Whenever I buy something that says "batteries sold separately." I calmly dream that this will be the store redeeming my basic faith in a company’s ability to seize the most self-evident opportunity for customer service.

(I’m starting to think I am a hopeless idealist.)

1. If you are selling an item. TEST it before you let the customer walk out with it. Take out a pair of batteries. Put them in and make sure everything works.

It really doesn’t matter that the item is made by Widget Industries in Upper Mongolia. YOU sold it, and the customer will be angry with YOU when it doesn’t work.

2 . (This is where companies make fools of themselves) Turn off the object and put it back in the box before closing the sale. But LEAVE THE BATTERIES.

Yes, I said it! Save your key rings, forget about the complimentary Frisbee. Take the unusually smart step of actually making sure that the item will work when they get home without the customer needing to buy batteries.

In fact, if I come home with an object without batteries, but a complimentary branding Frisbee, I’m probably going to be even more fuming than if I didn’t get the Frisbee at all. At that second I am going to wonder what moron came up with that idea instead of just giving me a pair of bloody AA’s! Now I’m both angry that I have to go back out and get batteries, and convinced that your establishment is owned and operated by a cretin. Not the customer experience you should be shooting for.

Giving It Away Increase Sales

The amazing thing is that your sale of batteries has a great chance of increasing too. Why? Because if you don’t have a policy of testing each item, your sales clerks are going to forget to remind the customer they will need batteries x amount of times out of a hundred.

If clerks test everything as a policy, they won’t forget as often and that will improve sales of batteries as well. And here is the kicker, the customer probably has other things that need batteries, so even though you just gave them batteries for the item they purchased, they will often end up buying them for other items.

It All Goes In the Plus Column

If the item you are selling is $2.49 with a profit margin of 30 cents. This is admittedly not a great idea. But if you are holding a profit margin anywhere over $3 per item, you can’t really lose by doing this.

AA batteries are about 7 cents if you buy in bulk. You are paying more for those fancy brochures used to staple the receipt to in case the product doesn’t work. Now you will have to deal with less customer returns as well, which also saves you money and bad will. (See the math here?)

If you have a profit margin that is high, Say $70. You will have to convert 1 sale in every 250 to a returning customer or a referral for it to break even.

I guarantee you will be head and shoulders above the competition that are still standing there like misers, taking them back out of the gadget before asking you if you would like to buy batteries. To me, that is not just a missed opportunity of customer service. It’s downright counterproductive and borderline rude.

I can also promise you that the statement "I’m going to leave these in here, if you would like to buy extra batteries, this item takes Double A’s" will do more for your customer satisfaction than a Frisbee ever will.

Have you bundled yourself so tight you can’t move?

Once upon a time…… I worked with a company that provided contracted services. The services were spanning many areas, and of course came in different bundles.

I was tasked with finding the "custom" contracts, those not conforming to any of the standard bundles, so that they could be standardized. Something that many companies try to do to simplify both the billing and being able to provide the service they agreed on. Up until this point, it was nothing strange to me.

When i worked on it, i quickly realized that almost all of the "weird" contracts as they were called, had been sold by one of the senior staff. These contracts were highly customized in both services provided and pricing. This of course was interesting, but what was more interesting than that, was that the company had an almost 100% retention rate of these customers.

After crunching the numbers, it also became very clear that the profit margin on those contracts were on average 7$ over the standard packages. Even after taking the "hassle" of customized billing and keeping track of what services to provide into consideration.

The Senior member had tapped several majorly important resources at once. The customer got a personal relationship which let them buy exactly what they needed. And in the process, the company:

A) Made more money
B) Kept the customers longer, (making even more money.)
C) Made the customer happy
(which i’ve harped on enough already as the only way to get good referrals.)

Simplified Billing be Damned

These wierd contracts were exactly what every customer should have been offered, Customized to perfection, the senior staff member had by "breaking the rules" shown that it was the best option available.

But as always, the "cutting costs" aspect of simplified billing and contract management was what the corporate head office could more easily measure, and therefore wanted. So that was what they got. The profitability and retention went down as could be expected.

The savings of "simplified billing" ended up costing them more than hiring an extra Accounts Recievable staffer would have cost them.

And lets not forget that they had a very powerful accounting and billing package that if used correctly would have made it a non issue to begin with.

Lessons Learned
What i learned from this staff member was that unless you are completely unable to customize, there is no reason not to. It’s simply better to sell them what they want. They are willing to pay a slight premium on the services they do get, if you allow them to cut out the ones they don’t want.

Thougts on Selling Services

-Services, should never be sold as a fixed package unless they are interdependent.

- if they are interdependent, they shouldn’t be listed as two separate items to begin with.

- Bundles are great, some customer likes the no hassle approach, and the rest can use them as a base from where to start. But to not allow customization is the same as saying "Your wants and needs are not important."

For Gods Sake, Don’t Listen to Me!

Every time you sell a custom contract that adds or subtracts a service from one of your bundles, You are being given Free Product Development . Your customer is helping you improve your bundles and packages with no other consideration than you listening to them.

Consultants like me charge big money to give you the same information that your customer just gave you for free.

So by all means, please ignore this opportunity, and call me instead, I’ll be happy to listen to your customers for you, (and bill you accordingly.)

—

Satisfied customers are your best sales force, but are you paying attention to the ones that are doing the work for you?

Next time you get a clear referral, don’t miss a beat in contacting the person who gave it. Make sure that you thank them for the business. If at all possible, reward them somehow, give them a discount, a gift card, take them out to lunch. Whatever you do. never let a referral go unnoticed.

If you notice and appreciate the business they send you, they’ll do it again.

Major sales teams almost always have bonus programs, are you rewarding your “sales force?”

I received an email today from a man, (the disclaimer at the bottom of the email clearly states that I was not allowed to discuss the content by the way) So, I won’t mention either his name or the company. I will however take my chances and tell you what his point was. Let’s just call him Mr. T. Rex

He sells mass email lists, and was fairly upset at what I said about direct marketing approaches in the “Extinction of Dinosaur Marketers ” Series.

I quote…

"If my services make more money than it costs, where do you get off claiming that it’s a bad idea! I sell exceptionally well targeted lists, with superior quality prospects that are handpicked for every customer, We have a higher conversion rate on our lists than our competition. Who the (expletive deleted) are you to say that we’re dinosaurs?” You’re nothing but a…
(I’m cutting it here because I want to keep this blog at least PG-13)

—

Well Mr. Rex, it’s easy… It’s the other conversion rate I’m really interested in. You see, I consider potential customers as being on a fence; you have to pay equal attention to how many you push down the other side as you do to the ones that jump down your side. The ones that don’t buy aren’t completely unaffected; they might be turned away too.

What I want to hear about is – How many of the ones that didn’t buy did you turn off in the process?
I’d be better inclined to like it if the list wasn’t targeted at all. Then at least you wouldn’t be turning away your exact target segment by giving them a negative connotation to your company.

If you convert X%, but give as many a bad taste, you just lost out in the long run. Your target segment isn’t going to grow fast enough for you to pick a marketing approach which potentially damages future sales.

Now tell me how drying up your potential customer pool is a risk worth taking?

I do however thank Mr. Rex for taking the time out to email me his thoughts; it’s always interesting to see what the other side of the coin looks like.

If you are intending to market your business to - or through - media channels, your best friend will be a well designed Media kit.

Media kits (also called Press Kits) help interested parties to find key information about you, your company and your products right when they need it. The easier this information is to obtain, and use, the better your chances are of getting it picked up.
Getting free publicity is never a bad thing.

A Media Kit is Useful For:

1. Spreading the word
Press kits act as a marketing tool to reporters of all kinds. Whether the person is producing materials for a blog or a major newspaper, a well designed press kit will get their attention. If you create a press kit that can get a reporters attention, you will be rewarded with increased exposure. Then it’s up to you to convert that exposure to whatever goal you are pursuing.

2. Attracting Advertisers
A press kit will give a potential advertiser access to the information they are looking for to make a decision. Having the right information in there tells them that you are the sign post they are looking for. Transparency, sells advertising. Don’t skimp on facts and figures.

3. Projecting Authority
Press kits are bragging posts. You can add things here that my may not want to publish in your own publication. How many are referencing you, what is being said about you. Things that might go against the normal rules of modesty can and SHOULD be in a press kit. Projecting authority is the key to bridging into new areas. If you write great blog posts, you might get asked to comment on a TV show. But you have to be able to show why you are the person they want.

Appeal to their Laziness

Remember, you are dealing with people looking for something. If they are looking for something to publish, chances are that they are on a deadline. Make it complete, interesting and do as much of their work for them as you can. You’ll see your press kit appear in places you never thought of. The stressed writer will gladly take well written text from press kits and republish it instead of missing a deadline.

People are inherently lazy; write text in third person that can be reused unaltered. if it gets republished, the sentence "We are a company who builds…" will have to be rewritten. Writing in third person appeals to the laziness inherent in most people. (And to the stressed journalist even more.)

What to Include

A press kit is comprised of three basic elements. (Static, Images, Dynamic)

1. Static Information
Facts about the company, things that don’t change or at least stays relatively fixed. This is where you can put all your background information.

Answer the standard battery of questions:
Whom - What - When - Where - Why - How

Write this information in easy to read, friendly, third person voice. DON’T make it read like a vision statement. A mission or vision statement is almost only republished when someone is writing about mission or visions statements.

The Press Release Trick

The static section should include Press-Releases. You should make a press release or two every month. A steady flow of press releases shows activity, which makes you newsworthy on its own. If you have tree releases spanning the last 18 months, you are not looking very active. Appeal to a publisher by telling them you are a business that is worth taking notice of.

You are also telling them that they better move before someone else gets the all important scoop on the next one. News people HATE being scooped, which works to your advantage.

Awards, recognitions, and references

Show them that you are the authority. Any accolade you have received should be noted and if possible shown in the static section. This is a lemming syndrome. If others think you are noteworthy, the person reading your press kit will think so too. If it’s an ego boost to you, put in in there.

2. Images
Remember that images are often a requirement, Logos, as well as pictures of relevant people and events.

Cover the Bases
Remember the lazy aspect. Don’t make them work to publish your image.

Include several versions of logos, banners and images. It is better for you to have several sizes than have your logo cut and butchered or even worse, skipped, because it doesn’t fit. If they can pick one that fits their available space, you don’t risk losing information because they re-sized your full width banner to a thumbnail.

Several formats

Have Black and White images ready. Some images just don’t look good when converted to B/W so it’s better to have done your own work there as well.

Print quality - Which normally is 300 dpi (dots per inch)
Try to include at least two of the following formats: TIFF, GIF, EPS (PDF is becoming more acceptable to most).

Web quality - which normally is 72 dpi
Try to include both JPEG and GIF

List images with a thumbnail and a clear description, and list the file formats available under as download links.

3. Dynamic Information
This is information that appeals to advertisers looking for a website or blog to publish their ads on. Show them everything they want in a simple easy for follow format. And keep it up to date. If possible use things like widgets to show your data in real time.

Hits and visits
How many hits you get on your site per day/week/month. How many customers frequent your location. You can also be even more specific, and tell them Weekday vs. Weekend, Data, I’ve seen that this can swing a publisher that has a specific target audience.

Subscribers
If you have an RSS feed or a mailing list, tell them how many you are reaching. Easiest way to do this is to have a feed widget published that shows your current number of subscriptions. Do not publish that widget however if your readers are low (some say 50, i’d say 100.) It turns away future subscribers to see low RSS Counts. But more on that in another post.

Demographics
Demographics are a huge selling point to advertisers. Get as much info as possible. You can gather information in several ways. A quick sidebar poll for instance is easy to create and a powerful way to get this information. Having it ready for your potential advertiser will increase your sales dramatically.

Display demographic information in charts and numbers. The Visual is a great selling tool.

Previous Advertiser Click through rates
If you’ve had ads before, tell them how many hits they generated.. If you can justify the price you are asking, you’ll get less apprehension from future buyers.

Be specific if you can. Tell them the difference between separate sizes and positions etc

Tell them the Price
If you are selling advertising space, don’t make it a mystery to find out how much. Let them know what you offer, what locations, sizes and prices of each opportunity.

Here is a pricing policy tip, Give them several levels with the second to last made unattractive by the top level.
- Text ad in RSS feed - $79/month
- 120 by 120 Thumbnails in sidebar - $199/month
- Banner $ 299/month
- RSS Feed and Banner $300 per month.

This trick actually increases the sales of the top level. The third option will get no sales, but it makes the top offer look attractive. If you get rid of the "package" top level, less people will buy the $299 banner than would the $300 package. opting for one of the lower levels instead . Always have the "duh" price in there. It might seem silly, but it has proven very effective.

Actual Factual

Don’t subject a publisher to hype. If you make a claim, make it a truthful one. They will not be very pleased with you if they publish something that turns out to be false. These people are spreading your name and increasing your notoriety, don’t make them regret it.

If you sell advertising space based on inflated numbers, you are guilty of false advertising yourself. You sell advertising more if you already have advertising there. So losing advertisers because they didn’t get what they expected will slow down your future sales as well when your ad slots are sitting empty.

Give them everything they need

If you are looking to get noticed, try to have everything that a publisher might want in one easy to access location. This includes the text, images, facts and figures etc. Make this accessible in one single file. A .zip or .rar file is online publishing standard. Again, appeal to their laziness. Give them what they want prepackaged, and ready to go.

They will want a quick fact sheet of information that includes:
- Name of Company and or Publication
- Contact information
- Exact URL
- Submission Deadlines
- Payment and Ordering information

Tell Them the Copyrights

Give clear instructions what they can publish, what they can change. And what they have to either keep as is, or request permission before changing. This is a common concern for someone looking to republish information, and if they can’t get it quick enough. They might skip you for someone that has it clearly listed.

Make it Easy to Find

Don’t hide your press kit in a link under "about" or "contact", give it its own link prominently displayed.
PRESS - PRESS KIT - MEDIA KIT work very well as link names. Whatever you choose, Just make sure that people don’t have to look around to find it. Although many hide it in the footer, if you want to sell ads, your better off putting it in the header.

Don’t Lose Out

A well designed media kit resolves the major problem of time. If it is available when needed, you don’t have to worry about missing an opportunity because you couldn’t take a call or answer an email in time.

The New Marketing Channels

Read the previous Entries:

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

—

So the market has changed, there is no denying that fact any longer. Now the question is how do we adapt and break in to this new marketplace? Since the traditional avenues of direct marketing, commercials, advertising etc. are drying up, we need to find the openings that have been created instead.

These new openings revolve around word of mouth, this is the new hard currency of marketing and the reason so many traditional dinosaur marketers have problems adapting. Word of mouth is hard to measure, largely uncontrollable, and almost impossible to buy without running the risk of being exposed as a "cheater." Hence, it is every traditional marketers and CEO’s nightmare. What can’t be exactly measured, reported and controlled with a spreadsheet tends to be ignored. This is fine; those who adapt will just have more business when the rest keel over.

Advertising Is Dead, Long Live Advertising

The basic rules of advertising have not really changed. AIDAS (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action, Satisfaction,) still holds true. The major change that social media has added, is Confirmation . Instead of having a single place in the chain, confirmation is now the center of the customer’s decision making process. Although the confirmation part is integral, it can be skipped. It can also occur between each step of the chain, multiple times if necessary. This is why the hard sell doesn’t work anymore either. The customer is demanding the right to abort any decision process to return to the confirmation part. More often than not, a hard sell approach will trigger this apprehension and drive the customer to verify with their network.

To avoid hype, people are looking to their networks to find someone who knows and is willing to talk. These experts can be anyone with the forum and will to voice their opinion. These networks are multilayered, a friend might not know the answer, but knows a blog that discusses the topic. This is considered more reliable than the corporate website.

The initial reach and market penetration is not happening through traditional mass advertising, but through targeted lifestyle and spokesperson advertising. In order to reach the new target audience, the powerful marketers of tomorrow will be on an increasing level people with some notoriety in a specific field. Being famous is no longer enough to create interest - context is.

The use of celebrities has become synonymous with major brand advertising, and as such, it carries little or no reference trustworthiness. Whereas smaller artists, athletes, bloggers, and other micro-celebrities are beginning to carry more weight because they are often seen as independent and with a higher degree of integrity and honesty.

What is important to notice is that the impact value of celebrities is diminishing, whereas the group specific role-model is increasing. Group specific in this case means anyone can represent you, as long as they are contextual. You can notice this in that celebrity endorsements have declined compared to just a couple of years ago.

No One Cares What Tiger Woods Drinks

The consumer is looking for contextual endorsements; a golf club is a great promotion for Tiger, IF he plays it himself. Or he can explain why this is a great club for an amateur and use his expertise to project believability. But he can’t sell Pepsi or any other drink very well anymore. Especially if he isn’t seen drinking it on the course. We see it more and more, celebrity advertising for non contextual products is dropping fast.

Also noteworthy here is that the reason for the non-celebrity advertising being more prevalent is not the ineffectiveness of the celebrity as such, but the ineffectiveness of TV advertising as a whole. There is simply a need to cut the production cost of TV and print campaigns to balance the reduced conversion rates that they are seeing.

This is where the micro-celebrity comes in. People are looking to the smaller more focused person, one that by default places a lot on the line with his or her word. These are the real marketers of the future.

A blogger promoting a product can have a higher impact value than a Tiger Woods promotion. Unless it is something that Mr. Woods uses on the course and thereby places his own reputation and success on the line with. Since very few people believe that Tiger actually drives a Buick, his endorsement of the vehicles they produce has been reduced, we have seen most car manufacturers move away from the celebrity endorsement to market to what the customer needs are, which currently is price and mileage. Mr. Woods’ contract with Buick expires in ‘09; I for one would be surprised if it was extended past that point.

Blessed are the Geeks

Traditionally, a marketing campaign would find their target market, and then find the middle segment -the large part of the curve - that consisted of normal users. Early adapters and latecomers were ignored as this market was the small portion of the fringe. And it was thought that early adopters would simply respond faster to traditional advertising.

As I discussed in Part 1, the middle of the road are no longer interested in hearing about your product. They have become exceptionally good at ignoring marketing messages. To get traction now, you need the people with the highest propensity to look for, and be excited by, new items.

All of a sudden, we have arrived at the evolution. Now, previously ignored market segments of earliest adopters, The Geeks , are ruling the earth. By reaching them, catering to their specific needs and wants, - which in most cases is extensive and factual information - you will create the necessary buzz around your product or service. And only through them will you be able to properly penetrate the social media networks to get enough spread. These geeks are key players in certain areas, and often have large followings of people who listen to what they say.

The early adopter is a decision maker based on two primary criteria. They want remarkable products, and they need plenty of information. In order to reach them, this information has to be available for them to become excited. What is important to recognize is that the early adopter will sell a new product before they have seen it. Your advertising can’t just sell on spin anymore; it has to sell on fact. Your word of mouth reach through these networks is the spin.

Watch Out For the Fake Geek

Although the Geeks have already passed along the social media craze well into the mid range of "normal targetable consumers." They are also the ones that pioneer the new social media sites. When a social media site becomes packed with dinosaur marketers spamming everybody, the geeks leave. When they do leave they take with them much of the credibility of that particular channel to the next evolution in social media,

To the dinosaur marketer, the obvious solution is to create a "fake geek." jumping on new forums to spread your message, but this doesn’t work well either. The "real geeks" will search and destroy any such effort, only when the onslaught is too big will they give up protecting their realm and move on to the next one. You can never maintain spam and early adopters in the same network for long. You can stay there and spam with once the early adopters have left, but your conversion rates will drop instantly when this is the norm.

A Shilling Backlash

The "shill" - a person that is paid to act like an unaffiliated customer endorsing a product, is perhaps the worst idea possible to work within this realm. It is considered one of the worst types of dishonest spam, and people are becoming VERY good at spotting this. As soon as a shill is suspected, the community will immediately paint the company out to be dishonest and underhanded. A real, honest endorsement from a customer is gold, to get caught manufacturing these is equal to suicide in most cases.

When approaching the marketplace as it looks today, honesty and disclosure have become watchwords. The customer is too smart to accept anything less than ethical marketing. They will force ethics by actively de-railing and exposing any attempts they spot to circumvent the rules of the new social networks. In the new marketplace you need to be both remarkable, and forthcoming, or you will fail on reaching the target audience.

Going Viral - Not What it Looks Like

The magic word today is Viral. The holy grail of social marketing is to find that one pearl that will spread itself like wildfire. And many companies are making a decent profit on promising viral marketing. This is an area to watch, and watch carefully. In many ways, it does not convert like you would expect. If used to spread a message that isn’t true, or leaves the customer feeling cheated, you will hear about it.

Viral marketing requires that the advertising itself is noteworthy, not the product. This creates a disconnect between what advertising is accomplishing, and what marketing should be doing. Viral marketing is so powerful that it can be intoxicating in itself. But the effect of a great viral campaign to promote a so-so product is disappointing in many ways. You’ll get noticed, which can be great for the ego, but if you’re not living up to the expectations. It won’t be good for business.

You could theoretically create something like "Poo-Perfume - He’ll never forget your scent ", and through a funny video ad blast the viral campaign wide open. You have the two parts of a successful viral campaign, the outlandish product and a funny advertisement that would be noteworthy by itself. But apart from gag stores, no one would buy your particular scent. These viral campaigns are excellent for brand building and to keep your name in front of a potential customer. However, the product has to deliver quality that matches the hype, or you are selling Poo-Perfume to everyone that thinks they bought Chanel.

The viral campaign is great for Branding, and to keep an already recognized name in front of customers. It may however not provide many sales. In order for the viral campaign to function, it has to provide an interest that can be converted into action, and that can only be done if the rest of the solutions are in place. Many of the viral campaigns you see out there miss this goal by a mile. The ad is watched millions and millions of times on YouTube, but conversion are average at best.

Since the viral spread is so powerful, if your product or service fails to meet expectations when the customers flock to find you, your negative effect can kill you as quickly as the viral boosted you to begin with. Remember that the social networks are as powerful in bringing bad products down as they are blasting a great idea into orbit.

It’s Your Call - Evolve, Or Perish

You can and must prepare to handle the new expectations of the marketplace. Social media has changed the behavior of your customer. The technical evolution of cell phones with IM, Email, Twitter and everything else connected into one persons pocket has left zero room for error. Every customer has to be treated like The editor of the New York Times, because quite frankly, their reach can be just as big.

Passing On a Sale Is Long Term Profit

Your name, brand, and business are on the line every time you try. Since you don’t know how many readers follow this particular customer. Your only bet is to apply good old fashioned business sense. It’s better to talk a customer out of a sale that isn’t what they want than to have him or her talk 400 people out of making a purchase later.

Quality Is Your Only Hope

Without it you will be left without remedy when someone is displeased. Your best bet is to fix a problem as they occur. If your business model is based on sub standard products, you can’t do this. The amount of complaints will take the profit right out of any venture. And the lack of remedy will be noticed, discussed and taken apart in public forums that you have no real control over. If you lack a direct relationship between your promise, and your delivery you won’t last long.

You can’t adopt old techniques to new media.

The key trait of any dinosaur is to attempt to fit old into new. Remember that the new media networks were created so that traditional marketing can be avoided. The only way to get old style messages into new media is to change the delivery method, which means you are trying to mass advertise without admitting that you are. We know by now that bring sneaky, underhanded, or dishonest is not the way to build relationships.

With Their Permission

Your customer is not willing to be accosted by marketing and hard sales anymore. Ask permission, don’t do it in a clandestine way either. Tell them what you want, and accept that the ones that are interested enough to give you permission to contact them are your best targeted audience to begin with. Anything less than a customer’s express permission is spam. Just because it is legal does not make it welcome.

When They Want It

Google is the key to many businesses success, being on page one there means that anyone that finds you. Should have been looking for what you have. This is why it’s a bad idea for you to have non-contextual search words on your webpage. It brings visitors that are looking for something else. Since they aren’t interested in what you have to tell them, you are wasting their time. Not a good place to start a relationship.

Customers Relations Spread

Your relationships with your customers will spread - Negative and positive experiences alike. Focus on the customer experience, and forget about the short term profit margin. You don’t like to be nickel and dimed, neither does your customer. The difference between the dinosaur age and today, is that your customer through social media and technology has a way of sharing this experience with everyone they know before they have reached their car.

The Market Is Not Yours to Take - But It Is Yours To Lose

You can’t blast your message out there until you reach enough people. There aren’t enough people interested to make it worth your effort. You can’t buy, get, or cheat your way successfully for long in the modern market. The customer is in control, and you are along for the ride.

They will not trust what you say, what your advertisements say, or what celebrities on TV say about you. They trust their networks, and their own experience. When you have their trust, you become part of that network, and they sell you to the rest of the world. Break that trust, and you just fired your best salesman.

Dinosaurs May Be a Dying Breed, But a Live One Can Still Kill You

Pay close attention to any idea that carries the traits of a Dinosaur Marketer. Anytime it sounds like they are about to break the cardinal rules of maintaining a good customer relationship as I’ve expressed here, they are liable to bring you into extinction with them.

You can’t really blame them; this evolution has shook up much of what was true in the past. Change is painful, hard and for some almost impossible when their entire world is built around providing a service that is no longer cost effective. Just be prepared to protect yourself and your company, because a dinosaur marketer isn’t willing or capable of doing it for you.

Parts One and Two Are still available, Please remember to Subscribe to get the last part.

Your New Marketing Approach - Claiming to Care is not Enough

Customer Centricity has been a catch-phrase for a while now. Many businesses still fail to understand what this is really about. It is not the practice of kissing your customers derriere, nor is it about gathering metric data to ensure that you know the size and color underwear they prefer. To be customer centric means you are in the business of being a real solution to their problems. A real solution that exists at their leisure, the price they want, and most importantly, that meets or exceeds their expectations. It is imperative, because customer centricity is the only real approach that ensures positive feedback. Positive feedback is the name of the game for your future success.

Your customer is re-learning the habit of asking people for opinions before making a decision. This is becoming the norm for most transactions. Your current customers will be talking to your future customers. You can no longer make overstated promises. Your customer is too smart, and has the benefit of learning from your past customers.

Referrals and positive word of mouth are the two major drivers of business in the new marketplace. Either can only be achieved by positive customer experiences. The end result of the social media revolution is that the marketing of today and the future will focus on completely different areas than it has been in the past. Advertising and catchy sales pitches are already taking a distant second place to the power of customer recommendations.

Marketing Today - One Step at a Time

As discussed in part one and two. The customer wants to be in control of the information they are exposed to. This creates a set of problems for reaching out with new products or ideas. In the past, advertising was the key issue here. You would blast advertising until you got a market penetration and then streamline it for effectiveness. Today, since you are not welcome to do this, you are looking at a slightly slower start phase; the return is that the products that are successful will see rapid growth as they reach critical mass on the word of mouth level. To get there, you have to relinquish some of the control to the customer; they will decide when your input is welcome.

Stages of Marketing

In order to cater to the new buyer behavior, you have to build your marketing on several levels. It is not enough to market to drive a sale. Marketing now occurs in stages, success demands that these stages are created appropriately to meet customer expectation at each level. Catering to their needs for where they are in the decision making process. Each one of these stages has to allow for customer feedback, talking TO the customer is not enough, you have to be prepared to communicate WITH them.

I will skip over the steps of product development, packaging etc. for now, and move to the relationship focus in the information and sale stages. Getting the right product to the market however follows the same principle. Listen to what the customer wants first, and try to solve that problem with your product. Any other way will be less than successful as consumers get smarter. You are rarely welcome to tell them what their problem is, instead they want to inform you about the solution they want first.

Staging marketing for customer relations means being prepared to receive the customer as they become increasingly interested and by growing the relationship on all levels, propel that interest closer toward the sale. The key concept here is that each contact should be receptive, not intrusive. Provide useful information about the product or service. Only at a late stage will the pitch be successful. If you try to drive the hard sell too soon, you will begin to see a lot more lost sales than you have in the past.

There is no set number of stages required; some products and services will require more customer steps to reach a position where they are ready to make a purchase. Propelling the customer too fast may still close a sale, but it will be detrimental to return business. The key is to allow the customer to progress through the information, and interest phase much at their own pace. If you are prepared to care for the customer needs and wants at each of the steps in their decision making process. Your bottom line will show the results.

The customer will not follow the old chain of decision making. Since additional information, customer reviews, and opinions are so easily acquired; many chose to step away from a decision until they have sought advice. This means that a sale can be aborted at a late stage, but reassume when they have found answers to their questions and concerns. Each time the customer feels that they are missing information; the new buyer behavior is to back away and look for that information. You will see this happen less if your advertising and sales approach is one of full disclosure. The more you disclose up front, the less the customer will seek information elsewhere.

Accepting this new behavior is important. The normal old-school sales process is to "not let them leave." This may have been a good approach before. But today, it is merely another high pressure tactic, and is not the best way to becoming a preferred provider of solutions. Once the customer has the information they want, the sale will be very quick. Before they get there, pressure tactics will sour the relationship.

Social Media Brand Management

Word of mouth, often in forms of social media, can affect your company and product severely, often faster than you will be able to realize something has happened. Keeping a good birds-eye view of your brand name is important, and should be on every marketing and PR department’s priority list. Good reviews and bad alike should be noted, these are prime sources of customer feedback, and is both a cost effective marketing research tool as well as a marketing opportunity if managed correctly.

There are several schools of thought on how to deal with negative word of mouth. Most of them are bad ideas simply because they forget the initial point of view. This is customer centric relationship management. As with any other customer argument, you stand to lose more the longer you let it continue.

Attack
Thankfully, not the most common approach, but it happens nonetheless, Often done through anonymous accounts and other slightly underhanded approaches. Posting ridiculing, and or scathing remarks about the original poster. Be aware that this will be seen through in most cases, giving you even more bad publicity. And the blogging world is very good at finding out the facts behind these apparently anonymous accounts.

This can also be done with a lawsuit. - Unless this is your only option, DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!

You may win the lawsuit, but you have just branded yourself as Goliath, and you’ll have 100 supporters of David making your life a living hell before you know it. Your only hope here is a Pyrrhic victory. In other words, you lose either way.
In most cases, it will have the opposite effect in that it gives your original antagonist more publicity, and you will get a lot less business.

Ignore
Also a bad idea, but not as bad as attacking, ignoring it can make the situation escalate out of control very quickly. Someone took time out to rattle your cage, and if you don’t react, they will rattle it harder. Ignoring might be an option for the occasional blip on the radar. Not every hiccup needs to be addressed; in fact, you really shouldn’t address anything too small. Not everyone will like your product, don’t try to correct every opinion. But keep an eye on it - you may be looking at the tip of an iceberg.

Defend
Go on the defensive; explain why the customer that wrote or said something bad about your company or product is wrong.
Bad idea! The customer has every right to his or her own opinion. And you defending your position tells everyone else that you are uninterested in actually catering to their needs and wants.
People don’t like it when you tell them they are wrong to feel anything. And they will make you pay for it. Antagonize a dissatisfied customer and you will lose business rapidly. Always remember that you are dealing with people who will assume that your interests are opposed to theirs when you enter a public discussion or forum to defend your case.

Discuss and Remedy
Remember the basics here? Customer relation is what it’s all about. The best damage control attempts I’ve seen are the ones taking the approach to fix whatever problem occurred. By doing this, you are accomplishing three things.

1. If the person complaining is not interested in resolving the problem, they will become the bad party very quickly. So the original complainer will lose credibility if they refuse to accept your honest attempts to correct the problem.

2. If your honest intention is to find a resolution, the public forum is actually working for you. You will show everyone that reads that you ARE taking your customer relationships seriously, which is actually good publicity.
3. If the person stating the problem has no real reason to be dissatisfied, airing it out in public will prove this point as well. Your best effort to find the problem will reveal that there isn’t one to begin with.

Bringing it all Together

The marketing evolution has brought customer centricity into the spotlight. You have to approach every aspect of your business with the intention of improving the customer experience. That experience will rely on the simple concepts of honesty, integrity, and respect.

Your business can only survive for an extended period of time if your positives are greater than your negatives. Every time you fail to deliver on your promises, you are creating negative word of mouth. Fail to correct for it in time, and the market will bring a power to bear that no marketing budget in the world can correct for.

Refrain yourself from driving your sale hard, if anything, guide the customer to the point where they feel that they have made an informed decision. If you allow this, they will sell your business and product for you. Pushing and pulling might create a sale, but will have much less chance of getting good references. It will however be the best reason of you being at the receiving end of negative word of mouth.

By all means, use the power of social networks to address problems that are being raised. But do so with the humble approach of accepting the existence of a problem. Never forget that you stand to lose more by trying to protect your position than you do protecting the relationship.

Take care of your customers; the new marketplace will reward you when their references take care of you in return.
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Don’t forget to Subscribe to get the last part of the series. - Advertising, Going viral, and how to penetrate your target segment.

Attracting the Customer You Want

First of all, there really isn’t a wrong customer. Any customer that buys your product or service with the right intention and can afford to pay for it is bound to be a good customer. However, your image might be turning away the customers you really want in order to grow past your current level.

Maybe your current market is dwindling? Maybe you are getting people without the disposable income to be either upgraded to other products over time, or that can’t afford to buy as often as you would like. Maybe you are just trying to attract a type of customer that will increase the prestige of your brand. Whatever the reason is, Re-Branding yourself is not going to be a quick fix, to attract a new kind of customer, you have to consider what it is that you have been doing in the past that hasn’t attracted them to begin with.

Step by Step

Re-Branding from one target to another is hard to do if you try to take it all on in one step. When making major changes, you risk alienating your current bread and butter long before you manage to get any traction in your new market segment. The best way to re-brand is to stage your image changes so that you slowly move towards your desired target, not assuming that you can just change everything at once.

You are fighting a battle on several fronts when you re-brand. Your current customers are not communicating to your new target, word of mouth marketing is in other words not really present to help you. If your desired target is distinctly separate from the old one, the gap will be too big to step in one go. You need to stage a brand image transfer through the segments that bridge the two. Trying to make a massive target change immediately will alienate your current bread and butter before you have achieved traction in your new segment.

First you have to identify the patterns of your current customer group and the pattern of the wanted group. Then determine the overlapping segments that link the two together, in order to maintain your profitability in the segment change you have to step through the changes, attracting the intermediate segments as you move along the chain. Overstep these intermediate boundaries at your own peril. Chances are you’ll need a very big wallet to see you through the aftermath of failing in two segments at once.

A simple example of this would be to change segments to one with a higher income. If your current customer has an average household income of $40K and you are interested in the $100k+ market, you need to find the 60 and 80k markets first. They will help you gradually make the transition to be able to handle the segment you really want.

This will also help you adjust and cater to the changing expectations of the new segments, which makes your control and modifications smaller and more manageable. If you allow your staged efforts to help predict the next step, chances of success increase dramatically.

Product Control and Development

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that your product is ready to receive your new segment as is. Most likely, there is a disconnect between the image you think you are projecting and the perception the customer has. This disconnect has to be addressed from the bottom up, taking care of the real problems before you can keep the segment you want to attract.

Re-Branding requires that you approach the new segment with care, listening intensively to their feedback and making corrections as soon as you discover the problems they are reporting. These corrections will be the base of return business, and return business is what can build you in your new segment.

Product Control here requires you to have research functions in place to measure the response from the segments as you move through them. Customer satisfaction surveys are great, but if you don’t know who answered them, you don’t know if you are hitting a new segment right or not. Focus groups, interviews etc. are much more accurate and can deliver the metrics you want.

If you don’t capture the feedback early, you end up growing into a segment you don’t understand, and you will see the same problem as originally - not catering to the expectations of your desired segment.

Advertising too Soon

The most common mistake here is to just rely on Advertising to attract the segment you want. If you are not attracting the right segment, your marketing channels could be part of the issue, but the problem would be better addressed in seeing why your desired segment isn’t biting instead of assuming that they just don’t know about you.

Advertising means making a promise, that promise will be successful when it matches a specific segments expectation. If you are not prepared to deliver to those expectations, you will probably hurt your positioning in this segment before long. Before you advertise on a broad scale, you need to know that the issues keeping your desired segment away in the past have been addressed. Otherwise you will cause an immediate backlash when they have their original pre-conceived notions affirmed.

Again, you will hurt your efforts to re-brand if you assume that the segment you want is just obtuse and uninformed. Chances are that they are choosing another solution because of some more profound disconnect between your product, and their expectations.

They are waiting for you

Your desired segment is out there, and just like any other market, it is waiting for someone to deliver what they want. As long as you are prepared to listen, adjust, and deliver on your promises. There is no market segment that is out of your reach. But get there one step at a time, with deliberate care to be what you claim to be and with a keen ear on the customers pulse.

Never assume that the customer was wrong in not choosing you to begin with, their business was and always will be yours to lose. You can reach them when you become what they want you to be.

Commuting costs are growing as the reason for employees changing jobs. With gas prices continuing to skyrocket and no end in sight, every business out there should be considering changing their schedules around and give their employees an extra day off.

The price of gas rose so fast that many got caught in a situation that is unmanageable. Large vehicles are losing their second hand value as fast as gas prices are rising. For many it is now almost impossible to get out from under a car payment on these gas guzzlers. The only viable option is to find a job closer to home, or move closer to work. Most will chose to change jobs given those options.

When asked, most employees would accept a 10 hour workday 4 days a week in order to get a three day weekend. It just makes sense to most people to sacrifice a little to earn what feels like a lot. And a 20% reduction in commuting costs makes this an even better idea. For those with small children, an additional savings on child care can really top the cake.

The financial cascade effect of not going to work one day is so far reaching that it actually outweighs a pay-raise to most employees. Not to mention that the three day weekend is appealing in itself.

If your company has the potential for moving the schedule around to accommodate a 4 day workweek, you will most likely see your employee retention increasing. Most companies can accommodate this is one way or another. And because of increased open hours, may actually see an increase in sales when they begin to be more accessible to other time zones.

Work with your employees as much as possible, there is nothing more profitable than human capital retention in the long run.

How not to talk to your customers

This past week I was discussing the construction of a new office/warehouse with a client. This of course is a major investment. So many options for both direct cost cutting and long term savings were discussed.

I was researching solutions like solar power, increased insulation, alternative construction methods and materials and many other things when it hit me. Almost all of the websites had completely misunderstood what the customer is looking for.

All these companies kept talking about the benefits of their solutions; they had savings over time numbers, and a lot of other data supporting their claims. But the one, simple question that every customer wants answered was missing. - "What is this going to cost me?"

Now, if you put an FAQ up on your site, and don’t include price, I think you’ve mistaken what the customer really wants to know. Even when price varies, include a ballpark estimate or examples. The customer will want to hear all your information, after they have determined this is something they are even interested in. Anything but that and you are wasting time - theirs and yours.

So I did a little calling around to get prices, and I managed to squeeze in a simple question to five suppliers of solar power solutions.
"How many of your calls include a question of price?" The answer was ALL OF THEM.
That in my book makes it a Frequently Asked Question, and one that you should be including the answer to on your website.

The thinking here is naturally that you want the customer to call so that you can put a sales rep on them and try to sell them the product. You know this, your customer knows this. Please do everyone a favor and stop thinking that you are smarter than your customer; it’s not going to make you any friends or sales. Since the customer knows that this is your intention, they will be resisting any sales efforts, and keep after getting the ballpark figure that you could have included on your website to begin with.

If you free up this time, your sales reps will have more time to answer the questions of those customers that can afford your product. Meaning that you will make more and better sales with less effort, this is not a bad equation to follow.

Next time you put up a Frequently Asked Questions page. How about actually making it about the Frequent Questions, and not a camouflaged sales pitch? Every time you insult your customer by thinking they can’t see this. You are simply saying "FAQ You!"

Do you really want to kiss your customer with that mouth?