M & A Rainmaker

Recently I needed to get a high value watch which had been sold via eBay urgently delivered to a location in Germany.

Although it is not their typical business area Eurgent Ecspress have a proven track record for performance and reliability as express freight forwarders within the time critical logistics environment and they sorted this delivery for me without problem.

As a small independent they feel that thier operation can give a more personalised response at all levels. Staff are available at any stage, day or night, during the transit of any consignment.

NEED TO SEND EXPRESS FREIGHT TO EUROPE ??

Their operational team have over ninety years experience in all aspects as express freight forwarders for transport throughout the UK and Europe. This, they feel, gives them a distinct advantage in solving the many problems that can arise in today’s turbulent logistical market

Eurgent Ecspress freight forwarders are the preferred suppliers to many multinational companies in the UK and European community, where they have built an excellent reputation for client confidentiality.

If you have an Eurgent Express Delivery requirement in Europe give them a call:

Eurgent Ecspress Unit 1b, Charnwood Park Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan South Wales, UK CF31 3PL
	+44 (0) 1656 656535
	+44 (0) 1656 656534
	enq@eurgent.co.uk

Eurgent Ecspress have been supplying Europe’s leading forwarders and transporters with cost effective solutions for the movement of time-critical consignments for over 11 years – over 95% of their clients are from within the freight industry – and their network of partners offer the assistance to make your consignment their top priority.
Their extensive database of agents ensure that no enquiry is without a solution. And their comprehensive network allows them to consider all cross-european destinations. Eurgent can supply all modes of transport – whether it be a small van to an air-charter option – and every solution will be considered to meet the transit time required .

Dear Managing Director/C.E.O./Owner/Proprietor/Boss,

The way that people seek information and buy is changing rapidly, dramatically and forever.

You have probably changed the way that you buy some things – using Google to search for things, holiday booking sites for great deals and price comparison sites to compare prices. If you have young people in your family or know them you will see them using Google for the answer to nearly everything !

This change puts the power in the hands of the searcher and buyer. They will seek information on your products and services when they want to. They will to some extent ignore your ” Interrupt driven ” efforts to make them think about you, your products and services ( Mailshots, emailshots, telemarketing, advertising etc. etc. ) in the same way that you may ignore people trying to sell you things in this way. Although you still may catch them at the right time or with the right offer.

Of course the fact is that we are part way through this process and so some of the older ways are still valid now and will be for some time.

This change in the way information is gathered and products and services are purchased has been facilitated by the appearance and development of the Internet.

Of course, at present, some people use  the Internet a lot and some people not so much. You might use the Internet for email but may not be on Facebook or Twitter.

If we look at the graph above we can see a number of things:

1. That business to business marketers ( B2B ) have a range of options to get the attention of their target customers. 4 of them are Internet related ( social media, virtual events/webinars, search engine optimisation ( SEO ) of websites, paid search advertising ( PPC ). 1 can be Internet and/or traditional media related –  Public Relations. The rest are ” physical ” – phone calling, mail shotting ( N.B. email shotting is Internet related ) , attending a tradeshow or advertising in physical media e.g. a paper or magazine.

2. That 6 of them are outbound or ” PUSH ” marketing and 3 of them are inbound or ” PULL ” marketing. ( Although I think that paid search and Internet PR can also be regarded as ” PULL ” marketing in some ways. )

3.  That marketers themselves expect to put more time and money into the first three to five than the last four.

You probably know quite a lot about the last four ( although each of these needs to be done well to be effective at all ).

You probably need to know more about the first 5 ( plus email shotting ?? ).

Subsequent ” Letters from Marketing ” will help you to work out where you are in terms of your preparedness and ability with these 5/6 and also how you can develop these areas.

Regards,

Chris.

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2011/06/28/letter-from-marketing-no-2/

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2011/06/29/letter-from-marketing-no-3/

http://mandarainmaker.co.uk/wordpress/2011/07/05/letter-from-marketing-no-4/

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Head of Business Development at Spectrum Telecommunications.

Contact us for Voice,Data,Mobile and Cloud Connectivity and Communications Solutions.

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FOUNDER OF THE BRANDING INITIATIVE and the B.P.M. MENTORS.

Website: https://thebrandinginitiative.com/

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When I started LanSwitch ( which became Voyager ) in the early 90’s I set aside a bedroom for an office and on my desk I had a telephone, a fax machine and a laptop ( initially not connected to the Internet , later connected with a dial-up connection ) with Office and a Contact Manager application and a printer. Luxury, I thought because it was the same as I had at Fibernet and much better than I had at Memorex.

My target market was basically: Companies that had busy Local Area Networks; that were in either The Midlands ( where I lived ) or London ( where I could easily commute to and knew people ). So, I basically targeted a combination of London based Financials and other general companies in London and the Midlands. I think I bought the Computer Users Yearbook as my basic database. ( Actually a very comprehensive and detailed source of information ).

I went through the process of identifying a target market and building a database of prospects and suspects many times over during my sales and business start-up career.

Typically now I will segment by horizontal ( size of company ), vertical ( type of company ) and geographical ( location ) and then various other factors eg structure of company, people within that company eg IT Managers etc etc.

Then a database can be purchased which is targeted and therefore typically lower cost than purchasing 1000’s of contacts many of which are not within your target market.

There are many database suppliers these days so it is possible to get some great offers on targeted data.

The equipment side has obviously come on in 17 years but not incredibly so – broadband and wi-fi; scanning software and fax software; CRM versus Contact Management; softphones ( eg Skype ) and video conferencing ( Skype, Webex etc ); standalone traditional and IP phones;printers. 

Where there has been enormous progress has been in Internet search and Social Network Marketing.

If you know what vertical you want to concentrate on eg Lawyers in Staffordshire you will find much of the information that you need online via Google or some other search engine.

With great timing ( !! ) I have just been reading this article about Linkedin

 http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/24/technology/linkedin_social_networking.fortune/

that I picked up on Twitter ( posted by Jon Besag who is in sales at Linkedin 😉

This is well worth a read for many reasons. 

This article includes comments about in house and external recruiters using Linkedin to find the people that they/thier clients are looking for . There certainly are a lot of recruiters on Linkedin – in fact when I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is a Linkedin trainer he told me that there were about 68,000 people on Linkedin who called themselves recruiters ( I just did a Linkedin search for ” Recruiters ” and got about 48,000 ) and that there were probably about 100,000 because a lot of recruiters did not call themselves recruiters.

I used this fact recently to help a company that I am working with, who are selling multi job board posting software, to target recruiters. From a small, personalised ” mailshot ” to selected Linkedin recruiters we got a few very positive responses and made a proposal to one within a week and got an order from it.

Recruitment is an obvious thing to do on Linkedin but  as said in the article ” The obvious one is jobs, but it’s not just jobs. It’s also clients and services.”

For me the goal is to make a ” personalised ” approach to potential clients and ” personalisation ” requires research. The difference between what you can do now and what you could do 17 years ago is that you can gather far more information on people and companies before you make any approach whatsoever.

If you combine a targeted database with internet and social media search then you have a fantastic tool to help you personalise your ” intelligent ” marketing and sales approach.

If you are a member of eg Ecademy, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed,Skype or MSN then each of these have thier own search facilities – some more sophisticated than others.

Just today I was asking someone how they prospected on the Internet and they said Linkedin, Skype and MSN.

Using a combination of Internet search and Social/Business networks you can find out an awful lot about people and companies.

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or call 0800 135 7270.

I am always searching for ways to describe how new media marketing works to the business people that I talk to.

My latest thought was that you could describe it’s implementation as a sort of whirlpool effect where your potential customers are out on the calm sea and you want to catch thier attention at  the outer influence of the whirlpool and then draw them gently in and then steadily down towards you – the supplier of products, services or information.

One of the main features of this type of marketing is that it is about ” Pull Marketing ” and not ” Push Marketing “. You are drawing potential clients very gently into the whirlpool and not pushing them in !!

We live in an increasingly self service world: We like to be in charge of who we buy from and deal with and we don’t much like things being pushed at us or people being pushy.

The numbers of people using the Internet to find what they want are increasing all the time. The types of things that they search for are growing all the time.

The old ways of marketing are not necessarily dead but they are suffering from a terminal disease.

Traditional ( Push ) marketing is still happening – advertising, PR, mailshots, telemarketing – it’s all still going on and it’s all still effective to some extent but more and more and every day Internet and Word of Mouth Marketing ( accelerated by the Internet ) are rising to the ascendancy.

I also think that in catching peoples attention at the periphery of the new media whirlpool you think more about people’s problems, needs, desires, objectives and questions and you lead them gently to solutions, fulfillment, destinations and answers. There is tremendous subtlety, patience, intelligence, kindness and humour in this new media whirlpool approach. Generally speaking the ladies are good at it because they often have these traits in spades. It is natural for them to deal with people in that way.

Thinking about the old Features, Advantages, Benefits sales approach you are again thinking about the potential benefits and advantages to people rather than hitting them with almost meaningless features.

You certainly need to have thought through what your core offerings are and who your target markets are. However then, you need to think laterally about what people might be thinking about or searching the Internet for and what might strike a chord with your target market. Definately you need to put yourself in the mind of the person who might be your client.

So, the way that you might attract people at the very edges of your whirlpool might be by posting a video on YouTube. Maybe something funny or shocking or maybe something informative. You might also post thoughts and useful information in  your blog. You might post a Press Release on an Internet Press Release site. ( By the way all the time that you are doing these things you have at the back of your mind the key words and phrases that your target market will be using to find someone like you ). You post things on Social Networks like Facebook and Twitter and again some are funny, some light hearted, some are informative and some are serious. Of course you still try to get into various publications and press ( many of these have online variants now ).  You list on relevant directories. You publish white papers ( as you did before ). You make your products and services clear ( as you did before ). You maintain a clear and consistent brand ( as you did before ).

Floating out at the edges of the whirlpool each of things are having thier own effect in terms of attracting peoples attention and drawing them closer to you. The YouTube video gets it’s own YouTube audience but also signposts the way back to you or your company. The blogs, PR’s, Social Networks etc all do the same.

Each of these things link back to your main website and to your email, phone number, fax number and ultimately to you.

Literally as people come within the sphere of your whirlpool the current gets steadier and stronger. Not in an unpleasant or imposing way but in a friendly and helpful way.

By the time they meet you they know quite a bit about you. They know what you believe, what you stand for and what you believe. They have, to some extent, a relationship with you.  They may even have exchanged Facebook messages with you briefly before they have spoken to you.

Then we consider that when there was only Traditional Sales and Marketing we always did our best to empathise with our potential clients – to make our advertising relevant; to make our telemarketing about creating a relationship; to tailor our mailshots and letters to our target audience; to have our salespeople ask questions and listen.

It always was and is about walking in thier shoes and understanding how they they think and feel and what they are likely to want and need. It is just that now we have this amazing thing called the Internet to communicate with our potential customers in words, pictures and videos.

The news that 365iT recently acquired IT Managed Services and Computer Hosting company 7 global gave us the opportunity to experiment with getting listed on Google NOT for the names of the companies eg 365iT, 7 global and 5i, but for the products and services that they offer.

As we have mentioned before the only people that are going to search on 365iT, 7 global and 5i for news about this acquisition are the people that already know about it ( because they have been told about it in some way and just need a bit more information).

Actually what we want is for people that are searching for terms like ” IT Managed Services Provider ” or ” Computer Hosting Services ” to come across the news that eg there is an IT Managed Services company that has just become a sister company to a unified communications company and could therefore provide a managed hosted unified communications solution as a ” one stop shop “.

This is actually what the potential customer wants ( assuming that this is what they were looking for ) and what the supplier companies involved want aswell ( ie they are looking for potential customers who want a combination of IT managed services, computer hosting and unified communications ). So, this is truly a win-win situation. In addition since Google wants to provide it’s searchers with the most relevant information for thier search it is a win for them aswell.

So, the first thing to understand is that we are not seeking to promote the company names involved in the acquisition but what the acquisition does for the potential clients. This leads to a re-prioritising and re-wording of the Press Releases and other communications  and it assumes that we have already worked out what keywords and phrases we want to promote. 

In this case for example 365iT, 7 global and 5i make way for IT Managed Services, Computer Hosting and Unified Communications. THESE are the things that we want to promote into the search.

The original Press Release

http://www.365itechnology.com/images/content/press_releases/365_iT_plc_acquires_7_Global_Group_Ltd.pdf

is therefore modfied to this Press Release

http://www.24-7pressrelease.com/press-release/365-it-plc-acquires-it-managed-services-and-computer-hosting-specialist-7-global-group-ltd-127184.php

http://www.prfire.co.uk/press-release/365-it-acquires-it-managed-services-and-computer-hosting-specialist-7-global-group-4212.html

where one emphasises the names of the companies and the other emphasises what they do. ( This thinking reminds me of the Feature, Advantage, Benefit sales philosophy – a Feature is like the company name, an Advantage is something that the company can do and a Benefit is something the customer needs and the supplier can provide and will lead to a cost saving or improvement in service ).

I chose a paid ( I paid $20 ) Press Release through 24-7 Press Release.com particularly because it is one that I have had a lot of positive experience with and I know that not only does it rank high but also it lasts some time in this ranking. ( Some Press Release sites posts appear briefly and then disappear ).

24-7 PR is also easy to upgrade so that, for example, you improve the SEO and the analytics as you go. I noted that PRFire was one of the websites that got good rankings when we were investigating boiler room brokers in an earlier post.

So it was a calculated assessment that by using the right PR sites with the right wording we would get appropriate rankings and this has indeed proved to be the case ( at the time of writing ) with the search as follows

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1R2ADBR_en&q=IT+Managed+services+computer+hosting+&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

 achieving a top of Page 1 listing and another front page listing

and subsets of this search eg

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&rlz=1R2ADBR_en&q=computer+hosting+services&btnG=Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=

also getting onto Page 1.

It should be noted that this is within hours of the Press Release actually being released ( it was released today ).

As soon as it was released we have supported the PR with comments and posts on eg Facebook and Twitter and links from these sites.

It will of course require further work to maintain these Page 1 listings but ” Objective achieved ” for the moment.

This is an interesting review from Icon Corporate Finance of Q2 M&A activity and mentions 365iT as being on the acquisition trail which it is for selected companies that fit the portfolio, such as the acquisition of 5i earlier this year and the very recent acquisition of 7 global.

http://www.iconcorpfin.co.uk/NewsEvents/M&ATechnologyReviewQ22009.pdf

The news that 365iT has acquired IT Fully Managed Services company 7 Global this month along with 5i earlier in the year is a Christmas present to all those involved with 365iT, in my opinion!

Since Peter ( Howells ) and I were at Voyager Networks where we had a national IP network to complement our data networking and Internet skills and expertise we have long harboured the desire for 5i to work closely with a forward thinking Managed Services and Hosted Communications provider.

The areas of ICT that 365iT covers include IT operations and management,IT Managed Services, Unified Communications, Business Continuity, Data Backup, IT Security, Virtualisation, Networks, Storage Solutions and Infrastructure Solutions.

These are some of the hottest areas in the ICT world at the moment and for the near future. They encompass other hot sectors like ” Cloud Computing ”  and ” Software as a Service “.

One of the great attractions to 5i of being involved with 365iT and Peter MacLean was his experience of putting together powerful, advanced communications companies. Don’t forget, he is doing this in one of the most difficult economic periods of our lifetime.

Where there’s a will there’s a way and now LMS Capital is also an investor in 365iT.

The story unfolds …….

365 iT plc has acquired the IT managed services and computer hosting specialist 7 Global Group Ltd (7global) from LSE Listed ,LMS Capital plc and LMS have taken a 12.5% equity interest in 365 iT.

7global, based in Liverpool, was originally formed in 1999 and has

developed a portfolio of fully managed IT services specifically aimed at

software vendors and end user organisations that wish to take advantage of Software as a

Service (Saas). The acquisition strategically enhances 365 iT’s capabilities in the fast evolving IT

managed services sector. It also strengthens 365 iT’s business relationships with key global IT

providers which include Microsoft, Cisco and Citrix.

“This acquisition is an excellent fit for 365 iT” said Peter MacLean,

chairman and chief executive. “It strengthens our strategic position

within the IT managed services sector, whilst also extending our product

portfolio, our client base and our geographical presence. The combined

focus of the enlarged 365 iT Group will enable us to further develop our

strategy of rapidly expanding our revenue and market share.”

MacLean concluded; “The Group’s capabilities are further enhanced by

the substantial technical talent and strong customer support attitude

that is prevalent at 7global.”

“We remain positive about 7global’s prospects as a leading Saas

infrastructure provider in the UK. 365 iT is well positioned to accelerate 7global’s growth,

thanks to its scale and complementary service offering. Therefore we are delighted to become

a shareholder in 365 iT in order to share in the profitable growth of the combined business”

said Pieter Hooft, MD UK Investments LMS Capital plc.

“This acquisition is an important development for all our customers and employees” said Chris

Bithell, Managing Director of 7global. “I am personally very excited about the opportunities

the future holds for us and am very confident that 7global will play a major role in the

development of 365 iT.”

Notes to the Editor

1. 365 iT plc was founded in 2005 and now employs over 85 people. Through its wholly owned

subsidiaries (365 iTechnology Ltd, 5i Ltd and 7 Global Group Ltd), the Group provides an

extensive range of IT services and solutions that address the nine strategic functional areas in

IT operations and management: IT Managed Services, Unified Communications, Business

Continuity, Data Backup, IT Security, Virtualisation, Networks, Storage Solutions and

Infrastructure Solutions.

2. 7global will continue to operate under its brand and name and will trade as a wholly owned

subsidiary of 365 iT plc. All 7global’s executives and employees will remain with the enlarged

365 iT group. 7global provides a range of support services and IT managed services including

hosted Microsoft Dynamics CRM, software and server hosting and Software as a Service (Saas)

delivery from its data centres including its ISO 27001 registered data centre located in the

former bullion vaults of the Bank of England in Liverpool.

3. LMS Capital plc is an international investment company whose shares are listed on the

London Stock Exchange. The investment portfolio comprises investments in both the US and

UK, with a spread of early stage and second round technology investments, development

capital and mature company buy-outs.

Enquiries:

Stephen Bean

Marketing-Alliance,

Tel: +44 (0) 7747 100000

www.365iTechnology.com

www.7global.com