Prospect To Customer Part 5: Do Your People Razzle Dazzle 'Em?

This is the final post in the Prospect to Customer Series.  See links below to catch up posts that you missed!

I stay at the same hotel every time I visit one of my clients in Richmond, VA.  It’s right in the middle of a group of different hotels, so I could really have my pick of any one.  But I keep going back to that one for one big reason: the staff.

Now this isn’t the Ritz Carlton, and I’m not spending hundreds of dollars a night on my room.  In fact, it’s the budget choice in a well-known hotel brand, and I’ve stayed at many of them across the country.  But I have rarely encountered a hotel staff that goes out of their way in every interaction to make me feel important and well-taken care of.  Because of this one hotel, I’m a loyal customer for life.

Of the 4 Levers, the People lever is the one that is most visible, and has the potential to make someone sing your praises or write a lengthy blog post about how badly your service sucks. 

Creating a high-quality customer service environment means more than just saying it out loud and sticking it on a poster in the employee breakroom.  It has to come alive in how your people treat everyone they come into contact with; whether the person is a buying customer or not.

A few simple ways that employees can make our day:

1. Be Friendly:  Being professional doesn’t mean that you have to be stuffy or formal.  Showing genuine interest and being friendly makes me more comfortable with you. 
2. Make them feel special:  Here’s my favorite thing that people do to make me feel special.  They listen to me.  Not only that, but when they tailor what they share with me based on my specific needs it saves both of us time and energy.
3. Ask Questions:  Asking questions shows me that you are paying attention to me and interested in what I'm sharing with you.  It can also help you uncover needs that I didn’t even know I had, and gives you an opportunity to suggest something else you can do that could help.
4. Set Expectations and then Deliver: Following through on what you say you will do should be one of the easiest parts of customer service, and yet it is where businesses consistently fall down.  If something does happen that is going to affect your ability to follow-through, be sure to tell me that as soon as you can.
5. Empower Your People: Help them help me.  Give them the power to make at least small decisions that they don’t need to get approval for that answers my questions, or resolves my issue quickly and efficiently.
6. Forget the Drama: When you are having a bad day, it’s easy to let that emotion come through in every interaction you have.  Emails are short and terse.  Your tone is annoyed and bothered.  You have to contain the negative energy, otherwise you will inadvertently cause me to think the reason you’re in a bad mood is because of me.

So you may not be Zappos or the Ritz Carlton, but how you and your employees interact with everyone they touch can make a significant difference in your sales.  Show the love, and they’ll show it to you in return.

If you missed any of the previous posts in the Prospect to Customer series, you can catch up by clicking the links below:

4 Levers that Convert Prospects to Customers

Prospect to Customer Part II: It’s All About Price

Prospect to Customer Part 3: For Product Development, Put the Kid in Charge

Prospect to Customer Part 4: Live And Die By Your Process

(photo credit by malfet)

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Prospect to Customer Part 3: For Product Development, Put The Kid in Charge

Nothing sounds duller than terms like “product development life cycle”.  There is a lot of talk about being innovative and delivering for your customers the greatest thing since sliced bread.  But originality is difficult, and attention spans are short.  You need a new plan.  It’s time to go back.  Way back.

Kids are natural product developers.  Their imaginations have no boundaries.  They aren’t all tied up in reality like gravity, money, physics, or the fact that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and magic don’t exist. 

They’ll spend days, even weeks, trying to piece together a perfect master plan to fly to the moon or turn invisible.  They’ll try to enlist your help, but quickly forgo it because they realize you don’t get it. 

As we grow older, we forget what it’s like to create with that kind of wild abandon and belief.  We get all adult-ified.  As soon as we lose that sense of adventure, our products quickly become just like everyone else’s, and that isn’t good for anybody, especially our customers.

We have to recapture our Inner Kid.

Dream big

Doodle.  Daydream.  Go someplace you’ve never gone before with a piece of paper and pen.  There is no pressure here.  Empty your mind and then let your hand go.  Think as big as you possible can for ten minutes.  Then take a break, and think bigger.  Ask yourself this question: “And then?” 

You will have to push through several iterations of this before you start hitting the vein of gold.  Turn your old ideas on their head.  No one is judging here.  The Inner Critic is gone.  In fact, he didn’t even exist when you were a kid.

Use trusted sources

Kids bounce ideas off other kids all the time.  There are no secrets and no worrying about what other kids are going to think about them.  There’s usually debate, but it’s not to squash the dreams.  It’s about how to make the dreams better.  Go faster.  Get more of whatever it is that they are seeking so that everyone can benefit.

Surround yourself with people that you trust want to help make your product better.  These may be current customers.  It may be a small group of friends.  Whoever it is, don’t let anyone tell you why your dream widget can’t be a reality.  This is just about getting useful feedback.

Design it

It is amazing to me how kids can fill notebooks galore.  Hand them a box of crayons and a blank pad of paper and they’ll draw for hours.  You watch them and can almost feel the intensity of their focus on making sure that each line is just where it needs to be.

This is the fun part.  Your big idea is about to take shape.  You don’t need to be a skilled artist.  You just need a sketch or a mind map.  This picture breathes life into your creation.  It makes it real.  It’s a lot harder to ignore something that’s real rather than something that only exists in your head.

The Act of Creation

The time has come.  The dreams and hopes are going to collide with the physical world.  If you are writing something, this is where you write.  If you are building something, this is where you build.  But there is still not judgment.

First drafts area meant to be toyed with- it’s playtime for your inner kid.

Test It

Kids beat the holy hell out of just about anything they get their hands on.  Their creations are no exception.  They love them.  They carry them everywhere.  They show it to everyone.  In fact, they can’t stop talking about it and asking other people what they think about it.

It’s your bragging time, but with caution.  You want to let others take a test drive with your prototype.  Likely you will be talking to the same people who helped you earlier in the process.  This is also your chance to get the bugs out before too many people know about it.

Rinse. Repeat.

It’s been a long process for your inner kid.  He’s exhausted and he knows he’s got a hard day of playing ahead of him tomorrow.  He’s konked out by the time it hits 10pm.

You are equally spent.  You’ve toyed and tweaked and tested, and it’s time to let your product go.  Tomorrow you will launch it.  But today you savor it.  Creation is not unlike birth.  It takes a lot out of you.

Launch it to the Moon

Your product speaks for you.  If it’s a great product that solves real problems, it’s going to fly away from you.  Quickly.  But your inner kid knows that it’s only a matter of time before you create another great product just like it.

Your product is a key lever in the customer's buying decision because it has to make their life better and it has to be memorable enough that they will want to recommend it to everyone they know.  Don't take any chances.  Let your Inner Kid run wild.

If you missed the previous posts in the Prospect to Customer series:

• 4 Levers That Convert Prospects to Customers
• Prospect To Customer Part II: It's All About Price

(photo credit: Jordanhill School D&T Dept)

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Prospect To Customer Part II: It's All About Price

When I'm thinking about buying something, I always start in the same place: Price.  Of the 4 Levers available to me, that's the one that can make or break a deal for me within the first few seconds. I know I'm not alone.

Most of us don't have personal vaults of cash to swim around in like Scrooge McDuck.  So if I know the basic premise of what you are selling, and then I see a price that seems completely out of left field, I'm going to turn high tail and run. (And likely buy it from a competitor.)

In pricing, you need to consider the Goldilocks factor: you want it to be just right.

What are you selling?

It's pretty common today for people to talk about the value of what they are selling.  There's a reason for that.  If your product is a widget that can be bought anywhere, then you have to make sure that your widget is priced the same or below what everyone else is selling that same widget for- which also means you have to spend a lot of time keeping an eye on your competitors.

But when your widget comes with something else- a bonus or extra added feature- then suddenly you have a package that is going to be valued as more than the widget by itself.  And if you can show how that package solves a problem that makes me pull my hair out on a daily basis, then you've turned this into a valuable package

Suddenly it's not about the price, it's about me. 

So value-based solutions can bump your price, and your customers will gladly pay it.  Everyone spends money all the time.  The key is are they spending their money with you.

Price at the high end of your bucket

There are a lot of great resources out there that dig into the details of how to price your product appropriately (I've listed one of them below).  But one simple tweak that can up your incremental revenue in short order is just making sure your price sits at the high end of your price bucket.

For example, you have an eBook and think that your ideal customer will buy it for $10-$20.  Instead of pricing your eBook at the low end, you want to price it somewhere at the higher end - like $19.99.  The reason is, we view certain ranges of prices together and determine that they are "okay" for us.  So if I'll buy an eBook for $11, I'd likely buy the same eBook for $19 because it sits within the same mental price bucket.

For you, as a business owner, you generate an additional $8 of revenue for each one of those sales, so don't shortchange yourself by going on the low end of a bucket.

Number puzzles in pricing

There's a couple of other pricing tricks that you will notice as you start paying attention to what businesses are charging for their products.

• The 9 factor: If you think your product is a $10 product, you want to price it at $9.99.  $20, you price it at $19.99 and so on.  That penny makes a mental difference, even though we all know it shouldn’t.  Sliding that “9” in there makes us feel like we’re getting a better deal.
• Lucky number 7: You may have observed an interesting trend where a product price point ends in a “7”.  It’s meant to catch your attention because it looks unusual.  There is vast speculation if using a "7" in your pricing actually has any impact on your sales.
  

Pricing can be fun, but it is something that needs to be tried, tested, and tweaked as you adjust your lever.   Focus on the value of your product, and why it's worth every penny of your customer’s hard earned dollar.

Then show that value by answering their objections, and ask for the sale.  Don’t make Price the lever that causes them to walk away.  At that point if they do, they probably weren’t the right customer for you

Free resource

This online pricing guide by Jonathan Wondrusch is one of the most comprehensive pricing resources I have ever seen and it's FREE.  It's a long post, but well worth it!

Next time, we are going to talk about the 2nd Prospect to Customer lever: Product.

(photo credit Steve Snodgrass)

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