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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.
—-
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?

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Welcome to the Evolution

In this installment of the series we will find out what a Dinosaur Marketer does, and how to spot them in order to avoid them. I’ll also begin to explain to you what will work today and in the future, as well as what companies need to consider if they wish to be a part of this future. Today we will look largely at the Internet perspective since this is where this revolution began.

Recognizing a Dinosaur Marketer

Anytime a Marketer is telling you that your current message should be used on Social Networking sites etc. You should run the other way. The simple fact is that old-school, Hard-sell, in your face, marketing is not going to impress anyone on a social networking site, and it will brand you and your company as a Spammer very quickly.

In the future, the successful marketing message will be an information road sign. With a strong invitational tone and a weak or non-existent sales message, the key will be to provide them with key information up front, but not to try and force anything down their throats.

The Comfortable Lie

The change away from so much of what we have known about marketing is causing some serious problems for many. Both business owners and a lot of marketers are uncomfortable to accept that what they know, and what has been working for so long is not only losing effectiveness, but could actually be hurting a company.

Many marketers out there are capitalizing on this reluctance, and they are making big money telling businesses exactly what they want to hear. These are the dinosaur marketers that can effectively put your company on the extinction list. They are not selling you the best option, what they are telling you is. "We can take the old ways, and force them into the new media." This is a great sales pitch, because it sells comfortable, easy to understand, old school marketing in new wrapping to those that don’t understand what has really happened to the marketplace. It is also a great way to make you about as popular as a meter-maid. You are about to become a Spammer.

Here are two key trademarks of the Dinosaur Marketer

1. They will propagate using Social Media Profiles to spread your sales message. The worst possible scenario of this are the ones that actually hijack "hack and steal" profiles on places like MySpace in order to use the credibility of the person to send marketing messages to their friends. Should they do this in order to promote your company, you are now liable for the legal ramifications of this.

Most aren’t that bad I have to admit. The norm is to set up a profile and try to add as many people as possible in order to then send them your sales pitch. The more unscrupulous will hire people to do this in large numbers with more or less sophistication, (less is the standard.) Then they show you how much traffic they are generating.

You can forget about the traffic here, it has little or no bearing, because this like any other mass marketing will have a very low conversion rate. What is even more telling is that profiles that do this are marked as spam and deleted. Although the people on this list might be interested in your product, they are not interested in being disturbed and spammed, so they will not look at your information as often as they will mark you as a spammer effectively cutting your access to them.

2. They will try to sell you on email lists, and often claim that these are "targeted".

They do this by data-mining social networking sites, finding people who are interested in your area of business, and then compiling lists for it. They will then tell you to send emails to these addresses.
These approaches are bad ideas because they lack the key ingredient necessary for success in the modern marketplace. Remember that the customer now expects you to ask for their permission before you start bombarding them with sales pitches. An interest in your general area is not the same as giving you permission.
Instead these marketing dinosaurs are trying to use some middle ground of acceptability to justify this approach. Arguing that just because someone lists "gardening" as a hobby, they want every piece of gardening related advertising you can throw at them.

You can’t have my email

People are now protecting their contact information more and more. Even when we do post an email address online today, it is becoming normal to camouflage it in several ways. Instead of Myemail@myisp.com, People will write things like myemail (a) myisp (dot) com in attempts to confuse the automatic software applications (called robots or spiders) that scour the web for the less careful posters. This is only one of the many attempts to protect email addresses from spam.

A lot of people now have a "trash" email with a service like Gmail or Yahoo mail to use as the email openly displayed. This is the equivalent of a large garbage can to collect your information. That most of the trash will collect there. Again, this is a hint to be applied towards your re-evaluation of your direct email marketing. If people don’t want it, why keep doing it.

The Dinosaur Marketer will apply the reasoning "If they don’t protect themselves, its fair game." I’ve heard that said more than once by the old school marketers. Now all I’m asking is that you think about this for a while. Not protecting oneself is not the same as giving everyone the permission to disturb. This kind of reasoning is like saying "if you don’t lock your car, it’s you are giving permission for anyone to use it." If you don’t appreciate spam, what makes you think that your customers will?

What is the market demanding today?

The market demands less noise. It’s really that simple. We are still extremely interested in huge information flows. Interconnecting ourselves to more and more information every day, but the customer makes the choice of what information they want.

This means that there are still plenty of customers out there interested in what you have to say, but they want it when they want it. They are demanding information at their leisure, and either with their express permission or at their direct demand.

Google is a great example of this. We hear all the time that being on the first page of Google for your specific search terms is key to generating business. This is not a testament to Google as much as it is a clear indicator what the new marketing landscape demands. It does however explain that Google has understood this and has become a premier provider of the solution that the customers want.

What I want, When I want it

Context is the key word you need to remember. When a search is made for "business cards" on Google, chances are the searcher is interested in buying business cards. Not getting an oil change or reading about Britney Spears latest adventures. This is the difference between the modern world and the old mass marketing swamp.

Your customers and potential customers are getting very good at finding what they want. And thanks to all the social sites, they are getting even better at sharing this with their friends. Your business has in other words only a few simple requirements. Make sure that the customer is able to find you when they want to, and when they do, meet their expectations.

Forced Ethics

Unscrupulous marketers have made customers weary of being cheated, tricked and duped. In the past, people might have just walked out of the store. Today, they will write about their experience. Your company will quickly show up on Google’s first page alright, with the additional keyword "scam" attached to it.

Try it now, pick any decent size company, and search for it on a search engine. But add the word Scam ("acme widget design" + scam). The results are pretty telling about this concept. When you manage to make a single customer feel like they have been cheated, you are going to have to live with it. And your company name will be dragging through that swamp for much longer than you might want it to

This creates what I call Forced Ethics; the mere possibility of this happening is changing the marketplace and mostly for the better. Customers now have the direct power to do serious damage to your business based on their experience alone. Negative publicity spreads much faster than positive leaving a large possibility of making a small mistake a very expensive one.

Your only real defense is to do business in an ethical manner. Companies are being forced to live up to all those lofty statements that they made in the past and never cared about. You have to promise what you can keep, and keep what you promise, or your customers will spread the word very quickly. You are no longer collecting the cash and moving on, every single time this happens you are losing prospective customers at an alarming rate.

The Dinosaurs of the business world are trying to fight this with lawsuits, suing bloggers and social network posters that mention negative aspects of their companies. But the only effect is a snowball of bad publicity. You have to remember, that even if the initial statement is false and you can win a libel law-suit over it. The lawsuit itself will now make you look like Goliath, and the original false statement is going to be reported on 100’s of blogs around the internet.

Now the blogs are reporting what is true, you did sue XX over the statement, so you just managed to create a negative publicity campaign for yourself that you can’t sue your way out of.

This effect is the same regardless of whether a customer is disappointed on or off-line, the information about this experience will make its way online and on to hundreds, thousands or potentially even millions of others.

It’s not about Web 2.0, It’s about relationships

Your business has to be based on relationships, your relationship with your customer will make you part of their network of connections. It’s a circle of friends and acquaintances that you have to treat like a social group of any other kind. Trying to force your way in will result in an increased effort to keep you out.
If you can build strong relationships, you will be invited into these circles. That’s where your money will be coming from in the future.

In Part three, we are going to take a hard look at everything you should be doing, how to make social networks both on and off-line work for you, and how to build your business around long term sustainable practices.
Don’t forget to subscribe so that you don’t miss the rest of this series.

This multi-part series will help you understand what is really going on with the marketplace today. How the Social Media Revolution is going to affect the way you do business today, and in the future.
We will address both the pure marketing as well as the management and business development issues that are changing your marketplace and forcing you to choose between evolution and extinction.

This revolution is not just a fad, it won’t go away, and most importantly, it is so momentous that you can’t just adapt your old techniques to fit it. Adaptation now means re-thinking your company from the core. With a weakening economy, those who cling to the old ways today will be the proverbial Dinosaurs tomorrow.

If you are in business today, or plan to be in the future, you should consider Subscribing to make sure you don’t miss any of these posts.

Part 1 - Understanding a Changing world

The technology revolution has since the 90’s sparked discussions on how we are becoming more and more disconnected from each other and how the Internet is depriving us the basic human need of socialization.

Human needs will only be denied for so long. The Social Media Boom is a clear symptom of this. The market has taken the internet to a new level by becoming increasingly interconnected. Before this revolution, a customer could do little more than sue if they were displeased. Today, even the smallest customer can build an avalanche of negative publicity.

Effectively the market has returned to a pre-computer time when "the customer is always right" still ruled. The customer now actively seeks out others to talk and discuss not only your products, but also everything else that your company does. They are using this means of communication to force companies to listen to them. The power of numbers has again made the customer right.

The relative isolation of an angry customer is no longer there. Your customer in Japan can and will communicate their disappointment to your prospect in New York as easily as if they were neighbors. Those that choose the short term solution of not listening to a displeased customer are handing out their own coffin nails.

Let’s take a look at what has already changed, and what changes we expect to see in the future.

Access Denied

The total accessibility of our modern times if often discussed. Technology gives us access to enough information to completely overload our capacity to take it in. When the overload hits, we naturally limit something. And the first thing to go out the window was our tolerance for unsolicited sales efforts.

We can see the movement towards this reduced tolerance in some recent developments.

1. The Do Not Call Registry
Over 70% has signed up for this list of numbers that phone salesmen are legally bound to not call. This should tell anyone that the industry is dead. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the remaining 30% WANT to be called in the middle of dinner, they just haven’t signed up yet.

2. TIVO / DVR
When asked, over 65% of all digital video recorder owners stated "the best thing with this technology is the ability to watch a show after it has been run so they can fast forward through the commercials." Although 35% had another primary reason for liking their DVR, over 99% reported fast forwarding through the commercials on a recorded show.

3. XM-Radio
Again, one of the big selling points here is radio without advertising. "100% Ad-Free" is on almost every XM-Radio sales poster you see around.

4. Direct Mail
Most apartment and condominium complexes have a trash can right next to the mailboxes for people to "sort" their mail before even bringing it in.
Next time you are in an office supply store, look at the shredders. One of the major selling points for these machines is that you have to shred your direct mail to avoid identity theft. Direct Mail is not only a nuisance anymore; it has become a threat.

The message is clear. The unsolicited sales effort is not only ineffective. It is now considered invasive, unwanted and interruptive. This means that the companies that continue their old forced efforts will be considered invasive, unwanted and interruptive as well. Not exactly the most desirable buzzwords for any company.

The marketplace has sent a very clear message, and you better pay attention.
"You don’t have access without my permission."

The Social Marketing Asteroid

So the customers got very good at screening out the unwanted sales pitches. This left a little room in their otherwise busy day for other types of information. Enter the Social Media networks.
Not only did they allow for a lot of activities that people simply thought were fun, it was soon discovered that it also gave access to information that previously wasn’t easily accessible. No matter how obscure the topic, someone knew something about it. Word of mouth marketing started in these networks simply because someone liked a band, a new product, or made some other discovery. This was not selling; this was honest stories from other consumers.

Now people were talking, and sharing information. Small companies, with niche products who had lived on tight marketing budgets were all of a sudden being talked about. Word of mouth rocketed some of these small companies out into the stratosphere before even they had time to react.

Then the Asteroid hit.

The information sharing online all of a sudden reached critical mass, and it became the norm for getting information about products and businesses. The customers now got the information they wanted, when they wanted it, and they got it from non-affiliated sources. We choose to listen to relative strangers before we take the word of the company that sells it.

All of a sudden, the high volume carpet bombing of customers lost most if not all effect. This was the real beginning of the end for the Dinosaur Marketer.

Just like any other well established institution, traditional marketing is fighting back, clawing at everything to retain a grip in a quickly changing world. These are the ones spreading mass emails through social networks, and using fairly innovative ways to fit their square peg into the round hole.

Here is the problem.

We know Social Networks became popular as a way to get information without being bombarded with sales pitches. The idea that we should try to fit mass marketing into this forum is nothing more than a foot in the door. It is the last desperate attempt of the ones destined for extinction because they are unable to adapt. Those who propagate this are the Dinosaurs of Marketing, and the market will exercise its power to push them into the history books soon enough.

For any company that wishes to survive, it is imperative to recognize this type of marketing effort. It may appear cheap but really is expensive, simply because it doesn’t work very well. More importantly it halts your company from beginning the necessary evolution to survive.

Stay tuned for Part Two where we will discuss how to recognize a Dinosaur Marketer, how to effectively begin evolving, and I will explain why this is going to change all marketing, not just the online world.

Most companies have a pricing policy that leaves very little room for giving a customer his or her money back. The ones that have that space normally do so because they are aware that their product is not what they make it out to be.

I discussed the cost of losing a single customer in "Short term Decisions ". And this is something you should always keep in the back of your mind.

Both approaches are equally dangerous. I won’t explain the problem with selling a sub standard product under the pretense of it being more than it is. You will however never be completely error proof in your business. You will always have customers with legitimate problems, and they should always be taken care of immediately.

Before you consider any major purchases or investments, put enough of a buffer away so that you can quickly and easily give a customer his money back should they be dissatisfied. Building this financial buffer into your financial model means that you will always have the ability to correct a problem and hopefully avoid bad will.

No one likes having made a purchase that they are dissatisfied with, but if they are met with no argument and a quick fix, this will often turn into a Positive relationship builder as opposed to a negative experience.

Take the small hit up front. You will gain a loyal customer that comes back, and brings friends.

You should never let a day go by without doing at least one marketing activity. This can take many shapes. If you are normally short on time, focus a lot of your energy on the activities where you learn more about your customers as opposed to just trying to sell to them. This will both build your relationships and give you an insight into where you can improve to better help them solve their problems.

If your schedule is normally packed full, your lunch could be a great way to do this. Start every day with making a phone call or two and see if you can book a lunch with a customer or prospect. The key here is to take the time to listen to them, ask questions about who they are, what they are doing, how they are doing it, and what problems they are having.

Don’t sell, don’t try to sneak in your pitch, and try to talk a whole lot less than you listen. Remember, this is not a sales meeting, this is marketing research. You are going to learn a whole lot about the customer and by not putting any sales pressure on them; you will be given a much greater gift, Information.

You can then take that information back and take a long hard look at what you are doing to meet the customer’s needs, and solving their problems. This is often the best way to find areas where you could be selling your services to a customer that neither you nor they have thought about. It can also be a way to find out that your customer could become a strategic partner.

You have to eat, why not make it count.

Customer relations are a wonderful thing. Done right you build a strong connection with your customers and you can become their preferred supplier of solutions to a particular problem. The new CRM software boom is giving us tools that make this process easier and much more effective. More and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon and the mating call "Let’s get CRM software" is echoing through the Business Jungle.

Just like so many other powerful tools, most end up using only a fraction of the available functions, and instead of evolving their approach and actually improve their relationships, they keep doing the same thing they have always done. Effectively turning what could be a great strength into a nuisance for the customer.

I keep hearing sales managers ranting "It’s been 32 days since we called, we have to call this customer now." This is the first mistake. It doesn’t matter how long ago it was that you called them. There are way too many other facts that come into play to just rely on this one number that CRM can track for you. If this is the common statement at your company, it’s a dead giveaway that you are doing something wrong.

It is however a great way for bad sales managers to look like they are doing something.

Customer relations like any other relation means that you need to pay attention to the customer and if possible try to predict their needs. It does NOT mean that you should be more diligent at bothering them.

The real way to build customer relations is to use every piece of available knowledge about them to become an asset, something that increases their productivity and makes their life just a little better. This is done by listening to what they say, paying attention to what they do, and then contacting them when the time is right. Or if you can’t predict their patterns, at least make their ordering process as smooth and painless as possible. Most services are needed when they are needed, which doesn’t necessarily mean on a fixed schedule.

At a small company I once worked for I was responsible for all purchases. The coffee usage at this place followed patterns that only a chaos mathematician could predict. So we simply ordered when someone noticed that we were getting low. I kept getting calls from the coffee supplier on a certain date every month. It didn’t matter if I ordered a week before or not, on the first Wednesday of every month I got a call telling me to order more coffee.
Not asking… telling! (but we’ll get to that one in another post… )

These calls not only did nothing to help me, they became annoying. They had entered my order frequency at once per month and picked the day to call. Come hell or high water they were going to call me on that day. The fact that I had to tell the sales-people that I just ordered coffee from them told me that they were not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

It would have taken little or no energy for them to start running my orders through the same system and seeing that I recently ordered, maybe over time they would have figured out what I never could; How to predict our coffee consumption. Had they managed to do something like that, they would now have become an asset, helping me make sure that coffee didn’t run out. This would have given them the competitive edge where a competitor would have to work very hard to even be considered.

Needless to say, I had no problems switching coffee suppliers when I saw a good deal simply because I got nothing more than coffee from the old company. Not only did the new supplier beat their price, but I had everything to gain in terms of service.

Real Customer Relations means that you listen, learn, and do everything you can to become an unobtrusive and natural part of your customers life. When your services are self-evident and automatically included in their day to day lives, I guarantee you that you will keep them as customers for a very long time.

By all means, use the tools available to you, but use them to become better at helping your customers. If all you do is use your CRM software to become the Swiss Watch of annoying sales calls, you could probably spend the time, money and energy better somewhere else.

Over 80% of all new businesses are gone within 4 years. Often the decision that kills the business is taken in the early stages, and the efforts to correct this mistake are never enough to overcome it.

Most of the time, the problem starts with a small decision that seems to be part of day to day management, and ends up being the 800 pound Gorilla that knocks the business over. This decision can be anything from placing a single ad to choosing what printer to buy for the office. Small and seemingly insignificant decisions that prove to be anything but small or insignificant down the road.

I saw a company go from a steady growth to being out of business in just over two months because they chose a cheap printer. When the printer failed late one Sunday night when a lot of printing was needed for a very important presentation on Monday morning, there was no time to correct. They had spent a lot of money on the event and had no way of recovering.

Two seemingly small errors, buying a cheap printer was one, the more serious one was allowing things to get that close to the finish line without sufficient backup plans. As much as we would like to think that this is the exception, small businesses are notorious for cutting deadlines way too close.

Being flexible is only good if you can stand firm too

Small businesses make these mistakes because they operate in the “flexible range”. One of the great strengths of a smaller company is its potential to adapt. This however often leads to changes being commonplace, which is never a good idea. Always changing to match the present is a reactive approach, always keeping the company behind the curve.

The key to avoiding these mistakes is to always make decisions for the long term. It’s known that successful business people are often quick to make decisions, and slow to change them. This might sound counterintuitive since a business person has to be adaptive to their environment, but the simple fact is that the short term environment is much too volatile to base your decisions on.

Being slow to change a decision means that your decisions have time to come to fruition, Making long term decisions and sticking with them until you have enough data to see whether it is the right one is the only way to ensure long term success, changing every time the wind does is an extremely expensive way of doing business.

Count to Ten (thousand)

You make long term decisions by stopping yourself from reacting every time something seems to be wrong. The “problem” is a marker, a heads up that this is an area that you should keep an eye on closer, but you should never make a decision based on disturbing news on a Monday morning. That’s the time to grab a coffee and talk to people. Try to hash out what this really means, Is it a trend change, or just a bump in the road. If you are prone to reacting quickly, you will make decisions based on too little information.
If you really think that a change is needed, it’s time to pull out the whiteboard and consider what that change will mean to all the other aspects of the business. Run through what the immediate effects of a decision are, and then try to see if you can predict what impact each of those effects will have for the future. Do this as a rule whenever you are considering making a change or a decision.

After a while, you will become better at seeing the long term, and that alone will put you ahead of the curve, the main idea is to slow yourself down to acting on trends, not just little bumps.

Don’t be so firm that you lose customers

There is one definite exception to this rule, make quick decisions when it regards correcting a customer’s negative experience. If the customer is displeased, you have a very limited time to make a difference. This is a now or never situation. And unless you are running a business that gets a lot of complaints, taking the hit and improving your customer relations is almost always the best choice. Because you are dealing with relations, this is in fact a long term decision.

As an example, think of a restaurant that you no longer go to because you didn’t like something there, maybe it was the, service, maybe the food itself. Fact is that since you haven’t been there for a while, you don’t know if it is anything like what you remember.

The restaurant could have fixed the problem the second you left the last time. You still just choose another place when you need to pick a restaurant. They have lost your business, regardless of what changes has been made since. Not only has their corrections not brought your business back, they have also lost your references. You aren’t going to recommend this restaurant to anyone simply because you have a bad experience from it.

Now imagine that the restaurant corrected the problem that turned you off the second you walked out the door. Think about the effects of losing you as a customer. Over the course of one year, you might have eaten there four times, and told five people about it, who each eats there four times a year, and tells five people etc…

If the above is true, each customer eats there four times a year and converts five more people to do the same every year. The total effect of turning you off from that restaurant is 18,748 customer visits in five years. Just ballpark that the average tab is $30, that comes to a total lost revenue of about $560.000 over those five years.

Would you rather lose the $30 tab, or the $560,000?