Lean concepts can ensure your startup succeeds

By David Ronald

You may have had a great idea for a game-changing product and started your own business. And you may have launched your product and experienced some early success.

Before long, however, cracks began to appear and the numbers started heading in the wrong direction. Things aren’t working out quite the way you had expected.

Don’t panic. Many founders think that the first version of their product will also be the final one—in reality, however, significant refinement is almost always necessary.

Here are some suggestions for how you can use lean startup concepts, popularized by Eric Reis (http://theleanstartup.com/), to improve your business:

1. Use evidence to unlock success
Lean startup concepts move beyond favourable opinions and towards gathering valuable, usable evidence. Adopting it enables you truly observe the effects of a product, seeing it in action and recording exactly how it is received externally—it allows you to measure what works and what doesn’t. As many businesses are now adept with using analytical tools and measurement systems this shouldn’t be daunting. Think of lean as a scientific method, with change grounded in data from behavior, not whims.

2. Reprogram your attitude to failure
While I’m a fan of Ries, I also share the success story of inventor Dr Norm Larsen (http://www.wd40company.com/about/history/) to help others understand why we chose to go lean. Although he may not have realized it at the time, Larsen implemented a lean approach when he devised his most famous product: WD-40. Viewing his work as an experiment, he constantly adjusted and refined the product until satisfied, which is exactly what we do. You know why Larsen’s product is called WD-40? Because versions one to 39 all had failings.

We can learn a lot from Larsen’s persistence and approach. It shows how rethinking our attitude to failure can enable us to learn and adjust quickly, bringing us closer to success.

3. Climb aboard
The lean approach involves your entire company, not just management. For it to work, everyone needs to be invested. I’ve found that once staff are signed up and have a sense of ownership and involvement, they will work with you to achieve tangible goals. It’s all about empowerment; Team members will work towards collective success based on their individual performance, not distant corporate objectives.

I strive to create an environment where people aren’t scared to try new things or speak up when they feel adjustments should be made. This approach has helped me create a culture of collaboration and innovation, which has invigorated the company across all departments and levels.

4. Take a practical and philosophical approach
You may wonder how to maintain momentum when the business flourishes beyond the startup stage. Positive or negative, all business changes must be consistently addressed and managed. A key consideration of lean is that ultimately it’s a mindset. With the right care, attention and with the senior management team leading from the front, a lean culture can be maintained with scale and with confidence.

5. Take as much (or as little) from it as you want
Remember, when it comes to going lean you can be a fan without being fanatical. With the Ries model, we take from it what we need and tailor it to our business. Like all business approaches, nothing is set in stone. That’s the beauty of lean: It encourages constant analysis, adaptation and refinement.

It’s within the capabilities of your business to achieve success. If you value business or product development as a constant work in progress, the lean startup approach can give you the framework to help your business flourish.

Thanks for reading.

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5 secrets of successful word-of-mouth marketing campaigns

By David Ronald

Companies that achieve word-of-mouth success story typically don’t accomplish it by chance—they have, instead, thoughtfully planned and developed marketing campaigns intended to create buzz.

Examples of companies or organizations that have done a fabulous job with word-of-mouth marketing include Apple (who wasn’t talking about the new iPhone 6?) and the ALS Association (their Ice Bucket Challenge went viral in a matter of days).

(Click here to read our white paper on word-of-mouth marketing: http://bit.ly/1jAM2Ct.)

While all of these companies/organizations are completely different, they employed similar strategies in launching their campaigns.

To follow in their footsteps, your WOM (word-of-mouth) marketing should:

1. Be unique—in order for your campaign to be effective, irrespective of whether you’re offering a new product or service, it has to be unique. In the examples above, the companies offered something that no one before had ever offered. While you may not have the means to develop an entirely new unique product line, you do have the means to think about marketing that product in a way that is creative and engaging.

2. Send a message—just as important as being unique is sending a message that meets consumer needs. People don’t just love Apple because their products perform better – they love Apple because their products are trendy, user-friendly, and look awesome. When you purchase an Apple product, you’re saying, “I’m hip,” or “I’m technologically savvy,” (ie, the message that Apple sends to its customers is that an Apple product will make you cool). If you want people to talk about your product, then you need to create a message for buyers that is just as tempting.

3. Guide the conversation—the point of WOM marketing is that it focuses on one customer talking to another potential customer about your product. Remember, however, that when people talk, the talk isn’t always positive. If you want to improve your marketing strategy, you can take small steps to guide the conversation that people are having about your brand. For example, you can highlight and promote certain products or services in store, on your website, and on any of your social media sites. One word of advice that will help you to direct (or avoid) negative conversation is this—if you have any potentially bad PR that people may discover, you should get it out in the open sooner rather than later—honesty is key to WOM marketing success.

4. Broaden the buzz—if people are talking about your product, that’s great—your WOM marketing is well on its way to being effective. A few people, however, talking about your brand is not nearly enough to make your marketing as successful as it could be. Once people start talking, it’s your job to broaden the buzz by building communities on social media, reaching out to influencers, and sending out hints about business or product updates, news and other exciting ideas.

5. Not ignore basics—while you should certainly look to companies with successful WOM strategies for inspiration, ensure that you don’t forget about the most basic element of a marketing campaign: your customers—if you want your customers to love you and to talk about how much they love you, you have to exceed their expectations. And do so consistently. Offering great customer service, going out of your way to keep customers happy, and always putting the customer first is the most essential aspect of a WOM marketing campaign.

Great word-of-mouth marketing epitomizes all of the elements mentioned above and employ all of the strategies that other companies have used to be effective.

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5 tips for becoming more successful at selling

By David Ronald

Selling is a tough business and every sales person needs a plethora of skills. But abandon any strategies that involve force-feeding prospects a product they don’t want and don’t need. As Dale Carnegie famously said, people don't want to be sold to—they want to feel as if they're buying.

Instead, as your prospect moves through the funnel, provide resources and guidance as they attempt to solve a complicated business problem. Always be helping.

(Click here to read our white paper on sales enablement: http://bit.ly/1Lbl1z7.)

Here are five things to keep in mind when you are selling:

1. Remember you're in the people business

Lots of sales people get caught up in what they are selling and forget that they're in the people business. Your customer wants to be treated personally. Getting attention and maintaining your prospects' interest is a huge problem today. But walk into any big-box outlet, restaurant or professional office and you might not even be acknowledged.

Before visiting clients it’s best to remind yourself that "This is a unique individual who deserves distinct treatment."

 2. Don't avoid things that are uncomfortable

The best sales people I have known are willing to throw themselves into harm’s way. So convinced of their offer, they are willing to get in front of the tough customers, ask the hard questions and go for the close. Doing the uncomfortable thing is where the top performers live.

Identify your toughest clients and call them first—and keep calling on them long after everyone else has given up. Once a month, make a list of your company's most difficult target customers and create an attack plan on how to get those accounts. As someone once told me, “You can't bring the big deals home without getting into the deep waters where the big fish swim.”

3. Focus on the results, not the effort

The sales game is not one of organizing, planning or meetings—it's about getting results. Sales people often spend time kidding themselves about doing busy work and don't get in front of customers who can buy their products.

Your success in selling is about getting results and that means getting your products into the hands of more customers. A great sales person knows how to get the customer's attention and present their product or service in a way that causes the customer to buy. Don’t confuse results with efforts. You don't try to get an appointment—you either get it or you don't.

4. Wow your prospects

Good sales people look for ways to inspire a prospect's emotional involvement and create the urgency to take ownership. When you wow a buyer you make a difference and cause them to want to hold onto that experience. You can take any product—even a boring one—and make an exciting pitch.

For example, someone selling glass doors in a hurricane zone could slap on both sides of the glass to demonstrate their construction quality doing so will get the customer's full attention and set you apart from the competition. Average doesn't pay in sales. Wow prospects with your knowledge and belief in the product.

5. Ask for the sale

This may seem very simple, but many sales people fail to ask for the sale. Ever. This is hard to believe, but it’s true. Regardless of your product, price or how professional you are, if you don't ask, you will only sell to those who are going to buy regardless.

Think about keeping a tally of every time you ask a prospect customer for their business. Use this to identify what approaches worked best.

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9 tips for building a successful startup culture

By Sharon Lee

The probability of a startup succeeding over the long-term is low if the founders cannot build a culture of passion and commitment.

What does it take to build an effective startup culture? Although there’s no simple answer, and the needs of every company are different, transparency and communication are likely to be a part of the answer.

 Here are some recommendations that should help every founder team put this into practice.

1. Don’t hesitate to verbalize your dream to team members daily
Written mission statements and a passionate quarterly pitch to the team is not enough. Team members have to hear from you daily and see your enthusiasm during individual discussions, to the point that they are repeating your story to others. That’s how a culture is solidified.

2. Demonstrate a consistent set of personal values and priorities
People believe what they see more than what you say, and they tend to imitate what you do. Thus investors look for consistency between you and your team on values and priorities. If there is no consistency, there is no culture.

3. Customize your organizational structure based on individuals' strengths
There is no rule that marketing needs to report to the founder or that every startup needs a chief operating officer. Some of the best startup cultures have no hierarchical reporting, yet everyone knows who drives each of the initiatives. Culture is not defined by job titles.

4. Focus on hiring the right people and deal quickly with mismatches
Skills and experience are necessary in hiring but finding a match in values and culture is equally important. Mentoring and training programs need to be put in place early. Entrepreneurs who are too busy for people never get the culture they envision.

5. Foster innovation in process as well as products
Technology can be used to facilitate customer support and sales as well as enhance your product. Investors look for innovation in all areas of the business and all levels of the organization, from top to bottom. Winning cultures incentivize and reward innovation as well as business results.

6. Visibly link your standards to industry best practices
Teams tend to look inside an organization and tend to compare their performances to their own previous records or other internal groups. Comparisons should always be with competitors and customer expectations of excellence. A culture that excels measures itself against industry leaders.

7. Create opportunities for continuous learning
A winning culture is filled with people who love to learn. They need opportunities to do new work and try out new roles, as well as have access to training updates in their current positions. Successful leaders are good coaches and mentors, as well as being on the lookout for personal learning opportunities.

8. Sponsor internal events to build team synergy
Events need to be inspirational as well as directional. These will build the culture you need, but also give you an opportunity to observe where you need more focus. Make sure each one highlights your values, recognizes the right team members and involves customers and outside experts.

9. Make your startup a winning place to work
Promote your culture and innovations through social media and the press to make the team proud of their jobs. This pride will be sensed by customers and vendors, since everyone wants to buy into a winner. Winning in business is all about building momentum, and capitalizing on that progress.

The right culture doesn’t happen overnight and it’s especially hard to change once it is set. It’s especially important, therefore, to start early. Your business's growth and success depends on it.

Culture matters. A lot!

Good luck building yours.

9 ways that social media marketing will help your business

By David Ronald

People sometimes ask me about the benefits of social media marketing.

In some instances a small business owner may already have spent time on social media in the hope that new prospects will appear in droves. After a few weeks, however, they scaled back on their social media activities, or abandoned them altogether, after becoming frustrated by an apparent lack of results.

I’ve highlighted the impact of social media marketing on SEO rankings in prior blog posts (for example http://bit.ly/1lW3GC7 and http://bit.ly/1lW3AKI). In this post I’m going to describe other benefits of being active on social media. The key thing to note, however, is that it takes time to build momentum with social media and the benefits aren’t always as obvious as you may like—successful social media marketing requires consistency and patience.

Nonetheless, if you’re feeling a little bit skeptical about the benefits of social media marketing, here are some reasons why it may be working better than you realize.

1. Brand recognition—one of the most powerful ways to use social media is as a brand-building tool. With social media, you get to decide how you want to position your company and what you want people to know about what you do. With consistent effort and great content, you can build a reputation for your brand around your company’s values, benefits, and advantages.

2. Repeat exposure—there is an old marketing adage that says it takes six to eight exposures to a product before a customer decides to buy. A clear benefit of social media is repeat exposure with your network. You have the opportunity to remind them over and over again about what you have to offer, which can shorten your sales cycles dramatically.

3. Authority—for coaches, consultants, authors, speakers, and other service-based businesses, social media can be very powerful in helping you establish authority in your field, making you the go-to resource for your target audience to seek out for help. Share great content, answer questions, and serve your audience, and you will inevitably build loyal fans.

4. Influence—as your following increases, your influence grows. Having a substantial social media audience creates a snowball effect that can attract new customers, media interviews, joint venture partnerships, and all kinds of other opportunities. It’s a bit like when you see a crowd hovered around something. You can’t help but want to see what all the fuss is about, so a large audience will only attract more interest.

5. Community—there is nothing like social media when it comes to cultivating a community. When your followers become part of your community, you gain instant access to them. That means you can find out what challenges they are facing and what they like and don’t like about your offerings. You can engage in ongoing dialog that can be more valuable than any kind of paid market research.

6. Ahead of the curve—whether you realize it or not, your prospects and clients are checking to see if you are engaging in social media. I always find it a bit odd when I’m investigating a potential service provider online and I can’t locate a social media presence or worse, I find Facebook pages that haven’t been updated in months, empty Twitter feeds, and a clear lack of interest in engaging. Social media isn’t a fad and it’s not going away. Even if it’s not your top priority, if you stay current with activity, your prospects will notice.

7. Mindshare with lurkers—although there will be days when you wonder if anyone is paying attention to your social media networks, you can be confident that more people are paying attention that you realize. Give it time and you’ll start to understand what’s happening behind the anonymity of the internet. You even hear from people who say, “I’ve been following you on Twitter for ages. I love your posts!”

8. Competitive advantage—the reality is that most of your competitors aren’t likely doing a very good job with social media (most companies aren’t), which gives you the chance to stand out. Also consider the flip side. If you avoid social media, you leave a big opening that allows your competitors to capture your audience.

9. Website traffic—social media can be a leading traffic generator and when you share blog posts, videos and other content from your website, you give your audience a reason to click through and visit your site. Once there, you have the opportunity to inspire those visitors to take action by inviting them to sign up for your mailing list, make a purchase, or call to schedule a free consultation. Install traffic monitoring service, such as Google Analytics, and if you are committed to your social media efforts, you will clearly see that social media brings traffic. Also, make sure that your visitors receive a clear call to action when they visit your site so that you can convert that extra traffic into business opportunities.

While many businesses large and small are trying to justify the cost and time investment for managing social media marketing, an important benefit often gets overlooked: Big Wins. For example, if a major media outlet finds you on Twitter and interviews you for a national article, then that is also a big win, one that you can’t measure based on directly-generated revenues.

Although big wins don’t happen often, when they do, they make it all worthwhile. It’s easy to forget results like these six months down the road you’re trying to assess whether your social media efforts are paying off. But that one contract you landed could cover your social media marketing costs for years. And that major media interview could lead to subsequent interviews and a line item on your resume that impresses a corporate sponsor three years from now. Never forget to factor in big wins in social media.

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7 SEO tips that can help your startup increase revenues

By David Ronald

Search engine optimization can have a dramatic effect on the success of any business regardless of its size. SEO best-practices are always changing, however, because Google frequently modifies its algorithms—so much so, in fact, that approaches which were effective in obtaining a page one ranking just a couple of years ago may even be counter-productive today.

The evolving nature of search requires a fresh strategy when it comes to keep your business prominent in search engine listings.

In this post I’m going to highlight seven tips for successful SEO:

1. Develop your strategy—a carefully-crafted marketing strategy is vital in identifying your target market segments, how best to communicate with them, what types of messages and content you want to evangelize, metrics that can help determine and how problems when content doesn’t perform as expected and so on. It’s an ever-evolving plan, but an initial strategy needs to be formulated before it can grow into itself.

2. Identify target keywords—all SEO projects begin with research into target keywords. Your goal here is to determine the keywords that have the most return with the least competition, and this is based on your target segments and an in-depth analysis of current and recent search trends. Build compelling content around these keywords—Google is adept at determining how relevant and informative content is to specific keywords.

3. Keep content pithy—if you’re focusing on a particular topic in your segment(s), then strive to write about everything relevant to that topic. Creating pithy content is how you attract new users and make sure that your site doesn’t stagnate. These also feed into the idea of generating good backlinks to go with good content. Together these things are very helpful for a site’s final page rank.

4. Build relevant links—modern day link building requires proper understanding of how anchor tags work and how you can best utilize them to increase your search engine rank. Link relevancy is key in figuring out which sites are best linked to. Tools such as Mozbar allow you to quickly ascertain if a link is good by glancing at the DA score. This is important because these links affect how relevant a site you are to your niche.

5. Determine social channels—there are hundreds of millions of users across dozens of social networking channels and as a startup, and your time dedicated to social media is already at a premium. Understanding that you can’t cover all the possible avenues is the first thing to come to grips with. Some background research can then direct you to the social media network where the majority of your target demographic dwells, allowing you to focus on that one.

6. Be mobile-friendly—it isn’t necessary to completely re-build a website in order to make it mobile-friendly. There are plenty of resources online that can convert a website to mobile-friendly standards, without a great deal to time or money. Even if budget is your concern, you have far more to lose from a site that isn’t mobile compatible than you save from not making it mobile compatible.

7. Befriend analytics—the numbers don’t lie and the relevant numbers to you are the ones that tell of your page’s successes and failures. While successes are important to celebrate, failures allow you to improve your site. Analytics gives you goals to aim for and are a pretty good guide as to how effective your marketing strategy has been thus far and what could be improved in the future.

These seven tips should get you started on the journey to a position on page one of a search engine listing. SEO is a huge and complex topic, so strive to increase your knowledge as much as possible—subscribe to relevant blogs (there are some very good ones) and consider taking an evening class at a local college if time allows. Spending time in acquiring more and more knowledge will be a worthwhile investment for your business.

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3 types of online advertising for small businesses

By David Ronald

The goal of advertising is to attract new customers—after all, no matter how awesome your company’s product or service is, if you don’t advertise, nobody will know about it.

It’s not surprise that ever more businesses are choosing to advertise online - digital advertising spend was $49.5 billion in the United States, in 2014, according to Internet Ad Bureau, digital now commands nearly one in five ad dollars.

The first thing to know when you are considering using the internet to advertise your product is what types of online advertising are at your disposal. And that will depend on what your business needs are. In this blog post, I describe the three key online advertising methods.

1. Search Engine Advertising

Of all the types of online advertising, search engine marketing has to be one of the most dynamic and challenging to harness. Basically, popular search engines like Google use complex algorithms to deliver searched-for content in their results pages. It obviously pays to be one of the first few results on a popular search engine. However, because these algorithms are constantly changing, staying on top of the search engine optimization (SEO) methods can be a little challenging.
The key benefits of this type of advertising are:

Origination—many prospects will hit search engines first when they are looking for a new product or service, or attempting to locate one that they haven’t had luck finding. By making yourself visible from the point of origination, you are more likely to get those customers.

2. Display Advertising

This category of advertising includes all of the visual ways to get your message across: videos, graphics, banners, sidebars, logos, photos…you get the idea. The display delivery system has come a long way from the early days of internet advertising, and it isn’t uncommon to see ads that are more experiential than passive, like interactive video ads.
The key benefits of this type of advertising are:

Visibility—of all the types of online advertising, display has the best chance of making a visual impression; a buyer can see your logo, your service, your contact information, or really whatever information you choose to include, which can make a lasting impression.

Targeting—huge steps have been made in targeting prospects, mainly through the use of behavioral targeting, which uses cookies and search data to deliver ads to people who are more inclined to want what you’re offering. Geographical targeting, on the other hand, will target buyers who are close to your location, which is especially useful for small brick and mortar shops.

3. Social Media Advertising

Social media is currently the sweetheart of all of the different types of online advertising choices that you have available to you. Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Vine and other social media properties are having a profound effect on the way information is shared online. And virality, or the exponential rate at which information is shared is what makes social media marketing so desirable—though it can be a little tougher to determine which things actually will spread like wildfire.
The key benefits of social media advertising are:

Cost—with a few caveats, most social media accounts are free to open and operate, making this one of the cheaper types of online advertising.

Visibility—many people enable push notifications, which update their mobile devices and computers immediately with alerts from social media sites. The popularity of these sites, and potential consumers’ constant interaction with them means that you’ll have a larger chance of being seen by more people.

So what are the next steps? Well, that’s entirely up to you! The first thing you should do is take a thorough stock of your advertising needs and see how these and other types of online advertising can meet those needs. Educating yourself and your employees in social media marketing will give you a definite leg up and understanding how to build the type of websites that people want to purchase things from will keep you on top.

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