A Branding Broadside

We work damned hard
to help our clients succeed.

Night after night and day after day we rack our brains for new ways to get them more clients. Not to mention:

• Save them money on everything from equipment and supplies to their quarterly tax bill.
• Defend them from all manner of legal predators - frivolous suits and legitimate legal gotchas they would never have known about if you weren't right at their side, guiding their major transactions.
• Make them look awesome in print, online and on video. Not to mention in the traditional broadcast media.
• Design amazing additions and remodels for their offices, facilities and sometimes their homes.

Sometimes we put our own good credit on the line for them.

And I know you've got payroll to make.

And it's true that the majority of our clients pay us the agreed amount in the time we ask.

For you guys, that's 30 days.

Question 1.

Isn't 30 days a rather long time to wait after you've done so much work?

And that's after the invoice is approved, amirite? (I don't do it like that anymore - I'll get to that in a minute.)

Question 2.

What happens when 30 days becomes 60 days, 90 days, 120 days - or a whole lotta never?

I remember trying to get paid when one of my clients got bought by a giant multinational. By the time 6 months had passed, I think I had practically decided I didn't need the money.

And I hate calling people to ask where my check is. I've gotten better at it, but I'd rather just control the whole situation from the beginning.

I guess I should explain.

From the time I was 8, my parents were in the high-end custom-kitchen business. My father is still a manufacturer's rep for a line of cabinets for apartments and condo complexes, and we do handle a line of high-end custom cabinets (mostly for a select audience of my book-club friends and a few relatives at this point.)

My mother, who died in 2009, was one of the best kitchen designers in the USA in the 1970s - 90s, and we had the wooden award plaques to prove it.

But it took them all of the 70s and into the 80s to learn how to get paid.

Before Excel, you had to be a whiz at record-keeping to manage even simple remodeling projects profitably. And they weren't. (I'm not either.) So when they used the invoice system, customers who wanted to avoid paying could always find some reason to dispute the bill - or just start the delay cycle.

Lots of customers found it very easy to avoid paying.

My parents went broke.

Twice.

And then they learned.

"Lady, that tile will come up a lot easier than it went down."

Neither of my parents has ever called anyone "Lady" in their lives, unless it was a dog's name.

Even our construction foreman probably used the customer's name in real life.

But at that moment, we all knew everyone had learned the new rules for good: Nobody leaves anything at a jobsite without payment.

I learned the lesson, too.

At the time, I figured I should adapt the lesson to fit our business.

I still used invoices. But I didn't mail them.

Instead, I handed them to my client on approval of a milestone in the project we were working on.

And forget 30 days.

I made arrangements to pick up a check that same week:

"Mind if I pick up a check on Thursday?"

To this day, I've found there are three possible answers to that question: two right and one wrong.

But even the wrong answer tells you everything you need to know about that client (Run!) so you can make an informed decision. (Run!)

Just so we're clear, here are the right answers.

1. "Sure! It'll be at the front desk. (Or in Louella's office. Or whatever.)"
2. "Actually that's a little inconvenient. Our payroll manager's been out sick, and . . . (sad story) How about next Monday?"

Here's the wrong answer.

1. "Why can't we mail it to you? Don't you trust us? We have a schedule to stick to, and anyway - this bill is for too much money (client works self into a snit, gets madder as the speech goes on.)"
2. The two red flags here are the getting mad and the allusion to trust. Anytime someone brings up trust issues, that's a sign they can't be trusted. And it's your signal to leave now and realize that client never had any plans to pay you for any of the work in the first place.
3. As I said, this is how I did business for years. And it worked well, until I ran into My Best Disorganized Client, or BDC for short.

Next: The problem with BDC, and how I work now.

What will be the single biggest factor driving your profitability in 2011?

In some industries it will be the availability of raw materials or labor. In others,the political situation in certain parts of the world.

But for the rest of us, the primary driver of financial performance will not be anything connected to our costs or our ability to deliver whatever it is we sell.

It will be our ability to sell, period. And to command whatever pricing we've set as fair value in the marketplace.

That means finding an audience of prospects who don't just need what we have to offer - but who want it.

Now. 

And they don't really care what they pay for it. As long as:

• They get it in time; 
• Their experience of the product or service matches their expectations;
• And they get a good dose of the amazing benefits they thought would materialize as a result of being involved with the product or the organization. (Or they understand what they need to do differently to get those benefits.)

Those people exist in every industry, including yours. 

How many of them would it take to transform your business next year?

One's kind of a quick hit. Except that it took 30 years to come up with.

The other, we'll be discussing more over the next several posts.

The quick thought.

We market to make sales. We brand to maintain margins.

The longer thought.

If you took marketing courses in school - and I never did - you learned about the four Ps that supposedly fall under its umbrella:

• Product.
• Price.
• Promotion.
• Place (meaning distribution).

Only, I think a lot of contemporary businesses would take issue with that set. The definition hardly leaves room for engineering and operations. Not to mention finance.

But I would suggest that the part of product development that has to do with packaging and bundling specific items and services is not only a function of marketing but also has a big effect on a company's brand.

Which lands it right in the purview of the branding consultant.

More and more, rearranging the product lineup and packaging it is a big part of what this branding firm does to help our clients establish premium positioning in their markets.

As we've all seen in the international marketplace, sometimes those product bundles wind up creating not just new positioning but reinventing entirely new product categories.

Take a look at Apple in that regard, for instance.

But even stopping short of the full-on category reinvention, pulling together more valuable product and service bundles can help any business make real money. It can:

• Capture new sources of revenue.
• Bring in that new revenue at higher margins.
• Widen margins with new, high-value offerings in current markets.
• Maintain margins on current revenue sources - even when the competition is trying to start a price war.

Of course, delivering on the promises implied in those high-value bundles is critical - just like delivering on the promises the existing brand already makes.

More on that in a few days . . .

Cindy writes:

I had a customer first thing this morning because of the email.  They about 5 or 6 more.

Email does work.

That was a week ago, based on a campaign we sent on a Thursday around 8 pm. All those customers came in the very next day!

Find her at sewitseamsllc.com.