Aug 26, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
The word recidivism is usually heard in the context of those convicted and punished, going on to re-offend. The objective is to reduce the rate, ideally to zero.
Not in the context of marketing and sales, where the objective is to raise the rate.
Think about your own processes, and sales and marketing funnels.
Most are messy, illogical, emotional pathways with all sorts of traps along the way, very few are the orderly, and sequential progressions that are usually reflected in consultant drawn funnels.
During the process, the objective is to bring as many of the wanderers from the path back into the funnel as possible, and help them to the end point, a transaction, or at least keep them in the funnel until such time as they are ready to progress.
The “recidivism rate” is an enormously valuable measure of the effectiveness of your sales and marketing processes, and can be applied at all points in the process, irrespective of the form of the process, from a simple spreadsheet to complicated CRM and lead generation software.
Would some help figuring this stuff out help?
If so, call me, now.
Aug 18, 2014 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing, Sales
www.strategyaudit.com.au
18 years ago running an ingredient supplier to the food industry as a contractor, I sponsored a project of quantifying a range of ingredient specifications against a matrix of organoleptic, and cost outcomes given a range of processing parameters.
Our objective was to be able to demonstrate on the spot to a customer the impact of apparently minor specification changes of the ingredient and/or processing conditions on the operational, taste and viscosity outcomes, and costs of the product. We did many hundreds of bench trials in the lab, carefully documenting progressive changes of all the parameters, their impact on the product outcomes, and recording them in a database that enabled us to call up the information at any time. This turned an ad hoc, iterative, time consuming, and inexact process requiring expensive lab time that had often taken months to complete, into one that could be done in front of the customer with a few mouse-clicks. Real time outcomes that we were confident could be replicated in a factory trial.
The impact on customers the first time they saw this capability was profound.
I was reminded of this project again recently talking to the manufacturer of extruded plastic components. His sales process involves extensive iteration on a 3-D cad/cam package following usually extensive design and problem definition discussions, and then still pretty expensive models that need to be validated before “cutting steel” for extrusion dies.
It seems to me that in the next very short time, all these processes would be able to be done in real time, in front of the customer with 3-D printed prototypes.
The intersection of sales and technology is ignored by many, for a host of reasons, but pretty clear when you think about it for just a moment. The scary part is that you no longer have to have the resources of a multinational at your fingertips, this stuff is available off the shelf at your local tech vendor, and if you are not doing it, the competitors you may not even know about probably can.
Writing this post, I also realised that we missed a really important parameter in the exercise 18 years ago, one that is the focus of my esteemed “e-mate” Howard Moscowitz‘s work. That missed parameter is what the consumer really thinks, rather than what the marketer with whom we were working thought they were thinking. This discrepancy has been made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s celebrated TED presentation reflecting on Howards work in the development of Spaghetti sauce.
This is a whole other area where sales, marketing and technology are increasingly intersecting
Aug 11, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
Things to avoid
Small retailers see themselves as under siege, and many just hunker down and work harder to survive, for many, it is too hard.
For those that survive, some are doing really well, and there seems to be a few common themes. Few are doing them all, but all seems to be picking one or two and really delivering:
- They treat the shopping experience as an occasion, they set out to deliver to their customers fun, social acceptance, an opportunity to express themselves, deliver serendipity, information, and advice to their customers. In short they are not there to flog product, they are there to provide a service, which happens to involve customers buying stuff.
- They carve out a niche, something distinctive, and set out to “own” it, at least in the local area. A friend of mine runs a small retail business, “Affordable Decor” in suburban Croydon on Sydney. It is a small store, set away from the main roads and shopping centres, but it is unique, a reflection of Maureen’s great eye and her connection to her customer base that comes from across Sydney.
- Digital capability is almost table stakes, if in no function beyond inventory management, retailers need to be digital capable. My mate Maureen down the road in Affordable Decor does not have anything digital in her store, everything is still pen and paper, there is no website, (despite my pleading) but there is a really focused program of text messaging to her cohort of loyal customers.
- Mobile friendly is evolving as a real differentiator. A huge proportion of customers and potential customers connect using mobile, so being there is fundamental.
- Big data gets all the publicity, but what about Small data? Successful small retailers are in a position to know the details, small data, of their customers likes and dislikes, successes and failures on a personal level. It is this intimacy with customers that big data cannot hope to match, for all its great value.
For those small retailers reading this post, how are you doing?
Need someone to talk to who undestands the challenges?
Jul 29, 2014 | Customers, Sales, Small business
Most of us recognise that the best sales lead you have is a satisfied existing customer, so why do SME’s so often fail to capitalise on them?.
It seems to me that there are a number of reasons, usually they boil down to not allocating the time, not thinking about it, or thinking they need some fancy CRM system beyond their means. All excuses that should not be allowed.
There are a few simple things every business should do, they should be baked into your sales and customer service processes, however simple or complicated they may be.
- Meet the promise. Make sure the sale you have just made at least meets the standards promised, much better when they exceed. Many SME’s seem to think the sales process stops at delivering the order, perhaps receiving payment, but that is just the start.
- Be visible. Make sure you are visible, and available during the delivery/installation process. This ensures that molehills do not morph into mountains.
- Ownership. Take ownership of any problems that occur, not only are the problems things that have to be solved, taking ownership of them is a powerful tool that communicates commitment to the customer, and they will not forget.
- Say Thank you. The two most powerful words in sales are: “Thank you”. Just saying them makes you feel good, and certainly it makes the buyer happy to hear them, creates an empathy, and opportunity to strengthen the relationship.
- Over-deliver value. Be more than a salesman, be a resource for the problems and opportunities that your customer faces. Send them snippets of information that they may find interesting, opportunities and ideas they may value. Not only does that keep you top of mind, it builds on the relationship, you stop being a salesman and become a contributor to their success.
- Be personal. In this day of electronic communication, email, content marketing, and all the rest, one of the oldest forms of communication works better than it ever has, just because it is different, and demonstrates you care. A snail mail thank you, personally written, stuck in an envelope, and posted will be read every time, and is guaranteed to generate a warm feeling in the receiver out of all proportion to the effort that goes into it.
Doing these things builds trust, and trust is the foundation of sales, we all know that, so why not just do it as a part of the process.
And the seventh?
When you have done all the above, and have a relationship with satisfied customers, ask them for leads, introductions and recommendations. Put yourself in this position. Someone you know, who knows a bit about you and your business rings and tells you of one of their trusted suppliers will make contact, and that they think you should talk to them.
Do you take the call when it comes? of course you do.
Jul 23, 2014 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
www.strategyaudit.com.au
The “sales funnel” is a pretty familiar diagram, it has been around for a long time, simply because it makes sense, at least it did to sales people. To their customer prospects, there is a level of antipathy to the notion of being just a part of some “funnel”
It is time for an alternative view, one taken from the perspective of the consumer who now has all the knowledge necessary to make their own informed decisions, and they are exercising that power aggressively.
The world has changed, so too should our representations of the manner in which our marketing activities are managed, and the nature of customers and potential customers reaction to our efforts to meet their needs.
Seems to me that we would be better off thinking about the process in two funnels, one that represents our e-marketing activities, the other the way in which those messages are received.
The first is the marketing funnel, which has replaced the sales funnel, an obsolete metaphor in a digital world.
Below is my way of illustrating the new Customer purchase process.
- Need awareness. This can be either explicit, one that emerges when the consumer recognises that a purchase is necessary, such as when your printer dies, you need a new one, today! The other type of need is implicit, which is generally uncovered by a sales process, rather than by the consumer in isolation.
- Information search. Google has revolutionised this part of the process, by taking the power of information from the seller where it has been for all of human history, and giving it to the buyer. It is this point at which the marketing process now kicks in.
- Value comparison. The value equation is different for every person, in every situation, but the components are unchanged. Features, availability, warranty, design, capacity, and many others all feature in varying degrees, the means by which we communicate the bundle that makes up the value, so is common to every situation, is price.
- Purchase decision. “Yes, I will buy” thinks the consumer
- Short list. Which options meet the need, operational requirement, and value outcome needed, from which a finance decision can be made
- Transaction. The transaction can take many forms, from a simple exchange of cash for product, to all sorts of arrangements and trade-offs made between sellers, buyers and various middlemen
Whilst the whole process is usually depicted as an ordered, sequential one, in which the various marketing automation software options can provide order and flow, in reality is is usually a chaotic, messy, and iterative process.
Jul 16, 2014 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Prospecting, lead qualification and nurturing, prospect management and the transaction itself have all changed forever.
The salesman with a bag has been relegated, at best, to the transaction end of the prospect to transaction continuum. In the process, we have lost some of the humanity, some of the eyeball closeness that good sales people brought to the table, the insights and instinct gathered from the context and body language that underpinned all the conversations they had.
All gone, but most would agree that body language holds a significant place in the sales process, so how have we replaced it?
Is there such a thing as “Digital body language”?
Can we score metaphors of the physical reaction from digital interactions?
Logically the answer has to be ‘Yes”, as we now have access to a huge body of data that reflects the sum of behaviour of all who come into contact with whatever platform or tool we have working for us. However, access to data is a very long way from leveraging the insights that are hidden within the data, a fairly advanced level of analytic capability along with a tool with some grunt is required, although simpler tools with manual intervention can be made to work.
Consider the process:
- Somebody reads a blog post and “likes” it, better yet, shares it,
- They subscribe to the blog to make receiving it automatic,
- They respond to an offer, webinar, e-book download, surveys, or combination of these, perhaps several times, and all the while your system is recording and responding to their actions, delivering the next step to them.
- The system is constantly being improved as more data points are collected, and A/B testing provides finer grained insights
The data collected can be sliced and diced, weighted and resliced in all sorts of ways that can provide an almost visceral insight into the behaviour of groups and subgroups to various content stimuli at differing levels of engagement. The relative effectiveness of differing pieces of content at each point in the sales continuum can be calculated with good levels of accuracy.
Surely this is the equivalent of the sum of the body language cues of those in the database, if not necessarily that of any individual within it, and so is a very effective guide when well used. Data will never replace the one on one human responses, but the value of the digital picture built up is a source of enormous value, immeasurably widening the net of prospects beyond what can be achieved with boots on the ground.
