- What is a 'call to action'?
A call to action is an advertising and marketing concept. It is a request or instruction to âdo - What is a Competitor Spotlight Survey?
The Competitor Spotlight survey is the first step Momentum take before undertaking any web project. - How do the different Momentum services work together?
A range of SEO services form the Momentum 4-step approach to beating your competitors and increasing
Business Development Advice for Online Business Growth. CEO Expert Roger Harrop talks to Momentum Web Solutions.
A valued customer of Momentum, Roger Harrop is an international business growth speaker who has spent over 25 years leading international business at the highest level. Momentum worked closely with Roger to re-develop his website in 2010 to help it generate more online enquiries and sales. His website www.rogerharrop.com is a good illustration of the strategic benefits that Momentum can bring to a web project.
In this interview, Roger tells us about his thought-provoking and entertaining seminars and presentations that have helped over 10,000 CEOs and business leaders achieve transformational change. As a consultant and independent director focused on business development and success, he is in a unique position to offer advice on how to deal with contemporary business challenges and to show how your online presence can help you do just this.
In part one Roger Harrop tells Momentum's Jonathan Fink all about his work and why getting 'back to basics' is so important for businesses if they want to grow their business on-line.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Can you tell us a bit about your expertise, how you deliver it, and what shape and size of company can benefit from it?
Roger Harrop: The work that I do can benefit anyone who is running their own business, from a one-man start-up to the biggest corporation in the world. I try and show people that running a successful business isn't as complicated as we think - in fact it's pretty simple. My flagship delivery vehicle is what I call the 'master class' - generally this will be a one-day event, although sometimes this can stretch to two or be condensed into a half-day - even a keynote speech at a conference.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Obviously you have a diverse audience and there are different ways of getting the message across. But would you say that the challenges faced by businesses are similar or, given the current climate, are there specific challenges faced by people within different organisations?
Roger Harrop: While every business has its core competence, the problems of growth and how to sustain are the same the business world over. It's about getting 'back to basics'. The businesses that are really successful, that will thrive in the present climate and come out the other side as winners, are the ones who have done just this. They have done their homework and they know exactly who their customers are. They know how to target them, how to get a prospect and then how to sell to them.
Of course, once you have got the order, you still have to do an exceptional job, you still need that ‘wow’ factor, so that they stick with you. And this applies whether you are a solicitor or running a major car corporation.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): The impression I get from running my own business is that there are also various stages of evolution - different challenges at different points - as the business grows. Would you agree?
Roger Harrop: Yes, in my experience there are particular 'tipping' points as a business grows. There is a tipping point - and this is a very broad brush - at about a million pounds turnover when you begin to need to have a specialist doing the selling for you. Up until then you may've had a technical specialist, but now you need somebody called a 'sales' or a 'marketing' person. This is a major tipping point, because now you are managing someone who has a different expertise to yours - or even the same - but they'll do it as well as you do.
There's another typical tipping point at something like five million pounds turnover, when you need to start integrating 'disciplines' into the company that you may not have needed before, in order to manage procedures and encourage creativity.
Another tipping point may be that you start to run your business out of more than one location - or even out of more than one country. This might be the the biggest tipping point of all, because this kind of change is essentially about people and communication. Once you have a considerable number of employees you have to begin thinking about how to communicate with them - and to do this you need to know what motivates them.
Of course, with more employees, comes more procedure. This is where a growing company - used to being small, dynamic, entrepreneurial and inherently more manageable - can run into problems. By keeping focused on your business basic - your target market, your customers and your communication - you overcome these sorts of problems.
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): Our experience, of course, is from the web side of things. We see what I call the 'fault-lines' of communication - almost like Teutonic plates - all the time in web-related projects, large and small. These simple fault-lines, usually based on a lack of proper instructions given to the right people, get more complex and difficult to resolve as you get higher up the chain. As you scale up to an organisation which may have offices and divisions all over the world, they're going to need a website that not only has to be agreed upon across the organisation, but also represents it internationally. But the issues of communication and the importance of planning and instruction remain the same - large companies have more baggage to resolve, small companies don’t, but there are similarities right across the web industry.
Roger Harrop: Planning is vital to the success of a project. The simple rule of ‘think, plan, do’ often gets forgotten when it comes to websites. Someone, somewhere says 'go get us a new website' while no one seems to take the time to sit down and really plan what that website is for. They’ll do it with any other investment. For example, take a manufacturing company investing in a bit of machinery - there has to be a return-on-investment programme put forward before the idea is even considered let alone signed off. But that never seems to happen with websites. It ought to.
Business owners need to ask: Why are we doing it? What are the objectives? How we are going to do it?
Jonathan Fink (Momentum): It's all about ownership. If you don’t own your own website, you don’t own the purpose of your business. You were talking about the 'basics' - what’s your view on ownership, in this context?
Roger Harrop: This brings to mind a company that I'm closely involved with. They spent an awful lot of money on a new website a couple of years ago - that does not in any way reflect the personality of the company. This is a thoroughly professional yet family-run business with about 20 million pounds turnover. They've achieved an ideal balance in the way that they make you feel: when you do business with them, you feel like they're metaphorically putting their arm around you, looking after you in a very personal way. Unfortunately, this doesn't come across from their website. Their website is incredibly impersonal. There is not a single photograph of a single person. And I look at it and I think, this is like all the competitors, this is not showing what is one of your differentiators, in my view, from the competition, which is the way you operate, the way you relate to people. The most important fact about your business - the customer intimacy - does not come across from the website.
In part two of the interview Roger tells us what he thinks business websites should be focusing on at the moment to overcome the challenges they face. [Go to Part 2]