Each month we shine the spotlight on a member of the Bizual community. This month it’s Alex Trapnell, Virtual Assistant.

The quick pitch: Tell us about your company in one sentence

As a VA (Virtual Assistant) I provide a range of Professional Business Support services and aim to exceed the expectations of my clients by effectively increasing their Business productivity, profitability and competitive advantage on a daily basis.

How long have you been a small business owner and what motivated you to start?

I set up the business back in March 2008 due to a variety of reasons, including the strong sense of challenge it presented, the want and need to greatly improve my work life balance and the wake up call I received having experienced the 5 long years of illness and eventual loss of my Father to Stroke & Dementia.

What’s your approach to marketing? Any tips for fellow Bizualites?

Well, firstly, now’s the time to up your game.  Don’t cut your budget – take advantage of your competitors who have done just that and as a result, have left a gap for you to exploit and increase your market share.  Get out and network – don’t sell, sell, sell though, instead listen, listen, listen – find out what your potential clients needs are, where you can assist them and step in at this point.  Be memorable and always follow up via email or telephone with those you have met.

In your time as a small business owner, what’s been your best experience of customer service?

Without a doubt, that would be my Logo Designer Ian Burrage.  Ian designs logos in his spare time and I have to say that I was totally blown away with how swiftly he cut to the chase and came up with the right logo for me.  I hadn’t even considered anything like the colours or design that he came up with, but that’s what I liked so much – he challenged my perceptions with a very fresh, appropriate and relevant look/feel, which I still love today and by God he was quick.  I was so impressed that I am proud to now call Ian a preferred supplier of Alexandra Trapnell - Virtual Assistant.

How do you stay in touch with your customers and suppliers?

Apart from daily telephone and email conversations, regular lunches, coffee meet-ups, networking events or scheduled business meetings, we share information/data via tools such as Google Docs where we can chat at the same time, I tweet via Twitter, have a LinkedIn profile, which I regularly update and I also send out a monthly emailed ESP Newsletter.

What has been your biggest challenge so far?

Well I would say the website, but I think the Marketing Plan has now outdone even the website learning curve.  Segmenting your target market and deciding how best to spend a limited Marketing budget are right up there for me at the minute.

What would you regard as your greatest small business success to date?

Hmmm, my greatest small business success would be working with such great clients, suppliers and a fabulous network, who make every day challenging, interesting and fun and, when you down tools at 5.30pm (yeah right) – ok, on the occasional days when you down tools at 5.30pm, you feel - yes tired, but actually a sense of great satisfaction and reward.

Can you recommend a killer small business resource?

Sure - I’d recommend Cobweb (http://www.cobwebinfo.com) for business tips, ideas, reports, guides, advice, news, know-how and opinion and also the related Enterprise Quest Bulletin (http://www.enterprisequest.com).

♦ ♦ ♦

Find Alex at: http://www.alexandratrapnell.co.uk

It’s common and generally accepted practice for clients to request a quote from service providers such as graphic designers and programmers.

The client will put together some kind of brief and send it off to a number of suppliers. A few days later they’ll receive a number of estimates and pick one - usually the cheapest.

But does this system work? Is it beneficial to the client and/or the supplier?

In the interests of testing conventional wisdom, here’s why we think it’s broken and how to fix it…

Let’s take the example of a client who needs a website. They approach four suppliers - a couple of freelancers and a couple of small design firms - and request an estimate.

Having worked at a couple of web design firms and run my own business I have quite a lot of experience in how suppliers go about devising a quote. Since no two projects are identical it’s near impossible to base a price on anything other than the estimated time it will take, multiplied by an hourly rate. Sounds straight forward so far. However, hourly rates are fairly standard in most industries and it would be fair to say that it would take one experienced web designer a similar amount of time to complete a project as another. So in theory the client will receive four very similar quotes. But anyone who’s ever been through this process knows that’s not the case. In my experience, clients will see a huge difference between estimates they receive. But why?

Here’s why.

When working out a quote for a project, a supplier will base their price within two extremes. At the top end is what we’ll call ‘Big Money’. This is the price that the supplier would love to quote. At the low end is what we’ll call ‘Rock Bottom’. This is the lowest price that the supplier would be willing to do the job for, even if they wouldn’t like to admit it out loud. The supplier picks a price lower than Big Money and higher than Rock Bottom and since companies are generally in the business of making money they’ll naturally go as close to Big Money as seems reasonable. Of course, the supplier always thinks this is a fair and reasonable quote.

It’s natural to look for the best deal so the client picks the lowest price even though the supplier they’ve picked isn’t necessarily the best for the job. The other suppliers find out the quote that they lost out to and all think “we’d have done it for that”.

A better way?

Having sat on both sides of the client/supplier table, here’s the advice I would give to companies in order to get the best supplier at a price that’s right. I’ve used the website example as most businesses will need one built at some point and it’s an industry I know.

1. Set a budget

This is quite difficult so it’s easy to see why clients would rather just ask for estimates. However, no one knows your business like you do and only you know how much you are willing to spend. There’s no point getting quotes for $10k if you can only afford $5k.

2. Make a supplier shortlist

Choosing the cheapest agency or designer doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get the one that’s most suited to the job. It’s much better to find people with talent and the right ‘fit’ for the project. Research some agencies by speaking to other businesses about their suppliers. Check our a bunch of portfolios and find out who designed the sites you like. Once you have a list, have a short chemistry meeting with them to make sure it feels right. Finally, make a list of the 3 or 4 that you’d really like to work with.

3. Write a detailed brief

Investing the time to write a detailed brief will save you time and money in the long run. If the agency you choose doesn’t fully understand your requirements the project could easily over run and the cost could grow. You’ll need to include information about your company and products, your brand, the desired look, and technical requirements (we’ll follow this article up with a guide to writing a good web design brief soon).

4. Approach your favorite supplier

By now you should have a list of 3 or 4 agencies you’d be happy to work with, a budget and a brief. Chose the agency you’d most like to work with and send the brief and your budget to them and ask if they’d be happy to carry out this project within your budget. If your budget is reasonable they will accept. It may be lower than what they would have quoted but if it’s higher than their ‘Rock Bottom’ price it’s worth doing. So you get the agency you want at a price that you’re happy with and 3 agencies don’t waste their time doing proposals for jobs they won’t win.

If your preferred agency can’t do the job within your budget, ask what price would be realistic. If it’s too high, move to the next agency on the list.

So what do you think?

Are you a client or supplier that’s recently been through the pitch process? Do you think this is a better way for clients and suppliers to work together?

When we were building the beta version of the Bizual site we made it compulsory for members to have at least one live Bizual Offer at all times. This meant that you couldn’t take up other members’ Bizual Offers unless you had a live Offer yourself. We wanted to encourage people to live by the ‘give a little, get a lot’ ethos of Bizual.

However, the Beta is all about testing our assumptions and seeing what works and we realised this was the wrong approach. At any point in time, some members really need to find suppliers but don’t necessarily need customers. Stopping these members from taking up Offers means that they lose out on a great deal from a great supplier while the supplier loses out on a potential new customer.

So, we changed it. You can now search and take up Bizual Offers without having to have a live Offer yourself. You’ll still need to fill in a limited profile (which takes only a few seconds) so that other members can see who they’re dealing with but apart from that the site is open to all members, regardless of whether they have a Bizual Offer or not.

We are often asked by small business owners just how to get started with social media. There are thousands of articles out there on the web on everything from Twitter Marketing to Facebook Pages, but for a small business that is new to the world of social media it can be difficult to know where to start.

Although there are hundreds of tactics for utilising social media tools, these are only worthwhile if you have a solid strategy in place. This post will provide you with that strategy and show you how to implement the tools to build what we call The Small Business Social Media System.

A definition

First things first. Let’s clarify exactly what we mean by social media. There are many definitions but here’s how we’ll define it for the purposes of our system:

Tools that make it easy for people to share and spread ideas

Let’s break it down. The word ‘tools’ is important because social media (Twitter, blogs, social networks etc) are just the platform on which ideas spread. The watering can helps your tomatoes to grow but it tastes bad in a salad. It’s the tomatoes that are important. Likewise, Twitter connects people together but it is the conversations that matter. The word ‘people’ is also important. People share ideas, they have needs and passions and they will ultimately be your customers. Finally, ‘sharing and spreading ideas’ is what people like to do. Your strategy will be to make that happen.

The strategy

The Small Business Social Media System is not a tactic or an advertising campaign. It is a long-term investment in building something of value. Something that will, if done well, help you to build your business. But it takes time and effort. This strategy will make sure that your efforts are not wasted.

Step 1: Building your brand

In a world where everyone has a voice, you’ll need to not only contribute to the conversation but be heard above the noise. People are looking for leaders, experts who will share their wisdom and provide answers to their questions. You will be that leader. Your aim is to position yourself as an expert within your industry or niche. (I assume that, since you’re charging people for your time, you already are, right?) We’ll come on to how you do that later on.

Step 2: Build your community

As an industry expert you’ll attract people who are looking for answers. Later they’ll become potential customers but right now they’re people. You’ll attract them, connect with them and build trust.

Step 3: Turn people into customers

When you’ve earned their trust and permission you can point them towards your products and services. It takes time to get to this point but the benefit is that you’ll get more than one shot to convince them to buy. You’ll be able to talk to people again and again until they need what you have to sell because you will have built a relationship.

The tools

So that’s the strategy. Sounds straight forward, but how do you put it into practice? Here are the tools you’ll need and how to use them.

1. The Blog

OK so blogs are old news and everyone and her grandma has one. But a well designed, well managed blog will be your social media engine room. It’s where you’ll publish regular, thoughtful and useful content. This is where people will come for the answers to their questions and where you’ll display your expert credentials. Your blog needs to be professional – nothing flash but it mustn’t seem like a personal blog. It can run alongside your ‘corporate’ website or replace it altogether.

2. Content

Flagship content

The first thing you’ll need is a flagship piece of content like an e-book or a tutorial video series. Invest time in researching, planning and creating something of real value. Something that has so much value and is so useful to potential customers that many of them would pay for it. But they won’t pay for it because you’re going to give it away for free. “FREE?!” I hear you gasp. Yes free. By creating something of real value you will attract people to your site, people will download it and forward it on. You can give it to bloggers to pass on and you will start to build your tribe.

Upload it to your blog, put a permanent link to it in your blog’s side bar and request an email address in exchange for downloading it. If it really is useful, people won’t mind giving you their email address. Make sure to tell people that you won’t spam them or pass on their email address to anyone else. (Oh, and don’t ever spam them or pass their email address on to anyone else!)

Regular Content

Just like your flagship content, your regular content should demonstrate your ‘industry guru’ status. This isn’t the place to tell people what you had for breakfast. Think about topics that your customers would find useful – tutorials, tips, software reviews – and mix it up with some audio or video content. You’ll need to publish content regularly. It doesn’t have to be daily but a few pieces of quality content a month is necessary if you want people to come back to your site or subscribe to your RSS feed. Whenever you create something new, think “will my potential customers find this useful?” If not, don’t post it.

3. Social Media sites

If you haven’t already, sign up to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. There are plenty of other social media sites you could sign up to but these are a good start. Think of these sites as extensions of your blog. Push your content out to these sites whenever you post something new. Post a link to your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts on your website, blog and email signature and start to build your follower base. Engage with people on LinkedIn by providing useful answers to relevant questions in the Q&A section. Again, there are many, many online articles on attracting Twitter followers.

4. Email marketing software

I mentioned earlier that you should collect email addresses. This is vital if you want to keep in touch with potential customers and have multiple opportunities to present them with your products and services. Set up an account with a service such as Campaign Monitor or Mail Chimp. These are free to set up and you pay a small amount when you want to send a campaign. These applications will allow you to add a form to your blog or website to collect email addresses and add them directly to your mailing list. Once you have a few people on your list, you can start to contact them with a monthly email newsletter. You’ll need to create content that is different to your blog content but you can also point them to a recent blog post if you think it’s appropriate. Again, try to make the email newsletter as useful as possible. Include a special offer from a relevant third party or point people to an article or video you think they’d find useful. You’re aim is to build trust and permission over time. Finally, it’s perfectly acceptable to push your products or services, but do it appropriately. Give people a preview of a new product to make them feel special or offer them an early bird discount.

5. Third party publishers

Creating great content is great but you’ll need people to read it if they are going to become part of your community. These people are already thirsty for knowledge so they’ll be visiting other blogs and websites for their fix of information. Your goal is to write guest posts for these blogs so that your audience is aware of you. Guest posts are great because you will automatically be seen as an expert. You will also receive a credit and usually a link to your site, driving people to your content. Use Technorati and regular search engines to find blogs and websites that cater to your target audience. Create a spreadsheet of the blogs you find along with the name of a contact you can write to. This should be someone with editorial control. Make a note of some of the posts they’ve written and the topics they cover. Remember, social media is all about people and building relationships and that’s what you’re going to do with the bloggers you find. Start by commenting on their posts and emailing them to say thanks for a useful article. These people are the gatekeepers to your audience so you want to be respectful. Ultimately, their job is to keep their readers happy so it’s your job to make that easier for them, not harder. You’re going to have to write articles in advance so that the editor can make a decision quickly without much work. Make sure your topic hasn’t been covered and don’t send the same articles to multiple bloggers at once. Your post should be closely related to your area of expertise but should also fit in with the subject matter that the blog covers.

Summary

This is by no means an exhaustive list of social media tools but is instead a solid system to start with. Once you’ve set this up you can start to investigate other ways to build influence, generate traffic and build your community. It’s worth remembering however that social media for small business is about quality not quantity. It’s better to have 1000 followers who might buy from you then 100,000 followers who won’t.

And finally…

If you need help setting up any element of the system, whether it’s a blog, an email newsletter or your flagship content, be sure to search Bizual for special offers from great suppliers!

Over at The Netsetter, Allan Branch of LessAcounting tells Collis Ta’eed about being the ‘Anti-QuickBooks’.

We’re very lucky to have such a large competitor. Their size makes it almost impossible for them to write software that is easy to use.

Taking a negative aspect of your competition and making it a positive characteristic of your product is a great way to position your brand because you immediately become the solution to a problem.

What is your product or service the ‘anti’ of?

Fresh off the back of the Mashable review we’re delighted to say that Enterprise Nation have named Bizual their website of the day for April 8th.

Here’s a quick snippit:

If you’re a home business owner with a great big idea but a teeny-tiny marketing budget, Bizual can help you get the word out about your product or service, through special deals that its community will promote for you.

Thanks to San Sharma and Emma Jones for the write up.

Here’s the article in full: http://www.enterprisenation.com/detail/Website_of_the_day_Bizual/2659/1.aspx

It seems the word is well and truly out about Bizual. Last Friday we were delighted to see that Mashable featured Bizual as part of their Spark of Genius series sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark.

Some highlights from the article:

Bizual is an awesome new service that makes it easy and affordable for small businesses to attract new customers and find great suppliers…

Bizual also rewards creativity and value by having a Digg-like voting system. You can vote offers up, which brings them up on the Most Popular Offers list. This community-based system helps find the most useful offers on the website…

It’s well-executed and could definitely be a great boon to both customers and small businesses.

Thanks to Ben for the write up and to all the readers who Twittered it to their followers. The article brought in lots of great new Bizual Offers adding lots of value to the growing community.

Here’s the article in full: http://mashable.com/2009/04/03/bizual/

Last Monday, 2nd March, Elliot and I finally opened up Bizual to family, friends and a small group who had stumbled across the holding site during the long development period.

So, what have we learnt from Week One?

Will people get it?

The answer so far seems to be yes, which means the marketing site, www.bizual.com, is relatively clear. If you feel differently, let us know in the comments section here, or by emailing us at feedback@bizual.com.

Will the sign-up process do its job?

Well, our biggest lesson this week was that the original sign-up process put people off.

We can see that visitors were happy to complete the initial simple form. But, when confronted with the task of entering profile information, plus creating their first Bizual Offer, many were put off.
Interesting, we thought, as these only take a couple of minutes.
The problem was that they needed to enter this information before they could access the site proper.
It was like a brick wall.
So, we have completely revised the sign-up process.
Here’s how it works now:

a)    Enter basic details into the sign-up form
b)    Click the link in your confirmation email
c)    Bang! You’re into Bizual. You can search Offers and have a poke around at your leisure

Total time: <1 minute.

In order to interact with the community, you’ll still need to update your profile and create an Offer, but this can be done in your own time and can take as little as two or three minutes. Simple.

Will members create genuinely valuable Bizual Offers?

The answer already looks to be a resounding yes. We have bands for events , IT professionals, personal trainers, brand consultants, web designers, business lead generators, accountants and flash animators to name but a few. And each Bizual Offer is exactly what we’d hoped for; innovative, generous and in the spirit of the burgeoning community.

So, the first week has been an incredibly valuable learning period for us. A big thank you to all who participated.

Now, its time to ramp things up.

After hundreds or thousands of hours of talking, planning, designing, coding, tweaking and testing, we flipped the switch today. Bizual is live.

I’m not sure if we’ve quite reached the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell claims is required for success but we must be close.

It’s been quite a ride so far. What started as a simple idea soon became scribbles on paper, then mock-ups, designs, and finally a working site. We’ve had meetings with banks, lawyers and developers. We’ve written business plans, blog posts and web pages. We’ve drunk gallons of tea and coffee and we’ve talked and talked and talked.

But it’s the members that will make Bizual a living, breathing, community and our job is to build and nurture that community.

The journey has just begun and we hope you’ll join us for the ride. We can’t wait.

Having a great product or service is important, but when it comes to making a lasting impression and building a loyal customer base, it’s what you do at the edges that really counts. It’s unlikely that your product is unique, so standing out means focusing on the details.

Last Tuesday I visited Daylesford Organic in The Cotswolds. Everything about the place impressed me. Housed in a cluster of beautifully converted barns in stunning surroundings, every detail was honed to perfection. Free samples of the delicious organic produce were available to try while the immaculately dressed staff were knowledgeable and helpful. This was no ordinary shopping experience and I was happy and eager to spread the word to friends and family.

The following Saturday I decided to visit their Notting Hill branch for lunch. Same company, same products but a totally different experience. While we waited for a table the shop assistant argued with a customer over a refund for an unsatisfactory bottle of fruit juice. Once seated our waiter told us we couldn’t order a cake from the bakery upstairs because it wasn’t on the menu. Meanwhile a member of the waiting staff argued openly with a chef in full view of the customers.

Customers buy products with their heads but they evaluate the experience on an emotional level. How does using your product or service make your customers feel?