William Buist

Introduction

In 2001 on the 31st August, I left Lloyds TSB Insurance for the last time after a successful seven years working for them. A further seven years on it’s good to look back with some pride at how I’ve built a successful consultancy practice. There was much I didn’t know, (and some things that I don’t think you can know until you need to know them) and much to learn and improve. Building a business from scratch may be a good option for some, and I hope that my experience will be of benefit.

There is so much that could be discussed about why the business has succeeded, so I’ve chosen to focus on one aspect, and that’s getting more business, new clients from the marketing, advertising and particularly networking that we have done.

Setting up

I used an agency to do the setting up, recognising that although some things have an avoidable expense in that you could do it yourself, utilising experts at the right time is lower risk and more efficient. The real cost of doing it yourself rarely factors in the cost of messing it up! This was a decision that I would repeat many times as the business grew.

So, the business is set up, the stationary is printed, the business cards are ready and the phone is firmly on the hook. Most of your old network aren’t your potential customers (probably) and they aren’t calling anyway. People need to know that you exist. Suddenly you need visibility.

The Web is a great place to gain visibility but it’s a massive sea, you are simply not visible unless you can define the people who you want to be finding you and understand what they will be searching for. Understand that better than the rest and you can be the most visible in the world (in time).

Finding the gaps

It wasn’t long until I realised that all the jobs I’d never really understood when I was working in the big organisation still need to be done in a small one. Marketing, Sales, Product development, Accounting, Taxation and so on. Whatever your skills you don’t have them all.

Success can’t happen without clients, so any strategy that doesn’t have gaining clients at the core might mean you run out of financial resources to realise all the things you want to do. A key element of my success resulted from getting new clients.

Attracting the best clients.

Marketing and Advertising are important, and difficult to get right from a standing start, marketing tends to evolve. Networking offers an alternative that is more adaptable, simply because it easier to understand how the message is being received and adapt it quickly. Visibility is the key. Marketing/Advertising makes you visible to those who read and see the relevant material, Networking gives you more reach. On-line networking gives you access to a global market and the possibility to communicate at a personal level with thousands of people.

One early lesson was that networking wasn’t how it had appeared when I was in a large Insurance Company. Then, people were more attracted to who I represented than who I was. Now I represented a much smaller business I was much less interesting to many. Recognising that contributed to a step change in how well networking worked in helping the business to grow. Any successful business has fans, people who tell others about the good service that they have had. People who know, like, trust and respect you will tell others about you, and introduce you to them. I knew I had to embark on a journey to advocacy.

Finding advocates.

Building Awareness.

Nothing can happen until people are aware of you. Only by building awareness can we hope that others will get to know us and start the journey to advocacy. Most won’t stay with us for the whole journey, but none of the people who don’t start will be there at the end!

Building awareness is about being visible, for the right things when others are around to see your contribution.

This is about quantity, whether people link up with you or not, this is about broadcast, big potential audience with a transitory attention span. Be good, be noticeable, or be missed. Some, though, choose to be noticeable for any reason, you still have to be consistent, people will judge you in the first impression you leave. Visibility brings a responsibility for consistency, and taking responsibility for the actions that you take.

Letting people choose to engage with you.

Once people start to become aware of your existence, both as an individual, and your business, then they will start to approach you, to find out more about you. You’ll recognise the success of building awareness from the fact that individuals, whom you have never heard of, contact you out of the blue.

What’s happening here is that other people are beginning to talk about you. They are not yet introducing you to others for business, they are not promoting you, but they are mentioning you, your business, your products, and your services at (some of) the appropriate points in (some of) the conversations that they are having.

Building rapport and shared vision.

Through the one-to-one meetings, the continued discussions via e-mail, telephone and more general meetings, and discussions that others have with their network about you, they’ll learn progressively more about you and your business. As they learn they will start to understand the way that you work, the people you work with, the needs that you meet, your target market and the associates that you work with. As people really understand your business they will start to acknowledge it, in their conversations with others. You won’t simply be mentioned, or talked about, but you will be introduced where those who have reached this stage believe you could provide help or add value.

However, people won’t yet be doing this proactively, and your name will only come up where you are the most obvious person for a particular need that has been expressed.

Advocacy

Advocacy comes from confidence, deep knowledge, and absolute trust between the people. it’s the last leg of the journey and the longest one. Building sufficient trust to ensure true advocacy requires both people to understand each other on many levels, to be open and to share a mutual respect.

Once the trust exists it’s likely that a small referral will be made, and the results of making that referral will undoubtedly be checked with all the parties involved. If the referral is being well handled; if the person referred feels that they have been extremely well looked after; and if the approach taken met (in almost all respects) the expectation then it is possible that they will become an advocate.

As an advocate you can expect them to be thinking about you in many, even most, conversations that they have with others. You will be mentioned regularly, promoted to others. Pro-activity is regular, and referrals are strong, and pre-sold.

The journey to advocacy is complete, but the journey to profitability over many years is just beginning.

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a consultancy specialising in improving team dynamics and performance. For more information visit www.abelard-uk.com

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There is no question that we are currently living in challenging times and in every recession there will always be some businesses that continue to grow and develop and others that will fail. In difficult times, perhaps more than at any other time, staying as we are is no longer an option if we want to survive and the reality is that we are left with just one choice, either to actively seek to continue to grow, or capitulate and see our business fail. It may be tough and we will have setbacks, but those who will succeed are those that can work collaboratively with others, achieving greater resiliency and opportunity.

Winston Churchill famously said “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”. Similarly, building businesses virtually with a background of recession may be difficult, but it has plenty of opportunity.

What does ‘virtually’ really mean?

Businesses that have been built virtually don’t use a single physical location for their people to work. In virtual businesses, technology provides the infrastructure to define the operation of the business. Members communicate electronically as well as face to face, and technologies like social networking sites, project collaboration sites and so on, provide a framework in which to work. Telephone answering may be handled through an agency with calls off flowing to people in diverse locations using fixed and mobile equipment seamlessly.

Marketing, sales, advertising, operational activities, delivery, administration can all be passed between people (who may or may not be employees) automatically and the virtual companies prime role becomes one of co-ordination. Ultimately, though the virtual company still delivers a real product or service to a real customer.

The evolving business model

Success means that you have more clients, or more work from your existing clients, more pipeline, more administration, more need to support the delivery of your products and services. Generally this means that you need more people working for you, in your business, and delivering to your clients. When considering what you need to be doing to help your business grow virtually, a clear picture of what it will look like when you have achieved that is critical to making good choices today.

Creating a virtual team

Virtual businesses don’t necessarily do all of this in-house though. One way that you can resolve increased administration, for example, is to outsource it to virtual assistants, on-line book-keepers, design agencies, PR companies, whatever it is that you need. The web enables you to use tools to share files securely, video conference, share project plans and messaging and so on with a variety of tools that vary from entirely free to still very cheap.

The advantages of virtual employees is that they manage the administration of employment, as you don’t employ them, and you pay for the services that you use, not a salary that means you need to generate work when times are quiet. The hourly rate may be higher, but every minute is spent working for you and adding value to the business. Cost for output is usually much lower.

In the client facing roles, and dealing with delivery, a virtual team requires some infrastructure (branded emails, business cards and so on) but these costs are trivial. With a wide team of partners it’s possible to compete with big competitors by being agile and cost effective, using the skills of your partners when you win business and providing skills to others who win business for you.

Of course, you have to know that the partners you choose will deliver the level of service you expect and there are cash flow issues to manage too. When you win new business and use partners to service that work, who is carrying the credit risk of the ultimate client defaulting? There should be a premium for that risk, but if you are carrying it, you need to account for the possibility that you won’t be paid, but your suppliers still need to be. These are business elements that need to be factored into the arrangements up front.

We have always had written contracts with our partners, even those we trust explicitly, in order to avoid confusion, and this is no different for a virtual partnership.

How can you save costs and be more resilient

Smaller businesses and the self employed have taken to Social Networks for support and help and gradually also to enhance their marketing. Even if the business is currently small it needs to compete in the marketing pool for the attention of your clients, particularly in a recession. Right now, we have the tools to do this and we have the knowledge, and we have it way ahead of those focused on ‘old’ non-virtual marketing. It’s the best time ever to drive personal brand to the forefront.

I’m a great believer in doing the things that you control yourself, for example, I can’t control how many referrals I receive, but I do control how many I give. Measuring what you don’t control is interesting, but hard to influence, measuring what you do control allows you to change the things you do and measure the results, changing the activity until you get the results you want.

Making the world aware of you through virtual tools means that people become aware of you. In that pool of aware people are both potential customers and potential partners. Get it right and the partners will approach you as a result of becoming aware of you. It’s so much easier (and cheaper) to have your partners seek you out than it is for you to find them one by one. Through conversation and interactions you’ll build trust with some of those who approach you and over time begin to find that they advocate you and your business.

In that group you’ll find the suppliers and partners that share your own goals and ambitions, that want to help you succeed and will work closely with you to achieve those goals. Collaboration means that you’ll bring significant skills to bear on your clients needs, the right skills at the right time. From a customer point of view there’s real strength in being able to do that, in terms of retention and referral to others. In a recession when decisions are made more slowly, and with more care, personal referral becomes ever more important in being considered for the product or services you sell.

Creating a virtual team around you enables you to outsource those activities that detract from your ability for focus on your core value in the business, and provides you with instant access to the resources you need to respond to rapid changes in market demand (both up and down) seamlessly and effortlessly, and this is what will give you the real competitive advantage in a recession.

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a consultancy specialising in improving team dynamics and performance. For more information visit www.abelard-uk.com

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Over the next ten years, we will begin to move towards web 4.0 and the emergence of the ‘societal web’. Publishing will move from telling to listening, from informing opinion to collaborative insight, from one to many and from mono-media to infinate-media. The challenge for publishers during this inevitable transition will be on how they can continue to maintain the income stream and adapt to the changing world of media.

The Past and the Present

Web 1.0, was a read-only, publisher led world. The role of media was to broadcast and for the reader or listener to be informed passively, without any real ability to comment or give a response. Whilst some reader interaction existed it was generally through ‘Readers Letters’ which were both selected and edited to ensure that they fitted the culture of the publication.

Web 2.0 was a more public author led environment, where people were empowered to read and then write, expressing their views, thoughts and opinions. Publishers chose either to heavily moderate user generated content or to lose some control. Some rely on the cultural reach of the publication within its readership to keep things in ‘style’. Users became engaged as part of the opinion forming process.

Web 3.0 will be a user-led experience. Consumers now extract content through the semantic ability of the Web as it begins to understand the context of content. Consumers now pull detail from one site and reform, transform and re-present it in other websites where the content is no longer culturally consistent with the source. It’s the equivalent of being able to read, write and execute the content.

Losing, or sharing, or empowering control

New technologies means publishers may lose control of the look and feel of their content. However, don’t engage and there is a real risk that your reach and visibility of publications will remain small. High visibility, extensive reach, deep brand recognition are all key features of the successful publishing, and it’s reasonable to assume that they will also be needed in future, irrespective of the media of delivery, too. Content will remain highly traceable though, at least thus far.

Web 3.0 also raises Intellectual Property and content ownership issues. The development of ‘Cloud’ computing where the data and the processing of the data are conducted in the ‘cloud’ means that you can’t ‘own’ the processing, and the data passes from one machine to another without reference to either ownership or geography. Data has become both ubiquitous and permanent. User generated content can be searched, found, quoted and reused, without reference, and without context.

Is this a recipe for anarchy? or a building block of collaboration that leads to shared knowledge and improved insight?

In our opinion this leads us to a development of sharing, of collaborating, in a community environment, by all, for the benefit of that community. It’s an environment where providing the knowledge, the means of understanding it (the semantic descriptions), and the facility to manipulate and re-present it enables the community to gain new insights and grow and develop as a society, a community. Those who gather around your ideas and subject matter become your society, your community, but they set the context and the culture, it’s no longer defined by the owner of the infrastructure.

This is the societal web.

Changing Face of Media

Advertising are having to adapt to the change from broadcast to narrow-cast. Permission Marketing is something Seth Godin wrote about in 1999, but it’s still not that common. Permission advertising is now beginning to develop and becoming more innovative. For example, Carling’s iPint application for the iPhone has been outstanding at getting the Carling brand into millions of eyes through a game.

As an example of ‘old style’ advertising designed for Web 1.0 and holding on in web 2.0. Banner adverts are becoming less noticed, and even blocked, by many. Click-throughs are declining; Advertising Monitoring firm EyeBlaster reported that click though rates declined from 0.75% to 0.27%, a 64% reduction.

Many are searching for new ways to follow their customers, particularly through social networking sites. Facebook, recently announced that it was opening up key pages to allow for contextual (semantic) advertising, and that will, increasingly, be how all content is delivered to consumers. By studying the buying habits of consumers and matching to reading, writing and interaction on the measurable parts of the multi-(infinate)-media experience, media companies can deliver targeted, relevant, context driven content that’s much more likely to meet the personal needs of the individual.

The point of all of this is that whilst printed media is not about to disappear, it is geographically limited. Online, however, geography has less (perhaps no) meaning so the right titles can grow globally. To do so you need the right people to be talking about you at the right time to many.

Why do people talk about you?

There are primarily three reasons for media companies engaging with social environments and these are;

• Knowledge
• Entertainment
• Product/Brand empathy

As we move from Web 1.0 where people ‘consumed’ (i.e. read) your content one or two of these was often enough to attract people to visit, and the commonest measures was ‘traffic’. Advertisers paid (and still do) for page views, so high visibility and frequent ‘attendance’ was important. In Web 2.0 engagement became important; advertising became more contextual. In Web 3.0 we’ll see a stronger drive to contextualization of content and advertising, matching to meaning. We’ll measure relevance.

From there, the buying habits of the other members of the community, of the ‘society’ will drive the content and advertising that we see. After all, if those we know (and like) are consuming something, we’re likely to consume it too.

Perhaps the biggest impact on a publication of losing control is what place the editor has when the content is provided by customers. The answer lies in the actions that they’ll take, in the way that they interact. The successful become guardians of the ethos not controllers of content.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, recently announced Facebook Connect, which encourages:

• Trusted Authentication – Connect your site to the consumer via Social Media Authentication
• Real Identity – Take your identity information with you wherever you go on the net
• Friends Access – Stay connected to your friends wherever you go
• Dynamic Privacy – access privacy controlled in one place

But is that what social media sites want? Or is it what they have to accept?

The biggest question for publishers is how will you use the data you get access to? For example, will you advertise differently to someone who is well connected than someone with few ‘friends’? Will you identify the things that your readers are reading and talking about elsewhere and present a different face of your product that is tailored to their needs? Targeting advertising becomes social recommendation.

Is it likely that those who do this the best will be the most successful? Could your niche reach a wider audience for whom your subject is an occasional interest? Could it then make it “sticky”? If an article in your publication is commented on by two or three of my friends then it’s likely to be of interest to me too. Media companies that present that story first make their site instantly more useful. I save time searching for the good stuff, because you’ve delivered the identification of relevance to the ‘social cloud’, do it well, and I’ll keep coming back.

Examples of this already happening are sites like Last.fm where the music that is played next is identified from those who like what is being played now. What you listen to is captured too and can be fed back via your social network.

Conclusion

So, in summary, we are heading to a society led world online, a societal web, where content will be collated and drawn together as much by the collective actions of the communit(ies) in that society as it will be by providers of the content. Publishers have always gathered content and re-presented it in their house style and with their “house” opinion. Increasingly they have to provide the means of gathering it and empower their communities to use the developing semantic tools to guide the presentation. In future that empowerment will lead to the most successful being those who serve the needs of the communities they gather around them, leadership will become a skill that derives from concensus and influence, from collective recognition of the benefits you bring. Media will become very diverse, and the successful will be present where their audience want them, rather than trying to attract their audience to where they are.

Important activities will no longer be selection and editing what to publish (think Wikipedia), but how to engage and embrace others views and opinions. Presentation won’t be controlled as it is now, and the look and feel of the content will depend on the devices used and the approach taken in software that you no longer control. Skills to contextualise material effectively are key.

Understanding the audience, always a key requirement, becomes essential, and more, it’s no longer enough to understand your customer, but also to understand those that they know, like, and trust, and those who influence their behaviour and activity.

Change is a constant, and much is, and always has been, changing in the field of publishing, in its widest sense. Those who embrace change, who take courageous steps to reach the future, will gain the trust of those they support and they can then ensure that they remain in the forefront of their markets. It’s an exciting time.

William Buist is director of Abelard Management Services, a consultancy specialising in improving team dynamics and performance. For more information visit www.abelard-uk.com
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