The Third Dog

The retail supply chain is broken and I am sadly observing systemic failure in the retail supply chain,. The symptoms are as follows:

1. Landlords may tell retailers that their stock is not what the market wants and the customers are simply responding to the fact that they can get what they really want somewhere else. They argue that the customer service levels are not good enough and that the presentation is not up to standard.
2. Franchisors will berate Franchisees for not adhering to the Operations Manual and for failure to engage the customer in the right way; not serve the hot dog the way it was meant be served or that the form wasn’t completed on time. It’s a constant challenge to get people to buy into the ‘system’.
3. Retailers (in shopping centres) on the other hand always blame centre management for lack of traffic and too much competition in their category.
4. Franchisees always think their franchise is a little bit different and deserves to be the exception in a dozen little ways.

Who is right and who is wrong? The short answer is they are all wrong – about each other – and this is the cause of the systemic failures in the supply chain.

We often have to spend a great deal of time on facilitating discussions to help each party understand the other’s point of view.

1. We have to help the landlord understand that the reason why the retailer is not engaging with centre management is that they rightfully don’t have respect for centre management. Just like customers punish the retailer with non-attendance when the retailer does not have what they want, similarly if centre management is not adding value to the retailers’ lives, they cannot expect any engagement from the retailer.
2. We have to make sure the retailer understands the landlord is not a financial institution and that they cannot use them subsidise cashflow shortfalls. They must understand that the centre teams can drag customers to the centre but not into their store.
3. We have to make sure the franchisee understands the Franchisor cannot guarantee success and that the ‘system’ is missing one important ingredient and that is the franchisees commitment and hard work. And of course that territories are not as different as they’d like to believe.
4. We have to make sure the franchisor understands the franchisee will not buy into the consistency message if the Franchisor treats different franchisees differently because that undermines their own demand for consistency. (If you demand consistency, you have to live it yourself.)

‘While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third runs away with it’; so the old saying goes. And it is true here too.

Whilst there is a tussle for power and control between landlord and retailer, between franchisor and franchisee, the customer (the third dog) runs away with it.

None of the business entities in the retail supply chain have much power anymore. And whatever power you exert over another party is tenuous and will fade anyway. The consumer is empowered. They have a little device in their pocket called a Smartphone, and that means they can any information and increasingly any product from anywhere in the world at any time they please.

A collaborative supply chain is a strong supply chain.

But, I am not optimistic:

• How many Shopping Centre Landlords have an actual, active and successful Retailer Engagement Strategy?
• How many Manufacturers have collaborative, transparent Trade Marketing Strategy that goes beyond mere promotion and equips and empowers their retail network?
• How many Franchisors invest in the development of their network beyond the minimum compliance at the ‘system’ level?

Have fun.

Dennis Price

ganador.com.au: architects of high-performance retail environments.

The retail landing zone

The landing zone (or ‘decompression zone’) is that area immediately inside the entrance of the store. Its size may vary from several square meters in department stores, to something much smaller (almost non-existent) for some specialty stores.

Once you have grabbed customers’ attention and they decide to enter the store, they must undergo a physical and psychological transformation. Watch carefully and you will see how they slow down, fold away the umbrella, pat their pockets, settle the child, adapt to the lighting etc.

People need physical room to ‘decompress’ and this area should not be cluttered.

It feels counter-intuitive to leave some of your (potentially) must productive space empty but one should view it as an investment in space required for customers to mentally and psychologically transition from passerby to browser. This transition is necessary in most stores before you can convert browsers into buyers.

If you are going to break the landing zone rule, then break it properly (create something with WOW) in order to ‘punch’ the customer between the eyes, but do it infrequently in order to retain the ‘surprise’ element.

7 things you should know before signing a franchise agreement

1. Know how you are going to get out. Like a Hollywood wedding, the pre-nup is the most important part because when the romance is gone, all you have is the paperwork. Make sure you read yourself and ask professionals about the things you don’t understand – don’t simply rely on (e.g.) lawyers to do everything for you because YOU are the one getting married – not the lawyer.
2. The franchisor is in a different business to you. They are selling businesses (B2B) and you will run that business, which is more often than not a B2C business. This means franchisor and franchisee have different objectives and metrics of success. If both parties understand this, there is much less conflict later on.
3. You should know why you are getting into the business. Understand your own motives and be honest. If you are looking for an easy way to make money, don’t do it because despite what a franchisor might say, it is never easy – at least not the first five years.
4. Know that no one can guarantee anything and that you are still exposed to some risk. A franchise system is attractive because it offers lower risk – not because it has no risk.
5. Every market is different and every franchisee is different and franchisors are constantly learning and adapting their offer to the market. The franchisee has an important role to play in all that by providing feedback and market intelligence. However, you must be willing to accept and live by the system because whilst every market is different, yours is not as unique as you would like to believe. If you can’t live by the system, don’t buy into the system.
6. The franchisor wants to sell franchises so they will present the realistic, best-case scenario. You should instead plan for the realistic, worst-case scenario – especially in terms of financing the business.
7. The best franchisors have the best communication systems. Things like conferences, training opportunities, supplier meetups, newsletters and intranets demonstrate that they take their network seriously and franchisees can take comfort from that.

Dennis:

PS: Franchisors we can help you save time, money and reduce risk and effort. Have a look...

Grunt and Grind: Retail is a sprint race

Life is a 100m dash after all

Dear Dennis: I seem to do be working my butt off but all to no avail. I just don’t seem to be getting the promotion or rewards that my efforts seem to justify. I have a small business and it seems my growth has plateaued and I just can’t seem to kickstart it.

Grumpy

Dear Grumpy,

Forrest Gump was wrong: life is not like a box of chocolates. Life is like a 100 sprint. Let me explain.

If you are a professional sprinter, your success comes down to two distinct and separate aspects. Firstly, when you sprint, you gotta win the race. It lasts about 10 seconds, and one minor stumble can cost you dearly. Just getting off to an average start could easily see you finish last. Or worse, third.

This may seem unfair. Especially if you are training to qualify for the Olympics and one bad race sets you back four years. But that is how it is.

The other facet of success is the work that you do in between the dashes; your training, your discipline, your diet. Not going to the parties. You know - the grind. The grind that gets you to the race.

If you don’t do this part well, you will lose the race. But doing this part well doesn’t guarantee that you win the race. If you want success, you still have to win the race – and your opportunities are few and far between. You get judged on your performance in that sprint. And you get rewarded for your performance. Everything is based on the outcome. The moment of truth, so to speak. I call this the ‘grunt’ – when it is about putting everything on the line.

So, success comes down to the grind and the grunt. And you need to excel at both if you want to taste success. The whingers will bemoan their lack of opportunity. They moan about the fickleness of the judges who make split-second decisions and how they keep such little mistakes against you. But life is like that.

And sometimes you get the flashy performer who arrives at the race; all mouth and shiny tracksuit. They talk the talk. But when the gun goes, their lack of grind shows through. They might win a few easier races early in their career when the competition is light, but they don’t go the distance.

There are two possibilities to explain your lack of success:

Option 1: The business is weak because; at the grunt (‘the moment of truth’) it just doesn’t perform.

This is every touchpoint with the customer. Your hygiene factors, the quality of the service, fairness of the price, convenience and value for money.

Option 2: You lack success because you are not prepared to suffer through the grind.

How well you are managing your risk. Are you planning your strategy? Are you constantly looking out for innovative ideas? You are managing your cash flow.

So the question is this, if you were honest with yourself, is your lack of success because you don’t grunt when it counts, or because you don’t grind through it? Any examples of grunt and grind in your business?

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Declining sales is not a problem

Most people were asleep in their beds when the sound, described as being ‘like a fighter jet’, woke those in surrounding lodges.

Outside they discovered a black void where two large buildings had once stood and they started digging frantically, spurred on by desperate cries from the rubble.

The main cause of the 1997 Thredbo landslide was the collapse of the Alpine Way above the town. It was the result of a combination of factors, including wet weather and the way the road had been constructed. 

The Alpine Way, which runs above the village of Thredbo and through the Snowy Mountains, was originally built as a service road during the construction of the Murray 1 and 2 hydroelectric power stations in the 1950s. After the hydroelectric stations were finished, the road was upgraded, which included the addition of landfill.

The people weren’t killed by the snow or the weather; it wasn’t the buildings and it wasn’t a slow emergency response. At least none of these were the root cause of these deaths.

Why did the road collapse?

The eventual root cause was determined to be a dripping pipe that undermined the foundation of the road which eventually caused it to collapse.

In your business you are constantly troubleshooting, trying to find the problems and trying to fix them. The real issue is that people misunderstand the difference between problem and symptom.

Managers/ owners (even CEOs) say they have a ‘problem’ because of “poor sales volume”. Or that the “market share is declining” for instance.

How often do YOU say or think that you have a problem because of declining revenues?

Declining revenue is not a problem – it is a symptom. Ditto for market share. And shrinkage. And many more…

The Solution

The way to get to the root is to ask ‘WHY’ at least five times – or until the answer to your question is ‘just because’. Only then will you have reached the likely root cause. The same techniques can be applied to any ‘issue’ – say absenteeism or poor customer service.

The Exercise:

Most people say they have a problem with ‘declining revenue’. 

I cannot tell you why your business has declining revenue (without knowing much more) but I can tell you how to determine the answer. So, here is the challenge for AGHA members:

Keep asking WHY to the question below and keep going until the answer is ‘because’ or there is no other answer.

Q: Why is my revenue declining?

Share your answer in the comments below.

And if you are not going to play along, my question is this:

Can you hear the dripping pipe?

Dennis Price

• GANADOR: Architects of high-performance retail environments.
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Smart Questions

Cross Posted from AGHA Blog if you already read it there.

This year let people be difference.

• We all know good selling technique matters.
• We all know that a good employee is hard to find.
• We all know the customer experience matters.

All of the above and more start with recruiting well. (You can train for skill but not for attitude.)

Interviewing remains one of the most important ways of judging another person before you employ them; yet, strangely it is a skill that few people seem to master. (Many recruitment agents who I have met also have poor interviewing skills, but they survive and succeed because they develop very strong instincts.)

The KEY to asking good interview questions are questions that elicit PAST BEHAVIOURS, because past behaviour is still the best predictor of future behaviour.

•  Don’t ask questions about what people ‘value’
• Don’t ask questions about what people think
•  Don’t ask people about what they would (hypothetically) do. 
•  The worst thing you can do is to ask generic questions that they have prepared for like "where do you see yourself in 5 years' time"?

Examples of questions that require the interviewee to reveal their behaviours could be:

1. Give me an example of when you had a major work disagreement and how it was resolved?
2.  What are the types of things you usually disagree with superiors about?
3.  What do you like/ dislike about your current supervisor? (Then follow up.) How did you handle that?
4. If you are in the middle of doing an urgent job and your manager asked you to do something else that is also urgent, how would you respond?
5.  Everybody is unique. What do you do differently from your friends?
6.  Give me an example of where you were late for work...
7. We all know that the customer is not always right, even if we try and please them. So can you give me an example of where a customer annoyed you?

I can go on, but you catch my drift.

You should sweat the small stuff

Be boring

At the beginning of every year we are inundated with posts reviewing the past, predicting the future or making plans for the year ahead.

Whilst all of those things are useful to a certain extent, most of the time they are actually not prerequisites for success in any business venture. None of the key drivers of the current economic environment were widely accepted in the mainstream – until it happened.

(The trend that matters most can be found here only because it is a meta-trend that has been happening in repetitive cycles for over 3000 years.)

What is crucial is to be in the moment. It is what you DO today that matters most.

People confuse planning to do with doing. People confuse reminiscing about the past with analysis.

Success is more boring than all of those things. Success is about doing stuff today. (There are very good arguments to suggest even doing random stuff is more likely to lead to a successful outcome than trying to pick a winner, but I won’t push our acquaintance that far so early in the year.)

You should make time to work on your business plan, research the market and analyse the competition. You should be evaluating shopping cart technologies for your new website. You should allocate time to think. Of course. But not at the expense of doing and not at the expense of doing the boring stuff.

1.      Do the post-Christmas stocktake – and enter the data in your system

2.      Clean the store

3.      Check the lighting

4.      Do a safety check

5.      Clean out your database

6.      Check your website, your store, your signage etc for all 2012 leftovers

7.      Refresh the merchandising

8.      … and build a ‘system’ that will make all these things happen all the time!

Engaging intelligently with the ‘system’ that is your business is more likely to produce an innovative insight than crunching ‘big data’. Attention to little details such as these is what separates the mediocre from the excellent and the lucky from the smart.

Then, and only then do you have the foundation from which to change, transform, adapt or grow a new, better profitable business.

Sweat the small stuff because it is all small stuff.

We have a ‘strategic’ plan. It’s called doing things.”  — Herb Kelleher (Southwest Airlines)

Dennis Price

GANADOR: Conceiving and implementing SMART solutions to create high-performance retail environments.

You are not in charge any more

The balance of power has shifted away

Every retail business is in a constant state of transformation.

Bennie spoke about the perceived ‘plight’ of the newsagent for instance. The subsequent commentary highlighted the fact that whilst it is a sector in transformation, there is nothing really unique about the challenges they face – all retailers have to constantly reinvent their business models.

I have been engaged in this sector for a long time now – directly with newsagents/ marketing groups as well as with suppliers in this channel and have delivered many success stories. By and large, most retailers faced with change (including newsagents) KNOW they have to change, but they don’t know HOW to change. (I don’t agree with Stuart Bennie that the majority - 80% - don’t want to change.)

Successful transformation is driven by people. During the challenge of the transformation, we must resolve the role of each stakeholder and possibly more importantly, identify which stakeholder is critical to our future success.

The key stakeholders in the typical retail business are customer, suppliers, staff and of course the owners/investors. They are all important in different ways for different things.

If pressed, most people say the customer is the most important. I have written about it and I have spoken about it too. Arguably, it is the staff who must do the servicing of the customer’ needs so they may be considered the most important. Of course, without an investor you don’t have a business.

But since Ganador’s business focus is working through the whole retail supply chain to get better outcomes on the shopfloor, we work both sides of the fence. From this experience I can unequivocally say to all retailers reading this that you need to think very differently about your suppliers:

What if your supplier is your real customer?

What if the consumer is simply a resource/asset that retailer can ‘sell’ to brand suppliers?

What if the retailer’s job is to create an environment that attracts potential consumers to the store in order to satisfy the needs of its ‘real customers – the supplier?

Is a retail brand not simply a meta-brand? (A brand of brands.)

Is a student a ‘product’ of a university that is ‘bought’ by society or industry; or is a student a customers of the university simply buying educational services?

Similarly, the retail supply chain needs to evaluate its philosophy towards the various stakeholders.

Historically, access to the retail distribution network was the only option for suppliers/brands, and retailers could use this threat of responding to the needs of consumers to vary your offering to manipulate suppliers. Is it any surprise that the retail brands who are suffering the most have traditionally been the most powerful?

The larger retailers introduced house brands (private labels) to further weaken the position of suppliers.

Many retailers, including smaller retailers, have dismissive attitudes towards supplier representatives.

Times have changed: The web has enabled the creation of an alternative channel (directly) to the consumer for the supplier.

Retailers who have wielded their power (of distribution and access to the consumer) may now be paying the price as their ‘customers’ (the suppliers) AND their consumers (their assets) are connecting directly.

This channel disruption demands price convergence (between offline and online) and retailers who are stuck with legacy infrastructure (including rents) must now secure better prices from the suppliers in order to remain competitive; ironically at a time when relationships are at a low point.

The balance of power is shifting - possibly to the extent that you have to consider your supplier as your real customer.

All stakeholders are important, but at this particular juncture the balance of power in the retail supply chain is being redressed in favour of a long-neglected stakeholder: the supplier. This means that retailers must adopt a different mindset towards their suppliers. (And so should some suppliers, but that is another story.)

How do you treat suppliers?

Has it changed in recent times?

What role will suppliers play in your success at the requisite retail transformation?

Every retailer has a marketing strategy, a pricing strategy etc.

What about a supplier engagement strategy?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Putting it in perspective

Your customer’s dog just died.

This is a true story related by Charalambos Vlachoutsicos, but I will paraphrase:

A Russian friend invited him to the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre in the 90s. During the 20-minute interval people queued up to get a glass of champagne. There were only four barmen, who could not keep pace with the long queues.

About half the people did not manage to buy their glass of champagne. He commented to his friend that the theatre simply had to hire a few extra barmen for the night to capture the captive business and impress the many foreign businessmen who were in the audience.

The host replied as follows:  "Don't you realize, my friend, that there was not enough champagne to go round and that this was the only face-saving manner that the theatre could conceal this shortage".

I think this just brilliantly illustrates the point that we don’t always know the back story.

During our customer service training sessions the same message is imparted. Moonyeen is fond of painting the picture of the harried housewife who has to find the husband’s keys, get the kids ready for school, and as she rushes out of the driveway, accidentally drives over – and kills – the dog.

That is the person who walks into your store.

The point both these stories make is that behind the story you see, behind the ‘obvious’ there is another story, the history that we don’t see.

We may call it that person’s ‘baggage’ – but that is their reality.

So, when a customer is ‘rude’ or ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid’ it is worth putting yourself in the shoes of that customer.

There is a dead dog on their driveway that they had to deal with before they got to you, and they have a 10-year old boy that they have to tell when they get home from school.

Of course, the reverse applies to. We have our stories and so do our staff. The customer would do well to cut us a bit of slack too – but they don’t. The difference is that they are not paid to do it.

Customers are not professional customers; they just are. But we are professionals who are paid to do a job.

And part of that job is remembering the dead dog in the driveway.

Why 'no problem' is a bad problem to have

What is your problem?

Last week I failed. I gave a presentation to a group and it was entertaining and thought-provoking. Some may even say it was good. But by my standards, unless the presentation actually changes people’s lives, I consider it a failure. (I got the opportunity to repeat the message in a different presentation to different people and succeeded. We live and learn.) 

The message I attempted to convey is one of the toughest ones to deliver because it is contrary to what people think they believe.

The core insight is this: Removing pain is a greater motivator than receiving a benefit.

This means that when you are attempting to persuade people to buy your product you must make it clear how your product achieves this. We refer to these persuasion techniques as ‘omega strategies’ – as opposed to ‘alpha’ strategies which emphasize value.

Now you can see why this is a difficult concept to get across.

This is a list of product innovations brought to market by Johnson & Johnson. This company has been trading successfully since 1886.

1887 - Sterile Surgical Dressings and Sutures

1893 - Baby Powder

1898 - Dental Floss

1897 - Sanitary Protection Products

1954 - Non-Irritating Shampoo

1879 - Antiseptic Mouthwash

1891 - First Aid Kits

1920 - Ready-Made Bandages

1955 - Pain Relief Without Aspirin (TYLENOL® )

Disposable Contact Lenses ACUVUE® 

Minimally Invasive Surgery (MAMMOTOME® )

1931 - Family Planning (ORTHO-GYNOL®)

1968 - Saving Babies’ Lives (RhoGAM®)

Life-Changing Treatment for Schizophrenia HALDOL®

Hip and Knee Replacements

Unblocking Arteries without open surgery (stents)

A Breakthrough in Sun Protection

Read the list carefully and consider this: What do these products have in common?

Every product solves a customer problem. Quite possibly a problem a customer did not know they had. 

The shampoo does not promise shiny hair, it promises ‘no tears.’ 

The toothpaste promises ‘no cavities’. (Check out the top US slogans for toothpaste here.) But there are toothpastes that promise a brighter smile, I hear you say. No there isn’t. What they do is promise you the confidence to smile. 

If you buy a BMW, people won’t laugh at you. People buy fashion not because they want to look good. They think they do. They will say they do. But there is a sub-text which is the real reason. They buy fashion to fit in – because ‘standing out’ runs the risk of looking stupid. But they will say they are buying it to fit in – just like a teenager gets tattoos to express their individuality, and end up with the same look as everyone else.

I am exaggerating, but only a little.

Last week I wrote a post that suggested that customer-centricity might kill your business. I explained why you should not rely on your customer to create new products or offer services. This is because people think they are buying something for one reason, but they are buying it for a completely different reason.

Unless we are solving a customer problem we don’t have a business.

In our case, we could say we help retailers and the retail supply chain not to lose their customers to competitors. What is your problem?

Have fun… 

Dennis 

PS #1: Something for you to like here. (The bribe still stands.)

PS #2: New Winners’ Circle will be published soon. Get yours here.

Ganador are trainers with track record of using smart ideas, structured execution and cutting-edge learning technology to enable people to deliver the ideal customer brand experience.

Your Reward

Apologies once again for the numerous re-posts. I have been on the receiving end of those before and now I know why: Feedburner going nuts.

Your reward is 20 minutes with Neil Gaiman. I promise it is worth it.

The only way you can improve your retail - marketing business

Allow me to propose a logical argument first:

Retailing is the PROCESS of offering a product or service to satisfy a (potential) demand.

This process requires certain knowledge and skills.

Assuming there is a market for your product, there are only two ways of getting better (making more money) at retail:

1. You can change the processes/activities that constitute the process = sell different products or change price points etc. (Manage the retail mix.)

2. You get better at this process by acquiring the relevant skills = get better at selling the same products at the same price points.

This is as basic as ABC.

A. The Process.

The ‘funnel’ has been done to death, but it conceptually holds true.

You must (1) attract potential customers, and then (2) convert them into buyers and finally (3) retain them.

Retail couldn’t be any simpler.

You put in place the strategies and the activities that will create a customer flow through this (virtuous) funnel.

It therefore makes sense to measure what you are doing, how well you are doing it and possibly even how that compares with the industry standard.

B. The Metrics

Each of the metrics below relate to one of the three stages of the funnel.

1. Awareness (Attraction metric)

I am not a big fan of reach and frequency type measurements since they merely measure potential. Actual brand awareness measurements are more useful. And for a smaller business it can be as simple as asking your customers some basic questions.

2. Head/feet count - (Conversion metric)

A simple measure of counting the feet or the heads or ‘visits’ in some form is vital because this simple piece of data makes for rich information.  All the measures that follow are based on getting an accurate number here. Get this wrong and you will never really know how productive your staff are, or how (in)efficient your sales processes are or how effective any retail operational changes are.

3. Capture Rate (Conversion metric)

This is often a bit more difficult to do (% of passing traffic you capture) but if you are in a shopping centre, you may be able to get reasonably reliable estimates from centre management on feet counts through certain doors/ down certain malls.

4. (Shopping)Trip Duration (Conversion metric)

One of the most reliable indicators of eventual basket size is the time a ‘browser’ spends in your store. (One specific study By MIT in a specific store revealed that every 1% extension of the shopping trip increased the average sale by 1.3%.This means an extra 2 minutes of shopping can increase sales by 13% if the average duration was 20 minutes.) But then again, the service is usually such that people don’t want to hang around…

5. Conversion Rate (Conversion metric)

This is the ‘crunch’ metric: % of store traffic that purchased. Everything that you do, everything you have done in your supply chain, in your marketing and in your store culminates in this number. Unbelievably, too few retailers measure this consistently and accurately.

6. Average Sale (Conversion metric)

Most independents focus excessively on the sales/ revenue for the day/week or month. I would argue that it is almost irrelevant. Certainly as a staff engagement tool, the idea of sales targets in a retail store based on total sales is a complete waste of time. Sales people know (if you don’t) that they have very little influence over the total sales. But some measure of an average sale/ basket is measurable even if only one customer entered the store.

7. Equity (Retention metric)

Finally you want to measure in some way the loyalty or value of your customers. This may range from the more esoteric ‘brand equity’ measures, to a simple number of ‘likes’ on your Facebook page or subscribers to your newsletter. You may gather by now that I would favour something like a repeat purchase rate or the number of visits per week/year etc.

From this list you will note that I elaborated on the conversion metrics more than attraction/retention metrics. This is because the latter are easy to understand and relatively easy to execute.

Conversion metrics, however, are where I believe we can really make a difference, and it happens to be the one which I don’t see often enough.

C: The Skills

The required skills set can be grouped into the three stages of the process too.

1. Communications

As a retailer you need communication skills to create awareness, interest and desire in your product. This can be anything from advertising effectiveness to learning how to tweet. We are currently assisting a retailer (one store, an online presence and a direct importing business) to resolve their brand architecture. As small as they are now, they are already finding it difficult to justify the costs of going through this exercise and losing brand equity in one of those businesses. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a brand – you ARE a brand and your customers think of you in a certain way. This requires strategies and resources and skills to excute.

2. In-store Experience

Note that whilst you may recognise the skills-sets listed below as ‘funnelling’ the customer towards the eventual sale, it is not a sales process. It is a structured way to deliver the experience – that translates into a (mutually beneficial) transaction – more often than not.

The four key skills here are:

• Perceptual: How to read the customer and the environment. (Spotting signals, reading body language.)
• Approach: How to approach a customer in such a way that they welcome it and the sales person feels comfortable doing it.
• Connect: This is the crunch stage: Make an emotional connection with the customer with what you do and what you say.
• Enable: Not sell, but help the customer buy by saying and doing the things in a way that maintains that emotional connection. This would include, for instance, the requisite product knowledge and so forth.

3. Community Engagement

This is NOT CRM – but about creating an environment where there is a dialogue in a non-threatening (desirable, actually) way where the past customers become brand advocates – not for what you get out of it, but for what they gain. (We started a program 4 years ago for a large publisher, and they are now reaping the benefits from these relationships as the industry is undergoing much turmoil – because the initial design of the program was solely about adding value to their distribution network.)

D. Summary

All of the above is reflected in this diagram below:

 

Apologies for a long post, but it was important.

In the beginning I said it was simple. I did not mean that it was easy.

In fact executing ‘simple’ is never easy. It is hard. But that, dear reader is the game we chose to play – and admit it – you love it too :).

Have fun…

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Ganador is a learning and development agency that turns employees into brand ambassadors and suppliers into partners. Email Dennis with questions.