Here is my list. What's yours? 

1. Not listening to customers

2. Not listening to and involving staff

3. Not being clear at the beginning about the outcomes that are expected

4. Not having a planning and a communications process
5. Allowing a consultant to rigidly enforce their methodology and not adjusting it to the needs of their business.

Malcolm

I recently carried out a survey of over 60 companies that asked which marketing tools are best for acquiring new customers. In #1 slot was Face to face networking. In #2 & #3 slots were Partners & agencies and Articles & white papers.

Many prospects use their perception of Relationship, Expertise and Trust (RET) to help select suppliers. The top 3 certainly help support this view.
By comparison the bottom three marketing tools were: Call centres, Price cuts and Cold calling. None of these are very likely to help anyone’s RET rating.

 
We carry out RET customer surveys for individual clients and while results do vary the results of this multi company survey are pretty consistent. I can certainly see that RET is becoming increasing important to prospects as the economic environment becomes harsher. Hence the increased drive to be more customer focused in everything that we do.

To read more about the survey results on the best marketing tools visit www.simpleplans.co.uk/7.HTML   Be interesting to hear if you get similar results.

I think that we all "worship" customers at one time or another. For example when they have just given us a big order or perhaps even helped our business survive by staying with us. The secret is to do the "worshiping" when the customer is not looking.

Malcolm

Innovation is anything that makes life better for customers, easier for staff and cheaper for the business. Real success is doing all three at once.

Malcolm says

Dogs are loyal, customers are not. Customers buy from you for a range of different reasons based on their perceptions and the relative value that they place on price, relationship, expertise and trust. There are often a few emotional factors in there too. The mix and importance of all these factors varies by product, circumstance, time and immediate economic environment. Of course it can also vary by individual customer too. This gives a lot of variables and shows that there are no easy answers. Success is usually based around really understanding your customers and providing an appropriate mix of the variables under your control for your target market.

If a strong competitor enters your market the worse thing to do is nothing. Hoping that “customer loyalty” will see you through is very dangerous. You have to understand the competitor, their offering and the likely impact that it will have on your current and target customers. Only then can you decide the most effective actions to take.

Step one, do not beat them up and tell them how badly they are doing. Step two, take the opportunity to engage other parts of the business to discuss what can be done to increase sales. Talk to Customer Services, Marketing and yes even Finance. Get a different take on customers that can be used to change how things are done. This current environment is a great opportunity to pull together the whole organisation to help and support Sales. With this extra knowledge and support Sales staff will be able to build better relationships with customers and improve results. Another key benefit is that top Sales staff will be more encouraged to stay with a company that helps them rather than just beats them up.

Malcolm says

I think that 2009 will be the year of the customer/client for smart companies. When times get tough consumers and B2B customers think more about what they buy and who they buy it from. Price is always a point but the RET factor is even more important. RET stands for Relationship, Expertise and Trust. If your business does things that negatively impact any of these three aspects less customers will buy from you. Of course the reverse is also true and that’s why the smart companies are implementing often low cost simple things that will improve their RET rating with customers.

The first step down this path is to understand how customers rate you today. I do a lot of RET surveys and almost without exception the company thinks that their customers will rate them higher than they actually do. With this evidence its much easier to decide what actions to take and what things to leave along. Without this evidence Corporations will continue doing what they think is best which is often not what customers want. Have a look at the survey results on www.simpleplans.co.uk/7.HTML which will explain this in more detail.

My prediction is that companies who do see the light and start to better understanding what their customers want at every touch point will be the ones who are successful in 2009/10.

Malcolm Wicks
0118 989 1107
http://www.simpleplans.co.uk
malcolm.wicks@simpleplans.co.uk

In my experience often the most interesting and useful customer feedback does not come through Sales or Marketing. It comes from functions that deal directly with the customer such as Customer Services, Logistics and Finance. I ask these people what customers are saying and often get some amazing information that by its very nature Sales and Marketing would have no way of capturing. For example the customer whose main reason for using one supplier was the way that they invoiced. (It fitted in well with their own internal systems.) Then there was the customer who didn’t like the way that boxes were opened for testing by the supplier. They thought they were faulty. These customers had told people in their suppliers company about these things before but the people in Logistics and Finance didn’t know who to tell or that this type of information was important.

So my recommendation is to forget trying to further automate stuff that Sales and marketing collect and focus on asking staff at the main customer touch points what they are hearing.

Malcolm Wicks
0118 989 1107
http://www.simpleplans.co.uk
malcolm.wicks@simpleplans.co.uk