I’ve just been doing a competitor analysis for a client and I’ve been struck by just how absolutely rubbish most of his competitors are.  Which is good news for him, but I thought there might be some learning for the rest of us.

In a slightly random order, here are some tips on what not to do

• Don’t make me guess what it is you do.  I want to know as soon as I go to your home page
• Don’t puzzle me with gobbledygook.  If you can’t explain what you do in plain English, I’m not going to stay around to figure it out
• Don’t make me peer at the screen to read the tiny writing.  I’ll either not bother and go somewhere else, or I’ll get fed up really quickly and go somewhere else
• Don’t give me a section called “Thought Leadership” and then put up two white papers.  It makes you look like a bandwagon jumping, self-aggrandising idiot.  Which is probably not the brand values you were looking for.
• Don’t rely on diagrams or videos to get your message across – give me some easily digestible words first, and then back it up with a diagram or video

Any other suggestions for bad practice you’ve seen?

I’ve spoken at length about the Joy of Networking and how important it is for business.  In essence, networking is about meeting the right people, and staying in touch for mutual benefit.

Today, I want to talk about one of my principal pleasures in life – cake dates.  A cake date is a term I’ve stolen from Pete Jenkins over at e-Advantage and means going for coffee (and of course a cake) to find out more about a potential client/referrer/interesting person/business friend.  Or to keep in touch with someone who is already an old client/referrer/interesting person/business friend.

Here are the cake date tips

These are just my cakes!

Do make sure that you talk business as well as catching up on the gossip. Do your research, read their blog, check them out on LinkedIn for mutual contacts and to find out more about their background.  This gives you a better idea of what they’re about, and gives you chance to ask very specific questions about areas of their work which might have some synergy or overlap with what you do.

Be ready to tell stories about your business which shows how you work.  I often ask people who their ideal client is, so that I can see how I might be able to make referrals and help out.  And of course, then you can say who your ideal client is as well.

Be prepared to ask daft questions if you don’t understand something, and don’t be all British about asking about money.  If you’re going to refer someone, or ask them to make referrals for you, you do need to understand how much they charge, otherwise you’re going to be barking up the wrong potential customer trees for them.

Spend an hour on talking about business, and then be prepared to head off.  That way the cake date doesn’t eat too much into your day, and you can still afford 15 minutes for more social chit chat at the end of the date.

And do follow up and email to say that it was good to catch up so you’re reinforcing your message, and have a chance to be helpful again by sending them useful articles, contacts of other people who might be useful, etc.

And if you hit it off, add this person to your list of top referrers (see my Joy of Business system of networking) so you make sure you stay in touch and have a long and fruitful relationship.

Where to eat cake

I’m compiling a list of suitable cake date venues in Brighton, Hove, Sussex and London.  They need to have excellent coffee, good cake and be quiet enough so that you can have a conversation without having to shout, or without the rest of the cafe hearing what your daily rate or current business issues are.

Where would you recommend for a cake date?

The delicious cakes shown above come are made by the delightful Jen Lindsay-Clarke at the amazing She Bakes If you ever need a fancy cake, give Jen a call

A couple of days ago someone wanted to give me some feedback about the Brighton and Hove Chamber of Commerce breakfast event that morning. I’m President of the Chamber, so I always want to hear what people have to say.

The main point from this guy was that he didn’t feel that there was enough time for networking at these events. In case you haven’t been to one of our breakfasts, the format is that everyone comes in at 7:45, has coffee and pastries and circulates and chats for about 30 minutes, then we sit down and have breakfast. After breakfast there’s a speaker for about 15 – 20 minutes, usually someone who is talking about their own business journey and passing on some ideas and inspiration. By 9:30, we close the meeting and some people go off to work, and some people hang on and have a bit more chat.

Mr Feedback’s problem was that he didn’t get to meet enough people. What he wanted to do was meet as many people as possible, see if they wanted to buy anything from him, and if not, then move on to the next person. This is called working the room.

My experience

For me, this is a real misconception about networking. I had been at the same breakfast that morning, and I’d spoken to Peter, Rosie, Toby, Rebecca, Rebecca’s friend, Robert and Mark.

I’d said hello to about half a dozen more people, and I’d been able to get hold of the guy that Rebecca wanted to speak to and send him over to her. For me, this is plenty enough people for one event. I want to be able to have in depth conversations with people, and to say hi (therefore reminding them of my existence) to others. I don’t know if there will be any direct business benefit to me from going to particular breakfast, but I know that I learnt some interesting things from the talk, found out something new about Robert which might be of use to one of my clients, and that I had fun. Again, that’s plenty, and well worth the twelve quid.

The risk of working the room

If you work the room, your desire to separate the wheat from the chaff means that you risk offending the people you discard. Those people are not going to want to be your friends.

Very few of us sell anything the first time we meet someone, especially if you sell services (this doubles if you sell complex service). So if someone doesn’t want to buy right now, make sure that you establish a good relationship with them, because they might want to buy later. And of course, they might not want to ever buy from you, but you want them to remember you and like you, because you want them to recommend you to their aunt’s boyfriend’s best friend, who does want to buy whatever you’re selling.

Don’t be a doggie

The other risk with working the room is that you can look needy. You’re like a doggie, sniffing each person to see who is going to give you the money. And no one is going to trust you or buy anything if you appear to be desperate.

Don’t be tempted to work the room – networking is a long term game, with big potential results. Some of the people who have done me the biggest favours in business have been people who I’ve known for years, and who are very unlikely themselves to be my clients, but I’ve got to know them and they’ve been incredibly helpful, recommending potential clients, setting up speaking opportunities (where I do meet potential clients) and media opportunities. You only need a handful of great people like this to make the difference.

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.