Planning for austerity in FE

Times are tough and getting tougher.

At such times some businesses stop trading. Some retrench. Some cut back. Some take stock and reinvent themselves.

Guess which ones are best placed to make the most of the current situation and to respond to new situations as they arise?

Of course, it’s the businesses that reinvent themselves.

Reinvention is just another way of talking about aligning yourself with your market.

In business, when the market changes, the rest of us have to change, too.

As colleges and other providers look to reinvent themselves, there's a very important question to ask.

What exactly does the market want?

Most organisations out there want, first, to survive and second to be ready to take advantage of opportunities as they appear.

This means your organisation needs a value proposition that is built around two themes.

• How will working with your organisation help an employer to be more likely to be around in two years’ time?
• How will working with your organisation help an employer to be well placed to seize opportunities in the coming months?

The answer is no longer built around training, qualifications or even skills. Neither is it a response built around helping employers to meet legislative requirements. Today, the answer to the question has to be about helping the employer directly.

Most people in business know that there are three things their customers will buy.

These are:

• Guidance and support on how to make more money.
• Guidance and support on how to keep more of the money they make.
• Guidance and support on developing their capacity to do the two activities above.

Now’s the time to re-examine your key message to employers.

Does our key message address all three of these issues?

If it does, you can expect your business to grow even in difficult times. If it doesn’t, then promoting your products and services is going to be an uphill struggle at any time, even when you’re “selling” free programmes. It will just be more difficult now.

Two action points come out of this.

The first is to make sure you are offering to deliver real value to employers. The second is to make sure that employers recognise the value you are offering.

So check out how you promote your organisation to employers and if they see things in the same way that you do.

Do this quickly, because it's part of your process of planning for austerity, and today no one in FE has any time to waste.

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Your customer pipeline (3) - Is it helping you to build your business?

Customer pipelines are great marketing tools. People love the concept of the customer pipeline. It’s a very popular search term on the internet. There are lots of new readers finding this blog as a result of searching for “customer pipeline”.

All of this is excellent . . . but is using the concept of the customer pipeline helping you to build your business?

• You already know that you can differentiate your customers, using your customer pipeline.
• You know that your customer pipeline can help you to be clear about the quality and depth of relationship you’re likely to have with individual employers.

Now let’s think about the customer pipeline and your business.

Your customer pipeline saves you money because . . .

Using your customer pipeline well helps you to save money because you can get away from “fingers crossed” marketing. That is marketing to every one on your list and hoping – or keeping your fingers crossed – that some of your efforts work.

Once you’ve used your customer pipeline to help you to differentiate between your different customer groups you can decide which groups merit having large or small amounts of marketing money spent on them.

This allows you to spend less on reaching all your contacts and to focus spending on the two groups where you have most to gain from your marketing efforts.

These groups are:

• prospects with whom you have a well-established relationship who have not yet bought from you
• customers who have done one piece of business with you and who you want to encourage to make that second purchase.

You’ll spend less by being focused because you will be working with smaller groups and you’ll be working in a more targeted way.

Alternatively you could spend the same amount of money but undertake more targeted and more relevant marketing. You’re almost certain to get a better return on your investment in this case because your approach is tailored to the specific circumstances and needs of defined groups of employers.

Your customer pipeline saves you time because . . .

Used well your customer pipeline can also save you time and, as you know, time is money.

If you build your relationships with the employers in your customer pipeline who you have identified as your advocates you can save lots of time and money. All you have to do is to ask your advocates to refer you on to others.

It sounds simple but most providers don’t ask for referrals.

Those providers who do ask don’t ask often enough or in the right way.

Yet, your advocates are longing to tell the world just how good you are.

Spend some time helping your advocates to help you and you’ve just recruited a skilled and motivated free sales force.

This means you can spend less time on bringing in new business and more time on the important task of building relationships with employers.

Making your customer pipeline work for you

Now you’ve got your customer pipeline set up you need to take steps to make it work for you.

Your customer pipeline could just remain a mechanism for establishing your relationship with each employer on your list. On the other hand it could become a valuable key account management tool and a generator of income.

It’s got the potential to be more than a great metaphor, so use your customer pipeline well.

See also:

Your customer pipeline - why it matters

Your customer pipeline (2): Building friendships

Have you created your customer pipeline?

Your customer pipeline (2) - Building friendships

Your customer pipeline is a great tool for helping you to decide which employers are most likely to work with you and hence which employers are going to be of most value to you in the long run.

Used well your customer pipeline will help you to differentiate one employer from another and to make a judgement about how much resource to spend on building relationships with particular employers.

In simple terms you can use your customer pipeline to help you to work out how much value to place on an employer and hence how much to spend marketing to that employer.

Turning strangers into friends

Employers who don’t know you are strangers.

It’s really difficult to sell to strangers. You don’t know anything about them. You don’t know about their needs and wants. You don’t know what keeps them awake at night. You don’t know if what you’re selling could be what they might want to buy.

Marketing to strangers is costly and not particularly rewarding. It’s hit and miss. You might be lucky, but then again, you might waste a lot of time and money trying to build a relationship with someone who has no intention of buying from FE – ever.

FE providers who don’t use the principle of the customer pipeline are doomed to sell to strangers forever, because they don’t take steps to convert strangers into friends. They don’t take steps to get employers into their customer pipeline. They don’t monitor employers’ progress as they travel along the pipeline.

Friends, on the other hand, are a little bit closer to you.

They are beginning to learn a bit about you. You know a little bit about them, too. You also know just how close you can get to them, because they send out signals, and if you’re on the ball, you pick those signals up.

In marketing terms friends are happy to learn more about you but they’re probably not ready to buy as yet. They will probably sign up for your newsletter. They might follow you on Twitter.

Make a hard sell to them, or bombard them with marketing messages, and they’ll disappear. They’re not that close to you as yet.

Yet, they’re in your pipeline. That means you can develop relationships with employers, provided you take care.

Pay attention to your friends

When you’re looking to find new employer customers it will make more sense if you focus on your friends.

Help them to travel a little bit further along your customer pipeline. Help them to get to know you better by using the knowledge you already have of them to tailor what you offer them. Just make the offers without frightening employers away.

Pay attention to your friends for other reasons, too.

It will also be cheaper to market to them than trying to convert more strangers into friends. You already have established ways of getting in touch and keeping in touch, so the hard work of relationship building is done.

You hope your friends will become customers in the near future. That means you hope they’ll do business with you. It’s a reasonable expectation. You’ve taken time to build the relationship. You know they like you a little, so there’s more chance of making progress. You’re not talking to strangers.

After that, provided you manage the relationship well, they could become clients, making multiple purchases from you, or fans, or advocates and so on.

Use your customer pipeline to differentiate one employer from another

You can differentiate all the employers who are in contact with you using the concept of the customer pipeline.

It’s worth doing.

Remember the basic points in the chain or in the pipeline: suspect, prospect, customer (makes a single purchase), client (makes multiple purchases), fan, advocate and lots of other types of employer in between. Vary your approach to marketing depending on where an employer is in your pipeline. Targeted marketing will be more effective. It will also save you money.

As you plan your new campaigns remember that clients are worth more to you than customers. Fans are worth more than clients Advocates are worth more to you than just about any other customer.

They’re all worth more to you than strangers.

When you start to think about it, your customer pipeline should encourage you to spend more time, money and other resource on your existing employer customers than on new customers.

It’s strange then, that so many providers focus on turning more strangers into friends, than on helping friends become customers, clients . . . and so on.

When you think about it, focusing your marketing efforts on strangers doesn’t really make sense ….. does it?

See also:

Your customer pipeline – why it matters

Your customer pipeline - why it matters!

Do you have a customer pipeline? Does having a customer pipeline help you to attract more employer business?

These are all good questions, and they’re exactly the sort of questions that providers are asking, especially since most people in FE know they need to bring in more revenue from employers.

Your customer pipeline matters

First of all, your customer pipeline really matters because it’s a mechanism you can use to help you to be clear bout how likely employers are to do business with you in the near future.

Employers at the mouth of your pipeline are least likely to make a purchase now. That’s because they are just contemplating beginning a relationship with you. Maybe they’ve agreed to attend an event. Maybe they’ve signed up for your newsletter. They have some interest in you and what you do, but the relationship is just beginning.

When you’ve begun building that relationship and employers know you better they’ll be more likely to buy. That is as they travel down your customer pipeline they’ll be moving closer to that first purchase.

Customer relationships also matter

People buy from people.

People also buy from those they know, like and trust.

Helping employers to move along the know-like-trust continuum is the same as moving people down your customer pipeline.

The concept of the customer pipeline helps you to build this relationship at the right pace. It also helps you to avoid the wrong sort of selling.

You want all your employers to move a step further along your customer pipeline every few weeks. You don’t necessarily expect them to buy from you immediately.

Thus, once they’ve signed up for your newsletter, you want them to read it and to start clicking links in the publication. When they know a bit more about you, you want them to get in touch with you and possibly get some information sent to them. A little bit later you want to visit them or establish personal contact with them . . . and so on.

With each activity the employer is moving further down the customer pipeline and further along the know-like-trust continuum. It’s a slow, but often very rewarding, business.

Bombarding someone with “Buy now!” messages will send them out of your pipeline quickly. Helping employers to come to know you better and to like what they know about you will help all aspects of the relationship building process.

Monitoring your customer pipeline

Probably the best customer relationship management task you can undertake in the near future is to work out where employers are in your customer pipeline. That way you will know what sort of contact they are likely to value, and what will drive them away.

Monitoring your customer pipeline will help you to differentiate your approach to marketing and to developing and managing your relationship with individual employers.

Doing this well will be repaid with more business. That’s why the customer pipeline really matters.

See also: Have you created your customer pipeline?

Are you on the way to becoming a client magnet?

Are more employers working with you this year than last? Are you earning more of your organisation’s income from employers this year than last? Are more employers working with you for a second or third time?

You want to be in a position to answer all of these questions positively.

If you’re achieving this sort of success and, if you’re hoping to achieve even more success in the future, there’s a good chance that you’ve accepted that client attraction marketing really works.

That means you’re applying the lessons set out in this series of posts.

• You’ve defined a market that you are going to serve.
• You know who you want to attract to work with your organisation.
• You’ve made sure that prospective customers from your chosen marketplace can find you.
• You’ve made sure you are memorable in a positive sense when customers interact with you.
• You’ve created a great website that really is the hub of all your marketing and business communications.
• You’re building your list of prospects and customers.
• You’ve created a customer pipeline.

Congratulations. You’re making progress.

Getting business to come to you is vital in the modern world of FE because, for the future, you’re likely to have limited amounts of money to spend on more conventional approaches to promoting your organisation.

If you adopt client attraction you can do more with less, in one sense so the cuts in budgets may be less serious for you than they would be otherwise.

However, you will have costs. It’s just that your costs will be calculated in different ways.

• Client attraction costs in terms of staff time.
• Client attraction costs in terms of skills. You definitely need people who have skills that can be in short supply, for example, webmaster skills.
• Client attraction doesn’t need to cost a great deal in terms of financial outlay.

Client attraction helps you to build your business for the longer term, so it’s a valuable approach to marketing, to promotion, to selling, to business building and to building long-term relationships with employers.

That’s why, now you’re on the road to becoming a client magnet, you’ll want to continue travelling in the right direction.

This is the tenth and final post in a series about client attraction basics.

Have you created your customer pipeline?

If you’re going to succeed in bringing in more employer business and more new employer business, too, you'll need to differentiate your list of customers and potential customers.

A good way of doing this is to think about employers as making a journey through your customer pipeline.

• Customers enter the pipeline via a wide funnel.
• They then travel along the pipeline.
• When they reach the end of the pipeline they have become your advocates and promoters.

Many employers will never get that far down your pipeline.

However, you need to know where employers are in the pipeline to help you to decide how to manage your relationship with them. You need to do this for several reasons.

• You deal with employers in different ways depending on where they are in your pipeline.
• You allocate differing amounts to resource to managing your relationship with them when they are at different points in the pipeline.

In marketing terms the employer enters your pipeline as a suspect.

When you know more about the employer and you think there is a possibility of doing business with him or her, then the suspect becomes a prospect.

When you do your first piece of business with the employer, he or she becomes a customer.

As you build the relationship the customer becomes a client. You start to tailor what you do to meet each client’s expectations and offer a differentiated set of products and services.

Clients with whom you work well become your fans and will, if asked, promote you, or give you a reference.

A few of your fans will become your advocates. These are the employers who take the initiative in promoting you. They are always looking for opportunities to let people know what a great job you do. These are the people who reach the end of your pipeline.

Your customer pipeline is an essential element in building your business.

Have you worked out where each employer sits in your pipeline? If you haven’t, you need to.

This is the ninth in a series of ten posts about client attraction basics.

Are you building your list?

If you’re going to attract more business you need a list of prospects and customers and a good list, too.

I’m not talking about the lists you buy in or the lists on your database.

I’m talking here about the lists you build – one address at a time.

Good lists take time to build because when you build these lists you are starting to build relationships. As you know building relationships takes time.

So how many lists do you need? There are three that will really help you to attract more business.

Your opt-in list

Your most important list is your e-mail opt-in list. This is the list of people who have agreed that you may contact them from time to time and they welcome your contact.

That doesn’t mean they have given you permission to send sales messages to them every day. In fact, you’d be wise to limit the number of sales messages you send out to this list.

The people who have opted into your list have given you permission to send them interesting and useful information that they will value. That’s what they want and that’s what they expect.

Your challenge is to make sure that your communications fulfil their expectations because you can lose people from your list as well as gaining them.

Your Twitter list

You also need to be on Twitter.

Attractmorebiz is on Twitter. Find us here.

I’m on Twitter. Find me here.

You need to follow people and organisations that you are interested in and which serve your marketplace. As a result some of them will follow you.

Again, the rule is to make your tweets interesting and that means avoiding too many sales pitches. It also means remembering that Twitter is at the heart of the social media revolution. Social is the word to remember. You’re creating links and relationships with this list. Be social. Communicate. Interact.

So get onto Twitter and get a Twitter list going.

RSS Feeds

This is a different sort of list, and it’s strictly not your list. You don’t directly know who is on this list but you can check how many of them there are.

When you blog – and, of course, you should be blogging as well as tweeting and building up your opt-in list – you should offer your readers the opportunity to subscribe to your RSS feed. This means that each time you post an item on your blog they will be notified about it.

The majority of people still subscribe to blogs via e-mail, which means your blog post ends up in their e-mail inbox, so remember to make sure that your RSS feed allows for this type of subscription.

All very basic stuff, but it will pay off in time and if you keep working on list building.

We have a growing opt in list and a monthly newsletter that is starting to be passed around. We know this, because people join the list as a result of receiving a newsletter from a colleague.

We are growing our lists of followers on both our Twitter accounts.

And, yes, statistics for our RSS feed show increasing numbers of subscribers.

These are the ways to build lists and to build business. Make sure you are building your lists in all these ways.

This is the eighth post in a long-running series about client attraction basics.

See also: What should your website do for you?