Don’t believe the hype!

Last week I organised an event for Nice Networking, which was a select afternoon tea gathering called ‘Cake-working’.

As the name suggest, this event was supposed to be “nice” so I did some research and picked The Gore Hotel in Kensington as our destination. I chose The Gore on the strength of their write up on afternoontea.co.uk, their own website and their mid-range price point for afternoon tea with champagne.

Click here to look at their website. Doesn’t it look like a fabulous place, and wouldn’t you expect a really refined and delectable afternoon tea to be served here?

Unfortunately, two things happened – the afternoon tea was okay, rather than really nice, and the venue itself didn’t quite live up to its glossy web photos.

Was I disappointed? You betcha! My disappointment was because my expectations had been built up unreasonably (that’s the key word), not because anything was fundamentally bad or wrong.

In this week’s tip, I’ll tell you why this happened and how to avoid it.

this week’s tip: don’t believe the hype

Most small businesses that I meet are better than their marketing, so they won’t fall into this trap, but here’s why it might happen to some businesses:

• Your marketing agency/ department are masters of spin
• You have got complacent about the value of your product/ service
• You believe your own hype

I think that my recent experience is due to all of the above.

You can avoid these pitfalls by following these pointers:

• Keep it real – tell your clients what they actually get from you and if that doesn’t sound good enough, improve your product/ service!
• Keep asking your customers what they think – use surveys, suggestion cards, client appreciation evenings and focus groups to identify what you could do better and how
• Don’t believe your own hype! To keep checking in with the reality of your business, take your customers journey to see what it’s like, rather than relying on marketing phrases like “superior customers service”, “great value” or “cosy ambiance”

Is this where you’re wasting money?

How much money do you spend on networking? Really, honestly add it up right now and see what you spend. You have to include:

• The cost of attending the meeting
• Your travel ticket/petrol costs to get there
• The ticket price for the meeting, if there is one
• Your membership fee for the organisation putting it on, if there is one
• The value of your time whilst you’re at the meeting (if you charge £50 per hour, and the meeting is 2 hours long, the value of your time is £100)
• The value of your time taken to get there (if it takes 30mins each way, that’s another £50)

Now think about what you do when you get home from your networking meeting. Most people reading this email will take the business cards of those that they’ve met at the meeting and stick them in a draw (that’s if they even make it out of your pocket/bag/business card holder in the first place).

Those cards then stay there until you do a desk clear-out 2 years later, at which point you throw them away.

If, at some point in between gathering the cards and throwing them away, you decide that you want to get in touch with “that guy that you met at that evening event – you know the one, he was tall, and it was at that bar, and he does something with companies in the City that would be interested in what you do, and he told you to call him”, but now you can’t find his card because you can’t remember his name or where you met him. Does that sound at all familiar?

Do you see how you are wasting the time and money that you spend on networking if you don’t then do something with the connections and contacts that you make at those meetings? I’m not saying that networking is a waste of time and money, in fact I am very pro-networking as a business growth tool, but you have to follow up.

There are 2 key things about this situation:

1. You have to follow up with contacts in an appropriate and timely way.
2. In order to follow up with people, you need to have a system in place to do just this

In this week’s tip, I’ll share my own business card collection and processing system.

this week’s tip: create a system to deal with your networking followups

In order to follow up effectively on the contacts that you make through networking and other meetings, you need a simple system.

Here’s my system for networking follow up:

1. At the meeting I take notes, either on a pad if it’s a sit-down event or on a person’s business card if it’s a stand-up-and-mingle event. I note down 2 things:

• What I can do for them.
• What they have said they can do for me, or would like me to help them with.

2. The next day (or as soon after the event as possible), I sit down with my notes and send each person an email which includes whatever information I said I’d send them, or makes reference to what they wanted from me (in which case I include a suggestion of how to proceed).

3. I then take the cards of those people, and the cards of any other people that I met at the event and pop them in a file marked ‘cards to process’ that sits on my desk.

4. Once a week, the file gets opened, and all the cards inside are added to my mailing list (I use constant contact).They then automatically get a message from me that says something like “it was lovely to meet you and I’d like to keep in touch by sending you news and marketing tips by email, but if you don’t want to receive them you can unsubscribe at any time”. N.B. If you have read my free guide to email marketing you will know that asking permission in this way is VITAL.

You can easily set up your own system that will help you to manage all incoming cards and contacts effectively and quickly.

However, that won’t help you to deal with your backlog of cards that I just know you have sat on your desk or in a drawer. Don’t panic – Tamara and the team at TJ Consulting can help.

They have a Business Card Buster service, and are offering this service for 100 cards with NO VAT to pay when you quote code ENTHUSE 01. See below for full details

special offer from TJ Consulting:  business card buster
 
Are you a keen networker meeting a lot of new prospects every month?

Do you often end up missing out on potential business, as you haven’t got a system to manage those new relationships?

Do you spend your valuable time entering business cards into your contact systems (Outlook, iPhone, Blackberry or CRM)?

Why not consider passing over the responsibility to your virtual assistant TJConsulting. Your business cards will be safely processed and emailed back to you as an Excel spreadsheet ready to be imported into Outlook or a CRM system.

In May: we are offering you our Biz Cards Buster. Get up to 100 business cards processed and entered into Excel for just £50. And, what’s more, we have included the VAT in this price for all clients of Enthuse Marketing (saving worth £8.75)!

Contact Tamara to BOOK NOW and secure this amazing limited offer!

Download a free marketing SMART worksheet

Marketing SMART is one of the most popular workshops that I run.

The benefits of this workshop are that it gives you an instant reality check on your marketing and a mini-plan that you can put into action straight away. It’s not in-depth, but it will get you moving if you’re stuck with your company promotions.

Download your own copy of the worksheet here to work through the exercises yourself.

If you want to attend my next Marketing SMART workshop, keep an eye on my events page.

email marketing mini-guide published

It’s a very simple guide to email marketing, so obviously there’s a LOT more you can learn, but this should help to get you started.

Click here to read the Enthuse mini-guide to email marketing