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Have we all turned into conservatives? No, I do not mean your political allegiance. Too many companies are hunkered down, taking the reactive approach to marketing their business. Unfortunately there are too many choices in the market and you may find yourself left on the roadside.
Can you afford to be reactive to your customers? It’s the chicken and egg scenario: You need to increase your revenue but money is tight. The easy decision is once sales increase, you will focus on the care and feeding of existing customers and renew efforts soliciting new customers. Take a step back and consider the consequences. New products and services hit the market every day so consider the risk factor of being displaced and you make the call.
Let’s walk through two typical scenarios:
- A new product/service was just released and money is tight so you took the bare bones approach to launch. Rollout is limited and you have your fingers crossed that the sales channel has enough in the toolkit to be successful. Some customers are evaluating it but need more these days to justify the expenditure. They review what you have given them and what they can locate on your website. If you are lucky, they will ask for more information and then you can justify
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resources to complete the project, right?
Reality check: many customers will not go to the extra effort to ask -- they will just move on to the next candidate. Take care of the sales channel and the customer as the priority. Re-allocate money as needed to ensure your company is putting it's best effort forward to close sales.
- You used to have an annual customer user group meeting but money is scarce and you decide to skip this year. You rationalize that your customers have cut back on travel and probably would not attend anyway. Break with tradition and use the technology available to you. Web conferencing was a half-billion dollar business last year and is growing at an annual rate of over 30% for good reasons. With an average price of 60 cents per minute, it's now a cost effective alternative to the face-to-face meeting. A number of the industry leaders offer subscriptions for $100 a month for unlimited use. Instead of a two-day face-to-face meeting, create a customer webinar program for an hour once a month to keep the communication flowing.
Break out of the conservative rut and get proactive for your customers.
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