Tag: customer focus
Anita Campbell Growth Questions Businesses Need to Ask
ave you defined a business growth strategy? Is it a continuous process as your company tries to keep up with business change? You would be surprised how many of our clients say they are happy with their size and therefore don’t have a growth strategy. In this blog, we share some Anita Campbell growth questions that can stimulate your thinking.
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
–Peter Drucker
In the life of a business, there are only two options … you can either keep up or surpass your competitors through a business growth strategy or lose market share.
Business growth obviously can be planned in various degrees. If your business is at the size you desire, a minimum or status quo strategy may be the best for you. In any case, you need to execute some form of a growth strategy to at least maintain the status quo.
How often do you review your small business growth plan or strategy? In the life of a business, there are only two options … you can either keep up or surpass your competitors by business growth planning or lose market share. Are putting enough focus or getting ready as Henry Ford says?
Business growth obviously can be planned in various degrees. If your business is at the size you desire, a minimum or status quo strategy may be the best for you. In any case, you need to execute some form of a growth strategy.
In a time of overwhelming competition, the increasing rate of marketplace change, and significant marketing message noise and clutter, even maintaining your current customer base is difficult … and real growth even harder. We define growth capabilities as composed of four key components. These are customer focus, creative marketing, adaptation and innovation, and your team.
Related: Define a Competitive Business Growth Strategy like In-N-Out Burger
Here are some ideas and questions to help you frame your thinking to define your growth strategy:
Anita Campbell growth questions … customer focus
Build customer relationships and trust
Customers choose businesses based on their confidence, strength of relationships, and trust.
Today there are many communication channels to engage your customers, build communities, display your brand’s values, deliver on your promises and ultimately build relationships and trust.
Every customer touchpoint in each channel is an important marketing opportunity.
Customer-centric
Do you know who your customers are and your most valuable customer segments? Do you engage your customers to build your relationship and to gain valuable insights? Do you frequently rethink the question of potential new customer segments?
Take nothing for granted
Don’t take a customer’s loyalty for granted, especially when dealing with a first-time buyer. The key to customer loyalty is not just by providing a quality service or product, but how you service and support it.
Meeting customer expectations in a first sale may not be enough. First-time buyers want to know you care. For loyalty to endure, it must be noticed and acknowledged.
Delivery channels
Are you considering ways to broaden your reach to more customers and improve your customer service by adding a new delivery channel? If so, are you thinking about how to integrate the customer experience across the channels effectively?
Anita Campbell growth questions … creative marketing
Integrated marketing strategy
Creating marketing messages that will be heard, remembered, and, most important, talked about, is very difficult in a world where customers have precious little time to listen.
Achieving creativity in your marketing messages delivery is essential to winning your customers’ choices, and then their loyalty.
Remarkable growth lessons … marketing initiatives
Are you adding new, collaborative ways to communicate with your customers? Do you consistently refresh your value proposition to ensure your discrimination is still valued, deliverable, and believable to customers?
Business Information: How to Completely Change Your Success Priorities
Anita Campbell growth questions … adaptation and innovation
Adaptability
The digital and network revolutions have unleashed rapid and significant marketplace changes that impact your ability to engage customers, and the rate and amount of change are accelerating.
Businesses must interpret and understand the implications of these changes and rapidly respond to creative ideas and innovations to maintain their competitive edge.
Learn from key competitors
Do you frequently observe what your key competitors are doing in the market space? Have they spotted a key trend that you have missed? What changes are they making to their merchandising and their value proposition?
Observing trends
Are you sensitive to the changes in your customer segments and to developing market trends? Do you consider how you might capitalize on these trends?
Do you frequently observe what your key competitors are doing in the market space? Have they spotted a key trend that you have missed? What changes are they making to their merchandising and their value proposition?
New white space opportunities
Do you combine your customer insights with your competitor and trend observations to derive new white space opportunities? Do you innovate on your business model and your product and services? Have you considered collaborating with local businesses and your customers?
Anita Campbell growth questions … your team
Building an effective team
Your team is your business, quite literally. It is only as good as the weakest link and your ability to provide strong and effective leadership.
You, as a business leader, must be a talent hound for future hiring, be a strong mentor and coach, and continually work to build your leadership skills and a staff that works effectively as a team.
Takeaways
As a business, you can either grow or shrink … where is your small business growth focus?
Are you satisfied with your progress? Do you have a growth story to share?
Lots of ideas on business growth here that can be easily replicated … which ones do you feel could benefit your business?
How could you improve the social media marketing campaign for your business?
There are many great business growth campaigns we can learn from. Please post your comments below, offering questions or your great examples of business growth strategies.
Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your business learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add to the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
Check out these additional articles on business and its performance in our library:
Retail Design …11 Ways Businesses Are Responding to the Future
7 Surprising Things to Know About the Zillow Business Model
10 Lessons for Successful Entrepreneurs You Need to Know
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Business Success Enablers: 16 Mind=Blowing Facts about These
Are you happy with your business success enablers and growth? Or are you struggling to keep up with your competitors? You would be surprised how many of our clients say they are happy with their success and size and therefore don’t have a growth or success strategy for remarkable business success. To exploit change as an opportunity, like Peter Drucker would say?
The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
– Peter Drucker
Related: Peter Drucker’s Crash Course with These Management Lessons
Remember this: whatever got you where you are today will not be sufficient to keep you there. A rapidly changing environment is the regular background against which organizations must develop. We can all dream about what it takes to make our startup a success. Dreams are important, but not without a success plan and its execution.
As an entrepreneur, I’ve long been fascinated by the forces that drive business success. It’s been 5 years since I founded Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing agency that focuses on helping to improve business success. In interacting with will be entrepreneurs, start-up business owners, or small businesses, I have noted that it is not too uncommon for them to want to spend lots of valuable time and energy thinking about appearance rather than spend their time demonstrating that they can win new customers, and more importantly, keep them.
Here are the top five most important success factors to a winning business that we use most often with our clients (listed in order of importance):
Business success enablers … your people are your business
Your team is your business, quite literally. It is only as good as the weakest link and your ability to provide strong and effective leadership.
You, as a business leader, must be a talent hound for future hiring, be a strong mentor and coach for people development, continually work to build your leadership skills, and build and maintain a staff that collaborates effectively as a team.
Digital Spark Marketing offers workshops and useful blogs in all of these areas.
Start with customer focus
Collecting and employing customer insights
We are definitely in the age of the customer … ignore this at the peril of your business. While the customer is not always right, he always has the right to choose. Building customers into advocates is perhaps your most important task. It all starts by listening to your customers.
Do you listen more than you talk?
Do you know who your most important customers are? Your influencers? And why they come back to do business with you? These are important questions whose answers provide valuable insights to your business.
Examples of business enablers … engage customers
Why engage customers? The answer is pretty simple. Customers remember and value personal experiences that demonstrate deep understanding and respect for their needs. There is a fine line between a bad, good, and great customer experience. You need to know your customers and understand your touchpoints well to build great customer experiences. Great customers experiences are the foundation for great customer service … both are essential in building advocates and influencers.
Smile, listen, connect, and thanks = engage customers
DSM Marketing Agency is skilled in understanding and improving customer touchpoints in ways that make positive impacts on customer experience and service. Our goal is to make your customer experience and service discriminate your business from its competitors.
Do you need the ‘spark’ to set your business apart … if so, call for a free consultation today.
Responsive customer service
Businesses need to take their customer service to the next level. The best approaches are by being more responsive and proactive, delivering on their promises, and listening and observing to gain insights and then acting on them.
The ability for a business to serve its customers in a responsive way that is consistent with meeting or beating their expectations will prove to be the ultimate differentiator separating the winners from the losers.
Be social, yes, but above all, be responsive.
When companies learn how to deliver and evolve differentiated customer service, they build strong, enduring customer relationships and trust.
Does your business strive to create world-class customer service? DSM Agency can help you build your roadmap.
Building customer relationships and trust
Few things as critical as building customer relationships.
Customers choose businesses based on their confidence, strength of relationships, and trust.
Today there are many communication channels to engage your customers, build communities, display your brand’s values, deliver on your promises and building customer relationships and trust. Use those that represent where the majority of your target customers reside.
Creative marketing
Creating an integrated marketing strategy and messages that will be heard, remembered, and, most important, talked about, is very difficult in a world where customers have precious little time to listen. Achieving creativity in your marketing messages delivery is essential to winning your customers choices, and then their loyalty.
The DSM Agency will collaborate with you and your team to design winning marketing campaigns to effectively deliver your messages.
Creative marketing messages
Your job as a business entrepreneur is to establish your expertise with your target customers … both on-line and off-line. You must know more than your customer communities know and use this knowledge to help them in their decision making. Use creative messaging to achieve these goals
Winning value propositions
With the amount of competition in the marketplace and the number of choices a consumer is given, the creation of a winning value proposition is difficult … but all the more necessary.
How does your business make a difference to customers who have infinite choice? The DSM Agency has been building successful discrimination and value propositions for the past several decades … we will be happy to collaborate with you on yours.
Brand marketing
Give your advocates and influencers good things to talk about. Focus on the advocates and influencers and let them take your messages to their friends and do your market branding for you. Everyone who touches a customer has a role to play in positively influencing a customer and strengthening your brand … so it’s their job to deliver the right kinds of communications and influence.
Social media and word of mouth campaigns
A community is a social network of people who interact amongst themselves about a specific topic. An audience is people who interact with a service. You can buy an audience, but you can’t buy a community. Focus on building communities through your use of integrated social media. We have many excellent examples we can discuss with you … it starts with a simple call.
There are many new components of a successful marketing campaign … such as social and mobile, and many more channels created by social media. The world of marketing is in a constant state of change, growing more personal, dynamic and local.
Is your business ready for the world of real time marketing? It is certainly an area that requires your attention. Let us discuss some of our ideas with you.
Integrated marketing campaigns
Marketing campaigns are not one dimensional. You have many customers, lots of messages, and several value propositions. You engage customers wherever they are … and they are on many channels. A campaign must effectively integrate your messages, their delivery and timing in a way that optimizes your ability to engage and not bombard your customers.
Innovation
What do you think: are innovators born or made? Surely, those who spawn ideas that change the world are special – different than the rest of us. Take one look at an Einstein, a Steve Jobs or a Da Vinci and it seems that they were bequeathed with something unique.
But are we looking in the right direction? I believe the biggest secret of innovation is that anyone can do it. The reason is simple: It’s just not that hard. Look up the word “innovate” in any dictionary and see what it actually means, instead of what you think it means. You’ll find something like this:
To innovate is to introduce something new.
That’s it. It doesn’t say you need to be a creative genius, or a workaholic. It’s just three little words: introduce something new.
The key word in the definition is “new.” The common trap about newness is the assumption that new means something the universe has never seen before. This turns out to be a very bad assumption.
Here’s why I conclude this: name any great innovator and I guarantee they borrowed and reused ideas from the past to make whatever it is they are famous for.
Innovation principles and process
Companies often ask themselves why their innovation principles seem to produce so few truly game-changing ideas. Why are they mostly getting only lukewarm suggestions for incremental improvements rather than radical new concepts for revolutionizing their industries? How can an organization get dramatically better at generating big, breakthrough ideas?
What are missing in most companies are innovation principles that translate ideas into winning ideas.
Crowdsourcing
Does your company do crowdsourcing in any form? Have you done any recent reading or research on crowdsourcing design? We follow this topic quite closely and have written several blogs on the topic and the businesses that employ it.
Crowdsourcing design is not just for new entrants challenging established players; the latter can also leverage crowdsourcing to their advantage, enabling users to design new products and test the demand at the same time.
Times of marketplace change
In a time of overwhelming competition, increasing rate of marketplace change, and significant marketing message noise and clutter, even maintaining your current customer base is difficult … and real growth even harder. Digital Spark Marketing Agency defines growth capabilities, as shown below, and provides services in each area. We add value in problem understanding, marketing campaign design, designing changes for market trends, and team training.
Adaptability to change
The digital and network revolutions have unleashed rapid and significant marketplace changes that impact your ability to engage customers … and the rate and amount of change is accelerating. Businesses must interpret and understand the implications of these changes and rapidly respond with creative ideas and innovations to maintain their competitive edge.
The survivor is the one most adaptable to change
Need some help in finding ways to grow your customers? Such as creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential customers? Or perhaps finding ways to work with other businesses?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your business learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on customer experience from our Library:
Client Satisfaction …10 Secrets to Improve Customer Experience
Customer Orientation … the Worst Customer Experience Mistakes
Customer Experience Optimization … 10 Employee Actions that Lower It
Building a Customer Experience Strategy for Business Success
Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements
10 Ways to Employ Customer Experience for Influence
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
10 Secrets to Select the Best Customer Focus Employees
What do you think is the most important factor in how your business puts attention to customer focus and engages its customers? Like many things in your business, we believe the answer to this question is the quality of your customer facing employees.
Check out our thoughts on team leverage.
How customer facing employees engage customers can make or break any business. It all depends on how employees relate to customers. We say it many times to our clients, this problem is solved by getting the right employees into the business (75% of the required solution) and then training and empowering these employees (25% of the required solution). Today we will focus on how to select the best customer facing employees.
Here is an excellent short video on recruiting tips.
So what skills and qualities are required facilitate positive initial engagements with customers? Here are the recommendations we give our clients:
Flexible as a customer facing employee
When dealing with customers, things can go bad often at the wrong time. Employees have to be adaptable enough to roll with the punches and think outside the box when meeting customer needs.
Customer focus … multitasking abilities
Often employees must to deal with multiple customers and their questions and needs, and at the same time, attend to their other store duties. You need your staff to keep cool and do well with multitasking at all times.
Customer focus examples … patience
Dealing with unruly customers means that you will have to take the good with the bad. Your customer facing employees must have the composure to deal with all types of stressful customer situations without ‘losing it’. That composure is vital.
Confidence
The confidence to make eye contact and strike up a conversation with strangers is absolutely essential … there is no substitute. It takes all-out determination at all times.
Friendliness
Customers don’t want to deal with personnel who don’t seem to care to be friendly. Unfriendly is the quickest way to close customers.
