Aug 21, 2012 | Customers, Management, retail, Sales
Without sales, all the rest of the stuff that goes on in an enterprise is irrelevant. All the lofty strategies, policies, and well intentioned platitudes are dependent on the delivery of sales for their oxygen.
As a senior manager in a large enterprise, I used to annoy, sometimes terminally, marketing personnel by insisting they all spend periods of time, particularly during the annual peak sales periods, out in the field, carrying a bag, talking to the retail personnel of our customers, and interacting with consumers in the retail space.
Most came back energised, engaged and motivated, some did not, and they usually found their career prospects better elsewhere pretty quickly.
Often other functional management also benefitted greatly from seeing how the product they made, counted, delivered, or engineered lived in the sales environment.
50 interactions with intelligent customers and consumers, and those who preferred our competitor products may not be a statistically significant sample, but you will learn more from those interactions than you will from reading expensive research reports behind a desk.
Jul 25, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Social Media
Sales people are used to being measured by hard metrics, and management is very used to imposing and managing these metrics, and marketers are more inclined now than just a while ago, to have quantifiable measures.
Therein lies one of the challenges of social media.
To varying degrees, SM is not a great sales tool, but it is a great tool to build engagement, and engagement leads to sales, eventually, and amongst other outcomes. It can take the place of the face to face selling, and potentially much of the role of traditional advertising.
When on the web, searching for information, peoples bullshit meter is working, so their receptiveness to advertising may be no greater than in a normal mass media environment, the huge difference being the ability of web advertising to target information at those looking for it. However, on social media, I contend that the bullshit meter is at a lower level, perhaps turned off, as they are seeking to engage, not just seeking information, so information accepted takes on some of the characteristics of endorsement.
Jul 20, 2012 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, retail, Sales
Amidst the moans being heard from bricks and mortar retailers, you can still see in almost any store you choose to enter, opportunities to make the experience of shopping easier.
If it was more social, friendly, service oriented in stores, it follows that shoppers would find it easier to part with their money. Human beings are social animals, we herd, and congregate around things that interest and engage us, so it seems possible to dream up strategies that enable that behavior in a store, to make it an attractive occasion to go there, even if it is to your local supermarket, there are opportunities to reconstruct the experience.
Many consumers in high value categories, from furniture to electronics and whitegoods, are “showrooming”, doing some research on-line, then going into showrooms to have a look at the short list in the physical state, then go out and buy on line. Notice the disconnect there, sales people let them out of the showroom not just without a sale, but without permission to continue the nascent relationship.
On the other hand, I wandered into the Apple store last week, seeking information for a client, went back the next day for an information session targeted at the specific questions I had, and yesterday got a targeted email offering solutions to the problems I outlined in the session.
No wonder the Apple retail stores are breaking all retail records, and they are bricks and mortar, with a huge difference, they work at creating a relationship, recognising that it is the precursor to a sale.
Jul 17, 2012 | Category, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
Huge amounts of marketing dollars are spent to convince customers to come back. They try the product, leave, or just shop around, so we spend to get them back.
If marketing really was a war, as the analogies often go, it would be the same as expending resources to take a hill, then abandoning it to the enemy, only to have some general say take that hill, so the grunts go through the hell again.
How much easier to have kept it once taken.
Jul 16, 2012 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Small business, Social Media
A vast array of marketing & sales activity is aimed at persuading, far less are aimed at engaging. This may appear to be a largely semantic difference, but consider the difference when you see someone undertaking an activity they are paid to do, compared to somebody undertaking the same activity because they love to do it.
Yet it is engagement that leads to persuasion, not the other way around, so why bother trying to persuade, which is usually a recitation of the features of your product or service, concentrate on engagement and have the product sell itself.
Jun 18, 2012 | Branding, Marketing, Personal Rant, Sales
I have been having trouble with bloody Optus, again, my exclusive supplier of communication services. They simply cannot seem to get anything right, clearly the left hand has no idea, and I suspect do not care what the right hand is doing. Their customer service does not talk to their accounts who will not talk to their technical service, who do not talk to their retailers, a real dogs breakfast. Frustrating in the extreme.
Yesterday, I got another call from some young bloke in their call centre, reading from a script telling me how he had a great deal for me because I was such a loyal customer. Pity they are not a loyal supplier!
How good would it be if they actually did care, and showed it by any one of a number of means at their disposal to make my digital life simpler, cheaper, better integrated, more transparent, and easier to manage. Allocating obviously anglo names on their call sheet to those in their call cantre whose first language was English seems a pretty logical step.
Loyalty runs both ways, and those very few businesses that make the effort to act in their customers interests, rather than just their own, usually do pretty well. There are the big ones we all know about, but there are also small businesses around that make it easy, pleasant, and “human” to conduct a transaction, so you come back for another one, again, and again.
Customers are always looking for a better deal because that is all that these dills have left them. If any of the telcos reduced the customer churn by 0.5%, a seemingly modest target, they would be way in front, because they could reduce advertising and re-contract costs, cross sell more easily, and reduce their “service” costs by doing something right first time.
Genuinely caring about the customer experience, being a bit loyal to their customers seems a pretty good way to start, a customers loyalty to a brand needs to be earned, it will not be given away to those who do not deserve or value it.
