Why Your Website May Not Matter (It's all in the workflow)

A friend of mine has a great website.  It is well designed, easy to read, with clear, understandable content, nice photos and a catalog with e-commerce capabilities. He even has a proven client base.  

So, why are they not using it?  

Why are they phoning in orders and sending him emails rather than placing them on the site?

WORKFLOW MATTERS

What matters most in the overall design of your website and marketing platform is your ordering process.  If the process is too complicated, or it lacks the necessary functionality, you may have visitors, but they won't be customers.

If you are like my friend and are lucky enough to get orders directly, the answer to your problem may be staring you in the face.  The orders you get are clues to what may not be working on your site.  So, let's break down this test case and see what we mean.  We will start with the types of orders that come in.

Types of Orders Received

1. Phone in Orders - When a customer or sales rep calls with an order rather than placing on your site, there is a reason.  Don't try to guess what that reason is.  Ask, "Why did you call rather than enter it on the site?" The answers may and should surprise you.  If they don't surprise you, shame on you for not doing something about them before.  Some of the possible reasons are:
   1. The minimum order quantity may be prohibitive and the rep wants to talk with you about it.
   2. Color or size options may be clear.
   3. There may be a need for a rush order for a special client.
   4. Availability may be questioned.
2. Email Orders - Unlike orders by phone, email orders require access to the Internet, so the rep or customer could have visited the site instead of taking the time to write an email.  If it is easier to email, what are the possible reasons?
   1. The site may be overly complicated.
   2. The email may be generated by their own order processing system.
   3. The website may not be easy to navigate on a smartphone or tablet.
   4. The customer may not know the site URL or that it exists at all.
3. Fax or Paper Orders - This could be an indication that the customer does not use the Internet, or is not comfortable placing orders that way.  

Follow the Process

Once we know the reason, it seems simple enough to make changes to our site, but before we do, we should consider the overall ordering process.  What will make the order flow smoothly?  What can the rep do while in the store or with the customer?  What can a customer do easily from a smartphone or tablet?

Form follows function, so it is important to begin with the functionality, the ordering process itself, and everything else will fall into place.

Customers may not want to log in before selecting their merchandise.  Sales reps may want to have flexibility around order quantities.  When you analyze your orders and the reasons behind them, you may find there are potential sales hidden in them that are being lost.

So, before you spend a dime on redesigning your site, check with your customers and sales reps.  They know why they don't use the site.  Going through the expense of fixing what isn't broken and leaving broken what is will only make you angry and less profitable.

Happy New Year!

Breakthrough Marketing

What makes an e-commerce giant decide to open a retail store in the high rent district of Manhattan?  What prompts tech giants to break up into smaller companies?

The answer is competition.  

It is extremely hard to act like a speed boat when you are an ocean liner, so when we see ocean liners lowering the boats into the water, we tend to think the crew and passengers are about to abandon ship.  But there may be another reason.  It may be time to get out and have some fun in more shallow waters.

Amazon is opening kiosks and toying with the idea of a storefront to be able to increase sales of devices that require a hands-on experience, and at the same time, there is an added benefit. Having brick and mortar locations as shipping hubs may make sense.

On the other hand, HP and eBay are among those looking to peel back the onion and split their respective companies into multiple entities, helping them compete against the smaller, more nimble rivals.

Will these strategies work?

Most likely they will, not because they are good strategies, but because these companies are choosing to try them.  They are venturing out into different waters, and if these ideas don't work, they will try something else.

There is a lesson here for all businesses.  Don't get comfortable.

As business owners, we like to believe that we have it all figured out.  We know why our customers buy from us and we do everything in our power to make sure we maintain the quality of that product or service so we can continue to please them.

But what if we have it wrong?  What if the tastes are changing?  What if we had never reached our full potential in the first place and we stopped experimenting, thinking we have the secret formula that is worth millions?

While we focus on one critical and valuable aspect of our business, we may be missing something that a new competitor will see as an obvious and marketable omission on our part.

Enter the speed boat.

If we think back to when we began, we might see ourselves as the speed boat captains, gathering up those customers who wanted to go ashore, leaving the big cruise liner behind.

Sure it is comfortable on that big boat, with stores and restaurants, pools, tennis courts, all sorts of amusements, even a theater, but what if you want something else, something different?  

When we are smaller, we can pay more attention to each customer, adopt new technologies, react to changing tastes ad demands, be flexible.  As we grow, we need to keep that ability to adjust and adapt as one of the tenants of our business or we will find ourselves on the downward side of the growth curve.

So, take a look at the products and services you offer today and look back to when you started.  Are they very different or pretty much the same?  

If you have been holding onto the secret formula and avoiding making changes, you may need to do a little experimenting, now before someone comes along and trumps you with a more modern version.

After all, you are probably looking closely at your competitors and wondering how you can modify their offerings to trump them, right?  

If you want a breakthrough, the first thing you need to break through is your own resistance to change.

Now, let me end this.  I have to go take a close look at how to be more agile myself.

The Elijah Project: The Future of Creative Consulting

Find out more about The Elijah Project by contacting Bill Cusano @ 201 755-1925

Welcome to your second career!

If you are old enough to remember when people would work for twenty or thirty years and retire, then chances are you have experienced at least one, if not several, job or even career changes in your life, and you are probably still working or looking for work.

While that may sound depressing, it is actually good news for a growing sector of our economy, small businesses.  They need your expertise in order to grow, and they need to grow in order to survive.

Do they know that?

They are beginning to get the message.  But there is a problem.  Expertise costs money - a lot of money, and small business owners don't have as much as they need to afford good advice and support.

There are three trends that, individually give us a pain in the pit of our stomachs, but collectively point to a solution that could ad should change our perspective on the future, from bleak to bright.

Trend #1 - Technology is Getting Faster, Cheaper and Smarter

What that means is that each day more and more people, at ever expanding levels of the economic and social spectrum are gaining access to information, entertainment, and just about everything and everyone else.  The competition to be heard and seen is greater than ever before and that spells opportunity for marketers, communicators, trainers, mentors, advertisers and sales professionals, anyone who can get a message across to a prospective client or customer.

Trend #2 - Everyone is a Broadcaster and a Receiver

While companies are scrambling to try to figure out how to jump on the social network bandwagon, they are failing to be leaders, and are lagging behind as followers of the trend.  In other words, the game is ever changing and the elusive customer or lead is becoming more elusive every day.  Instead of meeting the prospect in its world, they invite the potential customers into theirs, and that's not the way young audience works.  With the ability to create their own social circles and lock out everyone they don't want to let in, future customers can totally avoid the messages they don't want to receive.

Trend #3 - Past Sources of Low Cost Talent are Becoming More Expensive

Now you may not think India or China are high cost labor markets, and you would be right, but the cost is rising, especially if you add in what it costs in time and money to communicate specifications for a project across so many time zones and languages.  As the tools of the trades become more sophisticated (we can now create apps without coding and design brochures without a degree in graphic arts), the ability to train talent locally and put it to work quickly gives us a tremendous time advantage, and speed to market matters - a lot!

So, what do these three trends mean?

Faster and Inexpensive Technology reduces the cost of entry.

It opens up the whole world of the creative arts, from printed material like books, cards, brochures, programs, and now even 3-D output, like replacement body parts to commercials, independent films, music and live broadcasts.  

Everything creative can be produced inexpensively and broadcast anywhere.

From personal networks to locations across the globe, we can get the message to travel easily and cheaply.  And anyone can learn to do it!  

The Future Talent is available Today.

That is the key.  Everywhere we look, people need meaningful and well-paying jobs, to help them grow out of poverty or elevate themselves to a higher station in life.  Companies and schools have abandoned training people in the skills they need to compete in this changing world where creative talent is in such high demand.  

So, the solution is what we call The Elijah Project.  Named for the prophet who was called to come back after giving up and was nourished with food and wisdom, the project aims to feed and mentor people in need of work, while employing them on real assignments for clients willing to give them a chance.

Three players work together to make the solution work.  The first is the Sponsoring Business.  This is the entity that provides the mentor and gets the clients who need the work done.  The second is the Host Non-profit or Religious Institution that provides the space, recruits the apprentices and provides meals for them at the start of each workshop.  

The third is the Client itself, the small business or non-profit that is willing to work hand-in-hand with the mentor and apprentices to make this program work.  Involvement is critical to develop a working relationship and open the door for repeat business.  As the client's business grows, the opportunities for more projects grow as well.

In the process, we complete projects for small business or non-profit clients at a low enough cost to make it affordable for them.  The quality of work is high and the revenue from the assignments is split three ways: the contractor  the hosting non-profit that sponsors the program and the student apprentices.      

Cusano Marketing LLC developed The Elijah Project as a model for change as well as a way to meet the demands of low budget businesses and non-profits in areas of high unemployment or under-employment.  It is working in The Bronx and we are looking to spread across the country, with other businesses like us providing mentors and clients.

To learn more about The Elijah Project, contact us at StoryWizard@CusanoMarketing.com or DeaconBill@TheGardenBench.org.

Moving the Elephant

Getting people to make a decision is like trying to move an elephant.

In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath, the authors split our human psychological makeup into two entities, the elephant and the rider.  

The elephant is our emotional powerhouse, that large force within us that is capable of accomplishing amazing things when moved to action.  It is a force so great that the rider, the rational embodiment of our willpower, has trouble controlling it without expending enormous amounts of energy, energy that is both expendable and exhaustible.

We do not, according to the authors, have an unlimited supply of this willpower, so when the going gets tough, when change becomes hard, we run out of steam and lose the battle.

In the first chapters of the book, they give examples of successful change agents in a variety of situations, all seemingly impossible and improbable, from saving lives in the healthcare industry to buying 1% milk.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

What is clear in all this is that change occurs when people are moved (emotionally engaged and prepared to act) and when they are given specific things to do, very specific things, like buying 1% milk instead of whole milk to reduce the intake of saturated fats in our diets.

We see examples of attempts to motivate us to change all the time in television commercials which play on our emotions to get us to talk to our doctors about a particular medication or take a test drive to feel all eyes upon us when we pull into our driveways.

But appealing to our emotions is only part of the package that leads to change.  What is needed is a clear path to follow, those specific actionable items that we can do to get us to the desired result, seeking that prescription from our doctors, or buying that BMW.

So, how do you make big changes in your business?  Or how can we survive in a world of change that seems to be way out of our control, with too many variables, with really big problems to solve?

The authors make a very interesting observation.  Too many options, too many steps, and we lose interest, fail to make a decision, and continue with the status quo.  Life is just too complicated, we say, and we do nothing.  

They give an example of a study of surgeons who had decided after the failure of a series of medications to combat arthritis, the patient would need knee replacement surgery.  However, when told by the pharmacy that there was one drug they hadn't tried, 47% of the doctors opted to prescribe the drug and avoid surgery.

That sounds promising, in that they were thinking of the patient experience and long recovery period.

But when they were told that there were actually two drugs that had not been tried, and not one, over 70% of the doctors would have opted for the surgery instead of prescribing either of the drugs.

What?

It seems that our analytical nature, the rider of the elephant, has trouble with decision making.  The more choices we have, the harder it is to steer the elephant off the usual path.  In this case, the path most familiar was the path of knee replacement.

So, how do we make big changes happen?  How do we move the elephant?

1. Appeal to the emotional side - make sure the motivation to change is there and it s real.  Our surgeons could be focused on the patient experience first.  What will he or she have to go through if we choose surgery?
2. Look for bright spots, examples where choosing the new path worked -  Talk with surgeons who have had success with alternatives to surgery and share their experiences.
3. Set a clear path - come up with a few simple steps or rules to follow to guide the decision-making process.  A simple rule could be to try every non-invasive approach first before opting for surgery.
4. Provide support and mentoring - Change is tough.  If you want it to be successful, you need to demonstrate strong commitment to it.

Change is critical to survival as well as for growth of our businesses.  Without it, we will see a steady decline in sales and revenues.  We will also continue doing what hasn't worked until we are too convinced it is the only way that we fail to see the reality around us.

So, take a look at the issues facing your business and imagine a world where those problems are miraculously solved.  What does it look like?  What can you do that you couldn't do before?  Now think.  Have you ever had moments where you felt like that?

Those are the moments to focus on, the examples of when things have gone right.  Moving the elephant is all about capitalizing on the simple things that work, rather than looking for the complicated solutions that are impossible to achieve.  

I like that.  It is the way I tend to think.  Thanks, guys, for helping me move the elephant.