Be Different or be dead

June 22, 2020

3 simple things I did as CMO to build a powerful marketing machine

Source: Unsplash

3 simple things I did as CMO to build a powerful marketing machine.

In my experience as a CMO for a number of years, a marketing organization that has a strategy with these three elements is miles ahead of other organizations, and becomes the best practice for the herd to follow.

The strategy they follow involves a unique approach to:
▪️ The process used to understand what people want and desire.
▪️ The information selected on people that makes a difference on whether or not someone chooses you as their provider.
▪️ How to transform the information into something that people will pay for over and over again.

The process to follow…

The old adage that knowledge is power has a specific application in an environment where competition is fierce, economic shifts are dramatic and unpredictable and where customer wants and desires are changing almost every hour on the hour.

Most organizations employ market research as the tool for discovering the mood and needs of customer groups; the studies are typically performed by an external firm and are done periodically.

Market research has limitations.

— First and foremost, as the name suggests, it deals with ‘markets’; aggregations of people who express similar needs. The problem is that no two people are identical in any way, so when you look at market data you are looking at a blend of individuals where no one specifically is like the data gathered.

— Second, the fact that it is done periodically means that the rapid pace of changing needs could put organizations out of touch with what the current priorities are for the customer.
What people desire in this moment are likely different from what they yearned for a moment ago.

— Third, being outsourced to 3rd party contractors puts the management of customer knowledge outside the organization, and the understanding and application of it in the hands of a few employees.
Marketing receives the customer data and decides what it means to their marketing programs.

A new research model is needed; one that leverages the gathering of customer insights on the run to be a core competency of an organization that is unmatched by others.

Source: Unsplash

A core competency that applies the continuous stream of changing customer needs discovered to create opportunities and solutions for the customer that others simply are unable to do.

Customer learning is the answer.

Customer learning is the continuous process of capturing customer needs, wants and desires real time in the moment they touch the organization.

The idea is that every time a customer ‘touches’ the organization, it represents an opportunity to learn something about them.
My approach was to define all touch points in the organization and focus on the ones that represented 80% of the action.

Any customer touch point can yield productive learning if you consider it as a strategic learning opportunity rather than just a customer contact.

The challenge is to engineer the contact to produce the maximum amount of learning. Structure the engagement to allow you to easily gather their information you seek; ask the right questions, be unobtrusive and let the magic begin.

Obviously one of the engineering issues organizations need to get over is the amount of time an employee is allowed to spend with a customer. If they are managed by how long the engagement takes, the amount of quality information on the customer will be reduced.

And, for online applications, the engagement process must be structured to encourage people to provide information on the website. This has limitations, of course, because it’s not a conversation where the dialogue opens up opportunities to obtain more information from a person.

Source: Unsplash

A touch point that paid off handsomely for me was the customer complaint; when a customer called in with a complaint about something.
Dealing with complaining customers may not rank #1 on the rewarding experience scale for employees, but the complaint can, if listened to closely, produce useful information on how you can better serve your customers.

As an aside, I’m not a fan of being pointed to a FAQ web page as the organization’s way of handling my complaint. The questions are rarely relevant — because they’ve been prepared by employees from encounters with other people — and the moment leaves me frustrated and annoyed. On the other hand, I’ve had some terrific experiences with the Chat function; more resources should be deployed here.

What to do with all the information gathered from customer moments? Store them in a repository that is used by marketers to develop meaningful solutions to the problems and opportunities buried in the data.

The scope of customer learning is to look at the customer holistically; what their needs and wants are at the highest and broadest level.
The idea is to look laterally across their persona to discover their integrated needs rather than to look vertically to define a narrow — slice — need.

A holistic need for a consumer could be to travel every 6 months with their family; a slice need could be to have faster internet speed.
For a business a holistic need could be to leverage technology into a competitive advantage; a slice need could be to increase inventory turns by twofold.

To be able to use your marketing machine to standout from your competitors, it starts with institutionalizing a process to continually learn about your customers.

The information to gather…

The challenge in a world where virtually everyone has their basic needs satisfied is determining how an organization can stand out and be noticed. How does it get tagged with being remarkable and indispensable by their customers?

Today people are looking beyond their basic needs to feed their cravings, wants and desires. They are driven to a higher level to seek happiness; basic needs satisfaction may give people a lift for a period of time but the lustre soon fades — a new SUV soon becomes a used car.

As marketers, if we continue to focus on what people need we will miss the opportunities that lead to market leadership and enhanced profitability. The source of this huge untapped potential are the untapped secrets hidden in the deepest nooks and crannies of every individual that define who they are and how they want to express themselves.

A customer secret is what someone craves, aches and hungers for.

A customer secret has little to do with what someone needs. They need food, shelter, water and dependable communications — they expect to get them and pay as little as possible when they do; they might crave to see a Liverpool game played at Anfield in England and are willing to pay more for the opportunity to have their dream come true.
In a business setting, they might need power to run their manufacturing facility, but would be delighted to have a consultant recommend how alternative technologies could be employed to drive costs down and efficiency up.

Source: Unsplash

Exactly how does one gather secrets? People divulge their secrets only to others they trust, have confidence in, and have a strong relationship with.
If you are an outsider, they won’t tell you anything (other than perhaps what they need) and you won’t discover the gold that will enable you to have a profitable long-term relationship with them.

So, focus on relationship building with people you choose to serve. And don’t expect results overnight. It’s a long term investment; you can’t earn someone’s trust in a 60-minute interaction with them.

Secret gathering is a personal affair. Commit to informally meeting face-to-face with customers every week as a personal priority; you can’t discover secrets from your office. And have a casual conversation with the person you’re meeting; it’s not a formal market research interview — and don’t try and sell them on anything.

Avoid prying into personal matters unless it is a natural lead-in based on the conversation you are having. After the ice-breaker question, be guided by what they say.
And take lots of notes if it’s ok with them. It shows you’re interested in what they have to say.

How to use the information you gather…

Marketing with the focus on products and services is the way most companies engage with the market and compete today.

Nothing wrong with this, but it’s hard to find a unique niche where your competitors won’t find you.
Product competition is always challenged with how to provide features others don’t.

Rather than the traditional product-centric approach, unforgettable marketing is moving to offering packages of value that reflect the broad holistic view of the target customer in terms of their needs, wants and desires.

The key question is, of course, how do you move to the package creation mode when you have been stuck in the product-only gear for so long?
Here are the 5 steps to follow to create packages around your products and services.

Define the core product — start with your core product. It will be the anchor for your package and generally represents the key product or service that you want to offer.

Add elements to your core product — Identify additional components that can be ‘wrapped around’, or added to, your core product.
The choice of what value to add is based on what you have learned — through the customer learning process — about your target customers. The more you know about the customer the easier it is to choose what added elements are appropriate.

Your end game is to create a package that addresses a relevant want or desire in the most compelling way possible.

Resist the temptation to add too many value elements; don’t complicate the package.
Try to add just three additional value components that present a consistent and seamless value proposition to the customer and a natural add-on to your core product.
You can always add more elements later if you discover there are unsatisfied wants evident or if your competition does something creative and you need to respond.

Source: Unsplash

Choose synergistic value components to create your package in order to present a cohesive theme to the customer.
If the value components don’t work well together, your target customer group won’t understand the overall benefits your package provides.

If you are in the financial business, for example, with an anchor product of financial advice, you might consider additional value elements such as on-line self management investment tracking tools and quarterly financial management seminars which all play well together.

Or you might consider wrapping these elements around a four seasons resort hotel room:
— spa services
— yoga classes
— resort activities such as zip lining and water rafting
— a bottle of the customer’s favourite wine with a meal
— day care services

Create the value proposition — Define the value proposition for your package — what is the collective benefit the package provides to the customer?
This is not a statement that simply adds together the benefits of each package component rather it’s a declaration of the overall benefits of all package elements working seamlessly together.

In my example above, how might you define the collective benefits of financial advice, on-line tracking tools and regular seminars? You need to express the theme they collectively express. How about something like “investment self-management”?

Brand the package — Brand your package reflecting the value proposition you’ve created.There is no sense creating something new and not taking credit for your innovation. Too many organizations are into the bundling where product elements are simply added together and a discounted price is applied.

That’s not what I advocate.
Packaging is all about creating something new; bundling is merely slapping currents products together with reduced prices being offered with the volume increase.

Your new brand should reflect the collection of benefits provided. In the example that we have been using how about branding the package ‘The self-management Investment Plan?

Price your package — Price your package in terms of the market value provided.

Think premium pricing. Avoid the bundling mentality — and commodity thinking — of discounting the package based on the number of components in it.

If you have hit the mark with relevant, compelling value you should be able to command a premium price and realize healthy margins.
If you learn that you can’t price your package at a premium level, you have not defined it well enough — your package doesn’t contain the right combination of elements that result in a value proposition people are willing to pay more for.

Go back to the drawing board. Start over.

If you love your marketing craft and want to excel in it, do it the right way. Do it in a way no one else does.

Practise the process I’ve given you here and I guarantee success will be waiting.

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

• Posted 6.22.20 at 03:41 am by Roy Osing
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June 15, 2020

How to make your business plan better with COVID-19

Source: Pexels

How to make your business plan better with COVID-19.

Take a look at your strategic planning documents. I will wager that the vast majority of them are based on a 5 year period — YIKES! I’ve even seen 10-year plans as well.

The 5-year plan pervades our planning paradigms and quite frankly it’s nonsense in today’s world of chaos, unpredictability and uncertainty.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the destruction it’s had on businesses and other organizations worldwide is the extreme example of the fact that a long planning horizon is a ridiculous notion.
I doubt that many businesses contemplated they would be struggling for survival in just 8 short weeks after the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic March 11, 2020.
So much for the value of having a 60-month view of your business.

I wonder how many 5-year plans are sitting on the shelf right now? How many are being consulted to help businesses through this difficult time?
I would say ZERO, which really declares the value they are to any organization being ravished by an unexpected event.

The investment made in having a planning view 3, 4, and 5 years out is delivering a negligible return on investment in the current environment.

The truth is, the fifth year of a 5-year plan never shows up so what is the purpose of planning for it?

Every year the plan is revised to reflect new information that changes the complexion of the plan and in particular the latter years which end up to be an extrapolation of current trends with absolutely no influence on the actions needed to be taken today to raise performance.

If we take this thinking to its logical conclusion, it suggests that the shorter the planning period, the more accurate it is in terms of expressing the real challenges an organization will likely face and the actions they will have to take to face them.

If you can’t survive the short term, the long term never shows up.

COVID-19 reality — perhaps the extreme way to think of it — would suggest a “planning period” of 24 hours because that’s how rapidly things are changing at the moment as I write this post.

I know (and hope) COVID won’t last forever but its short term survival imperative should guide our thinking about how to create a meaningful plan for our organizations.

My conclusion — and it’s a view I’ve had for many years, but certainly emphasized and reinforced by the current pandemic — is that strategic plans must have a short term executional focus if they are to be meaningful and useful at all.

I believe that to survive the forces of an ever changing environment, executional tactics within a notional context of your organization’s long term endgame should define your strategic plan.

The sum of pristinely executing every tactical element of the plan should define your strategy because it recognizes that chaotic change is the new normal that must be successfully met by the leadership team.

The execution plan should replace the strategic plan nomenclature to give us the clarity we need to determine the success every organization covets.

I’ve suggested that the execution planning time horizon should be 24 months, but that was before COVID. I think realistically we need to think about figuring out what we need to do over the next 12 months to try and improve our chances for survival.

The new execution plan process should look like this:
- Declare your 12-month goals
- EXECUTE
- Track the results
- Learn from what you’ve accomplished
- Adjust the plan
- Go back to EXECUTE

The result of this process is that your plan suddenly morphs to a living document rather than the inert 5-year view. It’s an organic action compilation and changes with the environment as one learns what works and what doesn’t through execution.

And the actual plan document — if it exists at all — takes on a dual role of being both a description of strategic intent and a repository of learning.

It’s a messy document. It’s written on. It has coffee stains on the pages of which many are earmarked for specific reference.
And, it may possess the odd blood stain from an unwanted paper cut!

It is used, unlike many planning documents that I have seen which look like their original pristine ironed form (perched ever so elegantly on a bookshelf where one can hand gesture its presence but never violate its binding).

The strategic planning community will take issue with my approach. After all I suppose it is somewhat gratifying to believe that pristine appearance and a long term perspective somehow defines its worth.

But it doesn’t.

At best this view gives the organization the perception that it has a plan that will be good 5 years out; at worst it prevents the organization from building short term defences to prepare for the unexpected forces that will threaten its survival.

COVID presents n opportunity to make your business plan better. Seize it…

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

• Posted 6.15.20 at 05:02 am by Roy Osing
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June 10, 2020

Why being sorry is the secret to great customer service

Source: Unsplash

It’s counterintuitive perhaps, but if ‘I’m sorry’ isn’t in your customer service playbook you’re missing the opportunity to create amazing experiences for your customers.

And be rewarded for it.

No apology = no service recovery = no customer

The service recovery chain goes like this:

— You screw-up;

— You acknowledge that you screwed up;

— You apologize;

— You atone for your sins;

— You fix the problem to the customer’s expectations;

— You blow the customer away by doing something they DON’T expect.

A failure to apologize breaks the chain and a de-dazzling event (with a loss of customer loyalty) ensues.

So, lose your ego.

Take responsibility for your actions.

Its not about culpability, its about empathizing with the customer and feeling bad that you screwed them around.

Being human, not an impersonal organization.

Some claim an apology will actually reduce settlement claims for major screw-ups.
That said, the short term economics of “I’m Sorry” are overshadowed by the long term loyalty you achieve by not breaking the chain and having a mind-blowing Service Recovery.

Be at ease with apologizing; it’s a strategic act.

Make no mistake about it.

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

• Posted 6.10.20 at 12:59 pm by Roy Osing
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June 1, 2020

Why the best teacher on how to beat the unexpected is COVID-19

Source: Pexels

Why the best teacher on how to beat the unexpected is COVID-19.

My reader will recall that I believe success comes from the ability to react to a body blow, an unexpected threat that rocks you to your very soul.
It’s easy to achieve your objectives when things are playing out the way you expected them to, but that rarely happens.

It’s not that you don’t have the intellect to put together a good plan, it’s about the fact that the universe intercedes with random unexpected forces rendering your original plan irrelevant.

Recovery is the ability to not only respond to a body blow, but also to absorb its energy to do something remarkable in its face.
Making use of the energy of a random chaotic event to reach even greater heights is a bizarre notion, but a truism for those who understand it and who know how to use the force.

COVID is an unexpected event and it’s chaotic to say the least. It kills if it isn’t responded to in the right way. But on the other side of the coin, because of its extreme outcomes, it’s an incredible teacher for those who want to survive in the face of such pressure.

For organizations and individuals alike, here are 5 recovery tactics to be learned from this pandemic.

#1. Deal with the next 30 days

When a crisis hits, trying to develop a long term strategy to deal with it is a futile exercise. You have immediate things to do, and if you don’t, the longer term never shows up.
Survival tactics require that you do what is necessary NOW to get you through today, then repeat for tomorrow, then again for the next day…

Priority setting is important for your 30-day calendar, but I wouldn’t go overboard on it. Let your feelings, emotions and your gut lead you in terms of what’s really important to get on with in the moment.

And keep a journal of what you’ve done and the results you’ve achieved so you can learn from this recovery event the next time you have to do it again. And you will be in the recovery mode at some point in the future. Perhaps (hopefully) not a coronavirus response but something else unexpected will rock you eventually.

#2. Speed is the essence

Effective recovery needs speed not perfection. First of all, perfection doesn’t exist anyways, and even if it did, you don’t have the time to seek it. The clock is ticking when you’re in recovery mode, and every second you spend trying to discover the perfect response you’re survival is in jeopardy — btw, something is characterized as “perfect” only in retrospect when you look back on what you did and results. In the moment action is what it is, and can have no attribute characterization.

Pondering and tinkering are not your friends when you’re trying to stay alive, so forget about the grand plan intellectualizing that we’ve been taught in school.
Act NOW and learn as you go.

#3. Focus on the frontline

Survival demands that you figure out a way to keep delivering your products or services to people. Whether you’re in health provision, telecommunications, retail or food services it’s life-saving for you that customers continue to be served in one way or another. If you can’t figure out how to continue in a different way, government support will eventually run out and your business will die.

Your frontline people are the key to your survival. THEY are the connection between what you aspire to do and whether or not you’re able to do it. Frontline healthcare workers have proven the point in the most extreme sense, but the same principle is at play in every other type of organization.

When the body blow strikes, you don’t need employees with an impressive set of academic credentials, you need people who are able to effectively engage with others to carry your business forward.
The ONLY employees who carry survival on their shoulders are the frontline, so keep them safe and double their pay.

#4. Listen and learn

Surviving on the run requires a healthy dose of learning along the way. Spontaneity will result in mistakes or suboptimal results, that’s just the way it is when you’re focussed on speed and driven by what “feels” like the right thing to do.

So make sure your spider senses are fully activated to see the results of every action you take. And, as I mentioned earlier, record in a journal what’s working and what’s not with a view to making real time adjustments to what your doing.
Use the frontline as the primary source of learning and use THEM to decide on what needs to be changed.

#5. Communicate. Communicate. Communicate

When smitten by a pandemic-type event, it’s extremely important to communicate — no, over communicate — with everyone affected by what’s being done and the results achieved.

Reaction tactics need continuous feedback on actions taken TODAY in order to make the best decisions on the adjustments and tweaks that will be required TOMORROW.

On-the-run planning can only work if performance in the moment is clearly understood. And it can’t be a vague “things are going well but there are a few things we need to do differently”. It needs to be as specific as possible, pointing to the precise mechanisms that are working and those that are not.

This is a leadership issue. Leaders must hyper-communicate with employees on actions being taken and must be open and welcoming to honest opinions on whether they’re on the right track.

The COVID journey is an amazing teacher. Quite apart from the sad outcomes for many of our family and friends, COVID is instructive in painting a picture of what responding to an unanticipated event should look like.

We should take notice of how the pandemic emphasizes the criticality of communications, caring for the frontline, listening and learning, speed and a 30-day tactical plan.

Take all the good you can from the unfortunate set of circumstances we find ourselves in because we don’t have to look very far for the downside.

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

• Posted 6.1.20 at 05:39 am by Roy Osing
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