Customer Communication is King -- Sales and Marketing Team Work

It is critical at whatever stage the economy is in, good times or bad times, for your customer messaging to ring true with your target market. If the potential customers you are talking to do not understand what you are trying to convey, then your company is in big trouble. And that is spelled with a capital T. If your salespeople send more than a few percent of their time trying to explain what it is you as a company are trying to convey, you are then not in an optimum sales situation.

I have just a brief example of shaping the message to the target audience. When my son was very young his favorite fast food was a cheeseburger from McDonalds with ketchup and pickles only. He would go with me and tell me he wanted a cheeseburger, but please only ketchup and pickles on it. When I ordered it the way he wanted it ordered the McDonalds clerk would repeat it back multiple times, and with a high degree of certitude my son’s cheeseburger would have either mustard or onions or both on it. This would cause me to trek to the counter to exchange the cheeseburger for one that would meet my son’s standards.

This disconnect in communications got old very fast. McDonalds would always be gracious enough to make another to my son’s specifications, but the hassle quotient was off of the scales.

I started thinking about the issue at night once and determined for a product that contained only a bun, hamburger, cheese, onion, mustard, ketchup and pickle there had to be a better way to communicate my son’s requirements and make the process easier to digest.

I determined that I would order my son’s cheeseburger by what he did not want on it. “One cheeseburger with no onion and no mustard, please.” The clerk would repeat back, “Cheeseburger, no onion and no mustard.” Bingo, the rate of successful ordering for my son’s cheeseburger shot through the roof.
But there was still one small problem. When my son heard me order in the new fashion he would say to me, “But I want pickles and ketchup only on my cheeseburger.” With my son it was very easy to communicate to him that because of the finite number of ingredients only ketchup and pickle on a cheeseburger was exactly the same as no onions and no mustard on a cheeseburger.

My Son was happy, I was happy, the clerk was happy and somewhere Ronald McDonald and the shareholders of McDonalds were happy because the cost of preparing my son’s food had been reduced.

I use the above only as an example of customer communications and how critical it is. Lack of clear communications could be why you lost an account, why your close rate is not as good as your competition, or why you often leave your customers with a dazed and confused look on their face. Talk to your key salespeople and find out if messaging might be getting in the way of representing and selling your company. If it is, then fix it.

Customers Visiting Headquarters, Part 2

Corporate visits were a critical component of sales at a larger enterprise company I worked at. There were 200 to 300 customer visits per year at this company; sometimes there were three a day. We had a very nice corporate visitor facility; with dedicated staff, and with dedicated resources. Sales people, who wanted to have a customer visit staged, would call the visitor center and all of the particulars of the visit would be coordinated for that sales person and customer by the assigned visitor center staff.

I had an opportunity to see how the enterprise visit worked from the point of view of a “subject matter expert”. In a year-and-a-half I gave approximately 30 presentations on the company’s integration story. Each time after the visit the presenters were evaluated by the customer on their presentation quality, we received a grade, and the presenter with the highest grade at the end of the month received recognition for being recognized by the customers. In the 29 out of the 30 times I presented I was not briefed on the history the customer had with our company, what was the visitor’s objective, what was the sales objective, who the individuals were, their role in their organization and what was the customer’s objective.

The one time that was different was when a sales representative from Scotland came to my office the day before his customer was scheduled to visit. He had contacted me the week before and said he wanted to bring me up to speed on what he was trying to accomplish. He told me what the customer was evaluating for purchase, he told me why integration was important to his customer (my pitch was on integration), what he hoped they would learn from my presentation, how much they had bought from our company the last 5 years (year by year), who would be attending (and their roles), and he wanted to make sure I brought handouts of my presentation.

On most visits I knew only the name of the company that was in our visitor center, what room to show up at, and the time. At the end of my presentation the sales representative left the room with me and thanked me for presenting to his client, and gave me a rough appraisal of how it went from his point of view. Most of the selling that are supposed to happen on a customer visit he had prepared for.

15 THINGS YOU MAY WANT TO CONSIDER

From this and other positive and negative experiences I had at the visitor center I have developed a list of things that you might want to consider on staging a customer visit;

1. Before the customers are on site have a crystal clear idea of what their objectives are,
2. At the start of the visit list the visitor’s objectives and how you are going to accomplish those,
3. Make sure the visit is designed to address the customer sales and product issues,
4. Get executive sponsorship for each visit, at least have a letter from the CEO welcoming the visitors,
5. Make sure the people involved are briefed, at least with a background document,
6. Make sure the presentations are meaningful to the customers situation,
7. If you are the sales representative, request a copy for yourself of every presentation (I have seen presenters with 80 slides that were slotted for 45 minutes, and would not leave the lectern till finished),
8. At the end get feedback, not just on the presenters, but on how well the visit met the objectives your visitors had prior to the meeting,
9. Have handouts that are related to the visitor issues that are uniform in appearance for visitors,
10. Do not hold the visitors captive all day, provide breaks after most presentations, have the subject matter experts available for side discussion,
11. Stay on time,
12. Set-up a question “parking lot” for follow-up at the end of each session,
13. Ask customers to sign a visitor wall or hang their picture (something personal) that leaves their mark on the company that day,
14. Have sales person rate support staff, facilities, and subject matter experts (this goes to top sales management),
15. Stay flexible, and enjoy the time with your customer.
    

SUMMARY

The customer visit is an important sales event that requires careful coordination between the field and headquarters. When headquarters is in the planning mode they should not forget that the focus should be on helping the field close and support important and critical customers.

Customers Visiting Headquarters, Part 1

The corporate visit is a part of sales that is typically only seen in larger enterprise sales. Customers or potential customers drop in on your company to receive an update on company’s direction and for assurance that you are the right technology partner for their needs, now and in the future. Customers that take the time to visit you are very serious about the relationship they have with you as a vendor.

At an enterprise software company I worked at, an outside consultant was brought in to look at our sales process and why customers bought from us. The consultant found out that over 70% of the corporate visitors who visited us bought a substantial amount of product and service over the 18 months following their visit. Typically a large enough purchase was made that the customer visit program was deemed a very successful part of the sales process. Customer visits are not always appropriate, and have to be a well thought out part of the sales and marketing process. However, the expense and effort that it takes to put together a successful program can be well worth it in building close relationships with key customers.

Tell Me What I Want to Hear

Lots of us listen to the radio during drive time. The commercials spew out with great regularity (unless you are a satellite radio customer). The message most of the time falls on deaf ears, or worse yet a change in channels. The commercial messaging has little effect on the listener until they need what is being advertised. This struck home for me when I had a clutch fail on me a couple of years ago on a car that was out of warranty. I was trying to determine what my options were and then I recalled a radio spot for clutch repair shop that I had heard at least 50 times, but had paid little attention to. I called the shop, received a price estimate, and then had my car towed to the shop for the arraigned repairs. I never mentioned to the manager that a big reason I had contacted and then selected his shop was because of the radio spots they ran. Maybe I am the reason the shop does not buy radio spots anymore.

What is the point? The point is that in Business-to-Consumer or Business-to-Business sales you can deliver your message as often as you want, but until conditions are such that the prospect you are talking to is really interested in buying, you are not going to be able to establish a dialog with the prospect. The entire sales process is predicated on the sales dialog. The dialog can involve mail, email, commercials, and phone calls that allow you to send messages to your potential market, and allows interested prospects to raise their hand that they are interested. That is the start; the rest of the dialog is about the prospect’s budget, needs, timing, evaluation and decision. The figurative raising of one’s hand is when the sales dialog really starts.

There is a very good article on “Dialogue Marketing”, published in November of 2005. The article touches on retail mostly and is now a couple of years old but the messaging is spot on for today dynamic sales environment. My only criticism of the article is that it addresses mostly the marketing and messaging part of the sales process, and does not address the transaction side of the acquisition process. However the article is excellent food for thought. One of the critical elements of the article I felt was the following quote I pulled from the article, “Companies that blast frequent, irrelevant messages dilute their brand equity. What customers want is great service and a consistently excellent experience across all channels.” How many of us know the above is true, even without any empirical evidence to support it. We all want to be treated with respect.

In the past when working with integrating sales and marketing groups I have always focused on building a team environment, this can be hard to accomplish in many organizations, but is important for success. Many sales organizations like to give marketing a list of what they need and then sit back for the delivery. Many marketing organizations tell sales what they are going to deliver and then take little other feedback. I call this “Tick the Boxes Go-To-Market”. What is required is a sales process that makes sense from a business process standpoint and the marketing materials and infrastructure to support that. A sales process that makes sense starts with the customer, what is needed to support their buying decision.

To acquire new customers determine what your current customer expectations were pre- and post- sale, design a process that addresses those requirements in an intelligent manner and then implement the changes to your organization with the buy-in of all concerned parties.



The Perfect Message at the Perfect Moment. Kalyanam, Kirthi; Zweben, Monte. In Harvard Business Review, Case No. R0511G. Published 11/01/2005, Harvard Business School Publishing, (6 pages).