Don’t You Forget about me. Building Customer Loyalty

 

A recent survey shows that 68% of customers leave a current supplier because they felt undervalued. Most businesses focus almost all of their sales and marketing time, energy and budget bringing in new customers and seem to neglect their existing ones. Most mobile phone companies will give a better deal to a brand new customer then an existing one. This on the face of things is crazy.

The existing customer has cost

Is your Marketing Attracting the wrong Kind Of Customer?

Your marketing messages that you have carefully worded to attract customers and get them through your doors and spending may well be attracting customers who are only after one thing.

Most businesses want premium customers who are attracted to their brand, their products, their

How important is being different?

These days  leading up to christmas we as consumers are bombarded by adverts on television, in the papers and on the internet for new sofas. These are so prolific and so similar that they all appear the same. Watching these adverts may very well excite the potential customers  desire to buy a new sofa……but doesn’t make customers want to but it from any one particular  company.

So with this new found ‘need’ for a sofa, consumers head to the shops. This desire can be fulfilled with an attractive product from any company. You have to ask yourself how different do you look from your customers eyes. In the world of sofas it appears that price is the only mechanism for differentiation. Thus leading customers into ‘ bargain hunters’ not serious purchases.

How much more business would you win, if not only could you make prospects want you product or service….but want it from you?

Seth Godin uses the wonderful phrase ’ remarkable’ this way customers will gravitate to you because of you differentiators. If you don’t have that, then like many sofa companies you have to rely on price reductions and discounts to get the business.

Moving on defining what it is that makes you exciting, different, special, remarkable, memorable, interesting, engaging and most important attractive to new customers will create far more revenue than price reductions.

How Not To Make An Exhibition of Yourself.

I have just returned back to my office from the Business Northwest Exhibition in Manchester. I was staggered by the number of businesses that booked exhibition stands and appeared not to give a moments thought to what the purpose of the exhibition was.

Do not get my wrong, some shining examples of great stands. However on more then one occasion I was asked ’ can i help you?’ by someone stood on a stand with little explaination of what they do. Booking a stand is not enough. You must invest time and energy to ensure that the people on the stand are the companies’ best presenters and are confident.

• Get something intersting on the stand to get people to walk onto the stand. eg A proper competition or contest [ not just a waste paper basket openly collecting business cards of random people]
• Talk to them. Open questions to find out what they do ……then tell them what you do
• Make you stand so different that people have to look. Have someone in a costume [silly but effective] what about a magician or card tricks or even someone cleaning shoes [ that means you've got them for at least 2 minutes] imagination will attract far more people then free pens, boxes of mints or funny rubber shaped things.
• Oh and most importantly…get their name and details, make notes if you have to…..because you ARE going to call them back 

don’t monkey about with guerrilla marketing!

Since the godfather of Guerrilla Marketing Jay Conrad Levinson created the phrase, anything that is odd, noticable and REMARKABLE  has been called guerrilla marketing. Like this Smart car advertising. It is just a maximising of interlect vs budget that matters. 200 people dancing in a station for t-mobile looks great and gets results [ people talking about it] but it doesn’t cost anything. 21st century marketing is lifting the lid on some great creative ideas. As long as the purpose is not lost. If it is marketing, it is to make a statement to the selected target market.

don’t waste time cold calling!!

Cold calling, no matter how much you don’t like it is one of the quickest, most efficient and cheapest ways to actively generate new customers. So many people hate it so much that they put themselves in a mindset that automatically leads to failure. They then never return to it and miss out on potential revenue. 

Here are 6 ways to make cold calling not only far more effective, but also to make it more fun.

1 learn the right physiology. You may well find that standing up and putting on your biggest smile will help with your attitiude.

2 Timing is crucial.I sometimes talk to sales people who call for 6 or even 8 hours per day. I would stick a to maximum time on any session at 2 hours. The best two hours to make business to business telephones is 10 o’clock to 12 o’clock on a thursday morning.

3 Plan and practice the opening statement. It should be relaxed and rehearsed and bridge to an investigative question.

4 Understand the importance of cold calling. Too many people go through the motions. It will pay dividends if you are comfortable doing it.

5 Learn to cope with rejection. I always hear it from delegates on courses I run. They want techniques to stop rejection. Firstly, all sales people get rejection. Think of it as a numbers game. The more rejection you get, the closer you are to a yes.

6 When you have started. Never put the phone down. This will save you lots of time and stop you having to keep picking  the phone up.

Hope you enjoy your next cold calling session.

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