Irish Bank Shares - reality or illusion?

June 19th, 2009

With the collapse in the Irish property market there has been a question over the major Irish banks.  Collectively the banks have 90 Billion Euro in outstanding property development loans.   These loans are apparently secured to various extents against development sites and the personal undertakings of property developers.  In the past 18 months the property market has gone into a steep dive from which it has yet to recover, so development sites have lost a lot of value and property developers a lot of their net worth. 

 

All commentators believe that some percentage of the 90 Billion will not be repaid, the only question is how much.  If most of the loans will perform the banks can absorb the losses and recover.  If the non performing loans are greater than the banks capacity to absorb losses IE the banks’ capital, the banks go bankrupt and get taken over.

 

The first step to recover this situation was to guarantee the banks’ deposits.    BY placing the resources of the Irish state behind the banks at the end of September 2008, the Government was able to stop panicking depositors withdrawing all their cash. 

 

The second step was to beef up the Banks ability to absorb loses, by pumping in a massive 7 billion in capital.  The so called recapitalisation scheme announced in February 2009. In return for this cash the state secured an income stream and preference shares. 

 

The latest step is for the state to force the banks to transfer the 90 Billion in development loans to a new state run agency, NAMA.  Apparently NAMA will value all the banks development loans and take them over from the banks.  The developers still have the same obligations to repay the 90 billion plus whatever interest payments were agreed.  The banks will exchange their debts for government bonds and walk away from all property related debts.  The state will have a property portfolio of worth tens of Billions of Euro, which can be managed over several years to maximise value for the tax payer. 

 

Apparently AIB have 200 staff preparing documents to hand over to NAMA, and NAMA will have between 30 and 40 staff.  So Nama must be planning to let the banks continue to manage the day to day operation of all these loans and simply provide oversight, and hold the risk.  It will be interesting to see how Nama manages to align the interests of the taxpayer who will own the loans with the interest of the bank manager who has to negotiate with a developer about repayments. 

 

One thing we do know is that NAMA will only pay less than 90 Billion for the loans, according to the Minister for Finance Nama will pay “at an appropriately written down value”.  What is not clear right now is how much the state will pay for these loans? 

 

If the write down is 50% reflecting the collapse in the price of development land, the banks will face a massive write down in loans, that will wipe out the banks’ capital.  The only conceivable solution will be for the state to pump in replacement capital and take a major stake in the remaining banks.   Or as the Minister says:  “If the crystallisation of losses at any institution requires additional capital the State will insist on participation by way of ordinary shares in the relevant institution.”  IE the state take control of the banks and today’s shareholders lose what little they have left. 

 

If the write down is a more genteel figure, say 10%, then the banks can absorb the loss.  Yes they will take a bit of hit on their capital ratios (See page 49) but they will be free of these dreadful development loads and profitable.  Don’t forget that most divisions of the Irish banks were and are very profitable.  Strip out the toxic development loans and the Banks look like very attractive cash generating businesses.  In this scenario the poor taxpayer would be left with a huge portfolio of property loans that will never be repaid. 

 

But the Minister has his “Sword of Damocles plan” to stop the banks getting away scot free: “The stream of income from the assets and the proceeds from the eventual sale of the underlying asset will accrue to NAMA. The State will incur a loss only if the assets transferred to the State cannot over the long term repay the investment made by the State in their purchase from the banks. However, if NAMA make a loss over the long term, the Government intends that a levy should be applied to recoup the shortfall.”  So even if the banks negotiate a sweet heart deal with Nama there is a still the threat to the future shareholders of the banks. 

 

In either scenario the bank shareholders will have to pay for the excesses of the Celtic Boom.   

 

Yet BOI shares have rebounded from a low of 12 c to 193c  valuing the company today at about 1.8 Billion euro.   Similarly AIB has risen to 195c from a low of 27c in March, with a market capitalization of  1.6 Billion euro.  Yet when we look at AIB for example they have a Tier 1 capital of 7.7 billion (about 9%) and they stand to write off 8.5 billion up to 2010.   Remembering that the Tier 1 capital ratio cannot drop below 6-8% AIB can only afford to lose a few billion.  If AIB have to write off more than a few billion which looks increasingly probably, they will be insolvent. 

 

Logic seems to suggest that the share price should be on the floor.    Yet the Stock Market is backing the company heavily to survive and thrive – is this blind optimism or am I missing something?  

 

 

 

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“The 3 Big Reasons To Care About SEO”

April 10th, 2009

These are tough times, no doubt, the Celtic Tiger is dead and we need to pick up the pieces Every business knows it has to cut unnecessary costs and improve efficiency. Lots of businesses that were getting by are now in danger of closing their doors.

Marketing is usually one of the first items on to be chopped (though it shouldn’t be done blindly). You’ve got to cut costs, and you certainly don’t want to make employees redundant if you can help it, so you start looking a bit more closely at your marketing budget to see where you can trim fat.

Most business owners know the value of marketing, you need to let people know that you exist. Yes, word of mouth is great - there’s nothing like a referral from a happy client to instil trust in a prospect - but that leave you with a very small pool. To get enough clients you still need to be active in getting the word out.

The trouble with buying ads in the traditional media (billboards, Goldenpages etc) is that it is difficult to know whether your efforts are working and what is generating the best value for your euro. Are you just throwing muck at a wall and hoping that some sticks? The uncertainty makes it hard to keep throwing money into your ad spend. When your budget tightens it is even harder to justify the cost when the benefits are fuzzy at best. (See this blog)

But marketing on the web is different. The costs are from a euro a day, and traffic data allows you to figure out what works very quickly and optimize your budget. Search engines are the primary driver of traffic on the web. Search engine optimization (SEO), as a result, has received an increasing amount of well-deserved attention.

For most Irish small businesses, SEO is new. Some have considered it, perhaps even done a bit of research on the topic, but haven’t yet invested in it. Others have invested in it in the past and found themselves disappointed with the results. A few have found real success like vazumo.com.

  • In this economy, why should a company consider a new marketing vehicle when they’re already looking to cut their budget?
  • What about the risks involved in such a new endeavour?
  • What if it doesn’t work?

These are all valid questions. Business owners spend most of their time running their businesses, finding time to read up the last in what makes search engines tick is unlikely. Understanding SEO enough to truly benefit can seem an impossible task.

So why bother with SEO, and why now?

Targeted Traffic
Traditional marketing/advertising options often have you publishing an advertisement in a place where you’re hoping it will be seen. That’s great, but:

  • Who sees your message?
  • Are they the right people?
  • Do they want what you’re offering?
  • Can they afford it?

With SEO, you can tell you a lot about your market and what kind of language they’re using. When you choose your keywords and optimize for them, you’re addressing an existing need or desire - and you know that at least a good portion of visitors referred from search engines through your target keywords are looking for exactly what you’re offering. In short, SEO helps to drive high quality traffic to your website and gets your message in front of the right people at the right time.

Precise Tracking
Web analytics allow you to track your users with a great deal of granularity. Web Analytics will tell you where visitors are coming from including

  • What search engines and keywords bring in viewers.
  • What pages viewers start on.
  • What keywords have the lowest and highest bounce rates.
  • What keywords drive the most pages per visit
  • Average time on site and a lot more.

With basic conversion tracking you can even tie keywords to conversion rates – an incredibly valuable way to identify the most valuable
keywords and focus on them.

Bottom line: with web analytics

you can identify the dead wood in your campaign and focus on better opportunities to optimize your marketing budget in real time.

Unparalleled ROI

By knowing what who finds you website, how they find it and what they do, gives you a fantastic insight into your clients behaviour. You can use this to target your online marketing but also your offline marketing. Whatever your clients are interested in online is the exact same as what they are interested in offline. So instead of guessing what will work you will know what words to use in your Goldenpages ad!

How should you approach SEO?

If you’re considering investing in SEO as a marketing channel there are two basic options:

1. Take the SEO work on in-house
2. Hire an agency or consultant and outsource SEO

The In-House Option

Employing an in-house SEO guru is often far too expensive for SMEs - in especially in a recession. But existing employees can be redeployed to play a more active role. You need to research the “Whats and the Hows”, planning work schedules and oversee execution. In that way (and with the right training) much of the work required can be handled in-house.

Trying to understand search engines algorithms is a mugs game, they are closely guarded trade secrets and they probably change constantly. If any alleged guru guarantees you the front page on Google, they’re being either dishonest or foolish, or both. In the end the websites they reward with high rankings are those that get the simple things right: they feature interesting content on a regular basis, they stick around with the same domain name and with the same topic for years and they build links over time and from other relevant and trusted websites.

The Outsourcing Option

Full disclosure: I am biased. I run a marketing service. But I hope you’ll hear me out anyway.

To use an SEO agency to either handle the full scope of work or to consult with makes sense in many situations. SEO agencies usually spend a great deal of time researching strategies and tactics and compiling resources - all of which can help you hit the ground running with your SEO campaign. But you need to find the right agency.

SEO is scalable - you don’t have to throw everything and the kitchen sink into it. Sometimes just taking a few small steps here and there over time adds up to success. Other times you need a one-time overhaul of your site, or maybe a long-term relationship with an expert who can help chart the course. It will depend on the goals you set for your website and how realistic they are given the limits of time and resources. But search engines are going to remain the primary driver of traffic and sales on the web for the forseeable future. SEO, for that reason, shouldn’t be an afterthought to your marketing plan, even in tough economic times - indeed, with such a high potential return on your investment, it should be a priority.

If you want to talk more about research, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

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The 4 simple steps to reviewing a business

January 14th, 2009

To develop any business you need to understand how it is currently working. Here you get an easy to follow 4 step process to building a snapshot report.

An unexamined life is not worth living (Socrates) So too, an unexamined business is not worth running! If you don’t know why your customers buy from you then you are going to find it difficult to get them to buy more from you! In these days of economic woe all Irish Businesses are suffering. If the purpose of running your business is to make sizeable profits then you probably need to refocus on why people buy and where the cash is really coming from.   That is why I offer a Market Research phase to my clients and I’m going to share it with your here.

Step 1: Ask your clients. Don’t assume that you know everything. Go and ask your clients the basic questions where did they hear about you, why do they buy from you, what annoys them etc. If they know you too well then get someone else to ask the questions. Make sure you ask current customers and lapsed ones, and from each of your segments.   You can learn a huge amount from those who have left you already. Often there is something small which they are annoyed about and you can win them back.

Step 2: Your staff. This will be tricky for an owner manager, but your staff are the front line - right?    There is no better source than asking your very own staff, who you pay to be loyal to you. Yet a lot of the time we don’t trust their instincts or we assume that we know more than they do.   They are the ones who look into the customers’ eyes at buying time. They know if customers are happy or ecstatic. They know if clients are loyal or just lazy. You need to know this stuff too. So ask them!

Step 3: Your competition. When did you last take a good hard look at your competitors? The chances are one of two of them have been innovating! Some of them will have done stupid things but others will have made clever choices. You may not choose to copy, but at least you need to know what they are using to compete for your customers!

Step 4: The Web. These days every business has an element of web competition. Some people buy on the web others research and others gossip. It does not matter whether you love or loathe the web. You need to look at Key Word Densities, Header tags and a handful if other key indicators. You need to understand how the new Gods (Google and Yahoo) rate you. If they have not found or understood your website correctly, they will not guide paying customers to it.

If you follow the steps outlined above you can make a good platform to build a business strategy from.  With a strategy that you believe in you can make plans that you will execute because you will believe in them. Plus as anybody who has had to deal with the banks lately knows you need a strategy to secure any funding.  

If you want to talk more about research, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

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Search Engine Marketing - The basics

January 3rd, 2009

How to get your website higher up the Google or Yahoo rankings is a relatively new science.  Naturally there are lots of fraudsters offering fantastic results for a very minor fee.  You can normally recognise these as they offer to submit your website to thousands of different search engines.  Since most of us in Ireland (90%) only use Google it should be obvious that these thousand of other search engines are pointless, (if indeed they exist).  Ranking high on Google means having your site appear on the first page when a prospect searches for a keyword that is relative to your business. This is called a “natural” search, as oppose to a “paid” search. 

Paid search is when you pay Google for one of those little text ad that appear at the side of search results. Paid search is the fastest way to get traffic to your website.  You can open a paid search account and have visitors to your site in just a few hours.  Once you get it working you can experiment with keywords and get a good understanding of how the system works.  But once you stop paying it stops working and there is no long term benefit.

Natural search on the other hand, is slower and does not stop when you stop paying.  All you have to do is get Google to believe that your website is interesting.  That sounds easy doesn’t it?  So how do you get a good Natural Search ranking?

The best way to convince Google that your website is interesting is to make it interesting to real users.  The more relevant and useful your site content is to users searching on your keywords, the more traffic you will generate to your site and the lower your bounce rate is.  You need to have interesting content that is regularly updated.  The more traffic you generate, the more popular your content can become, the higher your ranking on Google.  

Also Google evaluates your site is by counting the number of links to your site.  This is also common sense: once you have interesting content you expect that lots of other sites will link to you.   

If you want to drive traffic to your website, you should quickly get a Paid Search campaign working, only then look at Natural Search.  These are two planks of any attempt to get a good natural search ranking: Interesting content and lots of inbound links.  Both of these require effort and consistency over time. 

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How to manage Sales?

December 18th, 2008

A lot of people complain that business is either a feast or a famine.  They are either selling lots or nothing. Yes you can blame external factors, if you want: blame the seasons, the competition or the government.  When I’m invited to look at businesses with that problem I invariably find that there is no Sales Funnel in use.    

 

Let’s be clear here, a “sales funnel in use” is not the same as “having a sales funnel”.  By “Sales Funnel” I mean a system that tracks prospects from first contact onwards through the  sales cycle.  It does not have to cost millions or involve complex software.  What it must have is be easy to use and comprehend as well as be appropriate to that business.  There are lots of cowboys out there who will sell you over specified rubbish when a pen and ledger will do just as well. 

 

If you don’t have a sales funnel you can decide on the building blocks over the weekend.  First break down your sales flow into components.  First contact, free samples, site visit, rfp/rfq, Tender, negotiations, contract signing  these are all elements that may be involved.  Grab a pen and sketch out your idea sales flow.  Then add your most common deviations and you have probably covered 90%+ of your sales.  Now jot down all the prospects that you have closed over the past period, from memory try to run these guys through your new sales model.  Did they move smoothly?  Are some sections too long and need to be broken down?  Are some sections too short and could be merged?  Hint: Normally 5 or 6 phases in a sales flow is about right.  Add a few durations, how long does each phase last.

 

Now as yourself the really obvious question, how do you know when a prospect moves from one phase to the next?  It could be they say “could you customise one for me?”  or money could change hands you will know.  At this stage you can label the end point of each phase with a fairly clear statement that marks it successful conclusion. 

 

Now you take all your existing prospects and position them across these different sales phases.  Because this is your first time doing this lots of your prospects will be long timers who are stuck for whatever reason.  Don’t worry about those right now.  Just sit back and feel proud, you have a solid list of prospects that you can market too.  Plus having look at this for a few hours you should now know the prospects are getting stuck in the sales cycle.  (ask about your sales barrier demolition workshop)

 

Congratulations you have now developed a sales funnel (or model) and lots of consultants will charge you 6 figure sums for doing this work alone!!!!

 

Now that you have this list of prospects at different phases you can see where the peaks and troughs are.  One you can see them coming you are in a position to do something about them, and that is called Sales Management.   

 

If you need to figure out how to get prospects into your sales funnel or how to move them along, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

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What Irish Banking Crisis?

December 10th, 2008

I keep hearing that we have a banking crisis in Ireland. I’m just not too clear if I know what that means.

Right now there is no run on the banks as the state has provided a guarantee. AIB’s last bond issue was oversubscribed as they raised 1.5 Billion. What we see on the business pages and discuss over pints is a much smaller problem: The share price has collapsed as shareholders have lost confidence in the banks’ ability to generate acceptable returns in the next few years. Hence the shares have been dumped in vast quantities and the price is on the floor. Bad news for private investors and people approaching retirement age. Possibly good news for people who are seeking long term investments. A source of great war stories over pints. But this is not a systemic threat to the Irish economy.

So what is the “threat vector” that has the nation so disturbed? The threat is the lack of cash in circulation in the economy due to a lack of confidence. Banks are terrified of non performing loads, so they hoarding capital and being very slow to authorise loans to anything with an element of risk. It is not just the banks that are hording cash: As spending has stalled in Ireland the effective saving rate has soared. Consumers and businesses are holding onto cash at an unprecedented level. Calling this a banking crisis is to miss the point.

This situation has its own scary logic. People now boast about cancelling Christmas parties and no longer spends vast amounts on a Friday night in bars and restaurants. This causes the bars & restaurants to close and triggers another wave of belt tightening. There are now 2 restaurant leases available around the Triangle in Ranelagh alone! The landlord will not fill those premises quickly and will have to accept a reduced rent when they are taken.

This lack of spending is the problem which need to be solved right now. Ownership of the banks is a secondary issue. The only way to restore spending is to first restore confidence. People will not spend if they fear for their future. Restoring confidence will be a slow process as the effect of this shock work through the system. Right now we have a confidence crisis and we all will be much more cautious for a few years.

Obama’s infrastructure package in the States will help and we should bring forward large scale capital schemes like Metro North (and wave power?) to help kick some life into the economy. We should never again have an economy so relient on the property market. Most importantly now is the time to start thinking about the kind of economy we want in future. If not property then what?

Do we have the leadership skills to start that discussion?

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Great time for small businesses!

November 29th, 2008

The constant chit chat about economic disaster is overdone – now is a time to look for opportunities.

Relying on our Dublin based media to explain what this means gives a very extreme interpretation. We are all doomed! Time to bring back the emigrant ships and TB. Let’s face it you will never see a newspaper headline saying ”Government did a great job – everything calm”. It is in the media’s interest to make stories as dramatic as possible. Not so long ago we had Ford building cars in Cork, and Digital making hardware in Galway . The loss of those industries was a tragedy for the people who lost their jobs, but was not an existentialist threat to the Irish economy regardless of how it was portrayed at the time. The Ford site in Cork gave birth to the Marina Commercial Park. Shutting Digital triggered a whole series of indigenous small business were spawned and rather than being a tragedy, it is now widely acknowledged as a great boost for Galway.

Recessions are cyclical events that remove inefficient actors from the economic stage. There are many people involved in parts of the economy who can’t pay their way. They will go out of business, free up the capital they are tying up and in time, both people and capital will redeploy to other sectors. As Warren Buffet said “It is only when the tide goes out that you see who has been swimming naked”. The Irish Economy is in a period of retrenchment (-1.9% says the ESRI’s quarterly update) , so the demand for goods and services is shrinking. Added to the shrinkage is the relentless march of progress in the shape of increasing efficiency. In broad terms each year less people are required to produce a given amount of output. So if demand remained constant we would require less people employed year. Right now we have a reduction in employment due to efficiency growth coupled with a loss due to the decline in economic activity. This is regrettable for the individuals concerned but has the beneficial effect of holding down wages. (see what has happened the latest national pay deal)

Poor economic circumstances can be great times for small business. Large companies are inward focused and incapable of reacting quickly. All their energies are focused on what Sequoia calls “The Death Spiral”. Where poor economic conditions lead to a swingeing round of cost cutting that saps morale and triggers a further drop in performance, that leads to more badly implemented cost cuts and so on. The fallacy that you can starve a business in to heath constantly returns during downturns.

Small Businesses and especially good small businesses don’t have these problems. There is a much closer connection between the market and the production side. Internal communication lines are tighter. Decision making cycles are short. This means that Small Businesses can be flexible enough to pursue opportunities. Lots of opportunities will appear, as they always do but there are now additional drivers as people change their spending habits, big business outsource and put expansion plans on hold and competitors go bankrupt.

The Irish Economy is still worth about 200 Billion, farming is doing really well, energy cost dropping, inflation has been beaten, wages are stable and interest rates at an all time low! This is a great time for small companies to grow wisely. The about 200 billion euro will be spent in the Irish Economy in 2009, nearly 5 million people will continue to eat butter, wear socks, play games etc. If you are smart enough and brave enough there are loads of opportunities. Think what one successfully exploited opportunity would mean to your business?
For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

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To spend money on Marketing or not?

November 24th, 2008

There is no doubt that the business climate in Dublin is tough at the moment. A lot of people are telling me that they are cutting costs to the bone, delaying payments and generally trying to be a lean as possible. As a marketing guy you probably expect me to say “Increase spending on every type of marketing”

Well I hate waste as much as anybody so I won’t say that. I think you should look very carefully at your marketing budget and figure out where your new business comes from. Is there a match? I’m a great believer in the 80/20 rule.

Sometimes businesses spend money on marketing for historical reasons, well there is no room for that anymore. Lots of Advertising people talk about brand awareness but any Advertising that brings in 100s of queries that doesn’t result in a sale are worse than useless. Those queries just get in the way.

Each cent should bring a reward and the best way to measure that is by looking at sales. Compare your sales figures to your marketing campaigns and map the peaks AND the troughs. If your sales cycle is fairly long then the least you should measure is “Qualified Leads”.

Lots of businesses did very well in the boom years without any real marketing systems. The result is that many do not have a way of tracking what impact marketing campaigns have. But times have changed, good leads are harder to find and without good information it is impossible to make valid decisions about what works and what doesn’t.

The good news is you can implement a system for tracking leads quickly and easily. Once you have the system in place you see that you now have a list of unconverted prospects which can be a very useful side effect. You can develop a system in-house or you can out-source, it doesn’t really matter how you do it, just do it!

Once you have that system in place then you can spend each cent in a way that maximises its return to you.

So should you spend money on marketing? My answer: Spend money where you get the biggest result.

For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.

Best wishes
Mike Spratt
www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
Phone: +353 1 491 3328

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What “endings” happen when you become an entrepreneur?

November 20th, 2008

Last night was the Dublin City Enterprise Board’s Link event as part of Enterprise week. A topic for discussion was what do you lose when you start your own business, and what can you do to cope with that.

To kick off the topic we had an animated video based on the bestselling book “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Spencer Johnson and a very insightful talk by Miriam Ahern of Align Management Solutions.

The discussion at my table was all about giving up certainty, security & salary. There were many different ways in which it was phrased, but that was the bottom line. We had a Property Developer, a Coach, a Project Manager, a Taxi Driver, an IT Specialist, A Shoe Maker, an Italian Food Importer and me the Marketing Expert. Each in their own way articulating the same point that “once you start on your own, you are on your own”.

There were lots of examples given such as not having a social network around you, not having defined roles, no salary. Lots of examples of where people were getting something of value from a previous role in life that they gave up to become an entrepreneur.

Being practical types we of course looked for solutions. As some Business Owner mentioned an “ending” they immediately offered something as a defence mechanism. As if denying that weakness are characteristics of humanity. If I may generalise: Entrepreneurs focus on solutions and deny their own falibility! But I digress….

We did list solutions, these were a selection from memory:

  • Seek out friends or mentors who have taken this step before.
  • Set small goals for each day and each week.
  • Take action do not let yourself stagnate.

  • Smile.
  • Then the more thoughtful people took over, beside the external stuff perhaps we could also look inside? We should always look at what our own mental state of being is before setting any goals. On good mental days we should seek out very stretching goals. Conversely on bad mental days we might deserve a bit more minding rather than punishment!

    The discussion was open and free and what I’ve recorded here are the thoughts of 9 Entrepreneurs (or owner managers depending on your definition of Entrepreneur!!) If you found this interesting and would like to join in contact Miriam Ahern the LINK! network manager

    For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.
    Best wishes
    Mike Spratt
    www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
    Phone: +353 1 491 3328

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    This blog is about, YOU

    November 14th, 2008

    Marketing is about convincing the prospects that you have something they want. So it should be personal to them as possible. I.E. You should try to look at the situation from their perspective - agreed? So here is a little test you can try out.

    The next time you look at some marketing material, your own or something you have received try this. Count the number of times the words “I” and “You” plus their derivatives are used. So “I”, “we”, “our company”, “name of product” etc are all “I” words and “you”, “your”, etc are all “you” words.

    Then divide the number of “You” words by the number of “I” words and you get a “caring index”. Less than 1 means the author has just spoken mostly about themselves, their company or their product. Above 2 means they are looking at matters from the clients perspective. Simple and easy to do - right?

    You can do this with your own marketing material, your own public speeches or even listen to your staff on the phone. The higher value you get on the “caring index” means the better job you are doing at getting into the prospects shoes. Try it out and see what result you get, you will learn a lot from actually paying attention to what is happening.

    Next look at what you competitors are doing. Surf their WebPages, do some mystery shopping, scan the trade press. See who gets the best “caring index”. Now you have a target to beat and we all love competitions! As long as you can make your marketing material better than everybody else’s you will get the lion’s share of whatever business is out there.

    For help and assistance with this or for any of your marketing needs, please give me a call. I’m very happy to discuss how we could help you further.
    Best wishes
    Mike Spratt

    www.rapidbusinessgrowth.ie
    Phone: +353 1 491 3328

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