Entrepreneurship – It’s about the Customer, Always
Published May 8, 2012 | 
There is a golden rule for every successful entrepreneur and business owner, and it is “Always put yourself in your customer or client’s place.”
Attributes of Successful Entrepreneurs – The Customer… the Customer… the Customer
Remember it’s about the customer, always, and not about the products or services that you sell. Your business is not about the prices that you charge for your goods and services, not about your competition and your strategies and tactics to beat them. Your business is simply all about your customers, or clients… period. Understand that after all is said and done, your customers are the people with the power to ultimately decide if your business is a success, or failure.
With that simple understanding, everything you will ever do in business must absolutely be customer focused, including your business policies, payment options, warranties, hours of operation, presentations, advertising and promotional campaigns, social media and Web marketing, Web domains. In addition, you have to know and understand who your customers are inside out, and backwards and forwards.
Know the art of apology, although the customer may not always be right, the customer must always win, or at least think they won. So… when something should happen to go wrong, apologize. It’s actually very easy, and your customer will get an important “sense of satisfaction,” while you may get some very valuable feedback, or even a chance to build loyalty and sell more product and services.
A customer by any other name is never your customer, and actually addressing your customers or clients by name is simple and easy, and the power it provides you is a wonderful phenomenon most never understand, and a real perplexity that it doesn’t happen more often. The simple truth is remembering dozens or even hundreds of names aren’t that difficult, but there are plenty of tricks to help you remember.
The very first is a simple self introduction to them. Now, some customers will respond in kind, but for the ones that don’t, credit cards are an absolute dead give-away, so be sure to take a glance at the name before you swipe. And yet, a third method is to ask your customer to sign up for an email list for important deals they won’t want to miss, and that way they have to give you their names.
Empower your employees, since there’s no way you can be everywhere at once, if you can, give your employees the freedom to do whatever it takes to provide assistance and help customers find solutions at the moment they need it. This is very powerful, if you have the caliber of employees that you can really depend on to deliver in your absence.
Understand putting that kind of trust in people takes real courage on your part. You know that mistakes will be made, but trust is empowering too, and trust that your best assistants will respond.
The answer is always YES, even if it’s no, because the bottom line is that people want solutions to their problems that are free of any hassle, so you have to make doing business with YOU as easy as possible. This means that if someone has an odd or unusual request, say you’ll be happy to handle it and then deal with the details later. And, if you simply can’t meet the request or need, help find another solution… and this is important… even if it means sending a customer to a competitor. Customers will thank you for it… and always remember what you did.
Finally, if you’re in business just for the money, chances are great you’ll never make it, but if you love what you’re doing and you always consider the customer first, success will be yours.
Customer Analysis – Decision Making Process
Published December 31, 2010 | 
To complete the Customer Analysis there is one last critical step that shows a complete understanding of the actual decision-making process. Examples of questions that need to be answered here include will the customer speak to others in their organization prior to making a decision? Will the customer request several bids? Will the product/or service call for substantial operational changes and have to invest time to learn new technologies? Will the product/or service bring about other members within the organization to lose their jobs?
It is necessary for you to correctly understand customers to create and develop a winning marketing strategy. This is extremely important since experienced high-level investors call for complete and all-inclusive profiles of a business’s target niche customers.
Consumer Targets & Partners
Most businesses target many consumer categories or segments, and each consumer segment that is very crucial to the business model you have developed have got to be detailed in this section. In addition, if partners are also crucial to the business’s marketing success, the plan has to specifically detail the partners the business seeks out, the wants and requirements of these partners, and how the partners’ management decision-making process operates.
How to Recession Proof Your Business with Customer Service
Published June 24, 2009 | 
In rough economic times when businesses cut costs in an attempt to improve the bottom line and the cash flow needed to effectively operate during slowdowns and economic recessions, they forget in many cases to retain the staff that provides good customer service, and more often than not, it’s staff that provide the best customer service on a consistent basis are the first ones to be laid off, as Circuit City did as recent as last year in an attempt to save the business, and the employees it laid off in its cost cutting measure immediately went to work at the nearest electronics competition such as Best Buy, where they were followed by many loyal customers, and we all know Circuit City was later forced to close and cease operations.
This is just one way businesses that deal with consumers seem to be suffering from a definite disconnect, between the level of service they want to provide, and the service actually provided by their employees.
Signs of Poor Service
There are some key signs that customer service may be in need of some attention – and most probably some staff training & experience retention – to help restore the customer’s faith:
- Poor employee retention
If employees are leaving too quickly (i.e. within three years), there can be no real opportunity for them to build up relationships with customers and knowledge about individual customers leaves the company with every lost employee, so if this is the case, consider bringing in an outside HR (human resources) consultant to talk to employees and find out what needs to be done to change the situation; employees will often tell an “outsider” things that they would never tell their manager. - Customer complaints
On average, only around 6% of dissatisfied customers will actually take the time to complain, so out of all the customers who encounter a problem, 94% won’t tell you (but they’ll tell their friends and family, of course), and when these dissatisfied customers do gather the strength to actually complain, many front line employees have a natural instinct to refer the customer to someone else or, worse still, to deny that there’s really a problem. So if management sees that there are very few complaints, that doesn’t mean that customer service is perfect at all, and if employees have not built relationships with customers, many customers will defect without any further prompting, so make sure that your front line teams are required to record all complaints and any action taken to
solve them and complaints data should be treasured, documented, and shared with management. The important point here is that if you’re not getting complaint data from the front line, there’s a serious problem. - Employees aren’t empowered to handle problems
Unless front line employees are empowered to resolve customer complaints and problems without resorting to calling supervisors or referring the customer to a manager, customer service – and the company’s reputation – will suffer greatly, as customer issues should be handled from start to finish by the same person if at all possible. Remember, customers do not want to wait or, even worse, be transferred to multiple people to have their problems solved, and there is nothing worse than having to repeat the problem over and over again to different people. The important point to know here is this is where you need employee training and empowerment: give the whole customer-facing team the knowledge, tools, and authority they need to defuse angry customers. - Loss of long-term customers
When a long-term customer leaves, you need to notice it and query it, since when you have built a long-term relationship with a customer, your ability to retain that customer significantly increases, and when a customer who would normally give you the benefit of the doubt takes their business elsewhere, the problem is almost
always the service they’ve received. What you have to do is try to find out the real reason they defected, and use that information to prevent it from happening again. Remember that flexibility is needed in order to make changes in the company based on information from lost customers. - Fewer referrals
A business with delighted customers should always be gaining new customers from referrals and if your service isn’t good, referrals will drop off first – even before your existing customers defect to a competitor, and this makes the continual monitoring of referral levels one of the most powerful indicators of ongoing customer satisfaction. To quote a wise mentor, “Satisfied customers buy from you, but delighted customers sell for you.” Also, if you’re gaining lots of new customers but losing just as many existing customers, this indicates a serious disparity between what your brand is promising and what it actually delivers. - Low morale
Employees’ morale is something that shows whenever they interact with customers, and the customer is very quick to pick up on negative sentiment toward the company, and while low morale is not always a result of poor customer service (although it can be due to a lack of empowerment), it always creates poor service. If this is the case, then you as the management need to try to instill a sense of pride
throughout the company, and offer employees some well-deserved “rewards and recognition.” Empower employees to make decisions (within reasonable limits), and train them to make good decisions that have both the customer’s and company’s interests at heart. - While there are obviously more than six signs that identify bad customer service, these are certainly among the main ones to watch out for, and if you recognize any single one of these six signs, the time has come to focus attention on fixing it urgently. If you recognize more than one of these signs, there’s absolutely no time to waste, because chances are great that you’re already losing market share.
How to Craft External Strategy
Published May 26, 2009 | 
External strategy is about your approach to communications and it is built from the outside in, from the customer backwards, and positioning theory provides the body of knowledge for crafting this type of strategy and its focus is purely strategic as opposed to the creative the orientation of internal strategy.
Positioning is used as a communication tool to reach target customers in a crowded marketplace and as advertising executives have begun to develop positioning slogans for their clients, positioning has become a key aspect of marketing communications, and while positioning begins with a product, it’s not what you do to the product, positioning is what you do to the mind of the customer.
Since the concept a positioning is really about positioning a product in the mind of the customer, strategy is therefore planned in the mind, not the marketplace, and marketing then becomes a battle of perception not products. This approach is needed because consumers are bombarded with a continuous stream of high-volume advertising and the consumer’s mind reacts to this high-volume of advertising by accepting only what is consistent with prior knowledge or experience.
In a very general sense, there are only a few generic external positioning strategies including getting into the mind first or finding the niche, positioning yourself to the leader, or repositioning the competition.
The easiest way of getting into the mind is to be first and for proof of this concept answer questions including who was first to fly solo across the north Atlantic? Charles Lindbergh, right? Who was a second? Who was the first person to walk on the moon? The answer is Neil Armstrong, of course. Who was second? What’s the highest mountain in the world? Mount Everest in the Himalayas, right? What’s the second highest? What’s the largest selling ever published? Of course the answer is The Bible, right? And the second largest selling book? Who knows?
It is very easy to remember who is first, and much more difficult to remember who is second, and even if the second entrant offers a better product, the first mover has a large advantage that can make up for other shortcomings, however, all is not lost for products that are not the first as it’s not being first physically to the marketplace, and by being the first to claim a unique position in the mind of the consumer, a firm effectively can cut through the noise level of other products.
If a product is not going to be first, it didn’t must find an unoccupied position in which it can be first, for example, at a time when larger cars were popular, Volkswagen introduced the Beetle with the slogan “Think Small,” now Volkswagen was not the first small car, but they were the first to claim that position in the mind of the consumer.
Consumers rank brands in their minds and if a brand is not number one then to be successful it somehow must relate itself to the number one brand, and a campaign that pretends that the market leader does not exist is likely to fail, as Avis tried unsuccessfully for years to win customers, pretending that the number one Hertz did not exist. Finally, it began using the line, “Avis is only No. 2 in rent-a-cars, so why go with us? We try harder.” For 13 years in a row Avis lost money and after the campaign, Avis quickly became profitable, and whether Avis actually tried harder was not relevant to their success, rather, consumers finally were able to relate Avis to Hertz, which was number one in their minds.
Remember, you must own your niche and own it out right and no one else can occupy your space, and if you can’t own it, especially from a marketing expenditure outlay, then decrease the size of niche until you can, and if somebody else occupies your chosen space you must try to reposition them.
All successful external strategies must start with the mind of the consumer and then work backward and this is true because the answer is not contained within the product or service itself, and no amount of creative thinking or analysis will result in the insights needed to successfully position your company, product, or service. The answer rests instead in the mind of your customer and you must begin with what’s already there and then work backwards, or outside in to create your external strategy.
Ask yourself, “What position do I own now?”And remember external strategy is thinking in reverse, so instead of starting with yourself, you start with the mind of the prospect and instead of asking what you are, you asked what position you already own in the mind of the prospect, and changing minds in our over communicated society is an extremely difficult task, as it’s much easier to work with what’s already there.
Next, ask yourself, “What position do I want to own?” Then ask yourself, “How can I be the first to claim a unique position in the mind of my customer?” And here is where you try to figure out the best position to own from a long-term perspective, and “Own” is the key word, as too many programs set out to communicate a position that is impossible to preempt because someone else already owns it.