As a small business owner you are always looking for the most efficient way to market your business. The aim of minimum resource and maximum return on investment will lead you into unfamiliar and uncharted territory.

Internet marketing is one of those new areas that we have come to understand as being essential for the survival of a business. Internet marketing can be very daunting to a business owner unsure of the ins and outs of the web. If you spend any time listening to internet marketing advice a lot of it centres in getting online. The advice starts with create a website, get a blog, be involved in social media, create viral content and so the list continues.

The problem with all this advice is that it can suck up your time and may leave you neglecting other important tasks. Much of the expert’s advice makes sense and promises to lift business and generate great internet return on investment.

But when have you spent enough time online? When is it time to change hats and do something else?

I have attempted a very basic internet diary as a guideline. It is only a starting point but like everything, internet marketing needs a plan. This plan does not consider time spent in learning or getting the knowledge required to market online effectively.

Creating an internet diary is important and will help manage your time spent online doing internet related marketing. Along with a diary an action plan should be created for each individual element that you include in your diary. This element action plan will outline objective, knowledge acquisition, tools required and the tasks that you will be doing during the allotted time slot in your internet diary.

INTERNET DIARY

Daily Tasks

Weekly Tasks

Monthly Tasks

Six Monthly Tasks

• 2007 – 2008 The minimum amount earned before needing to register for GST has been raised to $75 000 from $50 000
• There seems to be a whole lot of new tax concessions for small Australian business which are earning less than $2 million
• A whole bunch of changes to superannuation

I heard a business owner share a similar experience to this the other day – he said that he had one girl on the front desk of his hotel. People would phone to book and she would analyse their situation and tell them what she thought would benefit them, often encouraging them to stay elsewhere (at a hotel closer to the event they were traveling for etc). She viewed the phone (the customers) as an intrusion on her day.

Out the back was another lady. She loved to talk on the phone, and organise work functions. Unfortunately she was officially in charge of keeping the books. The books were a mess and took a couple of days a month of the accountant’s time to sort out. Under the banner of multi skilling their staff, this business owner swapped the two ladies around and found that they worked much better.

Businesses run better when people with the right personality attributes are in the right jobs. Training is easy to acquire, you can teach someone how to use a spread sheet, but you cannot necessarily teach them to love being meticulous.

I had an interesting experience recently that caused me to think about the question of how suited we are to our jobs.

I had to go in for an unexpected medical visit and my specialist was away so I saw a different doctor. He had years of training and he was definitely professionally qualified to treat me.

I was very surprised when he walked and began to criticise me personally for the way I had been taking care of myself.

I was too shocked to say much back to him, but I spent much of the rest of the afternoon thinking about the incident.

The conclusion that I came to was that despite years of training and plenty of smarts, he was not actually suited to the job of treating people.

Why? Because a large part of successfully treating people is being able to have a good rapport with them.

I would also say that he misunderstood his basic responsibility, which was to be a resource for me. He felt that our difference of opinion on my treatment was a direct challenge to his authority, while I see it as a right to have an opinion.

This experience underscored for me that not everybody is suited to every job, and that although formal education and experience are important, so is personality.

Bringing this closer to home, what do we do if we suspect that we have staff who are square pegs in round holes, or what do we do if as business owners we feel that we do not have the personality attributes needed to make the business succeed?

Firstly let’s talk about some of the information on personality analysis that we can use to review our situations.

There are many different personality analysis systems out there, and while it is easy to go overboard in their use, they can be helpful, provided a few points are remembered.

• People can change over time. So although someone may look either suitable or unsuitable for a certain position now, that can change in the future.

Businesses that produce great products and don’t get them to the customer go broke. Businesses that produce second rate products but get them to the customer (and the customer wants them) can do very well indeed.

We all try a variety of marketing and advertising strategies, ranging from use of printed media, radio, tv, word of mouth, but I want to talk about everyone’s favourite – cold calling.

There are times when the most successful way to contact your prospective client is face to face. In person. It is great if you can get an introduction, and so you should be actively cultivating your social network and encouraging referrals (a great way to encourage referrals, by the way, is to give them and to ask for them).

But if you can’t get an introduction then it is going to have to be a cold call. Who likes to cold call? Not many of us at all. Sometimes we feel that if we send a brochure out first and phone second it helps. And sometimes it might. It is all about testing and trialling things out.

But if you are doomed to cold call, then here are some tips that we picked up from a friend in Melbourne who is in corporate sales. He has been for years, and I believe he is very good. At any rate, he keeps getting bigger and better jobs. At the moment his job consists of cold calling businesses and trying to sell them software packages. And not any kind of software that they have already had, he has to try and sell them on a concept on which they are also cold. He is approaching big head offices in Melbourne.

Here are his tips:

1. Do your research. What is the company about, what do they do? Do they have any major projects on the go at the moment? What are their values, needs and buzz words. This will help in talking to them.

2. Go to the top. Don’t talk to people in the IT department (or whatever department is relevant to what you are trying to sell them,) they ultimately do not have the decision making power.
Go to the boss. Find out who the owner or CEO is in your research, or by phoning up the company and asking. That is who you want to phone. If you have been talking to someone lower down the tree then get the details of their head honcho off them. Then phone the head honcho. But don’t mention that you were previously talking to someone lower down the tree, or they may say something like “Thanks for phoning, I’ll talk to (Melissa) and she’ll bring me up to speed and then I’ll get back to you.” This is salesman’s death.

3. Have a reason to phone. This helps you get past the watchdog at the switch board. They are hired and trained to keep you out. If you can phone up and say “I would like to speak to Mr Jones, it is in relation to project X’, then you have a better chance. It puts you on the inside and increases your status. The secretary is unlike to say “no” because you sound like the CEO knows you and you have a reason to call.
Having a reason also helps you structure your pitch for the great moment when you are finally on the phone with your target.

4. Make your reason relevant to them. They will only let you go further if they feel it is relevant and something they may need. This is where your home work helps.

5. Don’t be afraid of conflict. Once you have the interview to present your goods, don’t be afraid of conflict. You want them to raise the objections that they have (if they have any, I mean, great if they don’t). Those objections need to be brought out into the open and then you need to object to their objections. For example you might say “You have a website that is difficult to use. It simply isn’t going to get you any sales, and quite frankly, that’s not good enough.” Now this takes courage, and you also have to be able to connect with them, or you will just come across as obnoxious. It also requires that you really believe in your product. If you think that your product is excellent, it really is a great deal and they would be so much better off with it, it will be easier to pitch it to them than if you really feel that you are ripping them off.

So, try those tips when you next have to cold call, but don’t get discouraged if things aren’t all plain sailing – our friend says that he gets maybe 1 out of 30 that he calls. So you need to make sure that you have plans in place to ensure that the value of a new customer to your business is great enough to warrant spending the amount of time wooing them.

And if you really can’t bring yourself to cold call, well, having a great website is also a great way to get new customers! So speak to us.

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