Steve Yastrow » We relationships

Will your customers be witnesses for you?

Steve Yastrow — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 03:02:19 +0000

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?

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What “trust” really means

Steve Yastrow — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 03:26:14 +0000

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?

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So you don’t want to be a “vendor?”

Steve Yastrow — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 05:30:59 +0000

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.

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The Way We Connect

Steve Yastrow — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:57:48 +0000

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?

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Improvise your success!

Steve Yastrow — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:43:41 +0000

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

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Be patient – You are a christmas tree farmer

Steve Yastrow — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:17:17 +0000

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?

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Is your company doing good marketing?

Amanda Cullen — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:38:47 +0000

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?

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Retention is not enough

Steve Yastrow — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:43:03 +0000

“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.

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Free Ebook: Encounters - The Building Blocks of We Relationships

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Trust is a most fragile brand value

Steve Yastrow — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 04:53:42 +0000

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.”

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A Cinderella Story

Amanda Cullen — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:47:27 +0000

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.

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