Author: Brendan Cullen

1: They’ve bought from you before.      

or…      

2: They’ve never bought from you before.

“Eh yeah Brendan” I hear you say – “What’s your point?”      

Simply this.      

What you want is new business.  You might not need new customers.      

Of course, increasing the number of (good) customers you have is worthwhile.  You also may need to think of acquiring new customers in order to replace those who leave you for whatever reason(s).

But invoicing an existing customer for €/£/$1000 has the exact same impact on your top line as invoicing a new customer for the same amount. And invoicing the existing customer may well have a better impact on your bottom line because the cost of customer acquisition is zero.

So how to get new sales from existing customers?

Sit back and confidently await them coming waving their chequebook or credit card?

A better way is to authentically stay in regular touch with them – providing value. That way they’ll know that you have their best interest at heart. You’ll also be able to sense their needs – to see if they’re at a place where they’d benefit from something you provide. Or that you could provide.

And another technique? Ask them what they’re looking for!

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The HMS Salisbury was an 18th century British Warship.

In 1747, while in the Bay of Biscay, there was a surgeon on board by the name of James Lind.

As was typical of that era, the long period at sea had resulted in sailors falling ill due to scurvy – a disease we now know is caused by a Vitamin C deficiency.

Lind treated two of the sailors with citrus fruit – two oranges and one lemon a day. By the 6th day, one of the sailors was ready to resume work and the other sailor was recovering well.

What Lind had done was to conduct a clinical trial. It wasn’t the first clinical trial ever. But it was unique. What made it different was that he used control groups.

Control groups are used when seeking to compare. There’s a group being treated a certain way. And there are other groups being treated differently, not being treated at all, or being treated with a placebo.

In Lind’s case he was treating 12 sailors in six groups of two. Each group was treated differently. Only one of the other five groups showed any improvement – and that was very mild.

The study showed Lind that citrus fruits were an effective remedy for scurvy – though not necessarily the only remedy.

Sadly it took many decades before the preventative treatment was standardised in the British Navy.

But that doesn’t detract from the significance of Lind’s work. He had demonstrated how the use of control groups can add legitimacy to scientific experiments.

Research can be done badly. And it can be done well. Some parents don’t get their children vaccinated against measles/mumps/rubella for fear of their children developing autism. The root cause? Bad research. (And effective PR when, e.g., Donald Trump supports the bad science.)

So tread carefully with your own research initiatives. If you are thinking of conducting a survey, book a free 15-minute call with me by clicking here. We’ll have a conversation and quickly determine if I can help you.

  And, if you want to receive my regular emails on getting the answers you need to make informed decisions, then sign up below!

You know those survey questions that ask your age?

Over the years have you noticed how your answer is moving inexorably from the younger categories upwards?

If so, you might like this question that appeared on my screen earlier this week:

  I was delighted – I was in the lower half :-).

Believe it or not the above is from a real commercially-focussed survey. The company were exploring people’s interest and budget for skincare. And, joking aside, we are looking at an ageing population! And a chunk of them/us will have money!

So if you have a real or potential product/service targeted at older people, perhaps don’t bracket them all into that 65+ box!

If it’s time for you to run a survey to get answers from your customers or employees or any group of stakeholders, book a free 15-minute slot directly in my calendar here and we’ll talk.  You’ll tell me what you have in mind and we’ll quickly determine if we’re a good fit.

  And, if you want to receive my regular emails on getting the answers you need to make informed decisions, then sign up below!

 

There’s a joke I trot out in my emails or blog every year or two.  Here’s how it goes:

“If a man speaks in a forest and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?”

You’ll probably know the one it’s based on – trees falling and all that….

The point?

Imagine you get a superb questionnaire or survey designed for you – by my good self or someone else.  Happy days.

Because it’s “good” it will undoubtedly get a more than representative number of answers right?

No – not necessarily.

And here’s why.

Think of the survey like the man talking in the forest.  Or the tree falling.  Is there anyone there?

Imagine if no one answers the survey.  Or at best not enough people answer it to make its results worthwhile.  It can happen!

However, the good news is that there’s a lot that can be done to help get a sufficient number of answers.  When you use my services you’ll learn more about that.  But this does bring me to Facebook.

I got an email from them a while back.  The subject was: “Brendan, you’ve been selected to take part in a Facebook survey”.   Maybe you got something similar?

Just look at the language.  I’ve been “selected”.  Really?  Should I feel honoured?  Privileged?

I actually felt irritated.  And I humbly suspect that Facebook irritated thousands of people.  Perhaps to them it’s just a numbers game.  With their vast audience they can perhaps reasonably assume enough people will take the survey anyway.

But you can’t afford to make the same assumption.  The population size for any survey project you’d engage me on will be at the very most in the tens of thousands.

So we need to be careful with your audience.  And we will be.

If it’s time for you to run a survey to get answers from your customers or employees or some other group of stakeholders, book a free 15 minute slot directly in my calendar here and we’ll talk.  You’ll tell me what you have in mind and I’ll decide whether we’re a good fit.

    And, if you want to receive my regular emails on getting the answers you need to make informed decisions, then sign up below!

Just imagine something.

It’s about your business.

Just imagine that you’re delivering outstanding customer satisfaction.

Will you keep all your customers?

You might like to think so but the answer is always no.

And why not?

They could die.

They could move away.

They could retire.

They could be sold to a buyer who has another supplier for the thing you do.

They might go out of business for reasons having nothing to do with you or the value you provide to them, e.g., silver mining towns in California. (More on silver mining later.)

For these and other reasons the chances of you keeping all your customers for the long term is nil.

What does this mean for your business?

You need to serve your customers well – but you also need to get new ones to (at least) replenish those you lose.

Which brings me to “John”.

I’m a client of John. I’m also on his email list. I see from his regular emails that he’s prospecting for new clients. As he should.

But John is doing one thing very wrong. His customer service is crap. (I’m not just talking from my own experience.) He uses a squeaky wheel approach to customer service. Ultimately this will cost him. Actually, it’s already costing him. I won’t refer anybody to him. I won’t buy again from him. He won’t upsell to me. And I suspect I’m not alone.

So John’s already suffering reputational damage and an opportunity cost.

I’m no longer shocked at seeing people like that chasing new customers. But it is a pity. Partly because it’s so avoidable.

Takeaway: take good care of your existing customers.

To learn how I can make it easy for you to effectively take care of those customers, book a free 15-minute Discovery Call directly in my calendar.  In that free call you’ll get a sense of me and of what I do and how I do it.  And, on the flipside, I’ll get a sense of what you need and whether or not I think we’re a good fit.

By the way, here’s a link is to a wonderful video – 90 seconds long – of that ghost silver mining town in California that’s for sale – just $925,000 for the entire town!

    If you want to receive my regular emails on growing your business by better serving your customers then sign up below!

Recently I dropped my son off at school after a dentist trip.

On the way back to the office I stopped by a coffee shop close to the school that makes a great takeaway.

It’s a very constricted place – when you’re at the counter you’re an absolute maximum of 10 feet from anyone behind the counter.  So, unless the people behind the counter are whispering quietly, you cannot help but hear them.

And what I heard was just one prolonged moan from an employee to her colleague about a supervisor (who of course wasn’t present).

Maybe what had irritated her so much was an isolated incident.

But I didn’t think so…

Firstly, she was talking for the full 2 or 3 minutes in those hushed tones to her colleague.

Secondly, she then went to the till and picked up a postit (that she had obviously seen before) and used it as evidence as she complained to her colleague about what the instruction on the postit was asking her to do.

What’s going on there do you think?

What’s the history that’s causing that employee to feel that way and to then be unable and/or unwilling to exhibit restraint in full public view?

One word is disconnection.

At that precise time that employee was disengaged.

And I’m talking about engagement rather than satisfaction. Employee satisfaction is just that – an employee having their needs met in terms of their jobs and work environment.

But satisfied employees might not necessarily be engaged – and this is because engagement means more. It’s about commitment, passion, and what employees do with their discretionary effort.

How engaged are your employees?  How do they represent your business?  How would you know?

I was talking with a client yesterday about one of the senior members of his team.  I asked my client how he’d know if that valued team member had an idea on how to drive the business forward.  My client humbly took the point.  He wouldn’t know unless the employee proactively spoke up.  And the reason was that the employee wasn’t either being asked for his ideas or being told that his ideas were welcome.

You and I are both old enough to have worked in environments where you just knew that ideas were welcomed by management and also in other environments where the opposite was the case.

You’re fostering an environment in your workplace.  Your fostering may be deliberate.  It may be accidental.  But you can be certain that it is happening.  What type of environment is it?  If you’re anything less than fully confident that your employees are engaged, take a quick read of this.

The team my son supports were playing a soccer match on TV – and he wanted to see it.

But he didn’t know what channel it was on.

He’s a kid – so if he wants information he goes about getting it in the easiest way possible. (There’s a lesson there for us all!)

Anyway, maybe the TV Guide (newspaper supplement) was missing – it’s a not uncommon experience in our house!  Maybe he wasn’t well versed in accessing online TV guides.  Maybe he was just being lazy!

Whatever the reason, he asked me a question:

“Dad – is the game on RTE 2 or 1?”

It was obvious what he was asking.  He wasn’t asking a yes/no question.  He was confident the match was on one of those 2 channels and he just wanted to know which one.

But his question illustrates an important point about questionnaire design.  You want to make questions as easy as possible for people to answer.  And that includes avoiding any ambiguity.  The proper aim is to never have any respondent confused about what a question means or how it should be answered.

So yeah – brevity is a laudable goal.  But whatever number of questions you ask – 1 or 100 – make all of them easy to answer.  Because everyone, including you, me and all your potential respondents, wants less hassle in life.

Besides being nice to your respondents, it’s also more directly in your own rational self-interest to make your questions easy to answer.  You’ll get more accurate answers and avoid making decisions based on questionable data.  You’ll also quite possibly get more people to complete the survey as they won’t have confusion as a reason to bail out early.  The more answers – the more accurate the results.

If you’re ever crazy enough to want to design your own survey without my help, then all hope is not lost.  Before you launch your survey, have me review it.

Take a read here for more detail on my 100% guaranteed survey review service.

Recently my inbox included an email from a PhD candidate.  He was looking for people to take part in an online survey that he’s conducting as part of his doctoral research.

I asked him how he got my email address.  (He should have told me without me having to ask.)  His answer was reasonable – he got it from a group he’s associated with and with which I’ve had dealings in the past – and my email address is in the public domain.

Secondly I noticed that the email invitation wasn’t an ordinary email.  It had been generated by the SurveyMonkey tool.  The tool’s capabilities are powerful – you can import a list of email addresses into the tool and then have the tool email the people on the list – each person then receiving a customised survey link which allows the survey designer to track who has responded.

However, he had screwed up.  SurveyMonkey’s policy includes: “SurveyMonkey has a zero-tolerance spam policy. This means that all email recipients must have opted in to, or otherwise validly consented to, receiving communications from you, the sender. Subscriber accounts may be terminated for sending unsolicited email messages.”

He shouldn’t have imported my email address into the tool without my consent.  This sort of stuff is becoming even more important (in the EU anyway) with the arrival in May 2018 of GDPR.

But anyway I still took a look at the actual survey.  Curiosity typically gets the better of me.  Also, looking into other people’s survey projects often gives me fodder for marketing material like what you’re reading right now :-).

I think it was question 3 where I hit a hurdle.  There was a multiple choice question where none of the options applied to me.  Further, there was no “None” option I could have chosen.  And I was unable to skip past the question because it was one of those obligatory ones.

So there you have it – 3 mistakes – all too common I’m afraid:

1. Giving people insufficient info on why they’ve been asked to participate
2. Contravening a survey tool’s SPAM policy
3. Cornering people into a choice of abandoning a survey or inputting invalid data

But you’re lucky.  I’ll never say “never” but if you use me for your next survey project, the chance of any of those 3 mistakes being made is vanishingly small.

Speaking of your next survey project – click here to directly book a 15-minute slot in my calendar to have an initial conversation about it.  It might be about your customers.  Or your employers.  Or any group of stakeholders.  I’m happy to briefly brainstorm it with you – to hear what you have in mind and to let us see if we’re a good fit.

By the way, I abandoned the survey at that insurmountable hurdle.  I could have chosen an option simply to get past the hurdle – but then I would have been providing invalid data.  The PhD candidate was better off without my subsequent answers – even though he’d have preferred the higher response rate.

Lip service.

You hate it.

Everyone hates it.

But it still gets paid a lot.

In surveys too.

People being surveyed are often assured of their opinion being valued and then their expressed opinion gets ignored!

Some years ago I met a woman who had stayed for a weekend at a 5 star hotel for a special occasion – a 5^th anniversary I believe.  With the competing demands of running a business and rearing a young family you can guess that such weekends were few and far between for her.

Unfortunately her stay was very unsatisfactory.  So she decided to use the hotel’s feedback form to let them know about her experiences.  The form asked for her contact details and she willingly provided them along with her feedback.

And then the black hole happened.

No acknowledgement.

No apology.

No notice of remedial action(s) being taken.

No compensatory gesture.

Nothing!

Her reaction?  She told people – not just about the stay but also about its aftermath – this complete lack of feedback from the hotel.

The effect?  The hotel needlessly incurred reputational damage.

And what’s more – just imagine if they had actually taken the remedial action and just not bothered to tell her?

So my question for you: What will you do the next time a customer makes a complaint – valid or not?

And by the way, if you’re interested in getting my help with surveying your customers, be damn sure that you’re committed to taking action (where appropriate and where your resources permit) on the results!