A-Class Above

Our most recent newsletter at Hot Pyjama Productions:

Getting to Know Your ABCs; Spend better, get more, win big.

You may have heard the saying; “Aim for nothing and you’ll hit it with alarming accuracy”. When it comes to your marketing spend, an amendment of this applies; ”Aim for nothing specific and you’ll hit it with alarming accuracy”.

The core foundation of marketing is selecting a market and selling to it.

Many people make the mistake of saying “Clearly we want everyone to buy our product or service, so our market is everyone”. Feel free to shoot for this target if you have an unlimited marketing budget!

If you’re in business, it’s essential that you classify your customers by various characteristics so that you can better market to your key audience. These categories are traditionally called A-class, B-class, C-class and D-class.

Why categorise?

Knowing your ideal target customer will drive your entire marketing campaign and give your brand some purpose. You’ll know you have a preferred client when you first say no to a prospect.

Spend money attracting a client that will cost you as much money as you’ll get in return and you have a recipe for failure.

Let’s put it in terms of Hot PJ. This morning I had a call from a man, let’s call him James as that was his name, who wouldn’t tell me anything about his company and wasn’t interested in meeting. He was after a price for a single-page website and had no idea about how much he would want to spend.

We pride ourselves in getting to know our clients well before carrying out a project. We take our client’s marketing so seriously that we would’nt be able to sleep at night if we created something for a client that we knew would be a waste of their money. But to know this, we need to get to know our clients better. Any prospect who doesn’t want to tell us about their goals before asking us to be responsible their all important marketing is politely referred elsewhere!

If we marketed to everyone, no one would know the values behind our business processes. We would have more and more prospects of the above nature and the Hot PJ name would lose its credibility as a marketing company.

Class categories

Classes can be categorised via a whole variety of means. These include (but are by no means limited to):

Spend - Not just your revenue but your actual profits. Some clients may be giving you heaps of sales revenue but for sales that are high in costs. Others may spend less but provide you with more profit.

Industry - Are your clients from specific industries? Are they white-collar or blue-collar?

Region - Are your clients within walking distance of your office? Do you market worldwide? If so where is easiest to sell your product to?

Age Range - You may have clients from a full range of ages but which age range is likely to spend more with your company? Which age range finds your company through the cheapest methods?

Employee Numbers - How many employees do your clients have?

Business Practices - Which of your clients know what they want? Which have a budget of exactly what they want to spend?

Knowing your ABCs

So let’s look at what these classes represent and what you get in return for targeting your marketing. For each, we’ll reveal a little bit of inside information on our own clients to give you an idea of the classes put into practice.

D for Donkey

The D-class. These are clients you may have obtained through their “pushing” rather than your “pulling”. These guys shop around for price, are constant bad payers and will happily complain about your company to others. Needless to say, these clients can be happily sacked and no money should be spent chasing them.

Our own D-class will never be interested in meeting face to face, give us the minimum of info and will give knee-jerk reactions to price without investigating the benefits. We would pass these clients in the street without any recognition.

C for Casual

The C-class consists of those clients that will buy off you but not for any particularly well thought out reason. They may pay on time and they may give you occasional repeat business but they are just as likely to pass on through and deal with the next guy.

Our C-class are clients that will do business with us because we happened to be the cheapest at the time. They’ll present us with little information for a project but this could be because they refuse to spend the time with us to establish exactly what they want for their own business. We may recognise these clients in the street but we’d try to avoid contact or enter into an awkward conversation!

B for Basic

Your B-class clients are those with the most potential to become A-class. You may deal with them on a fairly regular basis and yet have little of a real relationship with them. If they have a problem with your service or product, they are at risk of looking elsewhere without telling you the problem and giving you a chance to rectify it.

Our B-class clients are aware of the need for good marketing but have not yet got round to investing the time into establishing a full marketing plan and budget, although they are aware or open to the need for one. We’d stop to chat in the street and invite them for a coffee to further our relationship.

A for Awesomeness

Ahhh the top-profit class. To describe your A-class category, you will need to evaluate the best customers you have now and the ideal customer you would like to attract. Take the top 20% of your clients, lay them side by side and determine which characteristics they have in common. Group these characteristics together and you’ll have your ideal target market.

These guys understand the merits of your product or service and they see the benefits in choosing you over the next guy. They will be approached by other companies as they are a desirable client, but they’ll give you a heads up and give you the opportunity to show your worth before they make their decision.

Our A-class clients are known to all of our staff by name. They have a marketing plan (or want us to help them make one) and either a well laid out budget for us to work too, or ask us for some assistance with working out what budget would be best for them. They would go out of their way to recommend you to other clients that they personally think would help your business.

We’d not only stop to talk to them in the street, but invite them in for a coffee and a slice, chat about our personal life and wax lyrical about how wonderful our working relationship has become!

The underlying message here is that your most profit is going to come from your a-class.

So, you want to keep your a-class happy and encourage more customers of the same characteristics.

The only way you will be able to attract more of these customers is to know who they are, what marketing they respond to and how best to focus your marketing on them.

Do this well and not only will your bank manager be happy, but you and your staff will have a better sense of satisfaction through carrying out great service for your preferred clients.

Giving it away ...

Here, take my property and use it for your own monetary gains!

Would you walk up to a stranger in the street, hand them your favourite photographs and say, “you’re free to use these for anything you like”?

No? Well, if you have ever posted a photo to a social site such as Facebook, this is exactly what you are doing. And you’re not just handing them to anyone. You’re giving them to a company that currently has a vested interest in finding new ways to produce more cash flow for itself.

Giving up your rights

More and more individuals and companies are using social media methods to broadcast their brand. But exactly what are you giving up when you post images on social sites?

Concerning user uploaded content, Facebook’s policy states:

“By posting user content to any part of the site, you automatically grant … an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence … to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such user content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise. … Facebook does not assert any ownership over your user content.”

While arguably it is written this way so that Facebook can use content in promotional ways without fear of liability, the clause is written in such a way that Facebook could use the images as a stock photo library if it wanted. Facebook are telling you they can do pretty much anything they like with your images and videos, although ownership technically remains with you.

This isn’t just for images and photos. If you’re posting a series of blog articles or “wall” posts that are attracting a lot of attention, Facebook have the right to correlate these and make their own book! You may delete this content but Facebook retain the right to make copies of the content you have uploaded, and these copies will remain.

The really scary thing is that Facebook “reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to change, modify, add, or delete portions of these Terms of Use at any time without further notice”. Blimey! Would you go into any other contract in business knowing that at any point, the other party could completely change their terms and conditions?? Any section that details whatever rights you may have left … could be deleted in a heartbeat without your consultation.

Some users have already taken Facebook to court over use of images. Facebook photos of people who have been in the news have appeared in newspapers with “Photos courtesy of Facebook” underneath.

Not on Facebook? Your photos may be.

Many people are unaware their images are hosted by Facebook. Some blogs allow you to upload photos but use Facebook’s hosting service on Facebook’s terms. You can tell if your photo is hosted on Facebook by right clicking the image and checking for the domain names of “photos-d.ak.facebook.com”, or “photos-921.ll.facebook.com”, etc.

Be aware that sites like Facebook are not free services. You are paying for their services with your personal information and content. Facebook are currently dreaming up new ways to exploit this information in order to make them money. And remember that the terms and conditions that exist when you first sign up may well change at any point without your direct notification.

What can be done?

Really, nothing can be done if you’re using Facebook. By using their service, you are agreeing to their terms. In this relationship, they are the big guys, you are the little guy. If you want to continue to use Facebook, you can try contacting them to voice your concerns.

For the rest of us, there are sites that specialise in photo sharing for professionals and so make their range of privacy options well known, easy to understand and easy to change. Flickr have an extensive range of privacy options and take care to protect the rights of their members. Try right-click-saving an image posted by a user who has fully reserved rights. You’ll simply download a “spaceball.gif” image of nothingness.

To cope with new technology and increased access to online imagery, Flickr have partnered with Creative Commons to create a license specifically for those who want to share their work with people for non-commercial use only. The sandy image on this page was taken by me, Mark Lincoln, and uploaded to Flickr using the Creative Commons license. This gives people the use to show this image for non-commercial means only, and they must credit the image to myself.

Either way, when signing up to any online service, be sure to check the terms and conditions to ensure your rights are protected … before you click “I agree”!

Twit

I have now established myself in the world of Twitter: www.twitter.com/marklincoln

Yes that's right. The Primeminister of Australia is now following yours truly. 

I hope I can think of something clever to say ....

If the world could vote ...

Have you been to www.iftheworldcouldvote.com yet?

Quite an interesting insight into what would happen if the world was allowed to vote in the US elections. 

Let's face it, the US wants to control the world so maybe the world should vote on who controls the US?

Dispite the results on this site, I sill wonder what the actualy election outcome will be. After all, I would have put my money on Al Gore last time ... and wouldn't the world have been quite a different place? 

I saw a documentary on the current election race not long ago and I was sickened by some of the comments people were making. 

At one of McCain's rallys, a middle aged caucasion woman approached McCain on the stand and, right into a microphone in front of thousands of people, said that Obama was an Arab. 

1. No he isn't
   
2. Should it really be insulting to call someone an Arab?
   
3. Obama is being targeted for having had associations with "terrorists". Has the entire state of Texas forgotten about the Bush family's close association for many years with the Bin Laden family?
   

Rant over. For now. 

The Campaign for Honesty in Business!

The NZ Herald today reported that a real estate firm has been fined $7,500 for breaching the Fair Trading Act, following a case in December last year where an agent, let’s call him Tim because that’s his name, was sentenced for advertising a property as “buyer enquiry over $380,000″ when he knew the vendor would accept no less than $400,000.

This reminded me about a phone call I received last week from a popular cell-phone network. The salesman, let’s call him Bob, promptly ran into a speech offering me a free cell phone and all sorts of amazing bonuses in a call plan for my business and began the usual line of questioning resulting in “yes” answers to hook me into the conversation.

Something along the lines of …

“Would you like a top of the range cell-phone for free? Would you like 30 minutes of free call time?”

I was very busy at the time but I always feel for these telemarketers as we’ve all had to make cold calls at some point. Particularly as I once answered “No” to the first question and completely stumped the unfortunate caller.

Wanting to cut to the chase, I asked a number of times what would be involved for me to get this amazing deal and the answer each time took us back to the beginning of the conversation:

“Well … you get a free cell phone and 30 minutes of call time”

After much banging the receiver against my head, I finally extracted the keystone of the entire conversation: I would have to sign up to a call plan that would cost $45 a month.

Had Bob answered my obviously impatient “let me get back to work” flavoured question at the beginning of the conversation, he would have discovered I only have a pre-pay cell phone which I rarely use for calls, with a total bill of $5 per month. Mostly spent replying to my fiancé’s numerous texts.

Bob the cell-phone man and Tim the real estate guy both tried to hide the truth in order to gain interest and land a sale. The problem is, once the deception has been exposed, who’s going to trust the company enough to do business with them? Not me.

Two more topical examples of deception are the Telecom advertising series that uses actors to portray made-up Telecom clients, and the safety campaign for side air-bags that uses an actor rather than a genuine accident victim. Both of these examples have arguments for and against their deception.

However, I am a firm believer that honesty and business can still walk hand in hand down the happy path of success.

So here’s to the Campaign for Honesty in Business! Let’s treat people like the intelligent professionals they are and generate some genuine trust in our business dealings.

Take note. Carefully!

Ok, so we all know that first impressions count. What we aren’t all lucky enough to find out is the full extent of the impression we create.

I have always felt that I leave a good first impression; I dress well, I smile, I’m polite, I’m friendly without being over friendly and I listen carefully without making the speaker worry that I’m trying to control them with my mind. With the position I work in, for the company that I work for, first impressions are very important.

So, while our director was away, I had a meeting with a potential new client. Having worked in a similar industry, I instantly tuned into their wavelength and felt that I had a great understanding of their business. At the end of the meeting, we shook hands (I still haven’t got round to the Donald Trump over-sterile method of bowing), said our goodbyes and I skipped back to my desk to put together a proposal.

Now I don’t want to boast, but this proposal was a beauty! I tapped away at that keyboard like I was playing a piano in a symphony orchestra ... or something. I pressed the send button and sat back to await their response (actually that’s a lie. I then started attacking the pile of work on my desk but that’s not relevant to this story).

Yesterday, the client came round to the Hot PJ office to discuss their thoughts on the proposal. For the first few minutes, they waxed lyrical about how much they enjoyed reading the proposal and how relevant it was to their situation. Then, just before my head grew too big for the room, they told me that when they left the first meeting, they had turned to each other and said, “Well, that was a waste of time!”Slightly horrified, and with my boss raising her eyebrows, I nervously asked, “What do you mean?”

The client then went on to explain that they were dedicated note takers. During our first meeting, they were acutely aware of the lack of notes I had jotted down and so believed that I wasn’t really taking in what they were saying. On the contrary, I felt so tuned-in to what they were saying that I only needed the aid of a few buzz words to jog my memory in order to create a proposal.

What shocked me was how we had left that first meeting in such a contrast of thoughts. Me thinking everything went great and them thinking they’d wasted their time. In the worst-case scenario, they may not have bothered to open the proposal and we would never have had the second meeting.

This really made me think. In this case, the client was open enough to let me know their initial thoughts, but how many meetings had I been in where people had a genuine belief that my lack of note taking was indicative of my lack of paying attention.

Are any of us fully aware of the first impression we give? And I’m talking about the whole package here; from the way you dress to the notes you take! The happy ending is that they are now our latest client and this is the start of a wonderful relationship we will have together.

Definitely food for thought though.

The benefits of other people's shoes

This morning at around 8:30am you may have felt a sudden change in atmospheric pressure. This is likely to have been due to the almighty sigh of relief I gave when our director, Wendy, returned from two weeks annual leave.

During this time, I metaphorically slipped into Wendy’s creative shoes and learnt a few things about the role of others in my workplace.

I’ll admit that the first few days were quite hectic, but by the end of the two weeks, I’m happy to report that I had everything running like clockwork. I felt like I had survived an avalanche, dug my way out and carried on to the summit.

The whole experience has been a truly valuable insight into the inner workings of our design team. As a BDM, there is no better way to understand every step of the service or product that you deliver than to actually deliver that service or product from the job confirmation to the “thanks and come back soon”.

Now, when I’m discussing projects with clients and creating proposals, I can do so with an acute understanding of the work that will go into that project. This is stupendously beneficial from three different people’s shoes:

1. The client’s – I can confidently discuss the realities of timeframes and the limitations of print, resulting in a project that meets or exceeds everyone’s expectations.

2. The team’s – Don’t oversell. When putting the cheese in the trap, always leave enough room for the mouse. Now when I hand a proposal over to the production team, the team can be confident that I haven’t sold the impossible at a budget that can’t be met. This will make me an all round more likeable guy in the office!

3. My own – Confucious said: “What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.” I understand! Far more than if I simply listened to team members telling me what their job involves. This will really help to develop my career at Hot Pyjama Productions.

So if you really want to make yourself an invaluable asset to your company, dedicate some time to finding out what everyone else gets up to and, even if only for an hour, walk a while in their shoes!