LLH Enterprises

Getting new customers in the 1990's was relatively easy. For example, when Congress took away Bell's local monopolies, small to mid-sized business customers who were fed up with their phone company were easily gained as a new customer by new telecom companies. Door-to-door selling and telesales efforts seemed to work as long as the marketing department had good support materials such as brochures and a basic website.

Today, companies are finding themselves in a market where prospects aren't as easy to attain because the sales force has picked off the easy accounts leaving the more costly to acquire customers. Additionally, many companies are finding it harder to attain new customers because prospects have cut back on attending trade shows and other industry events. So how can you get new customers in a tough, mass marketplace that's not interested in you, while keeping acquisition costs at a minimum?

Try an innovative three-step process that mingles database marketing, telemarketing, and brand marketing to allocate your resources as efficiently as possible.

Build a prospect database of all the companies in your target market that you can serve. This shouldn't be just a mailing list. To keep acquisition costs low, zero in on the best prospects by adding overlays of survey data, company size, SIC code, number of employees and anything else that is relevant to your business.

For example, learn something from every interaction your sales staff has with these prospects such as why you are losing business, who they currently use and why. Remember, the point is that you need to think you are going to sell that account someday, so the more information you can gather from interactions, web-sites, brochures, vendor comments, etc. the better equipped you will be to find a way to serve the prospect. It is much more powerful if you can feed results of all sales touches back into a prospect database and build better and better information and hence predictions. In simple terms, the goal is to predict which sales channel, which individual rep, and what sort of benefit statement each particular prospect would respond to best.

Next divide your database into categories of customers or whatever works best in your industry. Consider such things as acquisition costs; number of face-to-face contacts; telephone contacts; and the prospect's age, gender, and years of experience. As an example, if you base the categories on average acquisition cost, then target the way you will handle them:

Even if you do not have a call center set up your categories so that accounts can be contacted via telephone and/or direct mail to reduce acquisition costs. Remember that any interaction via the telephone is about relationship building rather than strictly making sales.

Your company is the brand and as such it requires a steady outflow of information or messages to help support your sales efforts even during the worst days of a recession when most businesses tend to slash marketing budgets.

In a business environment where marketing resources are allocated at the individual account level, it is critical to understand that individuals who are easy to acquire and retain may not be the most profitable customers. Having a strategy, plan, and on-going evaluation process can help you gain clients to grow your business.

"Most people assume that a company's personality matches its CEOs personality," states author Sandra Fekete. "But that's not true. An organization has it own ways of being." Most organizations, like a person, have their own ways of focusing energy, gathering information, making decisions and structuring work. This is known as corporate culture.

The health of a corporation's culture goes a long way toward dictating its ultimate triumphs. For example, a company can boast working from an extensive, detailed strategic plan that shapes the next five-years of its anticipated success and exactly how it will play out. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean much if the organization has a culture that doesn't respect the value of its people and foster an environment of commitment. If the corporate culture is unhealthy you may see high employee turnover, lack of team work, poor communications, or low profit margins.

Fekete believes that "when you visualize a person instead of a bureaucracy, you make it easier for employees, clients, and business partners to relate to the company on a personal level." Humanizing the personality of your company and creating a compelling persona requires team effort and creative, honest, and innovative input. More importantly, once you think of your company as a person with preferences and values, you can make changes and establish a foundation for success.

Soft Skills and Values Drive the Culture
Leadership and "soft skills" are critical to achieving a healthy corporate culture. People skills have taken on a new meaning as we've gone from managing people to leading people. Today's successful leaders have people skills and the ability to influence. Leading means communicating a vision people can buy into. Leaders need to be goal oriented and must share their goals with others; otherwise, there is no way to get there. "People skills go back to the Golden Rule of treating people the way you would want to be treated," says Tim Webster, President and CEO of American Italian Pasta Company, headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri. "My leadership style has been modeled after a number of people who touched others in a way that motivated and encouraged them to do more and be more than in the past. Our company is about bringing dignity to the work, giving people personal involvement and purpose. An independent measure of our employees' commitment levels demonstrated that the personal interest the CEO and other members of the leadership team took in individual lives was the single most motivating factor in inspiring that commitment."

Values are most useful in combination with communication. When employees don't see leaders practicing what they're preaching, it won't take them long to bail out mentally and physically. American Italian Pasta Company has a formal Code of Team Behavior that includes giving feedback to anyone found deviating. Webster explains, "The Code states that we will work diligently in the constant pursuit of excellence with a sense of urgency, treat people with dignity and respect, talk only positively about others and focus our emotions on issues, not individuals. We also emphasize basic values such as integrity, consistency and honesty. We founded this company on the principle of doing the right thing and that's one of our core values." Values either exist or they don't. If you aren't already doing it, it's not a core value.

Developing Your Corporate Culture
By determining your strategic objectives and values you can start to make decisions concerning what your company will do and how you will do it. Focus on the strategic objectives that should receive the highest priority in the next year. They will be the basis of the strategic plan that is completely aligned with who your company is, what it stands for and where it's going.

It would be easy if CEOs recognized "disconnects" throughout their organizations and implemented solutions to close the gaps. But, corporate culture and corporate alignment are nebulous concepts. Walking into a company and gauging the degree to which it is aligned or how unhealthy the culture is are not such cut and dry exercises. If they were, the more numbers-conscious CEOs would do better recognizing when they needed alignment tune-ups and how to go about giving them.

How do certain leaders become as comfortable with their corporate cultures as they are with their numbers? There are assessments available to help identify behavioral skills and values, but first it requires leaders who are willing to walk away from their "hard skills" myopia and begin to look more closely at the "softer skills" that create their corporate culture. And, they need to look at strategic plans like the living, breathing documents they are - plans that are easily adaptable to change. Also, it helps to focus on the execution of strategic plans by walking around and actually seeing firsthand how they play out. In other words, don't rely solely on reports for information. By fostering an environment where they experience news for themselves, leaders of tomorrow will have the chance to ultimately turn bad news into good.

Determining your company's personality is a crucial first step in defining its corporate culture. But in her book, Companies Are People Too, Sandra Fekete asserts that corporate identity consists of three elements:

Based on these elements, if you identify your corporate personality you can then use it to enrich the company's brand and develop products or services consistent with its personality. So if companies are people, too, then what kind of person is your company? What persona could you create for your company? As a person, what would the character of your company look like? Once you determine a recognizable character for your company you'll learn to use the character to enrich your company's brand and develop products consistent with its personality by asking "what would our persona do in this situation?"

Fekete believes that "when you visualize a person instead of a bureaucracy, you make it easier for employees, clients, and business partners to relate to the company on a personal level."

Humanizing the personality of your company and creating a compelling persona requires a team effort and creative, honest, and innovative input. However, when you're done, you can welcome a new presence in the workplace whose perspective represents the interests and intricacies of the company as a whole.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal stated that between 9,250 and 23,750 Canadian hospital patients died in 2000 after a doctor, nurse, or other health-care professional made an avoidable mistake in their treatment. 7.5 percent of the country's 2.5 million hospital patients experienced at least one adverse event because of medical error in 2000. This is significantly higher than the rate found in the United States, where studies have reported adverse events in 2.9 to 3.7 per cent of patients causing an estimated 44,000 to 98,000 deaths a year.

Mistakes are common in many organizations where processes and procedures are not being followed. In the case of hospitals it is often a series of events that lead up to a death. While we think about this more as a disaster because it can lead to a death, think about it in terms of what goes on in your business. When I was in Arizona recently the Arizona Republic reported that the number of Arizona licensed contractors grew from 3.6 percent in 2004 from the previous year, while complaints against those licensed contractors increased by 6.5 percent. What is happening in your business? Ask yourself if your customer complaints are increasing and if you are losing accounts, sales and profits because of a series of errors. In your company, does work have to be redone because of poor communication and listening skills. Have you missed deadlines or seen other errors?

The High Cost of Poor Customer Service
More studies have come out about the high cost of poor customer service.
Georgetown University Professor Ronald C. Goodstein reports that 40% of customers leave due to service issues. The American Customer Satisfaction Index shows dismal scores for handling complaints for 40 industries. The bottom line is that losing customers costs companies a lot of money that could be saved by improving customer service and communication.

The following publications have sought Linda's expertise over the past two months:

Irrigation and Green Industry magazine quoted Linda for an article about How to Manage Your Business.

The Regan Report quoted Linda for an article about communication issues.

Professional Services Journal quoted Linda in an article about Rallying Your Leadership Team.

If you would like Linda to write an article for your in-house publication, email lhanson@llhenterprises.com.

Please give us feedback on this issue of The Superior Performance Report (click here) and let us hear your insights and what you would like to hear about next time.