Advertising is passive--it's the boomerang and pray approach. Put this out there, and hope and pray it comes back to us (or at least pays for itself! fingers crossed!). I can't tell you how many people pay for Ads and are happy if they pay for themselves. Is that really the point? Anyway, with ads, you have no control over the results once you put it out there. ROI is very rarely worth the investment. But, it is the easy road--the one most travelled.

Focusing on the Customer Experience is active--it does take attention, focus, and work on the part of the small business owner and their staff. It requires the courage and vulnerability to ask for honest feedback and then the humility and dilligence to make changes. It requires looking at EVERY part of your business--NOT just the marketing department. Everyone is part of this team. AND the process is empowering--these are the elements you can control. How liberating! It's definitely not the easy road. . .but it is the road that will lead to long term success.

Which will you choose?

Statistic after statistic supports how important exceptional customer experience and the resulting WOM leads to increased client retention, faster growth, and better profit margins.

If you ask most small business owners, "where do most of your customers come from," most will tell you either through their direct networking efforts AND (even more likely), via Word of Mouth.

And yet, when you look at where businesses are spending their marketing dollars, is it where the biggest payoff is? No, it's almost always being spent on new client acquisition. Even though their closing ratio may be small or their retention rate may be awful--as long as new people are coming through the door, they feel successful. But the numbers tell us otherwise.

It's 50-80% more expensive (depending on your industry) to attract a brand new client and grow through your current client base.

Why waste money getting people in the door if you can't keep them there, help them with their problems, excite them to come back, and delight them and have them spread WOM about you?


Where are your marketing dollars being focused?

What a provocative question for businesses! Today I came across a blog by BrandAutopsy and they're doing a series on "Would you miss .. ." on different national brands. What a great question for us to ask ourselves.

Are we Relevant?
Do we provide such a memorable experience that people would be sad to see us go?
Do we provide such a valuable service that people would be sad to see us go?
Would your customers miss you?
Would your employees miss you?
Would your vendors miss you?
Would the business community miss you?
I'm excited about this question--it's brilliant!


We should all be asking ourselves this and certainly, if you're a client of ours, we'll be asking you this question soon :)

Thank you, John Moore! You can see John's BrandAutopsy blog at http://brandautopsy.typepad.com/

When I'm advising clients to make changes on behalf of the customer, we have to sometimes start with, "what won't you do" to make customers happy? There are certainly lines you don't have to cross, but the point isn't giving up control--it's taking control of the situation and knowing what you will and won't do to make customers happy (and be successful).

It's helpful to know what you won't do ahead of time so when you get to that bridge, you know how to handle it. More importantly, once you know what you won't do (should be an easy to remember list), you and your staff are freed up to do everything else to make customers happy. Setting those boundaries for yourself and your staff means everyone feels empowered to take care of the customer on the spot--in real time--which is just as refreshing to your customers as it is to your staff :)

People can smell desperation and inauthenticity. They know when you're trying to meet a sales quota instead of trying to help them. It makes people wonder if you even believe in your own product or business. In this economy, we see more people committing "Elevator Speech Terrorism" (great term, see discussion at Society for Word of Mouth http://www.theswom.org/ ) and it's tempting to try to sell to everyone you meet because things are tighter right now. We've all been there and found ourselves crossing that line. Relax, people don't buy when they feel your desperation (except out of pity) and want to know that you care for them, you believe in your product, and want to make a buying decision based on the quality of your product or service. Better yet, provide a buzzworthy experience with your current clients and encourage those people to evangalize for you--that authentic buzz will drive sales.