GROWING

BY JACK KILLION

There are many approaches to driving profitable growth: hire more salespeople, increase your marketing budget, or invest in developing new products and services. These are all legitimate business development options, of course, but there’s another one that’s often overlooked. That strategy is person-to-person networking, and it allows C-level executives to leverage scarce resources to spur growth.

This is not the sporadic swapping of business cards or meet-and-greets that we sometimes consider networking. Rather, this is business development networking, and it’s about establishing substantial, well-targeted relationships tied to specific growth goals.

Targeted networking is a three-step process:

Identify one or more specific growth goals. For each goal, identify the people or types of people you need to reach. Look through your “connections clusters,” identifying those who can get you to the people you need to reach. Few people realize the range of connections in their various clusters of friends, family, and acquaintances, including business associates and customers, alumni groups, charities,

The Secret to Strategic Networking How will your business grow? It’s all in who you know.

community members and civic organizations. Most people estimate they have a few hundred connections when actually they have thousands. It is highly likely that someone you know can connect you to just the person you need.

HOW IT WORKS: Some years ago, I took over a failing industrial manufacturing company. I decided we had to penetrate new international markets, starting in Latin America.

I wanted to talk with someone in the U.S. Department of Commerce to learn about resources available to a company like mine. I discovered that a friend’s father worked for the Department of Energy, and I asked if he could connect me with an appropriate person. In a few weeks, he got back to me with a name, indicating the person was expecting my call.

A couple of phone conversations led me to access the network of United States commercial attaché officers throughout Latin America. Each was happy to help us market, organize, and host one-day events at the embassies for targeted industry leaders in their country. In one week we met with hundreds of potential new customers this way. That one referral from a friend’s father led to introductions to resources I hadn’t known about, which led to millions of dollars of equipment and service sales in Latin America. These relationships continued for years.

A friend of mine, the head of his own New York–based wealth management firm, targeted Hilton Head, South Carolina, for new clients. He identified and reached out to possible strategic partners there—banks, accountants, and attorneys. The head of a leading accounting practice agreed to host a presentation by the wealth manager. That generated new wealth management clients who remain strong advocates years later.

Another friend, a VC firm partner, wanted to develop a deal flow, and identified possible deal sources. A marketing professor and Harvard Business Review editor was on his hit list, and he was able to connect to him via a friend who knew the professor from Harvard Business School. The professor responded well to being asked to help steer viable earlystage deals to my friend. The two found many new ventures to tackle together in the following years.

You can easily apply the same approach to driving the growth of your business. Identify very clear growth goals. For each, identify specific people and organizations that can help you accomplish your goal. Look through your connections clusters. Reach out to contacts to get you to people or organizations you need.

The process works. Try it.

Jack Killion is a serial entrepreneur and the cofounder of Bluestone+Killion—Harnessing the Power of Networking.

POWER PORTAL

No matter what mode of communication you are engaged in with your customers—website, marketing materials, social media—the bottom line is that they are always looking for the same thing: ways to meet their needs and solve their problems. An especially good tool for helping them achieve those goals is the customer portal.

A customer portal is an interactive subdivision of your website that gives an individual customer the opportunity to fi nd and personalize information BY STEVE MACKINNON

specifi c to his or her needs. For example, a wealth management fi rm may use portals to allow customers to view fi nancial planning information and investment performance, or a manufacturing fi rm may provide portals to suppliers to support their supply chain operations. As more consumers prefer to get help at their convenience online, rather than picking up a phone, customer portals have become increasingly important.

The importance of a good user experience can’t be overstated, nor can the benefi ts to your organization. Used effectively, customer portals lower operating costs by shifting from manual to automated processes. They improve business

A good customer portal makes it easy to do business—and that keeps customers coming back.

productivity. They make your company easier to do business with. Do customer portals right, and they will increase your chances of keeping your customers for life.

EXPERIENCE IS KING. Customer portals are used in many ways—for customer service and sales transactions, content distribution, information dissemination and customer rewards.

The most common interactions revolve around FAQs concerning customer issues. Take a thoughtful look at your most frequent conversations and transactions with your customers. Build your requirements from this starting point and select a tool that meets the majority of those requirements (see sidebar, right).

To help create an optimal user experience, keep in mind these seven “experience pillars.”

FINDABILITY. Equip your portal with a powerful search engine to provide your customers with the information they seek. A bad search experience will lead to more calls to your call center and more e-mails requiring responses, leading to higher operational costs.

“ALWAYS ON.” Today, customers expect businesses to have answers and provide access to their information 24/7, both online and on mobile devices. You can achieve a great mobile experience for users by employing native applications (applications accessed directly from a device) and responsive design (a feature that allows a website to adjust to your mobile or tablet screen size automatically). Maintain a properly trained customer support staff that can walk your customers through the portal if necessary.

USEFUL. Customers expect to transact as part of their portal experience—from e-commerce, to form submission, to printing return labels, to updating their profi le information and more. If your customers are looking to do something, and your portal does not provide that ability, they will get frustrated and angry. Make sure you review your portal’s usefulness to customers on a regular basis.

USABLE. Keep it simple. A rule to live by is, if your kids or parents can’t use or understand it, then it is too complex.

Information architecture (defi ned as the way the information on your site is situated within the navigation and site map) is the key to a coherent experience. Poor architecture will confuse users—for example, when information is repeated throughout levels of the portal or there is too much information on a page. Have an analysis and review done by a trained information architect.

RELEVANT AND FRESH. Don’t let your portal content go stale. As with your main website, a well-thought-out, relevant content strategy for portals will give customers a reason to return. Execution strategies include hiring an internal or external team to be accountable for managing the content on your portal (which may include online training and videos); having your company thought leaders blog on a regular basis; and being active on social media. Offer content that is up-to-date and customer-centric.

SECURE AND TRUSTWORTHY. Your customer’s trust is the most crucial attribute in your relationship. Lose or degrade it, and you will lose that customer. Work with your vendors to understand their security practices and measures. Partner with a well-established hosting company that has service level agreements (SLAs) about safety and security to ensure you are well protected in this area.

COLLABORATIVE. Work with your customers. The customer voice and opinion is a powerful tool in evolving the overall customer experience, as well as your business. Aim to create interactive and social communities that enable collaborative communication. This can be as simple as providing discussion boards or forums, or even just adding the ability to comment within areas of the portal. Most importantly, listen. Pay attention to customers’ feedback, ideas, and desires, and implement the things that you feel are most vital to a good experience.

PORTALS IN THE CLOUD Customer portals fi t squarely into the trend for companies to use software as a service (or SaaS) in the cloud, rather than building portals from scratch or adding custom code to an existing website. Great tools in this space include RightNow, SharePoint, Sitecore, and Huddle. The open source community also has excellent tools, including Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress.

These tools provide technology that lets businesses populate a portal with information from consumers, from internal systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), or from ordering, transaction, and billing systems. Data aggregation allows businesses to create a central repository of information so that customer interaction is seamless.

Steve MacKinnon is the managing director of cBIG (Catch Business Innovation Group,) focused on business, technology, data science, and innovation consulting, at Catch New York, a full-service, fully integrated creative growth agency.