Archive for the ‘We relationships’ Category
Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 |
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
Posted in Conversation, Creativity, We relationships | 6 Comments »
Friday, December 11th, 2009 |
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?
Posted in We relationships | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 |
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:
- Are your marketing efforts focused on the right results?
- Are you clear about what you want customers to do?
- Are you clear about the rich story you want customers to understand?
- Are your marketing efforts integrated over the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with your company?
- Are you focused on internal marketing within the company?
- Does management allow its marketing professionals to succeed?
Today, he focuses on the first two questions. Here’s the link again: How can you tell if your company is doing good marketing?
Posted in Brand Harmony, Marketing, We relationships | 3 Comments »
Sunday, November 15th, 2009 |
“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.
Posted in We relationships | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009 |
In our current marketplace, trust is not enough to win you customers. You have many trustworthy competitors.
However, the slightest chink in your “trust-armour” can lose you customers. Here’s an example:
I have been a loyal customer of Orbitz for a number of years, creating a near-reflexive habit of going to orbitz.com when I need to book travel. Each time I use Orbitz I am offered the chance to click a box and purchase travel insurance, which I never do.
I noticed three travel insurance charges on my credit card bill, related to three international reservations I had booked. When I called Orbitz they said it was too late to remove these charges since the travel dates had passed. “But I never selected travel insurance” did not seem to be a plausible objection to them.
With the agent on the phone I walked through a couple of “mock” reservations, and learned that for international reservations travel insurance is pre-selected, and you need to opt-out if you don’t want it.
What a bait and switch. For years I’ve been given the choice on Orbitz whether I want travel insurance, and then they sneak it in when I book international tickets. My brand impression of Orbitz changed immeditately. It went from “hassle-free/always-works/I-can-count-on-them” to “I better keep my eyes open from now on because they will try to take money from me when I am not looking.” We went from a We relationship to a definite Us & Them relationship.
Don’t ever be tempted to sneak something by your valuable customers. For about $100 Orbitz lost most of the trust I had in them. Making money in this way is a great example of “bad profits.”
Posted in We relationships | 7 Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 |
Last week on tompeters.com, Steve explored a new concept that we are living in a post-customer service age. He continues the theme this week with his newsletter, The Post-Customer Service Age: A Cinderella Story. He asks us to ignore the bad customer service stories and focus on beating the best customer service-oriented companies through relationship building encounters. A tale with a moral, indeed.
Posted in Customer Encounters, We relationships | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 |
Today’s newsletter, Everyone Can Sell, focuses on a truth about success in business: Career success is less about technical skills, and more about the ability to sell and persuade. The good news: You don’t have to be a salesperson to sell. You need to be really good at creating We relationships. More good news: No matter how good you are now, you can become better at creating We relationships. Make it a habit.
Posted in We relationships | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 |
In these tough times, what’s the one thing you want to know?
I asked this question of a friend the other day, and, without hesitation, he answered, “How to motivate people to buy for a reason other than price.”
Today’s newsletter discusses my answer to the question. I’d love to hear your answers and insights in the comments below.
Posted in Invent Your Future, Thrive in a tough economy, We relationships | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 |
We all want our customers to think, “I can’t get it anywhere else!” when they think of us. How do we do this? How do we differentiate our companies in our customers’ minds?
Consider four different ways of differentiating your company:
- The least effective way to differentiate your company is through advertising and other traditional marketing communications. Ads are easily copied and more easily forgotten. This is the main tool of differentiation employed by advertising and marketing agencies on behalf of their clients.
- The next way to differentiate your company is through price or price-related promotions. These tools are generally more effective at driving sales than advertising, but are still weak differentiators, because they get your customer to focus on the wrong reasons for buying from you. (Unless you want your customers to focus on price, which, for most of you, is not the case.)
- Next, you can attempt to differentiate your company with superior products and services. This is increasingly difficult, because your customers, no matter who they are and no matter what you make, are convinced they can buy similar products elsewhere. Welcome to our land of plenty, where too many sellers are chasing buyers with limited spending power.
- The best way to differentiate your company in your customers’ minds is to help customers focus not on your advertising, your prices, your promotions, your products or your services, but on the relationship they have with you.
Relationships are, simply put, the most powerful differentiators. Your competitors can copy just about everything you do, but they can not copy the private relationships you have with your customers.
In your mind, flip the four bullet points written above upside down, with advertising differentiation on the bottom and relationships at the top. The higher you can climb on this ladder, i.e., the higher on this ladder are the reasons your customers buy from you, the more differentiated you will seem to your customers, and the more loyal they will be.
Posted in Marketing, We relationships | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 |
Relationships progress one encounter at a time, improving in steps until the relationship arrives at a new level where new things can happen.
Today’s newsletter, The Relationship Threshold, discusses what these new levels are, and how to reach them. This concept is, for me, simple yet cathartic. It has helped me focus sales and marketing efforts on their true goal: Building a customer relationship to the point where the customer will act in a new, important way.
What are the important thresholds in your customer relationships?
Enjoy the newsletter, and please share your comments below. (And, Amanda has prepared a free download of the Relationship Threshold Model chart for you, which you’ll find in the newsletter.)
Posted in We relationships | 6 Comments »
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