customer and competitor shifts.

The ultimate goal of a marketing campaign should be to go through the brand promise cycle often enough that your customers stop wondering whether you’ll make good on your promises. Once they assume that you will, they purchase out of habit rather than choice.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Photographed by James D. Love April 2021. William Hunn’s proposal to Brittney Miller included a helicopter ride over their home city of Atlanta, GA and Ms. Miller choosing one of the five engagement rings presented to her when she accepted his offer of marriage.

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Recipe for Great Content

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For several years now, the marketing gurus have been telling us that Content Marketing delievers results. Everything that you do to promote your business and your brand is useful, but Content marketing has emerged as an especially powerful strategy. But for the best Content marketing ROI, your content must address what matters to your audience–their pain points and priorities—and deliver what they value. Take care to produce content that brings these benefits to your intended audience:

  • Value: after reading or viewing your content, the Alternatively, your content may have helped them solve a problem.
  • Relevant: your content needs to relate to your audience’s life situation. Perhaps it helps them in their career, solves a relationship issue or serves to entertain them during a break. All three scenarios are perfect examples of content relevant to the person consuming it.
  • Consistent: publishing an award-winning newsletter of blog post post once and then never again does not constitute high-quality content marketing. Consistency  requires regular content of similarly high quality.

The guidelines above can help you develop a content marketing strategy that your current and potential customers will be drawn to. This is one of the most important aspects of Content Marketing—it’s all about your audience.

Furthermore, as you consider the platforms and delivery formats for your content, start by considering your audience. If social media will be used (and it most likely will be used), pay attention to the platforms that your target audience follows and trusts. Successful content provides value. In sum, you can better fulfill customer needs by understanding what they want from your business.

Updating existing content should be part of your content marketing strategy if your business has already started content marketing. Plus, updating existing content will benefit other aspects of your digital marketing strategy, including search engine optimization.

Keep your content engaging and easy to understand. If your Content Marketing Strategy includes longer blog posts, whitepapers or eBooks, they must be well presented and easy to read. Content that is hard to digest because it is challenging to understand rarely goes viral. Short sentences almost always beat long-winded explanations. If you offer video content, think about your presentation style and the technology used to record your content.

Content marketing is a great way to connect with current customer base and reach new ones. As with every form of digital marketing, a strategic approach is the most likely to succeed. Content marketing means being consistent, relevant to your audience, delivering value, most of all.

Evergage’s 2019 Trends in Personalization Survey Report found that 88 % of marketers felt personalization helped them deliver superior customer experiences, while 59 % felt it increased loyalty, and another 50 % saw a measurable ROI from personalization efforts.

Personalization doesn’t just mean dropping a customer’s name into an email. It means making your brand story come alive through relatable content and storytelling that connects on an emotional level, personalized to the customer’s current relationship with your brand.

In case you hadn’t noticed, customer-generated content carries great credibility and is a powerful for creating meaningful and influential content. Testimonials that feature your devoted customers can be used on your website. Positive online reviews are also very helpful, but the detailed and personalized stories presented in testimonials are known to surpass good reviews.

Your customers are sophisticated enough to realize that the goal of your marketing is to increase sales and leads; that knowledge can cause some to question the trustworthiness and authenticity of what you present. That potential for doubt is why successful Content Marketing Strategies include user-generated content to communicate first-person, relatable, credible experiences with your products and services.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: New Orleans, LA by way of New Bedford, MA chef Lagasse showcased his talents during Grand Cayman’s January 2018 Cayman Cookout, a premier culinary event.

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7 Personal Brand Building Blocks

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OK, it’s like this—- if you’re not sure whether or not you have a personal brand and you don’t know what to make of it even if you do, you’ve come to the right place. Today, we’ll examine the business strategy known as the personal brand and talk about why you want to develop one for yourself. The short answer is, an effective personal brand is an excellent marketing tool.

Your personal brand helps you to clearly define your company and its purpose, describe the value you bring to clients, articulate what sets you apart from competitors and helps you to build and sustain a community of loyal clients who will be happy to give you repeat business and refer still more clients to you. A personal brand serves to establish you as a known quantity, familiar and trustworthy, a go-to expert in your field. Those with a respected personal brand have a high perceived value and that attracts clients. Are you ready to explore personal brand building blocks?

Authenticity

Your clients and prospects have no desire to interact with a focus-grouped and sanitized version of who and what you think they want to see. Clients and prospects would like to know you, i.e., the part of you that culturally accepted boundaries would incline you to share. It’s akin to being emotionally available.

It takes some courage. Sometimes it means you’ll take a public stand that may not be universally popular. If you can appropriately define your boundaries (something that also requires courage, along with self-awareness), the practice works for introverts and extroverts.

Visuals

 It will be to your advantage to maintain consistency in how you present your personal brand, to make it easy for you to be recognized. Develop a visual repertoire that represents you well and makes you and your company memorable in the best way. Create a look that epitomizes you and your company and include your branded elements of style in all visuals:

  • A logo that is used consistently in all media placements
  • Your profile photo that is used consistently in all media
  • Consistent cover and background images used in all media
  • Specific colors used in all media
  • Consistent style of dress when your photo is included in all media representations

Story

Your story can be quite simply, what motivated you to go into business as told through the experiences that brought you to where you are now. Storytelling is used as a marketing strategy and your personal brand is an integral component. Be sure to emphasize that it is the quality of your product or service, as well as the attention paid to the needs of clients, that guides your company. Your emphasis on the importance of meeting the needs of clients and exceeding their expectations on every metric is another must-do.

Expertise

Establishing yourself as an expert is the key component of being in business, even if you’re selling popcorn. Your expertise is the foundation of your reputation and the trust that clients, referral sources and prospects have for you. Showcase your expertise through content marketing, public speaking, interviews and direct interactions with colleagues, peers and prospective clients. 

Visibility

Half of life is about just showing up, as some very wise person said many years ago. Along with your regularly updated online presence, remember to seek out opportunities to appear in traditional print media outlets and to make personal appearances. If you are a decent writer, learn to repurpose your blog or newsletter posts by offering selected pieces to the editor of a media outlet that covers your business sector.

Whether IRL or virtually, attend three or four professional or business association meetings each year. It’s thrilling if you’re asked to be a headliner or a panelist, but just being in the crowd presents many advantages. You can network and meet people who you want to know. You might even meet a good prospect or referral source. You’ll grow and strengthen your professional network. You’ll enjoy the experiences.

Value

A key component of building a personal brand is first developing an understanding and awareness of what motivates clients to do business with you and then developing the ability to communicate it clearly and succinctly in your sales pitches and marketing materials. Work on all the ways you can express your value, the why of doing business with you. Maybe you’ll be able to distill your value proposition down to a single sentence that you can use when asked you to describe yourself and your venture. 

Relationships

Who you know and who knows you are important as you spread the good word about your personal brand. Through your relationships you will receive introductions to others and will expand your network and influence. The list of supporters, referral sources and clients that you accumulate will result in testimonials that speak directly to your character. People do business with people they know and like; they do even more business with people they know and trust.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Anna Wintour, “Nuclear Wintour, ” powerhouse Editor-in-Chief at Vogue Magazine (America) and Global Chief Content Officer at Conde Nast, arrives at the Chanel ready-to-wear collection fashion show in Paris on March 3, 2014.

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What the Elevator Pitch Must Do in 2022  

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Yet another pandemic-era reboot that everyone who earns a living would be wise to make is how you introduce your professional self to prospective clients, a potential new employer, or your colleagues and peers. In-person meetings and events are reappearing and your clients are returning to the office, maybe reluctantly and just a couple of days a week. There are advantages to getting back into the swing of things, but your face2face interaction skills may have become a little rusty from lack of use.

I recently attended a virtual meeting of about 15 people and since we didn’t really know each other, we were asked to introduce ourselves and say a little something about our professional background and current role—- in other words, everyone gave an Elevator Pitch. Most of us were a little flabby because that muscle hadn’t been flexed in many months.

But hitting the restart button and expecting your 2-fer Elevator Pitch/ self-introduction to slide off your tongue the way it did in January 2020 is magical thinking. Navigating life and business in the New Normal requires a skill set update.

Remember that the purpose of an Elevator Pitch is to facilitate the growth of your network and your business. In a good Elevator Pitch, you persuasively communicate your value proposition and help prospects understand what you can do for them. A well- worded pitch will express the purpose and usefulness of your business and make clear what sets it apart from alternatives offered by competitors.

Craft your Elevator Pitch to:

1). Capture the attention of prospects and entice them to devote valuable time to listening to you tell them why your product or service might interest them.

2). Help prospects see a possible role for your product or service in their organization.

The prospect

In-depth and continuously updated knowledge of your target customer groups is a given, so you’ll know who you’re selling to. What do you offer that they might need and value? How can your product or service help them to either achieve objectives or solve/ avoid problems? What might your prospects find worrisome in 2022 and how have they managed that challenge so far?

Taking a few moments to think about these questions will help steer your pitch in the right direction and lead to what you’d like prospects to remember about you and your business. The goal is to make your pitch powerful yet succinct, clearly articulating why prospective customers should choose you.

Your value

What are the unique attributes and selling points of your product or service? Understanding the value you deliver will bring to the forefront talking points that prospects want to hear. Keep your customers, competencies and your competitors in mind as you develop your value proposition. Your task is to recognize and articulate what differentiates your company and how you are uniquely positioned to more effectively, quickly, or inexpensively solve problems and help customers achieve objectives, as compared to the competition.

BTW, your main competitor is inertia. Doing nothing is a popular “solution” because it’s easy and people think they’re saving money. Can your pitch motivate listeners to become customers? Assess the response your pitch receives from different customer groups and make adjustments where necessary.

How you say it

Experts recommend that you limit your Elevator Pitch to about 30 seconds and 75 words. Ideally, your little story will be clear, concise and compelling. Fine tune the wording to ensure that you express your company’s (and your own) unique value proposition in uncomplicated language that resonates. The ideal pitch will also be adaptable and easily made longer or shorter to fit different contexts.

Do it well and you’ll make a memorable first impression on a potential client (or new employer). A good Elevator Pitch in your back pocket makes it easier to start conversations off on the right foot, with the ultimate goal of discovering or creating opportunities. The process needed to create your pitch will take not only time, but also face2face experiences before you get it the way you need it.

In 2022 and beyond, all sales and marketing messages must be digestible in mere seconds if you intend to hold a listener’s attention. Clearly and concisely roll out a maximum of three or four selling points known to intrigue prospective customers and become persuasive and memorable takeaways.

  • What you do

Identify the need for your product. Encourage your listener to become interested in your products and services. Show that there is demand for what you provide.

  • For whom you do it

Describe your product-market fit with a powerful sound-bite that sums up in a sentence or two the customers you usually work with and why they do business with you.

  • The value delivered

The listener is more likely to trust your solution when it’s presented as an easy-to-picture remedy that gets the job done. After you establish the need, briefly explain how or why your solution works, based on real-life examples.

When and where to pitch

To more consistently recognize circumstances when it would be appropriate to present your elevator pitch, train yourself to be hyper-aware of your surroundings and the people you meet. Opportunities to deliver your Elevator Pitch don’t always occur where and when we might expect. Do not overlook casual settings as places to meet and interact with potential customers or employers. A wedding you attend, a running group or book club you join, a summer holiday barbecue, or chatting in line at the grocery store can lead to a door-opening, satisfying or lucrative discovery.

Follow-up

Conclude your Elevator Pitch with a call-to-action when the listener shows an active interest in the use and outcomes of your products or services. Ask for a card and offer yours, so that everyone’s website and social media sites can be viewed. Better still, offer to send the link to a newsletter, podcast, blog post or other source that addresses the topic or questions that were raised. You’re looking to establish legitimacy and expertise, build a relationship that leads to trust and rake in some billable hours.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: © Associated Press President John F. Kennedy visited Tirana, Albania while on a state visit to Europe June 23 – July 2, 1963.

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5-Star Client Onboarding Leads to Smooth Sailing

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Hallelujah, you’ve just brought in a client, and a good one. You and the team are psyched to start working and prove your bona fides but may I suggest that you slow down and present what might be called a “soft opening” for your new client? While you want to honor deadlines, it’s good business to first give new clients a proper introduction to your company, an opportunity to understand how his/her team and yours will pleasantly and efficiently get the job done.

This first order of business is a powerful move purposed to set the stage for a mutually satisfying working partnership. As it is for so many important goals, when your intention is to develop positive and long-lasting client relationships, it makes sense to begin with the end in mind. When you consider the big picture you’ll realize that an effective client retention strategy actually starts with good onboarding.

Onboarding is a series of choreographed actions that introduce new clients to your company and show them how to access and utilize the value in your products, services and organization—-everything that made them recognize you as The One. Your onboarding program sets the tone for productive client-company relationships, signaling that client expectations will be met and reconfirming that selecting you to do business with was a wise choice. Ideally, the onboarding experience you present will amplify your clients’ trust and confidence in you and your organization, resulting in referrals, recommendations and repeat business.

Onboarding is integral to client retention and limiting client churn, meaning one-and-done assignments. I don’t have to remind you that it costs at least five times the resources— your time and money—- to land a new client than it does to keep those you have. There will always be one-off projects but continually starting at zero and chasing prospects is expensive in terms of time, money and energy.

The top two reasons for client churn are 1) the client doesn’t understand your product; and 2) the client doesn’t know how to obtain the expected value from the product. Your thoughtfully designed and well-presented 5-star onboarding protocols can solve both problems. Here’s how you can greet new clients and start persuading them to become long-time fans and devotees of your organization.

Onboarding building blocks

Along with a welcome email, in which you thank the client for choosing your company over the other potential options and letting the client know how excited you are to work together, a 5-star onboarding recipe can include all or some of the following. Making the client and his/ her team feel confident in and comfortable with you and your team is the onboarding purpose.

  • Video tutorial
  • Live online or in-person product training
  • Follow-up video or phone call to confirm that the client is properly using the product or service purchased and is satisfied with the results and outcomes (and to troubleshoot where necessary)
  • In- person or videoconference meeting to introduce your project team and the client’s team, to discuss roles, milestones, invoicing schedules, reporting updates and the like
  • Company logo swag items and/ or a gift basket delivered to the client

The good news is that your new client already likes and trusts you and believes in your product or service and that’s why the decision to work with your organization was made. Build on these front-loaded advantages by creating an onboarding method that shows clients how to have positive experiences when using your product or service and working with your team. Your onboarding process is a follow-up step of the promises made in your sales talking points.

The onboarding process has lasting benefits for your clients and your business. Onboarding makes clients’ lives easy. It is vital to lowering client acquisition costs, increasing client retention, increasing the average lifetime value of clients and supports business growth.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: Super yacht Saint Nicolas (230′ 4″/ 70.2 m) at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival

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Is It Time for a Price Increase?

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We’re here to talk about pricing today, a favorite subject of mine, but I admit the process is tricky. Pricing is more important than you might think because if you don’t get it right you either won’t sell much, because prospects and customers feel you’re too expensive, or you’ll sell but won’t make as much money as you could, because you’ve priced too low. Pricing B2B services can be a challenge. You can’t walk into a couple of stores or check on line and comparison shop your competitors, so competition-based pricing doesn’t work. Value-based pricing is the best option for B2B services.

So that you can at least maintain, if not increase, profitability in these unstable times, business leaders and owners would be wise to evaluate the pricing of their products and services and make adjustments when necessary. Revenue and profit are tied to more than sales volume. The most important driver of sales revenue, after ensuring that production or acquisition costs are covered by the price, is the value that clients assign to your products and services. I suppose that’s another compelling reason why B2B services are most successfully priced according to the value and ROI they bring to your customers.

Conducting basic market research will help you discover or confirm the purpose, must-haves, priorities and ROI that drive the confidence in and sales of your products and services. As usual, knowing the customer means everything. Whether you get them on the phone or take them out to lunch, speak to three or four of your best clients to determine which outcomes and benefits, tangible and intangible, matter most. You want to obtain insight into how your products or services bring ROI to clients. Once you understand what your offerings enable clients to do, align your price with the value they bring. Furthermore, include in your marketing messages those benefits that clients with whom you’ve spoken indicated are the most highly prized.

When announcing price increases, it may be useful to explain your increased costs and how long it’s been since your prices have been adjusted. Don’t shy away from highlighting how much your clients have raised their prices. For clients who may be struggling, consider “grandfathering” to continue the pricing for the product or service they buy most often. You could also soften the blow of price increases by designing product and service options to accommodate price-sensitive clients. No-frills, economy versions of your offerings may be welcomed by some. Consider also indirect price increases, such as adding surcharges for expedited shipping, longer payment terms, rush orders and for performing small projects.

Charging one price for your products and services is, in fact, limiting for both you and your clients. The buying decision may be simpler, but it leaves no room for clients to upgrade and you to bring in additional revenue from upselling.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: The banker from the board game Monopoly ™, which was patented by Parker Brothers in 1935.

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How Would an Investor Judge Your Company?

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Recently, I was invited to judge a pitch contest for start-up entrepreneurs that will be hosted by the business incubator where I teach courses and workshops—-business plan writing, branding, selling skills and marketing. As I reviewed the list of questions that pitch contestants will address, I realized that those same questions mostly apply to those who already operate a business.

Every Freelance consultant and business owner should be able to answer pitch contest questions because when you think about it, selling products and services to clients isn’t altogether different from pitching a start-up to investors. So why don’t we flip the script and imagine that you’re an investor who’ll hear a pitch about your own business, delivered by your alter ego self?

An investor pitch outline is a useful guide to metrics and other critical elements that have a big impact. When business owners and leaders address these key performance indicators, a powerful enterprise will result.

Introduction–Who are you?

Introduce yourself with a 30-60 second elevator pitch. Give a brief overview of the type of solutions—products and/ or services—that the business provides and the primary benefits derived. Identify also one or two major client groups.

Purpose–What is the company’s reason for being?

Name the pain that the solution provided by your company’s products and services will eliminate. Paint a verbal picture to make the problem your products or services solve understandable to prospective clients. Give a succinct yet compelling description of the detrimental impact of not having your solution available, which could include loss of market share or dominance, diminished revenue, or even legal penalties.

Solutions–The value proposition that motivates clients to pay

What is the “fix” that resolves the pain or problem and therefore brings value that clients are willing to pay for? Describe or demonstrate how your solution resolves the pain and solves problem—how will the product or service directly address the problem and deliver the solution?

Detail two or three noteworthy benefits that your clients, or the client’s customers, will derive when your company’s solution is used. Benefits speak to most clients, whereas features appeal to technophiles. Overall, benefits are a more powerful sell, especially those that directly address the pain points you described. Be careful to limit industry-specific jargon so that your prospect will not feel intimidated.

Function–Prove that your product or service works

If you sell a technical solution, for example software as a service, explain in layman’s terms a brief summary of how the product works and why it’s useful. Include, as appropriate and helpful, product photos, screen shots, diagrams, drawings, etc.

Market reach–How much demand for your solutions?

Purely an FYI question and the answers you discover will benefit your business tremendously. Conduct some basic market research and reconfirm the size of your target market. Post-pandemic data could be available in some cases and that’s the data you want to examine. In order to make an intelligent plan for the future of your organization, you need to know, as confirmed by objective data, where your market is going and what’s trending.

If you’ve been thinking that a pivot might make sense, you’d be wise to know in advance what you can successfully pivot into—ideally, a sector that’s growing and that you have the expertise and contacts to enter.

Credible sources of business data include Forrester Research, Gartner Global Research, local trade journals, professional association research, the business section of The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other newspapers that address business issues in depth and also business data published by the U.S. Census/ Business and Economy data. Show your potential investor that there is a growing and sustainable group of potential buyers for your products or services.

Business (revenue) model—How will you find customers and make money?

Here’s another FYI question that you should periodically revisit, especially in the post-COVID era. The shutdown caused massive turmoil for the independently employed, fueled by the hollowing out of major industries. The work from home culture (which is waning) has made accessing potential clients tremendously difficult.

Now seems like an ideal time to re-examine how you expect to make money over the next 12-24 months. Determining what clients are willing to pay to do business with you is another question you need to address. Price to profit.

Focus on how the company generates its primary revenue stream(s). Review and clarify the usual steps of the buying process, including how long that process usually takes. Think about the job title of the decision-maker on the client’s team, as well as the usual job titles of the end user of the product or service. Furthermore, consider who the key influencers might be in the buying decision process, the steps are needed to achieve a sale and the usual length of time involved in the sales cycle.

Go-to-market—What’s the sales strategy?

Update the strategy you’ll follow for lead generation, inbound and outbound marketing outreach tactics. Discuss how product and service sales are executed—at your company office or retail location, at the client’s office (because you work from home), e-commerce via your website or other platform.

Identify whatever strategic partnerships or consignment arrangements that are in place (or are being negotiated). Identify who is responsible for selling—is it you, Freelancer friend, or do you split the sales function with a co-founder, or has the company hired sales reps?

The team—Who’s running the show?

If your company has co-founders or a management team, name them and describe everyone’s role. Describe also the job titles and functions of any part-time or full-time employees. If certain functions are outsourced, e.g., accounting, legal, payroll, or bookkeeping, document and describe their roles.

The purpose here is to reassure the prospective investor that your company is well-managed, that your solutions will be delivered as promised and that the company is capable of routinely meeting or exceeding client expectations.

Financial projections—Show me the money

Absolutely, your potential investor will take a keen interest in the state of your venture’s finances. You, the owner, must clearly demonstrate that you are reasonably adept at managing the company’s finances (even if your real talent is marketing and sales). At the very least, learn to get comfortable with interpreting the Profit & Loss (Income) statement, the Balance Sheet and the Cash-flow Statement.

Hiring an accountant, as well as a bookkeeper who is more than a record keeper and has a feel for financial management, will be tremendously helpful regardless of your talent for handling finances.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Image: A resident of the New England Aquarium shark tank in Boston, MA.

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A 360 Degree View of Your Brand

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I recently gave a talk on branding, a term that we know gets used quite a bit, but I wonder if Freelance consultants and business owners fully understand what a brand means and how the brand can be put to work in service of the business? It is vitally important to first, recognize certain identifying characteristics of the business, which need not be complex or unique, and then spin those characteristics into a mythology or a story, a brand narrative or creation story, that is then packaged and marketed as a brand, destined to become a powerful selling tool.

Depending on your business, you might even build a brand around your location. Maybe you own a restaurant, or a hardware store, in Idaho. Common impressions that Idaho natives and Americans in general have about Idaho—rugged, outdoorsy, resilient, folksy, friendly, mountainous, beautiful—can be used to build a distinctive and compelling brand narrative. The essence of Idaho can become a defining characteristic of the brand.

Other branding possibilities are grandmas recipes (restaurants), the size of the establishment (large and comprehensive or small and curated), the longevity of the business, the number of generations that the same family has owned and operated the business, prestige clientele, expertise in a niche market, or superb customer service.

The function of a brand is to communicate. The brand is the reputation of the business. What a business leader must decide is the primary message that should be communicated and how to articulate that message.

What can the brand tell current and prospective customers? The brand tells them what to expect when doing business with you and your company—the available products and services, that the business can be trusted to deliver what they expect it to deliver, for starters. Branding is about reassuring. Branding is about consistency, predictability, trust, dependability, familiarity, the customer experience and comfort.

If the business owner or leader does it right, the brand will become habit-forming and the list of repeat customers will grow. Customers will be motivated to refer their friends, family and colleagues to the business. They will endorse the business on rating sites like Angie’s List, Yelp and Trip Advisor.

When examining and/or refreshing the brand, remember that the brand is two-sided. There is the internal brand and the (better-known) external brand. The internal brand represents what the business owner and leaders feel describes the brand. The external brand is how the business is perceived by the public, i.e., customers. The internal brand is self-image and the external brand is reputation.

It’s easier to start the brand examination internally—what do you, business owner or leader, want your organization to be known for? What do you interpret as its competitive advantages? What do you see as the value proposition or distinguishing characteristics?

The external view can be assessed by talking to customers, whether the best customers or occasional users of the products or services. In both cases, it’s important to ascertain what has persuaded them to do business with you. What brought them to your establishment, how do they feel about the experience and was the problem solved or objective achieved? Who is motivated to do business with you again and why? Who will not do business again with you and why?

In this way, business owners and leaders can determine what customers and prospects consider to be the defining competitive advantages and selling points. Conversations, face-2-face or by social media, and customer surveys are among the useful ways to learn what makes a difference and keeps customers coming back—or drives them away. If something can be summed up in a clever tagline, so much the better. Most of all, the business must promote what customers value most and express that message in language and symbols that will resonate.

When the value proposition, i.e., the value that the products or services will deliver to customers, perceived competitive advantages and selling points have been recognized and articulated, the business owner and leaders can confidently spread the word by way of promotional channels that customers and prospects trust and put the brand to work for the business.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: Dwayne Johnson, aka “The Rock,” whose approach to branding has both a physical and professional dimension.

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Pricing B2B Services

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According to Dorie Clark (no relation), Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and author of Entrepreneurial You (2017), there are four pricing strategies that Freelance consultants might use, depending on the project at hand and the relationship you have, or would like to have, with the client. It is crucial to follow a pricing strategy that will support your objective to persuade the client that your prices are fair, your solution will be effective and you are the right person to hire.

Hourly billing. The most straightforward pricing strategy is to bill clients by the hour. When you are unsure of the number of hours it will take to complete a project, perhaps because your responsibilities will vary from week to week or month to month, then an hourly rate pricing strategy is reasonable. On the other hand, if you do have a good idea of the number of hours that should be necessary to complete the job, an hourly billing strategy is also reasonable, particularly for one-off assignments or sporadic work with the client.

You can then provide a reliable project estimate, based on your hourly rate for the work proposed and the anticipated number of hours, and that information will be reassuring to the client. But if you underestimate the time needed to complete the assignment the downside of this strategy will emerge, because your final price will overshoot your estimate and your client may not be thrilled.

Another potential downside to hourly billing is the level of scrutiny that it invites. Some clients may challenge the number of hours you record for the tasks involved and that is uncomfortable.

Set fee for services. This pricing strategy requires the Freelance consultant to develop a standard suite of services, where all related tasks are included and there is one price for the whole package. “Productized services” is the term pricing experts use for this strategy. If certain of your services are frequently requested, make life easier for yourself and your clients and create a standard rate sheet for services you perform most often.

For example, if you often conduct half or full-day workshops, billing a flat fee for all tasks involved is a more favorable strategy than billing separately and hourly for the associated tasks. Clients are comfortable accepting a flat fee because the project price is all-inclusive, predictable and transparent. Furthermore, the project specs describe your duties and discourage “scope creep,” those extra unpaid tasks that some clients like to sneak in. If the client would like an extra service or two, then you’ll price those separately and not be tricked or coerced into giving away free labor.

Value-based pricing. Evangelized by Alan Weiss, elite management consultant to multinational companies such as Merck Pharmaceuticals and author of dozens of books, including (Million Dollar Consulting [1992]), this strategy hinges on what Weiss calls “a value-based project fee structure.”

You begin by having a detailed conversation with the prospect so that you will understand the project requirements and the project’s relevance, urgency and impact on the organization. In other words, you and your prospect will achieve mutual agreement on the value of the project to the business. Weiss says that it’s useful to ask questions such as, “What would be the value to the company if this weren’t a problem?” or “What impact would it have if you could do XYZ better?”

Dorie Clark recommends the value-based pricing strategy for Freelancers who work with Fortune 500 companies, because value-based pricing is a way to help the prospect envision and appreciate the value of the right outcomes delivered at the right time. Clark feels it is appropriate to charge a higher project fee when working with big-budget clients because the stakes are so much higher.

Your work for a Fortune 500 company might, for example, create $10 million in new value, whereas even a dramatic improvement for a small not-for-profit organization may only enhance the bottom line by $10,000. Once the prospective client understands the full value that your work will bring to the organization, your fee — a tiny percentage of the overall gain — will in theory seem trivial in comparison.

Retainer agreements. These are an excellent arrangement because predictability is a wonderful thing for both you and the client. Once it is established that you’ll work a more-or-less fixed number of hours per week or month on a certain assignment or category of assignments and a comfortable relationship develops, by all means suggest that you create a monthly retainer agreement. Bring evidence of 6 – 12 invoices to bolster your case.

In the retainer pricing strategy, the client pays the Freelancer a flat fee every month for on-demand access to your services (and that could be anywhere from $500/month to a four or even five figure sum). This allows you to depend on a certain amount of money each month, no matter what. The downside is that unless you’re careful, your client may take advantage of the “all you can eat” pricing by monopolizing your time.

To prevent abuse, be very clear upfront about who can contact you and for which types of services. It is also advisable to specify the hours that you’ll be available ( 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM or longer?), the protocol for weekends and holidays and the methods of contact—email, phone and/or text. You’ll also want to specify whether they only have access to your advice, or if there are specific deliverables you may be asked to produce (for example, you might also agree to generate content for social media or the company newsletter). As you gain more experience and develop long-term relationships with clients, you will be able to propose retainer agreements and institute more control over your monthly income.

Freelancers who succeed are those who are appreciated for the value they bring to their clients’ organizations. An important building block that supports how you communicate your value to the client is your pricing strategy. Study the pricing options discussed above and choose the most advantageous for you and your client.

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: Courtesy of the Everett Collection. Dink (Margaret Nolan) gives James Bond (Sean Connery) a massage in Goldfinger (1964).

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Client Retention: Surpass the Minimum

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In 1990, the consulting group Bain & Company and Earl Sasser of the Harvard Business School analyzed the costs and revenues derived from serving clients over their entire purchasing life cycle and found that regardless of the industry, the high cost of acquiring clients will render many business relationships unprofitable during their early years.

Acquiring a new client can cost up to five times more than it does to retain a current client.  It is only over time, when the cost of serving a long-term client falls as the volume of their purchases rises, that these relationships generate big returns.

The Bain-HBS review found that when the client retention rate increases by 5%, profits increase by 25% – 95%.  Also, long-term clients are more likely to refer new clients to the business and increase sales revenues and profits accordingly.

That said, an ongoing client retention strategy is a must-do for all Freelance consultants and business owners.  Read on and discover how your organization can embed client retention practices in nearly every step of your client interactions.

Context and expectations

When you propose a solution designed to help your client resolve a problem or achieve an objective, include in the conversation your rationale for presenting that particular path rather than another.  Make it possible for the client to better appreciate your decision-making process and divulge how you carefully considered his/her priorities, values, budget, staffing, or other factors that impacted your recommended solution.

We may infrequently discuss the behind-the-scenes thinking that guides the possibilities we envision for a client and his/her organization.  Revealing your big picture thinking demonstrates the depth of the value you attach to the client and his/her unique circumstances and that builds loyalty, trust and a good relationship.

Become an adviser

Don’t shy away from asking questions that will surface your client’s sometimes unexpressed expectations or concerns.  You may discover a solution that is ideally tailored to the clients’ needs when you employ the consultative approach to selling.  You and your client can collaborate on the development of the solution if s/he is comfortable with that process.  Buy-in is a given when the client is a co-author of the process.

Along the way, let your client know what to expect as the solution is implemented; it will also be helpful to review what success looks like.  Communicate often, so that the client understands where you are with the project, especially as regards milestones, Key Performance Indicators, the deadline and other agreed-upon metrics.

Moreover, depending on your product or service line, recommend services to your clients, based on their previous purchases.  According to a 2015 survey of marketers, this personalized touch generates a high ROI.  It shows that you’ve paid attention to client preferences and it is a compliment.

Finally, we are nearing Holiday time.  Make sure that you send cards to clients you’ve interacted with over the past five years.  Who among us does not appreciate a card at this time of year, when we reach out to those who matter?

Thanks for reading,

Kim

Photograph: Corine Vermuelen (2013)  Alicia and John George, owners of Motor City Java House in Detroit’s Brightmoor neighborhood