Articles, Presentations, & Press Releases

The Launch Pad
November 2003

Customers ARE Your Business

Most companies have a pretty good understanding of their customers, or so they claim. However, customers change their attitudes, buying habits, mood, and perceptions, and OFTEN. After all, customers are (unfortunately) humans. Once you do an initial customer characterization, you think, “Well, that’s done. Now we can write out a couple of paragraphs describing the customer to put in the marketing plan and leave it at that.” Wrong. Your customers are sneaky little people. They change their attitudes, their buying habits, and (horrors) their opinion of your products. This happens without warning or provocation and for reasons only known to them. If you don’t pay attention to what your customers are doing, your whole business plan can unravel. It is crucial to constantly monitor and update your understanding of your target customer. Without customers, you don’t have a business. Do you?

It’s All About the Relationship
Customer relationship management is today’s buzzword for paying attention to your customers. Relationship is an appropriate word, because it takes effective communications between two humans to make it work. On the company’s end of things, there may be dozens of people interacting with just one person from the customer’s camp. That complicates things. From the company’s perspective, everyone has to be on their toes whenever they communicate with that customer in order to (in marketspeak): “deliver a consistent customer experience”. Wow, I bet most people in the company didn’t realize what was at stake every time they gave the customer a call to ask a simple question!

Sometimes there are changes on the customer end of things, such as turnover, which creates another issue. A person with whom you’ve spent years developing a customer relationship may leave the company or be terminated. You’ll have to start all over with another person and they may have totally different behaviors and characteristics. If you’re selling to consumers, personal situations can change, people move or move on to different tastes, habits and lifestyle. Customers in general are a constantly moving target.

Feedback, feedback and feedback
You may have just one market segment, but within that segment, the customers’ behavior may vary all over the map. Customers may have differing decision authority for purchases. Constant and ongoing feedback measurement is necessary to understand your customer’s behavior over a period of time. During an initial sale, customer behavior may be entirely different from that of a subsequent sale. It’s important to do a quick and informal survey after every sale. It can be done in the form of a few email questions or a phone call – the more personal the better. Respect your customer’s time. Give them an opportunity to make suggestions to improve their customer experience further. If there are long time gaps between sales or customer contacts, initiate a call or email to find out what’s new with your customer and how they are doing with your product or service.

Listening is Key
When you have the opportunity to gather information from your customers directly, focus on listening instead of doing all the talking. Humans communicate more than just words. You can gather information from the person’s tone, attitude, and willingness to talk. Sometimes there is information in what is NOT said.

Tap into the Pipeline
If you’re in the B2B marketplace, you should constantly be monitoring the business news and your customers’ websites to understanding what’s happening in their companies. If your customer had a bad quarter, what will that do to your plans to sell them the next version of your product? There may also be good news. Maybe you read that your customer contact person has just been promoted; that should give you a golden opportunity to send a congratulatory message and get an update on what the person’s new job will be. It could mean more opportunities to sell them products and services.

Engage your Customers
Get your customers involved in suggesting the next new product or service that your company develops. It will help strengthen the relationship, and give you more of an opportunity to understand your target customer. It also has the advantage of having some ready customers for your new product.

Be Ready (and Willing) to Change your Plan
Your marketing plan or business plan or some kind of plan probably has a section with a description of your target customer. Wherever it resides, that description needs to be updated as you gather more information. You also need to make sure that everyone in your company who interfaces with customers receives that updated information. You don’t want to put a salesperson in an embarrassing situation. Everyone needs this information to do his or her job.

Quick and Quirky Example
You have been hired by Ace Enterprise Systems, just in time to attend their annual users conference, where they fly in all their important customers to wine and dine them and give them a chance to try out your new products. Your last employer was actually one of Ace’s customers, so Ace decides to give you a Customer name badge at the user conference so that you can observe. (okay, spy.) Your assignment is to listen to what the attendees say about the products and company and report back.

The first day begins with a keynote speech by the CEO of Ace. He tries to be upbeat, but he is a talker, and drones on and on and goes 30 minutes beyond his allotted time on the agenda. You are yawning about halfway through. Later that day at the luncheon, you sit at a table with some of the “Platinum” customers, in other words, the big spenders. One of them leans over to you and says, “I sure hope I wasn’t snoring during that keynote this morning. What a windbag! Same speech as last year, too. If the food wasn’t so good and they didn’t pay for my trip, I’d stay home.” You smile and nod.

The afternoon is spent in the product expo room, where the customers are wandering around viewing demos and listening to sales pitches from Ace’s sales engineers. You listen to some of the questions the customers are asking. Most of the questions are about features they thought were being added this year, but won’t be added until next year. During cocktail hour that day, several of the customers are talking about the price hikes for some of the products that were shown. You inquire of one of them, “Did you ask them why the prices were going up if the functionality is still the same?” He replies, “Nah. You know these sales guys. They’re like robots. They give you the pitch, but they really don’t listen.”

So this was only the first day of the users conference, and already your ears are burning! In your report from day one, you make the following observations and recommendations:
1.Customers think the company is stuck in a rut, with the same messages and the same product functionality. Recommendations: Get an outside speaker (maybe even a customer) to give the keynote speech. Don’t hold a users conference unless and until you really have significant new products to offer.
2.Customers are balking at price increases without accompanying increases in functionality. Recommendation: Survey your customers about prices versus functionality before determining the pricing schedules.
3.Customers don’t believe the sales force is listening. Recommendation: Require sales force to undergo communications training or take a refresher course.

Okay, now you’re ready for day two. This job is going to be more fun than you thought.

May all of your customers be candid, content, and have buckets of money!

Catherine Kitcho
The Launch Doctor