You have an excuse to tell everybody, including those who were not interested before, about this new product, or services and where and why it is better for your customers.

This does not mean a list of new features! please No. This means little to your potential customers. They really want to know what is in it for them.

So, this week David Edgington is releasing a new book. This is a Book on Wolseley Stationary Engines. it is in fact an upgraded version of his previous publication on that subject. unlike many other industries, David increases his knowledge as new information sources are uncovered.

So, how were we to increase interest?

Well firstly we had pre announced the book on his web site, and this encouraged others to talk about it too. Once he had the publication ready to be printed, I suggested we did a short interview. We can a ‘trial run, which lasted about 2 hours and had a few retakes’ and then a week later, we did it again.  being aware of the questions and having time to think about what he would say, and not know being unaware how things would work, we started… and completed the whole interview in one take!

The video was uploaded to Youtube yesterday, and already over 30 people have viewed it, and two other web sites are now linking to it.

David and I are very pleased with the outcome, even though all the clips of me ended on the cutting room floor!!!!  Please do not take my word for it, have a look yourself and see how ‘easy’ it is.  Here is the link

The equipment is more advanced than just a web cam. I used an HD quality Digital Video camera,  USB Microphone and software to record, edit and render the final cut. My green screen, lights and teleprompter were not needed this time, but I use them for many of my own presentations. However, my total investment in equipment so far is around £ 1,200 (Not including the PC and Laptop used)

My smart way to combat this is to put a picture on my business card. So, at least everybody else will find it easy to remember me!  Maybe they will follow the lead and soon I can have photos of all my contacts on the laptop to remind me what they look like.

Ok, so you need a photo. Well that has to be easy because cameras are everywhere and we all have them including in our phones etc.  I can put my digital camera on delayed shot and run of loads till I have the right ‘face’ or use the web cam.  It does not matter if the lighting on the photo is a little off, because clever software like Photoshop allows you to edit, crop and change the brightness/contrast until you have what you need. No, No, No, NO NO NO.

Please let us start again. This photo will be for people to recognise you, and if you follow my lead it will soon be on your business card, your email signature, your Facebook, LinkedIn and website profiles. So why not have a good photo taken in the first place – with proper lighting. That requires no ‘touching’ except a few re-size operations. Have the photo taken with the assistance of a professional portrait photographer. Let them concentrate on taking the photo – you on assuming the appropriate pose. You may want to really make good use of the session and take a couple of jackets. Do you want one with or without a tie? Just the head shot is great for small profile photos, but you may want a three quarter length sitting or standing pose too. So, just like a fashion model, turn up with a few things to wear.  They will run off 40-50 or more photos till you have the right look. I suggest you take them away and ask a few people’s views before you settle on ‘the one’ – Don’t forget to take note of the photographer’s recommendations too.

My last tip is that you may want to ‘practice a few expressions before you go’, because what ‘feels’ like a broad smile, may not look the same when checked in the mirror. (Maybe I should have been vainer during my formative years?)

Now, with a much better photo to work with, you can resize your picture to create all those different versions and be proud.

One very easy way around this situation is the use of a Blog. – If you do not have an easy way to add news to your web site, then why not use a blog, linked to, but separate to your web site upon which you can post news and product launches.

So the first question is which blog system to use?

There are free blog sites onto which you can setup your company blog, but I would respectfully suggest that this is not good place to put your company information. You do not have guarantees of quality, control or the ability to customize.

There are also charged for blog sites onto which you can buy space, but although better, there are still many restrictions with the space, content, and layout.

We mostly host WordPress based web sites. These use the very popular WordPress blog format, but as we host the content, then we have total control over the system. WordPress has many dozens of ‘plug-ins’ and pre-defined layouts available.  By hosting ourselves, we can use any of these and then change anything, and so choose exactly the layout or options, and even be able to integrate information with another web site.

We can then provide a ‘managed’ blog service, where the customer has full control and can add pages and blog items where and when they want to, but we retain a login to help with system updates and installing any widgets or plug-in to deliver more features to your customers.

Such added value items often include

• Anti-Spam monitoring of comments added
• Pages that are Search Engine Friendly
• Ability to Tweet announcements of new posts
• Create Google Analytics monitoring of the blog
• Add videos from U-tube or upload your own

The schools are going back in the next two weeks, so there may be some fall out from that, but otherwise we are going to be ok till the winter flu period.

Can senior staff work from home and still be valuable?  Would they be able to use the company email and what about phone calls?

What happens if key personnel are unable to make it to the office. Who does the data backups for instance?

Remember: Failure to Plan is planning to fail.

You will want your offers, or marketing messages to be out there between 4 and 6 weeks from the 25th December. That means you only have a few weeks to make plans and start getting everything into place. A last minute email on Christmas Eve is going to be too late for anything.

How does your market react to this festival. Is it a time of boom or bust?

Who makes purchases at this time. Remember that most items are going to be presents, so it is not your target users that purchase, but the people near and dear to yoru target audience that purchase. So, you either need to nudge your targets with things they can pass on, or you need to attract the attention of the present purchasers directly.

There are no answers in this post becuase the subject is too varied for a genereal answer. That is why I raise the flag so early. You need to put on your thinking caps and cast your mind back to last year.

There are actually very few bad meetings. The law of the networking jungle takes care of that. Simply a badly organised meeting with members not doing the business will go one of three ways.

1. It will whither as people stop attending and eventually close
2. The core members will just turn in on themselves and no longer welcome new members
3. The meeting may limp on within a larger group till the management pull the plug.

When you look at larger groups that have multiple meetings, it is possible to find a meeting that is not working. Now when you have groups where attendance is NOT mandatory, there are going to be times when some people do not attend.  So you can be unfortunate to visit one the week when the main stalwarts of that meeting are otherwise engaged. This does not mean that the next week will be the same. Indeed it can also work the other way. A good speaker can liven an otherwise dull meeting.

So when you are hunting for new groups to work with, I suggest you consider these points.

1. Attend ALL the meeting you can find in your area, or within reasonable traveling, even where they may belong to the same group.  You do need to take note that if you join the meeting you will be making the trip on a regular basis.
2. Try and find out how long the group has been established and how long your local meeting has been going.  It is good to join an evolving and growing group, but not before they have momentum.
3. Do not assume that one bad meeting tarnishes that locality for all meetings and do not project that view onto an entire group, go to another meeting of the same group at a different location to compare.
4. If a meeting is lifted by a good speaker or other key person. Consider what it would have been like without them. Or go back again and see for yourself.

This will be part of the ‘Work the Room Box Set’ that will be shipping at the end of this month, and also part of the ‘Work the Room Workshop’.

4N is an interesting concept in that it was born from the founders experience with BNI. For me, it mixes the formal structure of BNI with the more open networking ideas of networking between groups. There is no doubt that BNI is a very successful model, but most BNI members are within their ‘home’ group and work within that. On the other hand, the 4N gives you that option of a ‘home’ group, or even take a few groups. These you can then attend on a regular basis to grow that more intimate relationship with the regular members for referrals and co-operation. However, great results can come from the 4N experience when you ‘move around’ and visit other groups. These do not have to be just in your local area. I know of people who visit clients all over the country and make a point to try and ‘drop in’ on a 4n group that is in the area.

It is something that I am gradually building up myself, although you wonder how it is possible to follow up with contacts when you give yourself 3 or 4 meetings a week to attend. However, my old sales manager used to say ‘you line up the clients and I will find you the backup’

Well the uncomfortable truth is that it is very easy. You can send an email and put anything you like within the ‘from’ address. One of our system messages actually has NO FROM address.

When the great and the techie setup email on the internet, they allowed you to set pointers so that any email server would know where you want email to be sent. This worked very well, and still does. However, a spam message that uses your email address, or a made up email address with your domain name, can come from anywhere. Until a few years ago there was little chance of anybody telling it was not valid.

The complexity of the Internet makes it hard for fundamental changes in the structure, but they do happen over time.  An organization was setup SPF.org, and the idea adopted (and slightly altered) by Microsoft.  We can call this steps towards ‘sender authentication’ in other words setting up a process that an email server receiving a message can make some checks to see if it is from whom it is claimed.  The SPF principle is to allow domain owners to specify which email server or services, are ‘authorised’ to send email for it. Any other servers can therefore be view with suspicion.

Most quality email server programs, including those of Microsoft, can do an SPF check as part of their spam protection.

If you think it is not a problem, and you have never seen one of these emails, please consider this. It maybe that your Spam service is protecting you from such emails. But the whole idea of using your domain for spam is that the emails are not going to you. They are flooding other systems and using your domain name as the cover. Now, if one of those spam systems belongs to one of the spam list services, you may find that they Blacklist your email account. This would have the effect that other email servers using the same blacklist list, will start to refuse your email. I did a test this week and took a little used domain I own and ‘left it open to abuse’. So that I could see what was really occurring, I also removed it from spam protection so that I would see all the incoming email.  I immediately found the standard 400-500 emails daily offering Viagra and other such ‘stuff’. What surprised me that was within four days I started to receive ‘Message Undeliverable’ messages from other servers where spammers were using my domain to send emails into other systems. I saw 200 plus AN HOUR, coming into the inbox. What is even scarier is that many such spam messages are just deleted, so this 200/hour was only a fraction of what was being done ‘in my name’.

Ok, so if you are now considering the idea of implementing SPF, you will need to know how complicated it is. Well for a complete novice it is slightly daunting, but for your email service provider, it would be very easy. I would respectfully suggest you consider changing supplier if they had not already set this up for you. There are some who will claim, it is not in widespread use, so we see no point. It is that casual attitude that makes life so easy for spammers and looses my faith in my fellow IT professionals. If you think that a more proactive company should be responsible for looking after your precious email, then please contact us through our email service. www.proserviceemail.co.uk

If you would like to see a little more of what SPF is, then you can check the web site that started this http://old.openspf.org/index.html

You should also consider domain keys. This is a slightly different solution to the same problem and supporting by companies including Yahoo. I would be interested in the reaction of your supplier when you ask about this because it evolves the installation of additional software, and so is a little more ‘hassle’ to setup.  More about that in a day or so.

 So, leaving beside my problems, it seems there are around only half a dozen live issues in the average brain. Now if you are looking for an action from a customer to benefit you, it is not going to happen if you are not in the front of the brain.

 Now, if you think that I am going to suggest you email all your customers to get your product or service into one of those slots then you need to think more deeply. This is because you need to know that after the email is closed, you stay in that slot long enough to be considered.

 This is not a one hit wonder. Few of us are ever fortunate enough to be selling impulse products for a living and those that do use far more subtle methods. You see, you need to prepare the brain for your product. Once you enter the front of the brain there needs to be a reason for it to stay there. You want to be considered and contemplated.

You need a plan.

 The question for today is for you’re to find the frequency of your product offering.  I define the frequency of a product as the speed at which you need to keep up communication for your product to be ‘live’ and under consideration in the customers mind.

 Actually, frequency theory works for many things. Even in a normal conversation, where you are trying to make a point, take dating for instance. (Yes my favourite example subject!) If you tell a girl she is beautiful and you love her every other sentence, a first date is not likely to lead too much. However, if you never say it, she is not going to be impressed either. You need to find the frequency that puts your message across without ‘pressure’.

For many working within the ‘Square Mile’ around all the booming city firms, business was good. In fact so good that at certain times in the month they could go home after working only two or three hours, because of the level of fares, and tips. They claimed an increased quality of life, and more time with the family.

Now this all sounds very good for them and you think they are on to a good thing, until you hear how one driver worded his sift. He had set a daily target of what he needed to take in order to produce a good life for him and his family. I am sure that you will have a good idea of what your business needs in order to be successful. However, the flaw I saw in his ‘business plan’ was that he stopped work for the day when he achieved his target.

Why do I find this a bad tactic? – Lets try some fictitious figures.

Assume that the daily target is £500 in fares. I have no idea how accurate such a figure is for now or then, but it will do as a guide.

• In a busy day the taxi driver reaches target in three hours and goes home.
• In a reasonable day the taxi driver reaches target in seven hours.
• In a quiet day he reaches £400 at the end of eight hours work.

Now my argument is not about the actual daily target, but looking at the takings against the effort.

• On the busy day he achieved £166 / hour
• On the reasonable day he achieved £71 / hour
• On a quiet day he achieved £50 / hour

Looking at this I would reverse the logic, by saying the he should work longer hours during the busy times and go home on the quiet days. Although this is then contrary to the daily target, you still need a daily target, in order to calculate the hourly rates.

So, you now probably want to know how you should apply this to your business. Well this is all about profit for your effort. Even if you charge a fixed hourly rate, you are only making profits when you are doing work for which there is a charge being made.

Look less at the time you spend on an action and more on the profit per hour of the task. This way you will become more discerning about which activities you prioritise. I warn you that you are in for some shocks. You may well find the some regular activities are far less profitable, even though they provide a ‘regular income’.

This type of analysis is also good for focusing your mind onto taking many ‘similar’ jobs, where the effort for one can be duplicated into many, with each still paying the ‘standard rate.’  We have spent over a year in re-defining the applications that we provide to our customers. This has meant the ‘unbundling’ of all the services, and then looking for the similarities in order to create standard ‘bricks.’ We have then used those bricks to re-build the services for new and existing customers.  

We often refer to this is our own sales system as re-designing for scalabilty. The scaliabilty of a bussiness process in the abilty for it to deal with increasing numbers, without the need to increase the finite resources, such as staff. If I have to have to demonstrate to each customer how our new product works, then I am limited by the amount of time I can give to demonstrating to customers. If I could record a video and send that on a DVD to all new customers, I am now limited by the production of DVD’s. And if I make that video available online, I now have scalabilty equal to my hosting provider being able to cope with the number of downloads. So, I have achieved the closest possible to infinite scalabilty.

I will return to scalabilty again, but the message here is ‘watch you profit per hour’