I spent last week at my favorite resort, Rancho La Puerta, and was inspired to write this newsletter, “Show Me You Know Me.” If you’ve ever been to “the Ranch,” you’ll have felt the deep level of personalized service. And your customers want the same experience! Read the newsletter for my thoughts on today’s key competitive advantage: differentiating your customers.
Read the newsletter: Show Me You Know Me
Today’s newsletter, “Don’t Stop the Conversation When You Hang Up the Phone,” focuses on creating ongoing conversations with your customers, giving you ideas for strengthening your customer relationships.
We’re all good at creating ongoing conversations with our friends. Let’s try to be just as good at it in business!
Read the newsletter: Don’t Stop the Conversation When You Hang Up the Phone
Imagine this … one of your customers is speaking with a friend, and suddenly notices that the friend should also be your customer. After witnessing this opportunity, what does he do? Recommend you, or let the opportunity pass by?
Check out today’s newsletter, Will your customers be witnesses for you?
Please share your comments … are your customers witnesses for you? Do you ever serve as a witness for others, noticing business opportunities for them?
When people talk about earning their customers’ trust, they are usually thinking about persuading a customer to believe in their integrity and honesty.
Ok … integrity and honesty are important, but they are not differentiating. Most of your competitors are not dishonest.
So, when you think about earning your customers’ trust, I recommend you aim higher.
Does your customer trust that you understand his business?
Does your customer trust that you really hear everything he has to say?
Does your customer trust that he will be better off if he is in a relationship with you?
Today’s newsletter, Don’t be a “vendor,” focuses on what it takes to be considered a “partner” by your customers, instead of being kept down in the lowly realm of vendor status.
I’ve heard 727,435 senior executives bemoan the vendor/partner challenge in the years I’ve been teaching people about “We” relationships, so I thought this would be a worthwhile topic for us to focus on. My theme: If you don’t want to be considered a vendor, be sure you’re not acting like a vending machine.
Here’s a link to my last newsletter, The Way We Connect.
In a world where products and services are, in the minds of customers, largely interchangeable, the character of your interactions with customers is one of the most important ingredients of effective marketing communication. So, how well do companies interact with you? How does your company compare?
Last Thursday, I was watching Whose Line Is It Anyway?, as Wayne Brady invented a song, on the spot, like no one else can. Drew Carey would throw out a musical style, the audience would yell out topics, and Wayne would instantly compose and sing a song, with perfect rhymes, double entendres, wit and humor.
That got me thinking a lot about improvisation, which has been a big part of my life since I started playing guitar at age 12. Improvisation became a theme a few more times throughout the weekend, inspiring this week’s newsletter, Improvise your success.
Improvise your success connects, chimpanzees, bonobos, The Second City, jazz and my second book together to create this message: Improvise!
There is a place in business for policy and programming, and there are many places for improvising. So what do you think? Is improv important to your business success?
Newsletter link: Improvise your success
Yesterday, I ran into a 24-year old young man who is the son of close family friends. I’ve known “Jake” since he was a little kid, so I’ve seen for years that he has a magnetic, charismatic personality, and has always been able to attract friends.
About a year ago Jake started working for a local firm selling life insurance and investments – a very difficult career for anyone to start at a young age, with its long sales cycles and the need to get people to trust you with their money. He and I work out at the same club, so I see him on a regular basis and have a chance to hear updates on his progress. Some days I’d see him, elated, after a promising meeting with a prospect. Sometimes he was discouraged he wasn’t closing more sales yet.
My comments to him: You have started a career path where long-term relationships create riches. If you have enough great meetings with prospects now, you will start to build relationships with some of them. When you are 40, some of the relationships you start this month may be paying your mortgage. Meetings you have next month will start relationships that will help send your kids to college. If anybody can make it in this business, you can. The only question: Can you wait?
In most businesses, customer relationships are your most valuable asset. Jake has chosen a business where this is especially true, with great rewards for those who can create and nurture long-term relationships. But we’re all like Jake to an extent: Can we be patient and invest now, one relationship-building encounter at a time, in building those relationships that will help us prosper in the future?
Certainly, Jake could use his exceptional relationship-building skills for more short-term financial gains. He could be a waiter in a fine-dining restaurant, creating 45-minute relationships that, I’m sure, would earn him the largest tips of all the servers. But, beyond the few repeat customers who ask for him, these relationships wouldn’t create lasting value for Jake. If his insurance job is like that of a christmas tree farmer, being a waiter would be more like that of a migrant worker, earning wages for today but starting over tomorrow.
I’m rooting for Jake, and for his firm. If he and they can be patient, all will benefit, including Jake’s future clients, since We relationships create strong benefits for both buyers and sellers.
It’s easy to look at Jake’s situation and think, “I’m glad that’s not me. I could never sell insurance.” And yes, specifically, I could never sell insurance. I’d go nuts. But Jake’s job really isn’t selling insurance. It’s building relationships that differentiate him from other providers in the minds of his clients. And when we recognize that we again remind ourselves that Jake’s challenge is our challenge: Do we want to be the migrant worker or the christmas tree farmer? Do we want to build our business around short-term transactions that produce their yields now, or do we want to invest in a rich, bountiful future harvest?
How can you tell if your company is doing good marketing? That question is the subject of Steve’s newsletter today. Over the next couple weeks, he’s going to explore the following six questions to help you evaluate and improve your company’s marketing strategy:
Today, he focuses on the first two questions. Here’s the link again: How can you tell if your company is doing good marketing?
“Attract and retain customers”
I hear this phrase all the time, as if it were an indivisible, and comprehensive, unit. It assumes that once you acquire a customer the only thing left is to retain that customer.
A newsletter I wrote last year, The Apple Farmer, shows why retention is rarely ever enough. When asked what percent of their customers are giving them all of the business they reasonably could, most companies report a very low number to me. They haven’t lost the customers, but they surely haven’t developed all they can from the relationships.
So be cautious of strategies designed to “retain” customers. These strategies may succeed, and, if they do, you may miss the chance to go beyond the success of retention and develop more profitable, mutually-beneficial, continually-developing We relationships.
"When Steve Yastrow writes, I pay close attention"
- Tom Peters
"I had to buy two copies. The first one is so dog-eared and underlined I couldn't read it any longer."
- Seth Godin
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In addition to writing, I spend most of my work time helping companies unleash their potential by creating better connections with their customers. This happens through my speaking events and through Yastrow & Company consulting engagements, where my team and I help companies figure out who they intend to be in the future, and then engage the entire company in creating that future through strong "We" customer relationships.
Before starting Yastrow & Company in the mid-90s I was vice-president of resort marketing for Hyatt Hotels. My experiences in the hotel business showed me clearly that most marketing doesn’t happen in the marketing department. Customers are paying attention to all interactions with a company, not just the promises made in traditional "marketing communications."
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