THE 10 T’S OF CUSTOMER ACQUISITION AND RETENTION (20)

But one small thing did go wrong. The cup holder, which was very important to me, my wife, and my son, broke twice. It broke, I got it fixed, it broke again, I got it fixed again, and then I sold the car.

This new GS 300 Lexus is superior in every way to my first one. It’s faster, it gets better gas mileage, and it’s more comfortable. The thing that really impressed me, however, was the cup holder. It is totally redesigned, in a way that makes more sense. I can’t imagine how it could break. I am now not only satisfied but also thrilled enough to be telling everyone about this car. And what pushed me over the top was a part that probably costs less than $10.

But the people who designed this car did it right. They kept striving for improvement. They listened to their customers and watched their customers react to the car. The European automakers, at that time, turned their noses up at even putting cup holders in cars and concentrated on engineering and handling. (“Those stupid Americans—they shouldn’t be drinking coffee in their car anyway. Don’t they realize this is a work of art?”) The American car companies cut corners wherever they could and continued to underperform on the price/value proposition they offered. Meanwhile, a Japanese car company personally showed me why they always come out on top with
both critics and customers. One tiny thing went wrong with my old model, and they fixed it in the next model.

Think of how easy it would have been for this behemoth of a company to rest on their recent laurels. They’re tenacious, and they refuse to be satisfied with just being the best. There has been no bigger success story in the automotive industry than Toyota, owner of the Lexus brand. When I bought my first Lexus, Toyota was the fifth-largest auto manufacturer in the world. Now they are the second largest.

Strive for continual improvement and refinement in the areas that customers care about most, even if those seem insignificant to you.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

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If you gain a reputation for going above and beyond on customer issues and complaints, will there be some cheaters? Sure, you will get a few opportunists and freeloaders. Usually, however, the positive effects of exceeding customer expectations such as increased loyalty and word-of-mouth advertising far outweigh these rare occasions of abuse. A customer who will recommend you to others is the most valuable customer you can get.

At the very least, be sure that you never hear words like these uttered by people in your organization:
• “I’m sorry, but that’s our policy.”
• “If I do this for you, I’ll have to do it for everybody.”
• “You’ll have to speak to my manager. I don’t have the power to do that.”
• “I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that.”
• “If it were up to me, you know I would do it.”

9. Telepathy
You and your employees need to have telepathy. You have to be able to anticipate the future. Your organization must assume a proactive stance as it relates to all your customers’ needs. You have to foresee any and all potential problems that could crop up before they do crop up. You also need to recognize the patterns that are indicative of future success or failure or future opportunities.

I was in a focus group with business owners where the moderator asked what kind of TV character summed up what their organization is like. What character defined their company’s personality? There were some really interesting answers from everyone, with a wide variety of characters from the past few decades—everyone from Mary Tyler Moore to George Jefferson. The best answer I heard was Radar O’Reilly from M*A*S*H. In case you are too young to remember Radar, he had the uncanny knack for understanding what was going to happen before it ever did. He was always in the right place, at the right time, with the right solution for that particular crisis.He continually saved the day, but he always did it in a quiet, unassuming way. He didn’t expect to get the credit; he just wanted things to go well. While his loyalties may have been split internally at times, he never wavered from his clear customer focus. The wounded and the maimed were his only priority, and he would do literally anything to improve their condition. To that extent, Radar O’Reilly might be the most customer-driven character in TV history.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

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THE 10 T’S OF CUSTOMER ACQUISITION AND RETENTION (14)

7. Time Bombs
Any company interested in growth needs to do things cheaper, faster, and better to win business. The only way we can consistently deliver on the “faster” part is to build and plant time bombs throughout our organization. Time is of the essence in today’s economy. Attention-getting time bombs of some type need to go off whenever you are not doing a good job of managing the customer’s expectation of time. The entire organization needs to see, hear, and feel the obvious warning signs of impending time problems.

PrintingForLess.com has set up a system where every order is being tracked at all times. Orders that are close to being in trouble set off an alarm in the company system.

When there is an alarm on this dashboard, the whole place goes nuts trying to figure out what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to keep it from happening again. The project is not late at this point. It’s just in danger of getting that way if people don’t react. It’s a time bomb.

Here’s an interesting story on how seriously PrintingForLess .com values the importance of exceeding customer expectations as it relates to time. Every time we get together, everyone in the organization, at one time or another, refers to the company’s on-time shipment performance. What percentage of orders were shipped before the promised ship date? What percentage shipped on time? How many times did the company
drop the ball last week, last month, or last quarter? These types of measurements of time performance are posted in prominent locations throughout the facility on a daily basis and are on everyone’s computer dashboard. The company has identified the crucial role on-time delivery plays in commercial printing.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

THE 10 T’S OF CUSTOMER ACQUISITION AND RETENTION (11)

In the world of commercial printing, every product delivered has always been mass customized. The good folks at PrintingForLess.com have taken this concept to the next level. A large part of the company’s growth can be attributed to the ability to better understand the unique nature of every customer. For instance, when the company first started taking online orders in 1999, they accepted only a few file formats. Now five years later, they accept 42. You can have your order shipped by any method you want, in any time frame that you need. Need your order faster? Not a problem. PrintingForLess.com can accommodate you for a nominal (but very profitable) surcharge.

6. Trenching
Trenching is a term I use to refer to the process of finding actionable
information in customer data and using that to grow your business. Some people would call this data mining, but you don’t really dig for it and remove it. Instead, you move along a trench looking at the stratification, like a geologist. (Besides, data mining doesn’t start with the letter “t,” so that would blow my whole premise.) When trenching, you are trying to find answers to the following key questions:

• What kind of customers should we serve?
• What kind of customers do we currently serve?
• How can we describe our best types of customers?
• What patterns can we find in our customers that predict future lifetime value,potential offers,or potential actions?

You can nearly always find patterns in the data: why people buy, when they buy, what they buy, what kind of offers elicit a response. If Tony buys only logo hats from me year after year like clockwork and nothing else, I’m probably wasting money sending him a shirt catalog 12 times a year. If Candlewic president Bill Binder has a customer who buys only soap supplies from him, it wouldn’t make sense to continually offer that
customer special pricing on candle supplies. Maybe once or twice a year, he would offer special pricing to see if he could elicit a trial, but certainly not as often as he would to his known candle supply buyers.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

THE 10 T’S OF CUSTOMER ACQUISITION AND RETENTION (8)

Most business owners agree that face-to-face contact is the most valuable contact you can have with a client or customer. I agree. Nothing is more valuable than face-to-face contact in any business. According to Cahners Research, the cost of the average face-to-face sales call was $329 in 2001. It is a tremendously valuable tool that should be used properly. Due to the high cost of face-to-face communications, we’ve found other ways to communicate with our customers, and there has always been a relationship between the cost and the value

We have the telephone, which is a very effective tool.While not nearly as valuable as face-to-face contact, it is still a tremendous tool for certain applications. The telephone has an auditory component, a real-time component, and a twoway interaction component that makes it extremely valuable. Everyone has it, and we can all use it. However, while it is significantly less effective than face-to-face contact, the telephone is still an expensive tool. If you factor in all of your real costs, from telephony hardware to health insurance, the average outbound sales call your company makes can cost anywhere from $15 to $35. Taking an inbound order from a customer can cost you an average of $7 to $12.

Mail is also an effective tool in the right circumstances. Most businesses still mail invoices. They still mail catalogs. Many companies still use mail to distribute compelling offers. Compared to real-time, two-way communication, mail seems limited, but the corresponding costs still make it a good value. Fax is cheaper still, but the limitations of color and format reduce its value.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

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3. Total View
As it relates to customers, everyone in your organization should be able to access everything they need to know, anytime or anywhere. This is difficult, yes, but not impossible.

How many times have you heard, “that’s not my department” or “that’s not my job”? That’s a pitiful response, and if anyone in your company says that, you should be embarrassed. He or she is costing you money and stifling your growth.

There are plenty of reasons this attitude surfaces. Maybe your employees don’t personally have the technical knowledge to address the request. Maybe there are too many territorial disputes in your organization.Maybe that particular person is just plain lazy. You need to fix these problems, either through better training, better people, or better technology—probably all of these. The problem of inadequate technical knowledge is one of the easiest problems to address. Technology allows you to solve problems seamlessly, without ever showing what steps got you there.

How many times does it look like the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing in your organization? See if any of these look familiar:

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

THE 10 T’S OF CUSTOMER ACQUISITION AND RETENTION (2)

When you can answer these questions and train people on those topics, you will have a powerful training program. You assume that customer satisfaction is obvious, but it is not. (See the Oyster Bar Story.) Most new employees have no idea what satisfies a customer of your company.You need to teach them.

Dedicate some serious time to the training that really delivers. Each new employee should go through at least one day dedicated to an orientation to the company, its values, and its history. The best growing companies pull in the company founders, the top sales reps, or the president to explain the company’s core reason for being. They get new hires up to speed on how the company is different, what it does better, and why it is going to grow.

I have observed on more than one occasion the training process of new hires at PrintingForLess.com (PFL). While PrintingForLess.com can point to many competitive advantages, its four-month-long training process for new hires is, in my opinion, the most important. Everyone, from a back-ofhouse pressman to the newest technical service representative,
is fully indoctrinated into the “customer-centric mind-set” that is PFL. In many cases, people being trained come from a printing background. That’s fine. They may have a slight headstart relative to their fellow trainees. But the customer-driven processes at PFL are unique, so even the most seasoned print industry veteran will need every bit of the four months of hands-on training to deliver at the peak performance level expected by colleagues and customers alike.

Historically, small business has had the reputation of not offering strong training. I’m not sure that this reputation is always valid. When it is valid, it is usually because small businesses think they can’t afford it. However, I am sure that the majority of small businesses can’t afford not to do this kind of training.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth

The Milkshake Story (2)

“All right, Stuart, here’s what I would like you to do. Please send up a tray with a bowl of vanilla ice cream, half a glass of milk, and a long spoon. Could you do that for me, please?”

“Certainly, right away, sir,” Stuart replied. I hung up the phone, and five minutes later there was a knock on the door. Sure enough, there on the tray was a bowl of vanilla ice cream, half a glass of milk, and a long spoon—all the ingredients you need for a vanilla milkshake. But, of course, they don’t have vanilla milkshakes

Now, my question to you is this: Is Stuart stupid? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s stupid, because this isn’t the first time this scenario has played out for me. In fact, I’ve probably repeated this exercise more than 100 times over the past five years. In only 20 percent of the cases have I received a milkshake.

So no, I don’t think it’s the individual that is stupid. It’s the systems
that are stupid. The primary obstacle is that milkshakes are not on the menu, and there is no key code for milkshakes on their point-of-sale touch screens. Therefore, they do not exist. Some hotels are now offering smoothies on their room service menu, which tells me the second most common obstacle, lack of a blender in the kitchen, isn’t even an issue.

Taken From:The 7 Irrefutable rules of Small Businnes Growth