Be Careful With Your Sales Approach

I recently vacationed in Hawaii, and was at the Thrifty rental counter finalizing our car for the next 10 days. As I began walking out the door, I passed by a kiosk with a lady, who I thought was a Thrifty employee, so I made no effort to make eye contact. However, she was able to get my attention by asking me if the group of five (four children and wife) outside was my family--hooked. As I answered yes, she followed it up by asking if I would be interested in treating the whole family to a nice FREE lunch, receive $100 discount on our rental--and wait there is more...a coffee table book on Hawaii worth $75. Well, of course, I said yes--not without a deep suspicion, however, that this was going to come at a price. Much to my surprise, she replied that since they are trying to showcase a new hotel in Waikiki, all I had to do was take a tour of the hotel and I would be entitled to all of the above benefits. Sign me up!

As I completed the paperwork, it became evident that this was not simply a tour of the hotel, it was much more involved. Once I signed the document to receive the benefits, my suspicions were confirmed, she subtly questioned me if I was familiar with timeshare--strike one. Unknowingly, I had signed myself, my wife and four kids in Hawaii up for a two-hour presentation regarding timeshare ownership of this supposed new "hotel".

Reluctantly, my wife and I, along with the four kiddos attended the presentation. Initially we were directed to the free lunch. Much to our chagrin, once we presented our tickets for the complimentary lunch, our server immediately lost interest in providing any type of service close to deserving a tip. Strike two!

We finally met our sales presenter for our two-hour presentation. She began the presentation with the disclosure that if we were uncomfortable with the proposal, we can say no, and she will respect that and end the presentation. Well, that was not the case. Repeatedly I tried to convey that this was not something for our family, but unfortunately she continued ignoring her promise at the beginning of her diatribe. At one point, she even involved her "finance" manager in the discussion to somehow strike interest. We were now 2.5 hours into our meeting and the children were beginning to grow restless. Strike three!!!!

A few lessons here that we need to tease out. First, be sure that you are not making any false or outrageous claims in your marketing. Ensure that your marketing communication is not hyper-inflated. Chances are that you will not be able to meet the expectations of your prospect or customer if your message is not reflective of your capabilities. In the end, this would mean that your customers will never come back.

Second, if you are going to offer any benefits like a free lunch, be aware that simply giving it away at no cost is not always perceived as a benefit, especially when it is mediocre at best. Select your add-ons carefully.

Lastly, stick to your word. If you make promises to your prospect or customer, it is essential that you respect and honor that promise. If not, the likelihood is that they will not return or refer you to a friend or colleague. Remember Net Promoter Score?

Expected vs. Amazing

Recently, I have been visiting a local coffee shop, BackPorch Coffee Roasters, in Bend, Or. After my second visit to BackPorch, the barista behind the counter immediately recognized me and engaged me in a discussion. "Cappuccino? On the wet side, right?", she asked. Now, I can only imagine how many coffee lovers she serves in a day, and for her to remember me after two weeks since my first visit, I was amazed! I was expecting the service to be, well, somewhat the same as any coffee outfit. "Hi, what can I get this early morning?" Not bad, but not particularly amazing. Starbucks, who is presumably selling experience over the coffee they serve, certainly has never remembered me, even after many visits.

So can your business do this? Yes, absolutely. Instill in your customers that they are the most important thing in the world when it comes to serving them. I was recently on the phone with customer service from an aviation insurance company. My last name is not the easiest thing to pronounce, but the customer service representative asked me how to pronounce my last name to prevent future representatives from pronouncing it incorrectly. For some, this may not be a big deal, but after hearing my surname butchered over and over again numerous times, I was relieved to think that on my next call they will not pause after saying my first name and guess which version of my name they were going to painfully speak.

Here are two crucial things to remember about your customers:
• Name (if possible)
• Reason for their first visit (probably more important that the name)

Keep in mind that there are endless varieties of technological applications out there that companies integrate within their system to remember you. Consider the airline reservation interface. Once you create an account, you can return without doing much work as the system has remembered your preferences from your last visit. Although this is very effective, it is somewhat regarded as "automated" and certainly does not have the impact of a personal experience.

Keep your customers amazed and keep 'em coming back.

Want to Conduct Surveys?

Organizations today rely on survey research to learn much-needed business intelligence. Surveys can help you understand customer preferences about a particular product, gauge employee satisfaction, identify market opportunities and much more.

Survey research is much more than simply asking someone a few questions. It’s a multiple-step process with a clearly defined protocol at each step. In order to get reliable results from your survey research, you must be able to plan the survey research project, collect data, access and manage the data easily, as well as report relevant results. And for your survey research project to be a success, you need to share your results with the decision-makers who can act upon them.

Areas that benefit from survey research
• Satisfaction measurements
• Customer/employee profile census
• Customer retention
• Complaint tracking
• Product features desired
• Medical errors
• Patient outcomes
• Viewer/readership interests
• Assess program effectiveness
• Customer acquisition

Popular questions that survey research attempts to answer
• What is most important to customers, employees or patients?
• What do people want or need in terms of programs, products or services?
• Who is our customer?
• Do consumers cluster into groups?
• How can we compete in the market most effectively?
• Are we providing value to our members or customers?
• What areas need improvement?
• What drives satisfaction or sales for customers
• How can we improve our programs, materials, products or services?
• What are the brand’s perceived strengths or weaknesses?
• Where should resources be directed?

The seven stages of survey research
Survey research can be divided into seven steps. In order to be successful, survey research needs to be implemented well at every step. Problems at any step can lead to incorrect results.
• Step 1: Planning and survey design
• Step 2: Data collection
• Step 3: Data access
• Step 4: Data preparation and management
• Step 5: Data analysis
• Step 6: Reporting
• Step 7: Deployment

Market Share vs. Market Growth

The economic downturn has changed the way business owners as well as consumers behave, so as a matter of course, companies will need to develop a plan that accommodates these challenges.

There are many speculations on what is going to happen economically in 2010. Most are very optimistic in their outlook, while others are still somewhat very conservative when predicting on how 2010 will unravel. Regardless of the economic prophecies, however, a majority of businesses will logically be planning for growth. The details of that growth can be planned effectively if you focus on the immediate opportunity of growing market share versus relying on market growth.

While your planning should integrate both, an approach that increases market share can facilitate expansion that is more tangible than market growth. Developing a plan that addresses market share permits you to evaluate the existing market and concretely implement plans that challenge the competition. When developing strategies to increase market share, you must have a good analysis of your competition. Outline their strengths and weaknesses in relation to their strategy but as well as in relation to their product or services. This analysis will provide you a landscape on how to construct a more effective approach on how you can compare your business or product to the competition.

Lastly, to optimize your activities in increasing market share, you can utilize a tool that evaluates your value chain. The value chain for your market is the series of people that actually experience your product from your company to the ultimate customer. For example, if you are a wholesaler, you may be selling to a buyer, retailer, and then the end-user. Once you establish your value chain, determine where in the chain your business is currently focusing on, and evaluate if this can be optimized or if a new marketing campaign that focuses on a different section of the chain. This exercise will help you to maximize your marketing efforts by targeting a specific segment within your market.

Why Should You Be Interested In Social Networks?

Social networking...still the talk of many businesses today. Larger corporations are now beginning to allocate large sums of their coveted budget into this phenomenon. However, there are still those millions of small to medium-sized businesses that are in the dark as to what social media can do for them. The fact is that social networking can be a crucial resource for growing your business, if utilized effectively.

Apogee Marketing Featured on Cascade Business News

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Do you have Promoters?

Take your existing and prospective customers and ask them if they are willing to recommend your products or services to a friend or colleague. This one question will allow you to calculate your Net Promoter Score (NPS).

The NPS is a customer loyalty metric developed in 2003 by Fred Reichheld. Today, NPS is utilized by numerous large corporations to gauge the success of their customer-centric initiatives that contribute growth to their business. The basic concept is to create more “Promoters” and fewer “Detractors” of your business. The NPS is simple and straight forward, thus making it far easier for a business to understand and implement changes than any of the other business metrics that are being utilized today.

The question, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” is answered by the customer on a 0-10 rating scale. And based on their responses, the customers are then categorized into three groups: Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8), and Detractors (0-6). The final step is to subtract the percentage of Detractors from the Promoters, which yields your NPS. When conducting the survey, the customers are encouraged to provide an explanation for their rating. These can then be utilized by your business to develop a plan to improve any existing weaknesses.

An NPS of 75% is quite high, most businesses will be in the region of 20-40%. If you want to improve your NPS, evaluate the Detractor’s reasons for their rating and categorize those into projects that you can address. Chances are that the reasons can be grouped into themes, making it easier for you to develop and implement improvements.

Business Recovery: Are You Planning for it in 2010?

For most businesses, 2009 was a disaster. Question is, where do we go from here?! Sitting back and waiting for the other shoe to drop is not an option. It is likely that you have evaluated your business and have implemented some cost cutting measures. But now it is time to develop growth plans and boost your performance in 2010.

Growth
I have repeatedly said in my previous newsletters that focus is crucial. And here it is no different, focus on some key growth activities. Here are some initiatives that companies are employing for growth:

• Develop/launch new products
• Strengthen brands
• Develop new markets
• Improve market share

Opportunities
Revisit opportunities you have outlined in the past as contributing to your business. Likelihood is that you never finished it. Evaluate the opportunity and determine if it is something that you should contribute to any of the above objectives. According to a research study, only 4% of companies address or follow through with any strategic planning.

Upturn in the Market
The above objectives will help you through the upturn. By that I mean, when the economy recovers and we produce more jobs. The reality is that consumers will behave very differently when it gets better. Consumers will be more price sensitive and reluctant to purchase. So competition will be fierce.

Act Now
There’s a time to plan, and there is a time for execution. Without the latter, planning is nothing. Look at all your options to improve your services to your customers and your employees today!

So ensure as you plan that your initiatives are actionable and measurable. Make them simple.

Easy Wins

After you read this make sure that you are on your computer and implementing some of the suggestions below. There are many free and affordable options on the world-wide-web today to get your business listed and be seen by web surfers. These easy wins will help you to get going for 2010.

LinkedIn If not already, go ahead and register yourself for a LinkedIn account. After establishing an account, you can now start a LinkedIn company profile. You can select MORE on the header to add a company.

Facebook Like LinkedIn, if don’t already have a Facebook account, establish one now. A Fan page for your business must be linked to a personal page, so without a personal account, you will not be able to initiate a Fan page.

Google Business You can register your business on Google and be listed with a location and map. You have probably seen it, sometimes when you search for a business, Google also provides you the physical location of the business, along with a phone number and website. Follow this link to get started on listing your business.

Yelp Yelp probably one of the more popular listing sites on the internet. Along with being able to list your business, Yelp also has the capability of providing its visitors a means to leave feedback or reviews. Akin to Yellowpages, Yelp is very powerful and helps your business to get that added visibility.

Cost to Acquire Customer

There are many things that one must consider when setting up their planning for 2010; business objectives/goals, marketing, sales goals, etc. And if you are an existing business with a good documented financial history, chances are you can perform a customer acquisition analysis. This simple, yet insightful analysis provides you with a means to gauge the success of each marketing and sales activities in relation the number of acquired customers. For those businesses that have never measured their marketing activities this is a simple one to implement and utilize.

Since we are in the age of electronic marketing, let’s take a look at an example that involves a website initiative.

Monthly visitors to website: 2000

Monthly promotion costs: $2000

Monthly maintenance costs: $250

Let’s assume that this business has a 20% net profit margin, and that the services or products cost $10, so that is a $2 profit to the business. With the above monthly costs of $2250, the business will have to convert 1125 of the visitors to the website to break even (cost/margin). And if the business wanted to look at the cost to lead the 2000 visitors to their website (acquisition cost), they can take the total monthly costs, $2000 + $250, and divide by the number of visitors to the site, the customer acquisition cost (CAC) is $1.12 per customer.

As you can see, this approach allows you to determine how you can evaluate your next marketing initiatives and help you to make smarter decisions.

Trader Joe’s Favorite-ism

As consumers, we all have our “favorites”. For us favorite-ing something is a fairly easy process. Often we choose something as our favorite because it is a trustworthy and a consistent source for an indulgence within our interest. Our complex behavior of selecting a favorite is a concept that many marketer’s are trying to sufficiently understand and leverage.

Trader Joe’s certainly has made an effort in trying to be favorite-d by their shoppers. There are marks of marketing wisdom throughout their store that perhaps may have been a stroke of marketing genius or simply an idea concocted by an employee. Regardless, Trader Joe’s has developed a killer experience for their shoppers, that it makes it hard not to favorite them.

Price
One of Trader Joe’s strengths is its key supplier partnerships. Their careful selection of suppliers has provided them not only the ability to establish crucial price points in a commoditized market segment, but as well offer its customers a comparable to superior product against the competition.

Unique
Another, but somewhat subtle strength of Trader Joe’s is its product offering. Yeah, they don’t carry the traditional brand names, but let me tell you that within a small facility, you can eat your way around the world. There are delicacies that are geared for the adventurous but also a complete selection of foods that can satisfy the timid eater. And while the perception of unique foods require additional preparation time, Trader Joe’s filled this gap with easy to prepare options for those who are on the go (and who isn’t on the go anymore).

Kid Friendly
We all know that shopping with children is at times somewhat difficult. Trader Joe’s has made an effort to alleviate some of the stress from the parents by giving them something simple to do while in the store. In each Trader Joe’s branch, a couple of items will be placed somewhere in the store for kids to find--I have seen stuffed toy lobsters, chickens, and polar bears. Once they locate the hidden characters, they can claim a prize at checkout.

Art
There are many hand-written signs in Trader Joe’s, and you can tell that they have taken the time to give it character. From caricatures to stylish alpha-numeric art, Trader Joe’s has identified that an appealing presentation of their products is crucial to inviting the return of new and existing customers.

With your business, try to think of ways that you can differentiate or improve your services to them so that they appreciate and eventually "favorite" the experience when dealing with your company.

Overview: Marketing Activities Tool

As small-business owners, you have limited time and budget, so that means your marketing activities must be filtered for its level of impact and ease-of-implementation to ensure optimal effectiveness.

The Marketing Activities tool from Apogee Marketing Partners is an easy way to evaluate and prioritize your marketing activities. With marketing activities, I like to advise my clients to conduct a brainstorming session for possible activities. Don’t be too concerned about costs at this point, just begin listing items that are in alignment with your overall business objectives and goals. Once you complete the list, now you can use the tool.

In the Marketing Activities tool, enter all of the relevant ideas that you generated during the brainstorming session. Order of listing does not matter. And for each entry, indicate whether this is a NEW, CONTINUE, or DROPPED activity under Status. The reason for including DROPPED is the next time you utilize this tool, you will have a historical account of what you have done in the past. Next enter, the primary Metric that you will utilize to measure progress or success. As you can see, the metric is not always dollars or sales. In this case, you need to be more specific, as it is difficult, in some cases, to determine the true impact of one activity to overall sales.

If this is a CONTINUE marketing activity, an estimated Current Impact should be entered. Keep in mind that your impact will be based on the primary metric you specified in the Metric cell, meaning if the metric is LEADS, you can then estimate the % impact of this activity on lead generation. The same concept applies with Target Impact. Under the Impact column, select from the drop down menu Very High, High, Medium, or Low. Note that this is subjective and in some cases you may feel that the impact of one activity may not be shared by another marketer, so try to be objective in how you rank your impact. Next, select the level of difficulty in implementing the activity under Implementation. When selecting, think of things like duration of implementation, resources required other than you, contracts, etc. How difficult or how easy will it be to get this activity launched?

When you complete these sections, the Category column will indicate one of four of the following: Easy Wins, Focus, Long Term, or Evaluate. These will coincide with the chart provided below the table.

Easy Wins If any of your activities fall under this category, it is then considered a low impact and easy to implement activity. In some cases, you may want to employ these Easy Wins for your marketing as they will in most cases have low cost and will not require a whole team of marketers to implement. Choose wisely, however, to ensure that you are initiating marketing activities that are aligned with your business objectives and goals. These activities will reside on the lower-right quadrant of the chart.

Focus These are activities that have been identified to provide the highest impact along with an easier implementation process. Focusing on these activities will help you to optimize the highest return to your business. These are your marketing prizefighters. Focus activities will reside on the upper-right quadrant of the chart.

Long-Term In the upper-left quadrant, the Long-Term category simply implies that these activities are not going to have immediate impact on your business. Rather, they are activities that will the platform for growth in the future. These range from public relations initiatives, surveys, white papers, case-studies, etc.

Evaluate Everywhere on the chart that is not occupied by the above. When an activity is categorized as Evaluate, it is considered to be an initiative that does not return to the business sufficiently to support and invest its development and implementation. The key objective when an item is considered Evaluate is to ensure that it is re-examined for its role within the overall business objectives. Don’t discard Evaluates, rather put them on the backburner for future consideration as your ability to develop and implement may change, both from a technology and resource standpoint.

Download Marketing Activities Tool