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The Virtual Marketing Manager – how a marketing consultant brings you more sales

Tons of small businesses neglect their marketing. They know they should do it but more pressing issues keep them from getting to it. No surprise that

  • The last company blog was months ago, the customer newsletter is late or never goes out at all,
  • The company’s signage and customer experience looks tired,
  • Customers looking online for what the business offers don’t see it appearing at or near the top of search hits,
  • Leads don’t come to you, you have to go out and get them,
  • Sales aren’t growing as they should be…

It’s tough keeping up your marketing when there are more pressing things to deal with in the business. Marketing is one of those things that is easy to put off but over time it catches up with you.

Marketing is about focusing on understanding the marketplace, the competition, and the customers’ desires and pain points.

Typically, marketing is about:

  • The future and deciding where to go next
  • Concentrating on differentiation and offerings that are unique enough to give your business a long term competitive advantage
  • Working on
    • growing brand awareness,
    • attracting prospects and
    • moving people into the sales funnel

Marketing is characterized by:

  • Research
  • Mapping strategy
  • Analyzing data
  • Developing performance measures
  • Setting up systems
  • Watching trends
  • Changing tactics as required
  • Developing and leveraging marketing assets
  • Thinking about long term objectives

Sales is not the same as marketing. They require quite different kinds of people. What makes for a good sales professional contradicts with what makes for a great marketing professional.

Sales professionals are driven by:

  • The short term
  • Converting the lead in front of them into a sale, and then moving on as quickly as possible
  • Looking for and closing the deal

Having access to a Virtual Marketing Manager can be a big benefit for a small business.

Most can’t afford an experienced, knowledgeable Marketing Manager on a full-time basis and may never consider hiring one.

That’s a problem because many small businesses fail within the first three years.

Reasons include

  • Failure to set themselves apart from the competition
  • Inability to find a profitable business model
  • Ineffectively building awareness amongst potential customers
  • Not maintaining customer service standards

A Virtual Marketing Manager is an affordable alternative to hiring a full-time Marketing Manager and can make a big difference to a small business by:

  • Helping to clearly define the key benefit that sets a business apart
  • Exploiting this key benefit through the company’s communications
  • Ensuring that the company is regularly communicating with its important audiences
  • Building inbound sales leads through its websites and other marketing assets
  • Ensuring marketing investments are achieving tangible returns

The nature of SMB marketing means that you probably don’t need a full-time marketing manager.

A virtual marketing manager lets you get the benefits of a senior marketing manager without having to establish a full-time position.

A good virtual marketing manager can let the business owner carry on with running the business without distraction while building demand for its products and services.

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Strategy is bottom up | Kan & Company

2 minutes to read

We believe that winning strategies are born from killer tactics.

Napoleon Bonaparte was a Sardinian artillery sergeant in the French army. In his day, artillery was heavy and difficult to move.

He discovered that if he could have mobile artillery he could move it to concentrate its fire on a key part of the battlefield as required.

The rest of the strategy was logistics to allow the tactic to work effectively on the battlefield.

Cannon with lighter designs were procured, larger wheels were fitted to better traverse mud, artillery divisions were given horse and horse handlers.

He needed good messengers to redirect fire during the battle. Lots and lots of training so that they could all operate amidst the cacophony and chaos of battle.

With this strategy born from the simple idea of focusing artillery fire during a battle, he took Europe.

In the 1930s Nazi Germany perfected the idea of coordinating both highly mobile mechanized infantry, armor and air forces in battle. With these new tactics came new logistics.

The new Divisions required were recombined with a mix of armor and mechanized infantry. These new divisions needed new logistics systems to fuel and maintain their vehicles and equipment. Training was needed to improve communications and coordination between different forces.

We in Kan & Company Ltd have evaluated many business models and strategies over the years, we believe in winning strategies based on killer coal-face tactics that win sales which are supported by great logistics.

Despite his success, even Napolean got predictable. Is your Marketing looking stale or missing the target? Has your sales growth flattened out? Is your firm ready for its next phase of growth?

Call us, let’s talk

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The Board-CEO Relationship: Balancing roles

The other day, I attended a board meeting, where the deputy chair said, our role is to support the CEO, and over half the board members smiled and enthusiastically nodded.

Yes, amongst other things, I thought.  

I was heartened to hear later that the chair, had had a conversation with the deputy outside of the meeting to correct him.  

The board also has to

  • Keep the CEO and his management accountable,
  • Ensure that the company has a clear and well articulated Just Cause, Strategy and Annual plan, 
  • track whether the organisation is heading toward meeting those goals; and 
  • Ensure that the the plan adapts if new information comes to hand that necessitates a change in direction.

The Board’s relationship with the CEO is a complex one with multiple roles.  Some of these roles seem contradictory.  On the one hand, the Board needs to maintain the CEO’s morale while on the other hand, it has to be firm if it believes the CEO needs guidance.  There is a difference between a cheerleader and being supportive.  

Boards can’t become just another component of CEOs’ fanbases, nor can they be hunter-critics, forever having CEOs watch their backs. 

The board room environment should always remain respectful but challenging.  Raising a question should not be treated as a threat.  Nor should a question be used as a tool to undermine management.  This is where honesty and integrity are important.

Without these, trust can’t be formed and discussions become a dysfunctional Hunger Game.  

The basis of a good relationship between Boards and CEOs must also be founded on role clarity.  Boards must know what their roles, their duties and responsibilities should be.  CEOs must understand their roles too.  And it isn’t to “run the board” and manipulate directors to expedite a desired decision.  

Allow a business decision to stand or fall on its merits.  If a decision needs manipulation to achieve it, was the case strong enough to bring it to the board in the first place?

If the Board doesn’t know its role, duties and responsibilities then training is required.  This happens more often then you think, particularly amongst School Boards, volunteer organisations or organisations with elected public officials.  

For schools, the NZ School Trustees Association provides plenty of resources and training opportunities for board members.  The NZ Institute of Directors provides an equivalent service for all sectors not just education.  Having used both resources, its remarkable how much the two sets of material resonate with one another.  Probably over 90%.

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Startups should not be charities

Often a start-up takes off with a whoosh, with great enthusiasm, an idea is shopped and everyone wishes the new team well.

The goodwill often results in generous gifts of time, expertise and materiel. Advisory boards, and independent directors provide their services for free or next to nothing.

On the one hand, the generosity and support is well-meant and heartwarming.

But on the other hand, it can breed a culture of entitlement and a lack of professionalism.

Directors show up because they are doing the organisation a favour, and people promise to do things but they don’t or their late because, it was a favour.

Start-ups usually don’t succeed overnight, and freebies offered initially in the hope of gaining real paying customers soon becomes tiresome when the initial glow fades and the wait for a hoped-for paying customer stretches from days, into weeks, and into months.

Start-ups need to get out of the charity-mode as quickly as possible and start paying wages and fees like a real business.

That means do what it takes to get the funding so that the start-up can conduct its activities as a business. Build your team of advisors and employees. Pay them. Get that first customer. Work out how to win more customers and scale the business. Reward for success.

This is vital to building a “we mean business” culture in your organisation, at all levels, within employees and also at the board table.

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Discipline and systems allow businesses to scale | Kan & Company

In New Zealand, because of our flexibility and laid back attitudes, it’s easy to conclude that a lack of formality and bureaucratic procedure is part of the reason why New Zealand company’s succeed.

However, that conclusion is false.

Too many of New Zealand’s businesses are stuck in perpetual “start-up” mode, frozen at a small scale, still operating like small start ups with few standard systems and procedures even after decades of operation.

Consequently, new staff are always re-inventing the wheel, developing processes from scratch for routine operational processes.

Without documentation systems, new project teams have to develop their own processes for deployment and these processes can’t be easily handed on to the next set of new staff, leaving new staff to repeat the same grind.

Without systems, mistakes and gotchas can’t be flagged for subsequent staff to avoid.

Without timesheets how can the organisation control its costs?  How can it apportion its overheads to particular projects and activities?  How can the business know whether a particular activity makes money?

Too few business owners and managers are disciplined enough to put systems in place to be able to answer these questions with any rigor.

These questions seem so obvious yet why isn’t answering them prioritized?  Often the lack of a systematic, disciplined approach results in poorly tested, and unreliable products and services.

Deployment under these circumstances results in much re-work and this gets in the way of product and service development, and places greater pressure on meeting contractual deadlines.  In other words, fighting fires.

Not surprisingly, profitability is impaired but often managers comfort themselves with high gross margins.  Such managers fool themselves into thinking they are still making money because all that re-work is still a hidden cost, buried among the overheads.

All that frenetic, frantic activity yet the company isn’t growing as it should.

Success is not just based on talent, expertise, knowledge, acumen or luck but also discipline.  Systems provide discipline.  Not just discipline for operational activity as we have just touched on, but also to strategy setting, business planning, goal and objective setting too.

In fact, if a lack of systems is creating bottlenecks that are constricting your company’s growth then implementing systems has become a strategic imperative.

Systems allow a winning formula to be replicated across a great many people and this is how businesses scale.

Implementing systems that encourage a systematic and disciplined approach to all your business activities (including sales and marketing) will allow your company to focus on the right things, control costs and scale to new heights.

Putting systems in place and gaining staff engagement to sustainably use them, takes leadership and hard work.  In my experience, it’s an investment that is well worth the effort.

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