There’s a reason ESPN, Google, and Zynga lead their industries. They’re relentless about understanding their users. Here’s how you can be too.

Companies that place a high value on digital user experience dominate their markets. I’m talking about companies like Intuit, ESPN, Facebook, eBay, LinkedIn, Zynga, Google, PayPal, FedEx, and Harley Davidson. I have seen first-hand how user-experience-obsessed companies operate—In consulting with these companies through my user experience research firm, AnswerLab. Here’s how you can practice the same top five habits.

1. Constantly learn about your customers and innovate
Companies that are focused on customer experience keep a constant eye and ear open to opportunities for innovation. They directly observe research sessions with their customers, where groundbreaking ideas can spring from the simplest of customer comments. They are relentless in seeking new research methods and techniques that ensure that they get a holistic perspective of their users’ experiences. And, they are acutely aware of the competitive landscape, evaluating what already exists so that they can build something better. Innovation requires a constant willingness to be open to opportunity that reveals itself through research.

2. Eliminate risk
You are just about to launch your new digital product, but you want to make sure there are no showstoppers. If this is when you are starting your user experience research, it is too late in the development cycle to make anything but cosmetic changes. Customer experience detractors found at this stage may result in lost conversion opportunities or worse—high costs of fixing problems so late in development.

Many user-experience-obsessed companies eliminate risk by learning about their customers at every stage of the development cycle. They employ a user-centered design process. Before anything is built, they find out what their customers need, determine how they can use their concepts and prototypes, and validate that their products and services meet expectations and improve customer perception.

3. Spend a lot of time with your top customers, in particular
The most important way to eliminate risk from your development process is to understand everything possible about your customers, particularly your top customers. User-focused companies watch their customers in the wild—in their natural environments—to see how customers use their products and how their lives could be made better.

For example, a major e-commerce company, relies on a continuous monthly program to spend time with its top 100 customers to learn how they work, how the site fits into their workflow, and how the site could improve their processes. This isn’t episodic or just when the company needs a particular question answered. It learns about its customers all the time.

This time with your top customers provides many benefits:
•You get an opportunity to strengthen or repair your most valuable relationships. Even the most disgruntled customers are often surprised and delighted that a business attempts to understand their needs through direct interaction with them.
•You gain visibility into the cutting edge of your business. Your top customers are often the first to embrace new trends and technologies, and they will be the first to hear about any innovations, competitive threats, or emerging strategies of which you should be aware.
•You learn how to help the rest of your customers. These top customers got to where they are because they were able to seize opportunities, devise workarounds, or take advantage of resources that other customers did not. Understanding the history of your top customers can lead to insights that have an impact on all of your customers.

4. Doggedly study the competition
To build the best digital experiences for your customers, you must know how and where they are setting their expectations for your products and services. Customers’ expectations are constantly evolving based on other encounters they have on apps, tablets, mobile devices, and the web. As users come across other experiences, they will switch to the product or service that offers the best one.

User-experience-obsessed companies understand the fickle nature of their customers, and they constantly research user reactions to competitors’ digital offerings. One of the largest credit-reporting firms in the United States worked with AnswerLab to study its competitors and learn how to build a better user experience than it already had. The research led to changes that resulted in a 240 percent increase in conversion and a 268 percent increase in average order size.

5. Validate your concept before you build it
Some digital products are extremely expensive and resource intensive to build or redesign. They can cost millions of dollars and require one- to two-year development cycles. With investments of this magnitude, it is critical to first validate that your concept or idea will fly.

One of AnswerLab’s user-experience-obsessed clients, a major bank, hypothesized that a new user experience would increase adoption of online bill payment. After conducting experimental user research to check the hypothesis, the bank learned that while the new version of the site would retain existing customers, the new interface did not drive adoption among those who had never used online bill payment. These customers’ barriers to usage had little to do with the interface itself but rather the value proposition of paying bills online directly with the bank. As a result, while the bank moved forward with the redesign for existing customers, they developed alternative messaging for non-users to improve the perceived value. User-experience-obsessed companies know that when you invest a lot in development, you need to make sure your concept will solve the right problems for your customers.

Source: inc.com, Amy Bluckner Chowdhry, 2 March 2012
Link to the articel on Inc.com here
Read more about 3S and how we support our clients to be even more customer focused here

As the traditional competitive advantages (product quality, delivery on time, reactive service, availability, etc.) are increasingly becoming “just what you expect” their relative competitive advantage decreases. Equally clear is the trend that “the new competitive factors” are becoming increasingly important for the customer when selecting suppliers or business partners.
Profesionell customer support is then becming a key factor for success..
Read more about this important area here:

// Johan

Focus on the human side of customer service to make it psychologically savvy, economically sound, and easier to scale.

Poor customer service isn’t a headache just for consumers; it’s a problem that vexes senior managers too. Balancing the trade-offs between the cost of services and the customer experience benefits they provide is difficult. Ensuring that frontline workers can efficiently and consistently execute service offerings across a far-flung organization is harder still. Along the way, many companies lose sight of what makes human beings tick—for instance, by overlooking well-known principles of behavioral science when delivering services—and thus unwittingly predispose customers to dissatisfaction.

At the same time, the customer service landscape is changing as social media and new mobile phone technologies give companies unprecedented access to data on customer interactions, while the technologies are changing the nature of the interactions themselves—for example, by amplifying the speed and impact of customer complaints.

Three questions
Against this backdrop, some organizations are making strides in the design and delivery of services. By focusing more thoughtfully on the human side of customer service, these companies are lowering costs by 10 percent or more while improving customer satisfaction scores by up to 30 percent. In this article, we’ll look at three such companies—a provider of cable-TV and Internet services, a technology company serving small and midsize businesses, and a car rental company. From their experiences, we’ve distilled three interrelated questions that CEOs and other senior executives should ask themselves before they introduce new services or conduct a reality check on the health of existing ones. Taken together, the questions can help spur productive conversations among top-team members, raising the odds that a company’s services will be both efficient and effective.

1. How human is our service?
It’s no secret that the quality of a company’s service interactions matters greatly in creating a positive experience with customers. Yet few companies focus on how customers form opinions about those interactions. By applying well known principles of psychology and behavioral science to service designs and working harder to understand what really motivates—and irritates—customers, companies can begin improving the experience quickly and at low cost.1

Consider the experience of the cable-TV provider that looked to behavioral science to help improve its widespread reputation for bad service. The company started by examining the characteristics of its most important customer interactions—phone calls initiating new service—and quickly identified several pain points. The calls, for example, typically contained off-putting directives from agents, as well as “dead” periods when customers felt that their time was wasted. Worse, the calls often ended with awkward billing discussions and legal disclosures.

The company completely redesigned the calls. First, credit verifications occurred earlier, and in the background, while agents helped customers set up their accounts. This approach eliminated awkward silences, as well as the frustrations that arose at the end of calls if customers were found not to be creditworthy.

This new approach also allowed customers to feel more in control, by adding simple choices to the conversation: “How do you want your billing to be set up?” for example, or “How would you like your installation to be conducted?” By reframing as choices what had previously been directives, the company found that consumers began rating the interactions more positively.

Agents were also coached to end the calls on a high note—another human preference that behavioral scientists have identified—by surprising customers with a coupon for a free product. Replacing what had been a stilted and highly scripted ending (“a lot of fine print and disclosures,” admitted one sales agent) with a bonus offer helped customers to view the calls more positively, introduced them to the company’s product catalog, and ultimately drove higher sales.

Similarly, behavioral science indicates that customers dislike unexpected changes and are more satisfied when they can stick to their habits during service interactions. A B2B sales group at a technology company took this tendency into account when it significantly redesigned its sales processes for small-business customers. The company augmented its traditional sales blitz approach—multiple reps targeted many clients at once, common in B2B settings—by assigning a specific “service champion” to each client. A consistent point of contact improved customer satisfaction and helped free up the sales reps’ time for additional selling.

Finally, by thinking harder about what makes customers tick, companies can turn service weaknesses into strengths and even spot possible new service offerings. A rental-car company, for example, recognized that its value-segment customers became more anxious than its premium customers did at the prospect of finding assigned cars in crowded lots. (The reason, in large part, was that value-segment customers traveled infrequently and were less familiar with the rental process than the premium customers were.) This observation led the company to introduce a successful—and, for travelers, less stressful—“pick any car” option.

2. How economic is our service?
The service offering that the rental-car company implemented was grounded in a clear economic rationale. The pick-any-car option was not only more efficient to operate than the old system but also created valuable revenue opportunities: the economy- and luxury-car choices were parked next to each other, so value-segment travelers with families were frequently tempted to splurge on larger, more expensive vehicles. Many executives miss opportunities such as these when they overlook the full economic impact of customer service.

In practice, of course, trade-offs among service levels, revenues, and costs are complex. Mastering the challenge requires developing an integrated view of the economics across a range of customer touch points. Often, tools such as breakpoint analysis, which can help determine customers’ actual sensitivity to service changes, are a good place to start.

The rental-car company, for example, conducted such an exercise and learned that its value-segment customers were more amenable to driving used cars than it had previously assumed. Received wisdom in the industry held that consumers balked when vehicles reached 30,000 or so odometer miles. Yet a quantitative and qualitative analysis showed that customers would accept cars with higher mileage if the costs were relatively low, the cars were clean, and the company offered a well-crafted maintenance and reliability guarantee. Determining the breakpoints opened the company up to a whole range of higher-mileage vehicles it hadn’t considered before and thus represented a significant potential for savings.

Similarly, the technology company’s sales group found that wide variations in service levels were acceptable when it returned its customers’ telephone inquiries. Executives knew, of course, that calls about the accuracy of orders required an immediate response but hadn’t realized that the company’s B2B customers were willing to wait up to a week for answers to other types of inquiries. Getting a handle on the different breakpoints allowed the service champions to work efficiently while still focusing their immediate attention on service hot spots.

The cable company’s managers conducted similar analyses as they focused on its inefficient (and, for customers, frustrating) scheduling system for in-home installations. The company had considered narrowing its appointment window— the block of time in which it promised to arrive at a customer’s home— to one hour, from four. But after studying the sensitivities of customers, the company found that the duration of the appointment window was less important to them than having drivers actually arrive sometime within it. Furthermore, the sweet spot for efficiency and customer satisfaction came at the two-hour mark. Optimizing for service better than that wasn’t worth the additional cost.

To be sure, the cable company’s executives looked closely at other basic cost drivers, and also balanced them against service outcomes. The company recognized, for example, that customers hated it when its employees didn’t have the necessary equipment on the day of an installation and had to schedule a second visit. Worse, any time the installers spent driving back to the distribution center was time they couldn’t use to educate customers about using the new equipment or to sell spur- of-the-moment service upgrades. An analysis of supply chain and inventory levels for modems and video equipment helped the company to improve its “on truck” availability in a significant way. This and other process changes helped double the amount of time installers spent educating customers, and that led to a 10 percent increase in additional sales made on the day of installation.

3. Can our people scale it up?
When putting together services that are economically attractive and grounded in a good understanding of what motivates customers, companies shouldn’t overlook their own employees—the other human beings involved in a transaction. Companies give themselves a big edge when they design service processes that a widely distributed workforce can easily adopt, understand, automate, and execute.

The cable company’s call center managers, for example, worked with sales agents to prepare them for the handful of scenarios that were most common, most likely to lead to dissatisfaction, or both: repair inquiries, as well as problems with the Internet, particular channels or channel bundles, and billing. Taking this more modular approach to calls helped improve the quality of training, which in turn helped improve service outcomes and the operational efficiency of calls. Better still, the moves dramatically improved employee satisfaction by giving frontline workers a clearer sense of what was required of them and how to prepare for it. “The new flow of the calls,” said one call center employee, “makes things easier for the customers, representatives, and technicians.”

Similarly, the technology company’s B2B sales unit identified the handful of most common situations its call agents faced each day. It then created a simple checklist of procedures to help standardize the way agents handled these situations; processes had varied considerably before, making communication between sales teams in different regions difficult. The new approach improved the consistency of service and made it far easier for the company to roll out changes across its more than two dozen widely dispersed regional markets.

As these examples imply, making services scalable involves more than standardizing processes: companies must ensure that their employees have the organizational capabilities necessary to carry out the tasks involved. Indeed, any suspected skill gaps should sound warning bells across the C-suite, even if a new service offering is economically sound and psychologically savvy.

This lesson was understood by the rental-car company’s senior team, which became concerned about the scalability of one of its new service ideas: a system allowing customers to check in while riding on the shuttle buses from an airport to the company’s rental facility. The company had piloted the service at smaller locations, where it was successful. By making customers feel, for example, that their time on the buses was better used, the new system made the long ride less annoying. Moreover, the service offered considerable potential for agents to promote vehicle upgrades during the rides.

Nonetheless, as the company experimented with this approach at its larger locations, executives began having second thoughts about its scalability—in particular, whether agents were fully prepared to sell in the new way. Ultimately, the executives tabled the implementation of the new approach until they could study the situation further and determine if the organization was ready for the changes.

Postscript: Organizing for action
While the decision to postpone the new service wasn’t easy for the rental-car company’s executives, at least they were in a position to make the call. Too often, we find that siloed decision making and implementation plans make it difficult for companies to involve the broad range of people required to change customer service priorities.

By contrast, the best companies we’ve studied establish teams with a rotating, cross-functional membership to review key services periodically. The most successful teams include a range of roles, from frontline salespeople and marketing managers to practitioners of lean production and Six Sigma—and even behavioral psychologists.

Further, as more and more customer data become available, some companies are investing in advanced analytics to understand customer interactions and channel preferences at a much more granular level. By focusing on the end-to-end nature of services as customers see them (from, say, order to provision) these companies can spot trouble—and design new services—much more quickly and successfully.

Source: McKinsey Quaterly, 2012
Authors: Johan DeVine, Shyam Lai and Michael Zee
Read the article on Internet here

Alla har råkat ut för en säljare med dålig dag. Men att ­expediten ­låter humöret gå ut över kunden kan kosta på. Bemötandet har blivit en allt viktigare del av shoppingupplevelsen – och butikens framgång.

Shopping handlar om så mycket mer än det du köper. En trevlig expedit kan lyfta hela köpet. Precis som att en otrevlig kan få dig att ångra att du överhuvudtaget satte foten i butiken i fråga.

– Det lättaste sättet att bli av med kunder är att ha en oengagerad personal som inte kan grejerna de säljer, säger ekonomiprofessorn Mikael Hernant som skrivit boken ”Lönsamhet i butik”.

Källa: DN, 13 november 2011
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En stor del av mina uppdrag handlar om att hjälpa min uppdragsgivare i att säkerställa en snabbare strategiimplementering. En av de största utmaningarna i detta ligger i att förnkra förståelsen internt om hur snabbt kundernas preferenser och köpbeteenden förändras i dagens konkurrens- och marknadssituation.

I ambitionen att fullt ut skapa en genuin förståelse hos alla för detta följer här ytterligare ett exempel som kan vara användbart när ni kommunicerar internt:

Kunderna söker mervärde på nätet

Den globala ekonomiska krisen har skapat ett nytt köpbeteende hos kunderna som lägger allt mer tid på att researcha på nätet inför ett köp. Det framgår av rapporten Globala megatrender som konsultföretaget PWC gjort tillsammans med Handelns utredningsinstitut.

41 procent av konsumenterna anger att de i större utsträckning än tidigare söker efter värde för pengarna, enligt rapporten Globala Megatrender. Den ekonomiska krisen får kunderna att byta till billigare varor, billigare butiker samt att göra mer noggranna inköpsval.

Nätet är ett viktigt verktyg för konsumenterna i värdejakten. Ju smartare kunderna blir desto viktigare blir företagens nätnärvaro. Konsumenterna lägger allt mer tid på att jämföra produkter, priser och kvalitet före köp. Denna research sker till stor del på nätet. Konsumenterna rör sig mellan prisjämförare, sökmotorer, nätbutiker, sociala medier och fysiska butiker för att hitta rätt produkt.

E-handelssajterna blir därför allt viktigare skyltfönster för multikanalaktörerna inom detaljhandeln.

Källa; JAJJA Mag och PWC, 21 september 2011

Läs hela rapporten här

How often have we heard the discussion that “one must be a born salesperson” to succeed in sales? But is it really so?
In this interesting theme, I would like to share with you these article from the excellent Harvard Business Review.
//Johan

My last post on the “Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople” was based on personality tests administered to 1,000 top business-to-business salespeople. The test results indicate that key personality traits directly influence top performers’ selling styles, and, in turn, their success. However, the study also raises the perennial question, “Are top salespeople born or made?” In other words, must top salespeople be born with the prerequisite sales instincts, or can someone learn to become successful in sales without them?

Based upon my research, experience, and observations, I estimate over 70 percent of top salespeople are born with “natural” instincts that play a critical role in determining their sales success. Conversely, less than 30 percent of top salespeople are self-made — meaning, they have had to learn how to become top salespeople without the benefit of these natural abilities. In addition, for every 100 people who enter sales without natural sales traits, 40 percent will fail or quit, 40 percent will perform at near average, and only 20 percent will be above average (These figures vary by industry and the complexity of products sold).

Based on the figures above, the real question that should be asked is, “What determines whether or not a self-made salesperson will become successful?” While it’s easy to recite a laundry list of general reasons for success (hard work, persistence, intelligence, integrity, empathy, etc.), my experience in the field and the research I’ve conducted indicates four key factors that determine the self-made salesperson’s destiny. They are language specialization, “modeling” of experiences, political acumen, and greed.

Language Specialization
The first differentiating factor between the success or failure of the self-made salesperson is language specialization. While all competent salespeople can recite their product’s features and business benefits, very few are mavens who can conduct intelligent conversations about the details of daily business operations. Every industry also has developed its own technical language to facilitate mutual understanding of terminology and an exact meaning of the words used throughout a business. The technical language consists of abbreviations, acronyms, business nomenclature, and specialized terms (for example RAM, CPU, and flash drive in the consumer electronics industry).

Successful self-made salespeople possess domain-area expertise and speak the corresponding business operations language, or have deep knowledge of the industry’s technical language. These languages are the yardstick by which customers measure a salesperson’s true value and greatly influence their purchase decisions. Lesser-performing self-made salespeople are not as fluent in these languages, so they tend to focus on likability and friendliness with prospective customers.

Modeling of Experiences
Modeling is the mind’s ability to link like experiences and similar data into predictable patterns. Salespeople continually learn through the ongoing accumulation and consolidation of information from their sales calls and interactions with customers. From this knowledge base, salespeople can predict what will happen and what they should do in light of what they have done in the past.

Modeling can be thought of as the engine that drives sales intuition. For example, let’s say a salesperson is asked by a skeptical, analytical, financial-oriented prospective customer how his product is different from his major competitor’s. His answer would be based on previous experiences with similar circumstances. Modeling can be thought of as trying to find the what, when, where response — what you should do when you are in a particular circumstance where you have to act.

Successful self-made salespeople have an effective methodology to store and retrieve all the verbal, nonverbal, factual, and intuitive information that occurs during sales calls and sales cycles. This results in a greater proficiency to win business than less-successful self-made salespeople who do not learn from their past mistakes and instead repeat them.

Political Acumen
Unfortunately, many under-performing self-made salespeople take a textbook-type approach to sales and concentrate solely on the procedural aspects of the sales cycle. They don’t take into account the human nature of sales and how people and politics determine the outcome.

Politics are based upon self-interests. Therefore, customers do not readily reveal the internal machinations of their decision-making. Political acumen is the ability to correctly map out each decision maker’s influence and motivations. Successful self-made salespeople consider this their top priority. Political acumen drives winning account strategy whereas strategic planning without political acumen is a losing proposition.

Greed
We normally associate greed with a corrupt character or miserly scrooge. While this may be society’s definition, in sales, “greed” takes on an entirely different meaning. In sales, greed and self-respect are closely intertwined. Greed can be thought of as the desire to be fairly paid for one’s time. Time is a salesperson’s enemy because time is finite. Time is the governor that determines how many deals can be worked and where effort should be focused. Salespeople are on a mission to learn the ultimate truth, “Will I win the deal?” Greed compels the successful self-made salespeople to push themselves beyond their comfort zone and ask difficult qualifying questions while continually pushing for the close. Conversely, the lesser successful self-made salespeople do not possess this inward drive.

Are top salespeople born or made? The true answer is that the overwhelming majority of top salespeople are gifted with innate talents. However, many others are self-made successes who have learned how to apply their language specialization and build their intuition. They know what accounts they should spend their time on and always navigate to powerful decision-makers in order to create the opportunity to persuade them to buy.

Source: Steve W. Martin, Harvard Business review, 29 August 2011
Link

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Early Wednesday morning in a sunny and beautiful Stockholm. Read an article in the morning newspaper and came to think of a meeting I have with a potential client on Friday. We’ll talk about his (he is the CEO of the company that operates in thirty countries) challenge to sucessfully anchor a new strategic messages internally. In the entire organization!

His strategy implementation challange is primarily within two areas:

“I am not a salesman, but all sells”. It’s a Swedish expression often used to create an understanding of how everyone in the organization affect the company’s image, profile and the short-and long-term business success.
it is a major challenge for many management teams to successfully anchoring this understanding throughout their organization.

In today’s competitive market situation, it becomes increasingly important to use the “engagement” as a competitive factor. Are long past the time when it was difficult to find a supplier with good products, good skills, safe delivery and good service and support. This is, in other words, something that quickly changed from being the primary competitive factors for becoming a prerequisite.

Today it is about complementing the “traditional competitive factors” with what I call “the new competitive factors.”
In most industries it is already long ago it was difficult to find a supplier with good products, good skills, safe delivery and good service and support. This is, in other words, something that quickly changed from being the primary competitive factors for becoming a prerequisite.

Today it is about complementing the “traditional competitive factors” with what I call “the new competitive factors.” One of the most important of these is a commitment!

There are always people who do business with people. And as long as our basic needs (quality, skills, etc.) are met, we will always choose to do business with the player who shows the greatest commitment to us, who really wants me as a customer and always strive for more than the competition. It’s that easy!

Or not? Is it really that easy? So, in terms of customers’ buying decisions, it is just that simple. However, it is a major challenge to anchor this understanding internally in many companies.

My experience is that in order to achieve this success (ie, more time and cost are the competitors) have the degree of internal understanding (the success of strategy implementation) set targets, measured and monitored. Individual directors should have this as part of their individual goals.

Read more about this under the heading “Fact Based Management” in my blog.
Below you find a very readable article from McKinsey in the subject of commitment and customer care …

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Engaging customers today requires commitment from the entire company—and a redefined marketing organization.

For the past decade, marketers have been adjusting to a new era of deep customer engagement. They’ve tacked on new functions, such as social-media management; altered processes to better integrate advertising campaigns online, on television, and in print; and added staff with Web expertise to manage the explosion of digital customer data. Yet in our experience, that’s not enough. To truly engage customers for whom “push” advertising is increasingly irrelevant, companies must do more outside the confines of the traditional marketing organization. At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company.

This shift presents an obvious challenge: if everyone’s responsible for marketing, who’s accountable? And what does this new reality imply for the structure and charter of the marketing organization? It’s a problem that parallels the one that emerged in the early days of the quality movement, before it became embedded in the fabric of general management. In a memorable anecdote, one of former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca’s key hires, Hal Sperlich, arrived at the automaker in 1977 as the new vice president of product planning. His first question: “Who is in charge of quality?”

“Everybody,” a confident executive replied.
“But who do you hold responsible when there are problems in quality?” Sperlich pressed.
“Nobody.”
“Oh, shoot,” Sperlich thought. “We are in for it now.”1

To avoid being “in for it,” companies of all stripes must not only recognize that everyone is responsible for marketing but also impose accountability by establishing a new set of relationships between the function and the rest of the organization. In essence, companies need to become marketing vehicles, and the marketing organization itself needs to become the customer-engagement engine, responsible for establishing priorities and stimulating dialogue throughout the enterprise as it seeks to design, build, operate, and renew cutting-edge customer-engagement approaches.

As that transformation happens, the marketing organization will look different: there will be a greater distribution of existing marketing tasks to other functions; more councils and informal alliances that coordinate marketing activities across the company; deeper partnerships with external vendors, customers, and perhaps even competitors; and a bigger role for data-driven customer insights. This article provides some real-life examples of these kinds of changes.

Marketing’s cutting edge is being redefined every day. While there’s no definitive map showing how companies can successfully navigate the era of engagement, we hope to help senior executives—not just marketers—start to draw one.

The evolution of engagement
More than two years ago, our colleagues David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susan Mulder, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik unveiled the results of a research effort involving 20,000 customers across five industries and three continents.2 Their work showed how collaborative the buying process has become and how difficult it is to influence customers by relying solely on one-way, push advertising. In the words of American Express chief marketing officer John Hayes, “We went from a monologue to a dialogue. Mass media will continue to play a role. But its role has changed.”

Over the past two years, that evolution has only accelerated. More and more consumers are using digital video recorders to fast-forward through TV commercials and are consuming video content on Web sites such as YouTube and on mobile devices. Billboards alongside train lines and bus routes struggle to capture the attention of people absorbed by the screens of their smartphones. Meanwhile, today’s more empowered, critical, demanding, and price-sensitive customers are turning in ever-growing numbers to social networks, blogs, online review forums, and other channels to quench their thirst for objective advice about products and to identify brands that seem to care about forming relationships with them. Individuals even are posting their own commercials on YouTube. In short, the avenues (or touch points) customers use to interact with companies have continued to multiply.

The problem for many companies is that the very things that make push marketing effective—tight, relatively centralized operational control over a well-defined set of channels and touch points—hold it back in the era of engagement. Many touch points, such as calls to customer service centers and interactions between the sales force and customers, sit outside the traditional marketing organization, which has little or no permission to reach into other business functions or units. Companies have traditionally divided responsibility for touch points among functions. But a comprehensive strategy for engaging customers across them rarely emerges and, if one does, there’s often no system for executing it or measuring its performance.

More pervasive marketing
To engage customers whenever and wherever they interact with a company—in a store; on the phone; responding to an e-mail, a blog post, or an online review—marketing must pervade the entire organization. Companies such as Starbucks and Zappos, for which superior engagement has been a critical source of competitive advantage from the beginning, already exhibit some of these traits. But these companies aren’t our focus, which instead is the kinds of actions everyone else can take as they strive for world-class customer engagement.

The starting point is a mind-set shift around customer interaction touch points. Companies typically think of them as being “owned” by a given function: for instance, marketing owns brand management; sales owns customer relationships; merchandising or retail operations own the in-store experience. In today’s marketing environment, companies will be better off if they stop viewing customer engagement as a series of discrete interactions and instead think about it as customers do: a set of related interactions that, added together, make up the customer experience. That perspective should stimulate fresh dialogue among members of the senior team about who should design the overall system of touch points to create compelling customer engagement, and who then builds, operates, and renews each touch point consistent with that overall vision. There’s no need to worry about traditional functional or business unit ownership: whoever is best placed to tackle an activity should do so.

Design
Designing a great customer-engagement strategy and experience depends on understanding exactly how people interact with a company throughout their decision journey. That interaction could be with the product itself or with service, marketing, sales, public relations, or any other element of the business.

When the hotel group Starwood sought to enhance its engagement with customers, for example, the company pored through data about them and identified clear demographic groups staying at its more than 1,000 properties. In 2006, the company unveiled a specific new positioning for each part of its brand portfolio, ranging in affordability from Four Points by Sheraton to its Luxury Collection and St. Regis properties.

Each brand seeks to deliver a different customer experience, on dimensions ranging from how guests are greeted by staff to the kind of toiletries offered in rooms. Crucially, for each type of property, Starwood sought to design not only the desired experience but also how it would actually be delivered. It therefore had to decide what coordination would be necessary across functions, who would operationally control different touch points, and even what content customers wanted in the company’s Web site, in loyalty program mailings, and other forms of communication.

Starwood’s experience underscores the fact that, despite the growing impact of digital touch points such as social media, effective customer engagement must go beyond pure communication to include the product or service experience itself. “At the end of the day,” says Virgin Atlantic Airways chief executive Steve Ridgway, “we fly exactly the same planes as everybody else. If we get our customers off the plane happy, and they go on to talk about that and get others to come and then come back again themselves—that’s a huge marketing tool.”

Build
Once a company designs how it will engage with customers, it needs the organizational capabilities to deliver: adding staff, building a social-media network infrastructure, retooling customer care operations, or altering reporting structures. Functions far removed from marketing often have important roles to play, so one or more marketing teams at the center may have to build skills in other parts of a company. A global energy company took that approach and then largely dissolved the group when those capabilities were in place.

Allocating responsibility for building touch points is increasingly important because of the degree to which Web-based engagement is requiring companies to create “broadcast” media.3 Some have built publishing divisions to feed the ever-increasing demand for content required by company Web sites, social media, internal and external publications, multimedia sites, and coupons and other promotions. Many luxury-goods companies, for example, have built editorial teams to “socialize” their brands: they are transforming the customer relationship by producing blogs, digital magazines, and other content that can dramatically intensify both the frequency and depth of interactions.

Last year, LVMH Moët Hennessy–Louis Vuitton, for example, launched an online magazine, NOWNESS, that offers what the company calls “information reference” about its luxury brands. The site presents a daily multimedia story with little pure advertising and (in conjunction with LVMH’s efforts on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) seeks to deepen the engagement customers have with the company’s brands. British luxury brand Burberry has undertaken a similar venture with its Art of the Trench site. France’s Chanel has for years used its own creative and artistic directors to develop content, without any need for help from external agencies.

Content-oriented strategies like these require creative employees who can feed the customer’s ever-increasing need for timely, relevant, and compelling content across a variety of media. They also provide an opportunity for productive dialogue within companies about the role of marketing versus other functions in building critical touch points that drive engagement.

Operate and renew
For companies in industries as diverse as consumer packaged goods and financial services, digital technology has upended the engagement expectations of customers, who, for example, want one Web site to visit and a relationship seamlessly integrated across touch points. Meeting such expectations requires extraordinary operational coordination and responsiveness in activities ranging from providing on-the-ground service delivery to generating online content to staying on top of a customer care issue blowing up on YouTube.

Behind the scenes, that new reality creates a need for coordination and conflict resolution mechanisms within and across functions, as well as budget procedures that allow flexibility and rapid action should the need arise. PepsiCo, for example, has sought to provide a single point of contact for its digital-marketing efforts by creating the role of chief digital officer: an executive without line responsibility who drives the application of best practices across the beverage group’s global digital efforts.

Companies also need a clear approach for monitoring touch points and renewing them as needed. At one major hotel chain, for example, a single group circumnavigates the globe acting as a “monitor and fix” SWAT team. It meets with hotel licensees, educates them about the company’s customer-engagement approach and management of key touch points, demonstrates new behavior, and trains the staff in new operational processes. Given the speed of information sharing today, constant monitoring and adaptation—indeed, continuous improvement of the sort that came to the operations world long ago—is bound to infiltrate marketing and grow in importance.

The marketing organization’s new look
As the chief marketing officer collaborates with the chief executive and other senior-team members to nail down a shared approach for designing, building, operating, and renewing customer touch points, he or she also will require a new kind of marketing organization. For marketing to truly become the customer-engagement engine that orchestrates the delivery of the end-to-end customer experience, it must evolve along four critical dimensions.

Distribute more activities
As marketing becomes more pervasive, the marketing organization will increasingly be defined by a core set of tightly held responsibilities, such as branding and agency relationships, and a set of responsibilities distributed among the functions and groups best placed to manage and use the information generated by customer interactions. Procter & Gamble, for instance, has created a group within the purchasing function to buy digital-media advertising space. The group spans geographic boundaries, reflecting the global nature of the medium, and while it sits within purchasing, it is staffed by people with marketing experience.

At companies where the marketing organization’s responsibilities will be split between core and distributed activities, CMOs will increasingly be held accountable for the performance of groups that don’t report solely to them. When CEOs ask for the marketing-org chart, they will see a complex web of solid- and dotted-line relationships showing the roles that marketing plays in designing, building, or operating touch points across the whole organization.

The chart will also show where marketing activities have been embedded in other functions. One major logistics company, for example, puts marketing resources within each sales district to adapt corporate-level marketing initiatives to local circumstances. This approach mutes complaints from sales reps who feel bombarded with marketing pushes from the head office by giving them simple, customized ideas for driving sales within their regions.

More councils and partnerships
While leading companies have long used marketing councils to boost management coordination, the new marketing organization will require many more of them, with greater representation from other functions. One global financial institution, for example, has created a digital-governance council with representatives from all customer-facing business units. The company’s goal was to ensure that data and analytics are shared, that customers receive the same experience regardless of channel (such as Web sites, branches, call centers, or automated teller machines), and that IT systems meet the customer’s digital-engagement needs.

More robust formal and informal external partnerships will be critical too. Customer forums, such as the one Virgin Atlantic Airways used to create a taxi-sharing app for smartphones, are one example. More structured relationships with distribution partners also can enhance engagement. The consumer-packaged-goods company Nestlé, for example, manages its relationship with retailer Wal-Mart Stores via what it calls the Nestlé–Wal-Mart Team. This unified cross-business, cross-functional group is responsible for everything from in-store activity to promotion, logistics, innovation, and product design. As a result, Wal-Mart has a single point of contact with one of its largest suppliers, Nestlé enjoys a stronger relationship with the retailer, and, critically, both companies gain a better understanding of, and engagement with, packaged-goods consumers.

Elevate the role of customer insights
Generating rich customer insights, always central to effective marketing efforts, is more challenging and important in today’s environment. Companies must listen constantly to consumers across all touch points, analyze and deduce patterns from their behavior, and respond quickly to signs of changing needs.

One implication is that the types of talent required to derive such insights will change. A premium will be placed on problem-solving and strategic-marketing skills, rather than on traditional market research capabilities such as designing surveys and commissioning focus groups. Some organizations also may need help from external partners, a pattern that’s already apparent at several insurers and health care payers that have neither the time nor the budgets to build the necessary data-gathering and -analysis capabilities in-house and at scale.

The insights group’s position in a company could even change. At one high-end hospitality business, for example, responsibility for generating customer insights has moved out of the marketing function entirely. The group now reports directly to the head of strategy, who uses information from it to redesign core business elements such as pricing, sales targeting, and the selection of properties for development.

More data rich and analytically intense
Reinforcing the importance of all these changes is an exponential increase in the volume of customer data and the intensity of the analysis required to process and act on it effectively. Without cross-functional collaboration and a clear delineation of roles, it will be impossible to gather, collate, gain insights from, and disseminate data that streams in from every customer interaction. The sheer volume of data is extraordinary: social-media gaming company Zynga, for example, generates five terabytes (the equivalent of about 1.5 million song files) of data on customer clicks every day.4 What’s more, “Marketing is going to become a much more science-driven activity,” says Duncan Watts of Yahoo! Research. In the trenches, this change suggests a shift toward sophisticated data analytics similar to the revolution that has already taken place in industries such as financial services, as well as in airlines and other industries where yield management is important. Some marketing organizations are already making their moves: to send targeted e-mails to customers, retailer Williams-Sonoma, for example, analyzes an integrated database that tracks some 60 million households on metrics including income, housing values, and number of children. These e-mails obtain response rates 10 to 18 times as high as those sent randomly.5 Such capabilities don’t necessarily have to be built in-house: many companies will enter into creative arrangements with outside parties to exchange data and run joint tests of alternative marketing tactics.

The major barrier to engagement is organizational rather than conceptual: given the growing number of touch points where customers now interact with companies, marketing often can’t do what’s needed all on its own. CMOs and their C-suite colleagues must collaborate intensively to adapt their organizations to the way customers now behave and, in the process, redefine the traditional marketing organization. If companies don’t make the transition, they run the risk of being overtaken by competitors that have mastered the new era of engagement.

Source: McKinsey Quarterly, July 2011

Det har under lång tid fascinerat mig hur lite fokus det läggs på säljfrågor i svenskt styrelsearbete.

Min uppskattning är att om man på årsbasis lägger 30-40% av tiden på kostnadskontroll /-uppföljning, så är motsvarande tidsinsats avseende säljrelaterade frågor mindre än 5%. Rimligen borde väl fördelningen vara 50/50, eller?
Anledningen är ganska enkel. Det handlar i första hand om en generellt sett svag kompetens inom området sälj. Och där man känner sig svag vill man sällan exponera sig.

Så säljfrågorna får hanteras av den operativa företagsledningen. Helt annat är det t.ex. i USA. Där söker man mycket aktivt efter styrelseledamöter med en genuin kunskap av, och förståelse för, såväl strategiska som operativa säljfrågor. Skälet är enkelt – framgångsrika affärer bygger på en balans mellan ”pengar in och pengar ut”. Således krävs det också en balans i styrelsens kompetens och styrelsens arbete som speglar detta.

Efter denna korta, och personliga reflektion, följer här en artikel om personlig försäljning i det mer operativa perspektivet:

Som säljare är förmågan att kunna motivera sig själv i såväl mot- som medgång en avgörande framgångsfaktor. Säljare arbetar ofta självständigt utifrån individuella mål, även om de jobbar i team, menar Susanna Udvardi, vd på Multi-Support Sverige.
Susanna Udvardi inledde sin säljarkarriär för 15 år sedan och hon vet av erfarenhet vad som behövs göras för att kunna hantera kunder som tackar nej. I svackor i säljarbetet krävs en mental styrka och en drivkraft som kommer inifrån, fastslår hon.

Ett vanligt misstag bland säljare är att släppa kunden när kontraktet är undertecknat och affären är i hamn. Genom att ta hand om kunden efteråt och ge de den respekt och hantering de förtjänar kan man nå framgång. Om du slarvar med att serva kunden efter det att kontraktet är påskrivet så riskerar du att förlora kundens anseende och respekt för dig som säljare och det företag du representerar.
“Ha respekt för kunder som tackar nej, men ta vara på möjligheten att fråga varför han eller hon valde att tacka nej till erbjudandet. Det är ofta många faktorer som gör att kunden tackar nej. Det är inte alls säkert att det har något med dig som säljare att göra. Däremot kan du lära dig mycket av den feedback kunden ger”, säger Susanna Udvardi.

För att hitta sin inre drivkraft och motivation som säljare är en grundläggande tävlingsinstinkt till stor hjälp. Framgångsrik försäljning handlar till stor del om att överträffa sina egna prestationer och att ständigt sträva mot nästa mål, nästa nivå.

För Susanna Udvardi är kicken i att kunna hjälpa en kund med den lösning man levererar och så småningom nå fram till ett signerat kontrakt ofta en tillräckligt hög motivationsfaktor för att kunna hantera många nej på vägen fram mot målet.
“Fastna inte vid dina misslyckanden, de är i princip aldrig personrelaterade. Gör en reflektion över vad som gick fel och fundera på vad du kan ta med dig från en misslyckad situation för att kunna finslipa din säljteknik, men gå sedan vidare och betrakta varje dag som en ny möjlighet, ett vitt blad där du själv avgör resultatet”, säger Susanna Udvardi.

Det bästa sättet att ta sig ur en svacka är, enligt Susanna Udvardi, att ta tjuren vid hornen och fortsätta sälja. I slutänden är det bara konkreta resultat och nya försäljningsframgångar som kan hjälpa dig att vända den negativa trenden. Att vänta ut svackan och hoppas att ditt tillstånd ska vända sig av sig självt hjälper sällan. Samla istället dina krafter och lägg i en extra växel, även om det tar emot.
“När du ringer upp en kund så är det oerhört viktigt att din röst signalerar energi och engagemang. Om du känner dig ledsen eller nedstämd eller bara har en allmänt dålig dag kan det bästa alternativet vara att ägna dig åt något annat eller gå hem för dagen och komma igen med ny kraft nästa dag istället, annars riskerar din negativa sinnesstämning smitta av sig på kunderna. Jag brukar säga att försäljning är matematik, när du ringt tillräckligt många samtal eller gjort ett visst antal kundbesök ger det i princip alltid utdelning”.
“Livet som fältsäljare är visserligen relativt ensamt, men mötena med kunderna gör att man känner sig betydligt mindre ensam. För att orka vara närvarande, entusiastisk, glad och energisk när man möter kunder så gäller det att ta vara på de stunder av stillhet och reflektion som erbjuds under dagen. Själv använder jag mig av min restid. Medan jag sitter i bilen planerar jag och laddar inför nästa möte eller säljsamtal. Balansen är oerhört viktig, varje säljare måste hitta sitt eget sätt att tanka energi inför kontakten med kund”.

Många säljare är typiska ”hunters”, de fokuserar på nykundsbearbetning och har sin starkaste drivkraft i att nå så många avslut som möjligt. Andra är mer relationsbyggare, ”Farmers”, som tar hand om kontakterna på ett bättre sätt. Framgången ligger mitt i mellan, enligt Susanna Udvardi. Efter att ha arbetat ett par år som säljare väljer många att trappa ner och gå in i en mer förvaltande roll som i större utsträckning baseras på lagarbete och att vårda befintliga kundkontakter. En säljare som inte längre har tillräcklig motivation för att jaga nya kunder kan byta roll och istället fokusera på att ta hand om befintliga kunder.

Källa: Proffice.se, augusti 2011