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Customer Manufacturing Update |  |
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Dear Mitchell,
Here is your May Customer Manufacturing
Update. Mergers, acquisitions, strategic alliances
and other combines are the rage again in some
industries. Even if your company is not directly
involved, if any of your competitors are, then your
marketplace and customers or potential customers
are affected.
If you have friends or colleagues who would
appreciate receiving this e-zine, feel free to forward
a copy to them using the "Forward e-mail" link at the
bottom of the e-zine.
The headlines might read that it was a perfect merger for strategic reasons. However, when reading this analysis how often do you even read the word "customer" in the companies' press releases or the analysts commentary? Without customers, no company lasts. So, why are customers the forgotten step child in mergers and alliances and how can you use that to your advantage? This month's white paper, written by our Northern California based principal, Bayard Bookman, looks at at this issue and provides insight into how you might capitalize on the miscues of others.
What does the term "sales process" mean to you? For some it means the use of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) or SFA (Sales Force Automation) software. And those are simply tools to manage activities. The Random House Dictionary defines a process as "a systematic series of actions directed to some end." This is clearly applicable to the desired result of sales. That this desired result is not always achieved by Sales, or at least not consistently, is usually due to a lack of appropriate sales management. Is your sales process producing the desired results? Is it doing so cost effectively? Is it getting better over time? Every process is perfectly constructed to achieve the results it does. If you aren't happy with the results of your sales process, maybe its time for a sales process redesign. How do you go about redesigning your sales process? There are several approaches you can use and we recommend a "classic" process redesign approach. (For more about process redesign see our white paper, Business Process Improvement Applied to Marketing/Sales.) The so-called classic approach uses the following steps:
Easy to describe, but not necessarily easy to do. Some of the obstacles that are likely to get in your way include:
As we all know, doing more of what you are currently doing, is only going to get you more of what you are currently getting. If you want different results, you are going to have to do things differently. Changing sales people or sales managers is not the real solution. If it were, you'd have solved the problem by now. Deming taught management fifty years ago that people are not usually the problem. It is the process those people are forced to work in that is limiting performance. How will you know when it is time to change how you manage your sales process?
Mitch and Ralph have a
blog. If you haven't seen it, you may want to check
it
out. They post a few times a month depending on
what inspires them. If you like what you see there, you
can
get an RSS feed for new posts. The following was
posted by Mitch a couple of weeks ago. First, yes I do feel safe flying. The airline industry has an impeccable and improving safety record. In addition, pilots have a self-preservation motive to make sure the planes they fly on are safe too. However, the customer issue is a whole different thing. American Airlines instituted a policy last year that no longer allows customers to talk to them about ANYTHING that is not current flight related. If you have a question, feedback, complaint or issue you have to email it to them. And their email response is no where close to prompt in my experience. However this policy has probably done one thing for them. They have found an effective way to reduce customer complaints. Regarding the current debacle, who knows. I have found that most airlines operate as if passengers are an inconvenience to the efficient movement of airplanes. And, since most of the airlines benchmark their performance against each other, the bar is not very high. The better airlines, like Southwest (who was also caught cutting maintenance corners) are usually full and a full airplane is less comfortable than a ½-full airplane. So, flying on the other airlines can have its advantages when they are not full. However, now that the "majors' (not that Southwest is not a major, but Jet Blue certainly isn't) are reducing flights, their flights are full too, so their benefit over Southwest has been reduced. And with Southwest if you buy a business fare or if you fly them a lot, you can guarantee yourself an aisle or window as you prefer no matter when you book. Anyway, as long as the employees of the airlines hate their management, and airline management operates as if customers don't matter, nothing is going to change no matter what the lawmakers try to do. Safety is not really an issue in my opinion, and you can't legislate good service. The market has to demand good service, and since the airlines appear to have banded together to remove that, it makes it tough for the traveler in normal times, much less with the current debacle.
We have written papers in the past on aligning your sales process to support your customer's buying process. We have talked for over 15 years about helping customers buy rather than selling to them. Recently, our friend Reg Nordman of Rocket Builders in Vancouver, BC, posted a valuable reminder of that on his Knights on the Road blog. It was mentioned awhile back that many sales organizations/professionals have a problem when customers self-serve on the Web and enter the sales process further along then they are used to. A "cookie - cutter" response and the resultant outcomes to this were described in Marketing Plans for Service Businesses, by Professor Malcolm McDonald One-to-one communications and principles of relationship marketing, then, demand a radically different sales process from that traditionally practised in service organizations. This point is far from academic, as an example will illustrate. The company in question provides business-to-business financial services. Its marketing managers relayed to us their early experience with a website which was enabling them to reach new customers considerably more cost-effectively than their traditional sales force. When the website was first launched, potential customers were finding the company on the Web, deciding the products were appropriate on the basis of the website, and sending an email to ask to buy. So far, so good. But stuck in the traditional model of the sales process, the company would allocate the 'lead' to a salesperson, who would telephone and make an appointment, perhaps three weeks hence. The customer would by now probably have moved on to another online supplier who could sell the product today, but those that remained were subjected to a sales pitch, complete with glossy materials, which was totally unnecessary, the customer having already decided to buy. Those that were not put off would proceed to be registered as able to buy over the Web, but the company had lost the opportunity to improve its margins by using the sales force more judiciously. In time, the company realized its mistake, and changed its sales model and reward systems to something close to our 'interaction perspective' model. Unlike those prospects which the company proactively identified and contacted, which might indeed need 'selling' to, many new Web customers were initiating the dialogue themselves, and simply required the company to respond effectively and rapidly. The sales force were increasingly freed up to concentrate on major clients and on relationship building. The changing nature of the sales process clearly raises questions for the design of marketing communication, such as: Who initiates the dialogue, and how do we measure the effectiveness of our attempts to do so across multiple channels? How do we monitor the effectiveness not just of what we say to customers but what they say back? And how about the role of marketing communications as part of the value that is being delivered and paid for, not just as part of the sales cost?
We appreciate any feedback you can provide to help us make sure these Updates give you value each month. Feel free to respond to this e-mail with any comments or suggestions for future topics or ways we can make these Customer Manufacturing Updates more valuable to you.
Thank you for your interest, and if we can provide
any
additional assistance in sales, marketing, strategy, or
innovation to help you increase your sales,
let us know.
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