How Breaking a Customer Promise Can Hurt Your Brand
our company’s brand represents the value customers receive when they interact with your business. It's a promise: When you choose to purchase from us, this is what we will deliver to you.When you break that promise – through defective products, shoddy workmanship, or poor service – you might lose the customer.But in this age of social media, you might also lose your reputation. Remember the musician who made a YouTube video about United Airlines breaking his guitar? It got more than 12 million views and spawned a whole culture of people creating videos so showcase their service complaints.How can you avoid mistakes that hurt your brand? And what can you do if those mistakes happen? Here are four insights from my recent experience for your smart marketing strategy.
7 Misconceptions about Marketing that Can Hurt Your Business
A smart marketing strategy is critical to the success of your business. But many companies have misconceptions about marketing that can hamper their ability to successfully promote their products and services in a competitive marketplace. Here are seven marketing misconceptions I often see in my work as a marketing consultant that can limit the effectiveness of your marketing plan and cause you to miss sales opportunities.
B-to-B Marketing: The Power of the Personal Note
There’s a simple business communication tactic that can have a huge impact on how your clients and prospects feel about you and your organization: The handwritten personal note.Here’s why personal notes are so effective in building strong client relationships and six tips for using personal notes in your smart marketing strategy.
5 Lessons from My UPS Guy: How to Create Loyal Customers
One of the most difficult marketing challenges is differentiating a service business from its competitors. One strategy is to market the knowledge and experience of the firm’s employees. Another is to focus on how the firm's employees make customers feel. Case in point: Tom, my UPS delivery guy. Here are 5 lessons in how to create loyal customers from a UPS driver in Cleveland.
Shut Up, Already: How Over-Marketing Kills Relationships
Permission-based marketing is now at the heart of relationships between companies and their customers and prospects. People opt-in to receive your emails, like your company on Facebook, subscribe to an RSS feed from your website or your channel on YouTube, or follow you on Twitter or LinkedIn.But having permission to market to someone isn’t a license to bombard them with marketing messages. In fact, not knowing when to shut up is a classic marketing mistake.Here’s how over-marketing can kill a customer or prospect relationship and 7 ways to avoid this costly error in your smart marketing strategy.
New Sales Rep, Key Account: Top 10 Tips for B2B Success
Smart business-to-business (B2B) marketers work hard to create and keep great relationships with their clients.In my last post, I shared the story of how a new B2B sales rep nearly destroyed a 10-year client relationship with my marketing agency by making six crucial mistakes in the first meeting.But transitioning a legacy client to a new sales rep doesn’t have to be a sales minefield. When handled well, assigning a new rep to a key account can be an opportunity to increase the client’s satisfaction and boost sales.Here are 10 things a new sales rep can do to ensure a smooth transition and earn a long-time client’s trust.
How NOT to Make a First Sales Call on a Long-Time Client
In business-to-business (B2B) marketing, the sales representative’s relationship with the customer drives sales and referrals.But when a trusted rep moves on and a new one is assigned to a long-time client, there’s potential for big trouble if the transition is handled poorly.Case in point: I recently met with a new sales rep from a company I’ve done business with for more than a decade. In less than 20 minutes, he managed to break six cardinal rules of effective customer relationship management and came very close to jeopardizing a long-term business partnership.Here’s where this salesperson went wrong and what can you learn from his mistakes for your smart marketing strategy.
The 7 Most Important Things to Do with a Sales Lead
Business-to-business (B2B) marketers often use such tactics as direct marketing, e-marketing, advertising, trade shows, and web marketing to generate sales leads.But a smart lead generation marketing strategy goes well beyond the creation of the marketing campaign.If your goal is to build a relationship with a business prospect, increase your sales conversion rate, and maximize the value of your sales resources, you need a careful plan for what happens after the lead comes in.Here are the seven steps you should take with a marketing-generated sales lead to achieve success.
21 Tips for Power Networking: When the Product is You
If you break into a cold sweat at the thought of walking into a business networking event as a complete stranger, you’re not alone.Networking is essential to building and growing a business, especially for business-to-business (B2B) marketers who participate in professional associations and trade shows.But it takes skill and experience to feel confident in a networking situation, and it takes careful planning to capitalize on the value of networking for lead generation.Here’s what I’ve learned about personal marketing and successful networking at B2B events, and 21 tips you can use to make networking a powerful component of your smart marketing strategy.
7 Things Every Marketer Should Know About Their Best Customers
Are you hard at work on next year’s marketing strategy? If so, there’s a critical first step you should take for a more effective marketing plan: A thorough assessment of your best customers. If your company is like most, you have a core group of customers that drive a large percentage of your sales. Here are seven things you should know about your best customers in order to develop a smart marketing strategy.
How Bad Direct Mail Can Sink a Customer Win-Back Strategy
Verizon says they want me back. But based on the direct mail package they just sent me, I don’t think they mean it. Reactivating lapsed customers is an important marketing strategy for every business. It’s easier to reengage a former customer than create a new one. If you’re using direct marketing to win former customers back, however, you’d better do it right. Here’s how a major marketer blew a customer win-back opportunity with poor direct mail, and five lessons for more effective win-back direct marketing.
B2B Sales Communication: 5 Tips for 1-to-1 Success
Call it contact management, lead follow-up, or just good salesmanship: One-to-one communication from sales representatives to prospects is vital to a smart business-to-business marketing strategy. But how do you do it well? Here are five tips for creating a one-to-one sales communication plan that engages prospects in a dynamic sales dialogue with your company and converts leads to sales.
How a Sloppy List Can Sabotage Your Email Marketing
Savvy direct marketers know that the list is the most important factor in the success of a direct marketing campaign. That’s why so much time and effort goes into keeping mailing list data current and complete. But too many direct marketers fail to pay this same kind of attention to the cleanliness of their email lists. Case in point: The Wall Street Journal. Here's how a major marketer's poor email list hygiene ruined their promotion, and five lessons you can apply to a smart marketing strategy.
Turn Leads into Sales with a Smart Marketing Strategy
The phones are ringing, web traffic is up, and the sales manager is telling everyone you’re a marketing genius. Your business-to-business lead generation campaign is a success! But before you break out the bubbly, remember that getting prospects to express interest in a product or service can be the easy part of business-to-business marketing. Converting those leads to sales is often a lengthy and complex process. Here's how to build a smart marketing strategy that engages B-to-B prospects and gets them to say "yes."
When Bad Marketing Happens to Good Customers
Loyal customers are a marketer’s best source of new sales and referrals. That’s why smart marketers treat their best customers like gold, and why earning customer loyalty is the goal of every smart marketing strategy. Except at Toyota. Their recent direct mail campaign to a loyal Toyota customer broke many of the rules of effective direct marketing and harmed a 25-year customer relationship. Here's why this campaign failed and what Toyota should have done instead.
Where Branding Matters Most: At the Human Level
There are many elements that make up a successful branding strategy, but the most important is how the people of a company are trained to exemplify the brand when they interact with customers. It’s branding at the human level – and it’s the pivotal point where many brand promises fall apart. Here's an example of a company that does it right.
Why Customer Data is Essential for Effective Marketing – Especially to Your Customers
When marketing to current or lapsed customers, it's essential to use your knowledge of the customer -- gleaned from database analysis -- to deliver a direct mail package or email that acknowledges and capitalizes on the customer's relationship with your organization.