Customer Experience

Every organization can improve the performance of its marketing operations – perfection is what we all aspire to but will never achieve.

You can use existing resources to identify opportunities for new products and services, or new markets to enter or new audiences to target -so before someone in your organization makes the fatal assumption that improvement requires additional resources, read on because what I offer below are 7 proven steps to improving marketing performance with your current resources!

As you read this post, it is important to keep in mind that I am defining ‘marketing’ as more than promotion.  In this post, marketing includes product, price, promotion, distribution, and customer experience so you will see examples that impact how your organization works together in order to consistently deliver unique value to the customer.

By the way, I have included a quote from Yogi Berra with each step because I have been a Yankee fan since birth and I happen to believe Mr. Berra’s words of wisdom support the points raised in this post.  Let me know what you think!  (And for those of you too young to recognize the name, feel free to visit this site.)

Step 1: Clearly articulate the vision

If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.

Whenever I start working with an organization, I like to meet with the key leaders and pick their brains – especially about the vision of the organization.  Unfortunately, when I ask about the vision of the organization, I typically get as many different answers as I have meetings.

How does this help your current resources improve your marketing performance?  The clarity helps your staff focus on what’s really important – and stop using precious resources on what isn’t important so your organization saves human, financial and technological resources.

Best of all, beyond the immediate benefits your organization will enjoy, this clarity also changes everyone’s thinking about the future and that typically brings new ideas to the table that are more focused on the vision.  Suddenly the discussion becomes “We should do this because it supports our vision…” rather than “Maybe this will help…”

Step 2: Clearly state key objectives that are necessary to bring the vision to life

Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.

This one is a 2-parter.  First, like the vision for your organization, everyone within the organization must know and understand the key objectives that need to be achieved in order to bring the vision to life.  Make sure that everyone has a specific personal answer when asked “What must you achieve today in order for the organization to succeed?”

Second, you have to be certain that those objectives REALLY ARE KEY OBJECTIVES because when you focus on producing the wrong outcomes, you increase your chance for waste.

For example, if your organization’s key objective is to generate 1,000 new first time buyers in Q2, don’t let your focus be LEAD GENERATION.  The reason is that when most organizations focus on generating 10,000 leads instead of 1,000 first time buyers, your organization begins to invest resources for the 9,000 non-buyers.

You will see the conversations focus on “How do we drive down the cost per lead…” rather than “How do we improve the quality of our leads so we can sell our products?”

In other words, your organization spends human, financial and technological resources on a large number of people that will never buy what you are selling – and that is a tremendous opportunity for your organization to improve performance.

Step 3: Clearly state your action plan for achieving those objectives

How can you think and hit at the same time?

How many #1 priorities does your organization have?  (Hint: If your answer was anything other than “One!”, you need to rethink things.)

Now, imagine the opportunity to improve performance by providing everyone within your organization as well as key suppliers and partners, with a clear overview of who needs to do what, by when, in order to achieve the organization’s objectives.

For example, when marketing and sales have a different definition of a ‘qualified lead’, you have waste.  When sales and finance have a different definition of what it takes for a customer to qualify for terms, you have waste.  Or when product development has a doesn’t clearly understand what the target audience needs, you have waste.

You can improve performance by ensuring that everyone understands how their work impacts those around them, and how the organization can only succeed if everyone works together.

Step 4: Constantly question everything you know and do today

I never blame myself when I’m not hitting. I just blame the bat and if it keeps up, I change bats. After all, if I know it isn’t my fault that I’m not hitting, how can I get mad at myself?

Sometimes what we have been doing no longer makes sense – yet many organizations don’t have a process in place for constantly evaluating in order to improve so the activity continues to occur and use your limited resources less efficiently.

For example, while working with one organization, I noticed that they had created a multitude of one-off communications for unique situations and audiences.  These required a significant amount of financial, human and technological resources to create, manufacture and distribute – so we sat down and cleaned up the process.

The result was more than $300,000 in financial savings as well as countless hours for creating and distributing the communications.  Oh, and the prospective and current customers bought more too – because the communications were clearer with more focused and motivating offers.

Step 5: Have a well thought-out data collection and analysis process that produces practical recommendations that support the vision

I wish I had an answer to that because I’m tired of answering that question.

How many times have your sat in a meeting and been presented with page after page of reports only to find yourself with more questions than answers?  That’s because most organizations focus on collecting data rather than answering questions.

By starting off with “What do we need to know and how can we get the answers to those questions”, most organizations look at whatever data they have and start issuing reports.  This leads to statements such as “We believe this implies that…” or, worse yet, it leads to ‘data dumps’ – reports without any analysis or practical recommendations.

So, to improve performance, identify key questions, ask what information you need to answer those questions and then determine where you can get timely access to that information.  The end result of this step is that you will find your analytics team is suddenly providing valuable insight that drives performance improvements within your organization!

Step 6: Talk with your customers, prospects, competitors, suppliers, employees

It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.

A major retailer approached me with a concern about rising customer attrition – a large number of customers were taking some or all of their business to the competition and the retailer wanted to put a stop to this behavior.

So I interviewed current and former customers and came back with a simple solution – talk with the customer.

You see, Customer A became a customer because the retailer solved Problem 1.  Over time, Customer A now faced Problem 2 – but the retailer was selling product and failed to communicate with the customer in order to identify the customer’s new needs and expectations.  This caused Customer A to search elsewhere for a solution to its current problem – even though the retailer already offered a valuable solution for Customer A’s new needs.

The solution was to have the sales and service team ask every customer about any new issues that the retailer might be able to help solve – something that wasn’t done on a regular basis, if at all.  Also, promotional messages were modified so that different services and solutions were featured in communications – so the customer’s awareness of the breadth of services was increased and the need to search elsewhere was decreased.

No extra costs – just improved performance and higher retention rates.

Talking with your suppliers, competitors and employees will also identify opportunities to improve performance in a variety of ways – so make the time to do this on a regular basis.

Step 7: Test. Test. Test.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.

I could have also named this “Try. Try. Try.” or just simply “Evolve.” – but no matter what you call this last step, the concept is simple.  Your organization has to consistently deliver unique value in order to attract and retain profitable customers and because the needs and expectations of your customers is constantly changing based upon a variety of factors (economy, society, technology…) you need to grow with them.

Don’t go crazy.  You need to remain true to the core purpose of the organization.  I am not suggesting that you follow the lead of [ex] Boston Chicken when it expanded its menu, changed its name to Boston Market and went bankrupt.

What I am suggesting is that sometimes, a strength that has not been perceived as valuable by your customers will come back into vogue and you will need to focus on that strength in order to better address the customers’ changing needs.

So, what do you think?  Can you see how these seven simple steps will help your organization better utilize existing resources?