Further, when you compete on your strengths and the value of your offering, you need not (necessarily) try to compete on price, because the value of your offering is perceived to be higher and more desirable to your customer than the difference in price.

Many times companies will do something freely or have a particular customer follow up approach that is unique, do something for the customer on their birthday, or have a financing policy that is unique. Quite often, companies do these things but don’t to tell the customer about them or why they do them, when it could be the outstanding difference between you and your competitor.

As an entrepreneur business owner or manager, it is imperative that you determine what is special about your product offering when compared to your visible competition. If you’ll take time to consider the unique things you do currently, you’ll undoubtedly find some unique niches. Hidden Marketing Assets marketing recognizes that uniqueness and tells the public about it. I know of a clothing store that had an unconditional return policy. We simply redeployed that unique service into an asset that could start generating customers.

An auto repair facility that they guaranteed all their work. The technicians knew it, and the owner knew it, but the customers never heard it. That asset is now an ongoing message that’s communicated to the prospects and creates new business! In addition it maintains loyal customers for the facility.

Hidden Marketing Assets marketing takes the current, unique assets your business has and turns them into communicated messages and increased revenue. They become marketing messages and marketing tools rather than closely held understandings by managers and key employees.

Once you identify your company’s unique selling proposition, make it the key message communicated in advertising and other communication. It is the message that becomes headlines for ads and radio messages as well as the slogan on your invoices and other documents. It is the message that’s communicated by employees, sales people, clerks and management. Finally, it is the message that’s communicated by your customers when they are telling their friends and associates about your business.

In the next post in this series, we’ll look at the importance of your current customer base in growing your business.

At hidden-marketing-assets.com, we offer a coaching program through which we guide you through these 7 marketing areas.  You can read about it on our home page at <a target=”_new” href=”http://hidden-marketing-assets.com/”>http://hidden-marketing-assets.com</a> or on the sales page for the coaching program at <a target=”_new” href=”http://coachingprogram.hidden-marketing-assets.com/”>http://coachingprogram.hidden-marketing-assets.com</a>.

First, in this article I give a brief description of eight areas where these marketing assets are found.

1)  Your business Unique Selling Proposition or Unique Value Proposition – Every business, to succeed in today’s economy and business climate, simply must have a well-defined USP.  The USP states what it is about your business that makes you the best choice for your visitor or prospect.  With a well-defined USP, you don’t particulary have to compete on price, unless, of course,  your USP IS that you have the best price.  This could be true the day you write the USP, but the next day a competitor can easily beat that price.  However, if your USP is that you deliver your product more quickly, or some other feature that your competitors are just not geared for, then you are offering a value that nobody else has.

2. Current and Past Customers and Clients:  Your customers, both present and past can be great contributors to increased sales and profits.  There are definite steps you can take to increase sales to existing customers and to benefit from their relationships through referrals and other methods.

3.  Staff and Owner Expertise: There is much more than meets the eye in the knowledge and backgrounds of you and your staff.

4.  Relationships:  Included are those lilke suppliers, vendors, customers, fellow business associates, other business owners, and competitors. Most people don’t think of these relationships as being marketing assets, but by networking with these contacts, a lot of benefit can be brought into your business.

5. Your Current and Former Marketing Strategies that Work: This is an asset usually under-utilized Whatever the business is doing now to get customers and business is a marketing strategy.  But are they profitable, or can they be made profitable and as effective as possible?

6. Alliances and Joint Ventures: Marketing alliances you create with other businesses can create a great benefit to your sales and profits growing.  These might be with customer businesses, non-competitive or, sometimes, competitive businesses, organizations and other groups.  These relationships can create a great deal of credibility for you and your alliance or joint venture partner.

7. Local and Internet Marketing: Today’s world is online.  Every business should have a solid and moving presence on the Internet, from a webpage that really markets the business’ capabilities to social networking and social bookmarking that help to bring new business into the business.

In the next post in this series, we’ll take a brief look at the importance of your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP.

At hidden-marketing-assets.com, we offer a coaching program through which we guide you through these 7 marketing areas.  You can read about it on our home page at http://hidden-marketing-assets.com or on the sales page for the coaching program at http://coachingprogram.hidden-marketing-assets.com .

Working with a business coach offers a world of opportunity.  Do you know what a business coach is?  If not, you should take the time to familiarize yourself.  Why?  It is a great service to business owners one that can translate into profits for you and your business.

A business coach is an individual who provides business owners support and encouragement.  This support and encouragement gives them that extra push they need to see a higher level of success.  The most common users of business coaches are new small to medium sized business owners.  These individuals usually have a passion and they want to profit from it.  For example, a stay-at-home mother may enjoy making handmade quilts for her children.  One day, it dawns on her that she can make custom order quilts to sell both locally and online for a profit.  She has a good idea and a good product, but does not know where to start.  This is where a business coach would provide assistance.

What areas of business are included in business coaching?  Anything and everything related to business and marketing.  If the above mentioned mom wants to open a local quilt shop, you can show her the importance of location.  A high-trafficked and easily seen storefront will help to attract more customers and sales.  If she has yet to pick a location, her coach can help her make the right choice.  As for an online shop, if she has yet to set that up, her coach can help her choose an affordable web hosting package, a good domain name, and encourage her to hire the services of a professional web designer.

Some clients seek the advice and expertise of a business coach right from the start, but others wait until their new business is a a turning point to growth, or shows signs of trouble.  In these instances, business coaches help their clients expand on marketing and sales programs.  A stay-at-home mom selling her handmade quilts online is nice, but handmade products are widely available online.  Just because she has a well-designed website, it does not mean that people will find it.  Business coaches help to create profitable online and local marketing, as well as highlight a few examples for their clients.

In keeping with the example of a stay-at-home mom who wants to profit from her talent, most of these individuals want to be self-employed.  They want to work for themselves and have no hired help.  This does lower costs and increase profits, but many new small business owners make costly mistakes.  One of those mistakes is taking on too much, too soon.  A good business coach can also stress the importance of time management and show proper techniques.  For example, the above mentioned quilt selling mom should have a waiting list and inform customers of a long wait, not stay up all night making quilts.

Many business coaching clients are new business owners or business owners who aren’t seeing profits.  How can these individuals pay for a business coach?  Honestly, some cannot, but many can.  As a business owner, look at it from the standpoint of a wise investment.  For a small to medium sized business that is barely staying afloat, a professional business coach may be its last hope.

In short, working with a business coach encompasses many things.  If you are running a small to medium sized business, you may profit greatly from hiring a business coach.

Read more about hiring a coach at our coaching page at Hidden-Marketing-Assets.com – Here

Customer Care and Fox Hills

On Thanksgiving, Lou (my wife) and I went with her Dad and step-mother to the lunch buffet at Fox Hills Golf Course, North of Plymouth, MI.

Fox Hills does a tremendous holiday buffet service that is open to the public and seats 300-400 people at one time, and serve about 1,600 meals on Thanksgiving.  At almost any time through the day, there are 100 diners selecting food from the several tables of buffet arrayed in the food area.  The customers are friendly, often recommending things to each other and generally just having a great time.

You wouldn’t know they were that busy as you relax and eat a wonderful meal.

That’s part of the point of this post.  The service at Fox Hills is wonderful, efficient and almost unnoticed (that’s a good thing).  Each table has two young servers whose job is to make sure you have what you need, feel welcome and comfortable,  always have a beverage and that you never have an empty plate on your table when you come back from selecting your next course.  They do an amazing job of keeping up with all the people moving about.

Today, there was a shining example of the priority the folks at Fox Hills place on Customer Care and Hospitality to their guests.

We’ve been to Fox Hills before, and they used to have a little dessert item that we call “chocolate mousse meeses.” It’s a delicious little bite of chocolate covered, chocolate mousse in the shape of a mouse. (That part isn’t important, but it’s fun to say mousse meeses.)  Today, and the last couple of times we were there, the chef didn’t include the mousse meeses on the menu.

So, Lou asked a young woman, who was probably a dining room manager, if she knew what happened to this favorite dessert.  The young woman, with a full dining room and the hostesses just seating a table of 20 said she didn’t know, but the chef would and that she’d find out.

Leaving the entire dining room behind, she walked directly to the kitchen and came back within about a minute or two with the report from the chef.  ( He hadn’t made any mousse meeses this time, but perhaps would add them back to the menu. )

That’s an example of Amazing attention to little things that they do at Fox Hills to make their guests and customers feel welcome and well served.

This made me wonder, what could any of us do in our own business environments to provide that super level of service and customer care to our visitors and customers?

I think I can make a case for the level of service demonstrated by the folks at Fox Hills.  What do YOU do in your business that is like this example?

We will help you with marketing your business through our coaching program at http://hidden-marketing-assets.com/coachingprogram/

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Most people aren’t interested in your entire business plan.  They are interested in what is different about you that would make them interested in your story.  The elevator speech is a motivating factor, the hook that gets your audience into the room. It’s the catchy jingle that gets people to pay attention to the ad. It’s the best parts of the business plan, without the boring details. It is the place for the excitement, not the place to include all the technology, buzzwords and explanations.

Your elevator speech should definitely include a statement of your Unique Selling Proposition, a statement of what makes you uniquely the right business to provide what you offer.  It should be able to be condensed into a single two or three paragraph presentation, short enough to be memorized, or read easily within a few minutes.  That’s how it got its name, it’s a speech that’s short enough to be presented during the course of a fairly short elevator ride. The elevator speech condenses your business concept into something that can be presented in about a minute or so – essentially, the parts that matter, the very essence of the business.

The elevator speech skips the hard-core details, and gets straight to the heart of what it is about the business that really gets you excited. That’s what this speech is about. You don’t need the proof of concept here, that comes in the full-length presentation. The elevator speech is the commercial that gets people interested. It should be inspirational and creative, hitting the high points of your business concept, and should accomplish the following:
Hit the high points of what it is you do
Summarize the problem/solution aspect of your concept
Create excitement on the part of the reader/listener
Describe the profit potential without having to bring out charts and graphs
Tell why you/your company are well positioned to accomplish your goal
End with a call to action, which is the listener asking for more information.

The first couple of sentences are the most critical, and should present your basic concept, as well as your business’s unique qualifications. If you can’t tell what it is you do in two sentences or less, then you need to simplify your concept. There will be plenty of time to get into all the details later, once you’ve captured your audience’s interest.

Make it interesting, with enough information to cause your listener to ask a question about it, or to ask you for your business card, so they can follow up with you.

The following might be a good elevator speech for hidden-marketing-assets.com :

“The economy and business climate are making small business struggle for new business and profits.  At Hidden-Marketing-Assets, we utilize a proven, 20+ year old system to  help the owners of our small business clients to identify and exploit marketing ‘assets’ they already own and can immediately put to work to increase profits and sales without increasing sales and marketing expense.  The system is so effective we are able to guarantee results.”

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One simple way is to start planting seeds! If you can start your garden growing in the spring, why not start your business growing in the same way, too?

You can start by telling everyone what you do, including those people in your life you see every day. Talk to your hairdresser, dentist, financial advisor, or babysitter. You just never know whom they might know who may want or need your products or services. Leave business cards with those people, so they can hand them out to others who may be interested in contacting you. That old saying that includes the line “the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker” may just ring true after all.

Plant seeds everywhere you go. Typical ways to market your business are fine, but the best way is by simply using word-of-mouth. “Who do you know…” can be a very powerful statement when you are talking to others about what you do or what you sell. Let your presence be known. Be creative! I have a Team 100 list of the top professionals I know. When someone either in my professional circle or my personal circle is looking for a particular service, I’m able to refer them to someone I know and trust. All of the professionals on my list are able to refer me to those they know as well. It’s a win/win situation. My name is on their list, their name is on mine, so the seed has been planted, and keeps growing.

These are just a couple of great ideas to help you get started in growing your business (if you want more business that is!). Taking some small action every day is better than doing nothing at all. Following a simple action plan consistently will most likely lead to several great opportunities down the road. Who knows? If you put in the effort, you just may find new business knocking on your door instead of the other way around.

Spring into action…and watch your business grow by leaps and bounds!

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I have been blessed to have many mentors over my career. One of them was the owner of a small welding shop where I worked shortly after graduating from high school. He taught me a lot but what I remember best was what he taught me about quality and how it applies to our real boss, the customer.

This little machine and welding shop was typical of what you would find in most small farming communities. Using just a few basic machines a small staff of incredibly skilled workers would perform repairs and restorations on everything from manure spreaders to rusty Pepsi trucks. One day a local farmer brought a badly damaged fuel tank from his tractor to be repaired and Lloyd decided this would be a good opportunity for me to use all I had been learning to do a complete job from the estimate to writing the invoice.

About halfway through the repair it became obvious to me that I had grossly underestimated the amount of time and material required to do a proper job so I took my concern to Lloyd. I knew he would not be happy losing money on this job so I suggested cutting some corners so I could stay close to my estimate. I thought I might be able to avoid the embarrassment of having to tell my customer his tank repair was going to cost him nearly double what I had quoted him. Lloyd saw it as a ‘teachable moment’ and what he said made such in impression on me that it has been the basis for my view on quality for nearly 50 years.

For those of you who have never sat in the seat of a Farmall model H tractor like my customer had I need to explain that there is no more visible part on the vehicle than the fuel tank. It is positioned right in front of the driver just forward of the steering wheel. Reliable fuel gages were rare back then so the operator would remove the cap often to get an accurate measure of the fuel level. Even if the fuel tank wasn’t placed in your line of sight you would still have to interact with it on a regular basis to avoid running out of fuel in some remote corner of the farm field. Now that you have a mental picture, here is what Lloyd said to me when I wanted to cut corners to stay within my estimate.

“You have to look at it this way,” he said. “If you do a proper job the customer is only going to be mad at you one time. If you cut corners, it might be functional but we both know it won’t look nice. In that case, he will be mad at you every time he crawls onto the seat of that tractor.” The quote that comes to mind is: “The bitter taste of poor quality remains much longer than the sweet taste of a low price.”

I don’t know of any business that has an unlimited supply of customers so it’s vitally important that they feel they received the value or quality they paid for. There is hardly a better way to encourage your customer to take their business somewhere else. Research shows the average satisfied customer might tell three people but if they are unhappy they tell anyone who will listen. Talk about having your problems multiply, poor quality can cost you customers you haven’t even met.

My name is Robert Schoonover and I am a successful business entrepreneur. I love to sharing my ideas and knowledge gained from owning and operating Schoonover Industries, Inc., at http://www.Schoonoveronline.com

You can read more of my ideas and posts at my blog, robertschoonover.com