A handwritten, personalised Christmas card allows you to not only spread a little festive cheer, but also to stand out from the crowd and keep you fresh in your client’s mind.  So much of business communication is electronic that a printed card is more noticeable, tangible and memorable – your Christmas thanks won’t accidentally end up in the junk folder; your card will most likely be on your client’s desk for several weeks.

Here are our top tips to consider when sending out Christmas cards;

• Personalise your cards by signing your own name and adding a message.
• Remember to thank suppliers as well as clients for their support over the past year
• Bear in mind that not all of your clients and suppliers will celebrate Christmas, so ensure you are respectful and use a generic card.
• Remember to check posting dates, especially if you’re sending cards abroad and bear in mind that not many people will be in the office the week leading up to Christmas, so post early to make sure they arrive in time.
• Make sure you’ve got up-to-date contact and address details.
• Keep in mind the reason for sending the cards – to thank clients and show you value them. A card is not the time for a hard sell.
• Don’t just focus on the present – remember to send Christmas cards out to past and potential clients as well as current ones.
• Be responsible – remember to source your cards from a printer using FSC or recycled paper and think about supporting a charity (you should also include their details on the card).

Choice is assumed to be the main route to marketing success.  Give your customers lots of options and surely they’ll find something matched to their needs that they like. You’ll sell more, and they’ll be happy and grateful.

Really?

The truth is that there is much research and even more consumer (and business to business customer) behaviour that suggests that the opposite is true.  We are increasingly overwhelmed by the choices on offer.  We stare and compare the specifications for all sorts of products and services. We wade knee deep through complex feature sets and special offers and benefits.  We struggle to assimilate relative values and costs, bogus USPs, and functional comparison tables – much of which is supplied by the same company or offered under the same umbrella brand or from the same B2B supplier.  We flick from tab to tab in our browsers or page to page in the proposal document, frantically sorting, sifting and comparing, in an ever more desperate attempt to reduce and simplify our choices so that we can make a buying decision.  And, after all that, we then don’t.

Why?

Well from my reading of the research, the data and the behavioural studies I have come to the conclusion that the last thing we want are choices.

What we actually want are options.

Give your customers a few (three?) well differentiated options and then get them to eliminate the other options to decide on the one they want. Or, in a competitive situation, either get there early with your product or service offering in the same space or maybe don’t enter at all (unless your product offers such a significant advantage over the competitive offer that all of the potential customers will automatically select or upgrade to yours).

Simple and far simpler for you and your customers.

Let’s all agree to reduce customer and consumer choice to some really differentiated options within the ranges we supply rather than trying to blanket the whole market.  Let’s control our R&D processes so we don’t automatically bring all options and variants within a range to market.

And, in competitive situations, if your competitors won’t do that for you (let’s face it it’s unlikely that they will admit that their product offers in this space are the ones to be sacrificed) then do it for them.  How?  Well maybe avoid comparison tables that list all possible competitive offerings.  Position and promote your offer carefully so that it is seen to compete with only those that are directly in your space.  And differentiate on real and valued (by the customer) differentiators.  Separate out – give yourself space and don’t just be another choice.

Let’s stop overwhelming our customers and consumers by confusing them with choices.  It really doesn’t work.  Let’s focus on the options that they really need – and sell them even more.

It’s an interesting approach.

It’s also a confusing one for the customer – sorry – ‘passenger’ (as the airlines insist on calling us – god forbid they should ever refer to us in a way that would suggest we are the ones who are paying the bill). And, as far as I can see, it’s a model that is unique to the airline industry.  Airlines seem to love it – and presumably it makes a substantial difference to their revenue (though judging by the profitability of the industry as a whole any positive difference in revenue it generates merely means that they lose a little less than they otherwise would).

So what’s my beef?

Well, as you must realise by now, I’m a marketing man.  I work with the idea of choice and brands.  Brand values, brand integrity (delivering what you say you will) and brand identity are central to my thinking.  And so is openness and integrity in dealing with customers (sorry, passengers).  And the concept of code share flies in the face of all of this.

Let me put this in another context.  Suppose you went to a supermarket – Lidl for instance – to by a carton of Coca Cola and when you got home you opened the box and found you hadn’t been sold Coca Cola at all, despite the packaging.  You’d ended up with a dozen cans of Lidl Cola instead.  You’d feel a little disgruntled wouldn’t you?  You were looking forward to one thing and then found you’d been sold another.  You’d probably complain to the store if not some regulator or another.  And you could bet your life that Coca Cola would have Lidl in court as fast as you could say ‘it isn’t the real thing’.  And they’d win on the grounds of copyright infringement, passing off and anything else their super smart lawyers could think of.

But the airlines don’t sue over this – they collaborate.  To sell you one thing and then deliver another.

The best (or worst) example of this travesty was with British Airways and Iberia (from before they became part of the same IAG business).  You’d turn up at the airport expecting a polite crew, a pleasant flight, a free drink from the bar, a snack, and a free cup of coffee.  And you’d find what?  An extremely rude and unpleasant crew, no food, no coffee for free, and a flight where even the water cost you money (Iberia had the best model in the business – full service price, low cost service – and they still lose money hand over fist).

Look – put as simply as possible – a brand is a promise.  You’re entitled to expect the brand to deliver an experience that you know, anticipate, and the provider committed to.  And this is especially true and important in a service business where all you have is the memory of your last experience.

Code share is an antithesis to the concept of the brand and to the promise.  It underlines what many of us frequent flyers have always suspected.  Most (if not quite all) airlines have absolutely no understanding of the concept of marketing, branding and customers.

And my point is that, until they change – until they do grasp the basic principles of marketing, branding and customers and look beyond their processes, they will continue to reinforce the point made by the sage of Omaha Warren Buffet – “The net wealth creation in Airlines since Orville Wright has been next to zero.”

As someone who has worked in both marketing and sales, with responsibility for both functional disciplines at the same time during my career, I am probably as well placed as anyone to note it and comment on it.

Far from being a team, sales hate marketing because they seem distant, remote and intellectual.  They never provide them with the collateral they need and the sales leads that they long for.  And when they do provide leads they are useless, uncloseable and uninterested.  Or can’t even remember responding to whatever the campaign was that generated their response.

Marketing hate sales because they always want everything, they want it now and they don’t want to do any work for it.  They are short term, tactical and see everything in terms of targets and quotas.  Whenever they provide the sales team with leads they complain or never follow them up.  They want support material for each and every opportunity.  They have no strategic view point or understanding.  And they always blame marketing for their failure to close deals.

But it really doesn’t have to be like that.

What we need to do is to get the marketing and sales functions to work together.  As a team.

But to do that they need to be given a team task.  So often in organisations I’ve worked with and for, I’ve found that the sales and the marketing departments might just as well be working in different companies.  Meeting rarely, these events frequently   end up as skirmishes between opposing forces. Viewed as opportunities to blame each other for the various failures of the organisation, the two factions seldom find common cause and because sales tends to focus on today and this week, whereas marketing looks at next quarter or even next year, the two groups hardly ever work on projects together.

Well I believe it’s time we ended that, because I think that the time has come for them to find real common cause and work together as one team, with one target, one objective and one goal.  It’s time for Account Bases Sales and Marketing.

Let me explain.

In most BtoB organisations new business opportunities usually involve sales or ongoing contracts to supply, which offer significant long term value.  Once won, the term of supply can last anything from 3 to 10 years.  These are big opportunities with in-sale cycles (as I like to call them) lasting anything from 3 to 18 months before the deal is signed.  And then once signed there are opportunities to develop such accounts which have significant additional value.

And big opportunities with long sell in cycles require real commitment and effort to win them and to further develop them.

So then why not form a sales and marketing task force to develop a whole campaign plan around such opportunities once they have been identified (by a joint task force team).  The sales and marketing task force team could then work together to:

• Develop a deep and true understanding of the selected account shared by both sales and marketing, based on the account’s likely strategy, who the key players are within the target accounts that they need to jointly communicate with, and identify their key needs and challenges.
• Identify and prioritise the needs of the account and map the specific opportunities to those needs.
• Produce a synchronised Account Based Marketing & Sales plan including:
• An account or opportunity specific overall value proposition, identifying the key touch points and players in the decision making unit with key value propositions for each.
• The marketing communications programme to support the sales plan and develop the account. Or close the opportunity together with the tools and techniques to build both (developing things like microsites, PR plans, contact programmes, presentations, case studies, reference sites or customers, account specific collateral and much more).
• Work jointly on managing and reviewing the implementation of the plan with agreed KPIs reporting and contingency plans.
• Apply post sales Account Based Marketing & Sales in relation to implementation and customer organisation buy-in.

Just think of the team work involved, the collaboration, relationships, trust and understanding that such joint campaigning can build – all for the common good of the whole organisation.  Here is a real and practical way to end the war and build a team.  A real band of sales and marketing brothers and sisters.

Now that would end up with some real gold medal winning performances.

1.    Keyboard Shortcuts

With most programmes you will always find you have a few key actions that you’re constantly doing over and over again, to begin with perhaps you are executing these commands by clicking about with the mouse, going up to the drop-down menus and scrolling through until you find the term you’re after, but, eventually, you start to utilise the keyboard to quickly perform these essential operations.

Premiere Pro is the same as any other programme, but features customisable keyboard shortcuts so you can arrange your keyboard and its associated tasks to exactly the right arrangement for you.  Personally, I’m the type who learns the language offered to me rather than attempts to impose his own, and as I’ve been using Premiere for almost all the editing I’ve done throughout my career it seems logical that its keyboard shortcuts would be the ones burned into my brain.

Saying that however, if you find yourself always having to click around for certain tools or to highlight different aspects of the timeline you should probably consider setting up a shortcut, it may seem a bit superfluous in a way – I mean it only takes a couple of clicks to do most things – but you’ll be surprised by the speed and dexterity it can bring to your editing work and soon you’ll evolve from a timid and clunky amateur into a nuanced and elegant professional!

2.    Notes on the Timeline

Often times in projects you may find yourself watching a video through with thoughts, suggestions and ideas flying around your head, perhaps ideas that you don’t want to implement just yet but would like to keep in mind for any future amendments.

Instead of scribbling down random thoughts and time-codes on various scraps of paper it’s a good idea to use the notes tool to pop a little reminder on the timeline that you can jot a few thoughts down into.

This also ties into the Quick Notes export process which is really handy if you want to send a work in progress of potential draft to a client for feedback, as the client can add notes to the timeline whilst they watch the video which you can then import into Premiere so you know exactly when and where a potential change should take place.

3.    Workspace

At Coussins I work with two monitors which gives me a great deal of flexibility with how I approach editing projects, some people will utilise a default workspace, but I like to move things around depending on the specifics of what I’m doing.

Premiere allows you to save your own default workspace and it’s a good idea if you have a specific layout that’s comfortable for you.  Personally, if I’m working on editing the film from a structural or narrative point of view I will fill the second monitor with the timeline preview, but if I’m engaged in finer tweaks I’ll use Premiere’s default set up with everything housed on one monitor.

Often times I’ll use the secondary monitor to display a related Word document or perhaps a web page that’s informing the edits and style of a piece of film, it’s often useful if you’re trouble-shooting issues you might be perhaps unfamiliar with and you can – thank you internet – open up a tutorial in the right hand monitor and copy it step-by-step in the left.

If Timelines still sound like something Doctor Who might hang his washing on you could always call or email us for your video production requirements.

And what about the sporting success?  Amazing for this little country with a comparatively tiny population to come third in the medal tables.  What performances.  What joy and heartbreak.  What sportsmanship and teamwork.  What an inspiration to a new generation.

And just when you thought it couldn’t get much better….  It doesn’t.

With her constant ‘meddling’ (a verb she is particularly keen on which I always thought mean ‘to interfere’ rather than to win medals.) here comes Baroness Sue Campbell.

As Chair of UK Sport, the Baroness reminds us that this is really no longer about amateurs fitting in their sporting prowess and training with the day job, but full time athletes constantly training and fully funded to produce medal winning performances.  Just days after the party has ended she reminds us that they will need even more funding for the next Games if they are to repeat that success.

Well, never mind.  They still won us lots and lots of medals competing against other much larger and fully funded nations and athletes.  Fair’s fair.  Though of course they also did thrash little national teams with no funding at all where athletes do have to fit their training in with the day job.  Like some of those central African countries.  And some European ones too.

But it’s all about national pride, winning medals and the thrill of it all.  I can see that too.  And I did really love it.

But…..

The Olympics was all about ‘inspiring a generation’ and if we are to inspire a generation to get more active, and develop a lifelong interest in sport rather than inspiring a generation  to sit around and watch sport – on tablets, TVs, big screens, and for the lucky few in stadia – then we need to fund the grassroots as well. (How to do it is the subject of a whole new blog – watch this space.)

And then I had this thought.  According to a professional sports agency, many of our gold medal winners are worth something in the region of £3 million a year in fees, endorsements and appearance money.  Not bad for doing something you love.

Well, they had all that funding to get to the point that they could begin to earn the big money.  What about asking those athletes that earn that kind of money to pay back their funding?  Currently a podium athlete (someone who has the potential to win a medal within the next four years) gets an in-kind package of support (including sports science, medical, access to facilities) worth around £55,000 per annum (according to the UK Sport website) and an Athlete Personal Award (APA) of £27,737 per annum. The APA is means tested so that if an athlete starts earning (sponsorship, prize money etc.) above a certain level they don’t get as much, and the average APA is currently £18,500.

So when they start earning large amounts, let’s treat them like students and get them to pay all the public and lottery money back. The amount per athlete probably wouldn’t amount to much and out of £3 million a year it’s not going to hurt them, but start to add it all together and it would add up to a significant amount for their NGBs and for their grass roots sport programmes. All the athletes say they want to give something back to their sport (and many of them do in their local communities) and this would be a great way to literally make the money go round.

And then those sports can harness market forces to help fund themselves. Then elite sport, the more gold medals it produces, continues to inspire further generations, and carries on funding new young athletes from their grass roots programmes in a lovely virtuous circle.

Now that sounds to me like a real win/win idea.
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Our customers are a lot more marketing savvy and aware of what we are up to than they ever used to be.  They are marketing sophisticates.

Which makes them much more cynical and sceptical too.

And alongside of this consumer cynicism we see increasing commoditisation where price is used as the only differentiator.

So, in their desperation to market their products and services, marketers spend more and more on marketing communications activities. In an effort to be heard each of us shouts louder and louder. Just look at the statistics. In 1990 there was €10.9 billion of all up advertising expenditure in the UK on above the line major media advertising. By the year 2013 that figure is expected to rise to €21.9 billion That’s one hell of a lot of noise.

When you add this to the explosion of media channels and the impact of the web on marketing and communication (now everyone can talk to everyone about anything and most of them are talking about you and your products and services) you can see why marketers are finding life so tough.

So what do you do in response?

In fact, this analysis suggests that there are only three factors that are critical ingredients in our success in the quarter of the twenty first century. These are:

1. Integrity

2. Selling Skills

3. Relationship management

Each of them are bound together in a virtuous circle that ensures our survival and prosperity. Let’s look at each in turn.

Integrity

In the face of cynicism and scepticism only the honest will survive and prosper. We can no longer fallaciously claim that this our products are ‘the best’, that the very ordinary price we offer is ‘special’, or that this old but slightly revamped product we are offering to everyone is ‘new and exclusive’.

So a large element in delivering on integrity involves being more honest with our customers. Successful organisations have already recognised the importance of this factor. Take a look at the strap line on the Tesco’s Clubcard campaign and you’ll see that it simply states that ‘every little helps’. Mastercard doesn’t claim to be priceless, but merely enables you to enjoy priceless moments.

Selling skills

Selling skills refers to all of the marketing communications mix. It deals with everything to do with the way you sell your products or services.

And of course the foundation on which critically successful selling skills are built is the integrity of the organisation. The greater the degree of integrity the more convincing the selling skills, because the more you can believe the sales pitch.

But good selling skills are also about compelling communications. With so much noise going on in relation to advertising and promotion and with so many media options bombarding the consumer it has to be the best it possibly can be in order to work at all.  It has to attract attention and generate awareness of course, but it must be single mindedly targeted on your specific market place and based on a deep understanding of the customer or prospective customer and their wants and needs.

Relationship Management

Good relationship management is much more than having a customer database and mailing them with your latest offer on a regular basis. It is about knowing your customers purchase behaviour as well as their purchase history.

It‘s about individualising them (at least virtually) and understanding who are the most valuable customers (not necessarily just those that spend the most) and making them more valuable. It is about knowing the customers that are not that valuable, but could be. And it must be about getting them to buy into the idea of you relating to them.

Which, of course, brings us back to integrity. The most critical success factor of all.

But please do not make the mistake of one major blue chip CEO who said on seeing this model – ‘integrity eh? How do we fake that then?’.

Free image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We now have one for almost every room in the house and my son was moaning that, since we moved things around a bit, there was no longer one in the kitchen.

I saw this as an opportunity to recycle some of the sets and get a nice latest edition one for the den.

Off we went to John Lewis (been going since the 1860s and, famously, is ‘never knowingly undersold’).

I asked the helpful TV department shop assistant about LCD and LED TVs and she told me all the details, the pros and cons, and the relative value of different models from simple devices through to super large smart ones.  Very hepful.

“Can I see a 32 inch LED one please?”  I then asked after about 20 minutes of help.

“Sorry – no – we don’t keep any stock or even showroom models in that size I’m afraid.  We can order one in for you though.”

Hmmm.

So I decided to try another specialist retailer, Richer Sounds 2011 winner of the highly coveted Which magazine “Retailer Of The Year” award.

Great salesman.

After about 15 minutes of highly informed advice I went from wanting a simple 32 inch LED TV to gagging for a fully wifi enabled, internet enabled, smart, 3D TV with a full sound system added on.  I was now up from £300 to £550 (well it’s only £250 more).

“Great” said I “I’ll take it”.

“Sorry” said the salesman “we don’t have any of those in stock.  We can order it in for you though.”

OK.

I really worry about retailing.

A friend in the States on visiting a UK mall with me last year said “Gee you guys still have these things?  We all shop on-line now in the States.  These are all gone”.

I don’t know about the malls yet but we can all see that the high street is really suffering. And we need our high streets – they create communities.

But the future looks grim and many retailers and retail chains, John Lewis included, claim that they are just being used as showrooms and information sources for shoppers that then, having noted the model number and all the details, buy exactly that model, cheaper, online.

Well they do if you force them to – yes.

What is it about retailing that retailers don’t get?

The reason I wasn’t buying online (and believe me, as a techno savvy consumer I’m quite happy to indulge my retail habit through my Amazon ‘One Click’ account, or on Ebay or anywhere else come to that) but the reason I wasn’t buying online was because I wanted a TV there and then.

Believe it or not John Lewis and Richer Sounds I can very easily “order one in” myself.  I don’t need a shop assistant to press the keys for me.  And I don’t need the inconvenience of having to come back to the high street to pick it up.

And, when I ‘order one in’ online I’ll probably save about 15 to 20% off your inflated retail price that pays for your helpful shop assistant, and all that heating and lighting and showroom stock.

If you think you are becoming a showroom for online shoppers the one way to make sure of it is to allow yourself to become a showroom for online shoppers.

In this instant gratification, see and buy it world in which we live, the one competitive advantage remaining to a retailer is to indulge our craving for having what we want, right now. And selling it now, when you have convinced me to buy.

‘We can order it in…?’!

If retailers won’t carry stock then why will anyone under the age of 60 who has some form of web enabled device attempt to shop with a retailer?

What I was just a witness to was retail suicide.  I’d like to say “don’t do it” but on the other hand perhaps it’s time these organisations took themselves out of the commercial gene pool.

We know what to inscribe on the headstone don’t we – ‘but we could’ve ordered it in’.