Be Different or be dead

November 10, 2011

Why giving thoughtful gifts to your customers will make you rich

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Why giving thoughtful gifts to your customers will make you rich.

Give stuff away and get rich. Think it can be done?

You’ve heard of the lost leader product which is often sold at below cost to get the buyer’s attention and to convince them to buy another offering. A cut priced pair of shoes just might entice her to pay full pop for a matching purse.

The other approach used is bait and switch: lure someone in by a tempting offer on one product bit then get them to buy another priced more expensively.

FREE in the sense of business building refers to neither of the above marketing strategies; it refers to gift giving. giving something of value unconditionally, expecting nothing in return.

The shameless act, as Seth Godin says, of passing your art to someone else, hoping you make a difference in their life.

Effective gift giving is all about intent. If your intent is to fool the receiver into believing you are earnest when you’re not, you will be discovered for your dishonesty and lose business

You will be found out and punished for your lack of integrity.

Pure gift giving has an amazing upside. First of all, the recipient is surprised with your unselfish act.

They will most assuredly accept your gift with thanks and will spread the word of your gift giving to their friends and colleagues.

And, when faced with the opportunity to do so, will go out of their way to help you in any way they can. They will also continue to reward your selfishness with repeat buying; in fact they will feel obligated to do so.

So, give a gift. Give it unconditionally. Unselfishly. Openly. With no ulterior motive to sell something. With no eye on a commercial transaction.

When you do, watch the magic.

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

• Posted 11.10.11 at 09:35 am by Roy Osing
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November 3, 2011

Why being efficient by reducing cost results in worse service

Source: Unsplash

Why being efficient by reducing cost results in worse service.

Efficiency is the enemy of humanity

I can hear the efficiency experts and technology pundits screaming. The process re-engineering guru’s laughing at my outrageous declaration.

But here’s the thing. Any person charged with employing a new way of conducting business — a process, procedure or system — always looks for the cost savings involved.
Streamlining is measured by how much we reduce operating expenses; how the customer experience will be enhanced is never the starting point of a redesign project.

Technology adoption is rarely measured by how much it enhances the customer experience notwithstanding the application of AI in the customer engagement environment.

It is the norm that when we seek to apply new methods of doing business we extract a nano-gram of humanity from our organizations.

We reduce our ability to dazzle a customer to save a dollar in operating expenses by substituting humans with technology.

If you migrate a person-function to a machine, you reduce humanity in your organization. If you rush a person-function to make the process ‘more productive’ (save expenses), chances are that you are reducing the value of the customer engagement.

It’s virtually impossible in my view to mechanize a customer contact function and preserve the warmth of the human experience. The delight of a customer reaction to a caring act by an employee.

Some advocates say AI technology can replicate an amazing human- based experience, but I have yet to see it. Yes, Chatbot technology, for example, are improving because the controlling algorithms are getting more exhaustive and they are now able to deal with the most rudimentary and predictable customer transactions. But they quickly run into trouble when customer behaviour doesn’t fit the predictive algorithm.

And I also think in general that technology acceptance is governed by the fact that people are now resigned to receiving the lower grade of service they provide.

If you are doing something for the sake of efficiency and cost reduction, be honest enough to declare it.

Then tell everyone how your actions will preserve the humanity in your business — good luck with that.

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

• Posted 11.3.11 at 09:50 am by Roy Osing
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October 31, 2011

What is a customer ‘secret’ and why is it really important to business success?

Source: Unsplash

What is a customer ‘secret’ and why is it really important 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 10.31.11 at 10:41 am by Roy Osing
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October 10, 2011

Why best of breed should be ignored if you want to be unique

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Why best of breed should be ignored if you want to be unique.

Best of breed is still part of the herd.

World class. Best in class. Best of breed. All ways to describe where an organization sits within the herd.

The problem is that every way used to stratify the herd essentially describes how successful someone has been to rise in it’s hierarchy. And people use what you have achieved to conclude how brilliant and successful you are.

You can be the best of breed and it guarantees nothing except you have been able to copy and incrementally creep forward more than your herd cohorts.

You’ve an edge that’s all. And an edge is not good enough when competition is growing at a breathtaking rate and customers are hungry for personal treatment and engaging conversation.

The best cow is still a cow unless it’s purple.

Different from breed should be what drives us.

Distinctiveness should be our goal. Remarkability should possess us.

Look at the best cow and create something different that captures the hearts and souls of your customers in a way that only you can do.

Best of Breed is only important to the herd.

No one else will notice.

No one else will care.

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

• Posted 10.10.11 at 10:05 am by Roy Osing
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