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Growth presents a real challenge for many small businesses. As your organization grows, how do you avoid compromising the personality and characteristics that helped build your business in the first place?

Act Small, Think Big

In his manifesto for small business in the new economy, Seth Godin has redefined small and big:

• “Small” is a mindset, a way of acting, as opposed to a physical state – Small is not the the size of your bank account, your asset base or the number of employees you have, etc.
• Thinking “Big” is thinking smart. Big ideas don’t have to equate to big budgets and expenses – Big ideas are new ideas.

The secret to managing the growth of your small business lies in understanding/balancing thinking big and acting small. Here are some ideas (please feel free to add to the list by posting a comment):

Acting Small

• Reach out and stay engaged with your customers (on a regular basis)
• Live your service promise
• Answer the phone (with a live person not an auto-attendant)
• Respond to website inquiries as fast as possible
• Return emails
• Listen
• Stay flexible
• Make decisions (the quicker the better)
• Avoid unnecessary meetings
• Communicate openly and honestly
• If you don’t know the answer, don’t fake it
• Ask for feedback – Survey your clients
• Use common sense (particularly when spending)

Thinking Big

• Focus on what your good at and farm out the rest
• Become your own publisher – share your ideas through a blog, e-book or whitepaper
• Give away content hat helps solve problems (for free)
• Embrace technology – use tools and applications to work smarter
• Learn how to use social media
• Always be trying something new – change is a stimulant
• Understand your clients and be the best at solving their problems

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Sales are important to every business because revenue is the fuel that drives growth. But in the case of small businesses, there seems to be a greater sense of urgency when it comes to converting every individual sales opportunity. Due to the real or perceived pressure of closing a sale, small businesses sometimes fail to recognize when the grip of inertia has taken hold of a prospect. What is inertia and how does it affect your small business? Are there any strategies to deal with “Prospect Inertia”?

Prospect Inertia

Inertia is defined as “a feeling of unwillingness to do anything.” Blinded by the need to make the sale, small businesses often mistake inertia for a prospect needing more time, information, etc. to make a decision. In a recent blog post, Seth Godin discusses indecision and inertia from a marketing perspective:

“We think that people are undecided because they don’t know enough
about our features or our competitors, or because they don’t have
enough money or they are waiting to hear from their friends. In fact,
most of the time, they’re undecided because they are afraid of
deciding. No is scary and yes is scary. The reason that so many people don’t vote is the same as the reason
that so many people walk past your store every day or click past your
site every day. Because inertia is compelling. Inertia absolves them of
responsibility.”

The Effects of Inertia

Prospect Inertia can affect your small business in two ways:

• Inertia wastes one of your most important assets – time. Time spent on Inertia Type Prospects takes away from precious moments you could spend engaging your interested target audience; helping move Action Type Prospects towards a decision; etc.
• Inertia limits productive feedback. Salespeople don’t understand where they are in the sales process; inertia prospects starve your small business of information that can help improve your product/service, help you gauge where your pricing is in the marketplace, help you build your brand, etc. “A no is better than a maybe, any day” says Seth Godin. “At least you can learn from a no.”

Inertia Strategies

It is impossible to prevent inertia from taking hold of some of the prospects in your pipeline – but there are a few strategies that may assist in breaking down barriers and helping some of your target audience reach a decision. These strategies include:

1. Published pricing. In my opinion, dealing with pricing during the early stages of the sales process is a great filter. The earlier your prospects understand pricing the earlier they will decide whether it fits their budget – they will either move on (which is good because it doesn’t waste your time) or the will continue along in the sales process (which is also good because now you’ve eliminated a major objection).
2. Make it easy to test your product or service. The easier it is for prospects to try your product or service the quicker they can decide whether it solves their problem. It’s great if you can offer things like free trials, have online demos available, etc.
3. Make it easy for prospects to get a number of their questions answered (before they have to call you). Whatever business you are in, take a look at the problems that plague your target audience and take the time to publish how your product/service solves those problems. One example could be a great features/benefits or FAQ section on your website.

When inertia takes grip of your small business prospects, it’s probably best to make the difficult decision to move on. Focusing your energy on the share of your target audience that is willing to make a decision (yes or no) will always prove to be a better investment of your time than working with prospects that will never decide.

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Understanding the website development process is important for small business owners – a well designed and programmed website will add value to your bottom line by engaging your target audience and generating leads. In this edition of the small business interview series, I speak with Jordan Klassen, Vancouver Web Designer, about website design and strategy.

Things to Think About

What are some of the things small business need to consider before they start development of a new website?

“You need to determine what the goals are for the site:

• Who will use it – customers, investors, recruits, current staff, and/or vendors?
• What information, features or tools will help you and these parties interact more efficiently and profitably?  How will you measure this?

Second, you’ll need to think about how they will be led to your website (direct marketing, emailing, search engines, advertising, PR, etc).  How you plan to drive traffic to the site has an affect on how the site is designed, and is important to consider, so you don’t build an amazing site with no budget to bring people to it.

You may feel pressure to have a website because everyone else has one or your competitors do.  Often a placeholder website, where you purchase a domain name and post a one-page website with the basics of what you do and how people can reach you, can be enough to buy you the time to think about the long-term vision for the site before you begin development.”

Website Components

In your opinion, what are the most important components of a successful website?

“A small business website needs to either drive business or improve the efficiency of your organization.  For some businesses “driving business” can be as simple as having a website that looks professional so you don’t lose business because people think you are “behind the times”.  It might mean making sure you can be easily found if someone Googles your company name looking for contact information, or it can mean receiving more leads, directly selling more through the web, reaching new markets, lowering your cost of sales, or saving your employees time.

A few specifically helpful tools include:

• newsletter tool
• statistical package
• content management system.

Newsletters are great for staying on customers minds, keeping them up to date and are the most effective tool at bringing users (back) to your website.  A website is one of the best places to get users to sign up for your email newsletter.

You’ll want a stats tool to find out how often people are visiting your site, how long they are staying, what pages they are viewing, where in the world they are from and how they found their way to your website.  This is invaluable in tracking and improving the performance of your online marketing.

A content management system will help non-technical persons in your organization keep your website up to date.  This keeps your website current, helpful, and credible, while saving time and money not having to contact your website designer for every little change.  You don’t necessarily need to be able to update all the content on your website, sometimes just a news section or your product catalogue can be enough.

Search Engine Optimization

There seems to a lot of confusion surrounding the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). In a nut shell, what is SEO and why is important?

“Search engine optimization encompasses all the activities you undergo to drive visitors to your website from organic search engine results (as opposed to visitors from paying search engines or other sites directly).  The primary misconception is that you can pay search engines to be placed near the top of the main search results.  You can’t.  These results are search engines best attempt at finding the most relevant sites for what the user has searched for and search engines don’t give away the exact details of how they work.  Still provide enough hints to allow you to optimize your website for better results.

SEO activities generally fall into two categories and both are required:

1. SEO involves choosing a few keywords or phrases to target and incorporating them into your website in a variety of ways.
2. It involves getting other high ranking websites for the keywords you are targeting, to link to your website, ideally using those same keywords in the link to your website.

Doing these two things well, can generate a long term, ongoing stream of visitors to your website that are actively looking for the products and services you provide, at no incremental cost to you.  Still, most search terms are competitive so it can take a lot of effort and a long time to move up the rankings, and it’s important to target the right phrases.  A good way to reduce your competition is to target geographic search phrases, since there are far less websites targeting “vancouver law firms” than simply “law firms” and still enough searches for the former to keep even the largest firms busy.”

Website Myths

What are some of the myths and misconceptions about developing a website?

“These are the biggest myths I’ve come across over 10 years of web design with dozens of clients:

• If you build it, they will come. You need to have a plan for how people will find out about the site and be enticed to visit.
• Ranking near top of search engines is easy.
• You can just ask for a website and it will get built.  A lot of back and forth is required for even the best designers to get it right.
• Once it’s built, that’s it.  Even the smallest sites will need updates over time and large online applications often require continuous tweaks and improvements for how people end up actually using the website.”

Hiring a Website Developer

Do you have any advice regarding what a small business owner should look for when selecting a website developer?

“I would look for the following:

• Experience in web design.  Lots of stuff can come up from a technical perspective and lots of small stuff can cause users problems and even cause them to fail at the simplest tasks.  I’m still learning techniques and solving fresh problems after 10 years.
• A strong portfolio that shows either a variety of styles or the exact style you are looking for.
• Good communication skills.  The designer needs to understand your business, what you are looking for and be able to explain your options and the pros and cons.
• Be wary of flash.  A really impressive looking website with animation, sounds, and video, is not necessarily an effective website.  Your web designer needs to balance ease of use for your target demographic with aesthetic appeal, and often search engine friendliness.”

Planning for Continuity

Do you have any final thoughts you feel are important to share with small business owners when it comes managing their websites?

“It’s important to plan for continuity.  With that in mind, two things are important:

1. When signing an agreement with a web designer make sure that you will receive copies of the source files and code and have the right to continue using, modifying and building upon them in the future, even if you need to use a different designer.
2. Make sure you have a back-up copy of your website and that a regular back-up system is in place to cover updates to the content or data used or created on the website.”

About Jordan Klassen

Jordan Klassen is a Vancouver based web designer and developer. Jordan has over 10 years of experience and offers clients practical, goal driven advice in the areas of web design, web development, web based applications, user interface design, usability consulting and e-commerce.

Check out his portfolio here.

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I took some time recently to listen to a great social media marketing podcast by David Meerman Scott, Paul Gillin and Mike Lewis. The idea that I found really intriguing, particularly from a small business marketing perspective, was “brand journalism”.

Brand Journalism and The Dynamics of New Marketing

Before the web, companies had to either buy advertising or convince journalists to write about their products or services (many organizations still use this approach). One component of New Marketing focuses on brand journalism – the idea that creating great content will help your small business publish it’s way to brand awareness.

The dynamics of New Marketing are based on web search and social networks. The argument for creating great content is based on the fact that the first place most people turn to solve a problem is the search engine community i.e. Google, Yahoo!, etc. Paul Gillin discusses an informal poll taken during one of his speaking events – the results highlight the importance of search in solving consumers’ problems:

The approximate number of people that use the following forms of marketing to help research or solve a problem they have:

• Direct Mail (find a solution by reading a flyer or postcard) – 10%
• Mainstream Media (find a solution via a TV, Radio, Print ad) – 20%
• Tradeshows (going to a tradeshow to solve a specific problem) – 5%
• Google (use Google to research a solution to a problem) – 100%

Companies Turning into Publishers

Scott and Gillin talk about the fact that your target market doesn’t analyze the source of content – as long as your organization has the right content to solve your audience’s problem, they won’t distinguish the difference between you and any other major media outlet. The ability for an individual or any sized organization to develop and distribute great content online has virtually eliminated the distinction between your small business and major information sources such as the Globe and Mail or The Wall Street Journal.

Social Networks

The other key ingredient in the New Marketing are social networks – Meerman Scott states the fact that “people love to share cool FREE stuff”. His latest free e-book has been downloaded over 300,000 times and he has repeatedly shared the amazing story of how Cindy Gordon, VP of New Media and Marketing Partnerships at Universal Orlando Resort, spread the news of the “Wizarding World of Harry Potter” theme park to over 350 million people (virtually for free) by telling 7 bloggers!

On a (MUCH) smaller scale, I can also attest to the power of how free content can spread over social networks. Using a group discussion thread on LinkedIn, I recently posted a request asking for feedback and reviews on my new e-book…over the next two days my website experienced a 400% increase in traffic!

The New Marketing works…take some some time to think about what kind of free content your small business could create to solve your target audience’s problems (e-book, white paper, research metrics, etc.) and start spreading the word. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, if your content can help solve a problem, your customers and prospects will use it and talk about it. As Paul Gillin says…”There are very few industries where word of mouth doesn’t work”.