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Building a Great Team with Rapport

Friday, July 9th, 2010

Hiring – especially for the first time – can be one of the scariest moves as an entrepreneur. Rapport currently has nine crew on top of me, and the dog. I’ve had a lot of experience with this and, though was lucky to find really great people, learned a few things along the way.

This is one of the top things other entrepreneurs ask me for advice on. My top tips are:

  • Try prospects out on a project or two before committing.
  • Define the need/position first, then find the right person.
  • Personality and ‘fit’ into culture is as important as skill.
  • Be open to them doing things differently then you and let them shine.

Try People as Freelancers Before Hiring

My very first hire was Art Director Lisa, who is still with me today. I absolutely could not have built the company without her. I was fortunate to work on a project with her old boss and friend of mine Mondo Lulu, and got to know her through him. Then, as he started scaling back she began freelancing for me. I knew her design style, her work ethic, that her strengths complemented mine, and that we got along like old friends. My only hesitation hiring her full-time was sustaining her pay. When I had the need with a large project and knew I could keep her busy for three months I asked her to come full time – that was six years ago.

Since then I’ve been fortunate enough to try most people out on a contract basis before making a commitment. Not just to see the quality of their work, but to get a taste of their working style and personality. If it doesn’t work out, it’s tough on both sides, so this is a really great way to try each other on for size.

What Kind of Help Do You Really Need?

My second hire was a newborn designer, and a big mistake. I was still doing all the admin work myself and felt I didn’t have enough time to do all that and my design work. I thought I needed another designer and the recent grad was cheap. I found I still didn’t have time to get anything done and was also now babysitting this kid. So, I let him go and hired an administrative person. Pamela was a God-send. This was my first pure overhead employee – unlike Lisa who generated revenue. But, Pamela took the work I liked least off my shoulders, did it better than me and freed me up to do what I was really good at and made good money for.

Besides hiring for the wrong role, it’s also a mistake to hammer a job around someone you ‘like’. I now determine what roles we really need to fill against goals for the company, then create detailed job descriptions around them to use in my search.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of the Culture You’ve Built

Our team recently did a colours test with our business consultants, Your Planning Partners. Seven out of 10 came in as blue or the ‘Relationship Way’ first. We varied on what came second (Action, Organized, Logical), and that was reflected in skills and roles. What it told me was the team strongly embodied the Rapport values of being laid-back, friendly, relationship-oriented, client-focussed and a close family that got us our name. This culture started with me, gained momentum with early people like Lisa, and continues today in the people we attract. Skills in relation to the role you’re filling are incredibly important, but if a really talented person doesn’t fit our friendly, collaborative culture they don’t belong at Rapport.

It’s important to have more than one of you meet with prospects. From a practical standpoint, I had Senior Web Developer Noel, do initial interviews with junior web developer prospects to make sure he had the skills needed. Then I met the recommended finalists to make sure they fit in and talk money. We added the ‘social interview’ with new guy Nick, where he joined the crew for drinks to get everyone’s feel for him. We are a very social bunch, and it’s a very big deal day after day if someone just doesn’t fit in socially. I think I’ll continue that tradition.

Define Your Values, Be Open to New Things

There is always more than one way to skin a cat. I find this most evident with web developers as their logical nature means they always question the way the other guy did it. But, it’s the same with design, processes and which way the toilet paper goes on. It’s important to define the standards expected for the end result as well as the practical processes that run the business, than make these consistent across the board. However, you’ve hired people to complement what you do, let them. This may mean everything from different journeys to great design, to suggestions that improve workflow.

We’ve defined our vision, mission and values, which I share with the company repeatedly. Resulting details include things like design and web standards, or the project management process we’ve developed. The key is sharing it with the whole team, getting their input, then giving them flexibility within to do their thing.

This makes for a much stronger and more dedicated team than if I insisted everything was done my way.

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Posted in Building Rapport, Business Growth and Change, Never Stop Learning, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Why B2Bs Should Care About Optimization (SEO)

Friday, June 18th, 2010

Should I care about Search Engine Optimization for my B2B company? The answer is yes.

In recent years many clients have come to us with search engine optimization (SEO) as an item in RFP for websites. Once they see what it takes to really make a go of it, to compete for first page, they’re turned off. They think it is not important or relevant to their business after-all, or at least not enough to pay so much. ‘We’re B2b, we provide a professional service, not sell products. People find us through word-of-mouth, not Google.’ I used to feel that way myself, but now I’m a convert.

Social media has created reasons to care about SEO from both ends of the spectrum.

First, because we all know how much user generated content, blogs, review sites are out there, more and more people are using search to find information or do research. When you search you are most likely to land on a blog or such like. If you generate content, people will find it.

Second and from the other end, social media has made it easy for companies to create opportunities for their brilliant content to be found in search, by writing blogs, participating in other blogs or discussions, having key people involved and hopefully active on sites like LinkedIn and Twitter – which all leads back to your company site.

Two sides to Social Media

There’s the literal driving people to your site, but those link-backs to your site also tell Google you’re important and socially active.

There are a number of things Google evaluates to rank your site; like in-bound links, conversion forms, alt text for images, blogs, meta descriptions, etc. They change the algorithms all the time but recently made a higher than usual significant change placing importance on social relevancy. Do you have an active Twitter account associated with your domain? Etcetera.
So what this means is, it’s not hard to build a website with good search-ability right from the start, like conversion forms, alt text for images, meta descriptions, etc. but then why not use social media to generate the content to be found? Google is a hungry beast, give it something to gorge on.

By the way, I learned a lot of this stuff from brilliant Smojoe, who we hire to help Rapport clients learn to make that content more findable and use social media for search with really different and interesting campaigns.

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Posted in All-inclusive Marketing, Business Growth and Change, Uncategorized, Web Development | No Comments »

Marketing To Women. Contrary To Popular Male Belief, There Really Is A Difference

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

One of our clients has decided that they would like to do a campaign that targets women. As a man who professes to be in touch with the feminine psyche, (with female partners in and aside from business), my assumption was that I would not find all that much of a difference between marketing to men and women.

But the question of what the differences actually could be was intriguing so I decided do a little digging on the good old world wide web.

Now you have to be careful when you research anything on the web, because it is the great equalizer when it comes to information, and it’s really hard to separate the political agendas from the honest information, especially with issues like this. But like anything in life, if you dig around enough, you will start to see patterns of opinion.

Rather than bore you with the longer version of the results I found, I have distilled this research down to what I call “The 10 Commandments of Marketing To Women.”

What you will hopefully find as you read through it is that there is a high level of interconnectivity between all of these characteristics, which is not something you can always observe in men.

Here they are, in my opinion, the 10 most important things to keep in mind when marketing to women.

  1. Women Are Focused On Connections: They look for similarities as opposed to points of difference. They focus on creating cooperation, good relationships and ways to help each other.
  2. Women Trust Common Experience, as opposed to men who tend to put more faith in authority. The reason for this is that men think vertically as in hierarchies whereas women tend to think laterally as in common ground or level playing fields, where everyone can benefit.
  3. Women Prefer Win/Win Situations, as opposed to men who think win/lose. That is not to say they are less competitive than men, just competitive in a different way.
  4. Women Plan Ahead To Avoid Negative Outcomes. As a result women tend to be better long term thinkers and planners.
  5. Women Put More Time And Research Into Their Decisions. This means that if you are marketing to them, you are obliged to do a very thorough job of communicating information to them, as they will take it all into account.
  6. Women Are More Loyal To Those With Whom They Do Business. This has to do with the fact that women are simply much more confident in their decisions, whereas with men, not so much.
  7. Women Refer More Often Than Men. This is an adjunct to 6. It’s a lot easier for women to be good and frequent referrers, because they are more confident in the decisions they make in the first place and because it is more in their communal nature to recommend products and services they are happy with to others.
  8. Women Are Much More No-Nonsense Than Men. If a woman has an objection to something, she will tell you about it and expect you to address it immediately. She is a big believer in testimonials, as opposed to marketing hyperbole because she has highly developed B/S meter.
  9. Women Prefer Stories Not Facts. To women, stories are more memorable than features and benefits. She will relate stronger to stories involving people’s experiences with your product or service. This makes an emotional connection that can motivate them to take action. This means that things like testimonials and product reviews are something they will take a good deal of interest in.
  10. Women Believe That Quantity Is Not Quality. Women tend to look at just about everything in their lives from a qualitative perspective. Quality of life. Quality of service. Quality of products. Quality of experience.

A Wisened Man’s Perspective

Now being a man writing this post naturally puts me at a disadvantage. Because on the one hand, you could look at the aforementioned things to keep in mind when marketing to women and think, well OK, that’s the man’s point of view.

But then I would have to politely correct you because the sources I used to derive this list all come from blogs and web sites that are run by women. Just wanted to clarify that point.

Now if you’re a woman out there reading this, very little here is going to come as a surprise. But if you’re a man, most of this is quite a revelation…at least it was to me. It might be worth reading a couple of times, and seeing if there aren’t some things we men could do to be more like women. Maybe then the world would be less of a ‘dog eat dog’ place than it is now.

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Posted in All-inclusive Marketing, Big World Marketing, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Marketing Map Talk and AIP

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

Last week I did my Marketing Map seminar for the Toronto chapter of the Association of Independent Professionals – AIP. Donna Papacosta interviewed me after and posted a podcast online.

AIP Interview with Faith Seekings and Donna Papacosta

I’m very pleased how well received and very rewarding considering they are all communications professionals. Even though they’re in similar businesses, the Rapport Marketing Map gave them a new way to look at the time and money they are spending on marketing efforts. They said they found it useful for themselves and see how it can benefit their clients too. Due to time limits, we focused on developing the map itself.

The Marketing Map Basics

I’ve described how to do this before, but essentially: you start by determining the thing you want people to do that usually leads to a sale (ie: call for a consultation or fill out a discovery form). Then, with this thing at the centre, you plot out all the different marketing tools you use and see how well they all work together. Don’t forget these tools are not only your business card and website, but any public-facing, company representing interaction like how you introduce yourself, your blog and your team members.

Top Three Points

You would review your tools for consistency: look, feel, messaging, etc. Then, how well they lead to each other: a dead end tool such as a piece of swag with no URL on it is a waste of money if it doesn’t lead to the something else. Then finally, how well your tools lead people to take action we defined, that’s at the centre. You’d be surprised how many companies don’t tell prospects how to do business with them, what to do next. There are often small, easy changes that can correct any gaps you see after you look at your tools this way. When they all work well together, each has more value and better ROI.

This isn’t meant to replace a marketing plan, but it’s a great way to make sure your marketing budget is working as hard as it can.

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