Why Blog? 5 reasons why you should start blogging.

Sure, lot's of people are doing it. But why?

Why would YOU want to set up a blog? As a consultant or a professional, Why would you do it? Is there really any point or is all hype? How can a blog help you with marketing or business development?

Well:

1) VISIBILTY. Your business success depends on your credibility and visibility. Publishing a blog gives you the opportunity to raise your profile and to demonstrate your knowledge. For many people, a blog is a very important part of their marketing strategy.

2) RELATIONSHIPS. The first person written voice of a blog communicates very directly with your audience. Your business isn't transactional - it's relationship based. Posting a blog gives your website a face, and a voice. It gives your clients and prospects a chance to experience the real you. From a business development perspective you're trying to build a relationship with your prospective clients before you even think about trying to 'sell' them anything.

3) SHARED EXPERIENCES. Your readers can post comments. It can become a two way dialogue. You can stimulate discussion and provide an opportunity for both you and your readers to learn something new.

4) INFORMALITY. Sometimes you want to put a thought out there, that has no place in a presentation, or in an article or white paper.

5) CONTENT. Perhaps in the future you'd like to publish a book, or at least some articles. Writing content for your blog can provide material that you can build on later on. It also allows you to find out which subjects are the most interesting for your readers and to get some feedback. It also establishes a habit of writing on a regular basis. Personally, I find it helps me to develop thoughts that are sometimes floating around in my head, and turn them into to something more concrete and useful.

How to have the latest news about your clients delivered to you for free.

It's important to keep up with news about, or relevant to your clients, but who has time? Life is difficult enough without searching for this sort of thing on a regular basis. But what if you could get a newspaper that just contained news about your clients? And what if was free? Would that help you?

Here's a way that you can put together your own, free, personalised 'news aggregation' service, tailored just for you. You can set the whole thing up in less than half an hour, and it's Google we can thank for providing all the tools that we need.

1. Set yourself up with a Google Reader account. If you're familiar with using RSS feeds, then you can use whatever tool you want, but if you're not, this is a great place to start.

2. Browse your way over to Google News, and search for news about your clients or your market sector. On the 'results' page you'll see the words "RSS | Atom" feeds. Click on one of them (doesn't really matter which), and you'll be taken to a new page. Provided that you're logged in with your Google Reader account already, you'll see a button at the top of the page - "subscribe to this page". Go ahead and do it, then do another news search for a different client and repeat the process. Your Google Reader account will now contain all the feeds that you've set up so that you can catch up on all the latest news in one place.

You can also 'share' items that you find interesting on a public page. So you could even have someone in your company read through all the news everyday and flag up the interesting items to go onto the public page for everyone else to read.

Enjoy!

In a post coming soon, for the more technically advanced of you, I'll show you a way to filter these feeds and join them together using Yahoo Pipes so that you can be even more efficient.

By the way, you can subscribe to this blog as an RSS feed as well - just click on this link: http://www.bullfrey.com/blog/atom.xml

Increase your Sales and Marketing effectiveness with these books

I've just updated the 'Bullfrey Bookstore', adding some new books and some short reviews. The only books that end up in the 'Books on my bookshelf...' section are books that I've read and would have no hesitation in recommending. There's quite a few sales and marketing books out there that haven't made it into there! Click here to see the ones that have!

Do you still use handwritten notes?

Typing while talking to someone is socially awkward - and certainly not something I would consider doing during a client meeting. It's also not the greatest way to capture a mixture of notes, diagrams, arrows joining up thoughts and so on.

So what do most of us still end up doing? Use handwritten notes in a notebook. Are there any alternatives? Well there's always a tablet PC, but I don't see this as being that much better than typing on a laptop. It's still a little bit of a performance to pull it out and start notetaking.

I stumbled across this the other day, the Logitech io2 Digital Pen.

For those of you who like to keep things simple. It's basically just a pen. It works, well... just like a pen. But it captures your writing and doodles (up to forty pages worth), and you can synchronise it with your computer later, so that you can add the notes to client records etc. Much better than having to spend time searching back through your notebook for an important bit of information. Add to that handwriting recognition software and you're seriously in business.

For round about £90 quid on Amazon, you might consider it to be a very expensive pen, or perhaps a very reasonably priced way to keep yourself that little bit better organised in 2007...

As with everthing in life, there is a catch however - the pen only works with special paper. But the paper is fortunately reasonably priced and comes in a variety of familiar formats, including "Black 'n Red" notebooks.

Managing Email

If your business has less than fifty employees, or if it's just you on your own, what's the best way to manage your email?

Well, I very recently reviewed all the possibilities as I was working out how to deal with the email for Bullfrey.com, and I thought you might find some of that research useful.

I wanted a system that would meet the following requirements:

Be available offline so that I could review old email and write new ones when I wasn't able to access the Internet.

Be available online through a web browser so that I could access it from any computer anywhere - and not just current unread email, all of my old email as well.

Be accessible via a mobile device.

Be very good at filtering out spam.

Not cost the earth.

The options that I considered were:

Download all my email from a POP3 server that also has web mail capability. This is what I used initially, but of course as soon as you download an email, it's no longer available online. Workable, but not too great.

Host your own email server with MS Exchange. Well, first of all you have to buy a copy of MS exchange (££), and more importantly, you need a computer that is always switched on, has a very reliable Internet connection, and have a backup strategy. A whole lot of money, and a whole lot of work. Not very appealing.

Host your own email server with Open Source technologies. As above, but no software license costs. Still a huge pain in the butt though.

Use a hosted MS Exchange Service. All the advantage of an Exchange server for a reasonable monthly fee. I was seriously considering this, until my friend Camille told me about:

Google Apps for domains.

You can set it up to receive all the email to your domain, and you can have anything up to 50 user accounts with different addresses. Each account has 2 GB of storage, and you can download it with POP3 for offline access. Anything that you send from Outlook is also stored online.

It took a little while to adjust to the user interface online, but once I did - wow. I love it. I rarely use my desktop email client anymore. I don't get any spam. It just works and I don't have to think about it. I still download all of my email, so that I have a copy of it should anything go wrong with the service, and I can switch back to my old system using POP3 within minutes if I really need to in case their system collapses (which is unlikely - something tells me that their infrastructure is probably more robust that mine!).

I also love the online calendar, which allows me to bring in other people's calenders and show them on mine, and also publish selected calendars (e.g. course dates) publicly if I want to.

How much does it cost? Well at the moment it costs nothing, which is pretty good value.

Introductions

Your 10 second introduction, your 30 second personal advertisement, the elevator pitch. Everyone trying to drum business needs to be able to tell people what they do in as concise and informative a way as possible.

Instead of theorising in this post, I'm just doing. So here's mine:

"My name is Richard Grant, no relation to the famous one, and I help consultants and professional services firms to sell. My company is called Bullfrey Limited."

By referencing "the famous one" I'm hoping to create an image in people's minds that they can anchor me to and remember my name. I then identify my target market and what it is that I do. Finally I give the name of my company.

With a whole 30 seconds to play with, I have the opportunity to build on this:

"My name is Richard Grant, no relation to the famous one, and I help consultants and professional services firms to sell. My company is called Bullfrey Limited.

How I do this is by improving your business development tactics and also, more importantly, help you to implement them in the context of your business, through coaching, mentoring and if necessary, rolling up my sleeves and doing it. I specialise in working with consultants and professional services firms.

If you’d like to do a little self-analysis, on my website you’ll find an interactive ‘sales problem diagnosis’ tool that might help you get started. The address is www.bullfrey.com (as in "bullshit free", but with a y at the end), and if you’d like to have an informal chat about what that turns up, give me a call, I'd love to hear from you."

I started off by telling you who I am and what I do and who for. Now I've had the opportunity to tell you a little bit about how I do it, and again re-iterate who I do it for. Finally, I have a call to action, directing you to a tool on my website that I hope will provide standalone value to you. If having used it to decide you could use some help, the tool provides a useful starting point for that conversation and let's me get straight into talking about how I could add value to your organisation with my service.

How could it be improved? Well, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Already I think that it could be improved by citing an example (relevant to the audience) of something I've done that demonstrates a tangible and relevant result. Pitches like this evolve over time and it's something that I'll keep working on.