Date post: | 23-Jan-2018 |
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Marketing |
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Hey there, thanks for stopping by. So if you’re watching this
video here’s what I know about you. You’re an Upper Valley
business owner, and you’ve got a vision of what your business
could be.
And you’ve got a vision of like in the future how your
business is gonna serve your clients. You’ve got a vision of what the business itself looks
like, like how many team members you have,
what kind of office space you do or don’t have, you got all that, you can see it… in your
mind and you also have a vision, of how it’s going to
change your lifestyle, o’ the impact it’s going to have on
you,
and on your family and what you’re able to do. And… then, you know, you wake up and
you go to work. And you get to work and all of a sudden you
run into challenges, like, there’s this thing called ‘I’ve gotta run
my business’,
and all the time that you have just like, goes away. You’ve got to go get leads, you’ve got to
figure out how to turn ‘em into clients, you’ve got to deliver for
your clients, you’ve got to manage the team,
you’ve got all these things that are going on and you get to the
end of the day and it’s like ‘wait a minute. I-I thought that I got like 2 more hours to make this happen. Anddd on top of
that,
you’ve got this kind of looming challenge that you’re aware of
which is, ‘I’ve got all this technology out there and every day I hear about a new piece of technology, that’s gonna make
my business super easy,
and the problem is that it’s all overwhelming, like I don’t
really know how to make sense of, what technology I should
use for this, or for that, and so, and I don’t walk around telling
people that as a business owner,
but inside, there’s this element of, dude, I don’t really know how to
make sense of all of that stuff. And, but I know I have to, right.
So, my name’s Sam Putnam, and, what I do, is I help Upper Valley
business owners build predictability into their business.
So, what does that mean. Well, the place to start is the process of how you take leads, how you
turn them into clients, and then how you deliver for those
clients. And, if we’re being honest,
what might be more accurate is the lack of process that you have in your business about
how that happens. So if we’re really going to make any
progress towards keeping your business in front of people and helping you make sense of all
this technology,
like, we’ve got to start, with the process of how you get leads
and turn them into clients. And, you know, the ideal
outcome here, is look, oh yeah, I’ve got this process dialed in, I
know exactly how my leads turn into clients,
I’ve got reporting on it, so I can see what’s happening, and I’ve
got these tools in here, you know like Facebook and Google and the Valley News and radio,
and I’ve got all these tools dialed in,
and it just runs, and it’s fantastic. Anddd, we all want that. And the reason why we
don’t have it is actually, we like to think it’s the software and
the technology, and that’s what we blame it on,
and it’s because we don’t have enough time, and the reality is it doesn’t have anything to do with any of that. It has to do with the fact that we don’t
have a plan of how we’re going to use the technology to free
up our time.
So, I’m a one-man shop here at Sam Putnam Consulting. I get
my mail in Hanover New Hampshire and I work mostly
at my home office here in West Windsor Vermont. I help Upper
Valley business owners build predictability into their
business.
For a lot of businesses in the Upper Valley, that means
getting you more calls. You really prefer to have the person call personally instead of email you. You know, you might not
have an email form on your site on person.
Appointments, orders, everything, through the phone. Now, as the owner, you either have a marketing guy, or work
with a marketing person, a social media person. Maybe
your brother set up a Facebook page for you,
or you’ve thought about getting one, or, the phone
company was setting that up for you, or something. And
you’ve probably got some stuff on there that you think is
important to you as an agency serving people.
And, you don’t necessarily do the Facebook stuff yourself, because you don’t normally use Facebook that much, or
maybe you’ve never used it at all. And you probably don’t
usually do the ads,
and I would bet you haven’t done much recently because
you don’t have that much time. But, then again as a business
owner, you probably do like to handle the advertising. You like
to kind of go through your budget and whatnot and do
that yourself,
and you don’t want to farm it out. You do it internally, and,
you’ve probably got some guys helping you out with that stuff
already. And, you know, you probably have your staff track
everything,
phone book, website, everything, you know, who
calls you and where they come from, even though it’s difficult to do, and, it’s difficult for you to tell if it’s working. Maybe, you do some banner ads in
Daily UV.
Or, you don’t spend any money on advertising. You have no
extra capital for advertising at all. Now, if you’re established, if you’ve been here for 20, 30,
50 years, you’re probably inundated with work.
You might be working with somebody, some website folks, a similar thing. You might not
even have had time to do what you wanna do on your website,
putting some stuff on it or whatnot.
You might be at a point in your career where most everything
you get is referrals, but you put some advertising out there just
so people can find you. And, you’re all about getting in front
of people, but,
you don’t want to spend any time on marketing. Soooo, you knoww it may be shortsighted, and, you knowww you’re kind of behind the times, but word
of mouth, repeat, referrals, knows you exist, uhh,
if you’ve got trucks, sees those all over the place, walk-ins if you’re on a 106, route 4,5, 12 whatever it is, that’s how you get clients, and, again, you’ve already got somebody with
your website who’s doing some things for you,
or, you’ve already got an online presence, and, you don’t really want to spend any time
with this stuff right now, you’ve got too much on your plate,
you’re booked up. And you’re not interested in dealing with
this.
You get back from a trip or you have to catch up on office work
and by the time you do that you might not even make it to
mail. And you could have a partner in your business who’s dealing with other folks as well.
And, if one of you guys does come up with something,
you’ve got to review it with the other. And that takes time. And
word of mouth and prior relationships work pretty darn
well for you, and so,
it’s not a high priority for you, you just need to hire someone
to serve those clients. You need bodies. You’re very short
staffed, you’ve been working in your business, not on your
business, and you need to fill one or two open positions,
with, someone moving, or, you’ve got to add to your
workforce, to get the work done that you’ve already got.
And as you’re working through your backlog of 50, 60 hours of
work, you’ve also got these internal processes, that you
want to work on.
You’ve talked to some marketing… software people
about it, maybe you’ve been to a SCORE workshop. And,
internal processes are the real priority for you. At the same
time, for some of you,
there is a quiet time of year, and you do think about this stuff, and you might need to think about it a little bit, but
you wouldn’t put doing it it out of mind. And, you know if your
business is a little different than most businesses,
you might do a handful of jobs a week, you know, not that
many clients. And, doing one more job a week is really good
for you, but, you’ve been getting everything through, the
yellow pages,
or some trade magazines or publications, or really just word
of mouth. But, if you got one more job every week, that’s good for you. You know, if
you’ve got a high ticket item, whether that’s an ongoing
service,
a membership, or Repeat business. So, the core of your
business is probably a 30, maybe 50 mile radius. So,
you’ve probably tried either the Valley News, or the radio,
or the yellow pages, or,
even a vanity phone number, although, that can not really work out as well as you hope
for some companies, or if you’re established for a long time you never ever want to
change your number,
but you know, you put an ad out in one of those places,
radio, phone book, print, and, you’re always glad to hear
when you put that ad out and you know it’s visible and that
it’s being noticed.
And, for the yellow pages, it’s really waning, you know, it’s
not working as well as it used to, and you’re probably
downsizing there unless they give you a super deal, but, if
you’re in there,
you’re probably still getting a significant percentage of the
people that call you from that, it’s a generational thing, people in their 20s are not inclined to
go to a telephone directory and look something up,
of course, this other side of it is, it’s pretty difficult to try to
google someone’s phone number that you want to call,
unless they’re also with a business. So, also, if people don’t have internet, or have
dial-up,
it’s really slow, and they’ll pick up the phone book and call you
from that. So, maybe you do Great Eastern radio, you know,
Kixx 100.5, 92.3 GXL, Q106, Cool 93.9, or the River, or
public radio, whatever.
And If you do a mix of radio stations, for a number of years,
that’s probably been pretty productive, radio could be
what’s worked best for you, you know, whereas, with print,
it can be hard to see predictable results so you
might cut that out altogether, especially if you were doing Co-
op ads. With radio, you run it on a pretty regular basis and
you get a fair amount of feedback,
being out in public, you don’t need a jingle, just a plain ad with you talking on there, it might be your most valuable source of traffic over the last 20 years. And, you, it makes some connections with the
community,
if you work through someone who lives around here, if you’re
doing business in the community, you’re advertising
through someone in the community, it’s your voice on the radio. People you don’t
know come up to you and say,
‘you’re the guy on the radio’, and it’s comforting to know
someone’s listening. And, you don’t expect them to
remember the number you put in your ad, but, you imprint
that association of your business and being a number
they can call.
So…you’ve got something working, and, you can’t just switch all the way to digital.
You need consistency. Presence is important too. You can’t just
do two weeks of radio, you need to do it for 10-15 weeks.
And, it depends if it’s at drive time, but, it probably works
out to about 5 thousand dollars, and, the Valley News
for a 3,4 inch ad, maybe you do color, maybe it’s a lot bigger,
it’s more like a couple hundred a day,
and a fair number of businesses pay that, because
that’s the clientele they’re trying to reach and they’re
going to keep doing that consistently, but it’s expensive,
but, you never know with radio, either.
So, you know, the key to all of this is the tracking, to ask people where they heard
about you or how they happened to come to you.
Tracking. Now, Facebook might seem like a whole different
world.
And, you don’t want to do any of this stuff in the immediate
future. But, this is the key, and, what we do is set up
predictability for businesses, and, really, the easiest way to do that is through my system,
and the if you don’t think that system’s going to involve the biggest website on the world, Facebook, um, you really are going to be left behind, you know, not this year, but, you know, 2018 is just a month
away now,
and, you’re gonna be leaving money on the table. People
who are not using this system, uh, they are leaving money on the table. So, that’s what this all about, reclaiming some of
that revenue that you’ve already lost by not using
digital,
and by not having a system, and in this 30 minute webinar I’m going to go through some strategies with real numbers
from real businesses in different industries, and
answer any questions you can come up with about why you
don’t want to do it.
And, you know, you’re not scared to do it, but, what we do as business owners is we
come up with these rationalizations as to why we’re not doing it. And again, I don’t care what you do, but, if you
do work with me,
I’m not going to let you throw money away, so, I’m very
convinced that radio, and the Valley News, and, to you know,
just enough so you’re gonna keep doing it, the yellow pages,
those are really working for Upper Valley businesses.
But, you can’t master all of those, and you can’t expect to
one, manage all of them successfully, and two, to get a payoff from all of them. And,
you’re really making life harder for yourself if you’re not
spending a little money on digital.
And honestly you are late in the game already to the biggest
social network in the world, and that’s facebook. So, sign up
for the webinar on Thursday right in this box here, right
here, And, I’ll talk about anything on there, that you
ask,
provided it’s a real problem you have and you’re located in the Vermont, New Hampshire area, so people watching, and
listening, can benefit from that. Ok guys, I’ll see you on
Thursday at 2. Bring a pen and a notebook,
so you can take notes, because, there’s going to be a lot of
material, and yeah, I’ll see you on Thursday at 2. And, that vision I talked about, that vision you have for your
business, Let’s get that vision you have a little bit closer. See
you Thursday.