Push and Pull?

One significant marketing trend in recent years has been the growing use of pull marketing techniques and channels.  Outsell, Inc., a media research firm, recently estimated that U.S. marketers will spend $65 billion in 2009 on their websites, which are constructed for the purpose of pulling Customers.  MediaPost recently reported that U.S. spending on search engine marketing (another pull marketing technique) will grow from $12.2 billion in 2008 to $22.4 billion in 2013.

Strictly speaking, pull marketing refers to marketing communications that are initiated by the prospective Customer.  In a general sense pull marketing is a distinct approach to marketing that relies heavily on engaging or informational communications to engage with potential Customers.  The single most important characteristic of good pull marketing communications is that the content is not overtly promotional.  The primary focus of most pull marketing efforts is on providing information that prospective Customers will consider to be valuable.  So for example, you might create a series of white papers, recorded webinars, articles or even micro-sites that address a concern your Customers have raised. We can show you how to efficiently discover your Customer’s concerns online and then deliver an ongoing stream of information to help both your Customers and Prospects get back in sync with your brand values and core messages.

The basic objective of pull marketing is to demonstrate your expertise and thereby establish your company as a credible and trusted source of information about a particular subject matter area. By doing this, you have provided the consumer with value even before they consider buying your product. When potential Customers go looking for solutions that fall within your area of expertise your company is more likely to receive favorable consideration because you have already established a bond of trust with the consumer.  Better yet, consumers who trust and value your content and products are more likely to use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to help build your buzz.

The effectiveness of traditional push marketing techniques is clearly declining. The fact is that people like you and me are bombarded with up to 3,000 advertisements each and every day! It’s a wonder that we are able to remember any of these ads. Sure, chances are still good that the ones that appeal to our sense of humor have at least a shot at our daily top 10 list but we have our own agenda today and we have access to the internet which means that we can PULL information that we need toward us when we need it.

The Internet has also contributed to the diminished effectiveness of traditional push marketing.  We have become confident that we can use the Web to find information about almost any product or service.  More importantly, we are confident that we can obtain that information whenever we want or need it. We rarely pay attention to marketing messages that aren’t relevant to our immediate interests or priorities.

Pull marketing is growing because marketers have recognized that their prospects are determined to control when and how they access marketing information.  Rather than fighting this mindset, savvy marketers are using pull marketing techniques to build credibility and trust enabling potential Customers to obtain the information that they want exactly when they want it.  We don’t believe that pull marketing will ever replace push, but it has become an essential strategy for many companies to reach out to those prospects that live by today’s social networking norms. 

Today’s most effective marketing programs are often a combination of push and pull.  For example, I frequently receive e-mails (push) that invite me to attend a Webinar (pull), watch a video (pull) or download a white paper (pull).

Are you ready to integrate pull marketing? Click here and let us know if we can help you set up a successful strategy.

Brilliant Linguistics

I am going to dedicate this article to phrases, quotes and sayings that I come across during business discussions, coaching sessions and educational experiences as a living reference for things people say and write that are so incredibly effective… I could not improve on them if I wanted to.

The first one was uttered by an incredibly good salesperson who refused to pitch anything until he knew what the person he was communicating with wanted. This salesman used a brilliant, easy-going method to uncover his Customer’s desires, objectives, wants, needs etc. and then orient the pitch around helping the person (his Customer) achieve his goals. Among others, his trademark follow up was:

“What would you definitely buy from me today if only I were smart enough to offer it to you?”

If you are ever on the receiving end of this question, have your wallet ready because the psychology of the query is more powerful than most people realize. This is a killer line and there really is no escape from it once it has been thrown into the court.

Going in a completely different direction, here is a quote that is simply remarkable.

“In times of change, learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists“

Each week we meet with senior executives with professor doctor titles running multinational corporations. Most are convinced that they did everything by the book and can not understand what is going wrong – why is their business not performing as expected?  Their concerns almost always deal with situations that were not described in reference books or textbooks in years past. While education is important, a continuous cycle of learning is even more important.  Today’s business managers need to equip themselves for an age where the only certain thing is uncertainty in a climate of constant change. You need to be a learning machine accepting that what you learned yesterday might not help you tomorrow. The quote above was written in the 1950s!

Features, Advantages and Benefits

Hey there,

Why is it that most people in business think that they are going to sell what they have by delivering a list of features along with a few reasons why someone should buy their product?

The truth is that there is a much deeper psychological process behind making a decision to buy something than most business people realize.

When selling to Consumers, the pitch must appeal to a buyer’s emotions or the sale is simply not going to take place. When selling B2B, keep in mind that the buyer is still a human being with needs and a strong desire to succeed – a benefits oriented approach has been proven to be more successful than any other technique we tested during the past 20 years.

If you’re ready to sell something, we are ready to help you create a winning pitch.

The first step is a bit of homework so grab a pencil and some paper and get ready to answer a few questions:

• Write down a list of your competitors and their websites
• Write down what they’re doing, what they’re offering etc.
• List their product’s benefits

Ahh, now we come to the core purpose of this article…

Do you know the difference between features, advantages and benefits?

A feature is what a product has. In essence, the core components of your product or service; sometimes referred to as the bells and whistles or buttons, knobs, levers, switches, format, platform etc.

An advantage is what the product does or how it performs against a competitive product. A vacuum for example, is a product that might have the advantage that it doesn’t need bags. Another advantage would be that it can clean the floor in a room without you being present. In a services business one advantage would be the number of years of experience you bring to the table or your level of certification. Some common advantages include words like fast, easy, simple, cheap and good.

A benefit is what a given feature means to your prospect in terms of emotions and passion. A true benefit goes really deep and says something about how it makes you feel – a really great benefit gets a consumer excited because it means something special to the buyer.

Here’s a good example. One of my Clients sells a facial cream online and she called it something like, microderm abrasion emulsion – essentially it is a cream that helps reduce wrinkles.

On her website she listed several features such as ‘it reduces wrinkles’, ‘it comes in an easy to use home care kit’, ‘it is pH balanced’ etc etc etc.

When she came to me to help increase sales, conversions and traffic… I asked her to:
Take a piece of paper and create three columns.
List as many features as you can in the first column.
In the second column, list what you believe are the top benefits.
She wrote down ‘because it reduces wrinkles, it makes you look younger’ and ‘because it comes in a home care kit, it is easy to use at home’ and the third one was ‘because it is pH balanced, it’s gentle on your skin’.

As politely as possible I let her know that those are really advantages not benefits so we continued the exercise and I asked her to list in the third column what she felt the ultimate end result for her Customer was going to be – in other words, ‘the ultimate benefit’.

Here is what she wrote:
‘If it makes you look younger: then it means you’ll be more attractive, you’ll get that promotion at work, you’ll feel more confident, nobody will know your true age, you’ll fall in love all over again and you’ll be able to attract that person you’ve had your eye on.’

‘Since it’s easy to use at home: you won’t suffer embarrassment by going to a doctor’s office, you don’t have to waste time, it’s like a face lift in a jar in the comfort and privacy of your own home.’

‘Since it’s gentle on your skin: there are no risks, no pain, no healing periods like surgery or those harsh chemical peels people usually buy.’

We had arrived…
These were descriptions of how Customers would feel before, during and after they used the product.

In a very short time she was able to list several of the true benefits her product offers to her Customers. She took this piece of paper and changed her website to reflect the benefits. She also adapted every piece of marketing material including all advertising (online and offline), all landing pages, sales letters and Customer communications and within 2 months her sales doubled. One month later sales doubled again. Then she adapted the packaging to reflect the new text and sales doubled again. Sure we did some work on conversions and 6 months later, she was not able to buy as much traffic as she wanted – not even from Google ,Yahoo and MSN combined… Folks, this stuff really works! I’ll let you guess if I am referring to the creme or the marketing process here.

Remember, real benefits go deep. They live within the emotional and passionate sweet spot of the person wanting or using your product. In order to increase your sales you will need to tap into that sweet spot and then use the real benefits in everything you produce to help sell the product.

What Exactly is Marketing?

Marketing is: The science of finding prospects and turning them into profitable Customers for your business. Let’s have a look at the 3 core elements in this statement:
– Science:
When I use the word ‘science’ here, I am referring to the methods and approaches that have been carefully tested and refined over time that deliver successful results. In marketing, doing things right incorporates metrics to measure results, testing to understand what works best and ROI accountability to know what elements and methods deliver a better return over time.

Here at BoxOnline we have been testing and retesting hundreds of approaches since our launch in 1999. We have followed the scientific method to eliminate all sorts of approaches that do not work well. We have also identified a few amazingly good approaches that seem to deliver exactly what our Client’s want time and time again. These sort of methods are what we refer to as proven methods. Today, we only offer proven methods to our Clients.

– Finding Prospects:
We often start by building a profile of your prospect(s) so that when your sales message reaches one, it connects with them and they find your offer irresistible. If we did not do this, the sales message would likely fall on deaf ears.

– Turning them into profitable Customers:
Our objective is to persuade prospects to act in a measurable way. We want to be able to measure our performance and know how well a given approach is working and what the difference is after a change has been made to a campaign.

Our marketing formula is based on something that has been dubbed the Business Friendship Model.

Consider how people make friends. The actual process is:
1) Get someone’s attention
2) Connect with them based on a common theme
3) Emotionally commit to do something with each other in the future
4) Act on the commitment by getting together again or doing something thoughtful for them such as buying a gift.

Often a business owner wants his business to appear larger and mightier than it actually is and thus they try to create an image of being a large corporate firm. We rarely support this sort of thinking because our experience has shown that when you try to behave like a big company, you de-personalize your relationship with prospects. In our research, small businesses grew faster when they were fueled by relationships rather than by expensive image campaigns.

So, what does a business typically do when they want to build a relationship with a new prospect?
1) Run Ads to get their attention
2) Relate to the prospect in the Ad
3) Get prospect to respond and commit emotionally
4) Get prospects to act

Well, Consumers don’t necessarily want to follow this process because they have needs of their own and based on our experience here is what prospects actually want:
1) that you, (the business) pay attention to them
2) that you, want to connect with them
3) that you, want to make a commitment to help them
4) that you, want to act on that commitment and are ready to deliver a desirable result to them

Does this make sense to you? If you are able to think like a prospect, it should. If it doesn’t, let us know… We’d love to hear your opinion – especially if you have a product to sell.

The Results Leader

Fundamental to the success of any small to medium sized company’s marketing campaign and their marketing plan is understanding the concept of the sales funnel.

Yes, whether you like it or not, marketing your services is key to your success and just like any other professional service such as business consulting, legal services or even psychological counseling, your services oriented company is a business that needs to follow the fundamental rules of marketing in order to succeed.

The cornerstone of any successful marketing method begins with an understanding that not every person you or your firm comes in contact with, is ready to become a Client. In fact, many prospects will never become Clients.

In other words, your marketing efforts will generate leads and these leads go into the top of the sales funnel but only a small percentage will drop out of that funnel as Clients. If the percentage of conversions is greater than 50% then you simply need to market to a broader audience – the shape of your sales funnel in this case will appear more similar to a pipe than a funnel indicating that conversions are unusually high.

Many firms tend to concentrate (generally to the exclusion of all else) most of their marketing efforts on improving the conversion rate or closing rate which amounts to the percentage of prospects that they have converted to Clients.

This helps to explain the fascination with networking, luncheons, presentations, meetings, seminars etc. The idea being: “If we spend more time trying to build relationships we will close more new deals.”

So called ‘thought leaders’ tend to foster this approach and sadly it’s very misleading as a marketing concept. Please allow me to illustrate. Charles Green, author of the book “Trust Based Selling” has written an excellent article titled: “Why Your Sales Process Matters Less Than The Psychology Of Selling.” The article is well written with numerical analysis of an entire sales pipeline start to finish. Unfortunately it misses the whole point of what a sales funnel is supposed to do.

An ideal sales funnel is designed to generate the maximum amount of QUALIFIED prospects possible from within a given marketing universe. It is from that pool of qualified prospects that we might apply the concept of relationship building so that prospects are converted into new Clients over time.

Here is the point of today’s article.

Regardless of how skilled you are at relationship building, you simply will not close any deals if you don’t have anyone to sell to. Here’s the good part, the more people you have access to, the more new Clients you will likely acquire (even if your relationship building skills need work).

Here’s a simple example.

Suppose you are a sales superstar ‘relationship’ builder and you have 10 qualified leads to work with. Over the course of a year, you wine them, dine them, schmooze them, golf with them and literally do anything they want using the company’s marketing budget as your weapon of choice.

Let’s say that at the end of a year, you were able to sign up 60% of them and thus 6 new Clients were acquired for the firm. If the main success metric your firm used were conversions from prospect to Client, you would be considered a ‘sales genius’. In reality, the average sales professional closes around 14% of qualified prospects in today’s competitive world.

What if I, on the other hand, through my integrated marketing efforts have created a pool of 100 reasonably qualified prospects. I’m just an average person so I close 14% of these prospects over a twelve month period. This is not a bad ratio it is simply average.

Pop quiz: If all deals are of equal size, who made more money?

I will have 14 new Clients and you will have 6.
You are almost 330% better at closing (read ‘building relationships’) than I am.

Please reread the above until you understand it.

Even though your interpersonal skills are 3x better than mine, I have made more than twice the amount of money you made during the same twelve month period.

The lesson here is if you are able to cost effectively convert prospects into Clients, you need to open the flood gates and fill your sales funnel with qualified leads. Good examples of tactics that provide you with tons of leads are going to be the subject of upcoming articles. In the meantime, if someone were to give you 100 highly qualified leads, what would you do with them to improve your relationship building skills and make more money next year?

I don’t know how you answered the above question, but I’ll take those leads any day over solely relying on my relationship building skills and I think most of you out there would agree.

More highly qualified leads equals more money no matter what business you’re in.

That is called results.

No disrespect to ‘thought leaders’, but I’d rather be a results leader wouldn’t you?

Should Everything Be Free?

As we sell more and more iPhone Apps, we collect more and more feedback from both our Customers and people who think that everything on the iPhone should be free. At first we were dismayed by the prospect that an entire generation of people (many iPhone users) actually paid for the mobile phone but now expect software developers to design, code, test and launch applications for free given the efforts involved, the costs for the hardware and the coding tools etc. We initially wondered how we could possibly make it happen. Could software be offered for free?

On a bustling corner of Sao Paulo’s quita district, street vendors pitch the latest “tecnobrega” CDs, including a few by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns where they plan to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That’s OK, because selling discs isn’t Calypso’s main source of income. The band is really in the performance business – and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet. Not a bad way to offer free software we thought.

Back at ground zero, our developers were asking for their paychecks and our freelancers were requiring payment for Apps that had just been accepted for launch. We can’t blame them for wanting money after all, they need to eat too but, this same generation of gotta-haves want to get paid for their time and yet expect most things that they need to be free – someone is going to have to pay for all this free stuff if you read your college ECON 101 textbook it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under scarcity.” The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they’re made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later, it could just mean that someone else is picking up the tab. Money is not the only scarcity in the world today… the other items include time and reputation. if you build on reputation, you gain respect especially in the troughs of a given niche market. If you increase attention you can actually build a business as you convert from reputation to traffic and traffic as many of us in this digital age know, can be converted into cash. There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities – and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. This ‘free mentality’ shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in Euros, Dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

How a company presents an offer for a product today differs in many ways from the past in that the price of each individual component is often determined by using psychology, not cost. Your mobile phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes – it keeps that fee low because it knows that will be the first thing you will compare when picking a carrier – thus another component, your data volume and your monthly voice mail fee is pure profit to the carrier. So you see ads for free phones but I have yet to encounter free calling plans.

You get the pipes for free but the water passing through those pipes is expensive. So, what are we to do about our dilemma? Many of our target prospects want something for free and yet our developers need to eat. If we were to offer a free ‘lite’ version, then we would encounter higher dev costs and support costs but the idea has crossed our mind.

Wait, there is another way… How about building real value into your offering so that people won’t mind spending some spare change if an App helps them do something that they wanted to do before but were not able. If an App were to focus on leveraging those scarce resources that we listed a few paragraphs above such as helping a user to save time, gain respect or save money – the App would pay for itself and that, in essence, is currently our favorite model of ‘free’.

The Psychology of Sales

Sure, there are boatloads of books on this topic so I’ll do my best to keep this article brief, helpful and to the point. First, this page is dedicated to the many kind folks I meet each day who really need help selling their products and services.

Products and services are wonderful things from both the perspective of the consumer or Customer and the person or company that is offering or selling the products and services. For starters, the consumer gets some form of benefit from the products or services otherwise there would be little reason to purchase them. The seller, likewise receives a benefit in the form of compensation, usually monetary. The difference is that the consumer gets value whether perceived or real from the transaction or the receipt of the product / service.

How the consumer perceives this value is the topic of this article today.

From here on out when I mention the word ‘products’, please understand that I mean both products and services.

Here are my suggestions when you want to sell a product to a given target market.

1) Know your target market well.

That means that you need to understand who they are, how they tick, what they like and dislike etc. If you have hundreds or thousands of Customers this goes for you too – that is what databases are for!

Let’s start with something basic like Motivation Strategies.
Are your Customers motivated TOWARD something or Motivated AWAY FROM something?
If you were to ask them why they purchased your product, what would they say?
More importantly, what would you learn from their response?

If you were to ask your Customers something neutral such as “What did they do this past weekend?” and then follow up the question with “Why did you do X this past weekend?” Chances are good that you will learn something about their motivation strategy.

If they were to answer that they “went to the mountains to ski” this would indicate that the person is likely to be motivated TOWARD something and thus, they tend to know what they want and they will move toward their goal of getting what they want.

If the response to question 2 were “to get out of the city” then you might guess that this person is motivated AWAY FROM something and this sort of individual knows exactly what they don’t want.

In order to sell to these two very different types of people, you need to be able to identify their motivation strategy quickly and then apply a marketing tactic even quicker. Your first step is to create two sets of marketing tools from business cards and form letters to signs, messages and selling phrases that you will learn by heart. Your purpose is to communicate with your prospect effectively using their choice of motivation strategy so that your message is accepted with gratitude and your offer is given priority consideration.

If you wanted to sell a massage to a person that is motivated AWAY FROM something, your marketing message may be something like:

– Want to relieve stress?
Come visit our Spa on the 3rd floor right now.
(special offer limited to the first 5 people, today only)

– Need to get away from it all?
Experience our 100 minute vacation
(Hurry, we only have 4 slots left)

If you wanted to sell the very same massage to a person that is motivated TOWARD something, your marketing message may be something like:

– Are you ready to relax?
Our experienced massage therapists are waiting for you on the 3rd floor.
(special offer for first time Clients – today only)

– Would you like a treatment that is usually only offered to top athletes?
Sign up for a medical massage on the 3rd floor today – there are only a few slots left.

In addition to knowing your Client’s motivation strategy, learn all you can about them and take notes so that you can communicate in a very personal and meaningful way in the future. For example, if you do not see a Client after several weeks, why not send them a thank you note for their last visit and mention a few personal things in the note that would perhaps encourage them to get back in touch with you. When they contact you, present them an offer that they would find hard to resist.

2) Always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS include a benefit in your marketing message. Just to be clear, I am referring to a benefit that your Customer experiences when they do business with you.

3) Incorporate some form of scarcity in your offer – there may be thousands of X available but to many people, the perception of scarcity is a very powerful magnet.

4) Upsell and Cross Sell at the appropriate moment but do it as often as possible. This is a lesson learned from McDonalds and it pays off royally. Have you ever been to a restaurant where they asked you if you wanted fries with your order? That would be an example of a cross sell. If you heard someone ask a Customer if they wanted a large order of fries for only 20 cents more, that would be an example of an upsell. Do not miss out on this essential element of profit building unless you really want to leave money on the table.

5) Practice each of the above suggestions with Clients, Customers, Prospects, Friends – you have nothing to lose

6) Test variations of the above to improve your results and keep track of what works and what does not work.

7) Reserve time in your schedule for building relationships. Many of our Clients are so busy delivering products that they forget to keep relationships warm. The result is that they have to work extra hard to acquire more new business. It is much easier to keep a Client than it is to find a new one so, spend a few hours each week, keeping tabs on your Customers and going out of your way for the ones you really want to keep. The idea is to grow the business you do with your best Customers in such a way that you build a lifetime of value into the relationship. Build those relationships and they will pay off big time.

Naturally, we offer our Clients courses in the above areas with the implied benefit that knowledge will increase their sales but we do things a bit differently over here. We select our Clients very carefully, only a few applicants are accepted each time we open the doors but those that make it through have a compelling business case and a determined desire to succeed. These are the kind of folks we enjoy helping. We could guarantee that our methods will double your sales or you get your money back but instead, we often opt for a success based fee thus, we only get paid if our efforts deliver results. Have you ever worked with a company like that before? Come on, give it a try and apply for a chance to be one of our top performing, revenue generating Clients today.

What’s a Website For?

A business purposed website exists to either
(a) sell something to a potential Customer or
(b) sign them up for a newsletter.

IT REALLY IS THAT SIMPLE.

If the site does not help visitors accomplish at least one of those two things, then the site provides very little benefit to the business.

That’s basically all there is to it.
Buy, join, or leave.

There is no other option.

With that in mind, do you already distribute an industry newsletter that your potential Customers might value?

If not, this would be a very good first step in the right direction.
Always remember to use benefit’s based selling methods, track those downloads, keep good clean statistics and test what works best for your business every chance you get.

Folks, if your goal is to make more money online, then do something about it and sign up for our Newsletter right now. BoxOnline is a team of professional, business process consultants dedicated to helping people like you sell more, earn more and basically get the results that you desire.

How Big Is Your Pond?

Why you want to be a big fish in a little pond
rather than a little fish in a big pond…

Explaining this issue to my Clients got my wheels spinning last year and today, I think I have come up with a reasonable analogy.

For several years, Manchester United was the top team in football (soccer for those of you across the pond). The team’s shining star, David Beckham was bringing in more than £80 million per year while some of his team mates on the bench earned the league minimum of £200,250.

Same winning team. Why the 300:1 difference in pay?

Because Beckham was slightly better than everyone else – he developed a specialty – he could practically fly across the field and score and his PR team took advantage of this to drive sales of footballs, soft drinks, clothing, books in Barcelona, toothpaste in Torquey, bubble gum in Birmingham, shoes in Sussex, telephones in Tokyo, T-shirts in Toronto, sneakers in Sydney, Sheffield and San Diego… you get the idea.

Joe Benchwarmer got a salary but very little else – not because he lacked talent but because the perceived difference between being the best in the world and being on the team is dramatic.

The gap between first place and second place grows larger with each passing season. The gap between first place and last place is now enormous.

In many fields there is rarely one winner, but those near the top reap a disproportionate share of the rewards.

The potential market for any product or service, any author or actor, for any singer or songwriter, for any doctor or lawyer, for any athlete or academic, now extends from one end of the world to the other. Yes, we truly have achieved a global marketplace.

Lesson learned?
Either you dominate the global market in your niche or somebody else will.

The name of the game is not being “The Doctor.”
It’s about being The Specialist for Catheterization for Patients over 60.

It’s not about being “The Lawyer”.
It’s about being The Attorney for Intellectual Property, Copyright and Digital Rights Management Law for the nano imprint lithography industry.

Yes, you leverage your expertise to hyper-specialize in a given niche market so that even on the mighty Internet, you can be a big fish in a little pond.

When you’re #1 on the net for that niche – you win big time.
So, sit back, relax and plan your move into a smaller pond. Business wise, it’ll be the best move you ever made.

If you’d like some help thinking through a solid strategy that works, be sure to ask for our specialist.

The Right Clients

Someone recently asked me why I chose to capitalize the words ‘Client’ and ‘Customer’ in my texts. Well, the simple explanation is that I appreciate their business. As a sign of respect and acknowledgement of their importance to my company, I want to show my appreciation in every article that I write containing these words.

It’s wonderful to have successful, paying Clients but even better to do business with the right Clients. To start with, we are either big fans of our Clients or we become big fans as we get to know them better. I hear our employees and freelancers raving every week about some of the great things our Clients are doing to grow their businesses. I want to maintain this positive culture and have therefore decided that our sales teams will only target companies that we really want to do business with. I want to be selective with the people that we do business with so that the result is and continues to be a positive experience for all involved.

Today we have four business relationship guidelines that steer our Client acquisition decisions:
1. Essential elements of our Client’s business culture MUST match ours or at the very least, are similar to those that we value and respect on both an ethical and moral basis. We take pride in our reputation and credibility and wish to work with those with similar ideals.

2. The potential for success is reasonable to fantastic. We want to ensure that we have the necessary competencies and availability to deliver the project successfully and exceed our Client’s expectations. Should a prospect have what we determine to be unrealistic goals, we will gladly recommend a competitor. We will never try to convince a Client that an apple is an orange or that we can deliver something that we know we are not capable of delivering because we want to help each of our Clients solve their problem(s) and, as a consequence, recommend our services to others.

3. Profit = Fun. It is a simple equation and there is a ton of truth behind it. A project must be profitable and have the potential to be carried through to successful completion with high levels of motivation and contributions to our bottom line. In essence, we ask for a win-win deal. If our Client wins, we win as well and if our Client is not able to achieve their objectives, we reconsider our role and our efforts to provide the necessary ingredients for success. Competing on price has little merit in this equation since the team requires rewards for a job well done.

4. Bandwidth is an annoying topic for us because our product is based on people with specific skills and limited availability. We want to give our Client’s the best possible service and that means that we need to have a well rested, physically and mentally fit team ready to jump into action. Success brings with it some level of frustration as you learn that you simply can not please everyone all the time. Our people tend to be booked solid for 60 to 90 days out and that means that there is little available bandwidth to acquire new business unless we add additional people to the team. On some occasions this is exactly what we did because we were interviewing superb people at the same time as we acquired a new Client that required the type of services that these new people were capable of delivering. That was a lucky situation and in 10 years has only occurred twice. Most of the time, we are approached by prospects that were referred to us by Clients or read about a Client success story that we created. These prospects usually have some urgent needs and therein lies our challenge. We want to help such companies but only if we can put the right team together to increase the probability of success.

Naturally, there are exceptions to the above guidelines but truth be told, we learned our lessons in the past and such exceptions are rarely worth the time and effort when a win-win is simply not possible.

We count on people like you to understand our thought process and although it may seem in some ways to be rather exclusive given the way that we filter our opportunities, please know that we really appreciate new business opportunities, they are the lifeblood of our business model. BoxONline is currently undergoing some growing pains and thus further expansion is necessary to achieve our objectives so, if you know of people who may fit into and support this Client oriented model of exceeding expectations, please do get in touch with me directly using this form.