… In which we learn to tell our story and reassure our customers big and small.

GOAT POLITICS

One of the keys for the well-qualified self-employed is to tell a good, well-presented and believable story – remember, maximum benefit with minimum risk. A good story can remove a load of those risks from the customer’s mind and in some cases it can generate a premium. Just think, what bothers you about buying fast food: poor quality ingredients, animal welfare, poor preparation, and stuff frozen and microwaved? Do you have a fast food joint that avoids all of these things? That is nice, but it won’t make any difference to the customer if they don’t know that and you haven’t told them your story – unless, of course, you are a customer of the British sandwich chain, Pret A Manger. Here, you will receive a sandwich packed in a rustic, environmentally-sound cardboard wrapper which, more to the point, carries the ‘story’, something like, ‘This sandwich was prepared in the last thirty minutes by our chefs, with golden free range organic eggs and salad washed in spring water. The bread is from stone-ground Norfolk wheat grown by Farmer Watkins.’ I just made all that up, but if you go there you will find I’m not far off.

Years ago, on one of my courses I had a lady who kept goats and sold the cheeses. The cheeses sold for around £1 each and she could sell all she could make (the restaurants found her to be a little treasure). The problem was that her capacity was a couple of hundred cheeses a week. “Why don’t you buy in goats’ milk from other farms?” I suggested. She looked at me in a very weird way and replied enigmatically, “Aha, now you’re getting into goat politics!” From that I assumed that output could not be increased, so what we did was to wrap and box the cheese in a nice country-style (but cheap) wooden box lined with wood shavings, but the key was a small booklet attached to the cheese by a golden thread. In it was written the story of Ivy Farm Cotswold goats’ cheese: ‘Goats that have roamed these hills for nine centuries, a rare animal that is fond of eating the windfall pears and rare herbs that grow from the craggy Cotswold stone. People often declare that in this delicate and subtle flavoured cheese, there is definitely an herby note of pear sweetness … Judy Truneon is the twelfth generation of goat farmers who lovingly fashion these sought-after local cheeses …’. You get the idea, I’m sure. We took them round the tourist areas and allowed restaurants to reproduce the words from the booklet. The cheeses are bought as gifts at well over £5 each (and she still can’t make enough!)

Returning to Fred

Our friend Fred from the previous chapter has got to find a way of doing the same. A website, of course, helps with that – but more of websites later. He could put a nicely produced board on the wall with a bit of life history, perhaps some pictures of Fred when he was a race mechanic working on the world champion’s car. He could put a short résumé in his leaflets and in the little paste-board folder where he puts the bill. The point is that all of this offers reassurance; so does a money-back guarantee, warranted work, loads and loads of testimonials, and a professional appearance.

KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER

Just think for a moment about your enterprise or planned enterprise. Consider the risk your customers will be taking by coming with you and how you can provide evidence that will reassure them. For instance, I know a sales trainer who says if sales don’t increase by at least ten percent you don’t have to pay for the training – now that’s reassuring!

This chapter is about how we can use tools, such as our story, our appearance, our professionalism and our guarantees, to reassure our customers. The problem for the self-employed individual is that they won’t necessarily just be doing business with individuals – in fact, a lot of self-employed opportunities come from doing business in the corporate world where all of the usual customer problems occur but are multiplied a thousandfold. As we have discussed, one of the things every customer likes to avoid is risk, but again this is multiplied when it comes to dealing with corporate customers and the self-employed person has to be acutely aware of this and possibly might have to consider whether the corporate route is one they want to take. A danger for us self-employed people is that a corporate customer can provide us with so much work there is no room for any other customers, so if we do screw up we could lose everything. Having said all that, there is a way of gaining the confidence of the corporate customer, but just be aware of the pitfalls if you are considering a service to corporate buyers. Fred may convince us, but could he go to ‘Consolidated Megabuck Inc’ and get their fleet servicing contract? I doubt it and you know I think I might counsel him not to try.

I think at this juncture, a key point has been raised for us aspiring self-employed, and that is … know your customer. If you remember, we discussed how the marketing department of huge corporations is obsessed with the concept of positioning. When I worked in advertising many many years ago, we (I am sure politically incorrectly) classified people into class types, something like A1, A, B, B2, C, C2 and so on. A-type people bought Rolex watches and drove Aston Martins; C-type people ate burgers and went on cheap rowdy package holidays. Of course, it is all a bit more complex than that, because a C-type who comes into money thinks that wearing a gold Rolex gives him a badge that says, ‘I am an A’, and all the As start wearing beaten-up Swatch watches so as not to appear ‘flash and over-eager’. For example, in positioning you would think Coke would go for the trendy rock-kids having fun thing, which on the whole they do, but hold on up there a moment. Coke has been around for years and was hugely popular in the ’50s and ’60s. Maybe a Harley thunders across a desert in a cloud of dust and thumping rock music, there is a muscular rider and a slim shapely woman, their faces hidden by dark visors. When they pull into the deserted diner and crack open two ice-cold Cokes, we see that they are ‘Best Agers’ (no, really, that is what marketers call old people). The first geriatric Coke advertisement! Would it work? Would they do it? Be assured that, if they did, they would have a very well-thought-out reason. They would be positioning or re-positioning Coke. This is because they know their customers.

The self-employed have a frightening tendancy to put out the proposition that appeals to themselves and hope that some customers might coincide with it. This is because they don’t know their customers and, in fact, have no idea who their customers could possibly be. When planning your enterprise, do you have an absolutely clear idea who your customers are likely to be? There is no point in impressing, attracting and reassuring, people who have no intention or ability of doing business with you.

One-Legged Scotsmen

We self-employed may feel we know our customers, but it is an unconscious knowing. We rarely sit back and categorize our customers and analyze where our work is coming from. But if we did, this should give us two options: one is to realize that we have a unique appeal to, maybe, one-legged Scotsmen and we look through every medical record to find amputees with a Mac or Mc in front of their surnames; or, secondly, we can realize that by making only competitively priced left shoes we are restricting our market and we should change to broaden our appeal.

In the case of Fred’s Garage, he might well be advised to put away thoughts of the corporate work and concentrate on his core business. If I were him, I wouldn’t go for the bottom of the market either. I would imagine that the three or more year-old cars owned by a mature owner who needs looking after would be a rich vein for Fred. Also, although it may be seen as a risky strategy, Fred could be niche. If he is Ford – or more to the point – BMW-trained, he could offer himself as an independent specialist, but he can’t step those customers down too far from what they are used to, things like the BMW logo, a dish of sweeties and a clean waiting area.

THE BIGGER THE BUSINESS, THE BIGGER THE RISK

The problem is that some of us come from a corporate environment and see that management training, corporate restructuring, event organizing, and so on, are where we need to be. It is possible to do business with corporations; I have a friend who is a one-person corporate catering genius who has sold her talent to a number of huge corporations where she organizes and manages all of the staff dining – but, boy oh boy, is she sharp and professional. So, it can be done, but the risk challenge is multiplied a million times and we cannot afford to slip up.

Big Decisions

To put this into context, let me explain. One of my occupations is to write books that analyze and explain the selling and buying process. Writers of the old-fashioned sales training books used to obsess about meeting what was referred to as the ‘decision maker’. This would lead to the mistake of imagining that you would move up the food chain for greater success. This assumed that, if you could get in to see the CEO and convince them, the job would be yours, but CEOs tend to feel that they are above all that and would certainly kick decisions about window cleaning, food or training down to their minions! I won’t bore you with all the details, but if you are really interested you could read one of my sales books, try Irresistible Persuasion or Resistance is Useless, or, for a more lighthearted approach, The Way of the Dog! The area I want to just touch on now, though, is big decisions. Just because we are a small enterprise does not mean that the decision to use us is a small one.

There is a rule-of-thumb measure to discover if the thing is a big decision. Let’s just examine what isn’t a big decision. A child has a few pence, child wants a candy bar, the bar costs a few pence, child decides to buy candy bar, job done.

The measure for big decisions is: (1) it takes time to conclude the sale successfully; (2) it is unlikely an immediate purchase will be made; (3) more than one sales visit is required; (4) often, more than one person is involved in the buying decision: (5) and for us this is the biggy … the buyer is cautious because a buying mistake would have major repercussions.

A Troubled Past

A little bit of a history lesson here. In the late 20th century, IBM was the absolute king of the computer and business machine market. Their executives dressed so smartly and sharply that they set the trend for every international business person who wanted or needed to look the part. The whole image thing – their pro­fessionalism and on-the-ball attitude – earned them the revered nickname ‘Big Blue’. The point of me telling you all this is that there was a very telling saying that went, ‘You don’t get fired if you buy Big Blue’, which would suggest that one may well get fired if one bought from someone less well known or risky; in other words, if they bought from you! However, by being such a leviathan, IBM became too slow to change and innovate at the correct pace and have declined from those earlier glory days. But even at their height, not every solution they offered was perfect for the customer, but still people would work with them – sometimes disappointingly – because of the words, “you don’t get fired if you buy Big Blue” ringing in their ears.

Frustration

When I started my business-to-business training all those years ago, I would get so frustrated when I met the sales managers or HR people. I knew I could do a great job for them, I was sure I had them convinced with my presentation, and then I would get that phone call – or worse – letter, “We are grateful for your time and were impressed with your presentation but for this financial year we have decided to remain with our current supplier.” “But you told me they were rubbish!” “Yes, they are rubbish, but better the devil you know and all that.” It used to drive me wild but then I realized that the minions that I needed to do business with literally feared for their jobs; they were safe if their decision was no decision. What I was failing to do was to tell them a convincing story, one that reassured and convinced them that I was safe to do business with.

What are you offering the large corporates: business intelligence, recruitment, product design, subatomic nanotechnology, or even window cleaning?

OK, let’s take the window cleaning. Megacorp have had their windows cleaned for forty years by Bloggs & Company. Their standards have declined while their prices have risen. Surely this is an opportunity for a bright spark like you? So you find your decision maker … well it won’t be the El Supremo, he will have delegated stuff like cleaning and maintenance to someone like the Facilities Manager, who in this case we will call Mr Perkins.

Sell, Sell, Sell

Could we just stop at this point, because my ‘thing’ is sales. In my heart, I am a persuader and a situation like this would normally get me to write a few thousand words on how this guy would be persuaded; how to crush all resistance to the requests for an appointment; how to evaporate any objections; how to make him chuckle with glee at our prices; and how to make him sign on the dotted line while dribbling with anticipatory excitement. But this is not the place for that detail here. To be fair, in preparation for this adventure you must have some selling skills under your belt, and there are some great books, DVDs, websites and seminars (and not all presented by me) that will help. My only tip, then, before we move on, is that when in the presence of a customer or potential customer, i.e. everybody, we should develop the habit of having an intention to sell.

Back to Mr Perkins. Using the above-mentioned wiles we get to see him, we convince him and start the window cleaning on Monday. His mightiness is wandering around his domain with his entourage of lickspittles and notices something different. His first reaction, whether or not what he sees is good or bad, is, “Perkins! Perkins, where are you, man? Perkins, get here!” “Yes, your great worshipfulness, how may we be of humble service?” “What’s this? “New window cleaners, light of my life.” “New window cleaners? What’s wrong with Bloggs? My father hired Bloggs.”

Perkins in Trouble

This is the sort of conversation Perkins wanted to avoid and now he has to, second-hand, justify your presence. While you may not feel that window cleaning is a big decision, for Perkins it sure is because it so fits that criteria, “The buyer is cautious because a buying mistake would have major repercussions.” The buyer in this case, Perkins, could lose his job or at least be in terrible disgrace. And if he does nothing? “Perkins?” “Yes, your highness?” “Windows are looking a bit grubby.” “It’s Bloggs, sir, they are letting things slip.” “Mmm, I’ll get on to it – I’m playing golf with Bloggs Senior. I’ll have a word.” It doesn’t matter whether he does or he doesn’t, Perkins is off the hook.

As a small newcomer to this market, we must be aware that whoever chooses to use us against the ‘safe’ (if crap) alternative is taking a massive gamble.

Outstanding and Remarkable

First, then, we must be better than good, more than professional; we must be OUTSTANDING and REMARKABLE. That means so wonderfully, awesomely good that we get noticed for the wonderfulness of what we provide and, when we do, pass the credit on to the Mr Perkins of this world. “I am Sir John Timbersaw and I would just like to congratulate you on the food at our staff party.” “Well, if it wasn’t for the wonderful briefing and help that Mr Perkins gave us, we would never have been able to do it.”

Secondly, understand that, by being brilliant, you have the potential to create enemies. By virtue of what you do you are going there to make their business better and more efficient. Not everybody will welcome that – they may have to work faster because of your efficient redesign, or they may have been receiving juicy little backhanders. If you don’t get in there and sort this out, you will find the honeymoon over very quickly.

STABBED IN THE BACK

When I was in the scrap game, we won a contract where the boss’s obsession was having enough bins, sacks and containers. I was aware of that and flooded the job with all the sacks and containers they needed, yet they still rang and rang, complaining they were short of sacks until we lost the job. It turns out that an employee was a relative of the old, inefficient contractor and was just stealing and vandalizing everything as fast as we could deliver it.

The solution is to return to the apocryphal decision-maker thing. What we have to realize is that, in a corporate environment, there are a lot of people involved in any decision. If we build a faster, more efficient machine we may get to see the CEO, we may convince him with our tales of increased production, but we must also make a strong financial case to the finance director, a great mechanical case to the works engineer, and finally a tale of increased bonus to the poor sap on the factory floor who has got to work twice as hard. In other words, in a corporate environment we may have many different customers, and each one will have to have a story that reassures them, a custom-made story that suits their particular situation. It cannot be a case of one size fits all. Know your customer and tailor your proposition to reassure them.

Next, we must allay the fears and risks by offering get-outs, guarantees and reassurances. They say the best way to eat an elephant is one piece at a time “Perkins!” “Yes, your mightiness?” “What’s going on here?” “Well, sir, some new people have offered a money-back guarantee on improved, more cost effective, window cleaning. They are just doing the ones in the small annex for now as a sort of trial. If nothing else, it will keep Bloggs on their toes!” “Carry on, Perkins!”

The whole point of all this is that if you want to succeed in any market you have to be good. Our friend the corporate caterer is good; she is bold, confident, and gives out an air of total competence. Her total assurance and professionalism quells any doubts her clients may have. Bad hair day, odd socks, grubby shoes, unreliability, and even a tiny hint of shiftiness and you are finished, dead in the water, caput! If you aren’t ready to offer perfection that is consistent or even improving (yep, improving perfection), then wait a bit until you are sure you are ready. Second chances are hard to get.