Craig Rentmeester's Blog

Ideas for Changing the Rules

I realized that my last post doesn't provide any ideas for changing the rules in your favor and improving your business.

Here are some ideas that you can build off of. They're broken up into categories and aim to look at every step in the sales process.

Phone Systems

• No more automated answering machine messages (think: please listen closely as our menu has changed).
• Put your number on your contact page, preferably one that is answered within three or less rings.

Testimonials and Case Studies

• Gather testimonials from your customers and use them in pre-sales collateral.
• Record testimonials from your customers and put them on your Web site.
• Create video testimonials with your customers.
• Create case studies of successful past customers in different situations that your customers are often in when they're considering.

Web Site

• Offer content online that you normally wouldn't (prices, price ranges, videos, photo galleries, employee biographies, employee testimonials.
• Start planing an SEO overhaul of your Web site.

PR

• Apply for industry awards that can be leveraged.
• Have your best employees apply to write articles for trade magazines.

Sales Reps

• Have your sales team attach their vCard to every e-mail.
• Have your sales team add upcoming events to their e-mail signatures. 
• Have sales reps add testimonials to their quotes.
• No more text-based, customer-facing PowerPoints.

Increase Customer Loyalty

• Put together a customer satisfaction event that people will have to talk about.
  
  • Top of the line. Exclusive. One awesome prize instead of 50 giveaways.
    
• Reward great customers with exclusive benefits.
• Let customers take an item for free at the checkout if the purchase over a certain amount. 
  
  • Don't advertise it. It will spoil it.

Product Development

• Customizable products.

Product Delivery

• Free, unexpected items in the shipping container that are useful.

Change the Rules

A problem that some companies face is that the way they've always attracted customers and made sales changes.

Here are some examples you can probably relate to:

• Sales numbers are down.
• Customer retention rates are down.
• Customer service calls are up.
• Direct mail begins yielding lower and lower, or dare I say, negative returns on investment.
• A ground swell of customer service mistakes leads to anti-company forums, blogs and web sites.
• The seminars and conferences you used to host and fill with eager bodies are being canceled or filled with people there solely for the free lunch.
• Newspapers aren't bringing qualified job candidates to your HR department.
• E-mail blasts have a click-through rate lower than five percent.

The question is, how do you market to people who have less and less time to take in your message?

How do you grow your sales ten percent in a market that's growing less than three percent per year?

Today is the best day to start changing the rules.

Make it Easy to do Business with your Company

A problem that some companies have is that they don't make it easy for companies to business with them. Whether it's a slow accounting department, software tools that don't integrate with other mainstream software packages or not providing enough product information online for a prospect to make an informed decision.

This applies to almost every company, and in fact, almost every company already tries to do this on some level. Here are some examples I thought of that you can probably relate to: accepting Mastercard/Visa/Discover/AmEx, sending contracts as MS Word document, using vCards in MS Outlook, making software that works with Macs and PCs, etc.)

The main question is how do you take it a step further and take down the barriers to change?

The Customer Band

In today's ever-changing, ever-connected, world it's not uncommon for customers to band together to solve each others issues, bring up ideas for how to improve products or even complain about bad customer service interactions.

This is already happening in places like Facebook groups, Google groups and Ning.

Here's a link to an interesting interview on Fast Company with Thor Muller, CEO of getsatisfaction.com, a site that brings customers and businesses together in a forum-like setting for customer service interactions.

Awesome Product

Caution: Shameless product mentioning ahead.

Warnings a side, the Dyson Airblade is one of the coolest and useful products I have used in a while.

If you haven't used or seen one yet, check it out.

Language and Control

It's been heavily talked about in magazines, TV programs and blogs for years, to varying degrees and with varying intentions.

Yes, customers are in control.

In the broadcast era of marketing, customers decided whether or not to pay attention to your message.

Then, the Internet came along, put print and TV on the ropes, and gave customers new avenues to express their opinions, along with a wider selection of free content delivered in many forms.

Online, customers are always in control. From product reviews, to blog posts, to the search terms they enter to find products they're looking for.  Not only can customers determine whether or not your prospects buy your products, but your prospects can pass you by without even knowing you exist, unless you play by their rules and cater to the wants that they communicate.

The key to marketing in the digital era is to research how your target audience describes the products and services they use. Then,  create content related to that instead of trying to have your audience begin using the language your company uses to describe itself. 

The best thing about online marketing is that the playing field is (relatively) even online. Companies small and big can use the same research tactics and create great content.

Business Profile: Lulu

Lulu is one of the neatest services I've seen in a long time, and I have been meaning to talk about it for a while.

What is Lulu?
Lulu provides short-run manufacturing of books for self publishers, among other things. It basically allows anyone to write and create a physical, paperback book. In addition, Lulu provides services for reviewing content, editing, formatting, and promoting your book.

The Pros

• The service is flexible. You can choose to print one copy, one hundred or one thousand. The quantity is up to you.

• The prices are  pretty affordable.
  • 35 copies of a 150-page book, black and white and bound = $243   ($6.92/copy)
  • 100 copies of a 85-page book in full color and bound - $1550   ($15.50/copy)

• Lulu offers a free online store front to help you sell your masterpiece without the upfront production cost commitments typically associated with printing.
• You can get your ISBN number
• A wide range of services for editing, formatting and promoting your work.

The Cons

• Lulu doesn't give cash advances to authors to allow them to quit your day job while you work on your masterpiece.
• Lulu doesn't provide data about the number of authors who sell fewer than 500 copies to strangers (most) or just how many books get published each year (thousands).

Feedback/Insight
Have you or someone you know used Lulu? If so, let me know. I have been thinking about writing a basic guide to marketing for a while and Lulu seems like the perfect route for it.

Any feedback you have would be much appreciated.

Leveraging your (blogging) assets

Here is a good article about leveraging social media to generate sales from Search Engine Watch.

The article brings up a point that I had not thought about prior to reading this.
Everytime someone comments on a blog post they're showing interest in particular product, topic, service, etc.

You can harvest that data either by aggregating the contacts e-mail addresses and sending them updated content related to their past interests as indicated by their comments or by updating them on more recent comments by other users (like PRBlogger does) and commenting on the thread yourself with new developments.

The numbers don't lie - Print is dying - Hooray for Online Ads

The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

Read the full article on Editor and Publisher.

Some Stats from the Article:

Print Advertising

• Total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion
• Classified plunged 16.5% to $14.1 billion.

Internet Advertising

• Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006.

Advertising as a whole

• Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.

Newspapers earning more of their money online

• The NAA reported that online revenue now represents 7.5% of total newspaper ad revenue in 2007 compared to 5.7% in 2006.

Tip of the Hat to The Cycle for pointing out the article.

Google, whose stock was trading at over $740 per share in Nov. 2007, had  no comment.