The Top 5 Success Factors of All Time
Part 3: Customer Relations and Marketing
The first job for any business, as the great guru Peter Drucker once noted, is getting and keeping customers. Whether you call this marketing, selling, customer relations or external communications, this, as we like to say, is where the money comes from. This is also the area where we have had the most personal experience, and we have written more on this topic in our book, The 5 Key Success Factors of Business: A Powerful System for Total Business Success. But for now we’re going to focus on the really, really important components we should all keep in mind and practice if we want to be successful.
1. Managing Customer Value. If you haven’t read the marvelous book by that name (see link below) by Bradley Gale, I highly recommend it. It has had a huge impact on the marketing profession and my practice. “Customer value” is the whole package of what customers want from you — generally some combination of quality, price and service, but always uniquely expressed by each customer or market segment.
We have conducted many customer surveys for our clients, exploring customer value, and we have always found it to be very illuminating. After asking customers what they value most in a supplier of X (the product or services of our client), we then ask them to rate the importance of each factor. Then we ask them to rate their satisfaction with how well our client provides each value component. The result is a neat bar chart which shows the relative importance of each factor, overlayed by a line graph which represents that company’s average “score.”
For one manufacturer, we discovered that, while customers were quite satisfied with quality and service, there was a big dissatisfaction gap in price. This was something our client was vaguely aware of, but when they saw the chart, they were motivated to act. They rolled out a lower-cost product in time for the next national trade show, and it was a huge success.
There’s much more to Managing Customer Value than this, but the point is: “value” used to be a vague concept, but thanks to Bradley Gale, it is now measurable, a “metric” every bit as solid and useful as sales and expense numbers. And just like financials, customer value and satisfaction should be measured and charted continuously.
2. Continuous Customer Communications. Customers’ needs change from time to time, and you need a way to hear that clearly. In my experience most small businesses NEVER ask their customers, “How are we doing? What can we do to improve your satisfaction?” The reason for that, I think, is business leaders don’t really want to know. If sales are up, they don’t think they need to know. If sales are down, they don’t want to hear bad news. It does indeed take courage to ask customers about their satisfaction.
But another obstacle is that customers will rarely tell their provider what they really think. If you survey your own customers, they are likely to tell you what they think you want to hear, not the real truth. The way around that is to use an objective professional research firm, and it can be much less expensive than you think.
Recently we were doing a survey for a professional service client, and one of their customers was intrigued by our questions, including customer value and satisfaction. He told our interviewer, “You know, I realized in answering these questions that I would not say the same thing to my contact in that company. I can see there is real value in having an outside firm do this. Tell me how you come up with the questions, and what you do with the answers.” And so we did.
For large financial or retail firms, where customer contact is frequent and the exchange relatively impersonal (buying a product, making a deposit etc.), Richard Whitely, author of Customer-Centered Growth (see below) recommends what he calls “hardwiring the voice of the customer.” This means that every single person who has customer contact is encouraged to capture comments, good or bad, and feed them into their central database. Some companies condense that information every day and feed it to key staff members in a concise report. Now that is continuous customer communication! The point is: Ask your customers what they want, listen to what they say, and act accordingly. This is one of the most powerful keys to success, so often ignored.
3. Positioning your brand. One of the great classics of marketing, Positioning:The Battle for Your Mind, by Al Ries and Jack Trout, changed the world of marketing and advertising forever. Positioning has nothing to do with physical location but with the “space between the ears” (the minds) of your customers and prospects. Ries and Trout claimed (and no one disagreed) that we all perceive things in our environment in categories, often hierarchical. For example, Pepsi and Coke continue to battle for the No. 1 position on the dark cola “ladder.” Luxury cars, family cars, compact cars, SUVs and other vehicles compete in their categories for dominance.
More recently it has become fashionable to speak of “branding” instead of “positioning.” But the point is the same. Your brand is perceived in relation to other alternative products or services. If you cannot be No. 1 or No. 2 in a category, as Ries and Trout point out, then reposition and create your own category. You must clearly state what is different about your brand, and it must be true.
For example, we are working with a talented architect/developer who is creating a “traditional neighborhood development” with inviting porches, wide sidewalks, traditional architectural design, and shops within easy walking distance. However there are a growing number of “TND’s” in the metro area, some of which “got there first.” With some analysis we realized that our client’s development was distinctive in that all the homes are all unique and custom-built, not “production houses” similar externally and internally. So we are positioning our client’s development as “The Custom-Built Traditional Neighborhood.” It captures a very important customer value, distinguishes them from the competition, and is a true claim others can’t make.
Be wary of really vague or esoteric claims like we’ve seen with some ads by high-tech companies (especially before the dot-com crash). If the target market doesn’t “get it” instantly, you’re wasting your money. Also try to focus on a sustainable competitive advantage. It needs to be something that is really core to your business, a major customer value, and not the latest bell or whistle of the moment. Otherwise once your competitor adds their bell or whistle, you lose your advantage.
4. Use multiple media. A big mistake many companies make is to rely too much on advertising, which is not only very expensive but also reaches many people who would never be interested in becoming customers. Advertising is certainly valuable for those who can afford it, but we have done many marketing surveys over the years asking people, “What is the best way to communicate with you about a new provider of (this product/service)?”
You know what the answer is, about two thirds of the time, across all industries? “Send me some information in the mail, then call me after I’ve had time to read it.”
If someone is important enough that you want them as a customer, personalize your communication with a brief cover letter, include a nice brochure or other sales materials, and call them, without fail, a couple of days after they’ve received it. So many people mail but never call, and so many call but never mail. The combination is dynamite, and one we’ve found to be most effective for our business (besides the best one of all, referrals). It is especially effective for services, business-to-business, or big-ticket product sales. For inexpensive consumer products, the cost per sale of mailing plus follow-up may be too high, so that’s where mass-media advertising works best.
(Since this article was written, the whole world of social media has exploded with Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Instagram and more. If you’d like to learn more about social media and marketing, click here.)
One other often overlooked form of promotion is public relations. Thousands of trade journals and periodicals out there are hungry for good articles. For less than the cost of a 1-inch ad, we’ve placed PR articles for clients in national trade publications, read by their target markets, running 3 or 4 pages in length with photos. Obviously the interest level and credibility of such articles is far greater than paid ads and so, so much cheaper!
5. One-To-One Marketing. This phrase, popularized by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers’ great book, The One To One Future (see below), is based on an approach many of us have learned over the years. The way I like to express this great truth is, “The unit of marketing is the relationship between two individual people.” What this means is, people want to be treated and known as individuals.
A great way to facilitate this is with a computer database which keeps track of each customer or prospect’s contact information, characteristics and preferences. Some Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software will pull up a customer’s key information file automatically when caller ID identifies their incoming phone call! If that doesn’t work, their name or phone number manually entered will pull it up. But on an even more personal basis, have one person assigned as THE contact person for each customer. For large-potential sales, encourage your pesonnel to build personal relationships with key customers. Find out about their likes, hobbies, families and more, and capture it in a protected database. Correctly used, computers can increase customer intimacy and loyalty. But only when that company-customer contact is experienced as one to one.
6. Universal love. The idea of “loving” your customer may sound great if you’re a “feeler” type, but if you’re a “thinker” type, it may make you uncomfortable. So try “caring.” Perhaps you’ve heard, “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care.” We are all human beings who want to feel other people love and care for us, and tapping in to that need is one of the most powerful, if not the ultimate, customer relationship methods anyone can use. This doesn’t mean erotic love, of course, but it does mean that we need to convince our customers we really care about what’s best for them, not just getting their money. How do we do that? A few key ways:
- Show an interest in customers as persons. Listen to them with empathy. Remember what they say. Record key information in a database so you and others don’t forget.
- Give something extra. Provide a small product or service for free, as an expression of appreciation, not just at Christmas but unexpectedly, or give a special discount.
- Begin with a needs assessment. This is a powerful tool which some professionals use regularly but many other businesses can learn to do. This shows you really want to understand what your customers need and are not just trying to sell them something off the shelf or something that someone else bought. (Marketing is giving people what they want and need; selling is trying to persuade peple to buy what you want to provide.)
- Remember to say “thank you.” Don’t take anyone’s business for granted. Let them know you appreciate their business by explicitly telling them so.
*References:
The 5 Key Success Factors of Business: A Powerful System for Total Business Success:
http://www.amazon.com/Key-Success-Factors-Powerful-Business/dp/1257156543/
Managing Customer Value: Creating Quality and Service that Customers Can See: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029110459 /wwwlciwebcom
Customer-Centered Growth: Five Proven Strategies for Building Competitive Advantage:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201154935 /wwwlciwebcom
Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0446347949 /wwwlciwebcom
The One to One Future : Building Relationships One Customer at a Time http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385485662 /wwwlciwebcom