Episode 012 What is a Seriously Social Business

IBGR 0:01
You’re listening to IBGR our call sign for the Internet Business Growth Radio Network. The broadcast frequency is our URL and it’s IBGR.network. We provide live and recorded shows 24 hours a day seven days a week on what an entrepreneur or small business consultant needs to grow their operation from zero to big. How big? Up to you. IBGR focuses on the 180 million English speaking small business owners around the world in four major markets North America, Australia, Oceana, the Indian subcontinent, and United Kingdom, Europe and Africa. All of these six hour cycles are delivered in six major themes strategy operations, sales, people, ownership and consulting. The first four tracks strategy operations, sales and people on the day to day tactical issues all entrepreneurs face. The fifth track, ownership, takes the conversation to the next level. How can an owner working in the business make the transition to an executive of a multibillion dollar firm by working on it? Our last track, consulting, is for our brothers and sisters with the same vision as IBGR. Helping small business owners grow. I bet you didn’t know that 50% of everybody on the planet is employed by a small business owner. Let’s team up and help business owners increase generational wealth for themselves in a family while creating good jobs in their local community. Our team has over seven decades of helping and building businesses we have turned those years of extensive radio shows and downloadable tools that any entrepreneur whether you’re an independent contractor, solopreneur or business owner can apply immediately. All you have to do is download, listen, apply and engage. Download the show notes that address current issues of your business. Listen to the show live or as a podcast. Apply the information and tools engage us with your experience and feedback. And if you really want to maximise your time spent when IBGR join our community and have access to our toolbox. This just scratches the surface of what you will receive every day at IBGR. The opportunity to grow with us is only limited by your imagination and persistence. Let’s grow together.

Simone Douglas 1:55
Good morning, Australia and hello world you’re listening to the IBGR network. That’s the International Business Growth Radio Network. And we are broadcasting live to 132 countries around the globe. For the next hour you are changing to Seriously Social with me, Simone Douglas and I’m your C3 host in a sales and marketing stream. I’m also CEO of Digital Marketing AOK, publican of the Duke of Brunswick hotel, Executive Director of BNI Adelaide North, host Seriously Social The Podcast and author of the book by the same name just to keep things entertaining. So for the down low on all things seriously social and digital marketing you can head to our website, www.socialmediaaok.com.au and drop us a line or better yet book in a coffee. No such thing as too much caffeine. Did you know that all of last season’s episodes are available on demand in our community of commerce? Get the complete one hour show instead of just the first 15 segments in our podcast live playlist. Now complete season of podcasts are located in our community of commerce, which you will find at our website, IBGR.network and click the Join Us tab then click community and get immediate access to the entire season of programming so you will never miss another episode. Throughout the show you’re welcome to reach out with comments or questions either tag us on all the usual socials by searching IBGR network on your favourite channel. Be sure to be tagging me in as well. You’ll find my links on the show notes at the website or just search Simone Douglas sm. You can listen to stage three business strategies four times a day, seven days a week. The time for stage three strategies in Sydney Australia is 10am local time. Mumbai, India is 11:30am ist. Accra, Ghana is 6pm GMT and Toronto Canada is 2pm et. So this is Episode One in our C lane IBGR.network seriously social our season overview so that you can get prepared for the journey I’m going to take you on over the next 12 weeks. Go to our website, IBGR dot network and download the show notes so that you can play along. We’re into season three in the final quarter of 2020. And here we sit as a stage three company, and now it’s about solidifying our revenue streams and making the most of our people and our opportunities. So let’s take a look at what it looks like when you have a sales and marketing strategy that’s completely integrated and the processes in place that are going to build upon it. So what is a seriously social business anyway? It’s time for us to take a serious look at the operational realities of understanding how our sales and marketing forms relationships with our customers for the lifetime of their journey with us as a business. It’s easy to get distracted by all the noise in the business world at large, but jump day, which is what I prefer to call Wednesday rather than it’s time honoured mantle of Hump Day, is your chance to settle in and work on your business in ways that allow you to make the most of your opportunities today, tomorrow and forever. IBGR is a global community of commerce committed to your success, and our programming is designed to give you the tools and resources as well as the one percenters you might be missing.

So, buckle up because season three is going to be a ripper. If you put the learnings into place, you’ll be all set to belt 2021 out of the stratosphere. After all, we didn’t wake up this morning and decide to own an averagely successful business now did we? The purpose of today’s show, is to give you an overview of what we’re going to get our teeth into this season of Seriously Social and how we make the most of it in embracing the humanistic approach to sales and marketing for stage three companies. The information we’ll cover over the next 12 weeks is an in depth set of sales and marketing topics, which deal with the items that need to be reviewed, implemented and refined when your company has entered into the stage three part of your evolution. Remember, at stage three, you’re a business that is getting ready to consolidate growth to date, solidify your systems and processes and then get ready to level up to stage four. So what are our key issues from an owner perspective in our final quarter of 2020? We need to be making sure our objectives fit with those of our customers. We need to help check whether our sales process is one of surprise and delight for our customers or is it like pulling teeth? Where are the road bumps? And how do we identify them and smooth them out? Then we need to take a look at what are the expectations were creating through our marketing messaging that is being delivered at the end, or are we breaking our brand in the process? So we over promising and under delivering? Or are we just giving people a terrible service experience on the way through? What are all the touch points are the moments of truth on the customer journey? And what are the metrics and benchmarks we need to be across? And how are we performing in the face of those? It doesn’t matter where you are in your business right now is definitely the time to be taking a solid look at exactly where you are, and making some realistic decisions about where you want to go in 2021. All whilst keeping a finger on the pulse of the last quarter of the year. This season is all about getting ready to ramp it up in the new year, but that’s not to say you won’t apply your learnings as he go and get some quick runs on the board on the way through. So what’s the plan for season three to make all this magical stuff happen? So our next show next week, coming up will be storytelling versus story selling and customer alignment. So we’re gonna look at the operational realities of understanding how our customers use our product or service and what their results are on the journey. Then we’re going to jump over to figuring out whether your does your six word story measure up? Or are you faking it until you break it? So taking a look at it through the marketing and sales and service experience perspective, are we delivering on the expectations we are creating, and do we live our values every step of the way, or are they just a poster on the wall? Then we’re going to move on to the feedback loop for consistent improvement, so user friendly and results driven, how is our product or service working for our customers? Now they’re part of our business family? And how do we assess that and maintain our relationships and the brand positioning that we’ve built for ourselves? Then we’re going to take a look at the bread and butter cream and dream customers how to recognise them and what they mean to your business. So understanding how customers are buying their paths of travel to your door who are my best accounts or or business family members? And why the cost of acquisition in comparison to top line sales is a critical factor in this next show after that is the relationship debate. Are you burning contacts or creating raving fans? If you’re going to improve the customer experience, how do you surprise and delight them in some way the one percenter that creates raving fans and those memorable moments that have people talking about your business for all the right reasons. And then the next show from there is hit wins and missed opportunities. So what opportunities do you have to increase purchase frequency upsell, cross sell or diversify to grow your wallet share with the customers? How do we make the most of that? And how do we make sure that we’re identifying all of those. And then we’re going to move on to making new friends and building relationships. Now it’s time to identify who else is out in the market that we haven’t reached who’s floating in adjacent markets that we need to talk to. This is not just the direct sales, but the referral relationships, we should be building and accessing to futureproof your pipeline. From there, we’re going to talk about one of my favourite topics, bright shiny objects and old favourites when it comes to sales. So the difference between acquisition and retention within your organisation and what it costs you on both sides of the coin, how to evaluate your processes to ensure that you have a balance book and who contributes to the journey on the way through.

From there, we’re going to look at baby in the bathwater. So customer recovery that works for you, you’re never going to get it right all the time. As much as we’d like to think that we do deliver on promise and recover when you do not is the critical key to success and the hidden path to profitability in the long term. From there, we’re going to move on to the numbers game, understanding the metrics that matter when it comes to sales and marketing, how to interrogate your numbers and the ratios to ensure that your team is running on all cylinders, whether you are at capacity, or there is room to move, where coaching is required and what to look at from a sales coaching perspective. So all of those things are going to be important. And then to wrap things up nicely coming into the end of 2020, we’re going to have a look at digital trends that we need to be aware of, and how they apply to your sales and marketing efforts. So what are the digital trends for 2021? And how can we make the most of those in our own businesses or organisations? And we’ll wrap it all up with flying or falling. Are you ready to take the leap? So this will be our season recap at the end of the season. So did you put all the checks and balances in place to make sure that you’ve set to saw rather than crash landing in 2021?

If this is your first time listening, welcome to the world of Seriously Social sales and marketing, when relationships win you the sales. If you’re a returning listener, thanks for being part of my Seriously Social global business family. The next three segments of today’s show will go over a synopsis of each show for season three. So you can start thinking about what’s going to be involved in getting the most out of our time together, make a note of the shows that you don’t want to miss and then make time to make it happen. As always, our team of on air talent is here to support you so be sure to connect with us in the community of commerce, and let’s get the conversation started. So you can join the global community that is IBGR. If you have a question about today’s show any of that one programming, is there a business question that you can’t find the answer to you can message us in real time during the show? If you look for the pulsating orange question mark in the lower right corner of most pages on our website, you can click it to ask questions or share comments about the show that comes directly to the station management and the on air talent. As season three programming cycle is launching this week. So you can find us by typing IBGR network on any of the social media platforms, whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or Twitter. And we look forward to some really robust conversations over this season. You have a whole opportunity here to supercharge what’s left of 2020 make the most of the opportunity to re frame where you’re coming from with your sales and marketing and health check that it lines up with your top line business goals. We’ll be working towards having a completely integrated sales and marketing strategy that ensures that there are no opportunities that are missed, whether it’s from start or finish and how we maximise our relationships, our digital footprint and the networks that we have available to us in such a way that it builds our business seamlessly. So we’re not in for a bumpy ride, we’re looking for something nice and smooth. You’ve been listening to Simone Douglas and I will be back right after the break.

IBGR 0:06
This is William Eastman Managing Partner for Growth Works Media and Station Director for IBGR. One of my jobs is finding great on air talent consultants and business owners presence and a story to tell. We’re expanding our broadcast team to represent our four core time zones North America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent and the last four, United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe and Africa. If you are a small business consultant or business owner would like to audition for an on air slot in our six hour show cycle, contact the station director and that is that programming at IBGR.network, we will respond to your email within one business day. Thanks for listening and don’t miss this great opportunity to put the world back to work at grow with us.

AD 0:59
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Simone Douglas 2:34
Okay, and we’re back you’re listening to IBGR.network more than a radio station, you are now part of a global business family dedicated to helping you achieve your goals and I am your host for this hour Simone Douglas. This is Episode One in our C lane at IBGR.network seriously social. Today’s topic is our season overview, what it’s going to take to become a seriously social business and why that even matters. Go to our website at IBGR.network and download the show notes to catch you up on the show so far. So let’s have a look at these shows that I’m going to be delivering to help you get this integrated sales and marketing strategy. So first up, we’re going to be looking at Storytelling Versus Storyselling and Customer Alignment. So the operational realities of understanding how our customers use our product or service, and what their results are on the journey. So what is it that we need to do here, exactly? We need to identify do we understand the difference between story telling and story selling when it comes to our marketing and our sales collateral. Have we got the mix right? Have we aligned roles within our business or organisation to meet our objectives? In other words, do the right people in the organisation have ownership over the right tasks in order for us to succeed? Are we all flying by the seat of our pants? Have we made it easy to collaborate by aligning technology, terminology and processes with outcomes? Is it documented and streamlined, and does everyone know how to use everything and what it is that they’re expected to do at any given time? You need to have KPIs every step of the way. There’s no point getting to the end of the month or the quarter and not knowing where you are at before you arrive there. So what are you tracking how and why then of course you have to make adjustments when and where necessary. This is the beginning of a cohesive and integrated sales and marketing framework which you can then refine and adjust ongoing. Is this designed to be a living document something that you are looking at on a daily basis not something that is in a folder and sat on a shelf to be dusted off at the end of the year. Our next show this season will cover off on does your six word story measure up. or are you faking it until you break it? Looking at it through a sales, marketing and service experience perspective are we delivering on the expectations we are creating? Do we live our values every step of the way, or are they just a poster on the wall?

So we need to start with our six word story. The thing that sums up internally the emotional felt sense you want to create in every customer, if you don’t have this, you have no anchor for all of the things that you do. So we’re going to look at documenting how from there how customers use your product or service in terms of their actual behaviour. We’ll explore the journey of the customer from the customer’s receipt of your product or service and who the last person in your organisation is that engaged with them, and how they contributed to that six word story. Then I’m going to take you through the process of starting with this first marketing collateral that they encounter and mapping each touchpoint the customer had with your business on the way through. From there, we’re going to create a value map aligned with our six word story and create a standard operating procedure and position description for each internal step and incorporate each external touch point into the corresponding SOP and position description. Sounds like a lot of work, but it’s important work. So definitely, session three of the season is one that you don’t want to be missing. From there, we’re going to move on to the feedback loop for consistent improvement, and so we need to make sure that it’s user friendly for our customers and for our teams but then we still results driven so that we have some benchmarks and some KPIs in place. In this show, we’re going to look at how is our product or service working for our customers. Now they’re part of the family, and how do we assess that and maintain our relationships and brand positioning. So knowing and understanding your customer experience across the lifetime of their journey with your business is critical to the growth of your company. Your goal is to make the experience user friendly and to give them the expected results that you promised, or were perceived as a promise by your customers. So again, this can be quite dangerous, your feedback loop is going to give you the heads up if your marketing messaging is in that over promise stage, or it’s deviated from the six word story that comes down to how you want your customers to feel.

We’re going to look at opportunities to gather and analyse customer satisfaction survey results, the process for identifying rates and reasons for customisation and engage with customers to ascertain their product or feature requests. We’ll also cover off in this session about the importance of the net promoter score. So how do we make sure that we’re regularly assessing it? We’ll identify different opportunities within the organisation to gather feedback. So what level do you engage? So if you’re the CEO, or the business owner, at what point are you engaging with your key accounts? Yes, you don’t manage them day to day, but is there at least one touch point a quarter where they receive an email form you that seems personalised even if it’s automated? So the best companies that have the best customer retention and are closest to their customers in terms of understanding the customer experience, as those where, all levels of the organisation have some kind of touch point with the customers. So we need to identify where we have the resources for that, how we make the most of it, and what that will look like, and then we’re going to take a deep dive into how and why you analyse customer support ticket trends. So what opportunities does that create for continuous improvement in making the most of what it is that you’re running through? So our first three shows, pretty hefty, and you’re gonna want to do some preparation. So some of the things that it’s good to start thinking about before next week, is when it comes to this storytelling versus story selling and customer alignment piece that we’re going to be covering next week. start evaluating your social media in your digital channels, because we want to have health checked what’s actually going on ahead of time. So out of the last 20 posts that you’ve done on your LinkedIn profile, for argument’s sake, because it’s a really good one to health check your personal brand and how how much you’re selling or not. Out of your last 20 posts, how many of them offered real value to your network? How many of them could have been considered opinionated or discerning? So in other words, you’re telling me why I need to read an article that you’ve posted, or what the benefits were, how many of them were actually helping and supporting people in your wider digital networks, because all of those things actually set up the right kind of expectations for you customers. From there, you need to take a look at your business organisations, social media and digital channels. Are we so busy selling or in other words, yelling at people on what is meant to me and other centric medium that we failed to build those relationships? So in those immediate opportunities, what we need to do is have a look at where we’re going, how we’re building those relationships. And to do that, you need to have first given yourself a score. So this week in between times, while you’re waiting for next week’s show, what you want to do is give yourself a score out of 10 as to how well you are building relationships on each platform. Okay, so one being terrible. So if all you’ve done is put a whole heap of salesy posts that talk about how wonderful your organisation is, and why I should buy your product or service, you get a score of one, if you’ve got a good mix of both sales related posts, let’s say you’re in the 50/50 range and the other mix is you know, collaborating with people that are aligned with what you do, but not competitive with what you do, then all of those things will give you a different opportunity. So you might get 50% and, you know, if you want a 10 out of 10, then you’re engaging in commentary and conversation across your channels in a really robust way that allows everyone to get involved. So all of these things need to be evaluated so that once we actually look at how our customers are forming those relationships with us, we get into that storytelling mode. Okay? So we’re conveying our vision and values for the business and organisation and the direct impact that it makes in our community, and for our customers. So we’re talking about being a values driven organisation at this point. And then from there, we’ll be all set to run through whether or not our six word story measures up or whether we’ve done a miserable job of connecting with our customers and actually giving them the experience that they want. So these are all good things to start thinking about and letting them percolate ahead of kicking into the season proper. So you also want to go out and get yourself a notebook that’s just for this show. Because by the end of it, you’re going to have a plethora of notes that you’ll need to go back over and put into practice. So this is designed to be a practical implementation where you get the most out of the time that we’re spending together. If you give me an hour of your life, once a week, then I will make sure that you are all set for success. Okay.

The other thing that it’s going to be important to do is have a look at what feedback mechanisms you currently have in place and how well they’re being used. So go back to your business and have a look, you know, how often do we survey our customers? How do we know is it the only feedback that we get is customer complaints? So what is our process for getting that continuous feedback, and how do we make the most of all of those things? This is going to be fairly critical at this point. So we’re very shortly going to take a short two minute break and when we return, we’re going to cover off on the bread and butter, cream and dream customers how to recognise them and what they mean to your business. In the relationship debate, are you burning contacts or creating raving fans and hidden wins and missed opportunities the key elements contained within these topics and why they matter in your quest for an epic 2021. Did you know that all of this season’s episodes are available on demand in our community of commerce? Get the complete one hour show in our community of commerce instead of just the first 15 minute segment in our podcast live playlist. Don’t miss the action steps in the third and fourth segments starting from next week that you need to grow your business. Now complete season of podcasts like hated in our community of commerce, go to our website IBGR.network and click on the Join Us tab and then click community and get immediate access to the entire season of programming. never miss another episode. You have been listening to seriously social the humanistic approach to sales and marketing episode one in our C lane IBGR.network sales and marketing our season overview on International Business Growth radio network. I’m your host Simone Douglas and we’re gonna get back to business in the season overview after a very short break. Thanks very much.