Align with Your Customers

   Some small business owners seem to possess a potent combination of optimism and a belief in their own ability to generate the circumstances necessary for business success.  Others seem to be inclined to “hunker down” and “weather the storm”, seeing each less-than-perfect economic indicator as proof we are “not out of the woods yet”.  The perceptions of the owner aside, because there certainly can be industry or company-specific factors that overwhelm any plan put into place by a small business, are there any fundamentals that can help drive success no matter who you are?  We think one important fundamental is “alignment”; in particular – alignment with your customers.

   Alignment is not a new concept.  Kaplan and Norton have written about strategic alignment in their work developing the balanced scorecard for business.  Alignment, or harmony with one’s natural surroundings is a theme found in ancient and modern texts.  We should all have an appreciation of the many types of environmental harmony important to our well-being – if only from the experience of dis-harmonies. 

   From a business perspective, what does it mean to align with your customers?  We believe it is a not a process per se, but a fundamental approach.  In a big company, it is called culture; for a small business it usually results from the owner’s personality having been imprinted upon the business as a whole.

   The first step is to put customer at the center of the business.  It is not about you, it is about them.  Sounds simple, but in the real world it takes some practice – particularly for the first type of small business owner mentioned above.  Customer experiences matter.  Customer perceptions matter.  Everyone in the company must behave with the customer first.  And the language you use to promote your business and interact with customers should be their language.  Industry jargon is great for communication shortcuts internally or with peers, but make sure the language of the customer has a prominent place.

   Once the customer is at the center of the business, you will gain perspective.  You will begin to experience your business as your customer experiences the various interactions with your company.  Seeing as your customer sees, combined with your internal knowledge of the supporting processes, will lead to an awareness of how well your business is actually doing at every step of the way.

   This awareness leads to an understanding of what needs to change and what can stay the same.  It will be much easier at this point to make decisions that can improve efficiency while maintaining or strengthening the customer’s experience.

   A key concept, related to alignment and one that intersects in many ways, is empathy.  It is important to be aware of customers as human beings - social, intelligent, ancient creatures carrying all sorts of evolutionary baggage.

   Social constructs, such as family, clan, tribe, village, nation, and others, always have been and always will be part of being human.  People have learned to validate their decisions and perceptions with their social unit.  This is why the reputation of a business is so important.

  Environmental cues have been key to survival, the ultimate evolutionary measure of success for an individual.  People are pre-programmed to look at faces, read body language, and scan the environment to make an assessment.  Your business cannot be threatening in any way.

   The individual’s current emotional state, over which a business has little control at first, is also part of the empathetic mix.

   Cognitive inputs, such as benefits and tradeoffs, are definitely part of the decision-making process.  But as we’ve seen, not the only part.  And at any given moment, not necessarily the most important part.  Relying solely on the customer’s ability to logically come to the correct conclusion regarding your business ignores the larger picture.

   We recently held an alignment-focused brainstorming session with a medical practice.  Included in the session were both the physicians and the reception, office, and supporting staff.  Physicians, while not fitting precisely into business owner example noted above, are by personality and training often possessive of a cognitive, logical, medicine-centric approach.  By introducing the customer’s voice – the actual language used by patients when they called to inquire about medical care (and which sometimes included crying – a pure, emotional response), the physicians themselves gained a better understanding of the patient interactions they had experienced.

Your Business has Two Sales Funnels

We talk a lot about the sales funnel in our presentations to business owners.   The concept is pretty straightforward - you need to propose a lot more business than you actually need to meet sales targets because not every proposal turns into a sale.  With a little experience, studying funnel performance will clarify the “close ratio” or “capture rate”, and you can even develop a formula to use going forward.  (If you have more than one sales rep, you can also use funnel performance to measure how well they sell).

In our examples, we presume that half our proposals end up in a closed sale.  That is a 50% close ratio, and it means for every $100 of sales we want (or need) we must propose $200.  When you know how many sales calls it requires to generate $200 worth of proposals, you have the beginning of a sales activity plan for your sales reps (or you).

Most funnel discussions focus on “acquisition”; generating new business by converting prospects into customers.  Business owners should already have a sense that acquiring new customers is relatively expensive, and the most cost-effective source of generating sales is from existing customers.  Upselling, cross-selling, and generally keeping customers coming back for more is relatively less expensive.  When you think about it, a lot of the convincing that you need to do with a prospect doesn’t need to be redone with an existing customer; they already trust you.

Which brings us to the concept of “flipping the funnel”, or making sure there is some focus on “retention”: keeping customers as customers, upselling, and cross-selling.  It turns out that email and social media marketing, while very good for the top of the acquisition funnel process, are great tools for the retention/upsell/cross-sell retention process.

Email and social media marketing are all about engagement; sharing content that really resonates with your audience.  Since you’ve already established trust, your messaging can get right to the point.  And your messaging is more likely to be read and acted upon, too.

As you think about where your sales will come from and how you are going to get those sales, don’t forget the two funnels.  Work them both.  Understand that the dynamics of each funnel are different.  And your email and social media marketing needs to be different in both cases, too.  The end result is a better close ratio on your combined sales efforts.  And a more efficient and affordable sales generation process.

Social Media Marketing Deconstructed

Small business owners, particularly those who have been in business for a while, often approach social media as a marketing tool with a degree of skepticism.  We see this in our presentations on the subject; some audience members sit with arms crossed and a bit of a frown on their faces.  It doesn’t take a PhD to recognize there are some barriers that need to be overcome.

We begin by deconstructing the phrase social media marketing and telling the audience to ignore, for a moment, the word in the middle; media.  And by promising, they know more about this than they think.

Marketing is Marketing

“Let’s begin with marketing.”

At the root of everything “marketing”, including marketing with social media, is the necessity to understand the customer, understand what a business can do for the customer, and communicate in terms that will resonate with the customer.

A bit of work in practice, but conceptually this is nothing new.  And something that most small business people comprehend intuitively – or quickly come to understand if they expect to stay in business. 

“Does this make sense?” we ask.  Nods, generally, around the room.  Marketing is marketing is marketing, and the basics have been in place essentially forever.

Humans are Social Animals

“Now, let’s talk about the first word; social.”

Ever since we metaphorically lived in caves, humans have been social animals.  We have depended upon each other collectively for our survival.  Clans, tribes, families, faiths, nations, friends, and probably numerous other manifestations throughout history attribute to our social nature.

An individual’s survival has depended upon the ability to quickly size-up a situation; friend or foe, fight or flight, safe or dangerous.  Before we left the cave each morning, we scanned for tigers, traps, or treachery.  By now, it is hard-wired in to our social make-up.

“We all know how to be social.  We’ve been doing it all our lives.”

A few arms unfold.  A few frowns relax.

“When you first meet someone, or enter into a social situation like a party, what do you do?  You size them, or it, up.”

Nods.

“When someone speaks to you, or asks a question, what do you usually do?”

“You answer back.  You wouldn’t stand there, stone-faced. That’s being social – you know this.”

More unfolding and relaxing.

“When you have a question about something, who do you ask?”

Now we prompt for answers.  Specific examples come back and we stop when we hear this: ‘someone we trust.’

“That’s right”, we say.  In the family, clan, tribe – someone we trust.

Dare to Reconstruct Social Marketing

So, social marketing would be leveraging the trusted relationships a customer (or potential customer) already has to help explain in terms resonant with them how your business can help them.

“Make sense?” we ask. “Pretty simple, right?”

And behold: the arms have unfolded and the frowns disappeared – sometimes even replaced with smiles.

“See, you know this stuff.  Told ya’.”

Concluding, we add:

Don’t worry so much about the “media”.  Media come and go.  They all have their specific rules and requirements, like column-inches in a newspaper ad.  That’s not the important part.

“Okay to continue?” 

With nods and relaxed attendees who understand why we market using social media, we proceed to show them how.