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Four Ways for Your Customer Service Team to Make Your Customers Less Angry

When your customers contact your customer service team, are they already angry?

An Increasingly Angry Customer Culture

Last month, I interviewed Carolyn Kopprasch, chief happiness officer at Buffer. She said:

“We live in a culture that has trained customers to start on the offensive just to get good service…Often, you don’t get to talk to a manager or someone with authority to solve your problem unless you say a curse word.”

This is, sadly, the case for many organizations.  Consider companies with which you do business in your personal or business life.  If something goes wrong and you need help, what happens?  How do you find that help?  And how do you feel by the time you call or send them an email?  I’m going to venture a guess that by the time you make that contact, you’ve tried a number of things—to no avail—and are pretty angry.

In fact, a recent report (“Duck and Cover:  More Customers Are Experiencing Rage”) on customer rage shows “customer satisfaction over a company’s ability to solve a complaint is no higher today than it was in the 1970s” and “customer dissatisfaction over complaint resolution has increased eight points in the past two years.”

This culture of anger is the result of a widely practiced approach to helping customers that is designed to lower costs for the company.  This approach is also thought to improve the speed of resolution, but it often just creates bad experiences.

The practice is one of self-help or community driven help (the latter being very common in the technology business).  Companies will try to figure out what most customers need help with and then post those issues on their websites in some form of FAQ.  The assumption is that most people will go there, find the answer, and solve their problem.  The advantage for the company is there is zero marginal cost to help each customer.

The second step of this practice is a community driven approach. The company will form some sort of online forum and allow customers to post questions and answer each other’s questions.  The underlying assumption is that someone else has had the problem before and can help solve it.

This is not a zero cost approach, as many companies also have customer service team members watching the forums, adding comments and solutions and, sometimes, looking for common problems or requests that can point to product improvements.  But it is a very low-cost approach to helping customers.  And it puts a big onus on customers to seek and provide their own support.

The next step is to contact someone at the company on a customer service team.  While a few companies don’t provide any direct contact capability, most do, either by telephone or email.

But by the time the customer reaches that point, they have probably tried to solve it through the other two methods, maybe had some unpleasant exchanges with forum members or employees, and have probably been forced to search the FAQs repeatedly to try to solve the problem on their own.

In other words, they’re angry.

Guiding Your Customer Service Team

Four things you can do to avoid this:

1.   Stop making it us vs. them.Four Ways to Improve Your Customer Service Team

When your customer contacts you and is frustrated, angry or worse, it’s your customer service team’s job to take the company’s side. However, your rep should take away the need to take sides at all. The conversation should never be about what the customer wants vs. what the company will do.

The only conversation your customer service team should have with your customer is about the result they need to achieve and how they can help the customer get there. If every interaction is not designed around that idea, your customers will see your customer service team and your company as “against” them, and they will get even angrier.

2.   Know why your customers are getting angry.

Don’t just ask. Measure. Don’t be biased by the loudest and angriest customers (perpetuating your contribution to the anger culture), but look at all your customer interactions and know why escalations happen.

Once you identify points of frustration, you can act to intervene. Depending on the issue, you can post simple solutions on your help pages or accelerate personal contact when a particular issue is raised. The better you get at directing more of your customers to their desired outcome, the happier your customers will be.

3.  Learn your customers’ interaction preferences.

Some of us like to talk through our issues with someone. Others like to do research and solve it themselves.

Do you know what your customers prefer? Are you providing it? Or are you making assumptions that result in more escalations than needed?

Talk to your colleagues in marketing, and steal one idea. Ask who is good at developing what marketing people call “personas,” and create the ones you need. Figure out how to identify what type of problem solver each customer is and what you need to deliver to have them walk away happy.

4.  Be honest.

If your customer has a problem, you have a problem. It doesn’t matter if it might be their fault. If you don’t eliminate your rep’s need to take sides and help your customer get the outcome they need, it’s going to be your problem, one way or another.

When you have a problem, admit it (“yes, I can see how the instructions are not that clear about that”). Show understanding. If it’s not your fault, help your customer get past it. If it is, be direct and just fix it.

When your customer service reps get to the point of quoting warranty limits, user agreements and company policy, you have lost — not just the conversation, but the customer — and you can kiss repeat business goodbye.

Are you already doing some of these?  Are they working?  Tell us what you think!

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Customer Service Culture Keeps Customers Coming Back

Best Customer Service

Below are  examples  of two very different customer service cultures.  Which would you prefer? Let’s say you have to bring your car in for repair.  The mechanic diagnoses the problem. Would you choose:

A)  The shop where the mechanic tells you:  “This is a simple issue.  We fix these all the time.  It’s not going to be any problem at all.  Your car will be good as new in a few hours.  Just go about your business, and I’ll call you when it’s ready.” or

B)  The shop where the mechanic tells you, “Your car’s coolant system has three leaks in different hoses.  The hoses are easy to access, and I have replacements in stock.  It will take me two or three hours to replace the hoses and test them to be sure they are working.  I’ll call you as soon as I’m done.”

If you’re like me, not only do you prefer option (B), but if you run into the mechanic in option (A), you’re likely not to come back (and maybe not even leave your car in the first place).

The reason is we don’t like to be dismissed, and we don’t like condescension.  The mechanic in option (A) was condescending and a bit insulting. She assumed we not only have no idea how our car works but that we don’t care to know and will trust her implicitly. The mechanic in option (B) showed respect for our knowledge, ownership of the car, and likely, our time.

Is your company’s customer service  insulting your customers without even knowing it?

I’ll give you another example of good and bad customer service.  Recently, I contacted technical support for two different software products.  Both are websites that run SaaS products.  Both issues were simple ones that required little explanation and should have been easy to identify as issues (I can’t say how hard they would be to fix).

Company 1 responded like this:

We really appreciate you bringing us this kind of issue affecting our software’s performance.  Rest assured our developers are fully aware of the changes and the glitches that occurred after the software update.  They have made these adjustments their top priority to ensure our software is as stable as possible.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.

Company 2 responded like this:

Thanks so much for writing in!  This is a great question, not too odd at all! 🙂  I’m afraid there isn’t a great solution for this at the moment.  Sorry about that. 🙁  We haven’t figured out a great way for it to know to re-look for the image and description if nothing shows up at first.  Great idea though, and we definitely see the value of it.

Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you on that one.  Is there anything else I can do to help or any questions I can answer?

I’m guessing you know which one I thought was well-done and which I thought was disingenuous

Company 1’s response is more troubling than just a dismissive response.  It points to a customer service culture that assumes customers want reassurance and kind words above all else.  It suggests that the company’s customer service protocol has guidelines or even templates that advance the idea that customers are to be dealt with and dismissed as quickly as possible.

This was reinforced after my follow-up question asking if they knew about the specific issue and might be working on it.  I was told there are many issues on which the developers are working and that I could be certain they would be informed of this one.  Further reinforcing the dismissive approach, five days later the company announced an update that resolved the specific issue.  I have to assume someone there knew that this update was coming yet failed to communicate that to me.

Company 2’s response points to a customer service culture of openness and honesty.  Telling me that there is “no great solution” admits the software has shortcomings and just can’t do everything all the time.  This is true of all products of all kinds.  Being direct about the limitations and aspirations of your product shows both honesty and confidence in your ability to deliver value to your customer.

My cultural assumptions were reinforced on follow-up exchanges, where I offered an idea for a solution, and an interesting discussion on how to best get the specific value I needed from the product ensued.

Evaluating customer service

Far too many companies evaluate the performance of technical support or customer service success on how quickly issues can be resolved and how friendly the language of the company’s representative is.  Both of these measures lead the customer service teams to shorten their responses, use more reassuring and friendly (not honest and direct) language, and to be dismissive of customer issues in the hope they will accept answers such as those above from Company 1 and go away.

But customers are evolving the other way.  Customers demand more details and honestly from companies, as well as more and more transparency.

In order to meet the needs of this evolving customer, companies must also change their customer service culture and the metrics that support it.  For example, rather than measuring duration of interactions, you might measure how many interactions it takes for the customer to consider the issue resolved.  You might also want to measure how much progress each interaction made toward resolving the issue (if it makes no progress, you are wasting time and angering your customer).  Your metrics should always focus on what the customer perceives as progress and what your customer perceives as a resolution.

Is your company’s customer service  culture dismissing and alienating your customers?

Try acting like a customer with a problem for a day, and go find out.  Then tell us your story in the comments.
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Investing in Your Customer (to Avoid Customer Churn)

I had lunch with a friend recently who ran customer success for a SaaS  company.  Customer success in the SaaS business is typically responsible for handling customer support and service to build renewals when they come due while avoiding customer churn (customers who do not renew).

As we discussed the issues surrounding delivering a great customer experience and handling renewal sales, he commented that his biggest surprise was how much customer churn hurt his business.  He noted that every percentage point increase in churn had a multiplier effect on the top line for the business.

I had lunch with a friend recently who ran customer success for a SaaS  company.  Customer success in the SaaS business is typically responsible for handling customer support and service to build renewals when they come due while avoiding churn (customers who do not renew).

I’d be repeating myself if I included a rant on how keeping customers coming back is the only way to realize the return you expect on your investment in customer acquisition.  So instead, let’s talk about investing and how you can apply some very simple investment concepts to your marketing ROI.

Let’s talk bonds to demonstrate customer churn.

I know:  bonds are much less exciting than stocks when it comes to investing, but if you’ve listened to any of the decent advice out there, you probably have a reasonable percentage of your portfolio invested in bonds.

Here’s the thing about bonds:  they provide you with an income stream.  You expect the issuer to pay the coupon on the bond (the debt payment) at the scheduled interval. The market places a value on the bond that is largely based on the dollar amount of those coupon payments, the time over which they will be paid, and the current market interest rates.  If all goes well, you invest a lump sum and get paid back with interest over time.

Sometimes, all does not go well.  I hope it’s rare for your portfolio, but defaults happen. Companies (sometimes even governments) fail to make the coupon payments.  When this happens, you lose your money.  Yes, it’s part of the risk of investing, but it also means your money is gone.  Not exactly the outcome you wanted.

Connecting bonds, marketing, and churn.

Marketers have been talking about a concept called “customer lifetime value” for the past few years.  Whether you are in a business that depends on subscribers or repeat customers, you can look at your customer the same way you look at a bond:  you pay some amount up front (your acquisition cost), and you get a revenue stream that comes in at predictable intervals over time.  As with the coupon payments on a bond, you can use the risk of the market and net present value formulas to determine the value of a customer’s revenue.

But sometimes customers don’t come back or don’t renew.  The difference is that this happens at a much higher rate than bond defaults.  For some SaaS software companies, customer churn (the rate of non-renewals) can be as high as 30% annually.

Let me show you what this does to your portfolio or your top line in marketing terms.

For the sake of simplicity and illustration, let’s assume you have 1,000 customers today, and those customers are paying you $100 per month for your service.  Let’s also say you are a fast growing company, hitting growth rates of 50% annually.  Here’s what churn (or customers not coming back) does to your business over three years.

MRR - Churn Rates
Click on chart to enlarge.

On the chart above, the green line shows monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth over three years, assuming there is no churn.  The yellow line shows the same growth rate, but assumes 10% churn.  The red line shows the same growth rate, but assumes 30% churn.

If you lose 30% of your customers every year for three years, your revenue is lowered by 56%.

If your portfolio underperformed by 56%, I’m guessing you’d be looking for a new investment adviser.  Likewise, if your revenue is 56% below where it should be, I’m wondering if your CFO isn’t thinking about a new CMO.

I’ve been fortunate to work with many companies who understand the financial leverage keeping customers holds for your company.  And I’ve helped a few gain insight into this leverage.

Which leads me to ask:

– Are you investing appropriately in keeping those customers?
– Does your company know how many customers it’s losing?

Tell us how you’re getting it right (or wish you were) in the comments.

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Getting It Just Right: Measuring Customer Success

In an earlier post, I discussed how to get measuring customer success right.  It sparked quite a few questions about how to choose the measurement and how to ensure it causes you to be aligned with your customer’s business success.  Here are some thoughts about how to get it just right.

The Goldilocks Customer Success Metric

In my earlier post, I compared two public safety companies that had very Measuring Customer Successdifferent measurements of how their customers became successful because of their products.

One was RedFlex, whose most often cited metric was the number of red light tickets issued because of their cameras (though, I don’t think they want to be measured this way).  This metric misses the mark, because it does not measure an outcome that is of value to the people who have to make a decision on the purchase of the camera system.  The goal is public safety, not more tickets.

In contrast, ShotSpotter (SST) measured a variety of outcomes, including number of arrests resulting from gunshots detected and number of convictions made easier because of their data.  The goal—public safety—is the same, but the metrics are directly relevant to the outcome.

Let’s analyze these:

Neither company chose what I’ll call the “papa bear” metric, which is something such as increased public safety.  This metric is far too broad, far too hard to measure, and while both companies do something that affects public safety, neither can claim to have increased it directly.

The number of tickets metric, which I’ll call the “mama bear” metric, is too narrow.  It measures the direct result of the system, but it does not take into account any of the results the activity produces.

The number of arrests metric is the Goldilocks metric (or one of them).  It’s not the direct result of the system (you could measure number of gunshots identified), and it does not claim to be a panacea for all police issues.  It does measure an outcome most of us can link directly to which is increased public safety (criminals get arrested), and one the immediate buyer (police department) and the ultimate buyer (political leadership) can relate to and definitely care about.

One alternative to the number of tickets metric might be to look at the total number of accidents at intersections with red light cameras.  For most of us, fewer accidents mean safer streets.

So How Do You Choose Your Customer Success Metric?

Let’s assume for the moment you are selling to a business.

Papa Bear 

Increase revenue or reduce costs.  I hope whatever it is you are selling to the business does one or both of these, or I suspect your prospective customer will never buy.  That said, with very few exceptions, your product or service probably does not directly do either one, and the outcomes of your product are not “more revenue.”  They should do things that lead to one of these two.

These are the wrong metrics.

Mama Bear 

More twitter followers (sorry, social media folks, this isn’t a business outcome).  This is certainly a metric, but for most businesses, it doesn’t produce something effective, nor does it (in any meaningful way) affect costs or revenue.  It’s too narrow, and too immediate. Other examples are things such as, “keeps all your customer activity in one place” or “ensures everyone knows the correct procedures.”

Those might be things your product does, but they are not why your customer buys.

The Goldilocks Metric (encore) 

If you were selling a product to a marketing department, the outcome might be “produces more leads in the pipeline” or “shortens the time to conversion to a sale.”  Both of those are things your product might do where you can measure the effect your product has on either number of leads or time to conversion, and the metric has a credible effect on the business (in these examples, more revenue).

In another recent post, I discussed Christensen’s idea of “hiring” a product to “do a job.” Your customer has a job they need done (e.g., they need more leads).  That’s something they hire a product to do.  And it’s something you can measure before and after they buy your product, so you and they can tell how effective your product is for them.

Another way to consider this is that every team, every group, and every department in a company has business objectives they can measure.  Your product needs to help their measurement of at least one of those business objectives moving in the right direction.

The Goldilocks metric has to be specific and countable.   ShotSpotter counts the number of prosecutions and convictions that use their data.  You can count number of leads, length of sales cycle, reduction in overhead, etc.

So finding the right metric is really simple:   It is a business objective, and it is countable.

Get that right, and you’ll have no trouble getting your customers to show you just how successful you are for them.  Which is just right.

Tell us how you are measuring your customers’ success in the comments.

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Has Marketing Failed Sales?

J W Marketing Wheel

A few weeks ago, at the Sales 2.0 conference, I noticed a trend:  salespeople are generating their own leads.  In fact, I heard pundit after pundit offer justifications for salespeople to be more proactive and take lead generation into their own hands, including statistics showing that as few as 30% of the leads sent to sales by marketing are worthy of pursuit.

Isn’t it marketing’s job to deliver qualified (or at least pursuit worthy) leads to sales?  So has marketing failed? 

Well, no, not exactly.  There are two significant (you might call them disruptive) trends happening at the same time in lead generation:  the individualization of technology and social selling.

Marketing is less well equipped than sales to take advantage of these.  Sales, especially the individual salesperson, is far better equipped to experiment with new methods, processes, and technologies than any marketing department can be, if only because of the scale.  And marketing has significant responsibilities beyond lead generation, including leading and developing the company’s relationship with prospects, customers, and all other stakeholders and stewarding the company’s brand.

But in order to be successful, marketing will have to watch these trends- and how salespeople take advantage of them- and figure out how to make them part of everyday marketing in order to stay relevant.

Trend One:  The Individualization of Technology

Technology has migrated from huge systems only practical for large institutions to apps any individual can use anywhere, anytime. In the same way, systems which large corporations use to manage their resources are now available for individuals, including cloud based (SaaS) services such as CRM and marketing automation.

Companies such as Nimble and Contractually provide cloud based services that are designed for (and priced for) individual salespeople to do the essential parts of what a more cumbersome CRM system once did. They manage everything from contacts to social relationships to follow-ups to engagement opportunities.

What is important about this is these services can be used by an individual salesperson to find opportunities and generate leads entirely on his or her own, even while working within a larger corporate CRM system.

In fact, my friend Matt Heinz offered a wealth of tips and tricks (he calls them ”sales hacks”) for individual salespeople to use as a range of tools to create a robust lead flow- all independent of any marketing department (yes, this works very well for sole proprietors, too!).

Trend Two:  Social Selling

Social selling means salespeople can use their social networks and the activity they generate to find prospects and identify buying signals.  For example, if I were selling marketing automation software, and a 2nd degree LinkedIn connection just took a new job as CMO (a possible buying signal) for a company in my market, I would want to contact that person.  I might find that out through the activity generated in my own social network and then find out more about that person through their own social and other activity.  I would then have a connection that can introduce me and would also know how to approach my newly discovered prospect.

Notice I am not looking in my CRM system for a lead that has not been touched in a while nor am I looking for an introduction from my management.  Salespeople (presumably) have their own networks they can use to find the connections they want and need.

Services such as TwitHawk and Newsle offer this kind of social signal search service, and Nimble and Contactually integrate it into the activity stream.

When you put all this together, you have a powerful new source of very well-qualified leads for the salesperson to pursue.

So Where Is Marketing?

Marketing departments have done a very good job of adapting to the world of on-line and social media, and they have found ways to successfully get the word out.  Marketing departments have also become very good at doing this on a large scale, just as they became very good at large scale communication in traditional media.

But even the most targeted integrated email and social media campaigns reach thousands- sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands- of people in the hope that a small percentage will be sufficiently interested to become leads and prospects.

Salespeople are looking at this from the other direction.  They are ignoring the scale of reaching mass markets and large target audiences, and instead, using the power of atomized technology and social media combined to find the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack- who they are pretty sure is an interested prospect.

Can Marketing Adapt?

Should marketing change its approach and focus on finding individuals?  No.  Well, maybe.

Marketing must look after its whole scope of responsibilities and ensure there are strong relationships with customers, prospects, and other stakeholders.  Marketing must also continue to use its ability to scale communications to ensure large audiences are reached.

In fact, without doing this first, the salesperson may never have the chance to find that one interested prospect.

But marketers must also become proficient in a world that has become individualized.  This individualization has happened not only in how sales leads are found but also in how relationships and brand preferences are developed.  Marketers must be able to take all the activities where they focus on the mass market and find ways to translate or evolve them into individual relationships.

It’s easy for individual salespeople to experiment with new methods and technologies, and they are finding some of them very useful.  Marketers must find ways to experiment with new methods, processes, and technologies to find the ones that work in this changing world.

The challenge marketers face is learning how to scale this individualization to reach the mass audience so the company can scale its individual relationships.

And marketing can deliver more relevant leads.

Join the conversation:  post a comment telling us how you are addressing this issue.

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Jeff Weinberger

DS3 founder Jeff Weinberger found his passion in helping organizations identify and develop critical, yet often overlooked, strategic opportunities. With a reputation for being innovative and, well, disruptive, he helps organizations maximize the value of their key relationships to create, adapt to and capitalize on disruption in their markets. A recognized thought-leader, speaker, writer and blogger on sustainability, disruptive marketing and Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technology issues, Jeff’s writings can be found at http://www.dsthree.com/blah-blah-blog/ and at @jweinberger.
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Make Remote Work Work: 9 Ways to Succeed & 5 Myths Debunked

Remote Work

If you’ve been paying attention to the news out of Silicon Valley recently, it would be hard to miss the uproar about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decree that Yahoo! would no longer allow its people to work from home.

I spent several years leading marketing and internal communications for the remote work program at Cisco Systems. During that time, our policies evolved and grew into a sophisticated program designed to create competitive advantage for Cisco in both its access to skilled workforce and in serving its customers.

I don’t want to jump into the debate about Yahoo!, nor do I want to discuss how organizations and employees benefit from remote work. My colleague Faith LeGendre has covered that very well.

I want to take a closer look at how to make remote work (which includes working from home, working in a remote location, or even just having a geographically diverse team) actually work well and benefit both the company and the employee.

Remote work is also for hard-working professionals!First, let me debunk a few myths:

  • Working from home is not with young children.
  • Working remotely is not just about wanting schedule flexibility for personal needs.
  • Working remotely to achieve a flexible schedule does not reduce productivity.
  • When remote work programs fail, it’s generally because of poor technology planning or a lack of good management practices.
  • Collaboration and informal interaction do not require being in the same location.

Making a remote work program work for the benefit of everyone requires hard work and a shift in thinking on the part of both the employee and the company. The goal of a remote work program should be to make employees just productive from anywhere as they would be in an office.

For the company and the remote worker’s manager, these practices will help make you and your people successful and productive no matter where they are:

1. Shift your thinking from presence focused to results focused.

  • One of managers’ most common complaints about people who work remotely is that they can’t see whether they are working. I suggest that your inoffice workers are probably also pretty adept at making you think they are working even when they are not. But it just doesn’t matter.
  • Whether your people are in your office or somewhere else, remember that you hired them to produce results. It may require a bit more rigor on your part, but make sure both you and they understand what those results are and how you expect them to be achieved.
  • Be honest: if your people are producing great results, does it matter whether they did all the work between 9 and 5? Or is it OK with you if they did some of the work at 3 AM?
  • This also means you need to set expectations and have an explicit agreement on when the remote worker will be reachable for emergencies and other time critical matters. Make sure you know what you actually need and what is reasonable to expect.

2. Be reasonable and allow yourself a learning curve.

  • Managing remote workers is not easy. You will find that shifting your thinking, measuring results in a different way, and trusting your workers more completely than you likely have before is challenging and requires a learning curve.
  • Don’t expect more from your remote workers than from your inoffice workers (though you will probably get more) and watch yourself for inequities in your treatment of the two. This will get easier with time, and it will be much easier if your company’s HR team provides support and training.

3. Create formal agreements and stick to them.

  • Your remote workers should know what you expect from them, and you should know how they are meeting those expectations.
  • When you either hire a remote worker or change an inoffice worker into a remote worker, create a formal written agreement. Outline everything from objectives, expected results, response times, and availability to reporting and collaborating with colleagues across the company.

You might have to buy new technology to make remote work work.4. Get the technology right.

  • Don’t skimp. The technology available in today’s market for making remote workers effective is both very good and very affordable. Make sure you have the technology that allows your remote workers to get the job done as efficiently as your inoffice workers.
  • For the remote worker, make sure you work effectively and follow these ideas to help your management realize as much benefit as you do from your working remotely:

5. It’s not about your convenience; it’s about producing results.

  • As with so many communications you have with your management, explaining why you need this ”privilege” just doesn’t cut it. Explain how it will benefit your manager and the company. Show how you will make it work. Sell your manager on trusting you to make it work.

6. Take it slowly.

  • Don’t walk into your manager’s office and announce your plan to work remotely full-time starting Monday. Start with one or two days per week. Create milestones that show your part-time remote work plan works. Then go to three days per week. Then four.
  • When you are choosing which days to start with, intentionally choose days that will show that you can work effectively. For example, choose a day when a weekly team meeting occurs, then demonstrate your outstanding participation in that meeting while sitting in your living room.

7. Demonstrate results.

  • If there is one single key to success in remote work, this is it: create external objective evidence of your work. Your management will not see every bit of work you do remotely. But they can always see the outcome of your work.
  • For example, let’s say your job is to run email marketing campaigns. You and they both know lots of planning and collaboration go into creating those campaigns. But they may or may not see that. What they will see is that the campaign launched and produced results.

8. Learn to collaborate online.

  • Both structured and impromptu collaboration can easily happen from anywhere. But for most of us, it’s not natural to strike up informal conversations electronically.
  • I can’t put too fine a point on this: learn how. Getting good at making connections and developing relationships with people you can’t (and may never) see is critical to your success.

9. Overcoming resistance is about proving success.

  • This is generic but critical to making it work. Some managers will resist the idea of having someone work remotely. You can’t change the culture overnight, but you can create opportunities to prove success. Create trial remote work times. Develop result focused plans for making it succeed.
  • When the trial period ends, make sure you have lots of evidence of success to show your manager the benefits and start planning for a larger trial. Make your success available to others also: the more people who show and prove success, the faster the culture of resistance will change.

The list of benefits of remote work for both employees and employers is seemingly endless, so there’s no reason not to get started. Remember, if your people can’t work remotely for you, they might just work remotely for your competition.

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Timing Matters: A Different Way To Fill Your Pipeline

by Jeff Weinberger    

As marketers, we are very good at understanding our products, knowing how they bring value to our customers, and helping JW Sales Funnel.jpgour customers translate our products into that value.  We know how to promote our products and how to target market segments and different buyers with the right messages in the right channels to make sure everyone in our market knows about the benefits of our offerings and can bring them.

We work to generate interest and then determine if the person interested is ”qualified” (meaning, generally, they can buy our product), then we create what we call a lead. Sometimes those leads buy, and sometimes (likely the majority of the time) they don’t and are sent to the cultivation pool.  There, we do things to keep in contact until they are ready to buy.

To do all of this, we run campaigns that target certain profiles of buyers.  Those might be by preferences, industry, or some other market segmentation.

But what if we segment by time?  What if we run campaigns targeting people who are ready to buy?

One of the ways I help my clients is to use the massive amounts of data they have about their prospects and customers to discover the actual triggers that cause prospects to make buying decisions and customers to make repeat buying or renewal decisions.  Once you have this information, you can go beyond a simple understanding of the reasons they buy to gain insight into what events trigger the decision.

Then, you can focus your campaigns around these events.

Consumer marketers have been great at this for decades.  You know this if you’ve ever bought a house or gotten married.  Suddenly, new homeowners are flooded with catalogs and emails promoting interior design, home improvement, and other related products new homeowners typically need.  Brides- and grooms-to-be are inundated with ads for wedding services, flower arranging, music performance, and other wedding related services.

Can this translate into the B2B world?  Of course it can!  But it has not done so very well.  At least not yet.

I recently talked with a vendor of marketing automation systems about their segmentation, and it turned out that they were very good at selling their system to young, growing companies.  So they were running campaigns targeted at those companies.  I asked them to review about 50 recent sales to this type of company, looking for things their sales reps knew had happened to the customer in the months before the sale.

There were several things that seemed to be common, but one that stood out was the closing of a fund-raising round (typically what Silicon Valley folks call a ”B” round). Suddenly the company had money, and the primary use of that money was to invest in customer growth- meaning marketing and sales investment.  One of the first things they did was to buy a marketing automation system.

After this, they started running a campaign targeted specifically at companies who had just closed a ”B” round of funding.  And, yes:  conversion rates shot through the roof.  Contact-to-lead ratios jumped dramatically.  Cost-per-lead dropped.

The next question is:  where do you find the people or companies that have recently experienced a buying trigger event?  Depending on the event for which you are looking, there may be publications or data sources that list these.  In the example above, we used some of the popular venture capital publications to get the lists of companies and then merged that with the data already in the CRM system.

If the event you choose does not have a data source or publication associated with it, you can use both traditional and social research techniques to find both the companies and the people (If you sell marketing solutions, imagine finding the tweet posted by someone you didn’t previously know celebrating their appointment as CMO.  You’d probably want to get in touch with them). This can require some data scrubbing, but it will yield a much higher quality of lead.

The important question we miss all too often is, ”When do our customers buy?”  We are quite good (I hope) at knowing why, but knowing when is just as important.

Selling to your prospects when they are ready to consider buying changes your lead generation and cultivation strategy.  You can become much more efficient in your outbound efforts and much less annoying to all those customers who just don’t want to hear from you this week.

I challenge you to consider:  do you know any events that trigger a buying decision in your customer?  Are you using that knowledge to create time-based segmentation?

Because in creating an effective and efficient lead generation machine, timing matters.

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Jeff Weinberger

DS3 founder Jeff Weinberger found his passion in helping organizations identify and develop critical, yet often overlooked, strategic opportunities. With a reputation for being innovative and, well, disruptive, he helps organizations maximize the value of their key relationships to create, adapt to and capitalize on disruption in their markets. A recognized thought-leader, speaker, writer and blogger on sustainability, disruptive marketing, and Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technology issues, Jeff’s writings can be found at http://www.dsthree.com/blah-blah-blog/ and at @jweinberger.
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Stop Enabling Your Customers! And Get Your Product “Hired” Now

by Jeff Weinberger      

Have you ever heard product or service claims like these:

  • [Our service] enables executives to achieve their top priorities.
  • [Our product] enables you to make better use of your network to help the people you trust.
  • [Our product] enables you to create beautiful native mobile apps styled with CSS.

These are typical examples of statements that all too often appear as the headline of product data or sell sheets, web pages, and other promotional material.  Two of these examples come from small companies you probably don’t know, and one comes from a large company you probably do know.  And while this type of phrasing is all the rage in Silicon Valley, it pervades plenty of other industries as well.

But it says nothing.

Brand Product Dev.jpg

Or at least nothing useful.  In these headlining statements, the companies producing the product have failed to communicate to the potential buyer why it is so important to the buyer to have the product or service being offered.

Of course, we want to enable our customers to do something that is of value, but all too often, when I see statements like the above, the value is either misplaced or misunderstood.  This is often indicative of a serious underlying issue with the positioning of the product or service.

Allow me to explain.

In his seminal work on innovation, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen points out that every product, in order to be successful, must have a job.  This means that in order for any person or organization to buy a product or service, they must have a job they want that product to do, and then they make a decision to ”hire” the product or service to do that job.

Sometimes we know well the job we need done.  A simple, if dated, example of this is the personal computer.  When PCs were first brought to market in the 1970s, they were hobbyist toys.  Then along came Dan Bricklin with a program called VisiCalc, and suddenly companies could ”hire” personal computers to do the arithmetic that had taken junior accountants much of their day to accomplish.  As the versatile computer became more of an office presence, it found more and more jobs to do but would never have been there in the first place had it not had a job in the first place.

Sometimes we don’t know the job we need done until it shows up in front of us.  A personal example goes back just two years to when I bought my first iPad.  As Silicon Valley marketing professional, I was a fairly mobile worker able to find ways to be reasonably productive from pretty much anywhere, whether traveling on business or working from home.  Once I learned how to connect my iPad to all the relevant services, however, I became a walking office.  Everywhere I went, all I had to do was open the iPad and suddenly there was no difference between being in an office and being anywhere else.  The iPad did the job of making me location-independent (or as one of my campaigns put it, ”as productive from anywhere as I am at my desk”).  I wasn’t very aware I needed that job done, but once it was being done, there was no question that I had made a great ”hire.”

So what’s the problem with statements like those above?  They don’t connect the value of the product or service to the value the potential buyer needs.  The marketers behind them found a really cool thing that their product enables, but they either failed to connect it to something their buyer needs or communicate that connection.  This is a serious positioning error that could cost you your ability to successfully enter a market or overtake competition.

Fortunately, the solution is simple, and it is nothing more than great positioning. Here’s how:

  1. Understand your intended customer’s needs:  What do they need done for them?  What needs does this create?  Which needs are being met and which are not?  Can you identify any needs they have – or soon will – of which they are not aware?
  2. Look carefully at your own capabilities:  not just your product or service but the whole range of capabilities your company, including its people and technologies, can bring to the market to serve those needs.
  3. Match your capabilities to the identified customer needs and figure out exactly how your capabilities meet those needs.
  4. Communicate as potential results your customers can achieve rather than things they could do, which will allow them to understand the compelling reasons to ”hire” your product or service.

There is one more pitfall.  Many of the start-up companies with which I work fall into the trap of defining customer needs as what they want them to be (or, in the worst cases, wish they were).  It’s nice to think your customers should have a need to do whatever your product does for them, but (as we so often have to remind ourselves) we do not get to define what customers need and why.  Our task is to discover the actual needs and meet them.

When you define customer needs, make sure you do not believe your own mythology.  Make sure your findings are grounded in reality.

So stop enabling.  Start solving problems and creating results.  And your product will be the one that gets ”hired” over and over.

***********

Don’t miss a MENG Blend post. Sign up now for direct delivery to your email inbox.

**********MENG is the indispensable community of executive level marketers who share their passion and expertise to ensure each member’s success.

Learn more – – – Apply for membership

Weinberger_headshot_2012_new (2).jpg

Jeff Weinberger DS3 founder Jeff Weinberger found his passion in helping organizations identify and develop critical, yet often overlooked, strategic opportunities. With a reputation for being innovative and, well, disruptive, he helps organizations maximize the value of their key relationships to create, adapt to and capitalize on disruption in their markets. A recognized thought-leader, speaker, writer and blogger on sustainability, disruptive marketing and Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technology issues, Jeff’s writings can be found at http://www.dsthree.com/blah-blah-blog/ and at @jweinberger.

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Keep Your Customers Coming Back: How to Market to Returning Customers

by Jeff Weinberger     

WelcomeBack.jpgAre you in a business that depends on returning customers?  Or a business that sells a subscription service?  If you are, then you already know intuitively that bringing your customers back – or ensuring they renew – is the lifeline of your business.

Knowing that, are you spending disproportionately on new customer acquisition and leaving renewals to a customer service team that lacks the incentive to maximize return/renewal revenue?

Many of my clients are in the technology industry, which is in the midst of making an industrywide shift from one-time product sales to subscription based services (the trend to so-called cloud computing is leading the way).  In the old model, it was fair to assume that once a customer purchased a product, they would most likely use it and then buy smaller add-ons, such as upgrades or service contracts.  In that model, most of the revenue came from the initial purchase, so most of the marketing and sales effort went into new customer acquisition.

But as the model has shifted, the investment has not kept pace.  My clients see symptoms such as customer service teams that are expected to renew their customers but have little or no incentive to do so or sales reps that have no incentives tied to long-term customer success.  The result?  Churn (customer turnover) rates as high as 33% are common.

So how do you keep one-third of your revenue from walking out the door every year?

The most common response I get when I ask this question is, ”Good customer service.”  But what does that mean?  It’s usually measured by anything from product performance, to support center response/resolution rate, or to customer satisfaction survey scores.  This is all good, and these are desirable results.  But they are not (necessarily) what keeps your customers coming back.

To succeed in a repeat customer or subscription renewal business, you need to do two things very differently:

  1. 1. Redefine your business strategy and goals to align with this desired result.
  2. 2. Create metrics that both demonstrate success and allow consistent incentives to be   

    provided to those teams responsible for that success.

Aligning Your Business Strategy

You have, I presume, a very successful sales and marketing strategy and process for acquiring new customers.  Do you have a parallel sales and marketing process for bringing customers back?  This won’t be the same approach as customer acquisition, but it will take advantage of the existing relationship – and everything you know about your customer and how they value your products.

The information you have from your ongoing customer relationships will determine how to set strategy and process for renewal/return sales and marketing.  To define that strategy, you must answer questions such as