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Tag: Management

Planning Tools You SHOULDN’T Use

Hopefully, if you’re a corporate marketer, brand manager, Marketing Director or Manager, you and your organization have a marketing plan that is reviewed every 4 months and updated, adjusted, reworked to maximize return on investment and protection and polish of the brand.

If you don’t, you’d better get one.

Most folks work toward having that plan include several different ways to measure their progress or success, often on a monthly or quarterly basis. Good for them. Not everything is directly measurable, but there are some indirect measurements you can use to gauge your effectiveness. Use them. Always.

For those of you forming a plan, here’s a few common things that marketers face when crafting a plan internally. Picture the planning meeting, and get a good bead on the personnel included in that meeting. These are things you shouldn’t succumb to from those in that meeting:

5) “We did it last year and it worked.” Marketers are supposed to be innovative, progressive, forward-thinking. Before you even get to the “and it worked” part, you should have a response ready that shoots this down. If you’re not moving forward you’re going backwards. Its a new year, use it.

4) “Our competitors did it last year, and it worked.” See above, plus how do you know if it worked? Unless you have espionage reports from inside the competing firm, you’re guessing. Plus, if you’ve stooped to the level of stealing from your competitor, why bother planning at all, just steal theirs.

3) “We don’t need new research, we know our customers.” Contrary to popular belief, your “gut” is not a primary research method, and won’t yield adequate or accurate data on your customers unless you have only one – you. Field intelligence is invaluable in helping to shape perceptions generated by research data, but if you use it as the basis of your planning, you’re missing a large part of your potential customer base. Why guess, when you can KNOW.

2) “Customer Service only deals with whiners, we don’t need to include their data in the plan.” CSRs and receptionists who answer the phone are a major source of information on your brand perception and characteristics. They are also key sources of information on the clarity, transparency and effectiveness of your sales promotion efforts. When the complaint call volume rises, it does so for a reason. Find out why, and fix it. Then take the list of those affected, and send them something nice, and ask them to tell their friends how nice you’ve been. Converting complainers to evangelists is a very effective way of expanding your reach and polishing your brand. Listen to the CSR traffic and respond quickly, include that metric in your plan.

1) “We don’t have results yet, but it looks like it’s working.” Some initiatives take longer than others to bear fruit. Unless you’re a start-up, you have at least some transactional data to work from, and can project results from that to gauge effectiveness of your previous efforts. If you really can’t get a bead on the impact of a campaign, don’t build your new initiatives based on that one – you could end up throwing good money after bad. Your plan needs to be broad spectrum enough and flexible enough to work around such issues without affecting the whole program.

Now that you’ve killed off all the bad ideas in the meeting, you can entertain the new, innovative and intriguing ones that you’ve forced everyone to come up with by taking away their crutches.

If you liked the thoughts presented here, find the best tools for marketing planning in my book, “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

June 5, 2014
Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-Up – Don’t Forget That Last One!

Usually I focus on marketing strategy, tactics and practices in this forum, but I wanted to touch on a more sales and management-oriented topic that has been rearing its ugly head recently – Poor sales personnel practices.

If you’re in sales as a profession, there’s a few simple adages that pave the road to success.

1) Know your market, know your customer, solve their problems, don’t create them

2) Under-promise and Over-Deliver

3) It’s more effective and less expensive to keep your existing customers than to find new ones

4) Always make that last call of the day, no matter how tired or late you are

5) Show Up, Suit Up, Follow-up

If you can keep those things in mind as you go about your daily interaction with customers and prospects, you probably won’t go too far wrong.

Where most less-experienced folks tend to drop the ball is on numbers 2 and 5. Most new folks are so eager to make the sale, they will tell prospects virtually anything to close them, and then when it comes time for the order to arrive or be fulfilled, the customer is left disappointed or worse, feels cheated. At extreme levels this amounts to bait-and-switch, which is a prosecutable offense. You may get a few orders this way, but there won’t be any referrals or recommendations, and the gravy train will grind to a halt fairly quickly, especially in the age of Internet postings, blogs and rating sites for every business imaginable. Word will get out even more quickly and nobody will touch you after that – bad idea.

Number 5 is sometimes a function of time management, sometimes of lack of training, sometimes lack of personal responsibility. The Show up and Suit up portions, most have down, although I’ve spoken with many business leaders in the last few months who say they can’t hire staff that can manage to do even that on a consistent basis. It’s the follow-up that eludes most people, and the one’s that discover this little secret are going to move to the top of the heap rather quicker than his or her competitors. Just because someone was not in a position to buy when you left them last, (some more hardcore folks would say you failed to effectively close them the first time) doesn’t mean that they never will have a need for what you’re offering. Your odds of them calling you when the time comes has much more to do with top of mind awareness and initial impressions than of product quality or benefits.

Effective follow-up must be gauged carefully and is different for each prospect. The tone, medium, frequency and content of your follow-up is critical to maintaining that tenuous connection and reinforcing that initial, hopefully good, impression. The more personal and more specific you can make that follow-up, regardless of the medium, whether by phone, card, letter, e-mail, or visit. General, automated, non-specific stuff will not have the impact or make the connection you need to encourage that prospect to pick up the phone when the time comes. Sometimes there’s no substitute for a hand-written note – it takes about 5 minutes of your time and you’d be amazed that impact it has on the recipient. sometimes a mix of media is appropriate, depending on the volume you need it to cover every week or the type of sale. The only constant you can count on is that if you don’t do it, your sale with go to the guy who does. Sometimes it’s trial and error, but you have to use common sense, especially having to do with timing and frequency. You really don’t want to overdo it – an e-mail every other day is likely overkill . . .

Consistency, reliability and accountability are the keys to good sales practice, and the follow-up should be part of that – if the customer feels you’ll be there before the sale, think how much they’ll appreciate you being there after the sale.

If you found this valuable and want more like it, sign up to receive more every week in your inbox – free! Also, be sure and pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

May 9, 2014
Marketing Leadership Means Asking the Right Questions

Ever wonder how market leading companies got that way? Ever wonder who lead the way and how they knew to veer in the direction they did? Based on our analysis of hundreds of business cases, we’ve determined that there are some key decisions that top marketing executives make in common with market leadership, the result of which is moving that company to the next level of market penetration.

5) Select Partners Carefully. Ask yourself this question: Would i want to do business with this company regardless if I made a profit or not? If the answer is no, then it’s probably not a good fit. For a partnership to work, both sides have to support the mission equally and enthusiastically. If you don’t enjoy your interactions with the partner and they’re not tremendously fruitful, cut your losses and dissolve it before things get bad.

4) Know When To Call it A Day. Ask yourself: Is this effort as effective as it was the week it started? If the answer is no, is it fatiguing and lagging due to lack of support, saturation, market shift or getting stale? It may be you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, and the ROI of continuing it is no longer viable. If that’s the case, you’re throwing money away, just pull the plug and initiate another effort. Clinging to a failing program costs you more than you imagine in lost opportunity, time, and it’s negative effect on your audience, staff and company morale has a measurable value.

3) Have a Purpose. Ask yourself: Why exactly are we doing this again? If the answer resembles something like “we did it last year”, or “our competitors tried it,” or “The Boss wants it that way” than it might be time to rethink the effort from the beginning. Legacy programs whose rationale have changed due to altered circumstances can be doing damage to your brand, losing you money, and wasting time. If the purpose no longer exists, don’t do it!

2) Are We Winning, and If Not, Why Not? One thing most market leading companies use as a mantra is that they have to be in the top 1-2 positions in each market they compete in or changes need made. They feel a need to lead, and they do everything in their power to lead their particular category for every product or service they offer. A quick analysis of the leader will tell you what you’re doing wrong, and you have to make a decision whether to fix it or bail out. The Cost/Benefit analysis should be performed regularly, and a market scan produced quarterly with ruthless honesty.

1) Where Do We Go From Here? Market leaders don’t often have to ask this question, because they think 8-9 moves ahead and plan strategically each move and have three contingencies based on research and market intelligence. They ask “where do we go” long before they get there! Draw the roadmap before you leave the barn, leave room to be flexible to respond to unforeseen challenges, and stay the course, and you’ll be surprised how far you’ll go. The control and discipline it requires to do this is what separates the men from the boys, but you can bet that market leading companies spend more time planning than executing, and spend significant time asking “What if?”

If your company wants to be a leader in their market, it comes down to asking the right questions, and probing until you get an answer that satisfies your needs. Keep digging . . .

For more great questions you should be asking, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

April 29, 2014
Networking Events Can Produce Results, But Common Interest Cements Relationships

We’ve all been there . . .

You go to an event, be it a conference, a seminar session or annual meeting, and you meet different business people, discover some common ground outside the theme of the event, and you keep in touch for a while after the event, but unless you work at it and nurture it, that relationship fades into the background, not serving either party. Occasionally, you run into someone that really has a lot in common with you, has some business reason to stay in touch and that relationship grows and flowers and produces solid business gains for both sides and lasts years. What made the difference?

I have a theory, and statistics gained in our work promoting events will back this assertion up to a certain degree: “The more closely aligned the business goals of the parties are, the less likely they are to form a longer-term relationship.” On the surface that may seem counter-intuitive, but keep reading.

What drives business relationships is gain – profit, cash flow, commerce. Each side has to have a clearly defined role and those roles need to be complimentary, not unidirectional, for the relationship to be productive. Gains are made and money moved when something is sold or bought. Seven times out of ten, what drives that relationship is the desire to sell to the other guy! Two salesmen can get together and banter and share a beverage, but chances are that relationship will develop a competitive or adversarial nature. But if one is a salesman and the other is a mid-level executive in another role, something can be sold there, business moves, transactions done, and the relationship works for both.

Two top executives can get together and share common issues, maybe even work on the same committee to solve an industry problem, and if there’s no chance of them being in a competitive situation, and with nothing personal underlying it – tough conditions to fill – that relationship might come in handy from time to time, but it probably will not be terribly productive. No chance to sell to the other one! No chance to beat the other one, either.

Networking meetings in general have been overused and relationships forced upon business people for a long time, and they still serve a useful function, especially for those new to an area or industry. But without the quantity of time required to care for and nurture those relationships, and a good business reason to do so, in today’s superficial and time-starved environment, most are short-lived and unproductive. The way to get the most out of networking meetings is to introduce yourself to a few key people, or better yet, have someone else introduce you to a few key individuals, and take the time to investigate them further, see if they are worth pursuing, and take the lead in keeping them fresh and alive.

If you meet ten people and stay in touch with just one really solid business individual and keep that relationship growing, you can consider that meeting a success. At that build ratio, you’ll need to attend a significant number of meetings to start a functioning network from scratch. But if you put in the time, make the investment in your own business future, you’ll find it pays off in spades over the years.

The best technique that we’ve seen success with is to let such relationships develop naturally through outside interests other than business. That fellow soccer coach, that neighborhood association committee member, that dinner companion of a college friend, that last-minute fill-in in your golfing foursome, that guy who has season tickets right next to yours at the stadium or the theater – that’s how relationships get started, and have no surface business purpose, but after getting deeper into them, you find common business ground if you’re open to discovering it. It’s old-school, but it works! It’s less contrived, less forced, more comfortable for everyone, and you don’t have to go out of your way, or wear a name tag for them to be productive!

Next time you’re at a networking function where the specific reason for attending is to meet other people to do business, think back to other similar situations and count the number of people you regularly do business with, and ask yourself how many of them you met at such an event. The answer will likely be Zero! Now examine those same people you regularly do good business with, and ask how you met them initially. The answer is usually that you were introduced by someone you both knew from somewhere else.

Try this at your next social outing or sporting event: try and steer the conversation you’re having so that it includes no clue about what your job is or what business or industry you’re in. You’ll be amazed how difficult it is, and how intriguing it makes you to others. But think of the information you’ve gathered.

Now you know more about them as people, and can make a more informed decision about whether to pursue that relationship further, and find some common business ground. My guess is that the resulting business relationship will be stronger and last longer than the one derived from the forced, contrived situation at the hotel.

Write to me with your networking stories, we’ll compare notes . . .

If you found this helpful, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog and get more weekly right in your inbox. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

April 16, 2014
Does More Pay Equal More Value?

There has been a lot of talk recently regarding and considering CEO compensation, especially in the financial sector, where the numbers compared to the average person’s income are literally astronomical. In my mind, it comes down to contribution.

Some companies are so well-constructed, that you could put almost anyone in the corner office and they would continue to run things profitably. Some are so inherently dysfunctional, that the most brilliant leader would founder in the effort to right them and run them logically and practically. But the average firm can benefit from strong leadership to set the tone, strategic direction, and operational efficiency that leads to success.

Typically this is a seasoned individual, with a good education, a strong network of colleagues and contacts, and enough political awareness to work his way into the job. There are some, especially in the tech sector, that don’t seem to fit this mold, but the vast majority of brick and mortar, bread and butter companies have an executive vet at the helm, one who is compensated handsomely for their work. But what do they really contribute on a daily basis?

Some lead by example, and therefore contribute as a role model and exemplar just by arriving and communicating within the headquarters office or division facility. Some lead through growth strategy implementation, working with M&A attorneys, brokers, bankers and business owners to grow the company through strategic acquisition of other firms, either to help shore up weaknesses within the firm’s core competences or expand into new affiliated or related markets. Some lead through mentoring, employee relations and succession grooming within the ranks, training and educating younger executives to move through the company with the goal of one day paying back that investment by leading the firm to greater profitability.

Those may seem like intangible approaches or qualities, but they contribute in numerous ways to the success of the company. In the case of some of the more high-profile financial firms, I’m not entirely sure the millions and in some cases billions that the CEO receives in compensation is proportionate to their contributions to the firm. In some cases, reported ad nauseum in the media, the same executives responsible for driving the profitability out of the firm are the ones now reaping even greater rewards, while the stock holders and general public flounder trying to make ends meet.

There has been a theory advanced that the CEO shouldn’t receive more than ten times what the lowest paid worker receives. For manufacturing companies that outsource production work to third-world countries, that compensation could be very low indeed. While the mechanics of the theory need some fine tuning, the sentiment is borne out of an innate sense of fairness, an internal gauge of “rightness” and correctness that we all possess when assessing such things. If you still go to the same office I do every day, do basically the same work, maybe among a more wealthy group of people, do you really deserve 100 times more than I do in compensation for it? – not likely.

Someone ought to do a correlative study cross-referencing the national journalists list of the top 100 best companies to work for, against the top 100 highest compensated CEOs, and see if there is a correlation between compensation and how the workers rank the company. My guess is the correlation would be rather low, and here’s why. Companies that are “Great” to work for usually provide a wide range of outstanding personal benefits, ranging from free child care to extra days off, to paid education, to personal loans, to flexible hours or work-at-home options to help better balance personal- and work-lives of the employees. Those benefits sometimes have expenses attached to them. Places where the CEO is extremely highly compensated are driven by profitability and sales volume, rather than work-life balance for the rank and file – different motivators, different cultures, different definitions of the word “Company”.

Let us know what your definition of the word “Company” is from a cultural standpoint and whether yours is a “great” place to work, and how much your CEO is compensated, and we can compile the results and see if our theory holds water. Can’t wait to hear from you . . .

If you liked (or disagreed with) this post, and would like to read more, subscribe to this blog and it will be delivered to your inbox for free weekly. Don’t forget to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

April 12, 2014
Sharpen Your Skills Before They Rust Away . . .

We all develop skills as we go through life and get older and more experienced. Some of those are of a more temporary or cyclic nature, and some are used daily and are at peak performance. Skills like coping with change, or a sudden occurrence, get used when needed and then left off the menu until they are needed again.

Some are annual, like “How did I put these lights on this Christmas Tree last year?” And some need to be constantly honed or updated, in particular, computer skills. This is a tough one, and in an increasingly computerized world, those who don’t keep up will certainly be left behind to one degree or another.

I’m not exempt from this phenomenon, either. Skills I learned about computers 20 or so years ago are long gone as they are obsolete, and certainly those learned 30 years ago are useless (try finding punch cards or teletype tapes today!). Modern computer skills in particular need to be practices and updated almost weekly in order to keep up to speed. Once I mastered the use of a server and printer, then the Internet and E-mail came along.

Once I got the hang of those to some degree, albeit not mastery by any means, then texting, social media and ads came along, and a whole new set of skills was needed. There’s always something new coming along that needs to be learned and understood, but if you don’t make a conscious effort to find out about new developments, they won’t find you and you’ll get left behind. And nobody likes to be left behind.

I have a theory that there’s a place in everyone’s life where that curiosity diminishes, and you stop making the effort to learn new skills. That date or age is different from person to person, and I suspect there are plateaus that each of use arrives at and must make a conscious decision to either surmount them and climb to the next level or stand pat on what we have and stay there. This date may be strongly influenced by the level of skill needed to maintain the status quo, and stay within our daily comfort zone. When the technology advances so far that it affects our daily functioning and pushes us out of our comfort zone, we are forced to learn new skills.

Everyday things like banking, shopping, finding services and vendors to meet our needs, all have changed and computerized to the point where it’s difficult to interact with those businesses without some level of computer savvy. Even reading the daily paper is a very different experience than it was even three years ago. There are now lists of “most read stories on the Internet” and stories have links and the columnists and staff writers open themselves up to rebuttal by publishing an e-mail address – in the old days, you had to write to them care of the paper, and they could decide whether to acknowledge receipt and reply. You could just delete the e-mail, true, but that kind of direct access gives them immediate feedback on their work, and they can sense and even quantify the reaction to their efforts almost instantly compared to the week or so delay of years earlier.

The moral of the story is that as soon as you lose curiosity, and stop learning new things, you are doomed to lose contact with a segment of our culture, and the more of those you lose, the more isolated and irrelevant you become, in the cultural scheme of things. AS in business, if you’re not moving forward, your dying, piece by piece. Maybe it’s time to return to some previously used skill and update it today – sign up for a class, go to a lecture, read a new publication, find a new book (e-book if you prefer) and keep that curiosity burning . . .

If you liked this train of thought, or if it derailed yours . . . if you’d like more like this, be sure to pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

April 7, 2014
Sometimes Business Growth Doesn’t Mean More Customers

In our daily consulting practice, we see the inside of businesses all over the country, and can make some fairly educated observations about how they run. Small businesses especially are having a tough time running smoothly, in a couple of aspects, operationally and financially.

Smaller businesses, especially service businesses like landscapers, technology companies, contractors painters and other building trades, are having trouble securing loans from local banks to use for working capital or expansion, new equipment, bigger crews, more workers. This type of business often has ebbs and flows in cash availability, either due to seasonality of their business or the size and nature of their work and their customers. Occasionally they need some extra capitol on a short term basis to make payroll and keep good people on the employee rolls until they are needed for the next big job. If they can’t get that extra money, they are forced to cut other staff, benefits or worse, close down temporarily. This up and down cycle, when not mitigated by some cash flow injections, can eventually destroy a small business, even one that is well managed.

1) Qualified Staff Shortage. Operationally, this cash flow issue changes the dynamic among the core of employees, and causes the other problem this type of business faces: scarcity of qualified staff and an employee pool too shallow. If the threat of being laid off comes repeatedly to the rank and file, word spreads in the industrial community and you will have a hard time recruiting good employees. The stress caused by the impending downsize can negatively affect productivity, loyalty and other critical areas of performance.

2) Reduced Risk Profile Stifles Growth. That lack of cash flow can also have a negative effect on management decisions as well. If you’re not sure you can fill that cash gap, but have receivables out there and the next big job is in the pipeline, management will still be reluctant to hire additional employees even when they’re needed. This reduces risk-taking, limits growth and expansion, and slows movement among the employees. Mentoring behavior slows or stops, training dries up, and the whole works can come to a virtual standstill, largely out of fear of that “big job gap”.

3) Know When To Let Go. The third but highly overlooked issue for small businesses these days is making the transition from founder-lead, to goal-driven enterprise. Usually smaller businesses are started by a single individual, who has a skill or a talent. They are successful using those skills and the business grows. They hire some semi-skilled workers to help in specific areas, but the founder still acts as president, chief cook and bottle washer, wearing a huge number of hats on the managerial and administrative side, and still doing the principal work at the same time. If they get caught in this loop for very long, performance suffers, crucial but routine admin work often gets missed or lies fallow for long periods, customer service suffers and eventually work quality will suffer.

The way to break the cycle is for the owner to know when it’s time to find a trusted team to run the jobs and they move over to take a more strategic role. Its a different skill set, but one that can be learned. Finding that team is becoming increasingly difficult, and this is one of the biggest single issues facing small businesses and impeding their growth. Advice for job-seekers out there – look at your skills and experiences and frame them in such a way as to make you attractive to someone seeking a clone of themselves – make yourself appear trustworthy and indispensable, and you’ll get hired in a second.

Growth from within, building a team, creating a chain of command, putting in place a management structure and policies that foster growth, innovation, initiative and empowerment are just as valuable as building up the customer list, and are a form of growth on their own.

If you found this valuable and would like to find out more, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

March 31, 2014
Boss Got ADD? – It Might Be The Media’s Fault . . .

Most people have what they think are busy lives, and most of us try to do as much during a given day as possible, to live up to expectations, either our own or someone else’s. That means we’ve figured out where we can cut a few corners and do more than one thing at once, like drive and hold a conversation on a cell phone. Some folks extend that to an extreme degree, adding feeding the kids, reading the paper, programming the nav, and more while driving, local laws and bans be damned – these folks are dangerous.

At work, most people I know try to be as efficient with their time as possible, to maximize productivity, keep the powers that be happy, secure their position and keep on track. Some take this to an extreme as well, and the ones who suffer are their direct reports and subordinates. If you’ve ever had a boss that was trying to do too much at once, you know how much it drives employees to distraction, and the higher up the chain the ADD boss is, the more chaos they leave in their wake.

I know of one boss that has reports clinging to every word, not out of extreme interest, but because he rarely ever finishes a sentence, and the object part of the sentence typically contains the “who” or the “what” of the directive at hand. Without it, no one knows what’s expected of them or who’s been assigned half the time. So they all have to listen to each directive to get the big picture, and then divvy up the work as they see fit since the “real” assignments are incomplete or incomprehensible. Ultimately everything gets done, but the time wasted figuring out what’s needed and who’s to do it is actually making the busy manager redundant. I know, there are lots of coping strategies and work-arounds that would work to curb, change or otherwise eliminate this problem. But the point is, the boss is so conflicted, consumed and otherwise easily distracted by new inputs, whether from other coworkers, colleagues, his boss or others, that he can’t stay on track long enough to function. Most of this comes as a response to a reactive culture. What I mean by that is the company culture is one of very high expectation in terms of level of service, both internal and external, to the point of mandated response times on e-mails and phone calls (ie, you must respond in some form to the sender of an e-mail within 2 hours of it’s origination). This type of thing typically evolves in response to a complaint at some point in the past, that people were not responding quickly enough to get their tasks completed in a timely fashion. The reason for the lack of response was never explored, but a policy was put in place to combat it, nonetheless.

Under those circumstances, the ADD boss has trained himself to let go of what’s in front of him (ie the meeting in progress), and to return to the inbox, lest he miss something or not respond in a timely fashion. Meanwhile, his staff flounders, the meeting gains no momentum and nothing gets accomplished, yet at review time, the boss can say, “we held a meeting, told everyone what’s happening . . .”

Sometimes, the ADD behavior is simply a response to media bombardment – the brain’s receptors get inundated with input from phones, e-mail, TV, the radio, music downloads, meeting reminders, other conversations, web pages and all the rest, and rebels by not lighting on any one media, including humans, for long enough to overload – it’s sort of like your computer skipping around from app to app to use the available processing power to best advantage, but slowing the entire machine down in the process. Small bites for limited amount of time, rather than longer, more focused attention to one thing at the expense of everything else. This makes the ADD boss “think” he’s getting things done, but it’s an illusion.

Write in to tell us about your most rambunctious ADD boss . . .

If this was helpful and you’d like to read more, subscribe to this blog above. Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

March 13, 2014
Good Customer Service MAKES Your Company Money

One of the hallmarks of a strong b-to-c company is the reputation of their customer service approach. Think how much the CS interaction defines the brand for customers. As an example, two companies highlight this clearly – L.L. Bean = Good! Comcast = Bad.

Comcast may be delivering an outstanding, clear, signal over a vast network of installations, over 99% of the operating time – a competitively good product in many people’s eyes. But mention their name to a customer who’s had a problem, no matter how minor, that they tried to resolve over the phone, and they will inevitably bend your ear for an hour about how hard it was to communicate and get issues resolved quickly and effectively. Horror stories abound, and multiply daily.

Now, mention L.L. Bean to a customer who’s tried to send something back, or return something to a retail outlet, and they will smile and say that it couldn’t have been easier, and they were nice about it. Bean ships globally to millions of customers a year, from a huge fulfillment facility with hundreds of different products, sizes, colors, styles and variations, leading to millions of pick-and-pack combinations for a given order. Inevitably mistakes occur, but it’s how they handle them that matters to customers. Their policy is that they will take returns of their merchandise and refund or replace, no questions asked. They LIVE that policy every day, and it shows.

If your marketing department is working in concert with your customer service department as they should be, your company can harness the power of the CS relationship with customers to build your reputation, and polish your brand to it’s desired brilliance. If they’re not, you could be languishing in the basement with the likes of those who outsource their CS, ignore complaints, abuse customers, and lose revenue as a result.

Customers will tell you some amazing things, about your own products, sometimes even come up with new uses for your products that you can use to market them! But you have to build in the mechanism for that information to find it’s way up to those who can use it.

Good customer service starts with the ability to empower CS personnel to resolve problems immediately and effectively. The customer is not the enemy, but you’d be surprised how many CS depts treat them that way. It’s not about policy, its about people. They don’t have to be all sweetness and light, but they should be professional, reasonable, helpful and genuinely want to assist the customer. If the response they are trained to offer includes the words “our policy won’t allow for that” – rewrite the policy and retrain the whole crew – it’s defensive, it’s confrontational, its antithetical to “serving” the customer.

Think how many evangelists you’d create if each and every customer interaction was a positive one. How many upsells, how much pass along, how many influencers would you create in the world if every time your company touched a customer, they came away better off for the effort. Think of the sales increase you’ll create, what that would do to the lifetime value of a customer! You can effectively take what is commonly treated as an overhead item and turn it into a profit center, with a few adjustments to the training, scripting and approach of your customer service team.

Tell us your worst customer service stories, and we’ll share them and use them to help make better companies with them.

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Also, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

March 12, 2014
Think Twice Before You Hit Send
Everyone makes mistakes – I don’t care who you are in life, you’ve made a mistake or two along the way, it virtually unavoidable. In fact, making mistakes is often the hall mark of successful individuals – you learn more from making mistakes than from succeeding the first time out. The real trick is not only to learn from them, but also to avoid making them in future. Making the same mistake multiple times shows a lack of self-understanding, wondering why things go wrong as a result is the definition of insanity!

One mistake I see many younger business associates make is to put something in writing and deliver it to a recipient before reading it and considering the impact on the recipient later. In the old days, if you had an unfortunate experience or got caught in some less than optimal circumstance, you could fire off a letter to the one who initiated this slight, real or imagined. This involved sitting down, composing the thought. Then you had to find a piece of paper, an envelope, a stamp, and physically write the vehement tract in longhand, place it an envelope, seal it, stamp it, and post it. All this took time – time to consider, reconsider, and with that many steps, many chances to halt the process, and reduce or avoid the impending damage altogether. It took effort to vent on paper, and usually only the intended recipient got to see the result.

Today, with the advent of e-mail, the opportunity for electronic lunacy looms large. Many people spend entire days tucked safely behind a computer terminal, reading, texting, tweeting, e-mailing, posting on social media sites – communicating to be sure, but communicating what? It’s now much easier to fire off a venomous missive at the drop of a hat, with no real editor involved, either internal or external. A few keystrokes, a few clicks of the mouse, and off it goes, wounding and excoriating all in it’s path. And, in true millennial fashion, once its out there, it stays there. It resides on at least two server drives, yours and theirs, as well as all the one’s in between, and can easily be forwarded, used as defacto evidence, either for the authorities or in an internal investigation. And, it carries with it an IP address that leads right back to you – no such thing as an anonymous e-mail hate letter.

Even routine business correspondence sent to the wrong place or copied to the wrong address can cause trouble. A quick note to a co-worker about what a jerk the boss was in today’s meeting (a bad idea to begin with, never commit such things in writing, it will always be read by the wrong person eventually)can easily end up in the wrong hands with a simple click that’s a bit quick, thanks to automatic address lists, group e-mail, and a host of other technological corner-cutting to make our electronic lives even quicker and easier.

To avoid all of this, there are three simple rules:
1. Read all e-mail at least twice before sending, starting with the subject line, word by word, slowly and carefully.
2. If you wouldn’t say something to a person’s face, don’t write it in an e-mail, tweet, Facebook post or IM.
3. Check all e-mail addresses carefully, and verify before hitting “send”
Take a moment, think about what you’re writing, think about the impact it can have on other’s, and ask yourself what you would do and how you would feel if you received this message in your in-box. If there’s any way your message could be taken the wrong way, misconstrued, misinterpreted or taken the wrong way, edit, edit, edit. It’s free, it’s fast, and can save you hours of grief and tons of trouble later. 30 seconds of review now can save hours of explanation and hard feelings later, not a great bargain if you ignore it.

Read before you hit send – the office life you save could be your own . . .!

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March 8, 2014