Niche Marketing Matters

E-mail communication with customers can be efficient and easy, but it is easy to fall into a bad habit of only using e-mail to handle customer inquiries. If your goal is to build better relationships with your customers, the telephone may be a better tool.

While talking on the phone can be can be stressful or distasteful in some instances, I find that most of the time you end up doing a better job helping the customer. A by-product of this personal contact is a more evolved relationship which can be more satisfying for provider and customer.

My auto mechanic, Earl, runs a busy shop. Yet, he always finds the time to call me about the status of my car when it is in his shop. His friendly call comforts me that the job is getting done. I count Earl as one my friends and refer him to many of my friends since I know that he will treat them equally well.

An opposite example is my relationship with Google. I recently had a problem with my Google Adwords account which had been infected with malware (corrupt software from an internet pirate). I have had 30 e-mail messages back and forth with the help desk at Google and still have not resolved my problem. I am not happy. I wonder how easily this could have been resolved by a simple phone call. Trust me; at this point I have lost all confidence in Google to solve my problem.

The moral of this story is simple: call your customer whenever possible. It will make you feel better.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

“Promise only what you can deliver. Then deliver more than you promise.”
- Author Unknown

Many customers hesitate to buy because they fear that they might make the wrong decision and regret it later. This fear dominates the purchase decision and may kill the selling opportunity altogether.

One way to minimize this fear, or even eliminate it altogether, is to offer a guarantee. This is not as crazy as it sounds. Presuming your product or service is good and you have few complaints, a guarantee might help you sell more. For the prospective customer, maybe the guarantee will help minimize the risk of doing business with your firm.

Here is the trick: you probably already have an implicit guarantee. For example, if a customer calls you with a quality problem, don’t you fix it or replace the defective product? Don’t you normally bend over backwards when the unhappy customer calls? Of course you do, because it just makes good business sense to do so.

The point is that most of you already have a guarantee policy and just don’t put it your e-mail promotions or your purchase agreements. Think how powerful it is to tell a prospective customer that you guarantee your work, your product, or your service.

Some consumer product based businesses offer guarantees that are “money back” regardless of the customer issue. This type of guarantee is a branding feature, which helps differentiate the business from the competition. I have found “money back” guarantees to be most successful when used for low-priced consumer products and services.

There also seems less impact and greater financial risk for money back guarantees when selling industrial products or high priced goods. For example, you don’t see money back guarantees on Honda automobiles.

Satisfaction guarantees are often a better alternative for these products; promise to make things right, but you don’t give away the farm in the process. Also, don’t confuse a guarantee with a mere cancellation for convenience. I have seen guarantees backfire when a customer is given unconditional cancellation privileges. This can be particularly injurious to long-term service contracts, when the full contract period is needed to ensure sufficient margin.

Finally, like most new ideas, you should test this guarantee first. Try out the guarantee on a customer or customer group. See what happens. With a successful trial, a customer-wide roll-out will go more smoothly.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

Satisfied customers are great, but they can still be teased by a competitor’s lower price or product features. Loyal customers are not swayed by the sweet talk from your competitor since they are committed to doing business with you. The acid test for loyalty is referrals. If your customer refers you to their friends and colleagues, they are loyal. It is as simple as that.

If you ranked all the tools in the marketing tool bag which includes product promotion, pricing, advertising, personal selling, and public relations, you will find that reference accounts top the list in effectiveness. Reference accounts are the most believed and trusted form of marketing. Let your happy clients do your selling for you.

If your existing clients are happy, ask them to write it down or ask them for permission to have a prospect call them. Most of the time they will be glad to help out. If they say no, they will be complimented that you asked.

Peer references resonate because prospects find them believable. Meanwhile, the prospect is disinclined to believe the sales rep, even though the rep may truly be expert on the subject and may know far more than the buyer. This also explains why advertising is such an inefficient tool: it is obviously paid for by the sponsoring firm and is not believable. Likewise, the buyer knows that the rep is paid to sell. References provide a work-around for this trust problem.

By the way, the venture capital community figured out about reference accounts a long time ago. They frequently build portfolios of firms that sell to each other and act as reference accounts for each other. A little incestuous you proclaim? I agree. Nevertheless, it works and I guess all is fair when it comes to the VCs.

No better salesperson exists than the happy customer. Reference accounts are critical to the successful marketing effort at any business.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2007 All rights reserved.