Christo: Today‘s tip is around confused customers don‘t buy so what does that mean; basically, when we overcomplicate the sales process we get less sales. We see it a lot with campaigns and things we put out maybe a marketing campaign where they say four options for a customer to proceed with you versus a campaign with one option often the campaign with only one option will actually give more sales it‘s really clear for people to know what to do rather than sit there and think about it for a moment and that moment they‘re already distracted and you‘re not off on the next thing so basically just make it really clear for customers to know exactly what to do with you to proceed towards a sale so if you‘re like if your business sells direct-to-consumer then just let the consumer know what‘s the best option the best product or something like on sometimes on websites how you see there might be three levels of options and it‘ll say recommended or most popular just always making it really easy for customers to know if they‘re you know consumer style customers and if your customers are business so you‘ll be to be style business once again make it really easy for them to know how to proceed you‘re like a consultant or the best package or the easiest way that you are or the best way that you work with people especially if you are a consultant where there‘s so many variables and people don‘t know exactly what you‘re going to do, what they aren‘t going to do, making up the price, so try and make the way you will work as tangible as possible in terms of like a package or program or a process that you take people through and then if you‘re selling wholesale let‘s say you‘re a manufacturer of a product that sells to retail stores, a good way to go with that is make it really clear for the stores to know which product is the best seller for you because obviously the stores want to know that the products are going to move for them and also a great way to help you sell into the stores is let them know which products you‘re about to do marketing campaigns for so let‘s say if I approached a store and I‘m a hat manufacturer and I said here we go shop owner, this is the best selling hat we have the blue hat at the moment and we‘re about to do a full-on marketing campaign for the blue hats to help you sell the blue hats, basically let you know we‘re going to be looking after marketing these things and giving a big push for these products for you so it‘s going to help you move off the shelves and that‘ll be something that the shop owners will be interested in as well. So there you go, that‘s our tip for today. We‘re going to go and check out Martina now and see what Martina‘s up to and she‘s going to share a tip around what images are working the best at the moment on social media so really cool tip here from one of the Basic Bananas team members

Martina: Hey guys! I just want to give you some tips today with regards to picking the best pictures for Instagram and when it comes to photography the most important thing is we really want to tell a story through our images. So when it comes to social media we always have to make sure to, for example, pick them in the beginning. I have some example for you, it‘s from Oceanlovers, for example, we have obviously ocean awareness as a theme, so all our posts are not just related to other products but they really want to like kind of create a lifestyle or a mood so if you scroll down everything has the same color, has the same vibe, then the photos are engaging and everything comes to ocean, so they‘re pretty blue. When it comes to the Business Hood, which is our branding agency, the theme changes and it‘s more like about lifestyle, about travel, and about design so if you scroll down we can see more really bright pictures and quality obviously has to be really good and we follow that theme through all the feed so we really want to make sure to kind of engage the customer and tell a story through our visuals. So it‘s very important not to show just a product but to kind of create a more dynamic feed to mix it up with maybe team photos or maybe flat lace they really work but the most important thing is to keep it really nice and bright and to make sure that the filters that we use are really consistent so always have the same look and feel and we scroll down through a feed we always have this really smooth kind of look.

Franziska: Thank you so much, Martina. Martina is our creative genius at the branding agency so super grateful for your wisdom Martina. Now we have a question from one of our viewers. And the question is that my team doesn‘t always do as good quality work like me, help! It‘s a great way to say a question and it‘s a very common question actually, I had a call this morning with one of our members and she runs a catering business and she said one of her biggest problems now that she has applied the techniques, the strategies that she learned in the Clever Bunch program and the business is growing, now her challenge is that she has too much work and she needs to find people to help her do the work but she finds it really hard to find motivated team members

Christo: ..who has good qualities

Franziska: Yes. I‘m going to give you four things that you can think about. The first one is when you have different projects and different jobs going in your business, make sure that somebody‘s responsible for the task, so somebody has to be responsible even if there are five people working on it, nominate someone or let somebody self nominate themselves to be in charge of it. Somebody has to drive the project. Number two, is if it‘s a bigger project, you might need to check progress so might have progress, we call it “Huddles” here. Sometimes you have a bigger project, somebody is responsible and then we do Huddles when we are about 20% into the project and maybe 50% and maybe 90%, depends on your project. But you can do huddles; huddles just mean ten-minute meetings, 10-15 minute meetings, you‘re just standing, you‘re checking in how is it going, anything you need help with, what‘s holding you back from doing an amazing job. Number three is, record your processes and your activities that you‘re doing more than once in Google Sites. We have an operations manual built here for all of our businesses and we record it in Google Sites. It‘s a free tool to use and it‘s basically an online operations manual, it ensures that the quality of work keeps being high because the standard is recorded in the Google Site. Number four is, depending again on your business and your team members. Mentor your team depending on the tasks that they‘re doing, help them out and most of all, when you mentor, don‘t micromanage. I find that micromanaging will never make your team step up and that‘s one of the biggest challenges, that is part of this question, is that a lot of team members, if they don‘t feel empowered, they find it really hard to stay motivated, so empower them to do great work. You know, one of my friends once said a really big thing, I was running a board meeting and I was just giving a few inputs and he said he‘s a business consultant, he said you‘re like the color bomb. I‘m like what does it mean, he‘s like, you‘re throwing bombs of colors for the team that they can then take which color they want and they can make it their own without micromanaging. And we found that this works really well here at Basic Bananas.

Christo: It‘s good to zero in, like what there‘s a difference between showing the level of quality you expect versus micromanaging like showing the level of quality can get into the details with someone and show exactly how it‘s supposed to be; it could be anything like a design work on a computer or it could be a gardening business and you get down on your hands and knees and show them exactly how every blade of grass should be cut, and you‘ll be then leaving them to it. So it‘s okay to kind of show them what you expect, but not be on their back.

Franziska: Exactly.

Christo: All right, now we‘re going to check a book recommendation from Franziska

Franziska: It‘s not my book, but I will give you my book probably in a few episodes. It‘s my recommendation and it‘s called the five love languages. Actually not.. The Five Languages of appreciation in the workplace. It‘s the same author who is this Gary Chapman guy who also wrote the five love languages which are the same languages, it‘s pretty much the same book but this one is targeting more in the workplace, and the other one is also you can use in private life. Now, buy this book because this book will help you appreciate your team and each team member in a way that they feel acknowledged, because what he found, these authors, is that people have different ways of feeling acknowledged. Not everyone speaks the same love language and there are five in general, at work, here we have actually made a poster, we use four because the fifth one is touch, and of course we don‘t want to get into trouble, so we didn‘t put touch on here, but there are four major ones that we use here and what you can do is just google the five love languages, or the five languages of appreciation in the workplace and you can do the test for free with your team and I suggest that you get everyone in your team to do it and then what we did is we made a map here, this is a poster that we have hanging in our headquarters with the different team members that it shows us what other ways of feeling appreciated, so somebody might be acts of service, acts of service means that they feel appreciated when you do something kind for them. You make them maybe tea, or you ask them “hey, are you okay? Do you need me to help you with some work.” The next one is quality time, these are people that feel appreciated if you spend quality time with them, so when you have a meeting, let‘s say with Rusty, I make sure that I don‘t bring in my laptop and my iPhone and don‘t be distracted with them. You want to give them undivided attention. And the other one is words of affirmation. Some people are driven by…

Christo: “You‘re awesome”

Franziska: Yeah, by telling them how amazing they are. And you want to do it in a very specific way. So you might want to say, “Hey you‘re awesome because the way that you picked up the phone to help this one Clever Bunch member is amazing.” So specific feedback is great, they love that. And the last one is “gifts”. Some people appreciated if you give them gifts, so if you have team members that enjoy gifts, send them gifts every now and then, if you want to appreciate them. Awesome book, I highly recommend it. I highly recommend you do this test with your team, if you have a team, and your families and friends even. You might find some really interesting information and it might help you to communicate differently, or better, also with your families, with your partners, with your friends, etc. Now, should we go into the word of wisdom?

Christo: Yes. That‘s one of my very own today. The word of wisdom for today is, I don‘t if it really works, but just basically to blow up a myth that nobody likes marketing. Well here‘s the reality…

Franziska: I like marketing.

Christo: I guess it‘s…you like marketing when it‘s working. When they know what to do. When they‘re learning new strategies, like when we‘re working with Clever Bunch members and they‘re applying new things that inspire them and they start to see new results, then it‘s awesome. But most business owners don‘t get into business because they like marketing, so they get into business because they see an opportunity to make money, or they‘re educated in something, or that‘s where their career path has led them, you know, qualified in, or something like that, and what they could have, and what they do usually, but not necessarily marketers. So you know, you don‘t become an accountant because you want to be a marketer, or a leadership coach or a sunglass manufacturer because you want to be a marketer, and this is really common, we hear it all the time people saying that “marketing is just annoying, just want someone else to do it, I don‘t even want to know about it,” now the reality is people like, the more you‘ve learned about marketing, the more exciting it becomes, as I was just saying. And the more you know what to look for, even if you have team, like you can‘t ignore it, doing marketing for you the way that you remove yourself from marketing, because you don‘t like it, that‘s okay, there are ways we need to basically learn more about marketing, so that we can have others do it and we know what we‘re paying for, we know how to look, we know whether it‘s one right or wrong, we learn the smarter ways to outsource that are really cost-effective, because most people think when it comes to marketing, I‘ll just pay someone to do my SEO or manage my social media or get an intern and love to all the social media for us, and it‘s like going, okay, you look after like bringing life into our organisations like look after breathing, but we need to know what we‘re looking for, and then we can outsource in smart ways. The smarter we get with marketing, and the more you know how to market better, you learn how to build your own team so you don‘t have to do it, but you can‘t ignore it, is the key here. You basically got to be responsible for making sure it happens and you can move it to people and kind of orchestrate it, and have it happen, like us, if we haven‘t maybe held on to all the marketing activities we do at Basic Bananas, we might have grown to the team go into half the size, but for example we implement a lot of marketing, learn how to do it, then move it off our plate, so we have team doing it, and that‘s about it, because we‘re across it as team, implement these things, we know what they‘re doing, and we look over it really quickly, or get a number at the end of the week that tells us what has been done. So basically the key is on this thing is even though you might like marketing, it‘s a necessary evil and the key is to keep educating yourself on it, forcing it to happen and you‘ll end up doing less and getting better returns basically from everything you‘re doing better. I just wanted to kind of hit on that key point there like no one likes marketing, marketing is annoying or thinks we can just outsource it all. But we‘ve to be responsible for it to make sure it happens.

Franziska: Awesome, very good, long word of wisdom. Hasta la vista, we‘ll see you next time! ‘Til next time, can‘t wait to have you back!

Christo: Bye for now!