Your website is all about one thing: Getting and Keeping the Attention of your prospects and customers. Causing them to pursue you, instead of you hunting them down. Being certain that every dollar you invest in advertising and marketing comes back to you with friends attached.
Cintas is probably the current, biggest news making the rounds in the records management industry these days. I felt like I should get the official word from them on what their direction was. Here is what I could get from Karen Carnahan, Cintas vice president and treasurer. She was clear that their strategy is not something they wish to share, but here is what she was willing to say.
Cintas’ latest and only acquisition is Cincinnati-based Data Storage Centers, which provides document storage services as well as a full range of related service offerings including media vault, imaging and destruction. Cintas has made a number of other acquisitions in the destruction area over the past few years. The most recent was the acquisition of Franklin, Ohio-based Erth, a document-shredding company, early last year. Included in that deal was a Centerville processing plant. Cintas now has mobile and plant based operations in 12 locations.
Cintas is in the process of determining if these two business focus areas fit within the corporate core competencies. Beyond that, neither Karen or Mike Gaburo, VP Corporate Development had much more to say.
I do know this… the Cintas team was involved in a lot of meetings at the PRISM/NAID conference. I suspect that if that is the case they are looking to buy more records or destruction companies.
The input of an advisory board can be invaluable to the success of your business–and you don’t have to run a Fortune 500 company to benefit. An advisory board can become your strongest ally, your eyes and ears, and guides. Every single record center, vault company or destruction company should have one, and if you don’t get one going as soon as you can.
How do I do it?
The first step is to establish both your company and personal goals. Take stock of what resources you have at your disposal and what’s needed to achieve your goals.
The second step is to define what attributes you’re looking for in your Board members. There are many traits to take into consideration, including character, availability, experience, knowledge, chemistry, contacts, mentoring skills and many, many more. Be cautious of having staff or family involved. This advisory group is a professional group. All interaction from the group will have to be taken back and interfaced in an operational way.
The third step is to determine the size of Board you desire. Larger Boards obviously have the ability to draw on a wider range of attributes, while smaller Boards are more manageable and therefore, easier to organize. I know some companies that have a couple of them. It does cost, but look at the value you recieve.
The fourth step is to actually request people to be on your board. It can be a simple request right up to a formal proposal.
What Next?
I encourage you to meet 3-4 times per year. Make it a formal event versus an informal one. Get your board to prepare for the meetings. Send them everything– financials, issues, problems. Let them use their experience and perspective to guide you.
How Do I Pay an Advisor?
Stick with tried-and-true cash! I would suggest $1,000 to $1,500 plus a meeting, depending on the time commitment and the level of inconvenience to your advisor. Or some companies choose to provide compensation in the form of trade. Others just buy a great meal at a great steak house and give a gift. Be sure to have an agreement about expectations on remuneration beforehand from those who want to work with you.
Is it worth it?
Try it and see!
Making contact with a new customer is just like starting that car. And if you sell new methods, new technologies, new ways of doing things — moving too fast stalls the process.
These are the gears of the RIM services sale:
-First gear: The customer agrees with you on what the problem itself is. If you sell records storage and management solutions, your customer must acknowledge that he’s got an records management problem.
(I would submit to you that for most sales people, this is the most difficult step in the process: They spend most of their time just looking for people who agree that there is a problem that needs to be solved!)-Second gear: The customer agrees on the “generic” solution to the problem. He agrees that the *right* records management vendor could, in fact, solve his problem.
-Third gear: The customer recognizes the value of your *specific* solution to his problem. Your records management service provides all of the things that are important to him; it makes his life more efficient, he has ability to manage his inventory via the internet, and fits within his budget.
-Fourth gear: The customer knows you, likes you and trusts you, he is persuaded that you will do what you say you’re going to do and he’s willing to risk his career credibility (maybe even his job) by signing a contract with you.
Now let’s talk about how most companies screw this up. A politically incorrect but nevertheless truthful analysis of what’s going on out there:
1) Sales people spend 90% of their time in first and second gear. This is a HUGE waste of time and resources.
The goal is the complete AUTOMATION of first and second gear. First and second can run on autopilot in almost any business, freeing the sales person to go 50mph instead of 15 mph.2) Generation Gap: There is a “Generation X” paradigm of selling that’s much different from the old “BabyB oomer” version. GenX maintains a personal ’space’ that requires permission to enter. So the GenX sales person looks for creative ways to engage the customer. But often the older sales manager thinks that’s a waste of time. He says “Hey, are you a wuss or something? Just get out there and sell!” Don’t get me wrong - I am not in any way putting down baby boomers or older people or whatever. In fact most of the people whose work I really admire today are 15 to 40 years older than me. I study them diligently; it’s a tragedy that older people are ignored today, and that the lessons of history are overlooked in favor of the latest fashion. Nevertheless many people have not caught on to the fact that selling today is much, much different than it was 15 or 25 or 40 years ago. It’s a new game.
3) Advertising and marketing is all about first and second gear, but companies rarely put first- and second-gear messages in their advertisements. Let’s look at this for a second: If first gear is agreement that there IS a problem, then advertising should be specifically and deliberately designed to identify prospects who have a particular problem to solve. Nothing else. Pick up any magazine or newspaper or look at almost any website, and the ads you see all talk about third- and fourth- gear issues. Their ads extol the virtues of a fantastic product, but the person reading the magazine doesn’t even agree on what the problem is yet. This is a HUGE waste of money.
True Lead Generation Advertising focuses on first and second gear ONLY, and leaves the product pitch for later steps. When you design it that way, you literally get TEN TIMES the response. I’m not kidding. That’s why a records retention guide, a white paper or other information download is a superior lead generation “magnet” — because it’s about the problem, not about the solution.
We’ve all made these mistakes - myself included. We get so excited about our cool new product that we forget to run through the gears. And it’s not really your fault, because every day we’re all immersed in bad advertising. Until someone sits down and explains how to do this properly, you just don’t know. But then the light turns on.
Every week I talk to people who are sick and tired of playing by the rules, and not winning nearly as much as they could or should.
They’re sick and pulling that black checkbook out of their top desk drawer, giving money to some media rep and not knowing if that money is coming back, when it’s coming back, or how they’ll ever know.
They’re sick and tired of dialing for dollars every day, trying to get in to see prospects who need what they have but aren’t willing to listen to “just another peddler.”
They’re sick and tired of competing only on the basis of price, when they know that what they sell is worth far more than what they ask for it.
In marketing, the old rules go something like this:
-”You’ve just got to get your name out there.”
-”Make more phone calls than you made yesterday.”
-”You have to prove to your customer that you’re willing to work harder, drive more miles, and bend over further to get his business.”
Today, those rules are a recipe for suicide. Here’s what some of the NEW rules are:
-When you automate the most labor-intensive parts of your sales process, you only have to spend time with people who are ready and willing to buy something from you
-Every marketing and advertising dollar you invest is held accountable for ROI. It comes back to you with
friends attached.
-All that Madison Avenue talk about “branding” and “image” for the sake of branding alone is a bunch of BS. It doesn’t work. It’s a waste of money. But… when your advertising really works, it’s the best place to invest your money, period.
-You can become a well-known expert, even a celebrity within your locality, by exercising the power of media and publicity. When you have that kind of status, it becomes easy to get appointments and close sales.
Over the next few days we will talk about how to do it.
With the ever increasing threat of worms and attacks to IT networks and related infrastructure, there is a growing demand for network auditing and vulnerability assessment services. Testing the network perimeter and internal assets, network auditing uncovers weaknesses in the form of vulnerabilities and unpatched security holes. In today’s environment, new vulnerabilities are being discovered at a rate of about 40 per week and the speed at which vulnerabilities are being exploited is faster than ever before. New worms propagate faster than anti-virus vendors can react. Therefore, the only reliable way to preventing attacks is via identifying risks on a regular basis and eliminating them before they can be compromised.
As auditors, you can provide customers with this valuable service via an offering designed specifically to address these security concerns. Qualys, the market leader in on-demand network auditing and vulnerability management, provides a resalable service that allows you to conduct audits of company’s internal and external IP addresses and related network for security risks. Depending on the organizations needs, audits can be setup to run as often as necessary. Common best practices suggest weekly on critical assets and 2x per month on non-critical assets - therefore, identifying and eliminating risks before they can be exploited by attack. As an auditor you can utilize this service and provide value to your customers. Through Qualys consultant package, you can quickly:
>>Conduct a perimeter audit of the vulnerabilities of the client’s public IP addresses. Following the audit, they are provided with a report indicating the necessary steps for resolution of any vulnerabilities discovered.
>>Perform both an internal and external audit of all corporate IP addresses. Internal audits are done by setting up a portable scan appliance within the client’s network. Upon completion of all scans, a full report is given outlining all vulnerabilities and required steps to fix each issue.
Providing hands-on remediation is an option for more technical auditors. The audit reports created by QualysGuard have both non-technical and technical summaries. From the technical reports, customers have step-by-step instructions on how to repair vulnerabilities and/or implement patches. The reports are can be segmented by critical assets (i.e. financial servers) and risks are also categorized based on their risk level.
QualysGuard is a leading provider of this type of service and is being utilized by companies and consultants in relation to meeting network security compliance for such regulations as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, GLBA, SB1386 as well as the recent VISA and MasterCard network auditing requirements. The QualysGuard solution has won multiple awards within the network security industry for their assessment products and services - including the recent SC Magazine Award for Best Network Security Service. I spoke with their marketing manager, Rich Brazeau earlier this week about the reseller program and learned more about the opportunity available to auditors and security consultants.
Our partners that have strong relationships with their clients are being asked more and more to provide the unbiased auditing of their networks. Using QualysGuard, they are able to reliable provide that service on an ongoing basis without dedicating a lot of manpower to the effort. QualysGuard simplifies the process for the auditor and provides the client with an accurate understanding of their weaknesses and what is needed to reduce these risks.
The initial reseller package costs $1995 to purchase, which includes the internal scanner device appliance and enables 250 individual IP scans. After your first 250 scans are used, additional scans be purchased with incremental rate decreases based on volume. Qualys suggested that many consultants are using QualysGuard consultant and substantially marking up the service by as much as 400%. For more information on the QualysGuard offering, visit qualys.com.
My advice: This could be a good offering that you can provide your clients; however, only get into this if you have someone on staff with a strong network know-how and can speak the language.
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”
Babe Ruth (1895-1948)
baseball player, currently holds the number two spot for the most home runs of all-time with 714