Aug 28, 2012 | Customers, Management, Marketing, Sales
Most of the best ideas are simple, as is the Net promoter Score (NPS) the brainchild of Bain & Co executive Fred Reichheld.
As it gained currency, its simplicity became blurred by unnecessarily imposed complexity, often added it seems, just to make a consulting job seem more complicated.
NPS is really just one simple question:
“How likely are you, on a 1-10 scale to recommend this product/service to a friend or colleague”?
What Reichheld termed “detractors” answer 0-6, “Passives” answer 7 or 8, and “promoters” answer 9 & 10.
A company’s NPS is the percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of detractors. Simple.
The complexity comes often from the sample to whom you direct the question, and it is pretty easy to see how it can be “gamed” by those selections, which happens most often when some senior person reads about NPS, decides it makes sense, and just decrees to the sales force to go ask your customers, and that is exactly what they do, selectively. After all, their bonuses may depend on it.
Aug 24, 2012 | Customers, Sales
I wandered into a car dealer a while ago, largely killing some time, but I do need a new car, sometime soon, so I was tyre kicking with a rough agenda.
One of the salesmen saw me get out of my old Pajero, and instead of sliding up with the typical opener, “got a few beauties here you might like to look at” he said instead, “great car those old Pajeros, don’t make them, like that any more”. A conversation was started, and I was engaged to the point where I will probably have another look when it actually comes to making the change.
Most sales programs I have ever seen are all about the “closing”, 101 techniques for a quick close, but the real opportunity is for an opening, the opening of a conversation.
Aug 21, 2012 | Customers, Management, retail, Sales
Without sales, all the rest of the stuff that goes on in an enterprise is irrelevant. All the lofty strategies, policies, and well intentioned platitudes are dependent on the delivery of sales for their oxygen.
As a senior manager in a large enterprise, I used to annoy, sometimes terminally, marketing personnel by insisting they all spend periods of time, particularly during the annual peak sales periods, out in the field, carrying a bag, talking to the retail personnel of our customers, and interacting with consumers in the retail space.
Most came back energised, engaged and motivated, some did not, and they usually found their career prospects better elsewhere pretty quickly.
Often other functional management also benefitted greatly from seeing how the product they made, counted, delivered, or engineered lived in the sales environment.
50 interactions with intelligent customers and consumers, and those who preferred our competitor products may not be a statistically significant sample, but you will learn more from those interactions than you will from reading expensive research reports behind a desk.
Jul 25, 2012 | Marketing, Sales, Social Media
Sales people are used to being measured by hard metrics, and management is very used to imposing and managing these metrics, and marketers are more inclined now than just a while ago, to have quantifiable measures.
Therein lies one of the challenges of social media.
To varying degrees, SM is not a great sales tool, but it is a great tool to build engagement, and engagement leads to sales, eventually, and amongst other outcomes. It can take the place of the face to face selling, and potentially much of the role of traditional advertising.
When on the web, searching for information, peoples bullshit meter is working, so their receptiveness to advertising may be no greater than in a normal mass media environment, the huge difference being the ability of web advertising to target information at those looking for it. However, on social media, I contend that the bullshit meter is at a lower level, perhaps turned off, as they are seeking to engage, not just seeking information, so information accepted takes on some of the characteristics of endorsement.
Jul 20, 2012 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, retail, Sales
Amidst the moans being heard from bricks and mortar retailers, you can still see in almost any store you choose to enter, opportunities to make the experience of shopping easier.
If it was more social, friendly, service oriented in stores, it follows that shoppers would find it easier to part with their money. Human beings are social animals, we herd, and congregate around things that interest and engage us, so it seems possible to dream up strategies that enable that behavior in a store, to make it an attractive occasion to go there, even if it is to your local supermarket, there are opportunities to reconstruct the experience.
Many consumers in high value categories, from furniture to electronics and whitegoods, are “showrooming”, doing some research on-line, then going into showrooms to have a look at the short list in the physical state, then go out and buy on line. Notice the disconnect there, sales people let them out of the showroom not just without a sale, but without permission to continue the nascent relationship.
On the other hand, I wandered into the Apple store last week, seeking information for a client, went back the next day for an information session targeted at the specific questions I had, and yesterday got a targeted email offering solutions to the problems I outlined in the session.
No wonder the Apple retail stores are breaking all retail records, and they are bricks and mortar, with a huge difference, they work at creating a relationship, recognising that it is the precursor to a sale.
Jul 17, 2012 | Category, Communication, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
Huge amounts of marketing dollars are spent to convince customers to come back. They try the product, leave, or just shop around, so we spend to get them back.
If marketing really was a war, as the analogies often go, it would be the same as expending resources to take a hill, then abandoning it to the enemy, only to have some general say take that hill, so the grunts go through the hell again.
How much easier to have kept it once taken.
