Category: Engagement

Customer Success

Four Ways for Your Customer Service Team to Make Your Customers Less Angry

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When your customers contact your customer service team, are they already angry?

Last month, I interviewed Carolyn Kopprasch, chief happiness officer at Buffer. She said:

“We live in a culture that has trained customers to start on the offensive just to get good service…Often, you don’t get to talk to a manager or someone with authority to solve your problem unless you say a curse word.”

This is, sadly, the case for many organizations.  Consider companies with which you do business in your personal or business life.  If something goes wrong and you need help, what happens?  How do you find that help?  And how do you feel by the time you call or send them an email?  I’m going to venture a guess that by the time you make that contact, you’ve tried a number of things—to no avail—and are pretty angry.

In fact, a recent report (“Duck and Cover:  More Customers Are Experiencing Rage”) on customer rage shows “customer satisfaction over a company’s ability to solve a complaint is no higher today than it was in the 1970s” and “customer dissatisfaction over complaint resolution has increased eight points in the past two years.”

This culture of anger is the result of a widely practiced approach to helping customers that is designed to lower costs for the company.  This approach is also thought to improve the speed of resolution, but it often just creates bad experiences.

The practice is one of self-help or community driven help (the latter being very common in the technology business).  Companies will try to figure out what most customers need help with and then post those issues on their websites in some form of FAQ.  The assumption is that most people will go there, find the answer, and solve their problem.  The advantage for the company is there is zero marginal cost to help each customer.

The second step of this practice is a community driven approach. The company will form some sort of online forum and allow customers to post questions and answer each other’s questions.  The underlying assumption is that someone else has had the problem before and can help solve it.

This is not a zero cost approach, as many companies also have customer service team members watching the forums, adding comments and solutions and, sometimes, looking for common problems or requests that can point to product improvements.  But it is a very low-cost approach to helping customers.  And it puts a big onus on customers to seek and provide their own support.

The next step is to contact someone at the company on a customer service team.  While a few companies don’t provide any direct contact capability, most do, either by telephone or email.

But by the time the customer reaches that point, they have probably tried to solve it through the other two methods, maybe had some unpleasant exchanges with forum members or employees, and have probably been forced to search the FAQs repeatedly to try to solve the problem on their own.

In other words, they’re angry.

Four things you can do to avoid this:

1.   Stop making it us vs. them.

When your customer contacts you and is frustrated, angry or worse, it’s your customer service team’s job to take the company’s side. However, your rep should take away the need to take sides at all. The conversation should never be about what the customer wants vs. what the company will do.

The only conversation your customer service team should have with your customer is about the result they need to achieve and how they can help the customer get there. If every interaction is not designed around that idea, your customers will see your customer service team and your company as “against” them, and they will get even angrier.

2.   Know why your customers are getting angry.

Don’t just ask. Measure. Don’t be biased by the loudest and angriest customers (perpetuating your contribution to the anger culture), but look at all your customer interactions and know why escalations happen.

Once you identify points of frustration, you can act to intervene. Depending on the issue, you can post simple solutions on your help pages or accelerate personal contact when a particular issue is raised. The better you get at directing more of your customers to their desired outcome, the happier your customers will be.

3.  Learn your customers’ interaction preferences.

Some of us like to talk through our issues with someone. Others like to do research and solve it themselves.

Do you know what your customers prefer? Are you providing it? Or are you making assumptions that result in more escalations than needed?

Talk to your colleagues in marketing, and steal one idea. Ask who is good at developing what marketing people call “personas,” and create the ones you need. Figure out how to identify what type of problem solver each customer is and what you need to deliver to have them walk away happy.

4.  Be honest.

If your customer has a problem, you have a problem. It doesn’t matter if it might be their fault. If you don’t eliminate your rep’s need to take sides and help your customer get the outcome they need, it’s going to be your problem, one way or another.

When you have a problem, admit it (“yes, I can see how the instructions are not that clear about that”). Show understanding. If it’s not your fault, help your customer get past it. If it is, be direct and just fix it.

When your customer service reps get to the point of quoting warranty limits, user agreements and company policy, you have lost — not just the conversation, but the customer — and you can kiss repeat business goodbye.

Are you already doing some of these?  Are they working?  Tell us what you think!

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Customer Success

Customer Service Culture Keeps Customers Coming Back

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Here are  examples  of two very different customer service cultures.  Which would you prefer?

Let’s say you have to bring your car in for repair.  The mechanic diagnoses the problem. Would you choose:

A)  The shop where the mechanic tells you:  “This is a simple issue.  We fix these all the time.  It’s not going to be any problem at all.  Your car will be good as new in a few hours.  Just go about your business, and I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

or

B)  The shop where the mechanic tells you, “Your car’s coolant system has three leaks in different hoses.  The hoses are easy to access, and I have replacements in stock.  It will take me two or three hours to replace the hoses and test them to be sure they are working.  I’ll call you as soon as I’m done.”

If you’re like me, not only do you prefer option (B), but if you run into the mechanic in option (A), you’re likely not to come back (and maybe not even leave your car in the first place).

The reason is we don’t like to be dismissed, and we don’t like condescension.  The mechanic in option (A) was condescending and a bit insulting. She assumed we not only have no idea how our car works but that we don’t care to know and will trust her implicitly. The mechanic in option (B) showed respect for our knowledge, ownership of the car, and likely, our time.

Is your company’s customer service  insulting your customers without even knowing it?

I’ll give you another example of good and bad customer service.  Recently, I contacted technical support for two different software products.  Both are websites that run SaaS products.  Both issues were simple ones that required little explanation and should have been easy to identify as issues (I can’t say how hard they would be to fix).

Company 1 responded like this:

We really appreciate you bringing us this kind of issue affecting our software’s performance.  Rest assured our developers are fully aware of the changes and the glitches that occurred after the software update.  They have made these adjustments their top priority to ensure our software is as stable as possible.

Thank you for your patience and understanding during this time.

Company 2 responded like this:

Thanks so much for writing in!  This is a great question, not too odd at all!   I’m afraid there isn’t a great solution for this at the moment.  Sorry about that.   We haven’t figured out a great way for it to know to re-look for the image and description if nothing shows up at first.  Great idea though, and we definitely see the value of it.

Sorry I don’t have a better answer for you on that one.  Is there anything else I can do to help or any questions I can answer?

I’m guessing you know which one I thought was well-done and which I thought was disingenuous

Company 1’s response is more troubling than just a dismissive response.  It points to a customer service culture that assumes customers want reassurance and kind words above all else.  It suggests that the company’s customer service protocol has guidelines or even templates that advance the idea that customers are to be dealt with and dismissed as quickly as possible.

This was reinforced after my follow-up question asking if they knew about the specific issue and might be working on it.  I was told there are many issues on which the developers are working and that I could be certain they would be informed of this one.  Further reinforcing the dismissive approach, five days later the company announced an update that resolved the specific issue.  I have to assume someone there knew that this update was coming yet failed to communicate that to me.

Company 2’s response points to a customer service culture of openness and honesty.  Telling me that there is “no great solution” admits the software has shortcomings and just can’t do everything all the time.  This is true of all products of all kinds.  Being direct about the limitations and aspirations of your product shows both honesty and confidence in your ability to deliver value to your customer.

My cultural assumptions were reinforced on follow-up exchanges, where I offered an idea for a solution, and an interesting discussion on how to best get the specific value I needed from the product ensued.

Evaluating customer service

Far too many companies evaluate the performance of technical support or customer service success on how quickly issues can be resolved and how friendly the language of the company’s representative is.  Both of these measures lead the customer service teams to shorten their responses, use more reassuring and friendly (not honest and direct) language, and to be dismissive of customer issues in the hope they will accept answers such as those above from Company 1 and go away.

But customers are evolving the other way.  Customers demand more details and honestly from companies, as well as more and more transparency.

In order to meet the needs of this evolving customer, companies must also change their customer service culture and the metrics that support it.  For example, rather than measuring duration of interactions, you might measure how many interactions it takes for the customer to consider the issue resolved.  You might also want to measure how much progress each interaction made toward resolving the issue (if it makes no progress, you are wasting time and angering your customer).  Your metrics should always focus on what the customer perceives as progress and what your customer perceives as a resolution.

Is your company’s customer service  culture dismissing and alienating your customers?

Try acting like a customer with a problem for a day, and go find out.  Then tell us your story in the comments.

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customers

Build Paths, Not Walls: Three Steps to Make it Easier for Your Prospects to Buy

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for Nimble.)

I sat in a conference session about building IT systems to ensure HIPAA compliance (which is all about medical insurance, in case you’re not familiar with HIPAA) and kept hearing pundits offer advice about how to prevent users of these systems from doing things that are unauthorized and outside the rules. It gave me flashbacks to conversations with my own insurance company and all the nightmarish moments having representatives tell me, “Our systems won’t allow me to do that.” (I’m betting you’ve been there.)

I realized that, each time the issue was resolved on these calls, the representative and I found some way to work within the limitations of the system to create a resolution that worked for me and seemed to work for them.

What we found was a path. The interesting thing to note about this path is it was the best option that offered — this is important — the least resistance.

I use this principle every day in my work. I try to find the way to achieve my goal with the least resistance. This doesn’t mean the easiest way or any sort of cheat; it means the way that allows me to do the best I can while avoiding unnecessary obstacles. I try to find the path of least resistance.

No matter what type of business you are in, at some point in your sales process, your prospect will complain (usually subtly, sometimes loudly) that some particular requirement to complete the purchase transaction is undesirable, difficult or even impossible to meet.

You just found a wall. Your prospect just hit that wall and might stop there instead of continuing to complete the purchase. You’ve heard this called “friction in the sales process” or any number of other challenging terms. You also have heard endless advice telling you to remove these obstacles. So let me offer you three simple steps for making it not just easy, but desirable, for your prospect to buy.

First, walk the path with your prospect.

Most salespeople will tell their prospect what the next step is. They will ask the prospect to complete some action, get some approval, call a meeting and so forth.

This is similar to providing a map and telling your prospect to get to the end of the path. It can work quite well. But it’s not the best approach.

Stop thinking of yourself and your salespeople as a map, and start thinking of you and them as a guide. Walk the path with your prospect. Take the same steps. Help them over the obstacles. Warn them of dangerous turns. Reach out a supporting hand when it’s needed.

This achieves two prerequisites for removing obstacles. First, it changes your perspective to align with your prospects. Second, it lets you take step two.

Second, relentlessly remove obstacles.

As you walk the buying path with your prospect, you will suddenly see — very clearly — every single obstacle, difficulty and blocking wall along the way

Make it your job to remove those. Not just for right now and for this prospect, but to remove the institutional barriers that keep those obstacles there for every future prospect.

And be relentless. Don’t let the small ones stay. They will grow and make your life — and your prospects’ lives — more difficult in the future.

Third, identify and clarify how this walk you are taking with your prospect creates value for your prospect.

In an earlier post, I discussed how to define measurements of value and how to determine the value you create for your prospects.

It is on this walk together that these measurements are created and defined.

Make sure you are talking about value and expectations. Make sure your prospect understands why it is so valuable to them to take each step and each turn along the path.

And when you reach the end and complete the purchase, you and your prospect will have a strong mutual understanding of why you are there and how your future relationship will progress.

It’s not always easy to take these three steps. There are plenty of obstacles, internal and external, to changing how you approach your work and your prospects.

But if you do, you will not only have created a path to purchase that is freer of obstacles, but you will have created an inviting and welcoming path your prospects will want to travel with you again and again. Buying from you will be their path of least resistance.

Which makes your job — and theirs — so much easier.

Photo Credit: Vainsang via Compfight cc

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Customer Success

Three Keys to Increasing Renewals

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(this is a repost of a post written by me for Totango.)

This happens to you more often than you’d like to admit. Your sales team lands a new customer with great potential. You work hard at the on-boarding process and hit all of the milestones. Roll-out is on schedule. Over the year(s) of their contract term, you resolve every issue quickly. Then two months before renewal, you get the call: They’ve decided not to renew.

Wait. What?!?!

This probably came as a surprise to you. You probably have a list of reasons these customers give for not renewing. Some of the items on that list are understandable, from product shortcomings to changes in the customer’s business (such as acquisition). Others you know are just excuses, such as pricing, or that one support issue that was only 90% resolved.

Now tell me, honestly: Was there something you could have — or should have — known that would have let you save this customer?

There are three things you should be examining closely every day to get a deeper understanding of — and a deeper relationship with — each and every customer:

1. Ask good questions

In an earlier post, I discussed the idea of measuring customer success from the customer’s point of view and choosing the right measurements. You have to help your customer use your product, but you also have to help your customer get the value they need from your product.

Your market is crowded. You are competing not only against companies that provide similar products, but with all the other investment priorities of your customer, and your customer is deciding whether whatever work you support is worth funding at all.

One of your first tasks when you assume responsibility for a customer is to understand how your customer will measure their success because of your product. If they are not clear, help them define that measure. (Again, suggestions are here).

One company with which I’ve worked offers tools to bring social information into the selling process. If you ask generically how they make customers successful, they might say they increase revenue. Well, yes. But so many factors affect revenue and the effect of their product may be small compared with others, so it’s a meaningless measurement. They could also quote their marketing material and say they provide a deeper understanding of each prospect. Again, yes, but can you measure that? And is it a benefit or just a thing the product does?

While the product provides many benefits, one that is particularly interesting is it shortens the sales cycle (decreasing time to revenue). So they ask every new customer how long their average sales cycle is. Then they look at the users of their product and ask them three months, six months and nine months later how long their sales cycle is. The length drops every time.

The customer is now convincing themselves that the product has significant benefit. And you know exactly how much and why they should renew (and how to sell the renewal).

Pick your measurements. Ask good questions. Make sure your customer realizes value. And they are less likely to leave.

2. Social engagement

I don’t think I need to convince you business is social. Your customers are in the social channels, discussing their business challenges and issues, as well as the products and services they like and don’t like.

The best possible case is when your customer loves your product so much that they recommend it to their friends and colleagues. You can see this from high NetPromoter scores or by looking at your brand advocates with services such as Zuberance.

The worst case is when they don’t talk about you at all. Remember the adage, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” If your customers are indifferent, they are not getting value from your product, and they are less likely to renew.

So, listen and engage. Follow your customers on whatever social networks on which they are active. Connect to their professional networks. See what they are up to. Talk with them. Focus on issues and items of interest to them.

LinkedIn offers advice to recruiters about retaining candidates. They suggest adding new employees to your network, then watching their new connections. If you see them connect to a bunch of people at your competitor all at once, there’s a pretty good chance they’re interviewing.

Do the same. If a new competitor comes up, and suddenly your customer connects to lots of their people, it might be time to strengthen your connection.

3. Look at the data

You have data. Lots of it. Don’t be afraid to use it. But don’t get caught up in the “big data” hype. Here’s how to make it useful:

You already track every single action your customer takes in your product. You know every interaction, and you probably know the results of those interactions. All of this may not be well organized, but a close approximation will work pretty well for this purpose. And your data analysts can help you make sense of it all.

The key to analyzing large amounts of data is asking the right questions. You should be asking one or both of these:

1)    What specific actions predict either renewal or non-renewal?

2)    What are the relevant (predictive) differences between customers who renew and customers who don’t?

If you know the answer to one of those questions (they are just two sides of the same coin), you will have a much better idea much earlier whether any given customer is on the path to renewal.

It’s important that you not just look at this data when it’s time to ask for the renewal. You must look every month (ideally) or periodically throughout the contract term. Don’t wait until they’re ready to say No to talk them into Yes. Get them on the road to Yes much earlier.

This can feel like a lot to do with each and every customer, and you might be thinking you can only do all of this with your largest customers.

I warn you: That is a mistake. The biggest danger for non-renewal — and for large revenue losses — lies in the middle of your customer base, with those customers who matter, but still fall outside your high-attention area (e.g. your enterprise group).

There are lots of technologies available today that allow you to watch large data sets, interpret social streams and collect customer data. Even I, as an independent consultant with no staff at all, engage and monitor social streams for clients, prospects and new business opportunities. Is easier — and cheaper — than ever to scale these efforts.

Now what?

1)    Pick a question or two to ask your customers every month.

2)    Choose a set of customers with whom to engage on social networks.

3)    Ask your data analysts one of the two questions above.

Most importantly, start counting your surprise non-renewals and the number of customers at risk of non-renewal. And (this is how I deliver value to my clients) watch the numbers drop.

Tell us what you choose and how you do in the comments.

Photo Credit: .krish.Tipirneni. via Compfight cc

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conversation

3 Reasons Recurring Revenue and Renewals are Critical [Podcast]

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I was honored to be interviewed by Linda Popky of Leverage2Market Associates and one of the leaders in marketing innovation in the technology business. We discussed a range of topics, including:

  • Why recurring revenue and renewals are so important to so many companies
  • Why many companies (particularly in the technology business) don’t invest enough in recurring revenue
  • How marketing and selling to renewing and repeat customers is different from new business
  • What companies can do right now to increase recurring revenue and renewals, and reduce churn

You can find the podcast here (just under 30 minutes). I hope you find it useful – please let me know in the comments.

Photo Credit: Colleen AF Venable via Compfight cc

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Customer Success

Getting it Just Right: Measuring Customer Success

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In an earlier post, I discussed how to get measuring customer success right. It sparked quite a few questions about how to choose the measurement and how to ensure it causes you to be aligned with your customer’s business success. Here are some thoughts about how to get it just right.

The Goldilocks Customer Success Metric

In my earlier post, I compared two public safety companies that had very different measurements of how their customers became successful because of their products.

One was RedFlex, whose most often cited metric was the number of red light tickets issued because of their cameras (though, I don’t think they want to be measured this way). This metric misses the mark, because it does not measure an outcome that is of value to the people who have to make a decision on the purchase of the camera system. The goal is public safety, not more tickets.

In contrast, ShotSpotter (SST) measured a variety of outcomes, including number of arrests resulting from gunshots detected and number of convictions made easier because of their data. The goal—public safety—is the same, but the metrics are directly relevant to the outcome.

Let’s analyze these:

Neither company chose what I’ll call the “papa bear” metric, which is something such as increased public safety. This metric is far too broad, far too hard to measure, and while both companies do something that affects public safety, neither can claim to have increased it directly.

The number of tickets metric, which I’ll call the “mama bear” metric, is too narrow. It measures the direct result of the system, but it does not take into account any of the results the activity produces.

The number of arrests metric is the Goldilocks metric (or one of them). It’s not the direct result of the system (you could measure number of gunshots identified), and it does not claim to be a panacea for all police issues. It does measure an outcome most of us can link directly to which is increased public safety (criminals get arrested), and one the immediate buyer (police department) and the ultimate buyer (political leadership) can relate to and definitely care about.

One alternative to the number of tickets metric might be to look at the total number of accidents at intersections with red light cameras. For most of us, fewer accidents mean safer streets.

So How Do You Choose Your Customer Success Metric?

Let’s assume for the moment you are selling to a business.

Papa Bear

Increase revenue or reduce costs. I hope whatever it is you are selling to the business does one or both of these, or I suspect your prospective customer will never buy. That said, with very few exceptions, your product or service probably does not directly do either one, and the outcomes of your product are not “more revenue.” They should do things that lead to one of these two.

These are the wrong metrics.

Mama Bear

More twitter followers (sorry, social media folks, this isn’t a business outcome). This is certainly a metric, but for most businesses, it doesn’t produce something effective, nor does it (in any meaningful way) affect costs or revenue. It’s too narrow, and too immediate. Other examples are things such as, “keeps all your customer activity in one place” or “ensures everyone knows the correct procedures.”

Those might be things your product does, but they are not why your customer buys.

The Goldilocks Metric (encore)

If you were selling a product to a marketing department, the outcome might be “produces more leads in the pipeline” or “shortens the time to conversion to a sale.” Both of those are things your product might do where you can measure the effect your product has on either number of leads or time to conversion, and the metric has a credible effect on the business (in these examples, more revenue).

In another recent post, I discussed Christensen’s idea of “hiring” a product to “do a job.” Your customer has a job they need done (e.g., they need more leads). That’s something they hire a product to do. And it’s something you can measure before and after they buy your product, so you and they can tell how effective your product is for them.

Another way to consider this is that every team, every group, and every department in a company has business objectives they can measure. Your product needs to help their measurement of at least one of those business objectives moving in the right direction.

The Goldilocks metric has to be specific and countable. ShotSpotter counts the number of prosecutions and convictions that use their data. You can count number of leads, length of sales cycle, reduction in overhead, etc.

So finding the right metric is really simple: It is a business objective, and it is countable.

Get that right, and you’ll have no trouble getting your customers to show you just how successful you are for them. Which is just right.

Tell us how you are measuring your customers’ success in the comments.

Photo Credit: Bill David Brooks via Compfight cc

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Engagement

Has Marketing Failed Sales?

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A few weeks ago, at the Sales 2.0 conference, I noticed a trend: Salespeople are generating their own leads. In fact, I heard pundit after pundit offer justifications for salespeople to be more proactive and take lead generation into their own hands, including statistics showing that as few as 30% of the leads sent to sales by marketing are worthy of pursuit.

Isn’t it marketing’s job to deliver qualified (or at least pursuit-worthy) leads to sales? So has marketing failed?

Well, no, not exactly. There are two significant (you might call them disruptive) trends happening at the same time in lead generation: the indivdualization of technology and social selling.

Marketing is less-well-equipped than sales to take advantage of these. Sales, especially the individual salesperson, is far better equipped to experiment with new methods, processes and technologies than any marketing department can be, if only because of the scale. And marketing has significant responsibilities beyond lead generation, including leading and developing the company’s relationship with its prospects, customers and all other stakeholders, and stewarding the company’s brand.

But in order to be successful, marketing will have to watch these trends — and how salespeople take advantage of them — and figure out how to make them part of everyday marketing in order to stay relevant.

Trend One: The Individualization of Technology

Technology has migrated from huge systems only practical for large institutions to apps any individual can use anywhere, anytime. In the same way, systems which large corporations use to manage their resources are now available for individuals, including cloud-based (SaaS) services, such as CRM and marketing automation.

Companies such as Nimble and Contactually provide cloud-based services that are designed for (and priced for) individual salespeople to do the essential parts of what a more cumbersome CRM system once did. They manage everything from contacts to social relationships to follow-ups to engagement opportunities.

What is important about this is these services can be used by an individual salesperson to find opportunities and generate leads entirely on his or her own, even while working within a larger corporate CRM system.

In fact, my friend Matt Heinz offered a wealth of tips and tricks (he calls them “sales hacks”) for individual salespeople to use a range of tools to create a robust lead flow — all independent of any marketing department (yes, this works very well for sole proprietors, too!)

Trend Two: Social Selling

Social selling means salespeople can use their social networks and the activity they generate to find prospects and identify buying signals. For example, if I were selling marketing automation software, and a 2nd-degree LinkedIn connection just took a new job as CMO (a possible buying signal) for a company in my market, I would want to contact that person. I might find that out through the activity generated in my own social network, then find out more about that person through their own social and other activity. I would then have a connection that can introduce me and would also know how to approach my newly discovered prospect.

Notice I am not looking in my CRM system for a lead that has not been touched in a while, nor am I looking for an introduction from my management. Salespeople (presumably) have their own networks they can use to find the connections they want and need.

Services such as TwitHawk and Newsle offer this kind of social signal search service, and Nimble and Contactually integrate it into the activity stream.

When you put all this together, you have a powerful new source of very well-qualified leads for the salesperson to pursue.

So Where is Marketing?

Marketing departments have done a very good job of adapting to the world of on-line and social media, and they have found ways to successfully get the word out. Marketing departments have also become very good at doing this on a large scale, just as they became very good at large-scale communication in traditional media.

But even the most targeted integrated email and social media campaigns reach thousands — sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands — of people in the hope that a small percentage will be sufficiently interested to become leads and prospects.

Salespeople are looking at this from the other direction. They are ignoring the scale of reaching mass markets and large target audiences, and instead, using the power of atomized technology and social media combined to find the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack — who they are pretty sure is an interested prospect.

Can Marketing Adapt?

Should marketing change its approach and focus on finding individuals? No. Well, maybe.

Marketing must look after its whole scope of responsibilities and ensure there are strong relationships with customers, prospects and other stakeholders. Marketing must also continue to use its ability to scale communications to ensure large audiences are reached.

In fact, without doing this first, the salesperson may never have the chance to find that one interested prospect

But marketers must also become proficient in a world that has become individualized. This individualization has happened not only in how sales leads are found, but also in how relationships and brand preferences are developed. Marketers must be able to take all the activities where they focus on the mass market and find ways to translate or evolve them into individual relationships.

It’s easy for individual salespeople to experiment with new methods and technologies, and they are finding some of them very useful. Marketers must find ways to experiment with new methods, processes and technologies to find the ones that work in this changing world.

The challenge marketers face is learning how to scale this individualization to reach the mass audience so the company can scale its individual relationships.

And marketing can deliver more relevant leads.

Join the conversation: post a comment telling us how you are addressing this issue.

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customers

Selling Again: Your Biggest Missed Opportunity

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Next week, I’ll be spending lots of time at the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco with people who think about revenue.

One of the topics I will be discussing with those revenue leaders is how to take advantage of the biggest revenue opportunity of all: selling to your current customers.

If your business depends on recurring revenue (for example, your customers buy subscriptions of some kind, say cloud services), then you not only have an enormous opportunity right in front of you, but if you overlook that opportunity, you are placing your business at significant risk.

Let me illustrate: Let’s say you sell a cloud (or other online) service. Your customers pay for a one-year subscription when they sign up, then pay for one year at a time every year when they renew — if they renew.

Your growth target for this year is 50%. But your churn rate (percentage of customers who do not renew) is 20%. That means you need to sell 70% more this year than you did last year to make your growth target.

I’m guessing your growth target is already a stretch. Can you really beat it by 20% or more?

Or should you take a different approach?

I help my clients focus on the relationships they’ve already built with their customers and building a sales and marketing process to make sure more of them renew and fewer leave.

Read my recommendations at the Sales 2.0 Conference Blog.

And join me in San Francisco on April 8th and 9th.

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Making Remote Work Work: Nine Ways to Succeed and Five Myths Dismissed

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If you’ve been paying attention to the news out of Silicon Valley recently, it would be hard to miss the uproar about Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decree that Yahoo! would no longer allow its people to work from home.

I spent several years leading marketing and internal communications for the remote work program at Cisco Systems.  During that time, our policies evolved and grew into a sophisticated program designed to create competitive advantage for Cisco in both its access to skilled workforce and in serving its customers.

I don’t want to jump into the debate about Yahoo!, nor do I want to discuss how organizations and employees benefit from remote work.  My colleague Faith LeGendre has covered that very well.

I want to take a closer look at how to make remote work (which includes working from home, working in a remote location, or even just having a geographically diverse team) actually work well and benefit both the company and the employee.

First, let me dismiss a few myths:

  • Working from home is not just for mothers with young children.
  • Working remotely is not just about wanting schedule flexibility for personal needs.
  • Working remotely to achieve a flexible schedule does not reduce productivity.
  • When remote work programs fail, it’s generally because of poor technology planning or a lack of good management practices.
  • Collaboration and informal interaction do not require being in the same location.

Making a remote work program work for the benefit of everyone requires hard work and a shift in thinking on the part of both the employee and the company.  The goal of a remote work program should be to make employees just productive from anywhere as they would be in an office.

For the company and the remote worker’s manager, these practices will help make you and your people successful and productive no matter where they are:

Shift your thinking from presence focused to results focused.

One of managers’ most common complaints about people who work remotely is that they can’t see whether they are working. I suggest that your inoffice workers are probably also pretty adept at making you think they are working even when they are not.  But it just doesn’t matter.

Whether your people are in your office or somewhere else, remember that you hired them to produce results.  It may require a bit more rigor on your part, but make sure both you and they understand what those results are and how you expect them to be achieved.

Be honest:  if your people are producing great results, does it matter whether they did all the work between 9 and 5?  Or is it OK with you if they did some of the work at 3 AM?

This also means you need to set expectations and have an explicit agreement on when the remote worker will be reachable for emergencies and other time critical matters.  Make sure you know what you actually need and what is reasonable to expect.

Be reasonable and allow yourself a learning curve.

Managing remote workers is not easy. You will find that shifting your thinking, measuring results in a different way, and trusting your workers more completely than you likely have before is challenging and requires a learning curve.

Don’t expect more from your remote workers than from your inoffice workers (though you will probably get more) and watch yourself for inequities in your treatment of the two. This will get easier with time, and it will be much easier if your company’s HR team provides support and training.

Create formal agreements and stick to them.

Your remote workers should know what you expect from them, and you should know how they are meeting those expectations.

When you either hire a remote worker or change an inoffice worker into a remote worker, create a formal written agreement.  Outline everything from objectives, expected results, response times, and availability to reporting and collaborating with colleagues across the company.

Get the technology right.

Don’t skimp.  The technology available in today’s market for making remote workers effective is both very good and very affordable.  Make sure you have the technology that allows your remote workers to get the job done as efficiently as your inoffice workers.

For the remote worker make sure you work effectively and follow these ideas to help your management realize as much benefit as you do from your working remotely:

It’s not about your convenience; it’s about producing results.

As with so many communications you have with your management, explaining why you need this “privilege” just doesn’t cut it.  Explain how it will benefit your manager and the company.  Show how you will make it work.  Sell your manager on trusting you to make it work.

Take it slowly.

Don’t walk into your manager’s office and announce your plan to work remotely full-time starting Monday.  Start with one or two days per week.  Create milestones that show your part-time remote work plan works.  Then go to three days per week.  Then four.

When you are choosing which days to start with, intentionally choose days that will show that you can work effectively.  For example, choose a day when a weekly team meeting occurs, then demonstrate your outstanding participation in that meeting while sitting in your living room.

Demonstrate results.

If there is one single key to success in remote work, this is it:  create external objective evidence of your work.  Your management will not see every bit of work you do remotely. But they can always see the outcome of your work.

For example, let’s say your job is to run email marketing campaigns.  You and they both know lots of planning and collaboration go into creating those campaigns.  But they may or may not see that.  What they will see is that the campaign launched and produced results.

Learn to collaborate online.

Both structured and impromptu collaboration can easily happen from anywhere.  But for most of us, it’s not natural to strike up informal conversations electronically.

I can’t put too fine a point on this:  learn how.  Getting good at making connections and developing relationships with people you can’t (and may never) see is critical to your success.

Overcoming resistance is about proving success.

This is generic but critical to making it work.  Some managers will resist the idea of having someone work remotely.  You can’t change the culture overnight, but you can create opportunities to prove success.  Create trial remote work times.  Develop result focused plans for making it succeed.

When the trial period ends, make sure you have lots of evidence of success to show your manager the benefits and start planning for a larger trial.  Make your success available to others also:  the more people who show and prove success, the faster the culture of resistance will change.

The list of benefits of remote work for both employees and employers is seemingly endless, so there’s no reason not to get started.  Remember, if your people can’t work remotely for you, they might just work remotely for your competition.

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Timing Matters: A Different Way To Fill Your Pipeline

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As marketers, we are very good at understanding our products, knowing how they bring value to our customers, and helping our customers translate our products into that value.  We know how to promote our products and how to target market segments and different buyers with the right messages in the right channels to make sure everyone in our market knows about the benefits of our offerings and can bring them.

We work to generate interest and then determine if the person interested is “qualified” (meaning, generally, they can buy our product), then we create what we call a lead. Sometimes those leads buy, and sometimes (likely the majority of the time) they don’t and are sent to the cultivation pool.  There, we do things to keep in contact until they are ready to buy.

To do all of this, we run campaigns that target certain profiles of buyers.  Those might be by preferences, industry, or some other market segmentation.

But what if we segment by time?  What if we run campaigns targeting people who are ready to buy?

One of the ways I help my clients is to use the massive amounts of data they have about their prospects and customers to discover the actual triggers that cause prospects to make buying decisions and customers to make repeat buying or renewal decisions.  Once you have this information, you can go beyond a simple understanding of the reasons they buy to gain insight into what events trigger the decision.

Then, you can focus your campaigns around these events.

Consumer marketers have been great at this for decades.  You know this if you’ve ever bought a house or gotten married.  Suddenly, new homeowners are flooded with catalogs and emails promoting interior design, home improvement, and other related products new homeowners typically need.  Brides- and grooms-to-be are inundated with ads for wedding services, flower arranging, music performance, and other wedding related services.

Can this translate into the B2B world?  Of course it can!  But it has not done so very well.  At least not yet.

I recently talked with a vendor of marketing automation systems about their segmentation, and it turned out that they were very good at selling their system to young, growing companies.  So they were running campaigns targeted at those companies.  I asked them to review about 50 recent sales to this type of company, looking for things their sales reps knew had happened to the customer in the months before the sale.

There were several things that seemed to be common, but one that stood out was the closing of a fund-raising round (typically what Silicon Valley folks call a “B” round). Suddenly the company had money, and the primary use of that money was to invest in customer growth—meaning marketing and sales investment.  One of the first things they did was to buy a marketing automation system.

After this, they started running a campaign targeted specifically at companies who had just closed a “B” round of funding.  And, yes:  conversion rates shot through the roof.  Contact-to-lead ratios jumped dramatically.  Cost-per-lead dropped.

The next question is:  where do you find the people or companies that have recently experienced a buying trigger event?  Depending on the event for which you are looking, there may be publications or data sources that list these.  In the example above, we used some of the popular venture capital publications to get the lists of companies and then merged that with the data already in the CRM system.

If the event you choose does not have a data source or publication associated with it, you can use both traditional and social research techniques to find both the companies and the people (If you sell marketing solutions, imagine finding the tweet posted by someone you didn’t previously know celebrating their appointment as CMO.  You’d probably want to get in touch with them). This can require some data scrubbing, but it will yield a much higher quality of lead.

The important question we miss all too often is, “When do our customers buy?”  We are quite good (I hope) at knowing why, but knowing when is just as important.

Selling to your prospects when they are ready to consider buying changes your lead generation and cultivation strategy.  You can become much more efficient in your outbound efforts and much less annoying to all those customers who just don’t want to hear from you this week.

I challenge you to consider:  do you know any events that trigger a buying decision in your customer?  Are you using that knowledge to create time-based segmentation?

Because in creating an effective and efficient lead generation machine, timing matters.

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