Golden Practices

Gear Up for the Next Interview Season

An interesting post at HR World talks about "30 Interview Questions You Can't Ask and 30 Sneaky, Legal Alternatives to Get the Same Info"

What I don't like about the post is the title. It presents the article in a light that the content doesn't follow, which brings us to what I do like about the post.

I like the fact that the authors encourage getting past the presumed cause questions (not allowed) and takes the interviewer to the real reasons one is asking the questions.

For instance, asking about religious persuasion is nosy and, clearly, not allowed. But if the purpose is to determine availability to work, say, Sunday mornings, then the author says to just ask if there would be any problems working the weekend hours.

As one commenter wrote:

The title made me think that it would be about how to ask slimy questions in a legal way, but I thought it was actually reasonable and helpful. I would much rather tell potential employers that I am available to work any day of the week than tell them that I am an atheist.

Anyway, I cannot attest to the accuracy of the advice (I'm far from an HR expert) but the article seems reasonable and informative about some of the legalities any employer probably needs to know.

What's In a Plan? Marketing Plan & Budget Development

It’s time to create your firm’s annual marketing budget. Hopefully, you’ve already read my “part 1” post, “Plan Your Marketing Budget.” This is in response to an "Ask Michelle" Q&A post.

I'm including several of our tools and approaches...

Start with a spreadsheet that has a couple columns on the left for your initiatives by various groupings (more on that below). Then you'll need a column for Timing and one for assigning Responsible Person.

To the right of that, I recommend columns for each quarter of the year or you can do months if you want to get that micro--and then create a "total" column to the right. These columns are where you'll include any anticipated expense in the periods you expect to pay them. Not all items will have related expenses.

Your spreadsheet might look like this:

Try having high level categories for the firm, overall (this will include initiatives you cannot tie to any specific industry or service area), and then for each Practice Area (can be industry or product/service) that you are actively building or promoting.

Within each of those categories, seek to include initiatives that address each of these approaches:

1. Existing Clients. Usually the most important area of focus yet, usually, little is allocated to this area.
2. Influential People/Referral Sources. Very important, and includes current clients.
3. New Business. Where people tend to allocate the most time and $, yet somewhat less critical than the first two.
4. Marketing Infrastructure. A potentially bottomless pit of marketing expenditures – make sure to do just the things you need to support the initiatives you’ll undertake, above. Most of this work should serve to convey your firm’s credibility, value, and personality. Remember, professional services are relationship businesses, and personality overshadows technical competence.
5. Research & Development. In order to stay relevant, you have to continually reinvent some aspect of what you do. I talked about this a lot in my post "Product and Service Improvement in Your Marketing Plan?"

The initiatives you’ll include in your plan won’t all have costs associated with them, but be sure to include them, their timing, and the responsible parties, anyway. This will help accountability. It will also help the marketing department have the "What comes off our plate if we shift gears and take on this unplanned work?" discussions that frequently arise.

It's easy to come up with lots of "bottomless pit" ideas, but where ROI is strongest is where specific clients, referral sources and new businesses are reached and impressed. If you're stumped for ideas, you might find the following helpful. Some specific items you might include in your plans are identified in my charts below.

The first one depicts some R&D type items you might undertake. These are best assigned by the firm's operational management group (for buy-in and accountability), but are best carried out by practice area teams flowing down to the individuals who are/should be in touch with the affected clients/prospects.

This second chart (also making available a PDF of this as the pic is somewhat small) shows a several initiatives that you might undertake at the practice area or individual practioner level. While your marketing department can do a lot of the prep and coordination, most results ultimately come down to what the practitioner does or does not do.

This is why it is so important to include practice group and individual "big picture to dos" in the firm's marketing plan. (Their detailed "to dos" can go into their individual marketing plans). It really doesn't matter whether you start with your firm level plan and drill tasks down to a practice group, then individual level, or whether you start with individual plans and stream those items upward to practice areas and then into the firm level plan.

Firms usually find one of these ways easier to begin than the other. It all depends on your firm.

Here is that PDF...Download firm_plans.pdf

Also, I'm happy to share a plan shell in Excel. It has a few ideas sprinkled in but is very generic. You would want to add additional sections for each of your practice areas.

Download sample_marketing_plan.xls

Note the Red items are DIRECT marketing and the Green items are INDIRECT marketing. If you want your plan to generate results, plan a lot more activity in the "direct" areas!

Happy Planning!

Gift Cards - the Gifts that Stop Giving

What's all the hype around giving gift cards? Of course it saves time (and thought). And receiving one can be a lot better than getting a hideous sweater from Aunt Nellie.

A spot on the news this morning defended, "Oh no, gift cards are NOT impersonal. But don't give cash anymore, because cash is impersonal."

Huh?? 

Gift cards, on the surface, seem harmless enough. But c'mon, it's a racket.

My 13 year-old son received a $40 gift card last December and he noted that the card's expiration date was a year away. He, unlike my other kids, likes to take his time deciding what to spend his money on.

So on a recent trip to the mall, he popped into the researched store of his choice to buy the researched item of choice and, low and behold, the store clerk informed him that his "gift" value had decreased by $12 due to the time elapsed since purchase.

Are you kidding me? I understand it dropping to zero on the expiration date, but depreciating its value during its valid period is lousy. Try cheering up a broken-hearted 13 year-old who cannot see how this is fair (hint: it isn't).

For family, cash is possibly still a better gift than a gift card with a squirrely policy.

Definitely, before sending your clients a gift card, check the policy!  Do you want them to have this sort of experience when they cash in your gift?

Maybe just send them a good old-fashioned bottle of wine or a great book, instead...

Writing Great Case Studies or "Customer Evidence"

We know that claiming ourselves to be 'all that' is pretty meaningless. And someone else claiming it, or implying it by working successfully with us, has much more credibility.

An effective way to get this across is to tell stories about what we can do, from the customer's perspective. Copywriter Matthew Stibbe on his Bad Language blog shares The Rise and Fall of the Case Study.

In this post he describes the problems in developing case studies, the dullness that can ensue, and several neat ideas for improving on stale approaches (i.e. formulaic: problem, solution, benefits). Three of his many ideas are:

One case study, multiple presentations. The source interview and research don’t change, but perhaps I could write a traditional case study, a bullet point summary for the web, a killer quote for an email newsletter and a longer more journalistic story for PR purposes. The incremental cost of the extra writing is marginal compared the cost of going through the process to produce the basic case study.

More journalism, more story. Clients say that they want writing with fizz and ginger. They want something that reads like The Economist of the FT. But when I actually write something sparkling, they try to dull it down again; afraid that informality or originality might offend. It’s like turning My Fair Lady back into Pygmalion. The antidote is to have a little courage.

Remember the audience. I wrote some case studies for an ecommerce company. They were 1,000 words long but I was only allowed to mention the product in one paragraph. The rest of the piece had to be a proper story designed to appeal to the company’s target audience. In terms of PR coverage, these case studies were - by far - the most successful I have worked on. Why? Because journalists could see the point and people actually wanted to read them.

Matthew's first item is something we do often; pulling out nuggets here and there as supporting statements behind otherwise vague claims of the firm (e.g. timely, responsive).

He also talks about the fact that they are expensive--there is enormous effort, process, and skill behind good case studies. I have found the same to be true for those we've developed. In fact, many firms don't want to pay the prices we need to charge to make it worth our while to do this sort of work.

I'm reflecting now that in some instances, I probably haven't presented compellingly enough the value of that work. That really hit me when I read Matthew's point on measurability:

Build in measurability. Too often, people seem to think that the end of the process is getting the case study signed off and uploaded to a central customer evidence website. To me, it feels like that is only the beginning of the process. It must be possible to build in more measurability. For example, I can see exactly how many people come to my blog each day and what they look at. Perhaps the same can be done for case studies.

Like Matthew, I've focused on the project at times, and not on the residual value of the case study. We marketers should definitely be thinking about monitoring effectiveness of this (and other) means of communication.

A side note....the comment string on Matthew's post is very interesting. In particular, Jeff Younger writes that "case study" is altogether the wrong term--that a true case study is a history report that provides a proxy experience for the reader.

He states, "Because case studies are particular, any attempt to turn them into general marketing tools is an error." He and Matthew note that organizations like Microsoft have adopted the more appropriate term "customer evidence" for what most of us call "case study."

If you are a marketer and you're not yet reading Matthew's blog, you need to be! Also read Matthew's post: When Case Studies Go Wrong

Made the Top 10 List of ASA!

Thanks, American Society of Appraisers, for including this blog in your "Top Ten List of Marketing and Sales Blogs for BV Practitioners."

The list appeared in the E-Letter, a publication of the Business Valuation Committee of the American Society of Appraisers on November 1, 2007.

Why Small Biz is Slow to Web 2.0

An interesting post on Seeds of Growth/Small Business Trends: 3 Reasons Why SMBs Have Not Flipped For Web 2.0 discusses a recent study by Bredin Business Information.

[BBI] found that SMBs (small and mid-sized businesses) have not jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon just yet. The BBI study found only 14% of the 300 people surveyed believe blogs are and will be important, while wikis, social networks and webcasts faired slightly better.

Compare this to the 49% who think e-newsletters will remain important for the next five years, and you see how little love SMBs have for “the new stuff.” This comes as no real surprise. 

Although many of us small biz types do blog and wiki and twitter, the vast majority of non-techie, traditional entrepreneur types aren’t drinking the kool-aid just yet. Given the typical “fear of change” and “lack of time” arguments, here are a few reasons why.

Citing "silly names" and perceptions of social media as "silly kid stuff" as two of the reasons for shunning social media--and calling them excuses--author Brent Leary says that big tech companies have fallen short of their duty by being "silly role models." He writes (emphasis mine):

Until recently many big time tech companies really didn’t get Web 2.0. Some have been slow to use it themselves while others misused these tools to deliver traditional marketing messages.

Why use tools meant for collaborating and community building to deliver the same old tired one-way messaging? Web 2.0 is about conversations, exchanges and creating an atmosphere where people can freely express their opinion. Not to deliver marketing schlock.

I couldn't agree more. Over on Brent's Blog, he mentioned his article again and wrote:

...as my buddy Paul Greenberg pointed out...the small business folks who have bought in to Web 2.0 are true mentors, demonstrating to the big guys as well as other small businesses how these tools along with the right mindset can be extremely successful.

Nothing to do With Firm Marketing

Skip this post if you don't want a small dose of off-topic humor.

Young people who didn't live through the 70s like we did keep trying to bring elements of the 70s back into the fashion realm and they don't understand why we "older" folks resist this. Yeah, I too have been drawn to the hip-hugger look and high boots and even peasant tops. But I have my limits and here's exactly why...

See this post by 15 Minute Lunch blogger, Johnny Virgil.

He describes stumbling upon a 1977 JC Penney Catalog that illustrates why the 70s are equated with horrendous taste. What the hell were we thinking buying this stuff thus encouraging the fashion industry to keep going in this direction? Now it is clear to see why even the 80s fashions were viewed as a significant improvement!

The post includes not only a large number of laugh inducing photos but the author's commentary is priceless. His post drew over 240 comments. I guess it's hitting a good nerve. Enjoy.