Turn Employees into Raving Advocates

How fantastic would it be for your future business revenue, if every one of your employees was a raving advocate for yourself, your business, and the products or services you offer to the market?

It is not hard to see that a concerted effort, to encourage all of your employees to raving advocates rather than just wage slaves, is clearly in your best interests.

What is difficult to understand, is why so few businesses have ever managed to succeed, in achieving such an optimum outcome.

Because it is an impossible task, I hear you mutter!

Not really.

It can be achieved, but only if you decide to make the challenge of turning all of your employees into raving ambassadors, a key focus for your business strategy over the next 12 to 18 months, and you are willing, and able to lead from the front, to make sure it happens.

If you are up to the challenge, the first thing you need to do is to change your own thinking and make absolutely sure that you acknowledge to yourself, and then accept, that you have the right to expect your employees to bring business into your enterprise from their own personal networks, and also through their advocacy of your business in their own, outside working hours, interactions with others.

It is a fair assumption that the majority of your employees (for whom you sign the pay cheques and who, in the main, are dependent on this income) will, in the right circumstances, under the right conditioning, and responding to effective management, be willing to meet your reasonable expectations as to the personal contribution required from them, to help your business grow and prosper.

Obviously, if you don’t currently have any level of expectation in respect to employee advocacy of your business, you won’t have any systems, policies and processes in place to encourage, reward, direct and manage employee activity in this arena.

Therefore, if you want the rewards which flow from having a team of raving advocates on your payroll, you will need a lot more than just rhetoric, to achieve ultimate success.

A very comprehensive and complex book could be written on the subject of how to get your employees to adopt your business as their own and become its raving advocates, so this article will only attempt to point you in the right direction, and suggest a few of the steps which will most likely need to be taken, to deliver the desired outcome.

An understanding of the Sphere of Influence is a good starting point. Basically it is said that the average adult in the workforce has a personal sphere of influence (to varying degrees) over approximately 200 people. Multiply this by the number of employees in your business, and you will quickly see the tremendous potential for your business to greatly increase its own sphere of influence, by tapping into each employee’s network.

In addition to people already in employee’s networks, the majority of employees through community activities, sporting pursuits, entertainment choices etc, interact every year with hundreds of people they have not previously met, providing you with great opportunities to help them to help you, by tailoring their answers to the age old questions; Who do you work for? What are they like to work for? What do they actually do?

You can also assist your employees to help you by providing them with scripted conversation starters to open up more opportunities for them to be asked these questions.

So how do you get all of your employees onboard with your challenge to turn them into raving advocates for your business?

The first step is to communicate that you regard each employee as an extension of yourself and, regardless of their individual roles, your expectation of each employee is that they will personally make an ongoing, and measurable contribution, to introducing new business to your enterprise.

The next step is to communicate to your employees the benefits to the business if they all meet your expectations, and ask them to tell you what it would take collectively, and individually, for them to become raving advocates.

You may get a surprise as to some of the answers you receive, and if you strike initial reticence, the following list can be used to generate possibilities;

a)      Group rewards if new business generated through employee activities meets minimum targets ie; Bigger, better Christmas Party in a fantastic location.

b)      Individual rewards for those who exceed expectations by wide margins ie; pay increase or bonuses.

c)       Training programs during work hours to prepare employees for the role of raving advocate and to enhance their understanding of the importance of this role to the ongoing success of your business ie; networking skills training.

d)      Special discounts on company products or services for both employees who embrace the raving advocate role, and those whom they introduce to your business.

e)      Allow employees to develop a clear Unique Selling Proposition for your product or service that they can identify with, and which they can also easily articulate.

f)       Profiling individual employees in the company newsletter along with photos of them with new customers/clients they have introduced to the business.

g)      Allow employees a key role in building a Facebook fan page for your business and allow them ongoing participation in this endeavour.

h)      Allow employees to host seminars for their own contacts to learn about company products or services and provide everything needed to ensure each seminar is successful.

i)        Let employees have a degree of control over their work environment and give them the tools they identify as being necessary to turn them into raving advocates; ie free or discounted wireless broadband modem with shaped and limited data allowance for home use, for the purpose of promoting your business through their own social media activities.

j)        Set up an employee run (perhaps management moderated) blog for your business where employees can blog to their hearts content about you, your business, your products/services and anything else that those subscribing to the blog are interested in and will engage with your business as a consequence of that interest

k)      Allow time of in lieu of approved, after hours endeavours, by employees at networking events, seminars and presentations they make to their contacts on behalf of your business.

l)        Throw and end of month party each month for all employees and use it as an informal forum to thank all contributors, single out exceptional efforts for specific praise or monthly awards, and reinforce expectations.

m)    Provide sought after privileges ie; a car parking spot to the employee(s) deemed to have supported to the highest degree the role of raving advocate over a specific period, and allow them the use of the privilege until the end of the next review period.

n)      Agree to review company policies, rules and procedures to remove barriers which may prevent employees wanting to embrace the company as a raving advocate.

o)      Make it clear that any managers who themselves become roadblocks or discourage employees in any way from being willing to be raving advocates of the business, through their actions or inactions, will not have a long term future in the business.

p)      Agree to build appropriate systems and develop the relevant policy and procedures to ensure that raving advocacy by employees becomes the way we do business around here, ie; effect and embed the change in business culture which must happen, and

q)      Anything else you can think of to facilitate the change you require in your employees.

The next step is to decide on the actual expectation level that you will apply and ensure that you get employee agreement that this is a realistic expectation relative to employee’s wages/ salaries and the trade-offs conceded to encourage them to become your raving advocates.

Once this critical agreement is reached, the next step is to decide on and create the necessary systems, policies and procedures that will embed the activity, as a key component of your operations, and provide the framework for effectively managing the process.

The steps which follow will be the steps needed to implement decisions made, monitor progress, review outcomes, moderate expectations if required, and respond to feedback from the employees themselves.

There will be of course many more things that you could do and probably will need to do to create the ultimate sales machine for your business, but to achieve success, you will need to play the role of idea champion, and make this endeavour one of your key priorities.

Can you clearly see the benefit of creating an army of raving advocates out of your employees?

What do you estimate to be the ROI you might achieve from allocating your time and the resources available to you to deploy this army?

Are you up to the challenge?

Posted via web from Unique Insights

Is Social Media Sucking your Business Dry?

Being blissfully unaware of the entire social media landscape before embracing LinkedIn about two years ago, and then branching out over the last six months or so to embrace facebook, twitter, blogger, instant messaging, web-based e-mail and the like, I had no idea of the amount of time, that active participants in this so-called social media age, must commit to remain active and relative to their audiences.

As a management consultant, I am now concerned for all business owners who have employees with direct and unfettered internet access, and who do not employ an IT manager, or have a very good understanding themselves, of the social media landscape.
  
My concern stems from the fact that even with an IT manager or a good understanding of social media, it is far from an easy task to determine the extent to which company time and resources are being misappropriated through the private social media activities undertaken by employees.

Without one, or both of these elements, at your disposal to stem systematic abuse, your business profitability, is at the mercy of your employees.

Apart from the time such private activities can suck out of any business day, there is also the cost of bandwidth effectively stolen from your business and used to download music, movies, video clips etc to ipods, mobile telephones, flash drives and the like, for private use (the fact that such devices can also be used to download and steal business data, is a separate issue all together).

Those of you with wireless capabilities enabled in your business premises may, to your cost, find that employees and their friends are accessing your internet connection for downloads after hours, via smart phones or laptops operated from cars parked within range of your business broadband signal.

The critical danger will be where you have one, or more employees, who develop an addiction to social media activities. There are already terms such as Facebook addict, Twitter addict, and Social Media Whore, being bandied about on the internet, with some users applying these labels to themselves.

Don’t just think that it won’t affect any of your employees, and remember that it is not only the young, that are heavily into social media. You need to develop a real awareness of the dangers both financial, and potentially legal, of providing unfettered internet access to your employees. 

Remember that if you feed an addiction, it will only get worse.

As with gambling, alcohol, and illicit drug addicts, it is ultimately a downhill spiral, with the employer bearing the brunt of the collateral damage, and ultimately paying a high price, before eventually needing to dismiss the errant employee.

Don’t think social media is a passing fad. If you have lived in blissful ignorance like myself until recently, you are about to be hit by a fundamental change in the way in which the world communicates and transacts.

I am old enough to have commenced work before mainframe computing impacted on the workplace, and well before personal computers were thought of, and certainly many years before that other supposed passing fad, the internet, was available to the masses.

I have no doubt that unauthorised social media activities by employees are going to become a large and problematic issue for small business owners, especially those not equipped to fully understand, much less handle, the risks inherent in this growing problem.

Do you know just how much time your employees spend on unauthorised social media activities during working hours?

Would you have any idea if any of your employees are social media addicts?

Do you understand that this is an issue that you can ignore, but only at your own peril?

Posted via web from Unique Insights

Blogging is Tough Going for Business Owners

Writing and posting a regular business blog is seen by many as an efficient and cost effective way to promote your business expertise and your business brand.  It is also now seen as an integral element of a necessary social media strategy, one that businesses that continue to ignore embracing, do so at their own peril.

Whilst it may be correct to say that doing it yourself is an efficient and cost effective means of blogging, this statement relates to an ideal world, and the reality will be far from this for most business owners, who will generally be far from efficient and effective at this multi-faceted task.  

Unless you possess a fantastic skill set, have a great handle on the language and its nuances, can find the time and the clear headspace to do the writing task properly, and you can then be disciplined enough to publish and promote your blog on a consistent and regular cycle, I would suggest you save yourself a lot of pain, and look at your alternatives.

As a first time blogger, with no previous experience at all of blogging, twittering, and face booking (if that is the right term), it has been a tough ongoing assignment for me to establish a blogging platform, choose topics to blog about, write and edit same, publish and promote each blog, and monitor the statistics to see who was reading them, where the readers are located, and how they accessed each blog.

Having said that, this article is the twenty-fifth consecutive, weekly business blog, that I have authored and posted to the "Unique Insights" Blog Site, and it will be the last for this year. Along this short journey, the Blog Site was awarded a Top 100 Business Blog Award, and it is now consistently read by business owners in over 35 countries, each week.

My experience over this last six months, tells me that the discipline required, the brain power necessary, the creativity that needed to be found, the understanding of audience needs that must be developed, as well as the ability to continually maintain a high level of enthusiasm, will mount a serious challenge to most business owners wanting to do it all themselves.

As a management consultant, I felt it was necessary for me to experience exactly what a business owning client would go through, if I was to recommend to them, that they promote themselves and their business, via a blog that they needed to write and publish themselves.  This was the driver that sustained me through my first six months of blogging, and without this driver, it would have been difficult to maintain the momentum.

Following my own personal experience, my recommendation to any business owner thinking of doing it themselves, would be to outsource the majority of the heavy lifting that is involved, and just play the key roles of idea generator and final editor.

However, before embarking down this path, I would strongly suggest all business owners need to be absolutely clear on what outcomes they expect to achieve from blogging, at what cost, and by when, so that they can adequately brief anyone they engage, and have a way of measuring return on investment, so that they can stop the activity if it is not delivering to expectations.

 Will I continue blogging, yes I will, as I have now gone through the pain of acquiring the required skills and have caught the bug. However, commencing with this article, and for all future articles, I will be posting via e-mail through Posterous (which I have just discovered and recommend anyone just starting out blogging should investigate) to my own domain, rather than via Blogger at the Blogspot domain.

Will your business have a social media strategy in place for 2010?

Will a blog site be part of your social media strategy if you adopt one?

Will you outsource the heavy lifting and stay focussed on areas where your strengths lie?

As this is my last article for 2009, I would like to wish all of my subscribers and casual readers, a happy festive season and a happy, healthy and prosperous year in 2010.

Posted via web from Unique Insights