Be Different or be dead

July 18, 2011

Why customer ‘secrets’ are absolutely critical to business success

Why customer ‘secrets’ are absolutely critical to business success.

Successful organizations know more about what people want than their competition; they use information — customer ‘secrets’ — as the power ingredient in their value proposition mix to separate themselves from everyone else and to achieve incredible levels of performance.

The winners are the insightful ones because there are two tiers of information available to organizations; the first tier is common, and the second one rarely gets used.

Tier #1 is the ‘needs-layer’; it consists of what people need.

Tier #2 is the ‘secrets-layer’; it consists of what people want.

A typical organization talks about the importance of determining what their customers need and delivering appropriate solutions accordingly.

The theory goes: identify what a person needs; build a product or service that delivers the needs and provide it. Simple enough.
The problem is that every competitor is doing it and no one in the market gains any sustainable advantage.

And the added challenge is that the needs of most people are already satisfied; most people already have the things that sustain their everyday lives.

So how can you be successful in attracting them if you and every other market player are using the needs-layer as the basis for your marketing efforts?

You can’t.

People are now more than ever doing business with organizations based on their wants and desires; products, services and experiences they ‘covet’ and ‘lust for’ as opposed to what they need.

And the successful organizations understand that it’s the secrets-layer of information on people that provides the insights they need to get and keep an advantage over their Tier #1 competitors.

So, what’s a customer ‘secret’?

A secret is an individual thing; it’s not a mass thing. Crowds don’t have secrets; individuals in the crowd do.

My secret is not likely to be the same as yours because we are different people with different backgrounds, different competencies, different lifestyles and, in organizations, different financial and market challenges.

A secret reveals itself as a habit, bias, dream, hope, skill, competency, lifestyle choice, family priority, ego drive, friendship affinity, recreation preference, entertainment choice, or in the case of an organization, inventory problems, cash flow margin challenges, employment equity concerns or product quality issues.

If we can discover the secrets of individuals or business decision makers, we will be in the enviable position to deliver something that they can’t get anywhere else (since others are still basing their offerings on what they learn from needs-layer information).

What does it mean to marketing?

A secrets-layer focus changes both the process we use to obtain information on people and the type of information we gather.

The focus of research must be to discover the secrets that every person has, with the trust and conviction that sustainable competitive advantage will result from using this information to develop products, services, packages and other offers (as an aside, packages solutions can only be created if we holistically understand what people desire.)

Marketing strategy must move away from periodic needs based research of mass markets to continuous secrets based learning of individual people

And the secret learning process must be continuous; information is constantly streamed into the organization as a result of ongoing customer engagement as opposed to conducting periodic studies which only provide a snapshot in time of what people are wanting.

What does it mean to customer service?

Secrets-layer information feeds the service recovery process — what the organization does in response to a service blunder that royally screws the customer. The objective is service recovery is to turn the service OOPS! into a loyalty building event where the customer is more committed to the organization after the mishap than they were before it occurred.

The service recovery process looks like this: fix the problem fast (studies show that a response is necessary within 24 hours) + surprise the customer with something they don’t expect.

If you can’t respond to an OOPS! in 24 hours you lose and chance of enhancing customer loyalty

And the essential ingredient of a surprise is the secret-layer; some fact or fantasy you have discovered about the screwed over person that they would be startled to learn that you know about them.

What is critical to get full value from the secret-layer in service recovery is that secret information is available to the service organization in real time.
When a mishap occurs, “What secrets do we know about this customer?” must be answered quickly so the recovery process can conclude within 24 hours.

Use the secret to personalize the process of apologizing for the mishap and ‘atoning for your sin’. Make it special. Show them that you put thought into what is the right way for you to make amends.

And they will quickly forget about the OOPS! and all they will remember is how amazing they felt when you recovered in a personal way.

What does it mean to sales?

A secrets-layer focus means that sales must be held accountable for gathering customer secrets, leveraging them as a customer engagement tool and reporting the information back to their colleagues (like marketing and customer service) who are then able to use them as needed.

Even though sales is in a great position to ask the right questions of customers, listen, take notes, and record what they discover, they are rarely asked to perform this function. They continue to be expected to perform their traditional — and commonplace — role of pushing products and services to their markets and hitting their short term quota.

And unfortunately, this traditional role contributes virtually nothing to enable an organization to stand out from their competition and gain a strategic advantage.

Notwithstanding the fact that the process exposes opportunities to grow revenue, secret gathering is an excellent way for a salesperson to deepen relationships with their customers.

The mere fact that it’s the secret discovery process is highly interactive means that relationships are automatically strengthened (with the caveat of course that fulfilling promises made is done promptly and to the customer’s satisfaction).

The way to get sales to be ‘secret agents’ is to build secret gathering into sales performance and compensation plans otherwise it won’t get done.

Sales bonuses should assign a material weight to this component to get sales attention - I suggest at least 25% of the sales bonus should be based on secret gathering effectiveness and that a customer report card be used as the measurement vehicle.

What does the discovery process look like?

The fact is that people are willing to give you their secrets every time you engage with them if the right approach is taken. 

All you need to do is to show that you are more interested in them than you are in pursuing your own agenda. By your actions tell them that you are a ’human being lover’, and that you are interested in their story.

The secret floodgates will open.

The secret gathering process looks like this:

Ask a question > listen > record what you hear > ask another question > ask another question > repeat.

The point is that we have all been taught to be in the transmit mode, anxious to tell the other person what we have been up to, what we have to sell and the attributes we possess.

To really learn about someone we need to make a right-angled turn from this behavior. We need to be open to others and focus on learning what THEY are all about.

As a way to get started, create a secrets manual on each of your high value customers

Have fun with the idea. How about a secret agent award to honor the person who discovers the coolest secrets every month?
Or an annual recognition award of someone who excels at continually maintaining and sharing their secrets manual?

A sustainable advantage is the most difficult thing for any organization to achieve in markets overwhelmed with intense and aggressive competition.

It’s ironic that most organizations look to the text books on strategy for the solution. They all look to technologies, products, services, branding and a plethora of other tactics to one-up their competitors, yet there is one rather mundane and non-sexy thing that can be done to attain incredible strategic success: discover the secrets that decision makers house and protect — and exploit them to grow business.

Secret gathering is strategic and it should be developed as a core competency in your organization if you want to standout and power up your business.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 7.18.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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June 27, 2011

3 simple ways sales can build the greatest customer relationships

Source: Unsplash

3 simple ways sales can build the greatest customer relationships.

Effective sales depends on building deep relationships with your customers

Intimate relationships. Trusting relationships. Long term relationships. Mutual benefit relationships. Cherished relationships. Memorable relationships. “Gaspworthy” relationships.

The end game is to establish such a strong bond with a customer they will never ever think of doing business with someone else. Customer intimacy results in barriers to customer exit; a far more effective approach that worrying about what the competition may be up to and over which you have little control.

Try these three things to get you on your way:

1. Declare that bonding is in; flogging is out

The business plan of the organization must include customer relationship building as a key strategic imperative in order to make it matter for sales.

Relationship building requires that a new strategic context be struck and communicated to the organization.
Make relationship selling matter. If you don’t make relationships a key element of your sales strategy and a key success factor for the organization, nothing will change.

2. Pay on relationships

Make relationship building a critical element of the sales performance and compensation plan.
Outline it as an expectation and include it in the sales bonus plan. That’s the only way sales people will pay attention to it.

Sales is the most compensation-driven function in any organization. Show a salesperson the compensation plan and watch them go. No question what their priorities and focus will be. Their actions will be directly aligned with what they are getting paid to do.

Introduce relationship building as the metric. Define no more than 6 that you feel are critical to your success. You could adopt proactive solution presentations, listening and engaging, follow-up, keeping promises and internal advocacy as behaviors you intend to hold sales accountable for. Don’t make it complicated, but implement it.

Year 1 make relationship building 20% of sales compensation and increase it every year thereafter at a pace and to a level you are comfortable with.

3. Engage customers in rating sales performance

How do you measure relationship building behavior? Introduce a customer report card and get the customer to rate how the person is doing on each behavior.
This approach will not only change sales behaviour, it will also bond you closer to your customer. Being open to customer input and actually caring about what they have to say will endear them more to you. Count on it.

Moving from a product flogging culture to a relationship building one is a major change.

Be patient. Don’t expect results overnight. But stick to your plan.

And get started.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 6.27.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 19, 2011

How the customer can still be loyal after you lose the sale

Source: Unsplash

How the customer can still be loyal after you lose the sale.

How many salespeople would consciously put their sale at risk in order to protect a long term customer relationship?

How many would continue to put time in with the customer even though they realize the probability of making the immediate sale is low?

How many would put their yearly quota in jeopardy in favour of securing an account for the benefits they will realize over the long term?

I suspect there would be an extremely small number of salespeople who would put up their hand and fess up to sacrificing the short term for the long term; and that is sad, unfortunate and just plain bad business.

The flogger is bad business

The fact is, an unrelenting focus on the immediate sale increases the chance that the salesperson will be a ‘one-sale wonder’, a ‘flogger extraordinaire’ who will be unable to offer any long term value to their organization.

Long term value creation in sales is all about building strong intimate customer relationships that will yield a relatively stable and healthy cash flow over future periods; it’s not about making the sale today.

The role of sales must change from the flogger of products and services to the ‘gatherer of friends’.

Relationships are all there are in sales and it is absolutely critical that they be protected, nurtured and strengthened in every moment a salesperson has with their customer.

The absolute worst thing that can be done is to erode the friendship by maintaining a short term product sale focus.

It’s all very well that sales leaders espouse the building relationships vision; it’s quite another when sales is confronted in the field with a situation where the organization’s products and services don’t meet the customer’s requirement.

Square peg in a round hole

This is the moment of truth. It’s that moment when the intent and action collide to discover if the organization is really serious about building long term relationships or whether it’s merely an aspiration with no substance.

Let’s face it, there are times when there isn’t the right fit between what the customer wants and what the organization supplies. It’s not a catastrophic situation; it’s impossible for an organization to expect to have a solution portfolio to match every problem their customers experience.

Your solution perhaps doesn’t have the right functionality to do what the customer specifically wants, or it might not be available when the customer wants it, or it might not meet their price expectations and there’s little to be done to satisfy them by adding value to the solution and selling at a premium price.

When this happens, the wrong thing to do is to try and force fit the organization’s solution into the customer’s problem in order to try and make a sale — again, it’s product flogging behaviour that will punish friendship building and long term performance.

Not only that, it’s more than likely to fail. Customers generally don’t like to get bullied into a sale and if a salesperson is into the force fitting mode, the customer will know it and will not buy. And two negative results occur. Not only is a sale not made, the friendship is diluted by the flogging behaviour.

The right thing to do is to walk away from trying to satisfy the customer with the organization’s solutions and refocus the energy on determining what can be done to ensure the relationship is deepened.

These principles should govern what a salesperson should do in this situation.

Sales Principle #1 — Own the customer forever

What does ‘owning the customer forever’ mean when the right solution for your client is not available from your company? If it’s not spelled out in detail, the salesperson won’t know what to do and how to behave and could risk the relationship ‘going south’.

Every action taken by the salesperson must be through a long term lens and leadership must draw a line of sight from this lofty goal down to the specific actions a salesperson must take when confronted with the challenge of a product or service misfit.

‘Owning the customer’ is a long term investment, not a quick buy-and-sell transaction.

You cannot leave it to the salesperson to decide how to respond; they will behave the way they traditionally have: bail on the friendship because there’s no quota payback from hanging around.

Sales Principle #2 — Do whatever it takes to protect Sales Principle #1

Every action sales takes must serve the purpose of solving the customer’s problem with whatever solution is available and from whatever organization supplies it.

Owning the relationship is a caveat-free goal without the constraint of solving the customer’s problem only with the organization’s solution set.
Rather, it’s an empowering notion that says to the salesperson “Go wherever you have to and do whatever is necessary to solve the customer’s problem. Period.”

It’s a narrative that needs to be an automatic response to a product or service deficiency — if this, then that.

It’s about you!

If you’re looking for a silver bullet to blow your customer away, this strategy is it. It basically subordinates the short term needs of the organization to the immediate needs of the customer; it says emphatically to them ’It’s all about you’.

As a loyalty building behaviour it’s probably the most powerful thing a salesperson could do.

Sales Principle #3 — Pay for the behaviour you want

If you want sales to behave a certain way, you must pay them for it. That’s the way salespeople are.

If it ain’t in the sales compensation plan it doesn’t get done.

Declaring the customer ownership goal and defining the specific behaviour sales must exhibit in order to achieve the goal is not sufficient; a measurement and reward system must be in place to ensure the right behaviour is constantly being practiced.

The measurement tool is simple: ask the customer if their salesperson offered other company’s solutions. If you don’t have a customer perception survey — the sales Report Card — in place, you should, because it’s the only way to get a handle on sales behaviour.

Owning the customer is more than sales revenue performance, it’s doing the right things today that will enhance the chances of maintaining a healthy revenue stream from the customer over the long term.

The rewards system is equally straightforward: include a compensation component in each salesperson’s annual performance plan for this practice. If 20% of their annual bonus is related to ‘selling someone else’s solution’, it will get done.

Building a long term friendship requires a great deal of emotional energy relentlessly applied day in and day out. And it involves sometimes taking a step back from our needs to put the other person first.

This is such a time in the world of sales, and those organizations who make the practice matter are the long term winners.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.19.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 9, 2011

Why customer intimacy is the best way to get repeat sales

Source: Unsplash

Why customer intimacy is the best way to get repeat sales.

Marketing and sales today are focused on pushing products and services.

The main problem with this approach is that no one appreciates getting something shoved down their throat.

So why do organizations continue to covet this flogging strategy?

It’s an easy route to follow. Focus on what you produce or supply. Be mesmerized with functionality.

Believe that if you advertise it far and wide people will come to their senses and buy.

Unfortunately the easy route is not very often the successful one that will make your organzation remarkable and indispensable because the herd is doing it in unison.

Let’s get back to Humanity 101.

People buy stuff because they feel they are getting value that somehow makes their life better.

Happier.

And the source of value delivery is an intimate relationship.

People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic —Seth Godin, marketing mastermind

Bonding with another human being takes time. Patience. Asking questions. Listening intently. It’s a tough job. But in the end it’s the ONLY process that will generate a long-term revenue stream.

If you really want to flog, flog intimacy.

Product pushing definitely has a limited existence.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 5.9.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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