Maybe it is because I just saw South Pacific at Lincoln Center a couple of weeks ago, but when Anne Mulcahy, Chairman and CEO of Xerox told 800 marketers at the American Marketing Association’s Mplanet in Orlando that she was not “a wild eyed optimist,” I perked up and listened. You just don’t hear the word optimist much anymore.
But what really got my attention was her following statement: that even in these crazy times she sees opportunities but we (marketers) have to act smartly. And a big part of acting smartly is getting close to your customers and LISTEN.
Throughout this conference, what I’m hearing is get back to basics, know you customers–especially your best customers, and — most importantly — listen to their needs. If you don’t pay attention and listen to your customers, someone else will.
Anne also commented that it is critical for smart marketers to stay in touch with customers because good or satisfactory marks from customers no longer cut-it. Companies have to strive for great. Xerox is so serious about listening to the customer that they have created a program called Sentinel. A Xerox executive is assigned to be the officer of the day and they get to deal with the escalated customer service issues–a.k.a the really angry customer. Sentinel is made of three components: listen to the problem, fix the problem, and assume the responsibility of identifying the underlying issue or process that has caused the problem and fix that. Talk about listening.
In his presentation at Mplanet, John Hayes the Global CMO of American Express backed up this core belief by talking about establishing new customer listening posts. And guess what… You have to LISTEN to what is the customer is saying they need.
Listening, according to John, is the most powerful selling tool. But the art of putting yourself in the customer shoes is becoming a lost art.
I know all of this sounds fundamental, but when you hear Mary Dillon, EVP and Global CMO of McDonalds say that you need to bond with customers and consistently win their trust and gain their respect, you know some of the most recognizable brands got there by listening to their core constituents. To this end, McDonalds has created a Global Mom’s Advisory Panel. They are actively engaging and really listening to mothers around the world. McDonalds meets face-to-face with this panel of moms once a quarter and some of these mom’s have formed their own Quality Correspondence communities online. McDonald’s has gotten the importance of engaging their customers… and at the very least is listening to their mother(s).
George Day, Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School feels that companies need a renewed sales focus on their best customers. He feels that while many companies are quick to slash now-a-days, slashing jeopardizes sales support which impacts revenue. Bottom-line for George: spend smartly now–and you guessed it–focus on customers.
What I walked away with from this conference is that one way to market smart with less is getting back to the basics. The basic of basics is listening and engaging your best customers.
You would think it would be easy to listen, but sometimes we just forget the basics.
Great post. Challenging economic times presents the best opportunities to grow your business. More than likely your competition is scaling back leaving an open path to additional marketshare.
The trick is to be smart with your resources. Instead of idling, use down time to revise your strategic plan, eliminate unnecessary processes and bottlenecks, and improve your connection with your customer.
I am amazed at how many “buy now, great sale” emails I receive from companies I patronize. And, how few “Thank you for being a customer. We noticed that you like (fill in the blank). Have you seen our new selection?” emails.
If they would spend some time creating targeted emails based on customer buying patterns, I guarantee they would see a bump in sales.
Sending emails to everyone in your housefile because it is relatively inexpensive is lazy marketing.
Thank you for a great post. Have a great day!
Debra
Susanne, as you rightly point out too many companies –and people for that matter, are talking. We push, push, push until the typical 2% (response rate) actually return our messages. Then we call it success.
Listening–and active listening–are lost art forms. Oftentimes, in the name of action, we’re tagged to “do something” when in fact, the better course most times is to observe, listen and then analyze.
I’m very happy to hear marketers talking about tuning into their customers needs, so your post was quite welcome. It’s quite heartening to hear the management and marketing heads of leading brands advocating this kind of approach.
Many of the speakers, it sounds like, brought up focusing on your “best customers.” In my experience, very often the folks companies believe are their “best customers” are not the most profitable for the firm. Sure, they may buy a lot–they are the so-called “heavy users” or “heavy buyers”–but they are price conscious and deal prone. They aren’t all that brand loyal either.
As far as developing marketing programs and new products and services goes, heavy buyers usually don’t have much in common with each other. As a result, coming up with a motivating brand message and new products to appeal to everyone in the group is pretty challenging and certainly doesn’t yield an impressive return on investment.
We’d absolutely agree that listening to your “best customers” is critical to financial and brand success, we’d just encourage marketers to define the “best” by profitability first.
I think it is great that companies large and small are actually starting to realise the worth of retaining key customers instead of just focusing on attracting new customers.
Regarding best customers or as we call it key customers I think there are 8 factors involved which includes profitability. You can easily model these to work out the value of each customer or groups of customers to a company.
Thank you all for your thoughts and feedback…and it is an interesting point…how are companies defining their best customers.
Suzanne, it was great to meet you at the Mplanet conference this week! Great follow-up post.
Focusing on existing customers is one of the best way to grow a company organically – especially in this economy. Cementing these relationships will also position a company for success as we come out of the “slump”.
When I worked for Peppers and Rogers Group, we looked at the definition of “Best Customers” as those that not only had some of the highest spend with us, but also based on the cost to serve those customers (this part is often hard to determine). Companies should also look to those customers that have a lot of potential to become “best customers”!
Susan – Nice to meet you at Mplanet. I really enjoyed your recap; “listening” to customers was a theme that seemed to run through many of the presentations .. and that was a very good thing!