The days of Star Trek are finally here.  For your Friday entertainment, I ran across this fun article that goes over a list of 10 Star Trek Inspired devices that are in use today.

With so many new devices and applications hitting the streets at record speeds, you might be wondering how to put some of these new devices to marketing use.

In my latest OpenForum article, I discuss 6 Ways to Use Mobile Devices to get and keep customers.  Here’s a short list for you:

1. Generate a 2-dimensional QR code and engage your customers and contacts with coupons or incentives.
2. Get Paid.  There are apps for that.  I use a PayPal app on my Android device that does the trick nicely.
3. Run Surveys – Ask a Panel.  Surveys can be FUN !  Why not run your next survey using SurveySwipe mobile survey platform.  It’s super easy.  You can ask an existing panel to answer questions OR you can upload your customer list and create your own panel.
4. Customer Service.  Most CRM systems like SalesForce.com have customer service apps that will allow you to help your customers on site.  You can also create an app just for your customers and deliver service on the fly.
5. Education and Training.  YouTube is mobile – why not deliver demonstrations, training and education via mobile phone?
6. Advertising.  This one is obvious, but can get overwhelming because there are so many options.  Use text messaging with Fanminder, offer alerts so that your customers can receive specials and offers straight to their device.

Every business loses customers.  We all like to think we won’t; we all like to think our businesses are amazing enough – and provide enough value – that we won’t lose any customers.

But the reality is – EVERY business does.

Sometimes it’s our fault – maybe one of our processes or systems didn’t work and a customer didn’t get the service or value they should have.  Sometimes their needs simply weren’t a good fit with what our business could provide (and in those cases, we probably didn’t do an adequate job qualifying them when they were still a prospect).  Sometimes their needs change and we can’t adequately help them anymore.  And sometimes – who knows?

When business owners are looking to improve their financial results, an often overlooked source of “new” customers are “old” customers who have left.  And it makes solid business sense to look to these customers.

After all, we know who they are, we usually have their contact information, and we know what they have bought from us in the past.

But before you rush into a full-on “customer reactivation campaign” and go contact all your old customers, wait.

Roll up your sleeves and do some analysis first.

What kind of analysis?

The most important one is to list your inactive customers along with the amount of business they did with you before they left.  Since inactive customers often become inactive over a period of time by slowly purchasing less and less from you, you should look at how much business they did with you each year for the last three years.

That way you can identify their true potential.  For example, an inactive customer may have purchased $1,000 of your products and services in the last year before they became inactive.  But they may have routinely purchased $5,000 in a year prior to that.

A customer like this would be a better reactivation target than one who spent $1,500 with you before they became inactive, but that’s all they ever spent in a year.

What you are looking for is the potential gain in revenue (and gross profit) you will likely realize by reactivating specific customers.

Another thing you should analyze for each inactive customer is how much of an investment they forced you to make in them.  For example, a customer who routinely purchased $3,000 of products and services from you before they became inactive may seem like a good reactivation target.  However, if they were slow to pay and therefore forced you to tie up capital, they may not be as good of a reactivation target as you first thought.

This is an important step in planning your reactivation efforts because the worst thing you can do is “win back” a bunch of inactive customers who will cause you to tie up excess capital.  That will actually cost you money rather than improve your financial results.  And even worse, they will do it because you asked them to.

Getting old customers back is often surprisingly easy.  You just need to ask.

But before you do ask them to come back, make sure you aren’t inviting people who will cause you repeat problems, and not add any profit to your business.

Sometimes old customers can be like vampires in some movies.  They won’t come in until you invite them – but once you do, they sink their fangs into you and suck the life from you.

Related articles

• What You Should Never DO or SAY to a Customer(diymarketers.com)
• Turn a Bad Customer Experience into a Good One(blogs.constantcontact.com)

When you first build your business, you vow to treat your customers like gold.  But before you know it, you get busy servicing customers and growing.  Then you start feeling the pressure.  And in this pressure, you start behaving in a way that you would never recognize.  It’s a slippery slope that starts with one small thing that doesn’t really matter and then grows into a bad habit that leads to poor customer service.

Check your behavior and and make sure that you’re not doing any of these customer killing behaviors.

1. Make them buy. The days of the pushy sales person have long been gone.  And if you’re still measuring sales performance on quantity (revenue) instead of quality (profit), then you are bound to get reluctant customers who cost money to integrate into your system and are often lost before they become truly profitable.
2. Set higher expectations than you can deliver. Studies show that expectations drive satisfaction results.  So if you set your customers’ expectations higher than you are able to deliver, they will be MORE dissatisfied than if their expectations were closer to the true experience.
3. Tell them what they want to hear.  This is another expectation issue.  Customers want to know what to expect; when will their product be delivered, when will the service guy show up, etc.  People are PLANNING their busy lives around your answer, and when you just tell them what they want to hear – and deliver something altogether different, this absolutely sends people through the roof.
4. Ignore them after the sale. Bringing on new customers is important, but loyal customers who refer do so because of their experience AFTER the sale.  There’s an old joke about a prospect that was sold on the pitch that hell would be nothing but a party – but when he showed up, saw the fire and brimstone and asked “What happened to the party?”  The response was “Yesterday you were the prospect, but today you’re the customer.”
5. Acting like a giant corporation when you’re a personal small business. Loyal customers feel like they have a relationship with the company.  When customers have the feeling that they can reach out and talk to the CEO whenever they want to (even though they rarely do it) it gives them a sense of closeness and loyalty.
6. Putting your policy about their service.  Rude and condescending tones can creep out in your communication – especially if you’re stressed.   Your customers probably aren’t as smart as you about the product or service that you sell – THAT’S WHY THEY BUY FROM YOU!  It’s that little bit of perspective that often gets lost – especially with industrial or technology products.
7. Nothing but Voicemail.  It’s getting more difficult to find people at their desk.  And today’s communication tools have increased expectations that when a customer calls, they expect a call back or a response ASAP.  Voicemail will NOT cut it anymore.
8. Not understanding what’s important in their application.  There’s nothing more frustrating to customers than feeling like they are talking into a black hole when they explain how they use your product and service in their application.

What are some of your Do’s and Don’t for powerful customer building relationships?

It’s one thing to keep saying that you should have a blog, but having a blog that actually attracts customers and builds loyalty means that you have to provide great content.

Here are some tips for providing great blog content:

1. Make a list of the 5 -7 top reader frustrations. In the same way that our eye is drawn to the crooked picture in an otherwise perfect room, we tend to focus on frustrations and peeves that drive us crazy.  Whenever someone mirrors those frustrations, we feel a sense of camaraderie.  Use these frustrations and your solutions as the anchor and mission of your blog.  You want each article to be a salve against the painful frustrations that your readers are experiencing.  Literally make this list and keep it handy use it as a rotating theme for your content.
2. Identify keywords and phrases from that frustration list.  Recent studies have shown that people aren’t exactly looking for solutions first.  BEFORE they look for a solution, the search out their problem — looking for ideas and options on what the solution is.  For example, “Leaking Roof” is a problem that I will search on hoping to see what options are available to fix it.  Is this a quick fix or do I need a roof replacement.  Or I might search on a term such as “sales process” because I feel like I have no control over my sales process or I’m not getting consistent results.  So all these terms are hot button issues that you can write about.  Your audience is searching for guidance on how to buy.  They are more likely to buy from the company that helps them understand and choose.
3. Answer customer questions. The easy way to do this is to have a board or Google Document  that people can contribute customer questions to so that you can create content that answers them and gives advice.   Take a helpful and educational tone in your writing and be open about where the question came from and then simply answer it.  Keeping tabs on customer questions will also give you ideas on additional kinds of content such as video.
4. Recruit contributing experts for each “frustration” your customers have.  Blogging can becaome a daunting task — but not of you recruit experts in your company or in your industry to be contributing experts.  Ask if sales, customer service, technical or engineering folks would be interested in writing out answers to customer questions or writing about events they’ve attended.  Also think about writing about events that you’re attending such as trade shows and what you’ll be featuring there.  Another win-win strategy is to recruit the experts in your industry to write for your blog.  Trust me – they would be honored and happy to do it.  It’s a HUGE promotional and marketing opportunity for them and a big help for you and information for your customers.
5. CEO or president is a regular contributor.  I’ve separated the CEO writing for the blog as a separate tip because it is so very important.  You don’t have to be a journalist or the next Tom Clancy to communicate what you’re up to as a company.  CEOs miss a HUGE PR opportunity in NOT writing for their blog.  You’d be amazed at the CEOs who blog.  I mean if the CEO from GM can find the time to blog — so can YOU.

Referrals are still the number one way of getting the best, most profitable customers.  And don’t think that just because you’re in a more B2B or industrial market that referrals don’t work — I’m working on a heavily industrial project right now where the most popular way that people choose suppliers is by calling other suppliers and customers and asking who they would recommend.

Your blog is a tremendous promotional and advertising tool – don’t let it go to waste.

So, the customer relationship management (CRM) system that you purchased back in the 1990s has run its course. You’re thinking about going in a new direction but you don’t know where to start. What to do?

In this post, I discuss some of the considerations in potentially making the jump to a new CRM Note that I discussed this very topic with a few of the people profiled in The New Small. (OK, enough self-promotion. Get to the good stuff.)

You don’t have to be at your computer to use it.

You probably still do most of your heavy lifting while at a laptop or desktop. That’s all fine and dandy, but what happens if you need to add a customer, look something up, or run a basic report on the fly? Today more than ever, speed kills. You want to take your data and application with you. Most major and recently developed CRM apps (read: salesforce.com, Zoho, and NetSuite) all allow users to least for the basics

You can customize it—within reason.

Let’s face it: terminology matters. You might refer to a certain type of client as a prospect, not a lead. Different companies have often wildly different terms for ostensibly similar things.

I’ve written before about how not all customizations are created equal. Without getting too technical, there’s a major difference between minor tweaks changing the alias of a field in a web form and major ones—e.g., altering database tables and structures, changing the way that an application calculates revenue or some other metric, and other “back end” stuff. The cloud-based applications today allow everyday folks to make largely cosmetic changes without causing major problems for other people.

It doesn’t scale.

Your business might have a small number of customers or offices now. But what about in two years? In The New Small, I write about DODOcase, an iPad manufacturer that experienced explosive growth in a short period of time. The company exceeded $1M USD in sales with only four employees. We’re talking about thousands of customers, many of whom are not located in the US and, as such, don’t pay with US currency.

Make sure that your new CRM application supports growth. The last thing that you want to do is to have to move to yet another application while your business is expanding beyond your wildest dreams.

You can be an admin.

For the new application, no one wants to have to hire an IT specialist to administer security, add a new user, and the like. Make sure that super-users can easily grant different levels of access to different folks. No coding should be required; we’re talking about checking off forms, reports, and other elements to which people should—and should not—have access. Nor should disabling a user (such as a terminated employee) require a call to the hosting company.

You can get web-friendly reports out of it.

Reports are essential these days to view the current status of a marketing campaign, product launch, or PR-related event. Remember that people are no longer wedded to their computers. Blackberrys and iPhones may not be the best vehicle to download—much less analyze—a complicated Excel spreadsheet.

Make sure that at least reports can easily be generated—and viewed—on the web. Beyond that, make sure that you can easily export reports to different formats, including PDF, CSV, TXT, and XLS. You may need to do additional analysis on the data and no one wants to paste a PDF into Word and spend hours reformatting it.

Summary

By no means is this a comprehensive list, but this post has covered five major things to consider when thinking about switching to a new CRM. One last tip: New CRM applications don’t come with all of your old customer data preloaded. Yes, you can convert it, but understand that this may not be as easy with you think. Expensive? Perhaps. Time-consuming? Probably. Worth it? Absolutely. Garbage in, garbage out.

Feedback

What say you?

While it’s always great to grow the size of the pie with new customers buying new products — competitive selling something we all have to do.  If you’ve decided to dominate a specific market niche and the top customers within that niche are buying from someone else — you’re in a competitive selling situation.

I received this amazing no BS sales book called “Competitive Selling” from the author Landy Chase and just loved it.  You will see the book review on Small Business Trends but in the mean time, here is a little preview article I received from Landy on the topic of selling and keeping the competitive customer.

Selling to the Competitive User
By Landy Chase, Author of Competitive Selling : Out-Plan, Out-Think, and Out-Sell to Win Every Time

Nothing is more rewarding for any business than taking an account away from a competitor. Successfully persuading a competitive user to leave their existing vendor for you takes an enormous amount of patience, skill, and strategy. Unfortunately, most business people don’t approach the strategic issue of competitive loyalty properly, and they pay for it with limited success in their take-away efforts.

To be successful in taking accounts away from your competitors, you have to begin by looking objectively at the situation from the viewpoint of your potential client. Consider for a moment the implications to your prospect. By asking them to move their business to you, you are essentially asking them to:

• Tell the current supplier that they are fired;
• Go through the process of setting up an account with a new supplier, including all of the tedious, time-consuming paperwork;
• Get to know a whole new set of people to work with;
• Get to know a whole new set of different and unfamiliar procedures;
• Take the risk of making a bad business decision, and paying the consequences.

This collectively adds up to a sobering fact that you must accept and work with: Unless your prospective client is having a major problem with their vendor, trying to persuade them to abandon that relationship is an exercise in frustration and futility.

Does this mean that you should abandon your efforts to sell to the competitive user? Not at all. The key to success here is to abandon the notion that you can immediately replace the existing supplier. Instead, re-think your strategy for success. Look for ways to supplement the existing relationship without replacing it, by providing a product or service that meets a specific special need that the primary vendor is either not capable of addressing, or has chosen not to.

Unless your prospect is having a major problem with their vendor, trying to persuade them to abandon that relationship is an exercise in frustration and futility. This approach is much more productive, and gets you over the two major obstacles you face in selling to the competitive user:

1. You find a way to get your foot in the door and prove yourself.
2. You turn the prospect into a customer, opening the “pipeline” for additional opportunities if you deliver.

My biggest new client one year was a competitive user who told me initially that they were happy with the resource that they were using, and weren’t open at that time to new alternatives. Accepting this, I was able to persuade a decision-maker within the account to allow me the opportunity to supplement their existing relationship by delivering a specialized service that the current supplier was not addressing.

This initial program soon led to more opportunities, and before long I had successfully acquired a full business relationship that has proven to be one of the best I have ever had. This strategy worked because I requested — and received — a small opportunity to prove myself, without threatening the existing vendor relationship.

Look for ways to supplement, not replace, the needs of the competitive user. By delivering value on  a small scale now, you can position yourself to reap big rewards later.

Author Bio
Landy Chase, author of Competitive Selling: Out-Plan, Out-Think, and Out-Sell to Win Every Time, founded his own sales training and consulting firm in 1993 and has clients in more than sixty industries on five different continents. He has delivered more than two thousand paid presentations as a professional speaker and holds the Certified Speaking Professional (CPS) designation from the National Speakers Association, the highest earned level of excellence in the industry. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina.

For more information please visit www.LandyChase.com.