You’ve come to realize that your best customers are your repeat customers. Those who are willing to keep coming back and will actually say good things about you and your business to their friends and acquaintances. You now truly understand that they won’t return or refer you to others unless you treat them right and they feel that their relationship with you and your business is good for them.

photo credit: {Guerrilla Futures | Jason Tester}

Well, here are ten things to put in place in 2011 that will make your customers want to be repeaters:

1. Offer something extra with your product or service such as a coupon or some little extra service.

2. Remember them at holiday time and send them a card or some other small token of appreciation.

3. Respond promptly to their phone calls and emails, even if you’re super busy.

4. Create special offers for your regular customers.

5. Offer them payment options such as term payments, layaway plans or store credit.

6. Track your regular customers’ product/service needs, busy periods and buying history?

7. Refer them to someone else if you are unable to help them with a particular problem or need.

8. Provide them with volume discounts, or do small jobs for free or at reduced prices.

9. Ask them regularly to evaluate the quality of your work, responsiveness and overall service.

10. Send them frequent news releases so that you stay uppermost in their minds.

If you put in place as many of these ten key tips as possible, they’ll be sure to keep coming back and to bring their friends along.

Remember that you’re in business to solve your customers’ problems with a product or service solution that you are certain will satisfy their needs and take care of the pain they are suffering from. The emphasis here is on customer not product/service or your company.

photo credit: Mashroor Nitol

Everything you do should be geared toward your prospective customers:

• You should understand your favorite customer’s demographics, geographics, behavioristics, and psychographics.
• Your marketing message should be in words the customer uses and should clearly let the customer know that you are taking care of his/her problem.
• The media that you use to relay the marketing message should be the ones the customer uses, whether it be traditional media like newspapers, TV or radio or new media like your website/blog or social media sites.

Customers are always tuned to their favorite Radio Station WIIFM “What’s In It For Me” and the theme song you should be beaming to them should always be “You,You,You.”

Getting an early start in the CRM software industry may have helped Salesforce.com to become a leader in the Hosted CRM space, but another CRM solution provider is making a statement of their own, paving the way for some intense competition in the small to mid-size business sector.

Better known for its on premise desktop CRM software, Commence Corporation has been providing contact management, sales force automation and marketing campaign management solutions to small and mid-size companies for more than two decades. The company introduced a web-based hosted version of their popular CRM software and is gaining notoriety. With an outstanding track record for performance, reliability and world-class customer service Commence is a strong competitor and becoming a favorite among smaller businesses looking for a flexible hosted CRM solution with productivity tools that are easy to use.

“Commence web CRM has an impressive and unique user interface that makes the product very easy to use and navigate” says Gary Sanders of OK! Magazine. “The product’s Home Page or Dashboard is completely customizable by individual or job function. This allows each user to create a dashboard to the way they work. The value here is that you can place the functions you use most right on the home page, such as today’s calendar and activities, e-mail, sales opportunities, leads, reminders and even an interactive sales funnel. We hadn’t seen this in any other CRM solution. This flexibility enables people to conduct 90% of their daily activities without ever leaving the Home Page and has really improved productivity.”

See the whole story at Customers Find Good Value In Commence CRM

It is bad enough that the big banks are screwing small businesses by totally ignoring their need for capital. Must the SBA aid in the screw job by providing irrelevant and outdated training materials to those wanting to hone their small business skills.

photo credit: ShashiBellamkonda

Yesterday. I was looking for a marketing text to pass along to a client and decided to go up on the SBA website to see what they were referencing. I went to www.sba.gov and in the search box typed in “marketing documents” and it returned the following page:
http://search.sba.gov/gcse/searchresults.html?cx=012149749304426494285%3Avl4bn0plkpq&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=marketing+documents&sa.x=30&sa.y=5#1060
where I chose to review the following three documents on page 1 of the extensive listing:

MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR THE GROWING BUSINESS

MARKETING FOR SMALL BUSINESS: AN OVERVIEW – SBA Homepage

BUSINESS PLAN FOR THE SMALL CONSTRUCTION FIRM

The first text was copyright 1991 and has not been revised since. It makes no mention of the Internet or Internet marketing and obviously social media marketing and wireless were not around then

I also quickly looked at the Business Plan for the small Construction Firm and the following paragraph just leads me to believe that this document was also written in the 1980′s.

Describe your market area in terms of customer profile (age, education, income, etc.) and geography. A customer profile will help you focus your advertising to reach your potential customers. For example, if you are a custom builder, you may decide to build homes in the $100,000-$250,000 price range. This would mean that your customers will have incomes in the middle-to upper-middle-class ranges. You may also decide you can earn a profit by building these homes within a radius of 30 miles from your office. In the space below describe your market.

Lastly, I tried the MARKETING FOR SMALL BUSINESS:AN OVERVIEW and in the reference to the Bureau of Census on page 5, everything points to data collected in the 1980′s.

How can a small business person trust the training materials on the SBA web site when they are over twenty years out of date.? How out of touch is the government? How is small business supposed to succeed when the materials put out by the government are antiquated and therefore irrelevant.

It is bad enough that the banks are screwing small businesses. We do not need the SBA to help in the process by their failure to stay in touch with the materials they are using to provide training for these businesses that are generating a huge chunk of the economy and are providing a large number of needed jobs.

A friend of mine recently received the attached letter from Key Bank. It appears that he kept some small change in a checking account at this bank and because the account had no activity for the last year the bank is threatening to charge the account a $5.00 inactivity fee every month. To prevent this from happening he needs to sign this letter and return it or make a transaction or keep a minimum of $5000.00 in a checking account that pays no interest.

So my friend decided to get some revenge and he paid a visit to a small branch of this bank with a bag full of all the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters that he had emptied from his pockets for the last couple of years. After showing the letter to a customer service manager who claimed to have not seen it before (as usual, the corporate types operate in a vacuum) and after telling the manager that he was going to get the letter posted on the Internet, he requested to comply with the terms of the letter and to deposit the change he had brought. He chose a small branch because they don’t have a counting machine and the teller had to manually count the deposit. Poor thing, she is still counting, this has cost the bank hours of her time, a very unhappy customer plus all of this negative publicity.

Was it worth it KeyBank?

If your bank is playing this kind of game with you, perhaps you want to get a little revenge. Let me know what you did.

You need to understand who your target market consists of and what they think of your business and your product/service. Your target market may be one or more market segments or sub-sets of your market, made up of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar products and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function. Here are 5 critical characteristics which help you understand your favorite customers:

photo credit: Matti Mattila

1. Demographics
These are basic identifiable characteristics of individual final consumers and organizational consumers, groups of final consumers and organizational consumers. Demographics are often used as segmentation bases because groups of people, or organizations, with similar demographics often have similar needs & desires that are distinct from those with different backgrounds. They include: age, race, religion, gender, family size, occupation, income level, education level, marital status and others.

2. Geographics
These describe basic identifiable characteristics of town, cities, states, regions, and countries. One, or a combination of factors, such as: size, location, density, climate, transportation network, media, competition, growth pattern, legislation, cost of living, and operations may comprise an identifiable locale.

3. Psychographics
These are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles They are characteristics like social class, family life cycle, usage rate & experience brand loyalty, personality & motives, perceived risk, innovativeness, opinion and lifestyle that determine how a customer thinks of themselves relative to others.

4. Behavioristics
These are variables such as occasion, benefit sought, user status, user rate, loyalty rate, readiness stage, and consumers attitude. They include loyalty, cost, frequency of purchase, amount of purchase, time of year, time involved in purchasing decision, where customer purchases the product.

5. Linguistics
The way language varies in communities of customers. Looks in particular at the interaction of social factors (such as a speaker’s gender, ethnicity, age, degree of integration into their community, etc) and linguistic structures (such as sounds, grammatical forms, intonation features, words, etc). They also include keywords, key phrases, misspellings, regional differences in spelling and pronunciation.

Are social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn being overhyped? Are all the social media pundits sending today’s business down a dark and dangerous alley?

If you are a large or medium enterprises you typically have the resource to devote to finding out the relevance of a social media focus on your overall marketing strategy. The million dollar questions for the small business are: “Is it really worth my time?” “Can I afford to be doing this now?”

If as a small business you are trying to use social media to get the word out to your customers and prospects about how great your product/service is then you are frankly wasting your time walking down a blind alley. If however, you are using social media to listen to your customer and learn what his/her problem or pain is and what value your business can bring to the table then you are on the right path.

Social media today is for listening. It is not a mike or a megaphone to be used to drown the customer out.

Concrete Ears

photo credit: peter pearson

To really understand your market and get to know what pain your favorite customers are suffering and what their concerns are, you need to be actively engaged in conversations with them. Conversation has two sides to it – talking and listening and the latter is what allows us to gain information. The difference between hearing and listening should not be confused. Listening is a skill while hearing is a physical ability. Listening skills allow us to make sense of and understand what your customer is saying. In other words, listening skills allow you to understand what the customer is “talking about”.

Here are 12 effective listening techniques so you won’t need concrete ears.

Ask open-ended questions to get the customer to open up
Face the one you are listening to, lean slightly forward and make eye contact.
Let your body language show your interest and concern.
Listen carefully so you can understand and evaluate.
Learn to read between the lines by listening to both verbal and nonverbal messages.
Come prepared mentally and physically to listen. Don’t think of answers in advance.
You can’t talk and listen at the same time.
Be empathetic. See the situation from the customer’s viewpoint. Walk in their shoes.
Don’t interrupt and take notes if you’re worried about forgetting a particular point.
Avoid setting expectations as this prejudices your opinions.
Listen to what is said and how it is said and listen for what is left unsaid.
Don’t let one person dominate a multiple-customer conversation.

In today’s social media world, we have finally realized that we need to understand our customers and part of that process involves holding conversations with the customer. Holding a conversation implies two things: talking and listening. Since we are trying to gain information about the customer’s status and needs, it would appear that we should be listening more than talking. So how do we listen effectively to a customer? Here are some keys tips to improve your listening ability:
1. Pay attention – If you really want to be a good listener, you pay attention to the person speaking. Use non-verbal cues like a smile, eye contact or a nod of the head to let the speaker know that he/she is being heard.
2. Listen for the message – This means you have to listen for facts as well as ideas , intentions and feelings. This might entail your paying attention to both the verbal and non-verbal messages along with hearing the unpleasant things that might be a part of the message.
3. Listen and hear before you evaluate – Try not to reach a premature conclusion. If you are unsure of the exact meaning question the speaker in a non-threatening way to get at the real answer and try not to give advice or counsel.
4. Playback in your own words – Try to impartially paraphrase the words of the speaker and asks if that was the intended meaning. You’ll avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
5. Refrain from giving advice – You are trying to listen and learn about the customer. Don’t jump in to give unsolicited advice.
6. Don’t rebut – Try not to listen so you can formulate a rebuttal. Again, you are listening to try to find the customer’s pain points and understand the language he/she uses.
7. Listen and don’t interrupt – This may test your patience, but you need to give the customer time to formulate and express the idea on his/her mind.
8. Listen and feel – Try to understand the underlying emotions and feelings, This might mean that you also have to ’listen’ to the body language.
9. Do not try to get your message across – Remember you are listening. When you figure out what makes the customer tick and more importantly what language to use, you can craft a message that will resonate with the customer.
10. Do not just pretend to listen – If you do, you’ll surely come away from the experience without gaining any information and you will be as ignorant of your real customer as you were before the conversation started.
Remember that we now live in a customer centric world. The only way the business will have a marketing message that resonates with the customer is if that message is geared towards solving the customer pain and is in a language the customer understands. That only happens if we learn to listen to our customers and they begin to feel that they are being heard.

Photograph attribution:

The last several years have brought a radical change in the relationship between the customer and business as a whole. More and more customers are collaborating with businesses and technology is playing a key role in this new collaboration.

An increasing percentage of interaction with customers is coming by way of social networks and online communities. These interactions include suggestions for product improvement, requests for help, information requests and even customers assisting their counterparts directly. These customer conversations are driving the need for the business to respond in a timely fashion and to also convince potential customers of their ability to adequately take care of their needs.

This is causing the establishment of a close collaborative effort between the business and the customer base. Sales and any other part of the organization that is in direct contact with the customer needs to listen closely to the conversation in order to hear what the customer is saying. Any data that is gathered needs to be analyzed so that not only does the business then understand which customers comprise the target market, but also how those customers think and how they communicate.

Even more importantly, with more customers using online communities and social networks, it is essential that the key phrases that the business uses are the same as the key phrases that the customer uses in their posts on Facebook and LinkedIn or in their tweets on Twitter. It also allows the business to search engine optimize its web site because the language used to describe the content and the keywords used are the ones the favorite customers are accustomed to.

So now, the business has a marketing message that resonates with the customer because it is geared towards solving the customer pain and is in a language the customer understands. The customers can begin to feel that the business is listening and that they are being heard.