Blog posts in Marketing strategy

Could your marketing be more entrepreneurial?

In the absence of in-house marketing expertise, more often than not we find ourselves working directly with the founder/owner-manager on their marketing activities. Many of our clients are entrepreneurs running small and medium-sized social enterprises — businesses that trade, and reinvest their profits, for social good.

Our experience tells us that not only do they do business differently but their approach to marketing doesn’t always follow suit with conventional strategies and practices either. 

We find that their entrepreneurial personalities most definitely influence their marketing style and thus “entrepreneurial marketing” becomes second nature. And they are not alone. These entrepreneurs have almost created their own marketing community and although they may not be following prescribed marketing theory, they know how to get results.

Entrepreneurial marketing is gaining recognition as an opportunity-focused approach that brings together the innovation, risk-taking and creativity of enterprise with the market understanding and customer-orientation of mainstream marketing. In other words, they put an entrepreneurial twist on traditional marketing strategies.

So what are the tell tale signs of entrepreneurial marketers?  

1. Proactive, moving quickly with ideas and being in regular and close contact with customers to understand their changing needs and preferences.
2. Thriving on developing and launching new ideas, based on instinct and intuition. Testing them live in the marketplace, using trial and error. No grand market testing initiatives here!
3. Maintaining an extensive personal network of contacts and using that to develop and adapt marketing activities. High investment in building relationships not acquaintances.
4. Using peers and business contacts to sound out ideas and gather information and knowledge rather than undertake formal research.
5. Being plugged into several specialist networks, each offering different value to the business. Understanding the importance of informal conversation.
6. Actively seeking to be different and differentiating through innovation. Seizing and acting on opportunities quickly.
7. Building alliances to break into new markets. Not afraid to collaborate with competitors. 

Despite feeling that they have limited marketing ability, many entrepreneurs naturally find their own way, yet recognise the value of some textbook marketing when they need it. This hybrid approach is very exciting to see in practice with the entrepreneur playing a central role in challenging accepted thinking on how marketing should be done!

Ranjit Bansal is co-founder of Dynamic Marketing.

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Is time your most precious resource?

Those of us that are self-employed soon learn that the true currency in business is not money, but time. If we can learn to manage and manipulate this most precious resource, then the money will flow, as if by magic. The problem is that most people find learning to manage one's own time is the most difficult part of setting up as a business.

This is likely to be an issue for a lot of people at the moment. The new year is a time when many people take the heady step of striking out on their own, often either because they are bored with their current lifestyle or they are forced to through being made redundant.

In a corporate environment, time management is enforced by a higher power, a process which always also generates plenty of good excuses for not meeting externally imposed deadlines. There are invariably genuine and easily documented evidence of having been let down by customers, suppliers and co-workers.

These pressures apply in equal measure to the self-employed, but the downside can be an immediate and fatal cash flow crisis rather than a missed quarterly profit target. So the first and most essential personal skill for the aspiring entrepreneur is always one of time management. 

This could mean realising sooner rather than later that all our efforts should be directed towards generating revenue, or that extra hours need to be applied to complete a project and thus receive an agreed stage payment. The trouble is that the importance of time management is often undervalued among those considering entrepreneurship.

People tend to think they will make a good founder because they are bursting with new ideas and enthusiasm. This is an essential first step towards starting a business, which always involves the making of promises, but it is not enough.

What characterises a successful entrepreneur is their ability to actually deliver on their promises, which typically involves engaging a second person who is adept at project management. In the meantime, the creative entrepreneur is forever rushing from one place to another and invariably arriving late for appointments.

Fortunately, my own career in start-ups was predicated on punctuality, as I was always responsible for sales. Confucius might well have said that "the salesman who turns up late for a client appointment will never close a big deal", so a wise sales manager will always arrange time management courses for new team members.

When I became self-employed, I was forced to master the basic spreadsheet, not only to monitor my own sales pipeline on a daily basis, but also to manage my own personal time in the form of a daily, online calendar, accessible on whatever device I might be using.

Personal discipline involves my making a specific diary appointment for every promise that I make, ensuring the system pings me audibly when that promise is due. Then, I make an instant value judgement as to whether that task should be done immediately or postponed to a quieter time.

This approach is exemplified by the most effective day in our working calendars, the day before we go on holiday. There is always a towering list of things to do, but we are forced to apply a ruthless filtering mechanism to each item, prioritising, delegating, and even deleting where necessary.

As we finally get on the flight to somewhere warm and sunny and look forward to a few days of uninterrupted sleep, we are happy in the glow that we achieved everything we could on that last day, but rueful that not every working day was as effective.

My advice would be to find a good book on time management and have that as your holiday reading.

Originally published in The Financial Times. Copyright © Mike Southon 2012. All Rights Reserved. Not to be reproduced without permission in writing. Mike Southon is the co-author of The Beermat Entrepreneur and a business speaker.

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