Is your business in trouble? Do things seem desperate? Or are you simply in a stagnant funk?

What are you doing about it? Are you paralyzed in fear and/or analysis?

Here are a few things to think about that might help give your mindset, energy level, staff and business a jolt:

• Of the people currently on your staff, who would you rehire in an instant? Are any of them taking on new, more important responsibilities – even if not asked to? If not, why aren’t you helping them grow and become more valuable to your business?
• Of the people currently on your staff, who would you hesitate to rehire? Have you bothered to extend the courtesy of counseling them? Asked them about whatever it is that bothers you about their work? Warned them that they aren’t fulfilling your hopes for them? Training them to do better? If not, why aren’t you helping them grow and become valuable to you?
• If you bought the business today, what would you change immediately, or have the seller change before closing? Why aren’t you doing those things? It’s *after closing*. You already own it.
• If you listed the business for sale, what would you change (that you can change) before letting an agent or prospect review your business, processes and financials? Why aren’t you already doing that? You’re the person who buys that business every day.
• What kind of attitude are you broadcasting to your customers and your staff? This is not the time for Debbie Downer. If you have a confidence problem, there’s little doubt your staff has detected it, if not begun mirroring it. Is that what you want your staff’s co-workers to see? Is that what you want your customers to see?
• Have you picked up the phone lately? How do your customers feel about your products, services, company, staff? Ask them what you can improve then take steps to deal with those things and provide feedback to your customers. What one will share with you is likely what 10 or 100 others are thinking but won’t share. Yes, common sense, but when did you last see an overabundance of it?
• Where possible, have a conversation face to face or on the phone with your customer. What can you do to improve right away? What ticks them off? What opportunities do they think you aren’t addressing? What causes them to lose sleep?
• Talk to your people. Ask them what they’d do if they were you. Doesn’t mean you have to obey to the letter, but you’ll learn the issues they see and hear.
• When you lose a sale, do you blame the customer or the competitor? What’s the real reason you lose sales to a competitor? Are you doing anything at all about those problems? If so, are you communicating the changes you’re making?

Basic common sense stuff…that gets ignored/forgotten every single day.

photo credit: seyed mostafa zamani

One of the more common things you’ll see from a business that’s differentiating themselves using things other than price is their use of a unique selling proposition (USP) and in the strongest cases, a “core story” that backs it up.

You’ve probably heard USP described before. Domino’s Pizza’s USP is a well-known example: “Fresh, Hot Pizza in 30 minutes or it’s Free.” Given that, there’s no doubt what Domino’s focus is.

A Core Story takes a good USP to the next level.

Evaporating Assumptions

Do people understand the value and uniqueness you deliver? Or what drives your desire to do exactly what you do and for whom?

The essence of this can be communicated using a “Core Story”. Simon Sinek might call it your “Why”.

While attracting the “most inclined”, you might be thinking that you don’t want to exclude anyone from doing business with you, particularly these days. While a good Core Story might do just that, but in a good way. Your core story will speak specifically to the people who see your business as the porridge that’s just right.

It helps them understand who you think your customers are and what they care about, as well as why and how you serve them. You might be thinking that this will weaken your business by limiting the scope of who you serve, but the reality is that it usually strengthens it by firming up the things you have in common with the just-the-right customers.

I don’t use the B-word (branding) much because too many confuse branding with logos and such. Even so, your branding is at the root of your core story because it’s a symbolic, often emotional statement communicating your business’ values, concerns and aspirations.

Boy, that was all fluffy clouds and blue sky, wasn’t it?

Let’s come at it from a different place. Branding, as it relates to core story, is more about setting the context for what you do and who you do it for. It offers (at least) one really important thing to a prospective customer and to the business who figures it out: Clarity.

Clarity

A core story gives your customers (and your staff, much less yourself) the clarity needed to know that they’re in the right place, will find exactly what they’re looking for, sold by someone who feels about it like they do.

BMW offers a strong example: Their core story is built around “The Ultimate Driving Machine”. It’s about engineering and refinement, not about safety, comfort and luxurious surroundings – even though their cars offer those things. They identify with the drivers out there. Rather than identifying “people who drive” (most anyone), they identify with people who choose their car – and even the roads they drive –  because of the joy they get from the physics of driving and the feedback / control offered by a precision driving instrument.

BMW is well aware that their customers take back roads because they like the curves.

By now you have a pretty good idea who the ideal BMW customer is and why someone would identify with them. Likewise, those who aren’t part of that group might be repelled by it or simply not get why those things matter to others. That’s ok, because someone else has what attracts those drivers.

A Common Language

Notice that BMW’s branding doesn’t get into the terminology of the German engineering or the forces that keep their cars on the road – instead it simplifies that down to the “ultimate driving machine” – bringing a common language to their customers and redefining a car as a driving machine, raising it above others.

A great Core Story resonates with the deepest desires and frustrations of your ideal customers.

Rather than simply identifying the core of your target audience, it does more to help them identify themselves as someone who should be doing business with you. Establishing a common language lets them quickly and easily understand your business and see themselves as part of the experience you described.

Now the easy part: What are the elements of your core story?

Pull them into your world with an authentic core story about your business that resonates with the things that motivate and excite them.

Speaks volumes about the mindset at Apple.

What mindset do you instill on their first day? What mindset do you hire for?

photo credit: laverrue

Are you wasting those carefully planned advertising investments?

The most expensive investment we can make is one that’s wasted.

You’ve studied, sifted and listened intently to figure out the perfect message for a certain group of people interested in what you make or do.

As you hoped, it resonates with just the right people at just the right time. Lots of folks are calling, stopping by your store, and visiting your website.

Minutes later, all the positive you’ve created can be gone… POOF!

At speaking engagements, I’ll often mention the importance of following up with the people you meet at a trade show (you *do* follow up, right?) and recall a trade show story about a major personal electronics manufacturer. During the show, they collected contact information from almost 30,000 people who said “Hey, I am interested in this new product”. Numbers like that are a big win, even for a global electronics company. Yet they wasted it by not following up with those people.

We’ve said enough of the right things to gain someone’s interest and then….what?

Saying the right things to the right people isn’t enough

We spend a lot of time tracking our marketing investments so we know what works and what doesn’t. We spend time making sure we’re delivering just the right message to just the right people by studying their demographics (facts/figures like gender and age) and psychographics (what they do, read, etc) and fitting our message to the reader.

But that isn’t the entire equation.

When we say the right things to the right people at about the right time, it usually results in “high-quality leads”. What exactly does that marketing-ese mean? To me, it means “people who have raised their hand to say they’re interested in what you have to offer – and are ready to buy now or soon if it’s the right fit”.

So then we turn our sales staff loose on them.

What makes this advertising so expensive?

Whether we’re a big company or a mom-and-pop, we have to sell. Ideally, we sell by helping them arrive at “Yep, this is what I need” or “You’re right, I really need something else”. Whether they buy or not, you’re creating trust for the next time they need what you sell…creating a customer, becoming an informed advocate for them, not just chasing a sale.

What sometimes gets lost in the sales process is congruency between the marketing message and what sales says and does. If sales’ behavior and words are disconnected from our marketing, we have a problem. If the sales team that prospects talk to in our business are “those kinds of salespeople”, all the trust we earned can be lost with a single sentence, like “Honey, we’ll talk price when you bring your husband to the dealership.”

When things like that happen, the expensive, finely-tuned message that we spent good money on is damaged, possibly for good. You might lose the sale now and the customer for life.

If the marketing-to-sales transition is where you most often lose them, there’s good and bad news:

• The bad news: All the advertising investment that attracted those folks was wasted. That’s the most expensive marketing ever.
• The good news: That’s a reasonably easy thing to fix in most cases.

Trust, The Final Frontier

We ask ourselves “How much do I like the salesperson?”, “Do I believe them? and/or “How much do I trust this product/brand/manufacturer?” before we finally buy. All of this comes down to “Do I trust this business?”

“We don’t like to be sold but we love to buy.” says Jeffrey Gitomer. We buy from people we like and trust.

Because the trust earned over time by some “institutions” is crumbling, that lack of confidence can seep into people’s ability to trust your business, something that’s already at risk in most sales situations. It’s no less damaging in a sales situation than the differences between a candidate’s promises and what they later do as an elected official.

Your entire staff must be aware (and regularly reminded) that reputations are built (or damaged) and trust is earned (or lost) with every single transaction and every single interaction. Keeping your reputation’s momentum headed in the right direction is everyone’s job.

The point is not to blame your sales staff as the source of your company’s ills. It’s to remind you that grooming, training and supporting them is critical to your success. The best marketing in the world isn’t enough if you aren’t supporting the sales team properly.

While I suspect that this change is about ratings and ad sales, it’s still an example of what kills businesses all the time…

Forgetting who the core customer is and what they want.

PS: Seems the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

photo credit: Alyssa L. Miller

Do you know what’s going on in the minds of your customers?

We’ve been talking about invisible signals a lot lately, but sometimes the signals are far from invisible.

Back in the day, my software company called every customer once a month. We didn’t do it because it was fun. We did it because we felt it was critical that we knew what was on their mind and what their concerns were that month. A tiny side benefit of this frequent contact was that they didn’t expect every contact from us to be a sales call.

During these brief calls, we engaged in meaningful conversation to find out how things were going. Any concerns? Suggestions? Any upcoming issues that we need to be aware of? How’s business? Is your wedding season booking going well? (or whatever)

If you don’t know what’s on your customers’ minds, you’d better find out.

PS: Paying an ESL speaker to call them is the wrong solution, by the way. Whoever calls the client needs to be a native speaker in the client’s language – no matter what it is. This is not the place to save a buck.

photo credit: WorldIslandInfo.com

In part two of the growth series, we arrived a place where we figured out that the buying signals customers (and prospects) send us are sometimes subtle, if not almost invisible.

One good example is the sometimes joyous, sometimes annoying as all get out process of buying a car.

Q: How does the salesperson know when their prospect has gotten past the point of no return when buying a car?
A: They take a test drive.

Every car salesperson knows this. They even have a litany of little sayings to remind themselves of it, like “The feel of the wheel seals the deal.” And that’s Ok, because that is one of the indicators they have to pay close attention to if they want to help their customer.

Remember, we don’t (mostly) visit car dealerships for our entertainment. We’re there to buy a car or at least, decide which one to buy. Their job is to make that process as frictionless as possible. In order to do that, they have to know customer behaviors.

The test drive is a great behavioral signal that you’ve moved beyond the financial questions and which model to get and so on. It isn’t some sales trick to “close more deals”, though I’m sure it has been used that way. It’s about knowing what your customers want and helping them get it.

Do you offer a test drive?

While a test drive’s value might be lower for other purchases (software, books, videos), it still might be worthwhile indicator. Do you offer your prospects and customers the ability to test drive what you sell? Even Amazon does this with their “Look Inside” feature. Software businesses have done this for decades.

Remember, the point isn’t the test drive itself, it’s the behavior that tells you “I’m ready!” In clinical terms, you might say “Behavior A is strongly indicative of a desired customer action”, but please don’t talk or write like that.

Depending on the behavior, “I’m ready” might say “I will be one of your best customers” or “I’m ready to move up to the next tier.”

That’s why you might look at purchase intervals in your sales data, at what your best customers buy that few others buy, and so on. A pattern of behavior will show itself eventually.

For example, if you look at your QuickBooks sales records and see that your best customers all bought within 30 days of being added to QB (what triggers them being added to QB for you?) and all your “worst” customers (bought the least amount, least often, whatever it is for you) average 90 days between whatever made you add them the QB and their first purchase….then the next person who buys within 30 days is…giving you (based on performance of everyone) an indicator that they might be one of those good customers.

As such, you might add them to a different email list. Maybe it’s the one that emails them weekly instead of monthly, talking about more sophisticated topics than your monthly emails.

In some ways, it’s not any different than looking for patterns in behavior in Olympic swimming, NASCAR or fantasy football. If you’re into those things, you know what winning behaviors are.

Why wouldn’t you also know what behaviors your best customers have? Not only does it help you figure out who the next one might be (sometimes long before they become one), in certain markets, it might also let you help others improve what they do.

Where the wild things are

Sometimes behavior is about location. Do you know where do your best customers come from?

Do they live in zip 59912? Do they call from area code 312? Do they find you because of an ad in a certain newspaper or magazine? Do they come to you from Facebook? Ever made a sale to someone who liked your business page on Facebook?

An ideal answer might be “We have 114 customers who live/work in 59912. Overall, 20% of our customers come to us ads in the NY Times Sunday Edition and 80% initially come to us from Facebook”.

Invest some time to find out where your customers come from and what behavior your best customers exhibit. Both are keys to growth if you take action on what you learn.

photo credit: c_ambler

Last time we started a conversation about growth and left it off with a brief discussion about digging deeper into customer behaviors.

In particular, we were starting to look at the behavioral signals that indicate your best clients or simply the signals that show they’re about to become a customer. Either way, it’s valuable information to have.

To continue from where we finished last time, let’s turn one of my final comments from the last piece into a question: “What behaviors identify a person about to buy?” and “What behaviors identify potential ‘ideal’ clients who are already a customer – but haven’t transformed into that ideal customer quite yet?”

Order history helps

When we’re looking for behaviors that indicate what a great (“fanatical”, to use Rackspace’s lingo) customer is, one place to look is order history.

Your order history is rich in information that can help your detective work on buying signals and customer behavior.

I know, you want some examples of what you might look at. From gut feel, identify your five best customers, using whatever means you use to determine “best”.

Your business may not fit all of these questions I’m about to ask, so look at them in a way understand that they might require a slight adjustment. It’ll depend on what you sell, how you sell it and how rich your product line is.

The questions:

• How often do they buy from you? In other words: What’s the average number of days between purchases?
• Does transaction size increase over time or does it shrink over time?
• Of the customers who buy everything you offer, do their purchase intervals or transaction sizes “look different” than everyone else’s (on average)?
• If your best customers don’t buy everything, what do they buy that no one else buys? Of those people, study the behavior prior to that particular purchase. What did they ask? What did they buy just before that?

Now…looking at the patterns that these “best” customers have established, what *existing* customers fit the early part of those patterns? These are the customers who are likely to join the “best customer group”. The difference is that you know the candidates in advance.

Not all of them will move into your best customer group, but in watching this process/movement, you’ll eventually learn what behaviors indicate that move.

Interaction clues

Look at your interaction data for each class of customer. When I say “class”, I mean your best customers, your newest customers and so on. You need to look at each because you’ll need to be able to detect a behavior that occurs when a customer moves from one to another.

When they do that, they’re sending a signal. Your responsibility is to act on it.

Interactions include sales and support inquiries, price list requests, orders, email (including subscribes) and the like. Remember “guinea pigs” vs. “guinea pig” from last time? Your most important indicator of “I’m going to be a great customer” could be that subtle.

Interactions and order history indicate future behavior. Your best customers’ behavior is there and shows patterns along the road to “BestCustomerVille”.

Misunderstanding metrics

By now you’re probably wondering about the not-too-standard things that I’m suggesting you observe. What about standard metrics? Where do they fit in?

Standard metrics, like the number of customers you have, the number of leads you have, the number you add each day/week/month, sales this month vs. last month and so on are certainly worth looking at, but remember that they primarily indicate *where you are*, not what you need to do to (re)produce those gains.

What do you learn from knowing that you have 1344 customers today and that you had 912 customers this time last year? Unless you look in the context of what resulted in the net gain of 432 customers, you learn little that allows you to reproduce that gain.

That’s what you want to know and repeat.

A “You are here” marker doesn’t help much if you don’t have a map. The behaviors we discussed are part of the map that shows you the path from new customer to great customer.

THAT is why we’re talking about behaviors. They are the invisible signals you have to detect.

photo credit: Vincent van der Pas

Recently I was involved in a conversation on producing business growth.

The discussion revolved around what to measure about the business in order to keep track of the growth.

A few things to start:

Don’t make things complicated. Be sure that you’re measuring the right things. Historical data has some value but the good stuff – the transformative stuff – tends to revolve around things that indicate future behaviors (or not) of your customers.

When the conversation started, I referred to a few blog posts to help the conversation move into the right frame of mind about how to be thinking about growth, including:

http://www.rescuemarketing.com/blog/2011/02/01/business-model/
http://www.rescuemarketing.com/blog/2011/11/15/the-basics-of-business-arent-basic/
http://www.rescuemarketing.com/blog/2010/10/07/just-one-thing/

In these conversations, there’s often a struggle with *where to start*. Ask yourself what’s important.

The answer in this case? Getting more customers.

Getting customers

Working on the assumption that “customers” meant getting new ones, I asked what clues prospects give that they are going to become a customer. Remember last week’s discussion about “invisible” signals? Customers/prospects give signals as well.

I didn’t really get what I was looking for regarding buying clues, so I started thinking about a way to reword the question. Why? Because lack of good answers tends to indicate that I’m not asking my question with the right words (think about that positioning vs. the more common “my customer is an idiot” framing that some default to).

Before I could reword the question, I was asked how one finds out what a person does before they become a customer.

A few answers might be: They become a lead. They join your email list. They ask you to send your newsletter. They call and ask for a brochure or prices. They stop in and kick the tires. Each of these sometimes subtle behaviors will signal where they are in the buying process.

Speaking of subtle, there’s a notable case where incoming Google searches in plural (ie: “guinea pigs”) were almost always new leads just starting to investigate the topic and singular searches (ie: “guinea pig”) were almost always searches done by people who were ready to buy.

You can’t get much more subtle than that. Paying attention to what your leads and customers are doing at that level was enough to substantially transform a website user’s experience and vastly improve sales. That’s the kind of signal that can transform everything.

If you think about these behaviors, you can come up with the things people say to you when they contact you or visit your business. They might say “Yeah, we just had a new baby so we’re looking for a new car / looking for a new house / buying carpet / selling our motorcycle or however they do business with you.

You know the clues, but you might not be thinking of them in that way.

Getting a plan

It’d be great if there was a single “golden spreadsheet” that every business could use to figure out these things. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work that way.

While numbers like cost per lead (CPL), cost per customer (CPC) and lifetime customer value (LCV) are absolutely critical for every business because they tell you which lead sources send you the highest quality customers, how much you can afford to pay for advertising and much more – they don’t tell the whole story.

Many businesses ignore LCV and try to pay as little as possible for advertising. Trouble is, LCV is a very important number in the big picture of your marketing and metrics because it reflects buying behavior.

That behavior is what you have to decipher. Like the analysis of lead sources, such as which leads give you customers with the highest LCV, which leads give you the customers who have the most returns; behavior of your existing leads and customers helps you find more of the “right kind” of customers.

Customers and prospect behavior frequently falls into patterns. While there are always exceptions, it’s wise to identify a sequence of behavior – particularly for the folks you most want to have as customers.

Digging deeper

Getting more customers is sometimes (not always) the easiest way to raise more revenue. The other two most common ways to increase sales are sell more to your existing customers and sell in bigger transaction sizes. To do that, you have to know more.

Study what your most profitable customers buy, how often they buy and how long they wait to buy after you introduce a new product (or make an offer) to them.

Sometimes these folks simply buy everything you make, it’ll depend on your business. Sometimes they buy the best products you make. Your order data will reveal much more than the Magic 8-Ball.

These steps will often help you understand who is, but hasn’t yet transformed into, that ideal high-profit customer.

We’ll hit this topic more next time.

I recently noticed that Dr. Scholls has made a transformation with their digital custom orthotics machines.

Just a few short months ago, they had their stand-on digital fitting gear in metro areas but not many other places.

Either the plan changed or we’re seeing phase 2…. the Walmart rollout. They now have these machines in many Walmart stores.

So I use their search to see if my local Walmart has a machine and I notice a little detail on the map results: “17 miles or approximately 32342 steps“.

A natural, in-context thing to include on a map from a place that sells foot products.

A little thing, but a sign that they’re paying attention to the little stuff too. Are you?

Sometimes a business does things that just don’t make sense, particularly when you consider the business they’re in.

Consider every hospital foundation director’s worst nightmare: Sending a donation request addressed to someone who recently died. What could be worse? Sending a donation request addressed to someone who died…. in their hospital. I haven’t personally seen this, but I had a conversation today with a hospital foundation director who knew of such things.

Paying attention

After my dad passed, I setup his email account to echo to mine just in case some last-minute personal business needed to be dealt with or a long-lost friend emailed him. Most of the email I get requires no action and off it goes into the circular file.

And then, there’s Ancestry.com.

I received this email on my parents’ wedding anniversary. Their first anniversary since my dad’s death.

Ordinarily, I would spend several paragraphs on the email itself.

I might mention things like the lack of the name of a real person as the sender. Or why they didn’t include a “PS: Happy Anniversary” (remember, they have data on marriages and divorces). Or the lack of questions why the renewal never happened after contacting me “several times”, much less the lack of a follow-up offer that repositions the pricing somehow. Or how calling me a “member” in a relatively impersonal email doesn’t make the email more personal. Or how the email is all about the payment and ultimately, all about THEM. Or by not knowing that the addressee has passed that anyone reading this might be considering whether or not to take over management of their genealogy data.

But that isn’t why I’m bothered by this email. It isn’t even about Dad.

It’s about demonstrating competence.

Competence

Ancestry.com sells data. Data about births, marriages and deaths.

Birth, marriage and death records are public information…and in Ancestry’s case, the delivery and organization of that data is their business.

Yet somehow, they don’t make the effort to figure out that their own customers are no longer alive. Receiving an email like this almost makes you wonder how close they pay attention to the quality of the data they sell.

When you aren’t paying enough attention to the invisible signals your business sends, you risk it all. In Ancestry’s case, they risk giving the impression that they aren’t paying attention to the quality of the product they’re trying to get me to renew.

Now turn this to your own business. Are you sending invisible signals about the quality of what you do?

photo credit: schani

In a recent Harvard Business Review, Tony Schwartz once again admonishes us about multitasking and offers some tips offering multitasking relief in the context of meetings, response expectations and taking breaks.

Why is multitasking “suddenly” the hip thing to rail against?

I suspect it’s a reflection of a number of things – including the economy, the need to get more dont to survive (much less to thrive) and most of all, because the bully pulpit is a reflection of the most valuable (and often most costly) lessons we’ve learned.

The obvious negatives to juggling are still there: Quality, exhaustion (ask any new mom) and stress, for example.

Show me

The major pain point isn’t what you might think: Everything takes longer.

It should seem obvious, but it might not hit home until you see this illustration.

Imagine you have 3 tasks (A, B and C) that each take 8 hours to complete.

• If you multi-task each one for an hour at a time, it looks like this: ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABC
• If you juggle each task for two hours at a time, it looks like this: AABBCCAABBCCAABBCCAABBCC
• If you focus on each task for four hours at a time, it looks like this: AAAABBBBCCCCAAAABBBBCCCC
• If you focus on each task until completed, it looks like this: AAAAAAAABBBBBBBBCCCCCCCC

Using the first method, task A is done after twenty-two hours of work.

Using the second method, task A is done after twenty hours of work.

Using the third method, task A is done after sixteen hours of work.

Using the fourth method, task A is done after eight hours of work.

Eight vs twenty-two.

The real problem

What’s most disturbing about this is that we ENCOURAGE multi-tasking as employers and co-workers.

We step into someone’s office with “Got a minute?” question when that question could be resolved with 5 minutes searching Google or just looking around the office a little. Even if we get the answer in 30 seconds from that person, we’ve interrupted their work and their focus. In some cases, it might have taken them as long as 20 minutes to get as deep as necessary into their work (common for highly technical work).

We let email, phones (of any kind), instant messenger and text messages divert our attention with zero notice. Got an email? The lizard brain that Seth Godin refers to is at the base of your skull screaming “STOP EVERYTHING, I MUST ANSWER IT NOW!”

The unresponsive one?

I was called to task for this not all that long ago under the guise that I was being “unresponsive”. My take on it was that I was not being unresponsive, I was simply focusing on work scheduled months earlier by a paying customer who likely wouldn’t have been excited to find me being pulled away from focusing on their work every few minutes by a phone call or email, much less a tweet.

It’s not unlike when you’re reading the paper and a four year old is asking you 20 questions. Your reading and your attention to the four year old will not only suffer, but you will probably resent the interruptions and feel bad about it later.

Is that the mindset you want to have with the four year old? Probably not. Keeping that in mind – it’s also not the state of mind you want to be in (“Darn that phone….CAN I HELP YOU????”) when answering the phone or an email from an inquiring customer or prospect.

The unresponsive (or just slow, you make the call) one is really the one who is a slave to their email, phone, chat, text messages and so on and can’t stay focused for more than a few minutes.

The Naysayers

At this point, the eternally busy doing little of substance and those who work on big projects are rolling their eyes and pondering whether they should change the channel.

The truly productive ones already know what I’m about to say. This isn’t about seeing how many things you can shuffle between at once. It’s ultimately about breaking things down into reasonable-sized piles of work and focusing on the pieces rather than the entire project.

It’s OK when entertainer Penn Jillette juggles, but it’s not something to do with your work.

Finally.

A mainstream, old school consumer product company figured out how to make it easy for customers to use their product at the recommended interval and do so with as little labor/friction as possible.

Rather than rolling their own, they used Amazon’s infrastructure to deal with payments, shipping and subscription management.

From Amazon.com:

“Amazon Subscribe & Save allows you to subscribe for RID-X to be delivered straight to your door every month. When you sign up for RID-X through the Amazon Subscribe & Save service, you receive 15 percent off and free shipping every month. While you can subscribe to any RID-X product, it is recommended you choose either RID-X 1-Dose Powder or RID-X 1-Dose Liquid so you stay on top of your septic system maintenance. You can cancel your subscription through Amazon.com at any time.”

RID-X has *television ads* that send people to that Amazon page. Serious money is being spent, this isn’t just a whim.

I’ve ridden you hard about this sort of thing in the past. If a septic tank additive manufacturer can do it, surely you can too.

Of course, you can buy other items of this nature at Amazon.com, Wal-Mart.com etc. Even toothpaste can be purchased by subscription.

What it isn’t and what it is

This isn’t about selling people stuff they don’t need or more than they need.

It’s about making it as easy as possible for the customer (with a by-product of making it easy for you) while putting a fence around your customers.

If your RID-X or your Crest 3D automatically shows up at home at just the right interval and ships free, why would you spend time and fuel making a special trip to pick up those things?

Yes, I realize you might pick them up when you’re already at the store for other things, but that isn’t the point.

When you force your customer to buy the old-fashioned way, you take the chance *every single time* that they will be lured by a coupon or some other bright shiny object (BSO). They might be disappointed in the product or service that coupon or BSO delivers. It might even hurt that consumer or business – something you could have prevented.

I don’t have enough time

Think about the complaint that so many people have these days. “I don’t have enough time .”

Yes, it’s often an excuse. Yes, they need to prioritize what’s important. Are you helping them do that?

Part of that prioritization is doing the important things rather than going to Wally World. When someone can deliver the product you need for the same or lower price than you’d pay by getting in the car, driving there, using fuel (more money), picking up another $57 worth of Richard Simmons videos that you won’t use and so on, why go there at all?

Would your customers rather have your product magically appear at their door? Or would they prefer to drive to your store? Some portion of them would rather take their kid to the park instead of sitting in traffic.

B2B

Even if you don’t sell consumer-class goods to businesses, there are services or products they need all the time. They are as time-pressured as consumers. They’d rather be on the phone with customers, working ON their business rather than running errands, or creating their next big thing. But instead, you’re making them drive across town. Or you’re making them remember to initiate those services.

This isn’t just about commodities like RID-X, toothpaste and softener salt. Customers of CPAs, attorneys and other professionals have *predictable* recurring needs that can be sold on a subscription basis.

Yes, I realize no one else in your market sells professional services that way. So?

That infrastructure thing

If you make things that have to be shipped, it might not be workable for you (for whatever reason) to ship pallets of your stuff to Amazon’s warehouses. Maybe you don’t meet their minimums. Or maybe you make things that aren’t shipped at all.

Even so, you might have a subscription-capable thing to sell. If you do, there are automated subscription-driven solutions out there that don’t require you to build it yourself. The right one will allow you to serve those customers in a way that fits you both.

photo credit: KayOne73

While the questions are different for the bakery, appliance store, law firm and butcher shop – much less a software company or SEO firm, the need is the same.

These 5 questions can make your business different in the eyes of your customers – and they’re what you’d call attention to if you could do so without seeming so self-promotional.

Why questions? Because it feels out of context with the conversation you’re having with a customer if you blurt out “Our on-time deliveries are at 99.3% no matter what the weather throws at us”…unless they ask.

So how do you get prospects and existing customers to ask these things?

Maybe before we figure that out, we should make sure you have the right questions.

Triggers

If you’re listening to your customers and observing your customers, you might already know what the questions should be. Joe Sugarman wrote about some of them in “Triggers“ (a book whose subtitle I don’t care for, but whose content is pure gold).

Listening for and measuring what triggers customer decisions helps you not only know what customers should be asking, but when they should be asked and why the answer is so valuable to the purchaser.

It’s important to encourage your customers and prospects to ask these questions, not just because you want another customer (or another sale), but because these are the questions that help them make the best purchase – even if it’s made somewhere else.

So how do you figure out what questions your clientele should be asking?

Finding your 5 questions

Let’s start with some comments that you would make about your business, your products and services, your staff and your clientele:

• People would buy my product instead of someone else’s if they knew this one secret: _________.
• Our most loyal, repeat customers use our product/service despite the higher price because ________.
• When shopping by price alone, people looking for these items need to be aware of _____________.
• People who don’t do business with us don’t realize that we _______.
• People who don’t do business with us are surprised about _____________ when they switch to us.
• The thing people most appreciate about our product/service is _______.
• Service/maintenance on our product is needed less frequently / unnecessary / less expensive because ________.
• Customers find it easy to use our product / service because _________.
• The biggest fear our customers have prior to making this purchase is ____________.
• Our on-time delivery percentage is higher than anyone in our market.
• We’ve never gone over budget on a project.
• Of 417 projects, we went over budget 3 times – but only with the approval of our client.
• Our warranty / money-back guarantee is four times longer than anyone else’s.
• We’re faster than our competition, but don’t sacrifice quality.
• Our ingredients are all made / grown right here in Montana.
• Our staff is certified / highly-trained and renews their training annually to keep it up to date.
• We automate the mundane work so our people can focus on the things that make our stuff so special.
• Everyone else uses white pine internal framing because it’s cheaper and no one sees it. We use oak / walnut / larch / etc because _______.
• We offer gluten-free / nut-free / allergic-reaction-causing-food-free dishes because we have customers who are allergic to those items. We aren’t willing to give up those customers just because there’s a bit more work involved in serving them.
• Our clients are highly-selective and do not have time to waste. Wowing them is what no one else is willing to do.
• We include 36 short how-to videos on our website that help our do-it-yourself customers do normal maintenance at home.

Now what?

Now turn the ones that fit your business into questions. Pick the most important ones and put them to use right away.

• Use them to set the “rules of engagement”.
• Put the 5 most important ones on the back of your business card.
• Blog about them.
• Include them in the monthly newsletter.
• Include them in your email sequence.
• Give your customer a checklist of things to consider when buying whatever it is you sell.

Use them to tell your story…and they’ll introduce your business to others in the best possible way – by suggesting that no matter what your prospect buys, you’re providing the tools to help them make the best choice for their situation.

This video is a stunning demonstration of creativity with the iPad, but also a strong testimonial for the city of Stockholm’s business environment.

The business environment where you live might be like potting soil. Or not. Regardless, it’s your garden. You decide what to plant and where.

If the local business environment isn’t as enriching as Miracle-Gro, what can you do to improve it? Your business community needs leadership as much as your business does.

If making that sort of change isn’t your thing, supporting the folks in those roles and encouraging the right people to step up, invest and lead might be your focus.

If all else fails, there are these things called “roads” in your town. You decide how to use them, as a foundation for your business or as a route to a better place. No regrets regardless of your choice.

In the TED talk “The danger of a single story“, Chimamanda Adichie shares some powerful lessons about stories, their environments and how they form our assumptions. It’s notable that she sees this from two sides: both, assumptions she and her family made and those made about her and her country/continent.

Once you’ve watched this, and yes, I realize you’re investing 18 minutes+ into this post, you’ll be much better prepared to consider the point of this post – that your business’ story is multi-faceted and the risk of telling just one story is shortchanging your business.

To put it in terms that fit the election season’s political rhetoric: If you are a fervent member of the blue party, when someone from the red party talks – I suspect you probably dont accept that the point that they’re making is worth listening to. Likewise, if you are a fervent member of the red party, when someone from the blue party tries to make a point, the situation is likely the same.

Are you “Talking to the hand”?

The stories your customers listen to might not be quite as highly charged as political conversation, but they still might be ineffective because your customer might feel you aren’t speaking to the problems/concerns they have.

The moment they think you aren’t talking about their problem, you may as well not be talking to them. It doesn’t matter if they are wrong / misguided / misinterpreting your story. It’s over as far as that conversation is concerned.

This is what makes it critical to know your ideal customers inside and out. Their needs, wants, fears and more. Every one of those requires you to tell a different story.

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

What do you focus on when it’s time to improve profitability?

Sometimes barely twisting a knob can make all the difference.

This 8 minute and 30 second running stride analysis video might be a little dry if you’re not a runner, but the focus on small improvements and 300FPS video to break down opportunities to improve performance inspired me not only to re-examine my stride but to consider it in the context of your business.

Even if you don’t run, the method used to break down the runner’s performance and focus on what would make a radical improvement in his running is worth the viewing time.

You might consider the same type of approach with your pricing, particularly before you offer a discount, BOGO or raise a price.

Small price increase, big impact

Let’s say that you charge $8.99 for a meal at your restaurant. Out of that $8.99, you have to pay our food costs (33%, or $2.97) and your overhead (33%, another $2.97). That leaves a gross profit of 33.92%, or $3.05.

What happens if you raise the price by a dollar?

Your food cost and overhead don’t change. They’re still $2.97 + $2.97 = $5.94. Your gross profit obviously increases by only a dollar, to $4.05. The gross profit percentage increases to 40.5%

Not bad.

Coupon coup…for who?

Now let’s look at what happens if you discount that meal by a dollar like you might do with a coupon.

That cuts the meal price to $7.99. Your food and overhead costs are still the same, $5.94. That dollar discount comes right off the top, reducing your profit to $2.05, or 25.6%

Now what happens if instead of a coupon, you offer a “buy-one, get one” (BOGO) free deal? People love those, right?

Your food cost and overhead double to $11.88, since two meals are involved. Thanks to your buy one get one free deal, your revenue is still $8.99. Profit has gone from $3.05 (33.92%) to a loss of $2.89 (32.1%).

If we change that to “buy one, get one at half price”, your food cost and overhead are still $11.88, but your revenue rises to $13.49. In this case, gross profit is $1.61, or 17.9%. Not a lot, but better than a 32% loss.

Is a one-time drop in profit from $3.05 to $1.61 worth getting those two people in the door? You’d better know based on what these customers will do (as a group) over time.

A plan, not a guess

As we talked about last time, coupons/discounts have to be used strategically. Fail to run the numbers and they can sink you.

Losing money on a BOGO isn’t ideal unless you know your numbers very well and know that over time, that offer will bring you a new, loyal customer who has a lifetime customer value that fits your business model.

photo credit: fusion-of-horizons

Pleased to see a short piece on Seth Godin’s blog this morning noting that business should be done with those who take it personally.

Your customers certainly view it that way.

The “it’s just business” thing is a Trump-ism that I don’t even believe The Donald truly stands behind, based on his behavior and that of his company.

Question is, do you? And how exactly does your business exhibit this personal touch?

photo credit: theilr

When something is viewed as an expense, your instinct is to reduce it to the smallest possible amount.

Doing this to your marketing is not unlike choking yourself.

Marketing as an expense

The most obvious clue that a business treats marketing as an expense is that they cut back on it when things get tight.

It makes sense on the surface, but it’s a clue that the business doesn’t know what works and what doesn’t.

For these businesses, the marketing goal is typically to get the next sale. Focused there, little effort is invested in the “care and feeding” of existing customers.

Without that care and feeding, you’re focused on people who woke up this morning, decided to buy an item and looked (for example) in the paper for a coupon. This buyer often has little or no preconceived notion where they will buy that item. Even if they planned the purchase, the where is still up in the air. Not what you want.

All such businesses compete for the low hanging fruit, the “uncommitted to any particular vendor”, the random, the price-at-all-costs shopper. Any buyer can fall into those categories if the vendors in that market do nothing to change it.

When you do this, you’re depending on buyers to randomly cross paths with you at just the right time. It encourages customers to shop solely based on price and/or what side of town they’re on and where their errands take them that day. On top of that, these businesses reward that buying behavior with a coupon discount for “just passing by”.

The way these businesses spend marketing dollars, it *is* a cost.

Marketing as an investment

To fix this problem and transform your marketing into an investment, you have to know what works.

When you know what works, you know the typical return on investment. That helps you avoid pulling back on marketing to cut expenses because you know better. If you put a dollar into something and get two dollars back plus a new customer, it doesn’t usually make sense to back off (capacity issues would be a valid reason).

In a time of uncertainty, many businesses pull back by instinct. On the surface, austerity of this nature makes sense. These cuts a business usually shrinks. You can see this going on now – leaving an opportunity for the business that’s paying attention.

Meanwhile, the business who knows the return on investment for their efforts can increase their marketing to increase their revenue (or maintain it in a slow economy) whenever they’re ready.

When marketing is viewed as an investment, a sale is made to get a customer. Each customer is viewed as an asset to be treasured and well-cared for. The relationship between the business and the customer is maintained (at the least)

Learning what works isn’t about changing what you do. Just start measuring results *then* adjust based on what you learn. No matter what media you use for your advertising – the results can be measured without expensive tools or technology – often using none at all.

What it’s really about

Because your goal is to get (and keep) another customer, you have to understand that the business you’re really in – finding and attracting the perfect/ideal customer for what you do – and then retaining as many as possible.

So many are waiting for the customer to decide, to step up, to figure it out. Do you have time for that? Even when a customer checks a reference service like Angie’s List, that’s still a customer whose “where to go” decision is uncertain.

Few business expend the effort to guide the customer, to establish in their minds who the no-questions-asked best vendor is so that when a purchase is imminent, there’s already a preferred vendor in the customer’s mind. When you do the necessary work to identify the perfect customer and do exactly what it takes to attract those customers – market share doesn’t matter. You can go get more customers based on your numbers because you know what works.

You can probably name a vendor that you would do business without considering any others. Your job: Be that vendor in your market.

Released the final draft of “The Best Code Wins – What’s wrong with your software business and how to fix it” to a short list of reviewers tonight.

Finally. It’s been a long effort. Giving birth probably isn’t the same, but this took longer.