Archives for category: Customers
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Told or Sold

April 27, 2016 //
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As a buyer, you want to be sure that a vendor’s sales person is telling you something rather than selling you something.

Sometimes it’s hard to discern whether a company has a specific product or service element that you’re looking for. Do they really have it, or they putting up ‘smoke and mirrors’ and giving you the impression they have something, when in fact they would have to build it, get it, or wriggle out of it if it’s not explicitly called out in the terms and conditions, should you become a customer?

Buyers who suspect they’re being sold not told on some important part of their requirements need to work hard to get to the truth. Ask direct, closed questions. Look for guarantees or break clauses if certain conditions aren’t met. Ask for references so you can ask both about the vendor’s performance and delivery generally but also about the specific thing that’s close to your wallet.

As a vendor, you really should subscribe to SWYG – sell what you got – or else be prepared to move the goalposts and persuade the buyer that they need something different, something you have. Selling what you don’t have is a recipe for strained relationships with both your customers and the other parts of your business. You’re simply building a rod for your back. If you don’t have close to what they need, nor are you likely to for some time, qualify out. It’s a bad fit for your business.

It’s better to be told than sold – for both parties.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Sales

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch

April 25, 2016 //
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‘Culture eats strategy for lunch.’ I love this phrase!

I hadn’t heard it in a while and was reminded of it recently in a meeting. It makes me laugh out loud when I hear it. It’s both pithy and witty. I don’t know if Peter Drucker did first coin the phase, but I think the sentiment rings true.

But why does culture eat strategy for lunch? My view on this is as follows: if all of your staff behave in the same way, and have the same attitude, and these behaviours are consistent with corporate culture, then whatever they execute is going to be done consistently too. They’re all pulling in the same direction, for the same things.

Strategy is only as good as the success, consistency and constancy with which it’s applied. When the culture’s not right, you don’t have everyone buying into the way things are done. It’s half-assed execution.

Culture is a bit like the goodwill you get from a brand. It’s hard to quantify but you know it’s important, you know it has immense value, and you want it for yourself or your business.

And that’s why culture never goes hungry.

 

 

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Categories Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Insurance

April 22, 2016 //
2

Where are you on the risk aversion spectrum? Super safe, insuring everything, or cavalier and blasé about your belongings and family? Somewhere in the middle?

It’s a tough one. Some insurances – like car or mortgage protection – you have to get. Others, clearly, you don’t. Some people seem to view insurance as something they’re entitled to get a payout for, after a few years of claim-free premiums. ‘Yes, I could do with a new living room carpet; time to engineer some spillage..’

For those of us who are more honest, however, either you view insurance as a necessary evil or an unnecessary ‘nice to have’. I used to belong fairly and squarely in the former camp. These days, though, I’m not so sure.

Firstly, there’s the financial argument. If you never pay for metered parking, one day you’re going to get caught and your fine might equate to all the fees you should have paid. That’s fair enough, and not really an insurance example, more a general risk and return argument.

I hire a car quite a lot, and I always take out excess insurance, so that I’m properly covered in the event of any incident. I have friend who doesn’t take it out, figuring out that if he does eventually have a prang, then the cost of picking up the tab will be off-set by all the times he never paid for the extra insurance.

The other dimension, though, is the success rate for a real claim. These days the small print seems to exclude almost every eventuality for which you’re taking out insurance in the first place. I have mobile phone insurance, but if I leave it in my car, it’s only covered against theft if it’s in the glove compartment and the compartment is locked. Who does that?

I used to work for a guy who never insured any of his contents. He simply didn’t bother; it wasn’t worth it to him. His reasoning was ‘Who’s going to steal a bed anyway?’ Well, presumably a bunch of organised thieves who know you’re away for a weekend and stage a fake house-moving heist. This chap would simply go ahead and buy replacement stuff if it ever happened. He could afford to.

But the question remains. As insurance companies are often in similar financial straits to lending organisations, and with premiums sky-rocketing, there is a huge incentive to make the claiming process as rigorous and parsimonious as possible. They’ll wriggle out of a payment if they can.

 

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Categories Customers, General

The Productive B2B Buyer

April 18, 2016 //
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A few years ago, I used to work with a company called The TAS Group. They invented something called the Sales Velocity Equation, a metric for sales effectiveness.

It was a really simple and powerful way of thinking about how effective a sales person or organisation you are. In a nutshell, your sales velocity for a given time period (let’s say a quarter) is proportional to the total number of qualified deals you work during the period, multiplied by the average deal size, multiplied by the percentage of deals that you win, the total then divided by the average sales cycle length for those won deals during that period. It’s all about speed, the implication being that if in the next period you can improve the factors above the line and reduce the sales cycle length, your speed – or sales effectiveness – increases. Good, huh?

On a number of occasions I suggested that the natural corollary to this is the buyer velocity equation, but my thoughts were not bought into, which is fair enough. I think it still has merit though.

If you’re a B2B buyer – and I suppose you could think too about yourself as a B2C customer or consumer, offline or online, though it’s nowhere near as elegant – you want to be as productive a buyer as you can.

It follows, then, that your productivity within a certain period is a function of the number of projects you have tabled, the average size of those projects, the amount of projects you get off the ground, and the length of time from project conception to project kick-off, or even to project completion. The greater the projects volume and project size, the greater the percentage of projects you get off the ground, and the quicker you get them off the ground, the more productive a buyer you are.

Make sense to me anyway. In the same way as the sales velocity equation, it helps you strip away the waste and the unnecessary and focus on the small number of important levers of success.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The B2B Customer Call

April 13, 2016 //
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A B2B customer is far, far more important than a B2C customer. Let me tell you why.

I work from the home office quite a lot of the time. When I’m on a customer call, or a customer’s customer call, and there’s anyone in the house, I always warn them that I’m not to be disturbed unless the house is burning down.

A B2C customer is one customer, one consumer out of many. There are degrees here, of course, since some B2C customers are large or repeat customers, and spend much more money than one-off or small basket-size customers.

A B2B customer, however, doesn’t represent their own interests, they represent the interests of lots of other employees, who are in effect lots of other customers. They’re corporate and they have very, very deep pockets. And for that reason, they’re very important. If they take away their business from you, you lose an awful lot. If one consumer does, it’s no biggie.

A B2B customer call is like the red ‘On Air’ sign outside a broadcasting studio. You’re broadcasting to a large number of individuals and are not to be disturbed. One bad experience is immediately magnified throughout the entire audience – or company.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

What Brits Mean When They Say…

April 6, 2016 //
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I’ve always prided myself on being honest and saying what’s on my mind. Not necessarily framed in a hurtful or undiplomatic manner, but one that leaves no room for misunderstanding. After all, people, especially customers, need to know what you’re thinking. They also need to be advised what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

It turns out, of course, that the Brits have long been guilty of not exactly saying what they mean, as the table here will testify. I’m indebted to James Trezona of Rooster Punk for drawing my attention to this table, though the version I’ve shown is borrowed from here. In this sense it would seem that the Brits are similar to other peoples, like the Japanese for example, in eschewing direct feedback.

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

 

I do think, though, that this British habit of hiding behind the nuances of the mother tongue is gradually dying out. You could put this down to a bunch of mega trends I guess: globalisation, American cultural influences, the erosion of the British class system, our increasing inclination not to waste precious free time, to name but a few.

If it’s not dying out, then it’s certainly lessening from a bracing wind to a gentle breeze.

Or maybe something else is at work here? Maybe we’re not very good at delivering bad news. Maybe we’re too willing to soften the blow for our audience and ourselves. Either way, I think we’re getting better at that too.

There is, however, still sufficient truth in the table, and sufficient difference between what Brits say and what they mean – and differences between two situations is of course the root of humour – for it to be seriously funny.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales

The Destruction Manual

March 30, 2016 //
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A funny thing happened the other day. A guy I know – I play soccer with him a couple times a month and would know him as an acquaintance rather than a friend – came to service our gas central heating system.

In he breezed, and asked me if I had the ‘destruction’ manual for the boiler. He probably gets to say it numerous times a week to break the ice with the customer and it made me smile as I handed over the instruction manual – to use its more common moniker.

Within 5 minutes the system had switched on of its own accord without the controller computer telling it to – not good – and ten minutes later the fuse blew on the system and shorted the circuit for the utility room.

He had indeed used the destruction manual to destroy the central heating.

It got me thinking about something I learned about early on in my managerial career, namely the self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the notion that your attitude towards an impending situation can often govern how it turns out. If you think a meeting’s going to go badly, it probably will. If you go in with a positive mindset, you tend to get a positive outcome. Clearly there’s some cause and effect at work here.

It follows, therefore, that a positive disposition is always worth the effort, as it will help the end result favour you and also perhaps rub off on others as well.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language

The Collective Intake of Breath

March 28, 2016 //
6

We’ve all witnessed those moments when someone does something truly remarkable.

What emerges in the immediate aftermath of one of those moments is what I call the Collective Intake of Breath.

They’re easier to spot in the world of entertainment I think. In soccer, there is a moment like the Cruyff turn, showcased in the 1974 World Cup. For a brief instant, the entire audience is captivated and taken aback by the sheer artistry. It simultaneously draws breath as if it were one giant multi-headed beast.

Two of these personal moments come to me first, though they occur – thankfully – regularly enough in a lifetime to keep us interested. One was seeing Michael Jackson in concert, in front of an estimated audience of 130,000, do his moonwalk thing – but sideways. I kid you not. It was mesmerising, and for a split second, you could hear nothing.

Another was a decade before when I was at the world table tennis championships, watching a match between an attacking Japanese player and a defensive Chinese player. The defensive player was pinned to the back of the court when another Japanese salvo flashed to his extreme left. In an instant, needing the extra distance to reach across his body to play the right-handed backhand, he turned his back on the table and ball, and flicked his outstretched wrist in a slicing motion. The ball flew off his racket, a centimetre over the net and he was back in the rally. It was probably the finest shot I’d ever seen, and I would have seen a million shots at that point. Same collective intake of breath.

So when we’re producing work, perhaps we should aim for something so remarkable that we cause in our audience a collective intake of breath? Not by offending or shocking them, but by amazing and astonishing them.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

One Chance

March 25, 2016 //
0

These days, as a provider of products and services in either a B2B or B2C scenario, you get very few chances before you blow it. If you’re in a commodity business, you get one chance. Mess up and you’re gone, even if you’ve had a good track record before your faux pas.

One strike and you’re out.

I’ve bought 3 shirts from an online discount store in the last 3 months. It’s the usual end-of-line strategy and stuff. The prices are good, and the quality of the product is decent. But the damn things take ages to arrive. Ages as in a month or more. And it’s tough to get customer service to respond, unless they’ve good news and can give you a tracking number. I haven’t got my last item yet…when I do I’m not using them again.

Years and years ago, when I lived in Scotland’s capital, I used to go to a local fast food place for fish and chips or pizza. One time I got a chicken pizza. I was ill with food poisoning that night and the whole of the next day. Never went there again. Did I tell them about my experiences? I can’t actually remember, but I voted with my feet.

I’m not the type of person who goes back looking to get a refund or compensation – life’s too short. I simply shop elsewhere. And don’t forget that we typically tell 3 times as many people about a bad experience as we do after a good one.

This is why, as a business, you must have a relentless and constant focus on quality, end-to-end. The thread can be that fine.

Along with trench warfare mentality, it’s a good mindset to imagine that you only have one chance to impress with every customer, every time.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Mea Culpa – Not

March 23, 2016 //
0

Do you know what I find pretty shocking these days? When a company doesn’t admit they were wrong, or they made a mistake, or their service failed to live up to expectations.

Now there’s a small chance a company didn’t know that its website was down for a good while, for example, but it’s a very small chance these days. When was the last time you saw a company admit they messed up, unless they were forced to because a PR issue they could have stemmed early has spiralled into a nightmare?

I recently got an email from a company whose stuff I subscribe to, because it’s very good content. The email came thru with the subject line exactly like this: [insert subversive subject line]. I kid you not. It’s wrong on so many levels, even when you try and explain it away as deliberate, but I never saw a subsequent apology.

Companies seem to want to sweep it under the corporate carpet, forget it ever happened, or else hope that no-one noticed. They hardly ever say ‘mea culpa’ unless they have to. Wouldn’t it be the most refreshing thing in the world if you went onto a website and there was a prominent statement to the effect of:

“Do you know something, our website was down for 2 hours last Thursday, and that might have been when you were browsing it. If that’s the case, we humbly apologise for your experience not being up the standards we set ourselves. We’ll try our best not to let it happen again.”

Do you think it will send their customers’ lawyers scurrying off to see if they can eek out a few bucks for a broken SLA? Do you think it’ll send their stock price plummeting and plunge the world’s markets into disarray? Probably not. A little bit of honesty, humility and integrity will in all likelihood have the opposite effect.

This is what it boils down to. It shouldn’t be a case of ‘Phew, got away with that one, let’s chalk it up to good fortune’ but rather ‘We should do better, we should come clean and we should redouble our efforts to live up to our brand promise.’

It’s OK to say ‘I’m sorry, my fault.’  In fact I encourage it, especially if you manage people.

The trouble is, it’s almost always expediency over effort.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
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