“One New Essential Business Strategy You Must Have”.

I heard Payton Manning, the Quarterback for the Denver Broncos being interviewed the other day by a reporter who asked what he attributed to his success.  His response was …”just be as consistent as possible."

But what he didn't say was that in order to be consistent, you have to also be constant, and constantly always trying to improve, especially if you are planning to be aggressively marketing your business.

that occur seasonally.  All of a sudden the smell of fireplace wood makes us feel a certain way, while brisk mornings and Sunday Football create other feelings that we dont necessarily feel in the summer.   As we begin to move into yet another seasonal change, these consumer likes and dislikes (almost like a seasonal mood swing) very often give reason and rationale to building your business with new customers relatively inexpensively.  When this is built and and becomes an on going marketing activity for your center, you will find this to be very profitable.

And If you think about the holiday season, most consumer studies attribute these "mass mood changes to such factors as climate, religion, thanksgiving, newness, hope, charity. Good will to men and all that…a merry glow for all. A feeling of optimism

And while the past few years have been difficult for many people, the richest 5% got a whole lot richer. That's about 11 million adults over the age of 18.  This is your target; a much more sophisticated segment and can smell BS in a heartbeat. 

They dont want fluff; rather being honest about what you offer and having their interest in mind is equally as important as a good value is to them...if not more so.

They are NOT looking for cheap, they want to buy and expect nothing less than your business exceeding their expectations. If you cannot deliver this kind of experience, then this blog was a waste of your time. Sorry about that.

If there are fewer customers, I want

·         the customer that has more discretionary income.

·         the customer who has more potential for referrals and for repeat sales in other categories such as adult child and couples programs

·         the customer who lives in higher end  neighborhoods will be the first segment I would test various offers…or high earner households.

My second segment, in order of preference would be the corporate customer.  In order to be as efficient as possible, I would then look at what type of company or business categories exist and ask, “Are there variables in these segments that are so unique as to be maximized to the seller’s (that’s us) advantage.

I would probably test a very upscale invitation vs. a premium in a box (or lumpy mail)to the business contact and then follow up with phone calls, just as soon as they open your email and get a fax about 15 minutes later.  I might even drop off a bowling pin, if the spirit moves me

Real simple, Here’s the summary.

Plan for big ticket buyers?  Make sure you absolutely know what the “big ticket buyer thinks she is REALLY Buying. Close the sale and make a friend with these customers.  Send them thank you notes, special invitations for events. Donate to their charities.  Go to their dinners.  You will have customers for life.

And what’s that worth to you?

Imagine if you added 5 new customers like that every year? Customers who would spend far, far more than a typical customer  per special event, holiday, fund raiser or company meeting.

Its just a little more effort on your behalf and I would be happy to demonstrate that for you.
Please give me a jingle if i can answer any questions about this...absolutely FREE

Fred

The Beauty of Asking

If you listen to enough people who own businesses, they will eventually tell you that the reason their business is bad is because of the weather, the economy, their suppliers, Wal-Mart, the new guy in town, competitors’ lower prices, neighborhood changing and...Did I leave anything out?

I’m never one to believe that you cannot stimulate demand for your product or service regardless of the aforementioned ‘excuses.” when you have a product that 68 million people use, I gotta believe that I can be a rainmaker.

Someplace in my imagination, combined with my experience, learned knowledge, I know  there is a way to create product.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about “gimmicks or magic bullets.” Instead I’m going to look for a product idea that will be attractive to my EXISTING customers. a product that offers a “UNIQUE” value at a time when my customers might have a greater propensity to buy it.

That’s the only way to make product that people want, to make product without excuses.

You don’t see Apple or Google making excuses or even Facebook when their stock tanked last year. They just got their best people together, defined the problems, brainstormed some alternatives and went and did something.

And the critical test whether a product will be successful is not whether you or your employees like it; or it’s easy to do in center.

No the critical test is whether your customers like it. So here’s a tip on how you can almost guarantee success.

Ask them. Ask the people in your target audience if they would buy what you are thinking of selling

Go ahead, ask. It won’t hurt.

Do You Like "Average?"

Ever since you were a kid, people probably told you how to fit in, how to dress alike and how to use the same tools to fit whatever job, profession or career that you were involved.

It might have been the High School English teacher who said there was only ONE way to construct a sentence or to tell you that “rules were rules” and must be followed.  Too bad Norman Mailer, and Jack Kerouac, as well as several other famous author types never got that message; we would have been deprived of some powerful fiction.

Maybe it was your first boss or senior “peer” who told you "NOT to make waves" and espoused “that’s the way we do things around here” so “go along to get along.”

It was all about maintaining the status quo or to "show" that the department was trying to be more productive, to get faster and more efficient; rarely was it ever about getting better and doing things smarter.

It seemed like the safest thing to do was just try to fit in, (you found that out at your first meeting when you made a suggestion that everybody in the room knew was a great idea, but waited for the Boss to agree.  When he saw that he wasn't the guy to suggest it, he put it down and said, “Fred, after you are here a little while I am sure you will gain the experience to make more appropriate suggestions, but thank you anyway.”  

And that was the end of your creativity.  You were basically told to assume NO responsibility for your actions and make NO suggestions.  Just be like everyone else.

“Damnit, just be average", they would say without saying.

We have enough of average. We have enough of people doing just enough to get by. We have a surplus of employees who are afraid to speak up, to suggest any ideas, to challenge conventional wisdom and to do better. We run our centers, all too often, like a fiefdom. We are all knowing, thus we are the smartest guy in the room so who are we to listen to a lowly desk person (who only happens to greet and speak to our customers almost every day.

Now if you have these types of employees I have bad news and good news for you.

One,  the bad news is that YOU created the problem by scaring the hell out of your employees for instilling fear in them that if they spoke up and challenged ‘the average” they would get fired.

Two, the good news is YOU are the only one who can fix it.  Encourage your people not to be different just to be different.  

Encourage then to be different to be better.

What do you think?

The Internet Has Changed Nothing

Has it really changed your business, brought you new league bowlers and increased the frequency of open play bowling from 2.2 visits annually to 2.2 visits PLUS.

Ah, I don’t think so. All it has done for many proprietors is give them a little less expensive way to communicate to existing customers.

In reality, if you take away the internet, you still have to plan, develop strategies, tactics, timetables, budgets and assign and delegate tasks to you, your wife, your kids, your employees and the dog to get stuff done...and monitor and modify. You still need to make sales calls; to develop special events, bring  fund raisers and community activities into the center that will generate "top of mind awareness" and bring your brand into a better sphere of activity.

You see the internet and all the social media platforms from Facebook to Pinterest to Twitter to Instagram to good old email; they are all mere tools to communicate your marketing objectives.

In fact the activity of social media is a key strategy with its own set of tactics, timing, and follow up.

Without the strategy and tactics and bolt on implementation, you are not going to move thee revenue needle because you sent out ONE email blast about Cosmic bowling this weekend. 

Was the email part of a bigger strategy?  Was it part of a total campaign that integrated Facebook, direct mail, in center selling, old media (TV or radio) and your blog with emails? Was it relevant to the target that you sent it to or did 78 yr old Bert who bowls in your senior league on Tuesday get one too? L

Here is s the bottom line. You still have to do the marketing; still have to test offers against various segments; still have to train and retrain your staff every day and continually build the marketing and service culture; still have to “do something weird” now and then to break on through to the other side.  

I have heard you say that you get a million emails, see a bazillion TV commercials and hear hundreds of radio spots and maybe read newspapers either on line or in print and can’t remember one of them.

So now YOU expect one little Email to make your Cosmic bowling great.

As Chris Carter says on Monday Night Football, “C’mon Man!” 

Check It or Forget It

Several interesting marketing items to report.  

Basically about customer service. OH, do you NOT separate the two and think that these two elements are two sides of the same coin?  I hope you do. Because you can market the best, the most innovative, the most unique program, but if no one cares about the delivery of the product at the center level, guess what?  You lose a customer that you worked so hard to get.  And that would be a shame.

Last week, some jackass hijacked, hacked, cracked and smacked my email.  I thought that was an easy fix. HA!  He had also cracked jacked and smacked my Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and Linked-In account.  In fact some 2000 people on my blog list, Facebook list and twitter list were affected.  If I haven’t apologized to you, please accept my apologies now.

It literally took me the better part of half a day to fix this stuff.  But before I took it on, I decided to give all these high tech companies a shot to test their customer service skills.

Here’s what I found out:

1.   They all suck, with the exception of one which I will tell you about.

2.  It is virtually impossible to find a phone number to call; a friend turned me onto a website about phone numbers for these companies so I was able to access them.

3.  Minimum hold times for any of them were one half hour plus; I left after a half hour.

4.  God forbid if you accidentally turn your phone off or another call comes in and you lose the tech call; you re toast and have to start ALL over.

5.  You are guaranteed to be asked your name, account number, password, social security number, first born’s weight at birth and your second grade teacher’s middle name.

6.  You will eventually be transferred to someone from India, Pakistan, China or some other country where the accents create a bit of a listening problem; at least for me.

7.  These folks will try as hard as possible to solve your problem, but ultimately you end up with “the high tech supervisor” who also tries to take care of it and in half the cases is successful.

8.  Rest assured that after it is fixed, another problem unrelated to the first will occur or a pop up will appear asking you if you want to buy “PC Protection.

9.  The only company that got back to me in a reasonable time was “Carbonite” that discovered my “in the cloud account” and was able to restore it in less than 5 minutes as well as send me a confirmation email

10.  The machines always win and you and the tech folks are mere pawns when the winds of tech turmoil blow.  I am still out of business about sending my blog out to a different list on a different server that refuses to accept my new password.

 

With that being said, I implore you to check your customer service policies.  Here is a story I heard that a proprietor bragged to me about. Seems that a woman and three children came in at 4pm to take advantage of a special that started at 6pm. 

The desk person refused to honor the woman’s request even though there was NOT one lane running.  And the proprietor told me that the desk person did the right thing!!.  I flipped out and told him that the woman will now go home; knowing she and her family will never come back, and no doubt told at least 14 other people about the “dumb” desk clerk.

Now I’m not saying this happens at your center, but with the season getting under way, this might be a good time to check your customer service and retrain your people.

A wise proprietor friend of mine, Wally Hall, said, “The successful business is one that offers a unique service or product.  Your unique service or product is  YOUR customer service.

Check it or forget it.

Black and White

“He sees everything as black and white”, said one of my colleagues and I immediately understood what he meant; that the person he was talking about was “Yes or No, Right or Wrong, Good or Bad – no shades of gray here. Just absolutes.  Lots of folks judge that way.  doesnt make them bad people, just a little bit narrow

But yes there are shades of gray, almost an infinite number of shades for that matter and for those of us who are inclined to see the world greater degrees of shades of gray, we probably have more choices. but, I think, a more complicated psyche.

So if you own a bowling enter or an FEC, you have the choice to see things as black and white or in various shades of gray.

For example, if you run a promotion, let’s call it "bowl your brains out" – you know x hours of bowling for $y dollars at a specific time – you have choices to add more or less hours, raise or lower prices, add more options like food and beverage and various prizes and surprises when people bowl and even add music or keep it quiet.  Lots of choices, if you see it that way.  Much, much fewer choices if you  see it as just bowling, rental shoes, time and price.

The real question is how does your potential customer and existing customer want to see it and are you offering that.  Oh, you don't know?  That's cool. here;s what you do: ASK THEM.

Sometimes we even do the black and white thing with employees. We see them as good or bad, positive or negative, friendly or unfriendly or energetic or lazy.  Unfortunately, when we do this, we have unfairly judged someone; simply because no one is just one thing.

And if you judge employees as having ONLY positive attitudes OR negative attitudes, you also do a disservice to them...and to you and your business, simply because your communication to these folks will be biased one way or the other

Maybe if you reinforced the positive while explaining how the negative hurts them from being happier, you could break through their narrow band of gray.  But, candidly, I doubt it.

They’re the ones you need to beware of; those folks who use words like “all”, never” “always” “none”, “everyone” and similar absolutes. They are the black and white types; they are the ones with the least amount of flexibility. So please watch for these words when you hire people, promoting people, giving them assignments and when you are making decisions that involve their participation.

Because to play the music, you need the black and white piano keys, but there are many shades of sound within that black and white band...to make REALLY beautiful music.

Every Time I Put My Shoes On...

I have written about emailing for some time now; trying to prevail upon you, dear reader, to use email to build relationships, tell stories and softly, softly sell your center or yourself as being part of the community. There's a reason it is called "Social Media" and not "Cheap Substitute for Direct Mail.

With "open" rates plunging to about 10% to 12%, you need to get better at having people (your TARGET) open your emails. The example you will see in this blog achieved that...and a whole lot more.  It added tot he value of the center's brand immensely

Futilely, I have looked for an email from proprietors to showcase an example of what I have been talking about. Instead I get appeals for “need two teams for Monday Mixers, Call Dale at happy Lanes (of course no phone number).

Or worse, someone sends me their flier for late night, great night cosmic fun starting at 11pm. Now I like cosmic as much as the next guy, but am I really the ideal target for that product?  Haven't been 18 to 34 for a few years now :).

Rarely do I ever get some “social media communique” that smacks of realism, emotion and a good story…until the other day when my great client Alley Katz sent me one that I just had to share with you.  Wood Foss and his family own and operate a bowling center in Westerly RI. It’s a beautiful beach town that like much of RI still suffers from high unemployment (I think it’s still in double digits).

 

Yet Wood and his wife Kathy and their sons David and Joe will tell you straight up that Alley Katz has been getting better and better because they “get it.” They understand how to be part of the community.  They understand the importance of planning and speaking to the customer from the heart. 

When their Westerly beach was almost wiped out by Hurricane Sandy or when a flood occurred and put the down town area in jeopardy, they were right there to lend a hand, run fund raisers, lay sandbags along with their fellow citizens and express their feelings about “their town” and emailed to their list a post that basically said, "please stop by for some coffee and donuts and a warm place to rest before going back out." 

Their results have been nothing short of extraordinary. And they didn't do it thru cheap, cheap pricing. They did it, the old fashioned way with family friendly, passionate service backed up by emails like this. Emails that puts the humanity of the moment into a business transaction.

So here is their beautiful and touching email that you need to read. Please  print and put on your office computer.  And every time you write an email think about this.  What emotions am I touching?  What human characteristic can I imbue my communication with and finally how can I stop selling and still sell?

The subject line was this: EVERY TIME I PUT MY SHOES ON..

I have 3 beautiful kids.  My youngest, Riley is almost 2. Every time I put my shoes on she says, "You going work Daddy??''  It's cute but kinda breaks my heart at the same time.  She is very young still but is also very aware of the fact that Daddy works A LOT.  I would love to spend some quality time with her and the rest of my kids for that matter. 

My parents and family that have had their kids already grow up before them always say, "it flies by"... "Enjoy them while you have them"...

NOW IS THE TIME.

ENJOY THEM WHILE YOU HAVE THEM.

SPEND QUALITY TIME WITH THEM.