Cameron Test Bootstrap: November 2015

Marketing Tricks To Learn From Black Friday

It's BLACK FRIDAY, which means that thousands will be already up and out of the house shopping for deals by the time this post hits the web. One of the largest retail days of the year, Black Friday offers opportunities to score some really great deals. It also offers up the opportunity to recognize some key marketing tricks, which you can leverage for your business at other times of the year. Try to see if you can recognize how the most successful retailers utilize these and brainstorm how you might use them to help your own business.

Scarcity

"While supplies last." If something becomes available only in limited quantity, consumers will feel a sense that it is more urgent to buy that item. If they do not make that purchase, they might miss out on the deal. Scarcity can also be used to create a sense of exclusivity, where only a select few can obtain a particular item. Those that manage to purchase it have their status elevated by ownership.

Time Limits

You might see these listed as "Doorbusters" or some other name to reference an even more specific time limit on a deal. Perhaps a particular sale is only available from 8:00 a.m. until noon. The idea of this one inspires that same sense of urgency, but it also plays more specifically to a timing factor. Appropriate use can create sales in a specified window that might not have materialized otherwise. This also explains some of the crazy purchases that happen in auctions, like eBay, where the time pressure encourages non-standard buying behavior.

Loss Leaders

Your big discounts on Black Friday? They are probably loss leaders. While the strategy of pricing some items at incredibly low or negative margins to get people in the store to encourage additional sales generally works best at brick-and-mortar retail outlets, some online retailers with wide varieties of products have been able to successfully utilize this strategy as well.

Companion Discounts

Similar to the loss leader, this strategy specifically targets items, so that you get a discount on product A if you also purchase product B. Driving additional sales of the non-discounted product is the primary objective, allowing a more commodity item to be sold at a reduced price when purchased together. The benefit of this strategy over pure loss leaders is that you avoid consumers who only buy the discounted items, but based on the ads I got in the newspaper this week, I don't think that particularly concerns the large retailers.

Feeding Frenzy

Done right, the combination of strategies creates a mad feeding frenzy of shopping today, or whenever these strategies are effectively employed. Even if the spike in sales only affects discounted products, the sheer volume of the transactions can boost a quarter with lagging profits. And when appropriately tied to other offers, it can lift transactions across the board.

What other marketing tactics have you seen in place to drive frantic buying behavior? How could you use them to boost your business? Leave me a comment and let me know. I'd love to hear your thoughts, unless you are out shopping for the big deals right now.

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that you are able to enjoy time with family and friends and reflect momentarily on what you have that you can appreciate. We all have so many blessings and sometimes the small stresses of the world can get in the way of remembering that.

I'm thankful for my family and friends and so many other things. This year, though, I am also thankful that I have been able to share quite a bit through this site. I hope there are many more to come!

Have a happy holiday.

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Seeing The Bigger Picture

You have certainly heard the expression, "can't see the forest for the trees." The statement implies that someone focuses completely on the tactical items and has a difficulty or fault in observing the big picture.

But how can you avoid being the person having difficulty seeing the forest? What if you are the one scratching on the bark of an elm tree and telling everyone it is important? Here are some questions that can help you get to a bigger vision.

Is this part of something bigger?

This question seems like a no-brainer, but the key isn't in asking it. Rather, the key is in continuing to ask it. I got in a discussion the other day with a coworker who was talking about a project and making the claim that it was bigger than what we were discussing. I agreed, but indicated it was also bigger than what she was saying it was. My guess: it was bigger even than my description. Ask the question of whether your idea or project belongs to some higher calling repeatedly, and you should devote yourself to the larger image, not the individual objective.

Can I make it bigger?

Just because something is not already part of something bigger does not mean that you cannot ask it to be so. You might even take a few stabs at how you could make your current question part of a larger picture if it isn't. Increasing by 10%? Add a zero. Gaining some efficiencies within a department?What would it take to eliminate the department? Asking yourself to look outside your current scope helps to frame the conversation correctly.

What is preventing me from seeing a broader view?

Acknowledge that something prevents you from seeing everything at once. Got a cool mastery of your product? How is it doing outside your region? Your country? What is your limiting factor in the knowledge of viewpoint that you hold? Acknowledging that you are limited in some ways helps propel your mind beyond your own limitations. Recognize them and move on.

Sometimes, seeing a big picture helps shape the remainder of your actions around a topic.

What is your best way to deal with uncertainty?What happens when or if part of all of gets thrown together? I'd love to hear your best technique or question for kicking it up a notch.

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Where Does Your Time Go?

Have you ever reached the end of a week and thought to yourself, "Where did all of my time go?"

We've all been there. The weeks that appear to be the most busy can disappoint the most when at the end, you realize you have not accomplished anything you can recall worthwhile.

How can you command control of your time, to avoid it slipping away? Here are a few tips to keep the time from slipping through your fingers as easily as sand through an hourglass.

Know Your Time Wasters

Do you spend every free second checking email? Scrolling through your Twitter account? Binge-watching shows on the television? Take a few moments to think about what your "go to" time waster is. I know my general way to waste time involves scrolling through the piles of television recorded on the DVR. And during the day, it's compulsive email checking. But like the old cartoon commercials would inform us "The More You Know," once you have identified the culprit, you can take active steps to avoid wasting time on those activities.

Track Everything

Your calendar shows your meeting history for a week. Take a quick glance at yours. Do meetings consume more than 80% of your time? If they do, you might start taking a look there. You might also want to use that calendar for a week or so to add in what you were working on the rest of the time. Are you working on the right, most important things? Once you track what you are working on, you can identify where you might be seeing the waste.

Be Intentional

Instead of wondering at the end of the week where the time went, try planning it out in advance. Sit down with your calendar on a Sunday afternoon or Monday morning and sketch out every minute of your week, including what you want to work on and when. When you intentionally plan out your timeline for the week, you control the outcome. You are no longer reacting rashly to the priority of the day. Instead, you are planning out the most important activities for your week. Be sure to schedule some time to handle those items that come up out of the blue, and some down time as well.

Your time is finite. Every minute that passes will never be available again. Hopefully these tricks can help you maximize your usage of it.

What other tricks do you have when pushing yourself and making sure you don't waste time? Shoot me a note and let me know.

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6 Tips to Engage Your Audience

You thought you had your speech worked out perfectly. The content, the cadence, and the visual aids all aligned perfectly. And yet, just a few minutes into your presentation, you start to notice a few audience members glazing over or nodding off.

How can you keep them plugged in? The good news is that you have several tools at your disposal that can help pull the audience in and keep them in. Some of them require preparation, so they might not all be an on-the-fly fix, but they can all help engage your audience.

Move Around

Audiences have a more difficult time tuning out an active speaker. Someone delivering a dry lecture from a stationary podium almost encourages the audience to ignore them. On the other hand, a mobile speaker causes the audience track their movements with their eyes which keeps them engaged with the speech as well. You can get bonus points if the setup of your venue allows you to leave the stage and move through the crowd itself.

Ask Questions

You can engage the audience directly by making them a participant. Ask them a question. Make them think. Encourage answers to be shouted out, and you have actually made your presentation into a form of conversation.

Take a Break

If things are hitting the snooze zone, your best bet may be to encourage a break, if time permits. Maybe you have been droning on too long. A quick, timed, break may result in an audience returning refreshed.

Have Playtime

Structure an activity into your presentation that requires the audience to participate, or even better, to get up and move around the room or auditorium. Then get interactive feedback on the results of the activity. Not only will the audience have an interruption that prevents them from snoozing in their chairs, but they might start to own some of the content themselves and find a higher level of buy-in to your message.

Stare-Down

You know the old trick of looking just over the audience as you speak? It may help your nerves, but it kills your audience engagement. Instead, look your audience members in the eye (don't actually stare at one member too long) as you move through the content. See if they are engaged, and let them know you appreciate their attention.

Pause

Silence can work wonders. A pause in your presentation forms a natural break. Letting the pause hang for a few seconds longer than necessary, though, can pull even the sleepiest snoozer out of drone-monotone-talk-daze to wonder why your constant verbiage has stopped. Make yourself uncomfortable with the pause for a second or two and you've probably hit the right length.

There are many other ways to engage with an audience, but these quick tips should get you started. Remember, you want your presentations to be a conversation, even if you are doing most of the talking. The body language and other cues of your listeners should be responsive feedback on their end. Take it, run with it, and get your message out there.

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What's the Most Important Thing to Work On Today?

Last week I attended a training teaching how to improve the quality of our conversations by focusing on the most important topic to discuss. Great session, to say the least, but it also got me thinking about how that hyperfocus could help in other areas. For instance, asking "What's the most important thing to work on today?" to get started in the morning.

How could you add the most value today? Which project can you have the most impact on? What one thing if you accomplish would make the day a success?

Sure, getting one thing done a day starts you on the path of my Productivity Challenge (which you can get in full by starting at the end here), but the key thought for today is to select the right thing to work on. Use these criteria to help you decide.

Can you finish it today?
Are you adding high value?
Is there anything else you could do more important or adding more value?

The selection criteria seem simple, but the process of selecting your highest value priority can daunt you. Don't let it. If you have trouble deciding between two similarly prioritized items, just pick one. Doing one important thing takes precedence over being paralyzed deciding on the thing to do.

So, what are you going to do today?

Book: The Phoenix Project

So, the latest book I checked out happened to actually be a fiction book. More accurately, it's a nonfiction walkthrough of how to transform an IT department towards DevOps concepts wrapped in a novel that pays repeated homage to The Goal, a book I read in my Operations Management class in college.

Remember, as always, links in my book posts are affiliate links and I make the smallest amount of money possible if you were to actually buy this book.

So this book (which you can buy from this lovely affiliate link: The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win) is a novel, which follows an IT leader who gets thrust into the spotlight only to find there are several problems to solve with the new organization.

Under the tutelage of a mentor who clearly loves some Lean methodology and may have read The Goal a few hundred times, the IT organization develops several DevOps capabilities and evolves to a much more efficient organization.

If you work in (or with) IT, this book is an easy read that provides (in my opinion) an accurate representation of challenges that IT faces and some potential solutions. We are actually doing a small group book study on this book at my office and it has sparked some extremely useful conversations in how we can move our IT organization forward.

I'd love to hear what you think. Go buy the book, read it, and come back and let me know your opinions. We could even start a discussion on the principles here on the site.

Happy Veteran's Day

To all that have served in the military, defending the freedoms that most of us take for granted, thank you.

I appreciate your service to our country and its citizens.

Have a wonderful Veteran's Day.

Change of Pace and an Interesting Week

If you haven't noticed, I've backed off a little from the post every single day of the business week. I'm still trying to put at least three or four things out a week. I have had some feedback that every day is a little too frequently for you guys to consume whatever I am pumping out (understood), and I have been trying to find some good time to add some words to the two books I am playing with as well.

Beyond that, schedules have been a little crazy. Last week I attended the TM Forum InFocus Catalyst conference for telecommunications industry folks and learned a good bit there. This week has a holiday in the middle for me, on which I've scheduled every contractor I could find to come do something on our house while I hope it doesn't rain so I can get some beer brewed. Monday, I am in an all day training. I also have a few other things going on the rest of the week.

With the holidays coming up, I am sitll trying to push out several items a week for you, but please understand that schedules will start to get crazy.

As always, let me know directly if you need anything and I will see if I can help. Have a great week!

What's the Scariest Thing in Business?

Last weekend, we saw little ghouls and goblins racing around the neighborhood in search of candy. As an adult, you likely weren't afraid. You probably didn't even jump when you were rewatching Halloween and Michael Myers jumped out to attack Jamie Lee Curtis.

In fact, as adults, we have conditioned ourselves to not fear imaginary and pretend villains or ghosts. We save our fear for real threats, most of which get recapped on the nightly news. But we also fear some intangibles that, in the end, boil down to one thing: a fear of failure.

Entrepreneurs extend that fear of failure to every element of their business:

"What if I don't have enough sales?"
"What if I can't deliver on my promises?"
"What if my customers don't come back?"
"What if I can't pay my bills?"
"What if we have to close the doors?"

So how can you keep from letting your fears become a prophecy? How do you prevent fear of failure from crippling you?

Ignore The Fear

First, realize that every one of those fears and questions begins with the same phrase, "What if." That phrase should scream one thing to you. The thing you fear has not come true yet. As such, you are wasting time and energy on something that has yet to pass. Wouldn't that same time and energy be better spent on growing your business? Focus on the real challenges at your doorstep. Prepare for the sale you need to close tomorrow. Finish the marketing copy for the campaign you are launching next week. Spend some quality time on product development. Do all of those things instead of worrying about and fearing things that may or may never come true.

Channel The Fear

Do you remember in The Waterboy when Henry Winkler's Coach Klein encouraged Bobby Boucher to use everyone that had ever insulted him as "Tackling Fuel?" (If you don't, it's available on YouTube) For business owners, the fear of failure can serve as your tackling fuel. Channel that fear into motivation. Run from it. Fight against it. If you're successful, you might find yourself headed to your own Bourbon Bowl.

Embrace The Fear

If you can't fully ignore your fears or channel it into your personal tackling fuel, perhaps you can and should embrace the fear. As an entrepreneur, the potential for failure has some reality to it. Whatever percentage your latest statistic shows, the reality is that many (even a majority of) small businesses still fail within the first five years. So understanding that failure may be your future reality should empower you. In fact, it should encourage you to fail faster, if that is the business's destiny, so that you can move on to your next business and next project. If you aren't certain of the failure, you can embrace the potential for failure and plan worst-case-scenario plans and contingency plans. Just don't let that consume your entire workday. Make your Plan B and move on with the business.

Whatever the underlying reasons that you fear failure, that fear only damages you when you let it hurt your business. Whether you ignore it, channel it, or embrace it, the fear cannot control you. You must find a way to work past it and maintain focus on growing your business and moving forward.

What else do you fear? How can you keep it from paralyzing you?

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Starting Anew

Starting new projects always excites me. The potential that the new project has to be something great, the allure of learning along the way, and the anticipation of change from whatever path I had been previously walking all give a thrilling boost of confidence to the beginning of a new challenge.

Somewhere along the way, the shiny newness fades and the project transforms into real work. At that point, you may be tempted most strongly to abandon the project and start another new initiative. Doing so only guarantees that you fail to finish the first project.

The middle is the most important part. In the middle, you press on against the odds, against your judgement, against the fear of failure, and you move closer, inch by inch, towards the end.

You will know you are at the end when everything feels like it races downhill towards the finish line. You can not only see the end in sight, but you can see the end growing closer and closer, and more inevitable than ever.

Then, you can start something new.