Value Needs to be Promoted

I don't like shameless self promotion, but there is a time and a place for it. If you have found a way to provide greater value for your customers you need to promote it. Value is one of those things that most business owners understand. They know that they need to innovate. They know they need to find better, faster, cheaper ways of delivering goods and services to their customers. And they work very hard at it. But they expect that "If I build it they will come." In other words, these innovators expect the world to beat a path to their door, but the world doesn't know why they should.

This is where business owners need to learn to talk about themselves. This is something I don't do very well. It is also something a lot of our clients don't do very well. But if you want all of that hard work to pay off you must let people know about it. And it's not just customers that need to know. There are three groups of people you should target when it comes to promoting the value you deliver.

1. Recipients of that value. The idea for this post originated while I was completing a client's tax return. There were a couple of items in our questionnaire that made me think there might be more money on the table. I dug a little deeper, then a little deeper. I went back to the client and asked for some more documents. Finally I found two unexplored areas for tax savings that netted the client an additional $1,000 on his refund. This was a tiny return that we were only charging about $500 to prepare and as I wrapped everything up I realized that I had not communicated any of this to the client. Here I was giving someone a 100% return on his investment in our firm and I wasn't even going to tell him about it. Shameful.
2. Your people. Value is a culture thing. You can't do it alone. Imagine you own a hardware store and you believe that it is your mission in life to be able to answer any hardware related question a customer might ask. Can you do that alone? Can you personally patrol the isles interacting with each and every customer? Of course not. Your people need to hear the stories of how you helped a customer stop a leaky faucet with a new 80 cent o-ring rather than $100 sink fixture. They need to watch you do it. They need to experience it. When you do something extraordinary for a customer the team needs to know. Culture isn't built through education. It's built through shared experience.
3. Future customers. This is the group that gets most of the attention. We build great stories into our sales pitch of how we have helped others and delivered great value in the past. That's good. Keep it up. But don't let your presentation go stale. Demand that only examples less than 30 days old make it into your pitch. It is more powerful to give an example of something that happened yesterday than it is to recount a success you had last year.

If you are delivering value to customers don't be afraid to self promote. You deserve it.

Using Flip Charts to Get Things Done

Whiteboards Create Ideas, Flip Charts Make Them Happen I have long been a fan of whiteboards. I use them to help clients understand aspects of their business, plan strategy, brainstorm, and keep notes of meetings. The beauty of the whiteboard is its impermanence. There is a freedom in being able to pick up the eraser or swipe away that last thought with a shirt sleeve. And whiteboards are big. They allow free ranging discussion that jumps around. Being able to go back to something that was discussed an hour ago is very useful. But what happens after the meeting? You can't file away those whiteboards in a back room and pull them out again to check up on your progress. Sure, you can take pictures or transcribe the salient points, but once they leave that magical, stark white, vertical medium they lose something. Enter the flip chart. Here is what I like about flip charts. They provide a natural segway from whiteboard ideas to necessary actions or decisions. When you get the group (or yourself) to commit action steps or decisions to a flip chart you can go back to that document again and again until the action is taken or the decision is proven good or bad. Use the whiteboard at the beginning of the meeting to brainstorm and discover. Use the flip chart at the end to summarize, memorialize and commit. They are easy to store. You can keep a hundred pages of flip charts on the easel and you can file a dozen flip chart pads in the store room without too much worry. They are big and they are vertical. It is important to get things off the horizontal desk surface. People think and present better when standing up. Flip charts, like whiteboards, encourage collaboration and group engagement. They are easy to keep visible. If you use a flip chart don't leave it on the easel in the conference room. Drag that sucker into your office and set it up so that everyone can see it, including you. If you committed the group to a course of action in the staff meeting last week, those action items need to be staring everyone in the face, every day. If you are concerned about privacy leave the very first page blank and pull it over the chart before your outside appointments come into the office. They start conversations. When blogging became popular it gave people a whole new reason to visit web sites. Visitors knew there would be fresh content, not the same static, boring web page. Flip charts can become the fresh content for your office. Don't be afraid of the conversations they generate. If you see someone reading your flip chart (and they will, they can't help themselves) ask what they think. Start the conversation and see where it goes. This results in two very important secret ingredients to success. First, it opens you up to new ideas and possibilities you might not discover on your own. Second, it creates a very real sense of accountability and recommits you to the actions and decisions you wrote down in the first place. If you don't have a flip chart handy I would encourage you to go out this week and get one. Buy some markers, stick it in the corner of your office and spend an hour or two this week tackling a problem or thinking about a big idea that has been nagging at you for a while. See where it takes you. I think you will find this simple, affordable conference room fixture quite valuable.

Automating Business Documents with QuickBooks

Getting Your Forms to do the Work for You We see businesses of all sizes relying on QuickBooks for their accounting software. Whether your organization is a startup or a $20 million company it is often hard to beat the flexibility, value and user base offered by QuickBooks. But despite this widespread market presence we see very few companies leveraging the forms customization features in Quickbooks. Here are several opportunities for your business to use this valuable tool to get more done with less effort. Customize Estimates to Summarize or Replace Your Contracts Quickbooks allows you to create Estimates that you can send to your customers, but most businesses don't use them because they don't include disclaimers or service information important to customers. Instead of using QuickBooks these business use a pre-printed form or possibly an Excel or Word template to create estimates or quotes. Using the Layout Designer in QuickBooks you can easily add blocks of standard contract language and place specific order or product information wherever you want it on the page. If your estimates contain multiple pages and cannot be ported to QuickBooks single page format consider designing your contract summary page in QuickBooks. Getting estimates and quotes into QuickBooks is a powerful efficiency tool because once the information is there it can be tracked, converted to a sales order, used as the basis for packing slips, and ultimately turned into an invoice...all with the simple press of a button. In other words, you enter the information once and you are done. Format Sales Orders to Mirror Workflow Manufacturing companies call them work orders, distributors call them pick lists, service companies call them route sheets. No matter what they are called all organizations have or should have a document that guides their service or product fulfillment process from start to end. The QuickBooks Layout Designer allows you to create standard form elements like checklists, sign off boxes, and workflow diagrams. If took my advice in step 1 and your quotes or proposals are already entered as QuickBooks estimates it is as simple as pressing one button to convert them into the "Sales Order" workflow document and start production. The other great advantage to building workflow documents from previously created estimates is the decreased opportunity for items to be left out or inadvertantly changed between contract acceptance and delivery. It is also less likely that there will be minor but embarrassing differences between things like document numbers, client addresses, phone numbers and sales rep contact details. Keeping everything in QuickBooks ensures consistency. Invoice in QuickBooks (please) If there is one area in which Quickbooks should be your exclusive tool it is invoicing. Many businesses don't like the generic look of QuickBooks default invoices. The newest version of QuickBooks introduces a form customization wizard, but whether you are using the newest version or one of the older editions it is a fairly straighforward matter to customize invoices to look identical or similar to the documents you get from your printer. If you have a sales order document already in QuickBooks creating the invoice is a simple one-button process. That is another great time saver that you can take advantage of, but the real reasont to do all invoicing in QuickBooks is that it makes for the most accurate set of accounting records. If you run two systems, one for invoicing and QuickBooks for everything else, sooner or later you are going to make an expensive mistake. Bringing it all together If you want to leverage the potential of QuickBooks form customization to make life easier in your business I would suggest you go about it this way. Map out your workflow first. Get in front of a whiteboard or a big, blank piece of paper and draw a picture of what happens from the time you create a formal pitch for a prospect to the moment you receive the last payment for a job well done. Decide how forms can help you facilitate this chain of events. If you start creating forms first you'll just wind up changing them over and over again until they mirror your business process. Think about consistency at the beginning. Do you want your forms in color or black and white? Color makes a big difference, but if only one of your fifteen employees has access to a color printer it may not matter. If you are going to be emailing documents (much recommended) you may not even need a color printer. But also think about what fonts you will use, which logo file is best for all documents, whether you want a standard footer, etc. If you do this in the beginning it adds a lot to your presentation. If you don't do it in the beginning you usually find that it is just too much work to come back later and change everything to maintain a consistent look and feel. Design your forms on paper first. If you already have pre-printed forms consider what you want to change about them. One of the big advantages of using QuickBooks for print-on-demand forms is the ability to change and try new things. But think them out on paper first and the work in QuickBooks will go much faster. Hire expert help. You may not need someone to design every form for you, but paying a CPA firm that knows what they are doing to walk you through the design process for your first form will teach you a lot and save you hours of frustration and headaches down the road. Think of it as an investment in reducing printing and business form costs for the rest of your life.

JoeyBrannon.com launches

On February 15th I started a new blog that gives me an outlet for my passion, teaching. The new blog at JoeyBrannon.com breaks down financial topics and explains why they are relevant to a CEO or business owner's understanding of the organization. I have been having a lot of fun with it. Please take a look and offer your comments.

February Newsletter

The February newsletter went out earlier this week. This month we covered the topic of sales drivers, commonly referred to as marketing. There is a lot you can do with marketing, especially if you follow the school of "test and measure." But in this newsletter I just cover the basics. They are:

1. Identify your customer. You must be able to describe the type of person/decision maker/company you are looking for vividly.
2. Locate your customer. Where do they spend time. What are they doing when they are there. To sell to them you must be able to track them down so you can get their attention.
3. Deliver a compelling message. Once you know who they are and where they are you need to know what to say to motivate them to action.

You can read an archived copy of the newsletter here.