1) Their History. Where are they coming from? How did they get here? What do they know about your and your firm? What dealings have taken place in the past?

2) Frames of Reference. What ideologies and situations might affect their decision-making? Do they have a certain way of viewing your offering? How do they feel about their own firm?

3) Needs and Desires. Where do they want to go? How do they expect to feel when they get there? How do they think they’re going to get there? What do they think will prevent it?

4) Likely Objections. What is going to cause them to balk? How fervently do the believe in that objection? How real is it? Might it block the deal, no matter what you say or do?

5) Capacity to Act. Are you communicating with decision-makers or seat-warmers? If decision-makers, what decision do you want them to make? If not, why are you talking to them?

6) Decision-making Style. If they’re decision-makers, how do they make decisions? Are they all about facts and figures? Or do they decide according to a gut feeling?

If you understand these six perspectives, you can tailor your conversation to match. For example, if you know that your firm contributed to the prospect’s success in the past, you can make sure that each contact knows about it, even if happened before they joined the company.

Similarly, if the decision-maker likes facts and figures, you can build your value proposition around ROI. By contrast, the the decision-maker is “gut-feeler”, you can use anecdotes and imagery to bring out the right emotions.

How do you find out this information. Easy. Research the firm and the audience on the Internet. Then ask around. Look for colleagues who know the company or the players. When you meet with prospects, keep your eyes and ears open for how they make decisions and how then tend to think.

After a while, it will become second nature.

The classic British sports car has reached it’s 50th birthday. Doc Roger’s favourite classic car has always been the E-Type Jaguar. Launched in 1961, I still believe this remains one of the most beautiful cars ever designed.

The E-Type was a true sensation from the moment it was launched. Most did not believe a car this pretty could be British. Surely it had to be Italian? It went like a rocket and was priced at a just-about-accessible-dream price of £2,000.

The E-Type was remarkable. And it went like a rocket. I became the first large-scale production car based on aircraft principles. In 1961 it hit the market at a ‘just beyond reach’ price of £2,000. So it became THE car for the successful gents of the day, and remains iconic to this day.

Actually, this turn around in opinion has taken far less than two years to be reached. More like just two months. In fact, it was just a few short weeks back when George Osborne announced that a smaller levy would apply to the banks in the current year. There go those green-eyed monsters….!

But things must be looking up for the Banks …. and consequently for the Treasury too.

In his wisdom, the Chancellor has decided that he should impose the full levy AND to do this with immediate effect. This will “extract” £800m more from the banks in 2011 than he had been planning to – a whopping £2.5bn per annum in 2011, with £2.6bn in both 2012 and then 2013. The Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, will pay £473m (that’s up by £150m from last year). Better days.

Let’s put this in some perspective with the help of that unpopular editor Robert Peston at the BBC says – “By way of context, the additional £800m of levy for (just) 2011 equates to around 13 per cent of the aggregated value of the big banks’ bonuses”. Remember, that the banks handed out around £6bn in bonuses to their investment bankers. OK, so not tooooo painful a hit then for the good old banks (sic).

The increased levy is only one element in a raft of initiatives to reach what The Chancellor has termed a “settlement” with the banks. These initiatives are part of the aptly named ‘Project Merlin’ (it’s going to take some wicked magic!) which includes a ‘through-gritted-teeth’ pledge from the banks to offer up £190bn of credit to businesses in 2011.

Better days indeed? We wait with baited breath.

What is about them that makes them stand out in the crowd? Ambition, creativity and a resilience to risk are all part of the recipe, but these are traits that cannot be taught at business school.

A Darden professor has tried to approach this from a different angle. By attempting to discover how entrepreneurs think, Saras Sarasvathy hopes to be able to transmit this knowledge to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Prof Sarasvathy, associate professor of business administration at Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia approached US entrepreneurs, who had at least 15 years entrepreneurial experience, had started multiple companies which had both failed and succeeded and had taken at least one company public.

After listening to them at length talk about problems they encountered as entrepreneurs she concluded that successful entrepreneurs are improvisers who rely on what she describes as “effectual reasoning” to attain their goals. These entrepreneurs she says “assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies”.

Corporate executives by comparison rely on “causal reasoning”, where they set a goal and then seek ways to achieve it.

Is it really the future of online advertising?

In pure advertising-speak …. the advertising world ties itself up with stressing about things called ‘behavioural targeting models’. But they now appear to be facing a backlash when it comes to the privacy lobby, made up of public interest groups. Fearful of damaging relationships with their readers, many publishers are removing third-party widgets and other technologies when those technologies are found to capture and sell user data without the user’s express permission.

Even Facebook itself has cracked down on unauthorised ‘data scraping’ (ouch, that sounds nasty). It could be that consumers completely block any sort of data sharing, and that’s not good news for those advertisers and their targeting models.

But consumer want to buy things. They always will. But as the best salespeople will tell you, the true skill in selling is to let the customer believe they chose to buy, not to believe they were ‘sold to’ by a trained, skilled salesperson. That independence of thought remains crucial.

Also, consumers don’t want to be constantly bombarded with ‘junk’ advertising.

So, there’s a quandary for both parties. How to get round this with a win-win solution?

So the future for marketers will see them take the higher ground and this is where Permission Marketing comes into play.

The concept of “Permission Marketing” isn’t new; in fact, Seth Godin’s 1999 book about “turning strangers into friends and friends into customers” seems remarkably relevant in today’s age of “Friending,” “Liking,” and “Following.” Seth Godin told the (then e-mail-dominated) interactive industry, “By talking only to volunteers, Permission Marketing guarantees that consumers pay more attention to the marketing message. It serves both customers and marketers in a symbiotic exchange.”

Today, technologies like Facebook Connect and OAuth are helping to redefine the concept of permission marketing. Using these technologies, brands, retailers, publishers and other sites are able to actively establish a permission-based relationship with their users and customers on their own websites. Now websites have the opportunity to embrace transparency, to be upfront with people during the registration process about how their data will be used, as well as how it will benefit both parties.

We have a new generation comfortable using Facebook and other mobile apps and who, according to recent survey data, are quite willing to share personal information with companies and brands in exchange for value provided. They are also relatively unconcerned about the security of data they share on social networks. The bottom line is that this type of authorisation-based relationship between brand and user is likely to become the norm.

Sites and brands need to ask themselves: What am I offering people that they will truly value in exchange for permission to talk to them as a friend and not an anonymous user?

It is inevitable that a permission-based model will prevail, and those that are able to rapidly embrace this model and experiment with its possibilities will win a more loyal audience.

No matter what your market sector, we’d all give generously to have lots of free traffic, yes?

The coolest thing is that if each keyword you can rank for brings in 50-100 visitors a day you’ll only need a handful of them to start getting decent traffic. If you’re using your site to build a list (you are, aren’t you??) then you could be getting 50-100 leads a day for free!

So, while the rest of the world is chasing after Google PPC or Facebook adverts, start learning how to rank organically and reap the rewards. Here are the exact steps Libby Collier took to get to #1… Whilst she is using her example, you can do the same for yourself. And watch the difference in your traffic flow!

Over to you Debbie ….

For the purposes of this I am going randomly pretend my topic was ‘Parents working from home’ and my keyword was ‘Business ideas for parents’. While the topic is fictitious the figures are real.

Step 1- Keyword Research

Using the Niche Profit Classroom keyword research method, I found a 4-word keyword in my niche that had:

* 5,400 searches per month (both exact and phrase match)
* 857,000 competing pages in Google (without quotes)
* 5,020 competing pages (with quotes)
* Average page rank of the top 10 search results of 1.5

In summary – good search volume but low competition. Purrrrfecto!

Keyword research drives everything when it comes to organic search. Don’t skip on this step peeps.

LESSON: Choose the right keywords. This alone will determine 90% of your Google SEO happiness or otherwise.

Step 2 – Write your article (On-page SEO)

I wrote a GREAT (no crappy content here) article on my blog about business ideas parents could do at home. I used a checklist to ensure my chosen keyword ‘Business ideas for parents‘ was:

* In the

and

tags
* Used for the page title
* In the description
* #1 in my keyword list
* In the first paragraph of the article
* 2x more in the body of the article
* Used as the name of one image eg: ‘business-ideas-for-parents.jpg’ (with Alt=”Business ideas for Parents”)
* As the url ie: www.ParentsAtHome.com/business-ideas-for-parents/

LESSON: Be like Santa. Make a list, check it twice.

Step 3 – Backlinks (Off-page SEO)

I then set about getting backlinks from high ranking pages, focusing mainly on articles.

Every time I created a link back to my page I used the keyword in my anchor text eg: Discover business ideas for parents that really work! (NB: that link won’t work, it’s just an example)

NB: The traffic I got directly from these links was a bonus but it wasn’t the key reason for creating them. My focus was on getting high quality backlinks that the search engine spiders would follow to my page.

* Jan 26 – Wrote article #1 for EzineArticles.com
* Feb 8 – Wrote article #2 for EzineArticles.com
* Mar 25 – Posted a YouTube video (Doesn’t allow anchor text)
* Mar 29 – Wrote article #3 for EzineArticles.com
* Mar 3 – Wrote article for ArticlesBase.com
* Mar (mid) – Wrote hub for Hubpage.com
* Jun – Answered 2-3 questions on Yahoo Answers

That was my exhausting, exhaustive backlinking schedule. All 10 of them.

So, if anyone offers to sell you a b’squillion backlinks for $10 don’t waste your money. When you pick the right keywords and get your on-page and off-page SEO right you simply don’t need them.

LESSON: Not all backlinks are created equal – go for quality, not quantity and always use your keyword in your anchor text

The Results

* Jan 17 – Blog post published, indexed within about 2-3 days.
* Mar 7 – #68 in Google
* Mar 28 – #17 (after posting just 3 strong backlinks)
* May 2 – #12
* June – page 1 (think it was about #7 – #9)
* Oct 10 – #5
* Nov – #2 or #3
* Jan 7 – #1 (whooo!!)

Now the skeptics amongst you will look at this and think it took me a 10 months to rank at #1.

But the reality was that I didn’t write down the exact date when I got to page 1. Once I saw I was on page 1 (#7-9) I answered a few questions on Yahoo Answers to get a couple more backlinks and boost the ranking.

Yes, I should have done another EzineArticles.com article but I was a bad, bad girl who had had enough of writing about my real niche subject by that point.

My page has continued to rise naturally, from other people creating links. That one page brings me around 40 visitors every single day and accounts for 40% of the website traffic. Ain’t life sweet!

As a side note, at the same time as ranking for this keyword, I was also trying to rank 6-7 other words for specific pages of this site so I didn’t have time to focus on just this one keyword. These other keywords currently rank around #4, #6, #8, #8, #9 and #12 from following the same strategy.

Thank you Debbie!

Now, off you go and do it for yourself. Can we fix it? Yes we can!

Filed under: Focus on Business Tagged: #1 on Google, Doc Roger, Focus on Business, Google ]]> http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/focus-on-business-160-heres-how-to-get-to-1-on-google/feed/ 0 pod3group http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/focus-on-business-159-10-ways-to-compete-if-your-market-is-already-taken/ http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/focus-on-business-159-10-ways-to-compete-if-your-market-is-already-taken/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 06:40:51 +0000 GuyM http://pod3media.wordpress.com/?p=771 ]]>

Starting up a new business is a daunting prospect at the best of times but if your chosen sector is completely dominated by a few big brand players it can make your task appear even more difficult. Being a tiny fish in a huge competitive pond can be a frightening thing indeed. Yet when Mark Zuckerberg had the idea for Facebook, the social networking sphere was already dominated by big players such as MySpace. Few would have believed at that time that he could take them on and surpass their success but that is exactly what he did. MySpace recently announced that it is launching a Facebook type ‘mashup’, or in other words the once dominant social networking brand is now found itself trying to copy the relative newcomer.

This should serve as an inspiration for any new business. However, while ambition is a good quality for any start-up, that alone will not guarantee success.

So what does a new business need to do in order to become a big player in its market?

1. Concentrate on Your Unique Selling Points
What is it that makes your company stand out from the crowd? Decide what it is that would make somebody choose you over a competitor and concentrate your marketing strategy on these qualities.

2. Define Who You Are Targeting
This point is crucial to your business success. Who is your target customer? If you get this wrong you risk wasting a lot of time and money targeting the wrong people with your marketing efforts. The more narrow your niche, the easier it will be to give the relevant people reasons to deal with you.

3. Don’t Sell Yourself Short
A new business should never undervalue the services it provides. Being small doesn’t mean the quality of service you will providing is inferior, in fact in many cases small businesses are able to offer a better service. It is also important to make sure your staff are totally aware of the value of the services you provide so that they are able to sell your services in the best possible way.

4. Don’t Try to Compete on Price
It is sometimes tempting for a new business to offer lower prices as a way to attract new business. This can be a big mistake. Many customers will be savvy enough to realise that paying a bit for your superior product will save them money in the long run. In addition the price of a product or service puts a perception in the potential customer’s mind and for many people cheap equates to inferior.

5. Concentrate on Customer Service
Concentrating on providing a friendly customer service will set you apart from many of your competitors. The disadvantage for many people of using a big company is the lack of a personal touch. This is where smaller companies can exploit opportunities to build a strong reputation for themselves.

6. Employ the Right People
Whilst the early days of a brand new business will involve a lot of your own hard work, there will come a point when you need to rely on other people. A good strategy in the early days is to employ the best staff that you can afford and try your best keep them motivated. Better staff will be better equipped to drive your new business forward.

7. Be Flexible
Larger companies tend to be slower to react than smaller companies as there is often a long chain of command in larger organizations and your small business can use this to their advantage. By reacting to changing circumstances more quickly you can steal customers from your larger competitors by changing the business model to react to your customer’s changing needs.

8. Go Against the Grain
Thinking outside the box and challenging the norm can get your business noticed and challenge your competitors as well as yourself. Just because most companies do something a certain way doesn’t mean it is the right way. A great example of this is Easyjet and their approach to airline ticket pricing which turned the entire industry on its head.

9. Simplify Your Website
Many lager companies have huge over-complicated websites which can be off putting for many potential customers. This is another opportunity for you to get one over your larger competitors by developing a website which is uncomplicated and easy to navigate. It will also provide your business with a great marketing and promotion tool.

10. Act on Good Ideas
The difference between big brands and smaller companies is that larger companies are often more able to make good ideas happen. Big companies do not have a monopoly on good ideas however. With a bit of hard work and persistence, you can make turn your ideas into a reality too.

Filed under: Focus on Business ]]> http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/focus-on-business-159-10-ways-to-compete-if-your-market-is-already-taken/feed/ 0 car_in_motion pod3group http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/focus-on-business-158-apprentice-week-is-coming/ http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/focus-on-business-158-apprentice-week-is-coming/#comments Thu, 03 Feb 2011 13:22:17 +0000 GuyM http://pod3media.wordpress.com/?p=812 ]]> Apprenticeship Week, February 7-11 2010, is a festival of events that encourages employers in England to explore new ways for a young person to join their company and helps young people to consider routes into the workplace that would best fit their skills and ambitions.

Have a look at the National Apprenticeship Service website www.apprenticeships.org.uk to find out about the events, help and funding in your area.

Here’s an overview of Apprenticeships and which might persuade you to take one on:

* Apprentices are employees who earn a wage and work alongside experienced staff in businesses to gain job-specific skills. Off the job, usually on a day-release basis, apprentices receive training to work towards nationally recognised qualifications.
* Apprenticeships can take between one and four years to complete depending on the level of Apprenticeship, the apprentices’ ability and the industry sector.
* There are over 190 types of Apprenticeships that are suitable for hundreds of job roles.

Key messages from YouGov research (October 2009):

* Over 80% of people are more likely to use a business if it offers Apprenticeships to young people.
* 94% think it is important that companies support young people by taking on apprentices in the recession.

Key statistics from Populus research (February 2009):

* 81% of businesses agree that apprentices make their work place more productive.
* Apprentices provide the skilled workers we need for the future (82% employers agree).
* Apprenticeships mean lower recruitment costs (67% employers agree).

Key statistic from the Institute for Employment Research, ‘Net benefit to Employer Investment in Apprenticeship Training’ (November 2008):

* On average an apprentice pays back your investment after 2.5 years

Key messages from ‘Good for Business’ research:

* Apprentices bring new ideas into your company.
* Apprentices inject new life blood into a company.
* Apprenticeships demonstrate your company’s commitment to training.
* Apprentices can be moulded into your ideal employee.

Filed under: Focus on Business Tagged: apprenticeships, Doc Roger, Focus on Business ]]> http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/02/03/focus-on-business-158-apprentice-week-is-coming/feed/ 0 pod3group http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/focus-on-business-150-asda-income-tracker-has-every-household-losing-8-per-week/ http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/focus-on-business-150-asda-income-tracker-has-every-household-losing-8-per-week/#comments Thu, 27 Jan 2011 10:09:27 +0000 GuyM http://pod3media.wordpress.com/?p=752 ]]>
On Doc Roger’s screen this morning, waiting as I popped in quickly before scooting off for a meeting, was the ASDA Income Tracker.

Now, we are all in business because consumers, somewhere along the line, spend their money on what we’ve produced.

But our consumers, according to the ASDA report, were becoming £8 worse off per week in December. Yes, you read that correctly, family spending power was falling off by £8 per week! With the average household in the UK having £172 a week of discretionary income, to lose £8 per week is a major problem for all of us!.

No surprise to anyone that this is the largest decline on record.

Doc Roger is going to look at all of this weeks stats (aka bad news) and suggest a remedy plan for you and your colleagues. I’m just putting thoughts together on these so check back in a couple of days and see what you should be doing to alleviate the pain.

Filed under: Focus on Business Tagged: 2011, Asda Income Tracker, Doc Roger, Focus on Business, household spending ]]> http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/focus-on-business-150-asda-income-tracker-has-every-household-losing-8-per-week/feed/ 0 1258067297cBn7Vv pod3group 1258067297cBn7Vv http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/focus-on-business-special-in-support-of-vat-increases-you-cant-believe-im-saying-this-right/ http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/focus-on-business-special-in-support-of-vat-increases-you-cant-believe-im-saying-this-right/#comments Wed, 26 Jan 2011 10:35:02 +0000 GuyM http://pod3media.wordpress.com/?p=697 ]]> Tax arguments tend to revolve around their actual level: they are either TOO HIGH or TOO LOW.

As these arguments quickly deteriorate into ideology – high is left and low is right — we generally get nowhere. Partly because, economically, the high/low comparing is a less consequential dimension than smart/dumb.

What makes a tax structure smart or dumb? Put simply, a dumb tax structure discourages activities that generate prosperity (and with it a big tax base) and encourages activities that do not. Conversely, a smart tax structure does the opposite.

Since the prosperity and the size of the tax base of an economy is driven by the capacity of its corporations to invest in creating high-productivity and therefore high-paying jobs, a smart tax structure provides as little as possible discouragement to corporate investment. The higher the tax burden on corporate investment, the lower the incremental investment in becoming more competitive and productive, the fewer high-paying jobs get created and the smaller the tax base is in turn. And the smaller the tax base is, the higher the tax rates needed to raise a given level of revenue.

Progressive taxation philosophy, as applied in UK and the US, argues that poor people should pay low taxes, middle class people should pay medium taxes, rich people should pay high taxes. And because corporations are like really rich people, they should pay really high taxes.

But corporations aren’t people. They are legally-constructed entities whose primary economic purpose is to create high-paying jobs (by, of course, providing useful goods or services). When they succeed, one by-product is for them to be in a position to pay dividends to their shareholders – who are then taxed on those dividends.

Countries like Denmark and the Netherlands have a profoundly different – and smarter – taxation philosophy. They keep their taxation of corporate investment very low (18% and 16% respectively) in order to encourage corporations to invest, and if a high-earning citizen wants to enjoy life in Belgium or Denmark, the government will tax them relatively highly for that pleasure. France, on the other hand, recycles 43% of its economy through the tax system and imposes the highest taxation on business investment in the developed world at 34%.

So this begs the question : How do the countries with low taxation of corporate investment fund themselves?

Well, the answer is, with the smartest tax vehicle on the planet—the value-added tax (VAT). A VAT is a tax on consumption – i.e. it makes consumption more expensive than would otherwise be the case. Rather than discouraging the production of future growth and prosperity, VAT discourages the consumption of current prosperity. In a world increasingly concerned with sustainability, the value-added tax system is increasingly looking the smarter of the options.

Every other OECD country has a national VAT tax, at an average of 18%. The UK just popped above this average, with an increase up to 20%. But conversely America is conspicuous with zero national VAT. This is great for the relative competitiveness of the rest of the world, but it does the America no favours.

President Obama was giving his ‘State of the Union’ address in Congress on Tuesday night. He might want to consider there is a simple and straightforward solution to the current economic situation for America. He could eliminate all corporate income taxation by instituting a modest VAT. The US Treasury and other economists suggest the VAT required at between 5 and 8.5 percent — and therefore still remaining one of the lowest VAT jurisdictions in the entire developed world. In one fell swoop, that would convert America from having one of the dumbest tax structures in the developed world to perhaps the smartest. And the impact on investment and innovation would be profound.

As for the UK, the VAT increase will have only a nominal effect on paring down the enormous budget deficit – approximately £13bn a year off the whopping £160bn+ it was allowed to reach. If the economic recovery depends, as the Coalition Government under David Cameron’s premiership purport, on successfully persuading investment from the private sector (aka businesses), especially if it is to absorb the 500,000 or so new unemployed falling off the public sector wagon, then come on, it’s drastic measures for difficult times. And the portends are that the UK is about to slip into a double-dip recession, and much harder times.

Filed under: Focus on Business Tagged: Doc Roger, double dip recession, dumb tax, Focus on Business, Obama State of the Union, OECD, tax, VAT increase ]]> http://pod3media.wordpress.com/2011/01/26/focus-on-business-special-in-support-of-vat-increases-you-cant-believe-im-saying-this-right/feed/ 0 vat pod3group