Sitting here at Soulard Barber Shop Saturday morning, I am reflecting on the IT Innovation Conference I attended last week in St. Louis. First of all, it was satisfying to see more than 500 IT professionals, infrastructure managers, staffing providers, storage, and computing vendors and CIOs gathered at a regional conference amidst the poor economic news of our time.  But it made sense, in light of the “glimmer of a turnaround” described in the closing keynote by CIO magazine publisher emeritus Gary Beach. Perhaps those who showed up had sensed the same. It was reassuring.

But even more reassuring was the talk of planned projects and ongoing implementations. One company was bringing a supplier management program on line. Another was doubling data center capacity to support an anticipated spike in consumer demand. Yet another was implementing an electronic records conversion across dozens of hospitals. (Check out the meeting agenda.) What was reassuring was not only the volume of activity presented in sessions and discussed in the hallways, but also the realization—in demonstrable, robust terms—to what exactly is required for success: great communications.

More so than in years past, project managers showed how they involved users from the very beginning, long before requirements were set or vendors were selected. They described involving users in large collaborative sessions to define requirements and evaluate vendors against requirements.  One healthcare company went so far as to invite three vendors in for a long weekend of product demonstrations and working sessions, and hundreds of professional employees showed up voluntarily on their weekend to participate!

Nobody wants to feel like an IT implementation was done to them. Users need to feel buy-in, like they helped design the solution. If they designed it, they will use it, and you will get a return on your IT investment, now, and throughout the system’s life. Since every system falls short in some ways, users must be committed to helping you improve the system. That implies that you, the project champion, have a communications plan. And that plan has to foster three-point communication:

• You gather input, often from users.
• You reflect back what you heard in some demonstrable way, such as in a beta test or feature set.
• Your user acknowledges—ultimately through increased usage—that you heard them and acted appropriately.

No matter how great your technology, communications must be robust. Prior to launch, gather input. Reflect what you heard with written requirements. Involve users in source selection and beta demonstrations. Build in channels for active and frequent user response. If users are not coming to you, go to them. That’s what so many of this year’s conference presenters demonstrated.

Read about next year’s IT conference in Saint Louis.

Times are tough, the economy is struggling, and your customers just aren’t buying.  So what do you do?

Let’s take a hard look at your sales and marketing processes to find the top ten ways you can close more sales:

1. Increase Your Customer’s Life-Time Value (LTV).
   How profitable your customers are over time defines your LTV and is a key component of your strategic growth.  Companies spend ten times more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.  Your current customers already know you, which means they are more likely to purchase from you again, spend more money with you, and therefore are likely to be more profitable.  If you don’t know your LTV, then how do you know how much money to spend and on which customer segment?
2. Improve Your Demand Forecasting.
   Every customer buys on a cycle. So this means you should track cycle times and variance to increase the accuracy of your forecasting and the loyalty of your customers.  If you don’t know when your customers need to reorder, then you may just lose them when the time comes for them to reorder.
3. Increase Your Sales Cycle Efficiency.
   There is an old sales adage that time kills deals.  The speed at which each prospect converts into a customer and the number of prospects required for conversion determines your sales cycle efficiency.  So ask yourself – are you taking the right steps to measure and reduce lost sales?
4. Improve Your Follow-up.
   Only about two percent (2%) of sales occur on the first contact.  Eighty percent (80%) of your sales will require five to eight contacts or touches of some type before you close the sale.  In other words, if you are contacting the prospect less than five times or more than eight times, then you could have a problem with follow-up in your sales process.
5. Increase Your Company’s Awareness.
   To keep the sales pipeline full of good quality leads you must continuously increase the awareness of your company and the solutions that it provides. Public relations is more efficient at building awareness than advertising, yet many companies spend wildly on advertising and trade shows while neglecting to fund public relations efforts. Increase your name recognition, not your budget.  Use more cost effective public relations.
6. Improve Your Lead Quality.
   Do you have methods in place to measure the conversion potential of each lead?  Lead qualification activities should pre-qualify every lead to ensure you take the right follow-up actions for the marketing offer. Strong leads produce strong sales.
7. Develop Your Lead Generation Process.
   Lead generation is a process, not an event.  So you need to ensure that you have a regular stream of article publishing (blog) activities occurring.  In today’s web 2.0 connected world, you should be using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn to increase your exposure and connect to your community.
8. Reduce Your Sales Discounting.
   Discounts represent deficiencies in your sales & marketing processes, which means you should be careful how often you discount. Instead, look for the root cause of your sales or marketing deficiency and you will reduce the need to discount. Customers believe opportunity costs outweigh operating costs. If you show your customers your value (more marketing), they won’t focus so much on price.
9. Train Your Sales and Marketing Personnel.
   Provide your sales and marketing people with more regular formal training.  Arming them with better product knowledge, as well as presentation, negotiation and selling skills, will improve their effectiveness and boost both employee morale and your bottom line – a win-win for everybody.
10. Understand the Problem You are Solving.
    Know what problem you are solving (as the customer sees it) to create an accurate value proposition.  Don’t pretend to understand the customer… ask them.  Obtain the voice of the customer through interviews, focus groups, and real two-way communication.  Ask probing questions to ensure that you have an accurate definition of your product.  Remember, a product encompasses everything that customers experience, including all the people the customer comes in contact with to make up the experience itself.

This post is about effective deployment of Voice of the Customer (VOC), quality-speak for taking action to reflect what your customers want in your products and communications. This is a continuation of yesterday’s post. Yesterday, Company ‘A’ failed to adjust its product offering and marketing messages to match customers’ desires, and suffered for it. Today, Company ‘B’ gets it right.

When Company B got its foot in the door of some big-time potential accounts, it heard what customers said, and reflected those perceptions of value in its product offering.  Company B took action to sell what customers wanted right away, and then set out to increase the value of their services over time as their customers came to trust them. 

Company B also listened to the language that potential clients used to talk about their problems, and then employed that language when describing their services.  Company B took to heart what it learned in half a dozen customer interviews to focus its product development and marketing message on recognized benefits.

As the selling proposition shifted to incorporate the voice of the customer, potential clients quickly recognized the value of the service that Company B offered.  They could get exactly what they wanted and needed from Company B, and they were willing to pay for it.  More and more frequently, when Company B got their foot in the door, they settled in for a nice long stay.

 Listen to Customers, Sell More of What Customers Are Buying

When interviewing our client’s customers, we listen for what they value. We listen for what they are paying for today. Then we help customers focus their product development resources on what they can sell today. With increased sales, we can help our clients build organizations that deliver value consistently, thus building trust with their customers. Trust is a solid platform on which to deliver increasingly valuable and unique services, thus achieving our strategy. Without first building trust, strategy is simply an aspiration with no concrete steps.

Truly hearing the voice of the customer means reflecting back to them in your own language what customers truly value. Adjusting your products to provide that value demonstrates that you are truly listening.

Company A’s corporate customers thought they were buying the time of skilled installers and customer service troubleshooters on demand. In an effort to be different from its competitors who also sold skilled labor hours, Company A offered additional benefits that its skilled workers brought to the table such as cross-training and process improvement.

At first, “differentiating” the marketing message seemed like a good idea.  Essentially, Company A was offering higher levels of service that it said would help customers improve operations and save money. But when interviewed, customers didn’t seem to get it. They resisted the idea that contract hires were in a position to influence substantial changes in business practices within their companies. Instead customers said they would rather pay less and get just the services they valued.

But customers did say that Company A provided rapid availability of highly skilled, highly specialized technicians. And they would even pay a little more for what they perceived as consistent well-managed delivery of the right skills at the right time.

But Company A was unwilling to change its story. Rather it persisted in a story that was out of sync with the voice of their customer. Company A failed to separate its aspirations for the future with the current perceptions of its paying customers. But you can only ignore the voice of the customer for a time.

When the recession hit a few months later and corporations sought to cut expenses, services they did not immediately value were hard to justify, and easy targets. As a result, Company A lost several customers and a double-digit percent of its revenue.

Tomorrow, read about Company B.  Because sometimes, listening means changing your story.

As I wrote in my past two posts, customer input equals a successful product. So why do so many products make it to market without the customers’ point of view in mind (and fail miserably)?

A customer representative in the decision-making process is essential. Whether this is the project manager acting on behalf of the customer, or better, an actual customer, hearing and understanding that perspective adds important insight to your product definition.

This is not to say that the customer representative designs the product, but certainly a customer’s input needs to be inserted into the process as more than just an afterthought.  As Scott Bellware writes in his post on customer service:

“As a product designer, you should already know what it is you’re building. You should have a strong vision for the product and already have a visceral sense of the customer’s expectations, needs, and desired customer experience.”

It’s not something that enters the project after the fact. You should have a “sense”–or, more like a validation–of your customers’ needs and expectations as input in the definition and design phases.

Customer representation validates what you’re doing and lets you know the product would actually appeal to your target customer. It’s more than creating a customer feedback outlet for a product that already exists.

How do you represent your customer in the development process? Does the project manager stand in? Do you solicit actual customers? How does it work for you?

In today’s article, I write about how important it is to know what your customer is thinking. If you haven’t talked to your customer lately, how do you know that you’re meeting their needs? Sales numbers are certainly telling, but they don’t tell the whole story. What if there is a completely untapped market because you don’t understand the needs, values and perceptions of those who want to–or MIGHT want to–buy from you?

When I’m working on our websites, I employ similar methods. We receive a lot of customer questions concerning how they can edit our policy and procedure manuals, so we’ve tried to play up the fact that they can be downloaded in Microsoft Word, so you can change any of the text you want. It’s a simple example, but it’s one that many companies may not think of on a grander scale.

Get out there and talk to your customers. They may tell you something that changes your entire strategy. Or, maybe, you’ll simply learn something new about them.

Blogging carries with it a history of introspection, with bloggers writing about what is going on in their lives and organizations. If your reason for blogging is to attract and engage customers, then your posts need the additional filter of relevance to customers.

Blogging about what you are working on any given day won’t necessarily attract more potential customers to your site. But tuning in to the value that customers see in your organization, and using the blog to provide thought, background and ideas related to that perceived value may interest current customers and even attract new ones.

Think of a business blog as a cousin to the personal blog, rather than as a twin. Like a personal blog, a business blog serves as a valuable outlet for personal expression. It helps connect bloggers to customers, providing a direct channel for communication helping to form strong relationships at all levels.  But first customers have to care about you are writing about.

So how do you know what customers care about?

Every business has customers. And the more you can involve your bloggers with customers, the more they can hear directly what is on customers’ minds, and then they can write about it.

Now, I am not recommending that you share a client’s specific concerns.  But you can certainly listen for the issues that clients want to address in meetings, and turn those around into blogging topics.

For example, my team and I were in a client meeting last week. The agenda focused on three topic areas: 1) the client’s sales pipeline activities and building a supportive sales culture; 2) processes for evaluating new opportunities and applying resources; 3) marketing messages and web site copy supporting sales for a couple of product lines. These topic areas translate quite nicely into blog post ideas that, by our customers’ attention and participation in the meeting, we can say would be relevant to them.

More specifically, here are a few blog-post ideas that derive from the agenda and discussion with our customer last week:

1. The Power of Narrative: Why case Studies Work for Technology Marketing
2. How We Test Your Value Proposition and Marketing Message
3. How We Write Effective Web Copy For Technology Companies
4. Writing Case Studies from Prior Employment
5. How Technology Companies Can Generate Leads With On-Line Articles
6. Giving Your Web Site a Job to do: Using Your Web Site as a Lead-Generation Engine
7. Using Google Groups to Coordinate Marketing Projects
8. Who in your Company Should sign off on Marketing Content
9. Make your trade show investment pay off: Set up meetings before you go
10. Getting Ready For Trade Shows: Typical Time Lines
11. When Engineering Companies Grow And Build Sales Cultures

Customers at the meeting leaned in, or sat up and focused on all these points over the course of a half-day working meeting.  Listening during meetings with customers can generate specific, relevant topics that simply reflecting on our own thoughts cannot.  Companies that want their blogging to be relevant and attractive for new customers should listen to what current customers are saying, and then follow through by writing about it on their blogs.

This also implies that your employees should blog about the aspects of their jobs that require interaction with customers. And when that is not possible, customer-facing employees should identify and share topic areas based on what they are hearing from customers.

Gary Hamel has a great blog post today on WSJ.com about how many industries are suffering from what he calls “Detroititis,” that is, failing to ascertain what your customers want, or in many cases, simply not caring what your customers want.

Detroit, obviously, is seeing this problem with the automobile industry. Since they failed to produce energy efficient or innovative vehicles, Americans went elsewhere.

Photo: Marcin Wichary

Hamel writes about how the PC industry saw the same thing when Apple introduced the iMac. Customers really did want a computer that was pretty. And for many, pretty trumped cheap. PC makers didn’t get it, or maybe, didn’t want to believe it.

Unless your company has a monopoly on a particular industry, can it afford not to care what the customers want? Can it afford not having a clearly developed and tested value proposition? If you don’t invest in developing your unique value story, be prepared for customers to go elsewhere.

The value proposition, as discussed last time, helps companies focus on growth markets; that is, on products and services that their customers want to buy. By focusing sales resources on the value proposition where customers are most receptive, sales performance improves. As resources are re-deployed from lower-performing products, the cycle feeds on itself, increasing payback on your sales and marketing investment.

But no one is brilliant enough to write a perfect story from whole cloth. And besides, we aren’t so much telling our client’s story, as searching for the aspects of our client’s story that resonate most with their customers. In effect, we are closing the gap between our client’s version of their story, and how that story is heard by customers. Closing that gap is how we define customer quality.

We test the value proposition by using it. By selling. We sell for the client using the new story.  We tell the story and observe where customers see the most value. Selling is the best way to gain feedback and adjust the value proposition.

In the testing phase, our sales executives work with our marketing consultants to produce sales scripts, selling pieces, updated price sheets, proposal forms, deal documents, everything necessary to complete the sales kit prior to roll-out. By getting all the pieces in place, sales professionals hired later to ramp up sales can be effective and productive right from the start.

Keep in mind, most of our work is with business-to-business (B2B) clients. So usually our customers have a relatively small number of valuable customer relationships.  Like us, our clients build their business one relationship at a time. Therefore, investing in a focused value proposition, or selling story, provides a high return on investment, a high ROI.

At Bizmanualz, for years we have helped companies improve their business results by improving their operations with policies and procedures, and with strategic process improvement consulting when asked.

Now as customers demand it, we are focusing more resources on our consulting practice. In addition to expanding our business policies and procedures publishing on-line, three experienced consultants—I am one—help clients reach their strategic objectives; typically growth and/or exit, via increases in operational efficiency and sales.

My focus is, and for years has been, marketing, especially business-to-business (B2B) marketing. Effective marketing work typically starts with strategy; developing and testing a company’s story, otherwise known as its value proposition. A value proposition is really about focus. Focus comes from asking and answering big questions: ‘What exactly do you do, and for whom? Why are you better or different than competing solutions? Do your customers see your value proposition the same as you do? What do customers say they actually pay for?’ (See my series of posts on deploying a New Business Council to weigh what new business you will pursue, and to ration what resources you use.)

We test a company’s value proposition with in-depth interviews with our clients’ current and past customers.  Invariably we expose gaps between our clients’ view of their value, and their customers’ view.  It’s an eye-opener. And it helps clients focus on what is important to their customers.

By clarifying a company’s value proposition, we help our clients redirect resources to projects that are in line with their strategy, getting  them closer to their growth or exit goals.

Next in this thread: With Focus Comes Growth – Lead Generation