Blog | Matthew Ferrara & Company

Innovation Isn’t Just for Recessions

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Thursday, May 10, 2012 with 0 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, Opinion, rssfeed, Strategic Thinking

A bounce in the housing market is great news, but don’t put innovation plans on hold just because it’s getting busy again!

Ask yourself: What’s the purpose of a recession? Recessions are market feedback. They have a meaning – usually to tell us that something we assumed before has changed. Profits, expansion, job growth – any changes in trends – are indicators of the correctness of our assumptions and applicability of our strategy to create a market. Even after you account for artificial distortions (bad monetary policy, tax credits or stimulus) every market will tell us what it needs.

It’s up to us to respond regularly, by innovating. Not just when things are bad.

Many lessons of the current recession are clear. Legacy systems frustrate customers. Technology has empowered them to call out bad service and praise great products. Per-person-productivity matters more than sheer size. Management can make or break a company. Vision is as important as price.

And perhaps most of all: Don’t stop innovating.

Many companies were innovating regularly before the recession; but some were so busy being busy that they told themselves they could innovate later. Bad choice. Worse, while the recession gave everybody plenty of time, it left them with less resources to innovate. Hanging on is not a strategy. But overall, many individuals and companies did the right thing: they re-though, re-tooled and re-skilled their companies to create a better market in the future. And some of that future is occurring now. Banks are in a better position to clear underwater inventory more efficiently. Brokers are in a better position to use technology to engage (if not delight) consumers. Consumers, at the center of the market, have done their part (with credit, expectations and information) to be prepared to engage in a new market.

So, here comes the bounce.

Will it last? Maybe. But what really matters is that the market makers – that’s you – don’t stop innovating just because you’re becoming busy again. If you spent the recession preparing for a better market, you did the recession homework. But your continuing education requires you to keep pushing forward. Don’t stop innovating, because the bouncing market is the result of your innovations, as much as anything. To take a break – some call it taking advantage of the now – is to repeat the mistakes of the past.

Continue to set aside time, money and effort to keep innovating. Don’t let busy-ness interfere with your long term business. Ensure that improving your lead generation, customer qualification, pricing and presentation techniques don’t take a back seat to a flurry of calls or appointments. You can do them both. Resist choosing satisfaction today for success tomorrow. That’s what 350,000 agents did during the boom. Look how that turned out for them, and their clients.

Try this: Schedule an appointment with your business every week. An hour in which you focus on improving the process, your knowledge, a tool or do some customer research. If you need help keeping the appointment with yourself, schedule it with a colleague, to keep each on track. Make it a morning session – when you’re fresh, clear, and energized. If you’re serious about your career, an hour a week is an under-commitment, but at least start somewhere.

Whatever you do, don’t stop innovating just because it looks like things are getting better. If you stop, the market will stop, too.

Join the Conversation!

Why the Economist is Wrong about REALTORS

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Saturday, May 5, 2012 with 12 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, Opinion, rssfeed

The Economist magazine thinks American consumers are cartel-ridden suckers when it comes to housing. Really?

In a recent article called American Property: The great rip-off we get once again a fine example of sensationalism passing itself off as journalism. Or worse, as journalism about economics. We aren’t too surprised. It’s always been easy to pick on real estate agents. So, when times are tough and nobody’s paying your advertisers, pick a scapegoat and start kicking.

Read the article for yourself, but it boils down to three claims: First, American real estate agents charge double what British ones do, so there must be something nefarious at work. Second, real estate agents are crooks: why else use a picture and reference to Glengarry Glen Ross? Third, economists somewhere are baffled as to how the industry still gets away with it, especially after years of the all-powerful internet cutting out middlemen. Thus, there must be a rip-off happening somewhere.

The argument turns on a single – and massively – mistaken claim: That real estate agents are simple middlemen.

“Economists are baffled. The internet has squelched inefficient middlemen in other industries, from insurance brokers to travel agents. Why not American realtors?” After all, the quoted economist claims American brokers cause “social waste” of about $8 billion dollars in “overcharging and inefficiency.”

Yet somehow, nobody has noticed all this evil-doing, especially American regulators, who love to charge companies with all sorts of wrongdoing. (Remember the famous antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft for making its internet browser free?) Regulators have somehow missed this perennial boondoggle of defenseless homeowners. It’s possible, they argue, that the “industry has captured its regulators.” That would mean fifty state regulators, industry watchdogs, the U.S. Department of Justice and perhaps the most lawyers per-capita on the planet are all in on the deal. Makes sense to us.

Oh, there are theories, says the Economist, in a kind of Monty Python wink-wink nod-nod sort of way. American consumers might just be suckers (how did we knew PT Barnum would somehow be referenced?). Possibly the industry is hugely inefficient and magically resistant to power of the internet. The first part is often true, but for all industries. But the idea that real estate is impervious to innovation dismisses a record of twenty years of technology, sales and marketing innovations.

From an economics standpoint, the article fails to mention how quickly and efficiently the U.S. industry purges inefficient agents and brokers. From our experience working with brokers since 1991, nearly 60% of new agents don’t last a year in the business. Nearly 90% don’t make it past five years. Seems like a fairly good track record for getting rid of waste and incompetence quickly.

So, the article settles upon the cartel theory, a perennial favorite catch-all justification. The massive waste and high costs occur because American brokers are in collusion with each other. Interdependent, is the word they use, but you can read between the lines. Since it’s common for all parties to be represented by a broker, the brokers have designed a system to pay each other off with fees from both sides of the deal. In fact, they won’t work with each other unless there’s a fee to be had, a system of discrimination which the Economist claims exists but is hard to prove. How convenient.

Ironically, the article makes note that most brokers get business from their personal sphere of influence. So, reputation is a critical component to the business. Just how long does the Economist think a broker’s reputation would last if she refused to show clients certain homes (which they saw on the internet beforehand, of course) because the other broker wasn’t offering them a fee? Clearly, the Economist hasn’t really talked to any buyers’ brokers here in the States.

Likewise, the Economist overlooks the essentials of the free market system. Nobody is required to use a broker. Consumers can try to sell on their own; about 10% do each year. Most choose to work with a broker. In any case, all payments are entirely voluntarily. Is the Economist arguing that Americans choose to waste their own money?

It might surprise the Economist to learn that American brokers don’t just get a fee for doing nothing.

Then again, the Economist doesn’t bother to examine what brokers actually do – on either side of the pond. We’re simply supposed to take their word that it’s equal, and not worth more than 2 or 3% of a property’s value. Without an honest comparison of the kinds, degree and level of services that brokers in different countries provide, the claim of overcharging rings hollow. American consumers demand very high levels of service, especially marketing, including professional photography, video, internet marketing and print media. All of these drive up costs, at the consumer’s own choosing, perhaps higher than the expectations or demands of consumers in other countries. The Economist would have done a greater service had they examined the cost-of-production factors that go into fees, such as training, marketing, technology, management, data systems and trade associations. It’s silly to argue that Mercedes Benz owners in London were “duped” into paying more, or there’s some sort of auto-cartel at work, because Indian consumers can buy an inexpensive Tata, even though both are “cars.”

There’s even the possibility that British consumers are getting less service because their brokers don’t (for whatever reason, perhaps regulatory) charge higher fees. Maybe the cost to be a broker in Britain is less than the cost to be one in America. Doesn’t the Economist regularly remind us how expensive American health care is compared to theirs? There’s often a non-nefarious economic reason behind the fees that entrepreneurs charge to make a living in any country.

It’s also simply more expensive because – gasp! – there are more brokers in America and therefore more competition for consumers!

But then, you really wouldn’t have a news story, would you, if it were all costs and margins?

We fully admit that we’re only armchair economists. But we believe that American consumers – the people who put those travel agents, book sellers and insurance brokers out of business, by the way – are quite able to Google-up a discount if they really want one. In fact, buyers and sellers negotiate their commission all the time.

Don’t get us wrong: There are plenty of places where the U.S. industry could be more efficient and create cost savings for consumers. Plenty of brokers are focused on doing just that. The housing market is huge, diversified and very cost sensitive. And it’s filled with plenty of hardworking, dedicated and value-oriented agents who would take serious offense at being compared to Glen Ross.

Often stone throwers fail to notice their own windows.The Economist might want to ask why it hasn’t lowered the fee for their magazine, despite the internet challenging news middleman. Last time we looked, a copy of the Economist was about $7. For some reason we still paid for it. Maybe that argues for Americans being suckers after all. Or maybe there are times when consumers are willing to pay a little more if they seek something more than discounted value… a claim we might have to re-examine ourselves, if the Economist keeps churning out articles like this one.

Join the Conversation!

Four Ways Salespeople Can Win on Price

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Tuesday, May 1, 2012 with 2 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, rssfeed, Sales

Everybody loves a deal. But you’re most likely to compete – and win – on price if you focus on these four factors.

Why do some people consistently get “full price” while others cut their commission frequently? Do some customers drive a harder bargain than others? Is the customer always right? No, not really, because when it comes to sales, most of us get paid exactly what we believe we’re worth.

And that, my friends, is the key to protecting your commission!

In fact, the best salespeople discuss price right away. Pricing, after all, is the best way to communicate your value and worth to a client. Avoiding price discussions only tells customers you’re not personally certain you’re worth it. I’ve always discussed price – on the first call, in the first email, at the first meeting – because my price informs clients about what kinds of work I want to do, and sets the grounds for dialogue.

Your price can do the same for you.

How can your price help you? In our experience, these four tips for a pricing strategy will help you reach your goals consistently. Even if you decide to “change” your price for a certain client at a certain time, you’ll do so with full intentionality – and for the right reasons. Plus, if you think about them, these ideas apply beyond your “fee at work” to the price of your participation in any social interaction. As you will see, price is merely another way to express to others what you believe you’re worth.

Clarify your Value Proposition. Salespeople who win on price clearly understand their value proposition. They keep customers from focusing on what they do and instead focus them on what they help customers achieve. If you focus too much on the steps, tools, technologies of how you work, you will dissect your value proposition right in front of the consumer! Suddenly, you’re nothing more than things and activities. Yet the sum is always greater than the parts. Keep focused focused on the outcomes you have achieved for past clients. That’s really the only valuable message in your presentation.
Easily Explained Pricing Strategy. Why do you charge what you charge? Salespeople who can explain their pricing structure in simple terms will appear more confident and deserving to customers. Remember that the central factor in price is time. You can only create so many outcomes for customers in a given year. Whether you sell homes, defending lawsuits or deliver seminars, time is at the center of your pricing strategy. Time plus outcomes is what you must price. How many outcomes can you create in a given year, and how much does each need to contribute to your budget? It’s that simple. Even margins are based on time. As time runs out, margins must be protected, since you’ll create the same outcomes, with less time to do it.
Ideal Deal Profile. Successful salespeople work from an “ideal profile” of a good deal. They don’t jump at any deal, or worse, ignore prospects without qualifying them against an ideal. They never believe they can do a few bad deals, but make it up in volume (see #2 for why this fails). Ideal deals create a mutual win for salesperson and customer. With an ideal profile, you can pursue the right work, and avoid the dangerous deals. This helps you pick deals that are worthy of your price.
Intentionality. As we’ve mentioned before, great salespeople create income in order to reach their personal goals. They work for a reward’s sake, not money. Every sale is another brick in the cathedral of their career. Every deal is engaged purposefully, as another step towards achieving a personal, professional or social goals. With that in mind, securing the right price becomes a necessary part of work. Price becomes as important as technique, technology or volume. Reducing a commission, if done, only occurs when absolutely necessary to move closer to a goal, and even then, only if a profit can still be made (see #3).

As you can see, there’s much more to pricing than simply picking a number and defending it against customer skepticism. Price is a package, containing your value, strategy, ideals and intentions. Pricing your services, and securing it consistently, is critical to achieving why you work, not just how you do it. So review and clarify your four factors, and get back to achieving your goals by winning on price every day.

Join the Conversation!

[VIDEO] Blog Post Summaries for April 2012

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Thursday, April 26, 2012 with 0 Comments
Categories: Featured, rssfeed

Need to catch up on our latest blog posts? This quick video summary gives you the highlights from our April 2012 entries. Enjoy!

Join the Conversation!

Too Much Stuff Interferes with Success

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on with 2 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, Sales, Strategic Thinking

Many businesses think their value proposition is to offer more stuff than the other guys. Often, this confuses customers, overwhelms employees and distracts salespeople. Does more stuff interfere with success?

Is your value proposition “more stuff”? Is that why people work at your company or customers choose you? If so, you are setting yourself up for big problems. Because someone else will always have more stuff.

More stuff is a weak value proposition. Only a few companies have ever pulled it off.

More stuff usually doesn’t mean more competition, or better results. It doesn’t automatically create more customers or market share or profits. A few exceptions – mega-retail like Wal-Mart, for example – can work. But that leaves you selling volume on tiny margins. Is that your plan?

More stuff might even attract employees or salespeople, for a while. But it won’t necessarily keep them, in the long term.

Especially in complex service industries and luxury segments, more isn’t always better. Do you hire a doctor because he has more nurses, scalpels or gauze pads? A lawyer because he has more law books? A mechanic who has more wrenches? No, you hire people who can consistently create a valuable outcome you desire. It’s also who you decide to go work for.

Yet there remain companies who equate their value proposition with their basket of stuff. Certainly, some stuff is necessary – marketing, sales, customer service and organizational tools are necessary. But can you have too much stuff?

Absolutely. In fact, it happens all the time. Then, excessive features, too many options, multiple websites, etc., start confusing customers (my Acura TL dashboard is a perfect example). Employees become overwhelmed when there are too many systems or steps to complete their work (go to any Starbucks to see this principle create long lines). And salespeople often end up spinning in circles, caught in a vortex of stuff that impedes success rather than empowers it.

Look at the relationship of stuff to success. Years ago, Sony sold more stereo systems because they had more buttons than the competition. But those days are gone. Learning from an era where few people could even set the time on their VCRs, today’s winning technologies feature fewer buttons. Apple’s iPad is the gold standard. It’s nearly buttonless interface enables it to ship without a manual. Yet even novices can quickly get it to create their desired outcomes.

Thus Apple soars while Sony fights to survive.

Too much stuff impedes success. That’s how you end up with real estate agents whose listing presentations span 50+ Powerpoint slides covered in tiny text. When in doubt, overwhelm the customer with so much stuff, they will list with you just to get you to leave their house….

Brokers repeat the mistake. They equate retention with the quantity of bric-a-brac they shower upon their agents. Their value proposition has become we have the same or more stuff than the other brokers. Rather than, we create better outcomes for the agents who work here. In fact, the constant production of stuff eventually interferes with the production of sales, as agents become overwhelmed by, rather than focused on using key tools repeatedly well.

Marketing departments make new stuff weekly. Technology people churn stuff faster than a trending hashtag. Trainers then cry for stuff to teach the stuff. As for customers, they eventually don’t know which stuff is important and which is just fluff stuff, so they can’t choose the right-stuff-ed agent to represent them.

Oh, the stuff: Nightmares are made of.

Ironically, the most successful people often use the least amount of stuff. Certainly, they use technology, systems, tools and training. But they don’t use all of it, all the time. Their success comes from knowing when to adopt and when to implement. They understand – intuitively, but often explicitly – that constantly adding new things doesn’t add-up to more results. It’s not resistance; it’s actually success clarity. They don’t want more stuff; just the right stuff.

High performing people rarely are retained by stuff, either. Some aren’t even impressed by it, because they know that the quest for new and more often distracts valuable management, technical and marketing resources from implementing existing things that were released last month, or the month before.

The stuff of success isn’t stuff. It’s implementation. Doing a few things well, every day. Yes, we have to adopt and adapt: Some new stuff must be incorporated over time. But it should be selective, a few things annually, maybe even just one. And it should be something, above all, that is fully supported to maximum implementation.

Not just another hold-over until next quarter’s new stuff.

Possibly the greatest irony occurs when a customer or salesperson leaves one company for another who offers more stuff, only to find their production fall because more stuff doesn’t necessarily mean more success. In our experience it happens all the time.

Almost as frequently, in fact, as new stuff is released.

Try this test: Go back to your customers, your employees, your salespeople and ask: How would you feel if we didn’t introduce more stuff this year, but instead focused on applying what we already have, until we can implement it 100% of the time with 100% excellence?

When you hear them all give a sigh of relief, you’ll understand.

Now isn’t that some stuff to think about….

Join the Conversation!

Talk to Teens about College – and Housing – Before it’s Too Late

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Thursday, April 19, 2012 with 0 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, Next Generation, rssfeed, Strategic Thinking, The Market

If you thought prospecting move-up buyers was hard, then you’ll be amazed at why you should start prospecting your future first-time buyers before they’re even out of high school.

In 1973, in-state public school college tuition was about $2000 a year; private college about $9,900. In 1987, public college reached $2700 a year, private about $13,000. By 1997, public college tuitions were rising so fast, that 1 in 5 college graduates told the National Loan Survey that their graduation-debts would cause them to delay having children, getting married and possibly other major life steps. In 2012, the cost to attend Tufts University will be over $51,000 per year, according to the College Board’s Net Price Calculator.

You get the point.

Becoming a college graduate these days will easily run up fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in debt for kids before they even hit the workforce. College aid and government grants won’t offset it all; much will be paid for by good old fashioned personal debt . Don’t expect mommy and daddy to tap into the Bank of Housing Equity any more, either: the housing ATM had been raided already and is permanently closed.

That’s why it’s important to realize so many people in their twenties won’t be buying a home any time soon. Possibly, up to two decades.

According to the Wall Street Journal, housing is off the table for recent college grads, along with marriage and kids:

Between the ages of 18 and 22, Jodi Romine took out $74,000 in student loans to help finance her business-management degree at Kent State University in Ohio. What seemed like a good investment will delay her career, her marriage and decision to have children….. A recent survey by the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys says members are seeing a big increase in people whose student loans are forcing them to delay major purchases or starting families.

It’s not news, really. In fact, we’ve been reporting on it for quite some time. But what can you do about it, especially if you sell an alternate use of that $50,000 of equity and debt?

Such as buying a house.

That’s why your next target prospecting audience needs to include teenagers. And not just their parents. Real estate agents (and luxury goods sellers) need to get a jump start on preparing the next generation of consumers for their products and services. They need to start establishing the value proposition clearly, frequently and directly – long, long before their customer will ever be ready to buy.

And they need to stop simply relying upon “general cultural trends” that say home ownership is still “important” to young people, because, if we look at other trends, like young people’s willingness to live at home until their thirties, this “importance” isn’t so very.

The bottom line is simple: if real estate brokers don’t start talking to teenagers and parents long before they consume the family savings (and accrue historic levels of debt), then the pool of first-time home buyers will run very low over the next decade. Or dry up completely, as renting and living at home creates an entirely new acceptable housing regime. Over-estimating the importance of the first-time buyer isn’t hard: They have accounted for 1-in-3 buyers of homes for nearly forty years. (During the recent boom, they accounted for 1 in 2.) That’s nearly 1.5 million out of the historical average of 4 million transactions that occur annually.

Even a small drop – say, 25% – would cut more than 375,000 sales from the pipeline. Considering the average agent only does about 6 deals a year, such a drop could easily eliminate 63,000 jobs from the housing industry.

Traditional real estate marketing has made two major mistakes: First, it has treated real estate as an “investment” rather than a valuable consumption: This has positioned real estate like stocks, that “go up and g down” with market cycles. Consumers are very wary of those things today: and will be for quite some time as the aftershocks of the Great Recession persist in their minds for years. It has also positioned housing as a weak investment against the alternative education which most people believe far more valuable to their own (and children’s) lives. Marketed as an investment, most people fail to see the bigger picture: which is why many brokers have shifted to the emotional side of owning a home in their messaging. By focusing consumers’ attention on the enjoyment of the product, and what it makes possible for their lives, not its investment qualifications, they can address the value proposition.

It’s a start. But probably not enough.

The other mistake is that most agents only know how to market inventory rather than value. The majority of every dollar spent in real estate advertising is on something physical: a location, price and bathroom. They rarely focus on selling the invisible - the important values to be gained through home ownership. Trust me: the words charming and secluded don’t do it. Importantly, the common treatment of the cost- aspect of housing is constrained to the affordability argument against rentals.

Rather than home ownership affords someone over their lifetime; which is the argument that college education makes.

This leaves a gap – and an opportunity – for very smart real estate pros to make a play for future market share. That play is to position housing as an alternate use of scarce resources: mom and dad’s remaining home equity and Junior’s yet-unblemished credit score. Think of this as the housing-industry equivalent of the “alternate use” theory of pricing. If you have $5, you can buy a gallon of milk or a gallon of gas. You decide upon the perceived benefits the purchase will bring you. If you’re thirsty, you buy the milk; if you need to go to the hospital, you buy gas. This same theory works in marketing your next generation of customers.

To create future housing markets, brokers must specifically start talking to kids and parents about their financial plans – especially on education - long before they start borrowing. It’s about inserting housing - and everything that housing makes possible, such as families and jobs and so on – into the college planning process. No, scratch that: let’s not call it college planning at all. Let’s call it life planning. That’s better! Here’s the template:

If you want to get married in your twenties, have kids before 40 and not live from check-to-check in constant fear of job loss with no savings, then perhaps investing equally in housing and education would be a good plan.

Yes. That’s the message.

But is anyone saying it? And if they are, is it being said before it’s too late? And if it’s being said, is it communicated in video form, promoted by text and Twitter, to a Justin Bieber audience with the attention span of a fly? Probably not. And I have a feeling the classic postcard and e-newsletter campaign isn’t exactly doing the trick.

Certainly, there remain many demographic reasons why the first-time home buyer pool may drain. Kids who expect to live longer, don’t mind living in mom’s cellar until they are thirty, and can get government health care until 27 seem very inclined to stay in school longer than ever. But the truth is, they are consuming their future at an alarming rate. Forty years of special tax treatment for housing equity (and sales) has caused another bubble to occur: College tuition inflation rates outpaced both CPI inflation and wage inflation for decades. We can’t turn back the clock. But we can prime the pumps for the future.

That means talking to kids today, before they blow a two-decade hole in their purchasing power.

This isn’t to say real estate professional should discourage kids from getting a college education. On the contrary: It means playing an active role in their financial education. Any industry who needs a quality-credit-scored not-overly-indebted customer to buy their goods and services in the future should play an active role in preparing customers to be capable of making that purchase.

Especially when kids can actually get government loans for college, but they can’t get bank loans to buy a house.

It opens up a wide variety of possibilites for engaging customers in discussions of home ownership years before they might actually be ready to buy. Imagine a customer for life strategy that actually starts four to seven years before the customer is able to make a purchase. Sounds odd, but isn’t that what Disney World does with kids, starting as toddlers, preparing them to take their children to the dream park sometime far, far into the future?

Peter Drucker once said that the purpose of business was to create a customer. If you can understand what he meant, you’ll see that investing in your future customer must start years ahead, especially when their resources will be far more limited to purchase your product as compared to others, than ever before.

Join the Conversation!

[STATS] Consumers + Video = Sales

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Monday, April 9, 2012 with 2 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, Marketing, rssfeed

More research pours in showing just how much consumers love video when it comes to learning – and buying – products and services online. Just how much? Check out these stats!

There’s a reason why, in the “internet age,” television advertising still works. Multimedia engagement is powerful. Not just because it combines sight and sound, but because unlike simple pictures, a movie can tell a story. And fast. So if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video clip is worth a thousand pictures.

In just thirty seconds!

So it’s no surprise that recent data from multiple research sources continues to show just how powerful video marketing has become. The basics remain strong:

YouTube is the second most visited search engine on the internet
Videos are two- to three-times more likely to be shared on Facebook than other content
Nearly 1/3 of all mobile data in the United States is video consumption
The number one iPhone app was YouTube (December, 2011) (#6 for Android smartphones)

Now let’s look at just how wide video consumption is globally:

Canadians remain the global leaders in video consumption (over 260 videos per viewer per month) (Nielsen)
179 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly 38 billion videos (Comscore, Feb, 2012) and 7.5 billion video ads
France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy average about 250 videos per viewer per month
Japanese viewers watch about 222 videos per user per month
Hong Kong and Singapore average about 150 videos per user per month
In Mexico, 87% of internet users watch video monthly, Argentina and Brazil (both at 85.6%), and Chile 83.2%

What about creating web traffic and engagement? New data suggests videos work on websites and direct response (e-mail) campaigns, too. According to MediaMind (pdf), use of rich media (like videos) in online marketing increased the likelihood that recipients would end up on a marketer’s website by threefold. Compared to classic banner ads, video ads increased click-through traffic nearly fourfold. Even if a user didn’t click the actual ad, they were 1.7 times more likely to visit a website after seeing a rich media ad than a simple banner.

Finally, eMarketer.com reports that spending on mobile video is set to double in the next four years, to nearly 10% of advertisement spending by format. They note a new study by Invodo, a e-commerce video marketing company, shoppers have a very high engagement rate to online video:

60% of US consumers watched product videos 60% of the time
36% said they had watched five or more product videos on brand or retail websites in the last 3 months
85% said they would videos that educated them about a product for at least 1 minute
Over 66% said they would watch videos several times before deciding whether to purchase
47% equated videos with high quality production values with being more reliable

Clearly, the future points towards a video-driven online engagement strategy. Consumers have the smartphones, tablets and

Check out "Everything Video Marketing" in the MFLN Learning Store

bandwidth – and the willingness – to move beyond the written-word marketing world. Of course, this presents new challenges for companies whose marketing technology – especially their people – have remained focused on documentarian style product explanations. But there’s plenty of help to be had, too, from professional to aspiring commercial makers. Best of all, the cost of online storage and social distribution has been reduced to near-zero for anyone who’s willing to try.

So, get out your director’s hat and start thinking like the Old Spice Guy, Kohler or that naked guy. It’s time to put video to work in your marketing strategy today!

Join the Conversation!

Asian-Pacific Social Media Stats

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Monday, April 2, 2012 with 0 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, rssfeed, Social Networking

As the U.S. real estate market experiences a bounce, many of the dollars pushing the market higher come from Asia. Good thing consumers in the region are such strong social media users. Check out these stats!

If you’re trying to grow your international business, then one of the best channels to reach new – and far away – markets is social media. Not only is it cost-effective, but it offers instant engagement and feedback, so you can refine your strategy in real time. Of course, it’s all made possible by the fact that consumers across Asia-Pacific countries are major consumers of technology, mobile tools, internet and online video. These data points (taken from various sources around the web) should give you some ideas for your international growth plans.

Internet usage across the Far East continues to grow at a record pace:

85% of consumers older than 15 in Hong Kong used the internet in the last month
67% of consumers in Singapore used the internet last month
These rates are nearly two or three times the rate of Malaysia, Thailand and indonesia

According to Comscore:

78% of Japanese smartphone users consumed digital media like video , web browsing and applications;
To put that in perspective, only 58% of British, 55% of US, 43% of French and 40% of Germans use their smartphones similarly.
What is truly amazing about this number is that the percentage of Japanese smartphone users as a share of the overall mobile market is only 16.9%

Tablets continue to grow in popularity

In Hong Kong use a smartphone and 58% already have or intend to buy a tablet computer
Nearly 5% of all internet traffic in Japan is from a tablet
Nearly 6% of internet traffic in Singapore is from a tablet, number two only behind the U.S at 6.2%

While Canadians are the number one consumers of online video in the world:

Japanese consumers are the 6th largest consumer of online videos with 222 videos per view per month in October 2011
Hong Kong consumers watch 160 videos per month
Singapore consumers watch 153 videos monthly
The average in the EU is about 250; Canadians watch more than 290 videos per month on average

Social Media continues to make huge progress in Asia:

1 in 4 online users across Asia used Facebook – the lowest globally, but still a rapid growth and massive number
Asia Pacific is still largest in total number of social network visitors globally
China’s RenRen has over 170 million student and white-collar users (#2 behind QZone and Weibo, which can tap into Tenent’s 700 million users)
Of the 40 million users of the French Social Network Viadeo, a business network similar to LinkedIn, 7 million are Chinese
About 1 million users of LinkedIn come from China; and since Facebook and Twitter are banned, the growth prospect is significant.
Singapore – with a population of 5 million – has about 1 million LInkedIn users as well.
LinkedIn Users are significantly more wealthy than Facebook users: 40% have a net worth of $100,000 as compared to only 31% for Facebook users.
Social networkers in the Philippines hold the world record for total time spent online on Facebook – nearly 42% of all internet usage, and nearly 93% of its entire population visiting Facebook at least once during the month.

Blogging is a major activity in Asian markets. Of the top 5 blogging markets by minutes per visitor,

Japan is number one
South Korea number two
Followed by Poland, Indonesia and Brazil

Join the Conversation!

Is Your Social Media Customer Service Up to Date?

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Friday, March 30, 2012 with 3 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, Opinion, rssfeed, Social Networking, Strategic Thinking

As more companies adopt social media, especially Twitter, as a customer service tool, it’s more evident than ever that few have thought out exactly what they’d do when they hear a complaint in real time. Here are some examples.

Our readers who may have attended our “Social Media Sushi” workshop know the story of my trip last year to the Newport Hyatt, where they gave away my balcony room, then “couldn’t help me” until I eventually tweeted my frustration. Suddenly, a call from the Hyatt’s central concierge service (thousands of miles away) not only had me out of the basement room and into a lovely balcony suite, but had delivered an important lesson to Hyatt about customer service.

Today’s customers will simply not be ignored, in real life or virtual.

Such stories are already the norm, perhaps to the chagrin of those who say they’ll “miss the face-to-face” interaction of real people at the guest counter or on the telephone. As for me, give me a kiosk and a Twitter account, if you can’t give me a well-trained human being. Too many “in person” experiences of companies these days are simply unacceptable. It’s not as if modern consumers want more than they paid for (ok, perhaps some who fly the cheap seats don’t understand why they don’t get steak…). Modern consumers are simply fed up with the blank-stare, repeat-it-again helpless-act that “in real life” people pass off as acceptable service nowadays.

As a result, Twitter (more so than Facebook) has become a frustrated customer’s best friend. (Note, it’s also the favorite cheerleading tool for happy customers, too). Consider the the stories of customers who get their internet service back faster by tweeting @ComcastCares than waiting for someone in Zimbindostan to answer the phone. I’ve often been a delighted diner receiving a free desert after tweeting how much I enjoyed dinner. Whether it’s solving problems or going the extra mile for customers, smart companies are keeping an eye on social media for mentions of their names.

And while they’re reacting fast, the best ones are also reacting well.

But not all of them. For some companies, their customer service remains in the “covered wagon” days, long after the car, train, plane and rocket ship has taken customers beyond the horizons. So monitoring your social mentions isn’t enough. Reacting well is still required. Yet it’s not rocket science: Avoid becoming defensive, ask questions, and invite the customer to suggest you how they’d like the situation resolved. Then do it, in an open, cheery fashion for everyone to see, because everyone is watching. It doesn’t mean giving away the store (more on that later) but it means paying attention first and addressing the issue in some fashion, even if a refund isn’t due. Sometimes, customers complain because they don’t understand why something happened.

With social media driving your customer service strategy, you can educate both the upset customer and the broader listening audience.

Of course, this only works if you actually have a customer service strategy that doesn’t stem from the 19th century. And not just any strategy, but one finely tuned to the kinds of interaction that each modern medium requires. There’s one method of engaging a customer wants to call you by phone to make a complaint; there’s another if it’s by Facebook, or Twitter. On the phone, you can listen, ask questions and make long-widned explanations. On Twitter, there’s little chance for such extensive chatter. Asking questions still matters, but you’ll need to practice offering pointed explanations and discrete actions that can be taken. Most of all, customers who post a complaint on Facebook or Twitter probably don’t want to call you on the phone, especially if they already had a face-to-face experience with someone at your company who couldn’t solve the problem.

Even if your company has tailored different approaches for different media, it still matters that your customer service is actually interested in solving the problems. Perhaps this matters most of all: It’s not nearly enough to say “We’re sorry to hear that!” or to cut and paste template responses. It’s also insufficient, even insulting, to throw money at customer complaints: many customers don’t want a refund so much as to know you’ll take action to resolve the problem. Previously we wrote how Delta Airlines thought offering me $25 or 1000 miles was the right answer to my tweet mentioning how their first-class seats reclined so far into the next person’s laps as to render their tray table useless. It wasn’t money or points I wanted from Delta: It was a very simple “We’ll alert our engineers to take a look at the problem and make sure it doesn’t affect future customers.” It was really that simple. Throwing money and points at me felt like Delta was trying to buy me off, silence me, and get the “bad” noise off the social stream as soon as possible. (Considering I’m blogging it now, I guess it didn’t work.)

Today a similar, but perhaps sillier incident occurred on Amtrak. I know, everybody beats up on Amtrak, but considering the experience isn’t far from what I imagine riding in a 19th century covered wagon would be like, they really deserve little leeway. Here’s the transcript, which started with a friend who noted my complaint about the super-slow wi-fi on the train.

Now, after the last message, this popped up in my @mentions.

So I replied…

Which was followed by…

Leaving me confused enough to finish with:

So, after giving Amtrak credit for listening for brand mentions on Twitter, I’m left to wonder why @Amtrak they bothered to contact me. Enjoy the trip? Wasn’t it abundantly clear that I wasn’t enjoying it? Were they simply taking a survey of whether I was traveling for business or leisure? Did they have any explanation for the quality of the ride, or the sluggish terrestrial internet service? And what was with that little “of course!” phrase? Were they somehow saying us business travelers are more whiney? Heck, they didn’t even try to buy me off with a free drink from the cafe car.

In other words: no strategy, and therefore, no customer service.

The good news is that companies recognize the reach of social listening to monitor their brand and address customer service issues. But monitoring keywords isn’t enough. You need people prepared to probe for feedback and offer to help. Otherwise, you might be better off simply ignore the medium entirely. Well, maybe not.

There’s little doubt, however, that simply having a social media presence won’t enhance your customer experience. Start listening, and react quickly, but most of all, make sure you intend to create an experience at least marginally better than asking me to travel to Zimbindostan in a covered wagon.

You can tweet me on that!

Join the Conversation!

How Pinterest Challenges Our Social Media Thinking

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Wednesday, March 28, 2012 with 1 Comment
Categories: Blog, Featured, Marketing, rssfeed, Social Networking, Strategic Thinking

If you only have a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. So it’s not surprising that some people struggle to fit Pinterest into their sales and marketing strategy. Here are a few ideas.

First, stop trying to fit every new technology into a singular use pattern. As social networks grow in number, by narrowing in scope, you will need a different use-strategy to make them work. Niche marketing requires niche thinking. In fact, the worst abuses of social media come from trying to make them do the work that other technologies were meant to do.

For a moment, consider email marketing. Most people still treat it as an alternative to postal-mail marketing. Whereas we once mailed flyers, letters and catalogues to clients, most email marketing looks not much different than a printed piece of paper. Thus, we waste the medium and our customers’ gracious allocation of a few seconds to us, rather than using the logic of email – which can do so much more work than a piece of paper – to communicate our value proposition.

The same holds for the egregious abuse of social media as an advertising tool. Every time you invite someone to an event they couldn’t possibly attend, or promote your products incessantly on your wall, you alienate rather than cultivate an audience of potential customers. Nobody goes to a cocktail party to carry away your brochures in their pockets; neither do they join Facebook to wade through a litany of your inventory and discounts.

Which brings us to Pinterest, one of the latest niche social networks built around users collecting and sharing their favorite pictures of anything they love. Some specialty networks are dedicated by interest type: politics or cooking or travel. Others focus on the mode of communication, the most famous being Twitter’s limitation of 140 characters. For every new network, a specific strategy needs to be developed. Pinterest’s is perhaps more challenging than others, because it’s primary mode of communication is visual, rather than textual. Engaging others in pictures is particularly hard for some people to do.

Even after years of explosive growth over at YouTube, most people aren’t really good at communicating visually. To some degree, the technology – cameras, video cameras, editing, and so on – require specialty skills of an order higher than handwriting or typing. So it’s understandable that only a narrow band of producers at YouTube reach serious levels of effectiveness. For Pinterest, communicating through the lens of a camera (mostly still photos, although it can organize videos) introduces both technical and strategic challenges.

Because most people haven’t really talked to each other in pictures since elementary school!

Yet Pinterest offers a very unique opportunity by making photos the basis of user interaction. Rather than trying to come up with the right number of limited words to Tweet, or a reasonably pithy status update on Facebook, one photo really is worth a thousand words on Pinterest. And a series of photos, arranged into an album or “board”, might be able to tell an entire story.

And storytelling is the key to leveraging Pinterest.

Telling stories in pictures is older than words, in fact. Consider the Lascaux cave drawings or Egyptian hieroglyphics: picture-storytelling was deeply ingrained in our species, long before Mona Lisa hit the canvas. Pinterest makes it easy for more people to become such storytellers, because nearly everybody has a camera attached to their phone these days; and better equipped cameras are cheap and ubiquitous. All that’s needed is a story-line.

Pinterest asks us to have a story-line in mind when we’re posting. Whether it’s the story of our vacation, or the story of our dreams, or the story of our products that we might want people to buy. Story-telling is critical to effectively using Pinterest, even if that story is captured by only a single photo.

The good news is that story telling is endlessly creative. No matter what you sell, helping people imagine themselves using, enjoying and valuing it is best told in stories. That’s what television commercials do, but magazines do it in pictures just as nicely. If we use the space wisely.

For example, if you’re a real estate broker, the story telling you might use Pinterest for isn’t about your houses for sale. Sure, there’s a story for each one, but few people are going to browse Pinterest for the story of a two-sinked-bathroom. However, they might browse the story of other valuable home ownership issues: the story of the local high school, the story of the town square at each holiday, the story of the beautiful parks in the town, and so on. The story of people’s lives and dreams made possible through their homes can be told in a pictoral format. That’s what local buyers will find compelling; and maybe even international ones, too.

Storytelling works for any industry, really. If you sell luxury fragrances, you could create picture boards telling the story of the interesting people who wear a designer, or the places they go wearing them. You can create a series of photos that tell the emotional story of the designers, or ordinary people whose lives are improved by wearing their fragrances. If you’re a moving van company, you can tell the story of people’s moving experiences, the excitement and joys of moving, the road trips their belongings take across the country, and the before-and-after progress of unpacking. Whatever you sell, your story can be told in pictures with Pinterest.

But that’s not all.

Pinterest, after all, is a social network. So your stories become portable, sharable, referable. Even individual parts of a story – a single unique picture – might end up re-pinned on any variety of other boards, like “places I want to go someday” or “my dream home” or “my favorite brands”. Just as people often only repeat part of your story when retelling it to another person, even passing along a portion of your photo album might pique someone’s interest, create a connection, attract their attention: and develop a new customer.

Whether or not Pinterest fits your marketing strategy depends less upon the network itself than your creativity in developing a plan to leverage it. Is every picture on Pinterest a unique and compelling story? Of course not, but neither is every tweet or like or share on any of the other sites. Still, there are plenty of success stories in Twitter, Facebook and even email marketing: yet they are rarely the same for all channels. Pinterest challenges us once again to think about communicating differently to each other. Like any new tool, you’ll need to practice, experiment, and have stamina before you see success. But if the cavemen of Lascaux could send their messages 17,000 years into the future, it’s pretty likely you’ll be able to weave a decent story into next week using a camera, some creativity and Pinterest.

Join the Conversation!

Housing Industry: Gen Y Happily Stays Home

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Tuesday, March 27, 2012 with 5 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, Opinion, rssfeed, Strategic Thinking

The future of housing in America?

Something much bigger than the recession is reshaping the housing industry. New data from Pew Research confirms our suspicions that the Echo Boom won’t be heard for at least another decade.

Our readers know we’ve been talking demographics for years. Peter Drucker noted that your customer’s age is the easiest trackable indicator of your future sales. So it’s with some wonder that five years after the housing industry fell off the wall, all of the king’s horses and men are still trying to put Humpty the “First-Time-Home-Owner” Dumpty back on the wall again. It’s going to take much more than “affordability” and low interest rates to compensate for what some new data from Pew Research indicates is a much bigger sea change than mere market cycles. Here’s why.

For nearly three years we have argued here and here and here that Gen Y isn’t at all like its parents when it comes to home ownership. Unlike married-with-children Boomers who bought their first homes in their early twenties, Gen Y hasn’t entered adulthood along the same curve. They have remained in school years longer than mom and dad did, and were doing so long before the current jobs scarcity. They have been putting off marriage a little longer, on average, every decade since the 1960s. They delayed raising children until their thirties, even forties. As for purchasing power, we’ve been talking about soaring Gen Y debt accumulation (driven by college tuition) for years.

All of which adds up to a different “repair formula” for housing – one in which it might not matter how affordable homes become, if credit worthiness, motivation and need remain weak.

As for the “dream” of home ownership, well, sure, Gen Y probably dreams about it. I dream of owning a private island someday, too. Study after study can tell us what people dream or “believe” in it. But it’s new data from Pew that tells us that, at least right now, they aren’t chasing that dream – because they’re perfectly happy living at home with the ‘rents.

The study – The Boomerang Generation: Feeling Ok about living with Mom and Dad – challenges an important myth that many in the housing industry have been counting on. The supposition is that, once the job market picks up, the Echo Boomers will return to the housing market en masse. It’s a claim that looks good on a bar chart, but nobody bothered to ask the Echo Boomers if they agreed. Until now, thanks to Pew Research. What they found is that the housing trends – especially preferences – of Gen Y don’t reflect the same patterns of their parents, who formed the basis of the massive “first time home buyer” population throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In fact:

“… 40% of 18- to 24-year-olds currently live with their parents, and the vast majority of them say they did not move back home because of economic conditions (in fact many of them may have never moved out in the first place).”

Which means that nearly half of Gen Y’ers aren’t delaying housing specifically because of economic conditions. The study indicates that only about 1/3rd of Gen Y’ers live with parents “temporarily” because of the economy. It found no major differences between genders, social, ethnic or household income levels, either.

“Parents with annual household incomes of $100,000 or more are just as likely as those with incomes under $30,000 to say their adult child has moved back home because of economic conditions.”

Apparently even rich parents aren’t handing out so many down-payment gifts as they once did.

But the real story isn’t about the money, but the emotional desire to move out of the nest. Whereas post-war Boomers were strongly encouraged to become start families and become self-supporting by their twenties, and Gen X’ers were (voluntarily) out the door as early as possible, Echo Boomers don’t see a problem with living at home until significantly older. Says Pew Research:

“Fully 68% of young adults ages 18 to 34 who are living with their parents or moved back in temporarily because of economic conditions say they are very satisfied with their family life. This compares with 73% of young adults who are not living with their parents (a statistically insignificant difference). Similarly, 44% of young adults who live with their parents say they are very satisfied with their present housing situation. A similar proportion (49%) of young adults who live on their own say the same.” [emphasis added]

The Pew study does note that people who moved back in for economic reasons were slightly less happy about it. But let’s not let the exceptions deny the rule. In fact, Pew notes that the rise of multi-generational households has been building for quite some time, rising to the highest levels (51 million households) since 1980. There have been plenty of economic booms and busts in the last thirty years to blame the current recession for this phenomenon alone.

Still, couldn’t it be argued that these happy-at-home-millennials are saving-up for their eventual migration? It’s hard to tell, but considering many are paying household expenses and rent (to their parents) they are arguably in the same situation as if they were paying bills to a landlord (even if they had roommates) outside of the home. Again, Pew puts numbers to this:

“Young adults who live with their parents contribute to the household in various ways. Nearly all of the 18- to 34-year-olds surveyed (96%) say that they do chores around their parents’ house. And fully 75% say they contribute to household expenses such as groceries or utility bills. More than a third (35%) pay rent to their parents.”

All of which means that something much deeper than recession hesitation is at work when it comes to the first time buyers for next decade. Even as some parts of the housing market experience an early Spring market, much of this activity stems from investors and luxury buyers, not first-timers seeking classic starter homes, or evan “fixer uppers” picked from the vast affordable foreclosure inventory.

It simply seems that they simply not looking because they are perfectly happy where they are.

The housing industry loves to note that most housing purchases are emotional. During booms, buyers emotionally overpay for their dream homes. During busts, sellers emotionally resist setting the right price. Well, if emotions are more powerful than intellect, then perhaps brokers need to consider what it will take for happy-to-stay-home twenty-somethings to leap from the nest – and into the housing market – before the end of the intellectually best-time-to-buy is replaced by a decade of hyperinflation.

But that, of course, is a topic for another day.

Join the Conversation!

Not the Droids You’re Looking For

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Tuesday, March 20, 2012 with 10 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, Next Generation, rssfeed, Technology

In a world obsessed with touch-screen smartphones, is there still room for those of us who think correcting touch-typos and sitting on airport floors to recharge batteries isn’t really all that cool? Here’s my take.

My decision to get a new Blackberry 9900 isn’t for everyone; but for me, it’s like a return to sanity after two years of constant phone trauma. Let me take you back in time: A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away… oh, sorry, where was I? Ah, yes, it started with the release of the Samsung Vibrant, a phone so promisingly marketed that I switched from years of Blackberry ownership to the Android world. Yet within a few weeks, it was evident that the Vibrant was so poorly designed that its most touted feature – the ultra bright AMOLED screen – was its worst feature: Too bright to use at night (even on the lowest setting) and guaranteed to drain your battery by your tenth tweet (I barely exaggerate), it was a disaster of untested-in-the-real-world technology.

Eventually, I switched to a HTC Sensation. Alas, I was destined for a journey past Scylla and Charybdis. On one hand, battery life improved to a whopping four hour average; on the other, the antenna design was so poor that signal strength required an alignment of the planets. But what really doomed that product, and so many other screen-touch typing handsets, was the impossibly inaccurate keynoard. Even after hacking the ROM and trying alternate keyboard layouts, my life became six-letters-forward-four-backspaced-back. Since voice dictation only works if you have a signal, it offered no solution. Still, I’ll take the blame and say that I simply couldn’t cross the distance from the analog keyboard to the VWLS NT NEEDD world of touch typing that casual smartphone users might find acceptable.

Which takes us to yesterday, when I decided to take back all those wasted hours fixing typos and seeking power outlets, and return to the keyboard accuracy and battery life of a Blackberry.

Now, I realize that these days, it’s fashionable to make fun of Blackberry devices. I’m the first one to recognize – with sadness – that the company is driving itself into the ground from a once lofty perch atop the smartphone industry. A number of rushed and poorly executed devices may have tarnished its image forever, especially against Apple’s nearly unbroken string of successes (Antennagate aside). Some people claim loyalty to Android devices – although I often wonder if it’s just an anti-Apple vote? I hear the Motorola series does have strong battery life, but if the cost is switching to Verizon, then no deal. Alas, few choices remained for me, a T-Mobile user who couldn’t get an iPhone and simply wouldn’t risk another Android’s claims.

Besides, I own an iPad 2, so I don’t need the “smartest” phone any more. I rarely used my HTC Sensation to browse the web or read news: Such things are much nicer on the full-page iPad. I simply need emails, tweets and calendar access on the go; maybe a Google search in a pinch. Yes, the camera is fun, whenever it’s not locking up the Android OS. As for GPS navigation, well, that requires battery life, right? So my smartphone can be less smart these days, especially if it has enough power to run from sunrise to sunset.

In fact, it started to make me wonder why anyone would pay $600 for a super-smart phone in the future (even if subsidized into your contract). As tablets take over for laptops, we’re less likely to be doing the “smart” stuff on pocket-sized screens. Returning to a “core” function phone makes a lot of sense: Checking vitals during the day shouldn’t require ultra-expensive technology. The trade off between slickness and usability has been settled not by a new smartphone, but by the tablet. Email, calendar, flight monitoring and car navigation, with a side of Facebook and Twitter should be able to run on anything. But as long as it’s smaller than an iPad, what is really needed is easier typing and longer battery life.

Thus, the return of the Blackberry.

Yes, iPhones have awesome battery life, but I still watch people who own them correct typos far too frequently. As for Androids, there are plenty of websites that purport to help you increase battery life: by turning off every cool feature. So what’s the point of owning a smartphone switched into dumb mode?

The improvements in usability since I switched back to a Blackberry are noticeable in just three days. I’ve gone without charging it for nearly a day and a half. I wasn’t anxious that I’d run out of power between breakfast and lunch, or navigating from the hotel to my client’s office. I won’t have to carry “extra” batteries any more. Crisp keys have sped up my typing. I’m less worried a Facebook comment will end up on Lamebook due to a bizarre autocorrect. No, I won’t likely play Angry Birds on my Blackberry 9900; nor will I download lots of games, photo editing or video apps. I might even delete WordMole, just to save the memory.

But I also won’t notice one bit, because I always have my iPad with me, for a far better experience with all such things.

Best of all, you won’t see me be rooting around airport lounges, like a pig snouting for a plug, to recharge my phone. I won’t be fighting for a seat near a plug at the next Inman conference, or walk behind a presenter to plug my phone into the podium power strip (yes, desperate people do that). My Blackberry will remain svelt: no hump-backed extra-capacity batteries. It all makes so much sense. And for every app I might not get from Blackberry World, I can use the more-than-adequate browser to just go to the website and look up anything I want to learn, watch or buy.

As I said in the beginning of this post: A new Blackberry isn’t for everyone. Some people seem to enjoy sitting under the pay-phone outside an airport bathroom, recharging their ‘Droid. Others might be more proficient than I could ever become, touch-typing on their iPhone. But even then, there’s one thing I am certain I’d never do on my ‘Droid or iPhone that I’ve just done on my Blackberry:

Write a 1000+ word blog like this one.

So, this might not be post about the latest ‘Droid you’re looking for; Move along. Move along.

Join the Conversation!

Grow your Business by Growing Yourself First

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Tuesday, March 6, 2012 with 0 Comments
Categories: Blog, Featured, rssfeed, Sales, Strategic Thinking

If you’re trying to grow your business, don’t just focus on more marketing and new tech tools. It’s important to grow yourself before your productivity can improve.

An irony of a technology dominated business landscape is that even an endless array of new tools doesn’t guarantee we’ll grow. Sometimes, it’s just the opposite: more tools decrease productivity. Now, don’t panic: I’m not becoming a luddite yet. But after twenty years of working with organizations around the world, I’ve seen too many people expect growth to come from more tools and more spending, that never pans out.

I’ve seen the reasons, too.

Consider two people at the same company, with the same tools, same training and same manager, yet only one increases their performance. It’s almost a tautology: tools and training are necessary – but not enough – to improve performance.

How about accountability, that buzzword that won’t die. Is one of them more accountable, and if so, to whom? Most of us consider accountability to mean punishment or, to be more accurate, pre-punishment before termination. In most cases, if you need accountability you’re probably in the wrong job. If you don’t need it, you’re probably growing just fine. I’m just not convinced that we’ll unleash our growth by someone wagging a finger at us every week.

Which leads us to what does release growth in business: Growing ourselves – first.

Isn’t that redundant? Not at all. As my friend John Schumacher reminds us frequently on his blog, growing yourself isn’t the same as learning to use a new business tool. We don’t automatically grow because we perform a new activity. We grow when we initiate new motion. It’s a fine point; but an important one.

When people are in motion, they are headed somewhere: usually towards a goal they consider important. Whether we’re improving our health, relationships or sales, we only move towards important goals that exceed the sum of the things we need to do to get there. If we don’t believe in the destination – that where we’re headed matters – we simply won’t go.

Or grow.

But when we do – well, you’ve seen it: Somebody around you starts gaining momentum, and they pull everything else into place. If they lose a few pounds, they spend that extra physical and mental energy closing more sales. If they spend the weekend pursing a hobby instead of cleaning their inbox, you’ll find them making big strides in the office on Monday.

It’s not only more work that creates better performance at work.

It’s a mistake for managers and executives to believe that only growing our business skills will improve our business performance. Simply stuffing more things into our heads won’t create momentum. Growth isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s a passion problem.

Momentum – growth – comes from releasing our achievement drive. Nobody has trouble doing something they’re passionate about. And passion begets passion. Help someone achieve an important goal in one part of their life and they’ll carry that energy over into other aspects. Like work.

And it’s not only organizations that can help us reach our goals. We must do it for ourselves. We have to grow ourselves – a little bit each day - so we can apply that momentum to growing our business at the same time.

It’s actually easier than you think. Consider a marketing person who finds time to engage their love of poetry; it helps them improve their advertising copy at work. Or a salesperson who schedules time to play their favorite sport or instrument, suddenly making more sales as easily as playing a tune. The best approach would be to incorporate our personal goals into our work efforts: Imagine writing ad copy that was like writing poetry, or prospecting as if you were playing an inning of baseball!

Think of it like the vacation phenomenon. Remember how productive you are the week after you returned from vacation? What matters wasn’t how relaxed, rested or active you were that week, but that you spent the time pursuing something important. Your performance boost at work came from the lasting after-effect of doing something important outside of it. You grew yourself one week, so you could grow your business the next week.

Now imagine building that effect into your daily routine.

Nothing says that growth has to come from another phone call, another report, another email. It just as easily comes from working on ourselves. Restructure your day to incorporate personal growth – pursing your passions – to improve your professional ones. We can’t expect to grow our performance in one area without paying attention to the other.

If you want to take your performance at work to the next level, start by taking yourself there, first.

Join the Conversation!

Who’s Raising the Bar for REALTORS? You’d Be Surprised!

Posted by Matthew Ferrara on Tuesday, February 14, 2012 with 8 Comments
Categories: Agents, Blog, Cool Tools, Featured, rssfeed, Sales

Dianne with her laptop, iPad, calculator and laser measurer.

All over the web, there are lots of discussions about “raising the bar” for real estate professionals. Funny thing is, the bar is already moving up fast, and you wouldn’t believe who’s responsible for it!

Who’s raising the bar in real estate? Companies like California Closets, that’s who. Yes, that’s right: A closet organization company is raising the bar for real estate professionals, and lots of other sales industries, actually. I’ll explain in a moment, but first, let’s take a step back. Regular readers of our column know our story about the basement refinishing company who came to our house and did a presentation using their iPad featuring a movie with Bob Vila in it. It was the most effective 3 minutes we’d seen in a sales presentation in a decade, moving the bar from the “brought my laptop, let’s look at PowerPoint slides” level to new heights.

That was over a year ago, and since then, the bar keeps rising. A few months ago, we had a sump-pump salesman visit to discuss how he might replace our aging sump pumps with newer, more reliable models. His presentation featured a video, too, explaining how newer systems worked. No slides either; very informative in very few minutes. The bar got a little higher that day, too.

But after last week, the bar for salespeople coming to our home in the future went sky high. That’s because Diane from California Closets came for a visit last Saturday, and you might have thought Batwoman had shown up with her bat-belt of techno-goodies. And oh, yes, we were quite impressed!

Diane made quite an impression. First, we explained our desires: We wanted to transform a spare bedroom into a walk-in closet. Much like a real estate agent, she visited the room, discussed possibilities, then went to work. First, she sized up the room, pulling her laser measurer and zapping away. Back in the kitchen, Diane wanted to customize a solution for us. This required two more pieces of technology – a laptop for her, and an iPad for us. While she punched calculations into her laptop, we flipped through photo albums on her iPad, which she conveniently setup with a stand and a stylus. As we explored different layouts, colors, materials and before-and-after pictures, Dianne was listening and watching for what made us gasp or groan.

It was a fantastic presentation, on many levels. First, it was informative, for the prospective clients, and the sales person watching our reactions. Second, it was engaging: We become engrossed in exploring how California Closets’ products could transform our lives. Diane went from sales person to dream maker. Third, it was imaginative: Diane hardly once spoke about things like wood, grommets, parts or pieces. Instead, she answered questions with stories about her other clients who transformed their lives using her products. We began to imagine what our lives would be like, too, with her help.

Most of all, it was effective. By the time we looked up from the iPad, Dianne had a beautiful 3-D CAD display of our clothing storage solution on her screen. It was literally our room, with her organizational solution, fitted neatly in it. We pointed out a few changes, and she quickly edited the design. The price updated as we worked together to design the right solution in our budget. Dianne had no need to overcome any objections because we were working together the whole time.

We cut her a check for half, right then.

We didn’t need to compare with anybody else. We didn’t need to research further. We had already done a few weeks of previewing, searching online, asking people we trusted for recommendations, even visiting home improvement stores. By the time we’d called California Closets into our home, we were ready. All that needed to happen was a presentation that wowed us. Which it did, exactly.

It was invigorating to see someone combine all the elements of great sales together: people skills (asking questions, listening, discussing) with technology tools (measuring, configuring, demonstrating) to the point where we literally closed the sale on ourselves. Everybody was happy and satisfied. We were going to finally have our dream dressing room; Dianne completed a Saturday morning sale.

Dianne reminds us that the bar for salespeople in any industry keeps getting higher. Real estate agents aren’t just competing against other real estate agents: They are competing against the basement refinishing guy, the sump pump salesman, and Dianne from California Closets.

There are Dianne’s everywhere, raising the bar for what consumers expect from sales professionals. When ordinary products are sold with exciting techniques, it’s further proof that the bar is being raised from outside the industry, as much as it is from inside of it.

The best way to sum it up is with a photo of Dianne after her presentation.

If you want your next appointment to end up like this, take a lesson from Dianne and bring more than your pen and paper to every sales presentation.

Join the Conversation!

Page 1 of 2812 3 4 5 »10 20...Last »

Innovation Isn’t Just for Recessions

Why the Economist is Wrong about REALTORS

Four Ways Salespeople Can Win on Price

[VIDEO] Blog Post Summaries for April 2012

Too Much Stuff Interferes with Success

Talk to Teens about College – and Housing – Before it’s Too Late

[STATS] Consumers + Video = Sales

Housing Industry: Gen Y Happily Stays Home

Not the Droids You’re Looking For

Grow your Business by Growing Yourself First

Who’s Raising the Bar for REALTORS? You’d Be Surprised!

Now Open! Online Store

Recent Posts

Register for Blog Updates

Translator

Learning Network

MFLN Video Samples

MFC on Facebook

Recent Posts

Contact