Building Strong Relationship with Customers

Selling to existing customers is far cheaper and easier than finding new ones. Use marketing to nurture customer loyalty through good service and quality products, backed up by a strong, lasting, mutual rewarding relationship. 

Customers today expect first-class service, and rightly so. Think about how you felt when you last received poor service. 

Disappointed? Angry? Cheated? 

This is exactly how your customers feel when they experience similar treatment.

Compare this with how you feel when you receive exceptional service. Remember that customers are not an irritation standing in the way of you and your work, they are your work. Without them you have no business. 

List areas where you feel that you can improve customer service. Look at how staff interacts with customers, how orders are processed, and how correspondence is dealt with. Tackle each area for improvement in turn.

Think, What Really Makes People Buy?

It’s the ultimate question, isn’t it? You work hard at marketing to make contact with potential clients. Then you work even harder to get a chance speak with them about what you have to offer. But how do you actually get them to hire you? The answers may not be what you think.

1. Know-Like-and-Trust Factor – When making a buying decision about professional services, the number one factor clients consider is how much they know, like, and trust you. It’s more important than how much you charge or even how much they need you. What clients are asking is how much contact have they had with you? Did they recognize your name beforehand? Are you credible as a competent professional? Were you referred by someone they know?

You can influence this factor by focusing your marketing efforts on meeting clients through networking, referrals, and public speaking. If you haven’t had prior contact with prospective clients and weren’t referred, give them copies of any published work or media coverage you have, and provide them with client testimonials. Be prepared to stay in touch over a period of time so they can get to know you better.

2. Match between your offer and their needs – If you pass the first test of seeming credible and trustworthy, potential clients next look at how closely what you offer matches what they are looking for. Do they have a pressing need for your services? Do they understand exactly what it is that you provide? Do they grasp the benefits of working with you?

The best way to address this issue is to ask plenty of questions. The more you can find out about what the client needs, the better you can explain specifically how you can help. The biggest mistake professionals make when selling themselves is to offer themselves as a solution when they don’t yet know the problem. Be sure also to communicate the benefits of hiring you — not just what you do, but what the client gets as a result of what you do.

3. Justifying the purchase – An often neglected component of the buying decision is whether the client will be able to justify spending money on your services to their spouse, boss, board of directors, or even themselves. In business environments, this is critical. The purchaser must be able to support their decision to hire you with verifiable facts. When selling to consumers, keep in mind there may be a naysayer in the background who will need to be convinced of your value.

Give your prospects the evidence they need to justify your value to others. Provide statistics or examples of results achieved, money saved, or performance improved in your former projects. Share a case study, your client list, or a portfolio of your successes. Help them find the language they need to reassure everyone involved that hiring you is the most practical solution available to the problem at hand.

4. Price vs. budget – The last element prospective clients consider is the price. Yes, cost is important, but if they trust you, your offer is a good match for what they need, and they can justify hiring you, then the only significant issue about the price is whether they can find the money.

The next time you’re wondering why a sale isn’t going through, check how you’re doing on each of these four factors. See if you can discover the missing ingredients that will convince the client to buy.

The fastest way to turn a prospect into a client may be simply to change how you think about them.

E-mail: deepak@managementthinker.com

CONTROL THE FREE-FALL

Do you sometimes feel a little bit out of control during your workday, wish you had more time to do the really important things or feel like you are doing a lot of wheel spinning on non-productive items? You are not alone.  Eighty-five percent of people in the workplace have similar complaints and part of the remedy is better control of our day through more effective Time Management.

For many of us, it is like the guy falling off the Empire State Building. While he is free-falling to a certain unpleasant collision with the pavement below, a co-worker pokes his head out the window at the 55th floor and inquires, “How's it going?” to which our free-falling friend replies, “Well, not too bad...so far!”

So it goes with many of our days, free-falling through the day, not in control of the events around us, spinning our wheels in an air of frustration that eventually sends us crashing into the pavement of missed deadlines, higher stress and lower productivity.

The answer is not to work harder but to work smarter.  Successful people do not necessarily put in more hours but, instead, work their time in a more efficient manner to get more done in less time. They control their time and understand that either they are in control or someone else is.

Planning is the most important step in effective Time Management.  Three easy rules can be followed to help you to significantly improve your productivity each day, which translates into getting more done in less time.

First, make a “to-do” list on a clean sheet of paper or in your day planner, such as a Day-Timer.  List all items you would like to complete today, if time permits.  Getting the items on paper gets them out of your head and in front of you. Having all items on one list helps to bring these items into control and avoids duplication and overlooking of important items.  One list also gives a clearer picture of the total amount of work to be done and allows for better scheduling.  Fewer things will slip through the cracks.

Second, prioritize the “to-do” list.  Select from the list the most important item to be done.  Ask yourself, “If I could only do one item today, which would it be?”  Put the numeral “1” to the left of that item.  Next, select the second most important item and label it “2.”  Continue the process labeling all items in numerical order.  As you start the day, begin with the first item on the list.  Complete it (around the interruptions that will inevitably come your way) and then go to the second item, then the third, etc.  You may not complete the list but you will always complete the most important items.  Making a “to-do” list is an important first step but prioritizing that list ensures that we focus on the more important items rather than giving in to the temptation of working on the less important items because they may stand out more or because they are easier to do.

Third, follow this process every day.  Wearing yesterday's dirty old shirt or fingering through yesterday's stale lunch is not too appealing.  So, just as you start the day with clean clothes and a new lunch, start with a new, prioritized “to-do” list.  Emotionally, it will give you a lift to start each day with the new plan, but, more importantly, it will give you a chance to reprioritize items left over from the day before.  For example, yesterday's item #9 may become today's item #1.  If you are working off yesterday's “to-do” list, that important item may not receive attention.  Daily planning will sharpen daily focus as priorities shift with each day.

These three rules will help you to significantly improve your performance each and every day and will help to reduce that free-falling feeling. You will find you are getting more done in less time and you will feel more productive and less stressed each day.  (And that is a good thing!)

OPRAH WINFREY AND LANCE ARMSTRONG

Delegation Dilemma

We all have 24 hours in each day, 7 days each week. (You probably knew that anyway.) If you multiply that out and if my math is correct, and I suspect it is because I’ve done the calculation a few times before, that totals 168 hours in a week. But then we have to subtract out time for sleep. Let’s use 8 hours per night, 7 nights per week (I know that might be high for a lot of people and maybe low for others, but we do spend about a third of our week dead), or a total of 56 hours. Subtract that 56 hours from 168 and now we’re down to only 112 hours per week to accomplish all we wish to do. If we chose to do everything ourselves, we will limit our potential because we are always hitting our heads on a ceiling of 112 hours. But what if we could plug into someone else’s time stream? What if we could get others to do things for us? Wouldn’t that increase our results? You bet. And all I’m talking about here is the concept of delegation.

Delegation is when you plug into someone else’s time stream when you don’t have the time or the expertise to do something, thereby increasing your own results.

Many feel they do not have the opportunity to delegate. “After all, I have no staff at work. I am the staff!” some will tell me. Yet, we are all delegators. Most have mail delivered to their homes. Any of us could go to the post office, rent our own postal box, and then each day take a trip to the post office to retrieve our mail. But most of us have made the decision that that is not the best use of our time so we have the letter carrier deliver our mail.

Maybe you went out for lunch yesterday at Burger King. You got a hamburger, fries, and a drink and paid $5 for that meal. How many people were involved in the production of that lunch to your plate? Probably hundreds, if not thousands. Someone had to plant the wheat to make the bread, someone had to pick the tomato to make the ketchup, and someone had to drill the oil out of the ground to power the delivery truck to your local Burger King. And if you paid $5 for this meal, everyone in this chain had to share in that $5, perhaps in fractions of a penny.

And I’m not trying to stretch delegation to some unreasonable application. This is exactly how the world worked up until about two hundred years age. All throughout the history of the world, if you wanted something, you had to produce it yourself. You wanted food? You didn’t pop over to your favorite restaurant. You had to grow it or kill it yourself. You wanted housing? You didn’t visit with your local real estate person. You went into the woods and cleared the land and built it.

In fact, if you look at the development of individual personal wealth from whenever they began to keep track up and through about 200 years ago, people 200 years ago were not a whole lot better off financially than their ancestors. And then from about 200 years ago to present times, individual economic wealth shot up through the roof because the Industrial Revolution permitted companies to mass-produce inexpensive products for the marketplace. This required payment of relatively good wages to workers so that they could afford to buy these products, so companies could make profits and produce more products.

If you and I had to do everything ourselves, create our food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, etc, the average person would probably lose 95% of what they have now or retain a mere 5% of what they have achieved.

So the question is not whether or not you delegate. We all delegate in ways that you perhaps had not considered. The better question to ask is, “How far do you want to go with it?” because delegation is the key to open the door to great success as we are forever hitting our heads against that ceiling of 112 hours available to us each week.

And now the “Delegation Dilemma.” The hardest part about delegation is not finding places to delegate. It’s simply letting go. We take great pride in doing things ourselves, don’t we? “If you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself,” we say often. That’s a nice thought and it would be a practical practice if we had unlimited amounts of time, but we don’t.

The starting point for delegation for me is each night in Daily Planning. As I look ahead to my next day and review all that I have to do and want to do, I look at each item and ask myself, “Is this the best use of my time?” If it is, I’ll plan to personally attack it. If not, I’ll try to figure out a way to delegate it and multiply my day tomorrow through the leverage of delegation.

40% Indian consumers research online before buying offline

Today, with approximately 13.7 crore internet users in the country, digital media has become a potential tool for consumer research before buying products and services offline. Moreover, consumers don’t only use this platform for search or social networking but also for utilitarian purposes. To understand the influence of internet on technology product purchases by buyers in-stores, Nielsen on behalf of Google India conducted a survey across 12 cities. The study interviewed 3,677 respondents outside 200 multi brand outlets and retail stores.

Google India’s Tech Shopper report claimed that over 40 per cent of the in-store purchasers in metros and Tier I and II cities use online research before making a decision and 69 per cent have already made up their minds about what model to buy and what not to before entering the store. For the record, the cities covered four metros, Chandigarh, Pune, Indore and Coimbatore for Tier I and Kanpur, Kochi, Vadodara and Bhubaneswar as part of Tier II cities. 86 per cent of the respondents included males across SEC A1 to SEC D and 92 per cent of the respondents were in the age group of 18 to 44 years out of which 34 per cent had already made the purchase.

Rajan Anandan, Managing Director and VP Sales Operations Google India

The noticeable fact is that the maximum number of online purchase related researchers are in Tier II cities, which stands at a staggering 83 percent compared to metros which is 30 per cent lesser. Is it because of the lack of resources, middling incomes or the search for value for money? Even though the offline behaviour of consumers is changing due to the research done on the internet but is the e-commerce segment also making an impact on the buying behaviour? Rajan Anandan, VP and Marketing Director, Sales and Operations, Google India, says that the objective of the research was to understand offline purchasing behaviour. “E-commerce will grow but over the next three to four years most Indian consumers will do research online and they will buy offline. What has changed is that they have already made up their mind before they enter the store. Additionally, 70 per cent of Indian consumers today have made up their mind about the brand and model they want to buy before they walk into the store,” he adds.

With Google being a platform used by brands for SEM (Search Engine Marketing), how do brands leverage this factor to their benefit applying to consumer research and behaviour? Anandan has a different take on this aspect, he says that the spends in the industry is growing at a rate of 50 per cent and by 2015 the spends on this platform will cross Rs. 5,000 crore. Though he says that SEM is a very important part of the media mix of the more advanced advertisers in India today, most active brands, however, have multi communication online strategies. “It is not one platform that a brand needs to be on, search, social, video and mobile all come into play. Therefore, the more active brands especially in the technology category are present across multiple platforms and have very comprehensive paid earned strategies,” he adds.

About e-commerce he says that the segment is growing rapidly. “Industry sources write $ six billion as e-commerce revenue last year growing at 50 per cent, which means it will be $ nine billion plus next year and by 2015 it will be north of $ 30 billion,” he adds. E-commerce is growing but of a very small base, he says and further adds that out of the $ six billion ecommerce last year, travel was $ five billion and non travel was about a billion and electronics and technology was about a third of that.

According to the survey, more than 90 per cent of the users are looking for prices; about 55 per cent look for photos of the product and a little more than 20 per cent look for reviews online. The study also focuses on the price aspect of different products which buyers undertake. This shows that the research intensity increases for high value products. For example the research intensity increased when the price range exceeded Rs. 7,000 for mobile phones and Rs. 30,000 for laptops among others.

Medium of First Awareness	Metros	Tier 1	Tier 2
TV	53%	64%	57%
Internet Ads	23%	17%	12%
Newspaper Ads	14%	11%	23%

According to Google, tablets are the fastest growing technology products in the search query growth category, bagging a 160 per cent compared to mobiles at 41 per cent. The top five brands that consumers search for online in the mobile category in descending order that Google claims is, Samsung, Nokia, iPhone, Sony and HTC. In the laptop category Dell leads followed by HP, Samsung, Lenovo and Acer and in the tablet category Apple iPad, Akash, Samsung, Micromax and HCL form the most researched names. This calibration of brands was done by Google for the period of January 2012 to October 2012.

Google also claims that tech products are the largest category after search in India. The report shows that there is a 39 per cent year-on-year growth from the period of January 2010 to September 2012. But is online research enough for a buyer? And is 39 per cent a large number for buyers who do internet research before buying? Conceivably that is the reason why there is still apprehension among the Indian consumer to buy tech products directly online. As per the claims of the report, 69 per cent of the customers like to have the touch and feel of the product after their ‘extensive’ research.

Source:http://pitchonnet.com/blog/2012/11/21/40-indian-consumers-research-online-before-buying-offline/

A quarter of our teachers are very good. If you could make all the teachers as good as the top quarter, the India would sour to the top of that comparison. So can you find the way to capture what the really good teachers are doing?

It's amazing to me that more has not been invested in looking at how does that good teacher calm that classroom? How does that good teacher keep the attention of all those kids? We need to measure what they do, and then have incentives for the other teachers to learn those things.