I’m sure that you already follow up the people you’ve met at networking events by an invitation to join your LinkedIn network.  But if you just use the standard invitation saying “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” you’re missing something.  Everyone knows that’s the same invitation that they get from all the other people – but I thought you were different.  When I met you, I thought that we’d had a good chat and got on well, not that you’d send me the same template email that everyone else uses.

It’s much more pleasant, and takes about 30 seconds longer, to say something specific in your LinkedIn invitation.  Mention what we talked about, when we met, what made you think of me.

The current campaign to keep Radio 6 reminds me of the campaign a few years ago to keep Heinz salad cream. Heinz threatened to stop making salad cream, because it had fallen in popularity, and this made headlines for a few days. People who had not bought salad cream for years suddenly became all nostalgic about the taste of their childhoods, and a campaign was launched to save salad cream. Of course, when we look behind the scenes here, we can see that this must have been a great big PR stunt – companies stop making products all the time if they stop producing enough profit for them, and it doesn’t make headline news. In the normal course of events, salad cream would have just disappeared from the shelves, and the 5 people who were still buying it would have just not been able to find it anymore, and they too would have switched to eating mayonnaise.

In order to make headline news, someone had to have engineered the PR. Someone had to write a press release about Heinz stopping making salad cream, and get journalists interested in the story. And of course, this had to happen before the end of production, so that people could then rush to the shops and buy the noxious yellow stuff.

With all the fuss about Radio 6, we see a number of the same elements. We have a product which has disappointing levels of sales, or in this case listeners. I regularly listen to Radio 6, and had been very surprised to find out a few weeks before that the listener figures were so low. The brilliant Adam and Joe show on Saturday mornings was the most popular show, but only had 160,000 listeners, and some of the other shows only had around 5000. So, the BBC has a problem child, their little radio station is a bit of a runt. And they’re doing a strategic review and have to think about whether this is the best use of their money.

I’m not sure whether the campaign was started as part of an official marketing strategy by the BBC, it seems more likely that as rumoured, it was started by a BBC employee – I’m guessing someone who works at Radio 6. Radio 6 has been promoted to millions of people who have probably never heard of it or thought of listening before. And I bet that their listener numbers have jumped this week just as dramatically as the sales figures for salad cream did when Heinz threatened to stop making it. In marketing terms, there are few techniques as effective as making people feel that they might have something taken away from them.

So I can admire this as a marketing technique, and you can argue that the ends justify the means, if Radio 6 is saved and lots of new people get to listen to a wider mix of music. But I’m not convinced that this is an ethical way to do things, so I won’t be wearing any Radio 6 ribbons just yet.

Although I work with many different types of businesses, there are several issues which clients experience time and time again, and I’m going to share these with you so you can apply them in your business.

Sometimes I’ll find myself saying this one several times in one day to different people.

“You might find it helpful to set some targets for your business.”

Now of course this sounds completely obvious (like many things I find myself repeating) but it surprises me how many businesses have only the vaguest targets.

Without a set of targets, you’ve no idea whether you’re doing well or not.

If you haven’t aimed for something, you don’t know if you’ve hit the right thing. Imagine a darts player just throwing the darts at the wall of the pub, with no dartboard. You’d imagine that he’s a madman, just throwing darts randomly – surely that’s dangerous?

There’s something strange about the act of setting targets for your business. When you set a target, as long as it’s realistic, you’re pretty likely to achieve it. Some people who have discovered this effect have thought that there’s something magical about it, something caused by the power of thought. But there’s nothing magical about it –

You’re more likely to achieve an explicity target if it looks like you’re not going to reach the target, you’ll do something about it.

If you’re selling shoes and you’ve been told that each day you need to sell £500 worth of shoes, and by 2 o’clock in the afternoon you’ve only put £65 through the till, you’ll know that you’d better be nice to the customers and sell some shoes. You’d pay attention. But if you think of your job as just standing around and making sure that no one steals the Jimmy Choos, it will be a different story.

Setting targets focuses your attention on what you need to do.

If you know that you need to do more networking, set yourself a target for how many networking meetings you’re going to go to each month, and how many catch up coffees you’re going to have with people who might send business your way. If you know that you need to get more clients of a particular kind, make that your target. If you have something which consistently gets pushed out of the way because other things are more important, then make sure it’s on your target list.

I’ll write another, more technical, article soon about how you set targets, and how to monitor them, but get thinking about what targets your business needs to set and reach.

I wrote recently about the businesses I can’t help, so I thought it was only fair to write about whom I can help.  It’s tempting to write this as a sales pitch, but I’ll resist temptation and try to be more objective instead. My strap line is that I help small businesses who want to be bigger businesses.  I specialise in businesses with less than 30 employees because the smaller businesses are the sexy exciting ones. The businesses where I can make the most difference are the ones where the owner is committed to growth, and knows that he or she needs some help and support to get there.  Where the owner wants to get to be a bigger business, but doesn’t really know how to go about it. Imagine a two-person design partnership.  They’ve developed some demand, and have some good clients, but they are uncertain how to move from doing all the work themselves to being able to manage other people doing the work.  If you’ve read any of Michael Gerber’s Emyth books then you’ll know that there’s a key growth stage in stopping doing the work yourself, and getting others to do the work, while you become responsible for developing and running the business.  The temptation for our design company is to carry on doing all the work themselves, getting more and more worn out by servicing clients, or by not spending any time on marketing, they risk running out of new business.  Or both. In this situation I can:

• Identify what sort of work the lovely designers need to go after
• See what how they need to price their work to remain competitive, but have enough to be able to afford to pay other people to do the production and improve their profits
• Help them work out what marketing activities are going to work best for them
• Refocus them on marketing, so they can attract new clients
• Make sure they do the marketing, by being there and reminding them of what they promised to do

Of course, my lovely designers could do all of this themselves, but what do they get extra by paying me to help them? I’d say they get:

• The courage to charge more money
• Some fantastic new ideas about marketing, which they maybe wouldn’t have been able to come up with themselves, because I spend all my time seeing what works and stealing other people’s tactics
• Someone to be accountable to – so they can’t just slip back to their old habits, but are reminded that now we’re doing business in a different way.
• Someone who gives a damn.  This sounds obvious, but how often do you have someone who actually really cares about whether you succeed or fail, and have that person be someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Let’s take another scenario, this time of a bigger business.  Here’s a company which has been running for a while.  They have 12 staff, so they’ve got over the delegation issue, and they’re nicely profitable.  But, the director knows that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life running this business – at the moment it’s still fun, but she wants to sell up in 3 years time.  And, she wants to have enough money to do something else after that, or to do nothing at all for a while.  In fact, she knows that she wants to sell for upwards of £1.5m. Why would she want to get the woman with the curly hair and glasses in? Our director (we’ll call her Alice) needs some help to achieve her target of a sale in 3 years with a price tag of £1.5m.  Where I can help is:

• Assessing how much turnover and profit she needs to bring in to make the business worth that million and a half, and make sure that the business is working in a way which will maximise the sale value.
• Working on a much bigger marketing strategy to build up the business
• Helping with the recruitment of a really hot sales director to bring in the big sales which are going to add up.
• Supporting Alice in all the little problems that come with growing a business, so she’s got someone to go through things with her.  Again, this is about giving a damn, and getting help from someone who has been through this themselves.

That should give you an idea of the sort of businesses I work with and how I make a difference.  If you would like to talk about how I can help, you know where I am.

This week I’ve been helping people with boring businesses. That is, the businesses themselves aren’t boring, nor are the people who run them, but the businesses look just the same as their competitors, and there’s nothing to make someone want to buy from them or even notice them.  Any differentiation has just been on the nebulous ideas that “we’re nice chaps” or “we’re really good at what we do.”  But of course, everyone thinks that they are a nice chap, or that they’re the best, but you don’t have any evidence of it.  I’m really lovely, and amazing at what I do, but how do I prove it to you?

Anyway, people don’t spend money with you because you’re nice.  Particularly at the moment, with the new rule that it’s bad to let any cash out of the door, people are only going to spend money if there’s an amazing reason for it.

To get people to buy from you, you have to get them to notice you first.  My friend Aida is this one that you want – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. She’s great Aida, a lovely girl.  And you won’t get even the first letter of Aida’s name if you’re boring – no one will even notice you.

Boring businesses include:

Many people set up a business as if they’ve been to see the careers advisor at school. I’m going to be a nurse, fireman, trainer.  They see what they’re good at, and there’s a category of business which they fit into.  No wonder they’re all the same – they’ve been designed to be the same as everyone else.  Does this sound familiar?

I’ve worked with lots of these businesses, and my first starting point is always how do we make this into something remarkable? We need something which makes people notice it, and even more importantly, talk about it, tell stories about it.  I’ve written elsewhere about the marketing advantages of running a remarkable business , and Seth Godin comes back to this point time and time again in his writing about marketing and business.

My technique when faced with a boring business is to dig deep into what’s really going on with the business.  Is there a niche of customers that the business is really good at servicing?  Concentrate on that seam, establish a reputation for excellence and that reputation will spill over into everything else you do.

Do the business owners have something that other people don’t have?  Jacky Misson at Nido Marketing has made telesales (a boring business if there ever was one) into something exciting, purely by force of her personality.  Because Jacky is so excited about her business, and the act of getting on the phone, she makes you want to engage Nido – her enthusiasm and sense of fun is infectious.

Is there an idea you can steal from somewhere else?  I recently told a café owner that I wouldn’t eat in her café – and she said she wouldn’t either!  No wonder she isn’t making any money.  I set her some homework to go to some great cafes and work out what makes them great – and then we can work on some ideas to steal, once we know what works somewhere else.

Have a look at your business and see what’s there under the surface, or what you can creatively swipe from other people.  Make it different, make it remarkable and then you can work out how to tell people about it.