COMMUNICATION MUST TOP BUSINESS AGENDA AFTER THE LOCK DOWN

After a month-plus of inactivity it would be naïve to believe it will be business as usual when we fling open our doors for business.
There will be major cleaning to be done, inventory taken, contacts reinstated with suppliers and clients and some hard conversations to be heard with our creditors and debtors.

For many of us if we are to have half a chance of surviving we must hit the ground running.

Time and tide wait for no man, now more than ever.

The communications with the market especially can not wait. The market is going to be a different one from the one you left behind.

On the one hand your clients, after a month of holding on to cash will be reluctant to spend.

On the other hand, for the first time in a while you and your partners will be starting from scratch, or almost.

While more established competitors may still own top of mind awareness everyone else will have to start from zero.

It is important that you get your communications with the public up and running to take advantage of this.

1. Tell people you are open for business

You have got to remember your clients have fallen out of the habit of coming to your shop. They have been making do with whatever substitute for your product or service or going without it all together. You need to remind those who knew you, that you are stilla round and those who don’t know you that you exist.

The knee jerk reaction is to advertise, the question is where to advertise. You have to hit your clients where they have been all through the lock down and that is on their phones...

There will be an urgent need to use your social media platforms and if you don’t have them set them up.

There are about a million Ugandans on Facebook, half that number on twitter and instagram about the same.

2. Sharpen your value proposition

What is the value of your product or service  to your client? Are you the cheapest? Are you the best? Are you good value for money? Are you convenient?

The key to a winning value proposition is encapsulated in this saying,

”People will forget what you told them, they will forget whet you did for them, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”

A winning value proposition has to appeal to your clients senses And it is the communication of this value that should lead all your communications.

If you are the cheapest, so what? “More mouth watering ribs for your shilling” If you are the best? “Once you have tasted our ribs you will never go back” Are you good value for money? “Money well spent when you dine with us” Are you convenient? “We deliver wherever you are, whenever you want”

You also need to identify a niche where you are the best and communicate your leadership, because leadership is a strong brand position to occupy in your client’s mind....

3. Invest in delivery service

It has become abudantly clear that those who invested in deliverys ervice came off better off than those who just sat in their shops and waited for the odd person to stop by.

If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain the mountain will have to come to Mohammed.

Getting an app that is readily available on your clients phone can be the difference between life and death in the new world. In our lock down we were looking for convenience since we didnt have our cars or we could ride a boda to the shops.

Guess what we not going to drop delivery services immediately after we are let loose. Expect that home deliveries will be more prevalent in coming days and if you are notin the game it will compromise your business capacity to bounce back.

If you snooze you lose.

I know your most pressing needs coming out of the lock down will be working capital, money to meet your day-to-day obligations.

Your next big urgency, which will help with that first urgency, is to get clients walking in through your door....

COMMUNICATE!

HOW TO GET PAID

So you --- like everybody else, think you are not getting paid enough. You put in the hours. You get the job done. You are top of your field. But still the money is not flowing like you had expected. In fact lesser knowledgable, lesser talented, lesser competent contemporaries are doing much better than you in terms of getting paid.

You need to fix this.

Below are three simple tips to set you on your way

1.       What is your value

If you are an employee ask yourself how do you make money for your company, boss, whatever? If you are a sales person that’s easy to point out, but what if you are a front desk officer?

Everybody employed in a company is there to help the company make money. So take a long hard look at what you do, not your job title, but what you do to help the company make money.

The aforementioned front desk officer value to the company would be in making sure that as the first line of interaction with the company’s walk in clients they have a nice, hopefully memorable experience that keep them coming back and cracking open their wallets to buy.

Her value comes from how she helps the company’s objectives.

2.       Who knows your value

Your value is not what you think it is but what the market is willing to pay for it. Be clear about this.

If you know your value you need to bring to the attention of people who recognize, will pay for that value. It does not help if you are the hottest financial analyst or litigator or bridge contractor if the people to recognize that value have no clue about your special skills.

The difference between those who get their full value and those who don’t, is communication. To get your value recognized you need to communicate it.

In this world of social media it is much easier to create awareness about your value than ever before. You can start a blog or vlog or podcast and drive traffic to it through social media instead of clapping back people and generally making a nuisance of yourself.

In a increasingly competitive world employers are on the lookout for that person who will give them the edge – serious employers at least and searching online is a good way to cut recruitment costs.

3.       Everything is negotiable

    

      A negotiation goes one way or another based on three parameters – knowledge, power and time. With a better understanding of how you can be of value to your prospective employer, knowledge you can see how to maneuver around power and time.

      Because they are the employer does not necessarily mean they have the power. You can shift the balance by being very clear about y our qualities and experience and what value you will be bringing to the table. It helps if your particular skills are widely in demand as well.   

      To be out of time could weaken your negotiating position, so the trick is not to be desperate for a quick resolution of the negotiation. Easier said than done.

      One last thing value is not static, it shifts and changes according to circumstance. You could represent value today and not tomorrow. The t rick is to keep increasing your value by keeping an eye on industry trends why continuously learning and growing your experience.

     It can be a whole thesis on how to get better paid but keep these three pointers in mind in trying to get paid.

REPUTATIONAL CAPITAL

In an earlier blog "The magic key, your personal brand" we made the point that the difference in earning power of individuals, companies and even countries depends on how they communicate what value they posses.

So you earn more than the next guy because you have built up value through years of study and experience and you have built a reputation that communicates this value to prospective employers or clients.

But there are those just as competent as yourself or even less so earning more money than you. When you drill down to why this is so you will invariably find they have been better able to communicate their value to their employers. This can be through better negotiation, building an industry wide reputation that is valued by the competition and all this above performing assigned tasks.

This is increasingly going to be the case in much more connected world.

The Ted Talk video of author Rachel Botsman illustrates/explains  the point perfectly and gives us a peek of what is coming.

Note however that she did this talk in 2012.

COMMUNICATE LIKE RICH DAD

The challenge of unlocking the  full value in ourselves, in our businesses, in our relationships,  in our assets is down to communication, or the lack of or the inadequacy of it.

In an earlier blog we made the connection that for highly competent individuals to increase the demand for their expertise or services they have to be more proficient in communication.

Look around yourself, the people who earn the top paychecks, companies that pull in the most revenues, charities that raise the most money are the ones who are the better communicators.

Unfortunately people, companies, relatives take communication for granted but don't recognize it. They blame their failures in their careers, in the markets and in their relationships to everything else but communications.

So I was glad to discover -- rediscover really, that Robert Kiyosaki, author of the wildly successful Rich Dad series put a high premium on communication.

He talks about communications although the series and it's importance in business but nowhere more emphatically than in "Rich Dad's Guide to Investing"

In the book Kiyosaki introduces the B-I Triangle in which he in a diagram shows the key elements needed for a business to succeed.

Our natural instinct is to believe that the product or service makes the business but Kiyosaki shows that the base of the business is formed on it's sense of mission, followed by cash flows and just above it is communication.

For more details on the B-I Triangle I advise you get yourself a copy of the book. I intend to stick to only the communication part of the book.

"The better at communicating you are, and the more people you communicate to, the better your cashflow will be ... The money goes to the best communicators," Kiyosaki counsels.

He says while most of struggle with sales an even greater majority struggle with marketing. He makes the distinction between the two by saying sales is what you do in person and marketing is what you do through a system.

The better your marketing system the more you sell, if you are struggling with sales look to your marketing process, which is after all about communications.

To build  brands, personal or corporate, we have to invest more in communications. Brands don't just happen. They are built and propped up by communication that is deliberate, systematic and consistent.

HOW TO MANAGE A CRISIS.... YOU DON'T!

It always makes me laugh.

This or that company has got bad press. Suddenly the phone is ringing off the hook, "What do we do?","How do we make this go away?" "Who can we talk to?"

I can imagine too, that more often than not, when tempers are still hot an official from the company has called the media house and given them a tongue-lashing, including threatening to take them to court, hang their mothers from the rafters and everything in between.

The above questions often come after things have cooled down a bit and the company is wondering what to do ... they are now in crisis management mode. By this time of course, the horse has truly bolted from the barn.

Here below are my fast and ready rules for managing a PR crisis

1. Calm down

Often times, because we are so engrossed in our own little bubble we think that the sky is going to fall around our ears. In the greater scheme of things many times, it is not as bad as it looks because one, the news is not as widespread as you think and two, if you have done your home work the people you care about you will see through the lies or brush them off as an isolated incident or never get to know about it anyway.

Take a moment. Breath. Clear your mind. Get a grip.

And most importantly don't rush into any action that may make things worse or antagonise potential allies who would help diffuse the mess.

Sadly spokesmen do the complete opposite, lash out at the media, make unnecessary calls to unrelated parties and generally make a mess of a not-so-bad situation.

      2. Who do you know?

Hopefully you have calmed down and the next thing is to make an inventory of your resources.  What is your side of the story? What are the channels you want/can use to get your story out? Who do you know in the media?

This where the rubber hits the road. If as a PR manager you have not been cultivating and nurturing your contacts in the media, chances are it will be an uphill struggle to get your side of the story out. Also because you have not been in touch you don't know how the media work and therefore how to effectively get your message out.

      3.Counter, deflect or bury your head in the sand

Believe it or not being defensive is not the only solution.

Sometimes the media has got it wrong and a robust response may be the key to shutting the whole mess down. But what happens if they have it right? Going after them hammer and tongs, hoping to intimidate them into silence or retracting their story, may backfire on you spectacularly and may very well make things worse. The smart thing would be to admit the error of your ways without admitting the error of your ways. This is often characterised by the response "We are not aware of this but we shall investigate the matter and if found to be true ...blah, blah"

And sometime silence is the best answer. With this you may judge by responding you will only raise the issues profile or that if you keep silent it may just blow over with little to no damage to the organisation.

This is the default position of many organisations but there is a real danger in this strategy. One, is that the consensus is that silence signals acceptance or guilt and secondly, nature abhors a vacuum and in this it will be filled and often than not to your detriment.

Crisis will come. That's a mathematical certainty. How you handle it will depend on how the PR department has been building the brand, maintaining relations with the media and within your company.

The truth though is that if your PR has not been deliberate,systematic and consistent up to that point the crisis may very well bury you. Good luck.

I AM THE PRO.... NOW WHAT?

So my friend was recently appointed the public relations manager of company X, lets call it Jack, Jilll & sons Ltd when it hit him that he didn't really know what he was going to do.

Which seemed strange since he had aced their interview, in an extensive and highly competitive process.

We sat down with my hyperventilating friend to chart a plan of attack for his new job and it looked something like this.

1. What's the company strategy?

The company he is set to work for has a set of strategic objectives my friend, called him Jalango, needs to acquaint himself with and commit to help achieve through his office as the brand custodian of the company.

The PR/Communications department is where the soul of the company's brand is nurtured and built before it is sent off to the marketing department to spruce up and defend with advertising.

Once he knows the strategic objectives of the company he would then be able to draw up his own communications strategy in which he would prescribe actions to achieve the the aforementioned strategies.

     2. Know your people

He was going in to head a team of three with the option to hire another person within his first year. He needed to get the measure of his people very quickly and decide how they fit in his strategy and what gap the new person would be coming in to fill.

We worked out that he needed at least one person to understand his strategy and even help in its development and if the other two were good implementors he would be off to the races. He also needed someone who would help him liaise with the media, hopefully a former media person, he was already respected in the media. It would be an added bonus if he had someone "who knows guys, who know guys" to get quickly around the organisation and the media.

    3. Touch base with your allies, enemies and everything in between

They had a PR agency under contract. He would have o go in there, share his  strategy and have a clear demarcation of responsibility. It was his responsibility to make sure they got value for money from the agency.

And then he would have to do a round of the media houses and understand house understand their workings, what they would require from him, what was feasible to expect from them and who will be his go to people -- find out their birthdays, their favourite restaurants, beers and if they were an Avenger who would they be --- that last one more important than you can imagine.

The media can make you or break the best PR man. If you think they are your enemies you would best be advised to keep them closer than your friends.

    4. Quickly who has the power?

Once we have the above sorted we would need to cover his back. Look within the company. Find out the power dynamics -- who has the power? who may have the power? who may not have the power but think they have the power? who may have the power but don't know they have the power? etc etc

This important because many companies think that the communication function is the dumping ground of those who have failed elsewhere, those who cant be sacked but have to be put somewhere eg the chairman's son or those who are in purgatory. 

Companies don't take communications seriously. It doesn't show until they are in a crisis and they have no clue how to get their message out.

To get anything done the PR man has to know the levers of power and how to work them, because communication is to important to be left to chance.

Do not leave your reputation to chance or gossip; 

it is your life’s artwork, and you must craft it, hone it, and display it with the care of an artist.

----Robert Greene