I thought you or your staff might want to attend the upcoming “Midwest Forum on Talent Management” on September 16^th in Madison, WI.  One of my business associates, Paul Herr, will be giving a talk at the conference from 11 am until noon titled, “How to Measure and Improve Employee Engagement (room A2142).”  Paul Herr wrote a critically-acclaimed book on employee engagement in 2009 and now consults on this subject internationally.  

Paul Herr

Talent Management Conference Program Guide

It will be held at:

American Family Insurance National Headquarters
6000 American Parkway
Madison, Wisconsin 53783 

If you are interested, please click on this link to register:

http://www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=947720

Best Regards,

Jeff Koser

P.S.  Discounted lodging can be obtained from:

LA QUINTA INN & SUITES

$80 per night

Madison American Center

5217 E. Terrace Drive

Madison, WI  53718

Tel: 608-245-0123

How has the current economic tide been affecting your business? Are there any positives to come out of it? Its safe to say this isn’t the kind of environment that inspires confidence. The latest global economic concerns have predicated a mass hysteria that really isn’t anything new, but is a crisis nonetheless. If your business is feeling the effects of the volatile environment you should stay proactive, rather than reactive. The silver lining of a crisis is that it forces you to streamline your business model. It’s the sort of sink or swim that makes you think about long-term sustainability in a way you never had to before. We have seen the competitive landscape shift as companies reorganize with a sharp focus on revenue and cost-cutting initiatives. The low hanging fruit has really been picked and squeezed, selling to early adopters in robust markets, without the need for a focused sales strategy.

You probably understand that economics is cyclical and this is why the current economic crisis shouldn’t go to waste. More than ever companies are scrambling for those problem solving solutions. What does that mean? More than ever, companies are ready to buy! Ergo, you have to be ready to sell your solution in a way that solves those restructuring objectives. Just yesterday Cisco CEO John Chambers said his customers don’t see a recession. As they reorganize you can be assured they are going to focus on the value they create and that their customers have come to appreciate.

“Our customers are saying they do not see a recession”

   -John Chambers Cisco CEO

Uncovering Value

ROI alone is not enough to garner attention anymore because everyone presents it and everyone presents a good one. You must align the parts of your message you think are important with what your prospect thinks are important. In effect, it needs to be simple, yet differentiated.

Reaching out

You should treat all of your sales as partnerships and by that I mean your customers should get the feeling your success rides on theirs. You aren’t selling widgets, you’re guaranteeing success. Start by reaching out to your current and past customers. Getting the right information is about asking the right questions. (Join the discussion in our new sales community and share your best questions!)

They will lead you to value you didn’t sell them. For example, maybe you provided new energy efficient windows to a university. You’d be surprised to find out that since installation class attendance has improved by 15% in addition to the anticipated energy savings. Discovering what resonated after the sale stirs a positive feeling of surprise and added benefit. Your genuine curiosity also improves your partnership, creating healthy up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

If that isn’t enough already, remember our goal is to translate this differentiated value to new prospects. The more transparent your positive surprise is to new prospects, the more receptive they will be.

Research New Prospect

Filter through a company’s annual report and 10k, Google headlines, and scour their website. You’re looking to understand the culture and initiatives in place. If you have a management tool, search for merger and acquisition news. Identify where you can enforce value and how you supplement current operations. Determine who Power is. Change is disruptive to any organization and your ability to recognize and overcome that barrier is crucial. Part of that is speaking to the right person. If you start too low in an organization you get resistance and a small budget. Latch on to current sustainability initiatives and missions that contribute to their long-term vision.

Partnering

I mentioned partnering before; it’s important enough that it keeps coming back. Once you have differentiated your solution and distilled it down to what your prospect cares about, you know whether or not you have a zebra. With that in mind, present your business case to the executive you’ve identified as Power. Sure you will have your ROI along with other conservative estimates, including EVA, payback period and a monthly cost of indecision…, but you want their critical business issues front and center in the discussion. Your financial benefit claims ride on these rails. Your goal at this point isn’t to sell, it’s to partner. You have to earn trust before you can sell. If you peak interest, ask, and they will grant you executive sponsorship to verify your value. Once they confirm and adjust your figures internally, you will reduce your sales cycle, increase your deal size and improve your pipeline close rate.

To dig deeper into all the steps of our process: Read the book and bring your expertise over to the sales community.

“We are separating our unlimited streaming plan from our DVD plan offerings. The streaming-only plan will remain at $7.99, while we now offer DVD-only plans starting at $7.99. Additional details regarding changes to our plans can be found on our blog: http://bit.ly/NetflxBlog”

Are you kidding me? I just got done reading blogs “Do You Really Give a Sh*t About Your Customers” and I closely follow one of our own customers as they brand customer experience with #cxo on Twitter. Didn’t you know…the consumer matters? So Netflix, why are you lighting this fire?

I have heard a rumor that Netflix needs to seperate their users for contract negotiations with the movie studios and to push users toward streaming. This seems plausible, but isnt’t there a better way?

You have to establish value early on if you want people to try your service and then continue to use it. If you’re able to find that pricing point where consumers feel like they’re getting value and producers are making money, good for you. I thought Netflix was there. I was an avid Redbox user and made the switch to Netflix because I thought it offered a great value. The value was in its convenience, flexibility and larger selection of movies. When I first heard of their new rate plan, I thought, awesome got in before the price hike. It’s standard practice these days to reward your pioneering customers. Cell phone companies let current customers keep their unlimited plans after they stopped offering them. I was shocked that they were going to implement this to all customers for several reasons.

• Nobody likes a price hike, much less 60%.
• If you’re going to even be insane enough to try, you will at least have to validate some sort of value. Thats what our business is based upon. The movie selection is actually dwindling as studio contracts come up for negotiation. Sony films are no longer available for online streaming, which include Salt and The Social Network. The online streaming is also mostly old content to begin with. It was nice getting a relatively new disc in the mail.
• A three-month pricing extension for current customers creates no positive emotional response at all, in effect stirring a negative response that is spreading like wildfire(Social Network Response)
• Netflix announced a week ago they were expanding into 43 countries this year. As a customer do you want to give Netflix more money so they can provide streaming video to people in other countries? I don’t think your charitable donation will be tax deductible. Netflix is obviously trying to cover expenses as the company is looking at a loss of $50 million to $70 million in the second half of the year with overseas expansion. Your stock is up 65% year over year that’s a nice return. Can you reward shareholders as well as customers?

What Netflix needs to do:

1. Not be Blockbuster: Being a bully doesn’t work
2. Apologize and admit they were wrong: Do you really want to gamble with your future by seeing how many people will leave September 1^st?

I understand Netflix is the small fry competing with Google and Amazon in terms of market cap, but they have the niche customer base. They will never be able to get those customers back if they lose them at this point. They all are also all closely linked together now since Netflix is heavily integrated into the social media space. I also acknowledge the pressure from movie studios in contract negotiations. Netflix, however solves a pain point for movie studios, providing an alternative to piracy. Netflix accounts for 30% of all broadband traffic compared to 18.8% for P2P file sharing which is actually decreasing. By making movie access affordable and of high quality they attract more paying customers. Netflix is also able to monetize garbage movies that nobody would ever pay for individually. If they can’t propose value to the movie studios, they are in trouble.

I can see the next big lockout, Netflix vs. Hollywood. They have a big pie to split up and there is too much greed to go around.  All I know is that if we go back to Blockbuster pricing the same thing will happen: Investors and Customers will lose!

 Sources: Netflix is doing its job to reduce piracy in North America
Can Netflix Swim With The Sharks And Survive?
Netflix expanding into Latin America

I am an efficiency shellcase, as well as a cheapskate and I don’t know for sure that the two are mutually exclusive. You either care about time, or you care about money and through the transitive property, with time = money, it’s safe to say efficiency probably bothers you(and you are a cheapskate) like me. We are all forced to do more with less, so if you can harness the power of a functional disorder like cheapness you can create a more efficient operation that saves you time and money.

Put your dollars in the beginning of any process and it will yield a far greater return. You save time and money with good communication.

Start With Communication.

It’s part of our process, but the same principal can be integrated at all levels within an organization. If you want to be efficient, have your sales force speak to Power, those who have the authority to make the decisions. This is where communication is important and the decision is fast.  You have Power’s attention but can you communicate your solution to their problem? Be assertive in your value claim, and don’t assume the “expert” has interpreted you correctly. The game of telephone exists in the real world. Ask to speak with several executives who are in on the decision. Nobody knows your value better than yourself and you want to be the voice conveying that message so it is not lost. We’re turning left here right? Throughout your organization avoid relaying messages. Like a dance, everyone has their own interpretation.

Listen To Your Customers.

Communication is a two-way street. Talking too much can relegate you to the voicemail. Listen to your customers because they are the ones you should be adapting to accommodate. You also want to listen to customers because they can save you time. This is a very transparent world, with the internet, people are very smart, they like to find you and they like to solve the problems. Getting credit for finding a solution is also way more gratifying than being sold a solution. Let your customers take the credit as they help you navigate their company.  Listening will help you make the transition from an outsider to an insider. Customer feedback also confirms that the most valuable information is obtained after the sale.
               

A customer can…

                -Validate ideas for new products and features
                -Identify flaws
                -Show you how the product is being used
                -Provide a review of competitors
                -Offer insight into the industry and product’s future
               - Provide quantifiable evidence that your solution solves their problem

Customers are eager to provide feedback. Everyone appreciates a voice, so give them the opportunity and get answers to the questions you didn’t know how to ask.

Chinese Food "Experience"

By Brent Nauer

“What is this a PF Chang’s?”

Ok, so this line is from the new “Hangover” movie. The guys walk into a monk monastery outside of Bangkok and Zach Galifianakis says, “what is this, a PF Chang’s”. A crack at the PF Chang’s customer experience: the extravagant décor, pillars and horses, origami takeout bags. If you haven’t eaten at the restaurant, in other words, it’s an experience. You can go get takeout at a Chinese restaurant, but if you want to experience Chinese food, you go to PF Chang’s.

Chinese Food Cost: $15
Chinese Food “Experience” Cost: $40

The Old Birthday Experience

At the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs conference on Wednesday, I had the chance to meet Mark Schmitz from Zebradog (no affiliation). He reenergized the idea of driving sales through an extraordinary customer experience. A brief historical walkthrough on the evolution of the consumer and cake offered great insights into the intimate relationship between customer experience and your bottom line.
I don’t want to wreck a great story, but it all started before the industrial revolution. Cake has been around a long time! To make a cake pre-industrial era there was a lot of toil in the kitchen, but even more work was required just to obtain the simple ingredients. I imagine birthday cake was quite an experience for everyone.

Birthday Experience Cost: .39 cents

The Social Experience of Cooking

As a result of industrialization, Betty Crocker capitalized on the means of assembling the cake ingredients into a readily available box in 1952. Everything was perfect, just add water, or was it? Surprisingly the product floundered. A market research team, featuring business psychologists was brought in with surprising results:

From Finding Betty Cocker by Susan Marks:

“‘The problem, according to psychologists, was eggs. Dichter, in particular, believed that powdered eggs, often used in cake mixes, should be left out, so women could add a few fresh eggs into the batter, giving them a sense of creative contribution.’
“As a result, General Mills (who own Betty Crocker) altered their product, abandoning the powdered egg in their mixes. The requirement to add eggs at home was marketed as a benefit, conferring the quality of ‘home-made’ authenticity upon the box cake mix. (Whether using fresh eggs instead of powdered eggs actually enhanced taste was beside the point.)”

Personalizing The Experience

Birthday Experience Cost: $2.99

Of course as women flocked to the workplace in the following years, the next phase of the cake experience was shaped. With dual incomes and maximized schedules, consumers turned to bakeries. Spending five minutes picking up a cake for Suzie surely didn’t lend itself to “creative contribution” so they splashed “Happy Birthday Susie” on the top and called themselves the greatest parents in the world.

Birthday Experience Cost:$20.00

The New Birthday Experience

It should be rather obvious by now, it’s not really the evolution of cake at all, it’s the evolution of the experience! And for the grand finale Mark gives us the sticker shock of the modern birthday experience today: A catered pow-wow with a couple of inflatable bounce houses, and pony rides, but don’t worry they throw in a cake.

Birthday Experience Cost: $500

Selling an experience is nothing new, but surprisingly people aren’t doing it. Mark and his company Zebradog have founded a business on that principal. They have revamped the visual experience for corporations, professional sports venues as well as universities, including American Family Insurance(click for example), Duke Basketball, the Green Bay Packers and my alma mater: Marquette University. My mouth is watering, thinking about analyzing the value added to the bottom line of these institutions with a relatively simple focus on customer experience.  Its a great business model: Increased recruitment and retention of athletes is directly correlated with higher ticket sales and pricing. Corporations are starting to catch-up with what used to only be theater and entertainment.

It is without doubt that changes to the customer experience can also indirectly benefit an organization internally with employee satisfaction and loyalty. The compounding nature of investments in customer experience are sure to have a quick and sustainable effect on your business. Make sure you are selling an experience! When you sell the experience price is often only an afterthought.

Vivisimo, A Zebra client, is also leading discussion on the topic of Customer Experience Optimization. You can follow their discussion about customer experience on twitter with hash #cxo and Tracey Mustacchio’s blog.