Q: Todd, what’s the best business book you have read recently?
A: Ignore Everybody by Hugh MacLeod. It’s an easy read, it will only take an hour or two. But man oh man, is it profound.
I’ve been a fan of GapingVoid.com, Hugh’s blog, for quite some time. Hugh makes you think about marketing in a whole new light. For me, he makes marketing fun. I’m actually inspired after I spend time with his material.
As for the book, it makes you appreciate the need and the value of creativity. As a natural follow-up, the person I told this to asked: “What does creativity have to do with my line of work?
In the May 8-14 edition of the Atlanta Business Chronicle there is an on-target opinion piece written by Tim Bentsen, the Managing Partner for the Atlanta office of KPMG, LLP. He discusses the opportunity in this economic downturn to step back from the short-term focus, and think for the long-term. He suggest three areas for this long-term focus, but leaves out an important fourth – building up your people by training them.
If your phone is not ringing off the hook, then you have available time to invest an hour a week training your people, at all levels, on the key ways your company creates value and makes money for your clients.
• Work with your executive, management, sales and service teams to identify the areas in which your products and services bring value to your clients. What do you do for clients that helps them create value for their customers?
• When you gather them for weekly training, invest 10 – 15 minutes talking about client success stories in applying your solutions.
• Focus on teaching your employees how to uncover ways to build additional value through your offerings for your clients.
• Help them create the diagnostic questions they can ask to uncover needs that you can fill, and share those questions with everyone.
When you meet for your weekly sessions make sure to:
• Equip your employees to really find out what your clients need. Help everyone learn how to uncover what the clients can do now to grow their businesses, and look for needs that your products and services can fill.
• Train your employees at all levels to make your key products and services known to your prospect and clients as solutions.
• Rehearse ways to show clients how your solutions will help them get business, now and for the long term.
• Convert your solutions in to dollar savings to demonstrate to your employees direct value for clients.
When the economic times are uncertain, people become fearful about a lot of things. They stand around the coffee pot or water cooler and commiserate about the troubles – unless you give them something good to talk about; something challenging to focus on in helping your customers succeed at their businesses.
The organizations who are now focusing on the basic issue of building value for their clients in this tough market, will be in the best position to break through when the recovery begins.
We at Intrepid want you to be an intrepid marketer. And whether you are the CEO, the Marketing Director, or the janitor - we believe we are ALL in the company marketing department, and have a critical role to play.
So, we present this series of questions you should ask yourself - EVERY DAY - to see if you are doing the things necessary to be intrepid:
1. What have I done to destroy the status quo?
2. What actions have I taken to make a customer say “wow!”?
3. Have I reviewed and held myself accountable towards my written long-term plans?
4. Have I spent time trying to innovate and make my product or service - or customer experience - better?
5. Have I made the effort to meet someone new, and expand my network?
6. Have I done even a little something to Give Back?
7. Have I considered my customer when making any and all business decisions?
8. Have I helped anyone connect with someone of value?
9. Have I spent even a few minutes learning something new and continuing my education?
10. Have I identified the thing I least want to do - but most need to do - and just done it?
11. Have I refined and improved my ability to convey the value of my product or service?
12. Have I focused our sales process on solving problems or fulfilling needs - instead of pushing products and services our prospect might not need?
13. Have I brushed up on my ability as a storyteller - using this skill to make our prospects feel more emotionally attached to our company and brand?
14. Have I reminded EVERYONE in the organization they have a role in our marketing? And have I encouraged them to see themselves that way?
15. Have I realized that we are not really in the business of producing a product or service - we are in the business of marketing that product or service?
16. Have I refined my ability to differentiate my company in the marketplace?
17. Again, have I thought about ways I can destroy the status quo?
What are some other questions one should ask - each day - to become a better marketer?
My wife’s birthday was last week so we decided to go out for dinner as a family. I have two young boys and as any parent of young boys will tell you, they don’t sit still for long. Anyway, she wanted to go to a particular restaurant in Roswell that was known for their friend chicken. Problem was, it takes 30 minutes to cook and they do not take order over the phone. So over my best judgment we went anyway. Want to guess what happened?
By the time the food came, the kids were bouncing off the walls. My wife and I left the restaurant exasperated and certainly not in a celebrating mood. Now, it is not the restaurant’s fault we didn’t have a good experience, it was our kids. However, I have no desire to ever go back to that restaurant because of the overall experience was so bad.
How could they have helped make the experience better? Well, when my wife explained about the kids, the restaurant could have taken our credit card information (in case we didn’t show up at all) and started cooking the chicken. Is that against their rules? Certainly. But it would have solved our problem and created an overall better experience.
What are you doing in your business today that hinders your customer’s experience with your company? What can you do differently to ensure that you’re solving customer issues, not following internal rules?
Over the past several months, I have done a lot of thinking about how to better assist my clients with their business. One thing we are doing is focusing on the customer experience.
Here are a few things you can do to improve your customer’s experience:
1. Get your customer’s FEEDBACK. While you may not want to hear negative complaints from customers, trust me - you do. This is the only way you can solve problems - and actually it is the best way to build loyal customers. They will appreciate when you bend over backwards to handle their concerns, thereby building a stronger relationship. Here are ten questions you can ask your customer.
2. OBSERVE your customer. What they say, and what they actually do, are sometimes different. Point is, you should always monitor the behavior of your customers, and see how they go through your company experience. It won’t be a smooth as you might expect…
3. Be sure they understand the VALUE you bring. Tell them that story. Often. Be sure they understand what value you bring to their business - how you are making them better. This enables them to better spread your story to their network.
4. EMPOWER your employees. It is critical that you give your employees the freedom to handle customer complaints and needs - on a moment’s notice. If you do not empower your employees to make decisions on their own - then you are seriously limiting your ability to satisfy and serve your customer.
5. Make yourself ACCESSIBLE. Make it easy for your customers to find you when they need you. In this day and age of easy communication - there is no excuse not to be easily found.
6. BE your brand. You must always live your brand. If you position yourself as a green company, you better always live that brand. If at any time you deviate from your brand, you will injure that reputation, and business will suffer. People will pay a premium to live the brand with you.
7. Never stop INNOVATING. Looking for ways to improve your service, product offerings, and customer experience - never stops. The minute you stop seeking improvements is the minute your business begins to fade away. As soon as you bring a new innovation to market isn’t the time to start looking for the next one - you should already be on that path.
8. Make your website EASY. Sometimes you, the business owner, may like the look and feel of your company website, but what does your customers and prospects think? Your site won’t always make the same sense to a new user as it does to you.
9. Make the experience UNIQUE. A person makes lots of transactions and decisions each day. They buy goods from the grocery, pay a utility bill, buy songs from iTunes, etc. What you should strive for is a unique business experience - one that stands out and is memorable. And what happens when your customer experiences this? They come back. And they tell others!
10. COMMUNICATE. Reach out to your customers. Often. Use social media tools. Blog. Send newsletters. E-newsletters. Progress reports. Keep them in the loop about what is going on.
11. TRAIN. If you want your employees to behave a certain way, and learn habits that will serve customers well, you need to establish good training programs. But also know that training never stops. The best athletes never stop practicing.
12. Install SYSTEMS. Establishing set processes and systems that are meticulously followed by you and your employees can create a standard that customers will come to trust and expect. Don’t get trapped into never changing (always be looking for improvements), but a system allows your company to perform consistently, and systems bring comfort to customers.
13. Have FUN. If you aren’t enjoying yourself and having fun running your business, you are not providing an environment suitable for you and your employees to give a good customer experience. Make working your business fun - and the customer will certainly benefit.
14. Think Customer FIRST. It is a mistake we all make. When we make decisions, we sometimes don’t think about how those decisions will impact the overall customer experience. You should not do ONE thing (however remote) in your business where you don’t question how it will impact the customer.
What are other ways to improve the customer experience?
The need to stay in touch with customers, to cultivate top of mind awareness, to create preference for doing business with you has never been greater or more difficult to accomplish. With the advent of exciting new communication methods, the ability to communicate effectively and respectfully will differentiate winners from the losers. Customers have an unprecedented number of choices in the marketplace — so the need to connect and becompelling is both imperative and urgent.
HOW TO CONNECT:Don’t sell …Nurture. This powerful communication strategy aims at the core of why people buy.It’s fueled by an understanding of human nature, the need for trust, relationship and enabled by fresh new technology. It’s a way of connecting personally to build rapport and gently embed your brand in their hearts and minds causing them to call you when they’re ready to buy. You can automate many of these processes to help you be more efficient and effective.
With each prospect and client, teach them how to buy through ongoing, personalized correspondence and carefully sequenced touch-points. Begin by documenting your approach. Map your process. Do this and you’re ahead of 85% of the small and mid-sized companies who don’t.This step-by-step process outlines your expectations of the sales and marketing teams.You’ll minimize failure from human error while celebrating the human spirit. People don’t care what you know until they know you care. This simple idea revolutionizes the cultivation of loyal customers. Set yourself apart.Don’t sell. Through a nurturing philosophy, help people buy.
HOW TO BE COMPELLING:You earn it.Your product or service offering is deeper, more relevant and better strategic fit than your competitors.That’s because you know your customer–you’ve taken the time to understand their wants, needs and desires.You’ve analyzed competitive offerings and created an added dimension that further solves the customer problem.You operate with a true differentiator.The only one that matters is one that’s admired by your customer.
Are the promises of quality and service good differentiators?It’s not enough. You sound like your competition which adds noise and confusion to purchase process leaving price as the primary consideration.Give your customer tangible reasons to make emotional decisions they can justify logically.
HOW TO CREATE PREFERENCE:Live your brand promise.Your brand is the sum total of what you say, how you deliver and the customer experience you provide.In essence, your authenticity.You can certainly influence your brand, but you don’t own it as it is the perception of how your prospects, customers, partners and vendors view you.A well articulated brand strategy is the bedrock foundation of every successful enterprise.It’s no longer optional or nice-to-have. It’s required.
Your brand strategy serves as a blueprint for management and marketing decisions.It articulates what makes you unique, supports long-term vision, explains why customers buy and aligns all your employees with messaging elements to reinforce the values and principles your company stands for.
WHAT EXACTLY DOES YOUR COMPANY STAND FOR?Hint: more than shaking the money tree.The best brands are created from the inside out.This requires outside objectivity.I can’t empathize this enough–seek outside expertise to analyze your competition, talk to your customers, interview employees and review industry trends.You’re too emotionally tied to you business.Even though your opinions and bias make you less than objective, you should be involved in the co-creation process so the brand values of your company are authentic.
Your brand is more than your graphic logo, your positioning statement, your unique selling proposition.You own and manage those elements.Your brand is owned by your customer and their beliefs.The single most relevant thing you can do is deliver a customer experience worth repeating.When you properly manage customer expectations and then exceed them, you create brand ambassadors.These non-paid soldiers will do more to validate and create demand for your business, but you must give reason. The good news, you don’t have to spend a dime.Spending time to innovate around customer experience pays big dividends and begins with speaking to those who have already had one.
To summarize, let’s break things down into two actionable takeaways; 1) If you’re not making enough sales, you’re not talking to enough people, 2) If you want to change your income, change your marketing.Key word is change.Yes, the market has changed and so must you. When the market was good, you could exist without a refined brand strategy, without documented sales processes and without compelling messaging to build awareness, preference and a solid foundation for a customer experience worth repeating.Today is very different.The market you compete in is less forgiving. Assuming failure is not an option, there’s really no choice but to out smart, out market, out sell your competition.Do this and you won’t be out of sight, out of mind or out of business.
“Converting prospects into customers” – which is what GrowthANSWERS calls the “Customer Gap” – should be an important issue to most small-to-mid sized manufacturers. The reason? Most manufacturers under $75M in annual revenues rely heavily on niche markets for business – which means that they generally will have a limited pool of current and potential customers to do business with. This makes it imperative that they convert as many prospects as possible into customers in these niche markets.
(By the way, this also means that keeping as many customers as possible from these niche markets – i.e. closing the “Loyalty Gap” – and servicing them in as many ways as possible, which is addressed by the “Expansion Gap” – are also important issues. These will be addressed in future editions of this newsletter.)
Given the limited nature of the prospect pool in niche markets, some market research into the needs and pain points of prospective customers may be cost-justified. In addition, it is equally important to explore the key reasons that current customers buy your products and/or services, as well as the reasons that fallen-away customers no longer buy from your company. Only then will your sales force be truly prepared to convince prospective customers that your product or service is the best solution to address their needs and areas of pain.
Whether you use a professional market researcher or decide to have one of your internal team members conduct the interviews, here are a few tips and techniques for interviewing prospects, current customers, and fallen-away customers:
1) USE OPEN PROBES: Open-ended questions allow your prospects and customers the opportunity to think and respond in ways you might not anticipate. Be ready to ask the question in another way if you meet resistance or if they have trouble getting started with their answer. Probe deeper when you aren’t certain you have a clear understanding, or if you think they might have more opinions and insights to share. Most importantly, listen. Your goal when making the phone call is to uncover points of pain that perhaps you didn’t realize your prospect or customer is experiencing. Even nuances make a difference in how effectively a piece of marketing collateral is written.
2) GET FEEDBACK ON PAST EXPERIENCES: Take the bad with the good — and don’t get defensive. Asking for specific details regarding a bad experience will give you valuable problem solving material. Address concerns at the end of the conversation or, better yet, set up a future meeting so that you have time to prepare and offer a well thought out solution. You are just trying to pinpoint the key gap areas during this interview. But, don’t forget to ask what your company does particularly well. Good performance is just as important to know about as bad.
3) TEST SOME NEW CONCEPTS: Use the questionnaire as an opportunity to test some new concepts or approaches that you would like to explore with your prospects or current customers. It’s a perfect time to informally introduce a new idea or product/service offering.
4) KEEP IT SHORT: Do have a dialog, but don’t ask so many questions that it overwhelms your customer. Normally, 8 to 10 minutes is what you want to allow for this type of interview. Let the customer be your guide here, though. Sometimes they want to talk a lot longer. Do enough to make it meaningful, but don’t make the set of questions so long that you can’t complete it. Focus on your key objective areas, and make questions in those areas count. End the call by letting the contact know how important their comments are to you and your business.
By conducting interviews with your current customers, you are creating deeper, more meaningful relationships. Conversations with fallen-away accounts help you to discover why certain customers fell away and what steps you might take to bring them back. And, periodic interviews with prospect companies in your targeted niche markets will help you to understand what you can do to become even more valued and differentiated in that niche.
Finally, remember that current customers (and sometimes those who once were your customers) are your best source and most cost-effective business prospects.
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