BY MARK WALKER

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.

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BY DON RIGBY

As published in the Tri-City Journal of Business

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 be compelling 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.   

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BY MICHAEL MCCLELLAN

“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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BY J. MARK WALKER

Several years ago I was the regional sales manager for a small manufacturing company.

One of our product lines was made by this German parent, and was often used in OEM applications.We had a prospect in my Region who bought $500,000 per year worth of a product like one of ours, and we wanted their business. I worked through their Purchasing Department and Engineering Group to insure that we met or exceeded all their design specifications, and that our price was right. After more than a year, we still did not have the order.

I called the Purchasing Agent and asked, “We have the best product at the best price. Why don’t we have the order?” His answer floored me. “Our Vice President of Sales and Marketing does not want to change suppliers?” I asked, “That seems a little out of the ordinary. Why is that?” He responded with a story about a big problem with their present supplier which caused a major public relations disaster in one of their markets. They eventually got the problem resolved, but the VP of Sales and Marketing did not want to risk going through that kind of issue with a new supplier.

After verifying that he wanted to order our product, I asked the purchasing agent to set up a meeting. My Vice President of Sales, Director of Engineering, and Product Manager met me at their plant and we sat at the table with their Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Director of Engineering, Quality Control Manager, and Purchasing Agent. We got all the concerns out on the table and demonstrated how the problem they experienced in the past could not occur with our product. We then agreed upon a plan for a site visit to our facility by their people to verify that we could serve them.

From then on it was just a matter of working the plan, and we got the order.

What was the question that I had failed to ask one year earlier? After we became an approved vendor, I should have asked the Purchasing Agent something like this: “Who else needs to agree to this before you can place the order with us?” I could have saved a year of time and earned an extra $500,000 in revenue had I uncovered the issue with “changing suppliers.” Often there are factors in a purchase decision which don’t make sense to us, but which relate to a cultural issue or a historical problem like my customer had.

You will only learn this when you ask questions to pull out the information.

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BY ZAHIR PALANPUR

One of the cornerstones of the customer gap is understanding why our customers buy from us and what their criteria is in evaluating us and the options in front of them. Effective CRM and sales processes will highlight this critical step where you interview your customers to get this perspective and understand their needs and motivations to make their buying decision. 

So what if we could take this a step further and have your customer engaged in an ongoing interactive exchange to help you define and develop your products? Now, what if you could take it a step further and engage them in the selection process and have them help you in the marketing of your brand? This approach can dramatically increase the involvement and participation of your customers and sphere of users – they become part of your product development process, decision makers and marketers. This makes them highly vested in your brand. 

The ideas behind today’s web 2.0 networking technologies are making these ideas increasing feasible. Simply stated, Web 2.0 can be defined as that next wave of tools and platforms on the web that allows for greater collaboration and sharing of information including user generated content. It not so much about new technologies (as some of it has been around for awhile) as it is about new ways of applying it. 

You’ve probably heard about the main platforms like Linked In and Facebook and some of the tools out there like blogs and wikis. So how can you use this in your business context and how can it help you close the customer gap and “engage” the user group that makes your target market?  

A recent example that I can share with you is from what we did for a client. Late last year we partnered with them to launch a platform that you can view at - http://www.txstyle-mannington.com/. This is an exciting Web 2.0 / social media platform that allows target users for our client (in this case commercial interior designers) to submit design ideas, share these with their network of contacts and vote on the designs. It is taking the collaborative approach to the next with the user being involved in the product design creation process as well as the selection and marketing. By inviting people to come see what they have created and vote, the users are marketing for you and registration has risen rapidly from the first days of its launch. This has been very successful in the market with over 3,000 registered users and about 350 design submissions in the short time since it was launched. Equally compelling is the high level of interactivity including views, votes and comments – a designer called this the American Idol competition for the design community and said she had visited the site over 50 times in the last couple of weeks! You can imagine the level of engagement this has created and the potential benefits it can bring to our client. They couldn’t be happier! 

So think about how you can take advantage of this for your business. The above example may not apply to you, for that matter, no one platform or tool maybe directly relevant. Even blogs, one of the most common of these tools may not be right for all firms. By learning more about what’s out there and immersing yourself in these new tools, you will surely find the right mix for you. You now have everything from blogs, wikis and networking sites like Linked In to sites with specific applications like Yelp which gets customer feedback and business ratings on local businesses and Ning which allows you to create your own social network in a matter of minutes!This heralds a new level of marketing and sales that can best be defined as “Customer Engagement Marketing”. We’ll do our part in keeping you informed about by periodically profiling some of the tools, technologies and platforms on one of our web 2.0 customer engagement tool – here on the Growth Answers blog!

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BY STEVEN WINOKUR

Your front-line employees have a tremendous amount of influence over the experience a customer has with your company. The simple mistake many managers make is that they simply expect the employee to do the right thing. The question is, what is the right thing? Without expressing to your employees how you want them to act, they’ll act according to their own impression of how they think they should act.

This gets right into the next comment – don’t skimp on training. Once you start building the customer-centric culture and measuring the experience, you need make sure all your employees understand how you (as the manager or business owner) want them to act. Is the number #1 priority making sure the customer is happy, no matter what? Is it something else? Whatever it is, your employees need to understand it.

Communicate is key here – employees must have a clear understanding of how they are expected to act. A big part of that is simply defining what you would define as good behavior. Once that’s done, you can work on measuring it and incenting it. Let’s look at an example in a call center.

If the desired behavior is for the call center agents to solve the caller’s issue on the first call, then you should track first call resolution numbers. But, make sure then you incent on that – don’t incent on call time. It doesn’t do much good to say we want to solve problems on the first call and then incent people on how quickly they get customers off the line. It is inconsistencies like this that can cause a customer experience initiative to fail.

How a customer uses your product or service is only part of the experience. How your employees interact with customers goes a long way toward how a customer views the experience with your company. You can influence those interactions – just remember to communicate to your employees how you want them to act. Then back that up with training, measuring and incenting to ensure the behavior you want is actually occurring.

Next, we’ll look at everyone’s favorite word, Innovate.

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BY STEVEN WINOKUR

The first tactic on how to create a better experience has to do with creating a customer-centric culture.

Step 1 is to shift from a self-focus to a customer-focus. Far too many companies force customers to interact with them in the way that best suits the company, not the customer. Wrong! This demonstrates to customers that they’re not important. Find out how customers want to interact with you and then make the operational changes to best accommodate those desires.

Step 2 is to shift from focusing on product features to customer needs. This is especially prevalent in high-tech companies – don’t build new products or add features just because you can or because YOU think it’s cool. Obsess about fulfilling customer needs, not building a cool new “toy”. Unless you fulfill a need, if you build it, they won’t come.

Step 3 is looking at the customer experience as a company-wide competence, not a function. There shouldn’t be a Customer Experience Department that is solely responsible for the experience. Yes, there should be an executive that “owns” the experience and can direct other departments to change their operations. But, EVERY department has a responsibility to positively impact the customer experience. It’s not just the Customer Support/Service group that has to worry about the experience. This leads directly to the final step.

Step 4 is about reinforcing the customer experience with every interaction. The customer experience begins with their first touch with your company –whether it is a call or a website visit. From that point all the way through purchase, use and billing, the customer has many interactions with your company. Each one provides an excellent opportunity. Remember, every department has a responsibility towards fulfilling the promise of a superior experience.

Make the change to a customer-centric culture won’t happen overnight. But don’t let that stop you. These changes aren’t just about being nice – they’re about generating increased loyalty and driving revenue growth.

Next, we’ll be addressing the second tactic – “Defining, Designing and Measuring”.

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BY STEVEN WINOKUR

I had the pleasure of speaking at the GrowthANSWERS Meet the Expert meeting this month on the topic of customer satisfaction. More specifically, the discussion focused on the concept of the customer experience. We talked about the benefits of focusing on the customer experience as well as why it’s so important. Once everyone understood how it impacts their business, we demonstrated 4 tactics to create a better experience.

We’ll be addressing those 4 thoughts over the next week or so, but for now, let’s take a look at why the experience a customer has with your organization is so important.

Before proceeding, let’s all get on the same page. Defining exactly what the customer experience means can be a challenge in and of itself. I’d like to define it this way:

“The perception of the sum of ALL interactions a customer has with a given provider.”

It’s crucial to notice the use of two words: perception and all. Perception is used because the experience is in the eye of the beholder. The perception has to deal with the actual experience and the expectations that lead up to that experience. All is used because that’s exactly what makes up the customer experience. Every interaction – not just the ones with customer support or during the use of the actual product or service. Every touch influences the perception, either positively or negatively.

Now that we have the definition sorted out, let’s move on.

Creating a better experience for your customers isn’t some altruistic belief that people should be treated nicely. It’s about hard and fast business results. Having a superior experience can lead to increased revenue, greater protection of premium pricing and increased brand loyalty. In fact, studies have shown that the single most important attribute of driving customer loyalty is the customer experience. Not price or some fancy loyalty program. It’s the experience.

With the economy the way it is, customer retention is priority #1 for many firms. And retention is not about slogans or tri