The Facts of Business Life: What Every Successful Business Owner Knows That You Dont

by Bill McBean

  Another step you can take is to determine how aggressive those companies are in their efforts to sell their customers. In fact, finding the answer to this question speaks to both ownership and opportunity. If the market is full of competitors with the “killer instinct,” you have to determine if you will feel comfortable and be able to function effectively in such an environment. But even if the market is full of sharks, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the opportunity isn’t big enough for more passive owners to thrive. Lawyers provide a good example of this. Every market seems to have some lawyers who advertise themselves as so “bad” that they will destroy their opponents. But every market also has a place for lawyers who don’t portray themselves as killers, and both seem to survive. So if your market is like that, even if you don’t consider yourself to be a “killer,” you can still have a very successful business. One way or the other, though, this is something it’s important for you to think about even before you start your business.

  Understanding how you want to sell into a market is an important issue to consider, and ignoring it could lead to an irreversible mistake. Knowing the selling climate speaks to both your specific ownership philosophy and your competitiveness. Doing so will enable you to find the opportunity that will most closely match the way you want your business to be recognized and the reputation you want your business to develop. In other words, as far as marketing and selling goes, it’s essential that you be comfortable with the way it’s done, and that you know even before going in whether you want to compete with the “killers” or will be satisfied making a good living by selling less aggressively.

  Keeping the Customer at Level 1

  Part of the formula for keeping your customers is being smart, creative, and copying what great companies do to keep their customers; that is, finding out the best practices and trying to duplicate them. But that’s a lot easier said than done. And there’s not much point in even trying unless you know you have the determination and passion to enforce the discipline necessary to keep customers. In this regard, keeping customers is more about ownership than opportunity. By this point, the opportunity has been achieved—you’ve created a customer by making a sale—so now you have to make the most out of that sale by doing whatever you can to make sure the customer comes back. The fact that someone bought from you once doesn’t mean he or she will do it again. Your business has to not only treat customers right—as you define it—the first time but also work continuously to earn their business.

  In order to illustrate the best way to keep a customer, in his book The Seven Habits of Successful People (Free Press, 1990), Steven Covey talks about the difference between shearing sheep and skinning them. He suggests—and successful owners will certainly agree—that it’s much better to shear the sheep time and time again than to skin it once. It’s the same with customers. You might be able to “tag” them once, but if you do you will never see them again. This is the way you need to start thinking about keeping customers at Level 1, and the way you will have to get your employees to think about them at later levels. But it requires effort, and unless you’re strong enough to make that effort, to make sure your employees are sufficiently disciplined and professional to treat your customers “right” so they keep coming back, competing and winning will not only be difficult, it may be impossible.

  Level 2: Creating Your Company’s DNA

  In the discussion of marketing at Level 1, I said the kind of marketing an owner chooses to do reflects both his or her personality and competitiveness. This is equally true at Level 2, but at this level, marketing also reflects the owner’s character. This is because the way an owner chooses to sell the company’s products says a great deal about the kind of person he or she is. For, example, owners who advertise a product at a particularly low price even though they only have one or two items at that price are likely to have a somewhat questionable character. However, owners who are honest with their customers are unlikely to engage in such deceptive practices, and will accordingly be able to earn the customers’ trust. In other words, marketing is not only about driving traffic to your business, it’s also about building and displaying an attitude that’s reflected in how you market your business, how you operate it, the type of people you hire to serve your customers, and the way your customers are treated. In other words, it’s about your company’s DNA.

  Having decided to become an owner and selected an opportunity at Level 1, at Level 2 you have to begin to match your company’s marketing to the opportunities available. That is, you have to make sure your marketing goes where the customers and the opportunities are. If, for example, you determined there was a market opportunity in the automotive supply industry for low-priced tires and batteries, you would stock such items, hire and train your staff to help your customers, and then let those customers know that you have what they are looking for. Similarly, if your research indicated that there was a demand for quality automobile body work, you would hire experienced repair people, get the most up-to-date equipment, and start advertising to your target market. The point is that the opportunity defines the market, marketing attracts the customers, and your business’s DNA has to support the image your marketing projects. In order to accomplish this, it is necessary that you essentially develop both internal and external marketing programs.

  Internal Marketing

  The internal program is the means by which you implement the first macro concept concerning marketing—that is, marketing is not the responsibility of one department but, rather, the responsibility of every employee in the company. Customers want their presence recognized and their expectations met, and the only way to make that happen is for every one of your employees to have some responsibility for marketing included in his or her job description. And that means everyone—from your most junior part-time clerk to your most highly paid executive. It might mean as little as saying hello and smiling to a customer, answering a phone no one else is picking up, or replying quickly to a customer’s e-mail inquiry, but it’s important, and it’s all part of the internal DNA you have to instill in the company.

  The goal of internal marketing is essentially to deliver on the promise of the external marketing, that is, what you tell prospective customers about your company and the products or services you provide. At this level, though, the internal marketing program actually needs to be developed before the external one. This is because external marketing must be backed by substance, and if you don’t know exactly what your company can provide its customers, or the way in which your employees will provide it, it will be pretty difficult to sell your business’s differences and skills. What ultimately separates successful owners from the also-rans is not the size of the external marketing and advertising budget but the internal effort to make sure the staff meets the owner’s expectations for the way customers are handled. It’s one thing to attract a customer to a business, but it’s another to make the sale and to keep the customer coming back.

  Put yourself in your customer’s place. Imagine that a business has attracted your attention, but when you try to purchase something, the company’s employees treat you with a lack of respect or an “I could care less attitude.” You might still buy something from the company, but it’s not likely you would go back. Your customers are no different than you are. They don’t like being ill-treated either. And what’s even worse, if they don’t like the way they’re treated by your employees, they’re likely to tell others about their experience. So in the process you don’t only lose one potential customer, you lose any number of them. This is why implementing an internal marketing program as part of creating your company’s DNA is so important.

  Internal marketing is not, however, just about how the customer is treated. It’s also about creating and controlling internal processes that support the sale, that is, making sure the business can deliver on the marketing and advertising promise. If, for example, one of your selling points is quality, you have to set up a quality control process to make sure y
ou can deliver quality. You don’t want a customer to come in to pick up his car after you’ve supposedly repaired his front bumper only to find that it’s still full of dents. Similarly, if your marketing projects an image of professionalism, you have to develop a training program to ensure not only that your staff has the most up-to-date product knowledge but also that they know how to sell the benefits of your business and your products. You don’t want a customer asking one of your staff about the latest version of a product only to have him or her stammer out an incoherent answer. In other words, the image you project externally has to be backed up by internal action, and if it isn’t, the disconnect will cost your business sales.

  External Marketing

  The external program is the means by which you develop the message you want to send to your target market about your products or services, and about the company itself.

  The primary goal of this program is to match your marketing and advertising to the opportunity, that is, to make sure your marketing is focused on your target audience and delivering a message that not only gets their attention but also moves them to action. Eventually, the way to do this will be to develop a process that will track your customer traffic and sales so you can see if your message is reaching them, and make adjustments if it isn’t.

  At this level, however, in order to get the program started, you have to make three important decisions. First, you have to decide how you want to attack the market, that is, how you will price your items, what kind of selection you will have, and other factors that will enable you to exploit the opportunity. The second is to decide what media and message will attract your target audience, that is, whether you will use print, radio, television, social media, or some other means of reaching those who should be interested in what you have to offer. And, third, you have to decide how you want your customers to be able to contact your business—such as through a web site, e-mail, or telephone—and how you will greet them and make a positive impression. In other words, you have to develop an external marketing program that will drive customers to your business, where they will be met with an internal marketing program that fulfills the promises the external program made. And the sooner you do that, the sooner success will come, and the sooner you will be able to make the most out of the opportunity you have discovered.

  Understanding the various aspects of marketing and how they impact on each other is not an easy task. But like so many other things in business, as in life in general, if you first concentrate on the basics the rest will eventually come to you. In marketing, those basics begin with understanding the difference between internal and external marketing, recognizing their importance, defining what you want your company to represent, and then mastering the three elements of marketing—attracting, selling, and keeping customers.

  The Benefits of Marketing at Level 2

  Understanding marketing enables you to recognize that it must be aimed at the audience that matches the opportunity you’ve selected.

  Understanding marketing enables you to see that it has two macro elements, internal and external, and that they must be connected and coordinated if your business is to be successful.

  Understanding marketing helps you develop transparent processes that will ensure what you want to happen does happen.

  Understanding marketing makes it easier for you to make critical decisions because you will recognize that it must be appropriate to the opportunity.

  Understanding marketing enables you to not only direct traffic to your business with a “buy here” message but also to brand the business in a way that customers can identify with it.

  Attracting the Customer at Level 2

  Attracting customers is a continuous activity regardless of what level your business is operating on, simply because attracting more customers means increased sales, increased profits, and usually a greater market share. It’s often thought that attracting customers is limited to external marketing, but the fact is that internal marketing plays an important role as well. The reason for this is that customers talk to other people about their buying experiences, and often recommend businesses where they have been looked after and treated well. So once your business is live, whatever you and your employees can do to make the sales process more enjoyable for your customers, the more they will tell their friends and neighbors about it, and the more customers you will have. It’s as simple as that.

  Of course, first you have to let them know that your business exists, and the way to do that is through advertising. The issue here is making sure that you are advertising in the media that your target audience uses. You may have a great message and a wonderful product, and spend a lot of money on advertising, but if your customers aren’t where those dollars are spent, you’re wasting your money. It’s at Level 2 that you must research where your target market goes to get its information and entertainment. It’s also at Level 2 that you set up a process so that when customers start contacting your business you will be able to track how they found out about you, which will not only sharpen your media buying but also enable you to more effectively match messages to the various media.

  It’s very important, though, that you recognize the difference between attracting traffic and attracting buyers. There are lots of media that brag about the campaigns they run that can get a lot of people to your door or your web site. More traffic is obviously a good thing, but traffic has to eventually translate into sales. And the sooner you can find out where your buyers are and how to attract them, the sooner your business will become successful. At Level 2, there are several ways you can do this. Perhaps the most obvious is to research how your successful competitors market and advertise their products. However, what’s even better is going to other markets and talking to successful owners about how they do it. This will not only give you fresh ideas, it will also give you ideas about how to collect the information and how to design processes that will provide you with solid data you can use to your advantage.

  Selling the Customer at Level 2

  Making the sale is ultimately “where the rubber meets the road.” It’s what all of your hard work is about. So when you are creating your company’s DNA, one of the first questions you have to ask yourself is “What can I do to give my employees the best chance of making a sale?” That is, how will we handle the web site contact, the phone call, or the customer who comes into the business? And the answer is to make sure your employees know to ask for the business, the steps to take in making a sale, and how to close—that is, the sales process. Addressing this issue is essentially what creating the DNA for your marketing program is about.

  An example of a simple but effective process that can work, with modifications, whether you are selling products or services is one in which the salesperson:

  Welcomes the customer, introduces him- or herself, and thanks the customer for coming in, phoning, or visiting the web site.

  Begins building rapport by asking questions to determine exactly what the customer either needs or wants.

  Restates what the customer has said to confirm his or her understanding.

  Explains how your products or services match up to the customer’s needs, possibly even suggesting options the customer may have not known were available, in turn reinforcing why doing business with your company is his or her best alternative.

  Begins to start closing the sale by asking for the business, that is, saying, for example, “Can we make the appointment to perform the service tomorrow, or would Thursday be better?”

  If the customer has objections, slowly starts working through the objections, continuing to sell the benefits of your business, and ends by asking for their business again.

  If he or she can’t make the sale today, finds out when it might be done, asks for the best time to contact the customer, and requests his or her contact information.

  As you can see, selling processes are simple to design. More important, they are easily adaptable, so depending on your preference and your compa
ny’s DNA, they can range from being very passive to being extremely aggressive. Regardless of what kind of selling process you create, however, the fact is that if you want your business to do well and be consistently successful you will not only need to have a selling process but one that is sufficiently transparent that, if there is a problem, it can be readily identified and corrected.

  Keeping the Customer at Level 2

  Generally speaking, businesses today have to do more to impress and keep their customers. This is due more to competition than to any other factor, because more and more industries and businesses have made customer retention an extension of their marketing efforts. As a result, companies are being creative in keeping their businesses in front of their customers long after a sale has been made. Technology has made customer contact and retention relatively easy and inexpensive to do, which has leveled the playing field for small business owners who are going up against large public companies like Walmart, Home Depot, or Macy’s. In fact, you can pick up generic customer retention software programs at stores like Office Depot or Best Buy, as well as have a program designed specifically for your business.