Without a doubt in my mind if your business wins awards for its work it is a very good thing. The publicity alone can propel your social presence to new heights and the credibility they bring with prospective clients can be significant.
One thing that is sometimes missed by award winning companies is the reinforcement the awards give to those companies that were your early adopters.
Those people who took the act of faith needed to trust that you would deliver against your promises. It allows them to reinforce either publicly or inside their own organisations, or both, that their decision to use you was right. It shows that other people recognised this and that they had made the right decision to use you in the first place. When you win an award remember to thank your clients. Those are the people that helped you make this happen and propelled you into the black tied formal spotlight.
So, awards are great, right?
The truth is like everything only some are, some are frankly garbage. It is not a popular statement I am making but it is true, I want to alert you to this fact.
When I ran Freight Traders and Trade Extensions, we did enter award competitions, we actually won a few, and I am still very proud of that. The awards we won were all from very recognised bodies though, or the leading publications of the time. So yes, I still have the awards from The Freight Transport Association (now Logistics UK), The Chartered Institute of Logistics and Supply, The Wall Street Journal and a very special one we received from a client, Nutricia, which is now part of Danone, for being their supplier of the year.
We did enter others, but they were strictly curated. I had an approach that we would only enter awards from well recognised, or leading bodies in our field. I strongly suggest that you do the same. Watch out for those awards that are meaningless trinkets, that mean nothing, and are only put together to sell an event or some advertising space.
I have lost count of the number of times I have seen the phrase “award winning” attached to a company only to look at their website and find out that the award is from a publication that is there to sell adverts and simply paste press releases that are sent into their publication using false journalist names, since the fact is they don’t employ any.
Be warned, these organisations still exist. I had one ring me this morning telling me that ‘Simplify to Succeed’ my first book had been shortlisted for an award of “best new business publication”.
The thing is I hadn’t entered this competition, I hadn’t heard of the awarding body, I googled them as I was chatting to the nice guy (who was telling me how good my writing was) and found a website designed by a gifted five-year-old with none of the things that should be on a good company website.
I decided to have some fun and asked them how the process had been run. I was told about high profile industry leaders on their judging panel, without any names being provided of course, extensive process, highly sought after, yada yada yada…. I had some time, so I started to enjoy the conversation, and had decided to save some other poor person having to listen to what was clearly rubbish. Eventually, when he thought he had me I was presented with the real reason for the call.
Apparently, the winners were to be revealed at a gala dinner, taking place in London in early December and as a short-listed entrant (What? I told you I hadn’t entered!). I could buy a table for myself and nine others, my readers, friends, advisors, contributors for only nine thousand pounds.
How honoured did I feel that I would get to sit and eat a probably very poor meal, with poor wine (but good company of course) at nine hundred pounds per head. In addition to this I would be allowed to display the winner’s logo on my website and headed paper and receive a featured article, that I could write, that would be placed on their corporate website. Yes, that’s right the one I was looking at now, written by a gifted five-year-old. All this would be mine for a further three thousand pounds.
Funnily enough I declined the offer and told them to send me the award when they had decided the winner. I doubt I will see it.
So please, if you are entering awards make sure that they are ones that you and your clients and prospects will value if you win them. Make sure that it is a recognised industry body, publication, or event with a recognised awarding panel that you can look up on LinkedIn at least. Check out previous winners and the history of the award. Perhaps even speak to previous winners.
Buy a table at the awards dinner, invite your clients along and make sure it’s going to be good, don’t waste your or your clients time on badly organised shoddy dinners that you will feel embarrassed about inviting people to. AND I would say NEVER pay to have your “win” publicised. Good organisations do that for you because it is in their interests to be associated with good companies.
There are lots of joke, false, rubbish awards out there, do not get dragged into the mire by associating yourself with them or worse still paying to be part of them. Your image is yours, protect it.