1. Define your personal time as a priority

Many of my clients and colleagues now define the time they spend out of their Business as their priority. Time dedicated to partners, family, friends, health, fun and holidays are now the first entries that go into the diary each week -rather than the last.

Obvious ones to book in are the start and end time of each working day, visits to the gym, meal times and weekends.

This tactic works particularly well for those who work closely with their partner or family, where boundaries between business and personal time are often very blurred.

Everyone I know who’s tried this has said they ended up happier and less stressed. And here’s the really interesting bit – almost everyone said that it had no effect on their business or it even improved the performance of their business

2. Share the benefits

The default diary has practical applications not just for you, but for your entire team too. Mike Bradley who runs SEO provider 1^st Page prophets, uses the concept for all his team, including any part-time team members or interns.

He says that it helps because it means everyone has clarity on where they should spend their time each week. They all love the concept and it gives Mike peace of mind that they are taking responsibility for how they use their time, rather than him having to constantly check up on what they’re doing.

3. Make time for your team

Many Business Owners complain that their teams don’t do what they are meant to. Dean who runs Cloverleaf plumbing and maintenance, tasked his team in the office with booking jobs over the phone and collecting payments.

The credit control was not under control so I asked how much time he spent training his team on how to do that….you can guess the answer.

Like many business owners, he assumed that after a few days in the job, his staff would automatically know what to do. To improve this situation, we implemented a 1 hour team meeting every Friday morning in everyones default diary.

In the meetings we gradually worked on improving the team’s understanding of the credit control system. Sure enough it was the consistent weekly meetings that generated improvements over time.

The result from this one simple change was that the next 3 months were his best ever for credit control and improvements in his bank balance.

I’m a firm believer that making time to train your team is the one task that should be in every Business Owner’s default diary.

If you’ve got any stories about how you’ve used a default diary in your company (or in our personal life) please share in the comments section below.

Increasingly managers are using personality profiling to better understand the people they work with and provide actionable insights into how to lead them. People are incredibly complex and as a result, various techniques have been developed to analyse personalities. The most well-known being Myers-Briggs, Belbin and DISC.

Less well known in the UK is Birkman® who have been developing their real-world research-driven analytical tools for over 60 years. In my opinion Birkman understand personality analysis better than any other and provide the most practical insight into how to effectively engage with your team.

1. The Platinum Rule

We all know the so-called Golden Rule: “do to others as you want them to do to you”. However, personality profiling suggests the Platinum Rule:

“do to others as they need to be done to”

The key to applying the Platinum Rule is to understand the following:

• You will see things through your own “perceptual filters”
• Your team members will each see things through their own “perceptual filters”
• Your own personality will pre-dispose you to behave in a certain way, and expect others to behave identically
• If you can assess the personality of your team members, you can behave towards them in a way that will best motivate them

Action point: When managing your team take time to understand each person’s personality. Don’t just assume they see the world in exactly the same way you do – because they probably don’t.

2. Motivation

It is often quoted that understanding motivation is the key to effective leadership. There are many aspects that influence motivation in the workplace: pay, promotion, self-esteem, credibility, moral framework and even things like dreams and desires.

The Birkman approach views people as having two inter-related aspects to their motivation:

• External Motivators
• Internal Motivators

The external motivators (Birkman calls them ‘Interests’) describe the type of things that will energise and motivate us. They keep us motivated in the short term.

However, these are secondary to the internal motivators (Birkman calls these ‘Needs’). They describe what we need from others in order to perform well in the long run.

Understanding and fulfilling your employees’ needs is the more difficult task and also the most important. A person will only work in a consistently productive way if their internal motivators are met over time. And if they’re not being met, people become stressed and start behaving in ways which are not productive.

Action point: To ensure your team members remain consistently productive and motivated first attempt to understand their internal motivators or ‘Needs’

3. Communication Styles

Consider the way we communicate. Some people ‘speak directly’ or ‘call a spade a spade’; others prefer a more indirect approach.

As a manager, you will have your own personal communication style. You may be tempted to think that your team members share your preferences. But, in fact, each of your team members may be very different.

Action point: When communicating with your team don’t use the same communication style for everyone. For best results tailor your communication style to the personality of the individual.

4. Group Relationships

Another example concerns how people relate in a group setting. We know statistically that 80% of people will be seen as sociable and friendly. But most people also have a more reflective side to their personality (which is often hidden at work). They go through periods where they need time alone or time spent just with close friends.

So when a member of the team suddenly withdraws, becomes a bit unfriendly or avoids meetings, they may simply be expressing their internal need for time alone. This insight provides a practical way of exploring why they are withdrawing and helping them return to their usual productive self.

Action point: Understand that different members of a group have different internal needs. For example, some may need time alone. First understand and respect these needs then step in and try and help where appropriate.

Final Word

Managing and motivating teams is incredibly complex. Although we all know some basic techniques that can encourage or deflate a colleague, having access to personality profiling techniques gives us clear strategies for motivating them in the best possible ways.

Dennis Adams is a director of Chief Executive Coaching who provide practical advice and mentoring on strategy and team leadership to executives at all levels within organisations.  Executive coaching is the key that enables SMEs to face the unique challenges presented by transition and growth.

www.chiefexecutivecoaching.com

If you can’t read this you can view a bigger version of the sales email he sent out by clicking here

1. Subject Line

The subject line of a sales email is probably the most important part. If it looks like spam it’s likely that your email won’t even get opened. On the other hand a clever compelling subject line will boost conversion rate by a huge amount.

There are 3 common tactics for subject lines:

• Arousing curiosity – something like “What does the world’s best business card look like?” or “How to become 7x more memorable at networking events…”
• Talking directly to the recipient “Mark, I’m selling business cards for half price this month, are you interested?”
• Promise an immediate benefit “50% off business cards till the end of July”

Jai has gone for the third tactic by writing “The Greatest Offer You Will Ever See This Month!” I think he could have gone even further and told the recipient exactly what they would get from reading the email. It’s definitely attention grabbing but I wonder if some people might mistake the email for spam since it doesn’t mention what the email is about (business cards) or why they should personally read it.

2. Opening

The opening lines of a sales email or letter do the job of keeping the recipient in their seat. They should reassure them that this message is worth paying attention to and reading through to the end.

The opening line here is:

“Hope you’re well, I know its been a long time since we last spoke. Hope business is well.
I normally send automated emails but this month I thought I’d try the personal touch.”

What Jai has done here to reassure the reader is to explain that this isn’t a spam email that gets sent off to thousands of email addresses. Instead it’s a friendly catch up email that only gets sent to people he has spoken to. Personally I love this approach – if it’s done correctly it will probably get the best response rate of any tactic out there.

However, it’s a very hard one to pull off because the whole email has to fit with this ‘personal message’ approach. I think you would need something in the email body that proved that the email really was a personally written message. I’m not convinced by this one. One idea would be to separate your database into different industries and then mention that industry in each email. That at least proves that the email wasn’t sent out to every business owner you know.

You could also add their name and business name in the email body somewhere. All good email marketing software should be able to add this customisation automatically for you. You normally just have to write {name}, {businessname} etc. in the appropriate place and the software will automatically fill these in for you.

3. Offer

Your offer will make or break your sales email. It’s what will ultimately decide whether your reader decides to take action or not.

The offer is the thing I like most about this email. Buy one get one free on all business cards is a very compelling offer. Jai has also included a time constraint which says the offer is only available until the end of the month. This encourages the reader to take action now rather than putting it off for a week and probably forgetting all about it. Well done! There’s nothing else I can suggest here.

4. Call to Action

This is the part of the email that tells the reader exactly what action to take next. It’s time to start being direct and firmly pushing your lead towards the sale. The call to action needs to be completely unambiguous and self explanatory.

The call to action that’s used here is:

“Call me or email me asap so we can get you this offer. It’s only on until the end of the month.”

This is a firm and direct call to action. The phone number is included in the email signature. I think it could have been added here as well just to make it that little bit easier. The less you make your reader work the better.

One common technique for sales letters and emails is to follow up with a phone call. This is proven to increase conversion rate dramatically since it gives prospects who are on the fence a much needed nudge and it also gives you a perfect excuse to call people up. I often end sales letters with the line:

“I’ll phone you in the next couple of days to discuss the idea further. I look forward to speaking with you then”

5. Language and Layout

Good use of language and an appealing layout isn’t the thing that will make make a sales email work. But it is something that people will notice if you do badly.

This email is only in the draft stage and would be proofread before being sent out. We’re business owners not English teachers so don’t waste too much time on trying to write beautiful prose. But in the final version grammar and spelling would be very important so Jai would make sure any little grammatical errors like capitalizing the ‘I’s were spotted and corrected. You would also want to ensure that a sales letter with the phrase ‘every businessman’ only got sent to the male contacts in your database.

There’s some debate over whether to use bold in your email to emphasise the offer and call to action. It’s so easy to A/B test with these kind of email campaigns you could just try it with and without and then track which one performs better.

Final Word

Jai has done a lot of things right in this email. His tone is conversational and he even throws in a joke or two which is exactly how you write engaging copy that connects with people. His offer, the most important part of any marketing campaign, is fantastic as well. I do think with this kind of thing that it’s important to do something really creative and different though.

I’d suggest having a team brainstorming meeting and trying to come up with a really new and creative concept that would make this email stand out from all the spam clogging up everyone’s inboxes. A really compelling, risky subject line followed by some clever off-the-wall copy might be one way to go. A highly targeted and believable personal message would be another direction. The important thing to remember is you can never really know what’s going to work until you try it out. Split up your email database, test several approaches and then refine the one that works best.

Mistake #1 – Trying to sell too early on instead of first offering value and building up trust

There’s a really obvious question that people who are new to social media often forget to consider…

How is the mindset of a customer who sees a flyer/billboard/TV advert different to the mindset of a customer browsing Facebook?

The customer who’s engaging with traditional marketing has no choice about what she sees. This isn’t the case on Facebook. If you’ve clicked on a link it’s because you chose to – either because it looked funny, interesting or useful. The customer on Facebook is giving up their free time and they don’t expect to have to sit through adverts.

The marketer Seth Godin was one of the first people to popularise this idea in his book Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers. He talked about how people are turning away from traditional ‘interruption advertising’. People fast forward through TV adverts, they use pop-up blockers to hide adverts on the internet and they actively dislike people trying to sell them things without their permission. However if you give them something they want without asking for anything in return, you build up trust until they like and admire you… it suddenly becomes okay to try and sell them something. Social media has made this strategy possible by lowering the costs and changing customer behaviour.

You won’t get social media marketing until you properly understand this shift in thinking. In traditional marketing it would be very unusual to spend time on marketing that didn’t offer some kind of special offer or call to action. In social media it’s quite possible that in the first 5 interactions you have with a prospect you don’t explicitly try and sell anything. And remember – even if somebody doesn’t buy from you they can still benefit you by sharing your content, evangelising your product or brand and referring friends to you. Community building might be a better way of thinking about it than marketing.

Mistake #2 – Not differentiating yourself from the crowd

Setting up a Facebook and Twitter account and populating them with news stories and resource links is free to do. Consequently there are millions of people doing it.

These days that approach simply won’t cut it. With the exception of celebrities and household names the only social media campaigns that are really successful are those that do something bold, inventive and unique. But what exactly could you do? What do you have to offer that’s actually unique?  How about the expert knowledge of your staff?

Social media marketing rewards expert knowledge and good customer service – as an SME business owner this is where you should excel.

If I want to fix a shelf in my bathroom I will go to the local hardware store because the person at the till can tell me exactly what I need buy and even give me instructions on how to get the job done. The teenager working on the checkout at B&Q probably doesn’t know the difference between a cross-head and a flat-head screwdriver. Why not use this massive asset you already have, excellent industry and product knowledge, and leverage it in through a clever social media  campaign?

• If you make cakes record some cookery lessons and put them on Youtube - You can easily produce something semi-professional looking with a £100 Flip camcorder if you get the lighting correct, write a script and record a few takes. If people follow the recipe at home and then walk past your shop the following week, are they going to come in and try the real thing for comparison? Yes!

• If you’re a personal trainer ask people to post their fitness goals on your Facebook fan page and design them a personalised exercise routine and diet plan for free (you don’t even have to do each one individually just make some templates then fill in the blanks for each person.) Are people going to come back and visit your page regularly to update you on their progress, ask clarifying questions and thank you when they drop a clothes size? Of Course!

• If you’re a business coach invite people to ask you questions about problems in their business and offer them expert advice for free - Oh wait… somebody’s already doing that one ;)

I hope this post has inspired some ideas and given a few people a new perspective on social media for businesses. As usual leave your comments, questions and advice in the comments section below or on the Facebook wall. Next time I’m going to be tackling an issue that lots of people have been asking me about – self mastery and time management.

1 – Lack of knowledge

Start off by talking to people. Chances are you know someone who’s a social media fanatic. Take them out to dinner, get them to tell you their social media story and ask them all the stupid questions you need to.

If you want a very quick introduction to social media marketing read this

If you want the help of an expert and you’re in London, I recommend my good friend Nelly Berova and the team at artdivision or I can put you in touch with my social media advisor Bryn.

2 – Lack of Time

During the first 6 months, for the returns you’re getting it will feel like you’re wasting too much time. Social media marketing is a long term strategy. It’s not like placing an advert in the newspaper where you get leads straight away and the Return On Investment (ROI) is quick and easy to calculate. However, there are some things you can do to save time:

• Delegate and share the work with your whole team
• Outsourcing – agencies, interns or even offshore
• Social media management tools
• Pre-scheduling your content updates
• Listening tools
• Paid ads to speed up the initial growth of your following.

The bottom line is: you don’t have to invest massive amounts of time and you shouldn’t expect results over night. Daily 20 minute time commitments over a year work much better than month long blitzes followed by loss of enthusiasm and giving up.

Andrew made a very good point in the comments section of my last post when he pointed out that there can be valuable effects to your social media efforts other than simply attracting extra customers. He mentions that by listening and interacting with his customers via social media he managed to learn things that he could then use to refine his product and customer service strategies. So one bonus of investing in social media is that you can also use it as a market research tool!

3 – Lack of a clear strategy

You will want to sit down with your team and formalise a clear strategy. Make sure you’ve at least answered these questions:

Where is your audience? Facebook and twitter are the obvious ones. But there’s also…

• LinkedIn
• YouTube
• Blogs
• Forums
• Q&A sites
• Social bookmarking sites
• Event management sites like meetup.com
• Group buying sites like Groupon
• Location based social media like foursquare
• … etc.

What UNIQUE value can you add? The internet is a crowded place. If you’re not uniquely informative, funny or useful you won’t be successful. I really want to stress this point – it’s what everybody gets wrong first time.

What case studies can you do of other businesses in your industry who are successfully using social media?

How will you measure ROI? (CAN you measure ROI?)

What are your next actions and your 3,6,9,12 month milestones?

That should be enough to get you started. In my next post I’m going to highlight two very common mistakes that those who are new to social media often make. Namely: not being different enough from other social media efforts out there and not building up enough trust before trying to sell to your following. Check back in a fortnight or subscribe using the buttons on the top right. If you have any question about social media in the mean time why not ask the ActionCOACH Parag Prasad London SME Community?

Thanks for reading.