1. Face to face.
2. On the phone.
3. Over the web (mail, IM, social media sites etc).

The above is the order of priority I think it should be in.

Over recent months I have seen it reversed for all intents and purposes as we rely more and more on the convenience of the web.

Is it actually convenience that has us doing this or are we losing the ability to communicate face to face?

Are we hiding behind the technology?

When was the last time you had a face to face meeting that sorted out a problem that email was just prolonging?

Face to face will always be more effective – let’s not lose sight of that.

Now I’m no engineering expert or oil rig risk analyst but surely someone, somewhere has asked the question “what do we do if there is an under-sea blow-out caused by..” and the answers have already been considered.

So it should be with our own businesses.  While the majority of our businesses are unlikely to affect the world on such a scale as the BP problem, the overall impact will feel just as bad to those who are affected.  The pressure it will put on you as the business owner/manager and your team will be just as intense as those engineers trying to find a solution. Your impacted customers will feel just as aggrieved as those suffering from the oil approaching the coastline and destroying their livelihoods.

Your ability to predict risks to your business is a key prevention tool, but so is how you react when things go pear-shaped.  At a minimum you should have;

1. A communications plan in place for your customers. Tell them what’s going on and what you are doing about it. Doesn’t really matter how – phone, email, web-site, social media.. whatever is the appropriate medium for addressing the situation.
2. Consistent updates on where you are at in resolving the problem. I know that I get really frustrated when I call a service providers automated helpdesk and get “there is no estimated time of resolution for problem X”. It would be far better to say, “we currently have no estimated time for resolution, but we’ll update this message at <time>”. At least this way, we know when to check back for an update.
3. A strategy in place for how to deal with customers who potentially have lost business/data/sales as a direct consequence of your inability to deliver. There is always the possibility of being sued. How will you deal with it? Are you sufficiently protected by your insurance?
4. Once you have fixed the problem, an update should be sent to your customers explaining what happened and what you are doing to try and prevent it happening again. It doesn’t have to be a multi-page report in most instances, just a simple paragraph or two. A small thing that can have a huge impact on your customers loyalty.

Shit happens! How you manage your business when things go wrong will ultimately determine your ability to recover and continue to run a successful business.

Have you a basic strategy in place to manage things when they go wrong?

Where does customer relationship management begin?

In order to gain a customer, you need to have a product or service that is needed/wanted and to achieve that you will have had to identify and understand that prior to launching your business. So in effect, your CRM has commenced before you have even one customer engaged.

Regardless of your selling point, the experience that your customer receives when engaging with your business will determine the future loyalty of that customer.

So let’s think of the customer engagements with your business.

Browsing

The customer has entered your shop, your e-commerce site, your marketing site, your magazine article… whatever their first contact with your company happens to be. Examine how you are presenting yourselves to your target audience. Is it as clear as you can make to ensure customer engagement and capture?

Committing to purchase

The customer has indicated to you that they are interested in purchasing your offering. For retail shops, this is simply the decision to walk to the counter with the product the decision to buy on-line. For those in services, there may have been a negotiation requirement or competition with other companies. In all instances, have you done everything possible to entice that purchase from you?

The purchase itself

Obvious one, but is it as simple as possible and delivered in as friendly a way. Did the assistant look grumpy or happy? Is your e-payment system as easy as possible?…

You want your customer to leave your sales point with a good vibe – this will enhance their enjoyment of the product/service offered.

The quality of the product/service purchased

Did it meet expectation? Ask your customers, they’ll be happy to tell you.

The after sales (if appropriate) care and follow-up

Did you check your customer was happy? Perhaps you could drop them a line a week or two after the purchase and see how they are getting on.

If they had a complaint, did you deal with it appropriately, quickly, openly and honestly?

It appears that I am simply talking about good customer service, but this equates to customer experience which creates loyalty and better sales i.e. the CRM end-game.

How do I get customer data?

Great, if you have a system that can capture some of that information for future use, all the better – but it is not mandatory.

For many smaller businesses, particularly those that have personal interaction with their customers, the CRM tool is the personal understanding of that customer that is held by the sales man, owner, retail assistant.

Often, the interpersonal relationship creates an innate understanding of your customer through the interactions, the trick is to make sure that your business acts on that understanding to engender loyalty.

Embrace the concepts of CRM. Look at your business and see how the concepts can be applied to give you and your customers benefit.

You neglect customer relationship management at your peril. Don’t fear the language that is used to sell software to big business, understand its message and apply it to your business.

Do you employ customer relationship management in your business?

Photo: Olibac

This is a challenge that I have faced since setting up MyProjectTracker. For months, it was all about features and capabilities. The 15 second pitch included the words project management (and yes, I could see peoples eyes glaze over!). In other words spoken like an IT person selling to an IT person, not as a marketer or sales person to a business owner.

I was pitching a great product (modesty aside)  in a boring way.

Learning to speak in the language of our customer has been one of the toughest challenges I have had to face as a start-up. In my previous lives, I have been able to talk tech because I was selling to techies. Now I have had to leave behind my background of technical comfort and drag myself kicking and screaming into the real world where people talk about unique selling points and customer benefit. Not only that, but to stand out, I have to find a way to do it that puts us above the competition.

In some ways, I consider myself fortunate in that I understood that this was/is going to be a challenge and sought help early enough along before I dug a large hole for the company. It has been a lengthy process and it’s still going. I am still working to shape the company message and still seek assistance when needed.

The ability to project a strong message for our potential customers so they can really understand the benefit of the product is too important to get wrong.

I still on occasion find myself talking about hosted project management solutions. It’s going to take some more practice, fine tuning and help but I’ll get there. I can’t speak for Eoin of course – he’d just say he’s naturally gifted.

Do you talk the language of your customer and make your message fresh?

I read a post yesterday from the team at 37Signals and found the on-going commentary fascinating.  The post concerned two approaches to a response being sent to a customer who was looking for a bigger discount.

The first reply was very direct and essentially said;

“sorry, but no can do over and above what we are already offering“.

The second was more flowery in approach and basically said;

“we’d love to have you as a customer and feel your company would benefit” along with a re-dressed version of what is being sold on the website.

The variation in opinion as to which was the correct response has been exactly 180 degrees. To me, it is reflective of how difficult it actually is to put together a response that will please most of the people, most of the time – which is what many of us try to do.

So which is the right answer?

For me, neither – the first was overtly direct and the second overtly fluffy.  But this is exactly the challenge isn’t it? What works for me, will not necessarily work for others.

So perhaps instead of trying to please everyone all the time, we should just focus on putting ourselves forward in our communications and accept that this is who we are.

Of course I am not condoning being ignorant, rude, dismissive or intolerant communication towards our customers - but I suspect that most of them would prefer us just to be honest, ourselves and a decent representative for our business.

What are your thoughts?

Photo: DerrickT

Those who have decided to establish their own businesses can feel very like David. They have confidence and ability but the challenge for success can be gargantuan.

This challenge is not easy and should not be considered as such. Most business concepts have already been thought of or implemented to greater/lesser extents. So the small or new business venture is in a highly challenging market – Goliath!

Small business – who is your goliath?

1. He’s the bank manager who won’t lend you the capital you need.
2. He’s the government grants that none of us can get hold of.
3. He’s the corporate giant who is in the same/similar field and who, if they bothered to look, could squash your business like a bug.
4. He’s the people you know who say “this is never going to work”.
5. He’s the cash-flow problems.
6. He’s the non-paying customer.
7. He’s the supplier who delivers late.
8. He’s the competition.
9. He’s …….The list is endless. Goliath pounds on the business owner/entrepreneur every day.

So how does the small business/entrepreneur beat it?

Obviously having a great product or service that is better than the competition is a good start. But small business I think survives and prospers by being faster, knowing some killer moves and delivering customer service that is above and beyond. Many larger businesses are so caught up in running themselves that they forget to look at their customers and their customers’ needs. Their bureaucracy is an inhibitor – use that to your advantage.

Don’t be naive enough to ignore them though. If they happen upon you while you are sneaking up on them, life can get very difficult! Of course, this also applies to the rest of your competition also. Stay alert to your market place.

The other items in the list?

Outside of financing, everything else is in your power to control or manage more efficiently.

With the financing options? Well, we’d love to hear your suggestions. Often it is about gaining the gravitas necessary to convince an investor. E.g. getting a “name” on your board who has previous business start-up and investment experience perhaps.

Remember: The biggest selling point in any smaller business is the team that makes it work. They are a part of your brand. Your team are the people that your customers have faith in. All other things being equal, they are the reason why customers keep coming back to you and hopefully bringing their friends.

Most importantly, keep your sense of “self” – you are your business’ greatest asset.

Have you anything else to add to the Goliath list?

I was doing some work for a client on a tender response.  During the engagement, numerous emails were going backwards and forwards to gain clarifications on certain aspects of the tender.

As can sometimes happen, the emails started to become a little less structured as both parties feel that they “know” the person at the other end simply through this communications channel. “Dear” becomes “Hello” which becomes “Hi”. Punctuation and the language used can become less constrained and it becomes, in effect, a casual written engagement.

During one of these email sessions I created a response to a question, re-read the message and sent it off. I received a most direct and unexpected reply questioning the motivation for the response that I had made and the seriousness under which the tender process was being taken.

Alarmed, embarrassed and not a little distressed I re-read the message again and still could not see where the problem was. ThenI reviewed the email to which I had been responding one more time. And there is was. The query and comment that could have been read a multiple of ways. I took it to mean one thing, the writer had taken it to mean something completely different. I could now immediately see what had annoyed them.

I was lucky. A quick phone-call to explain the context and thankfully the person in question saw where the mis-interpretation had come from and we agreed to move on and put it behind us. It could have been so very different.

Lessons learnt?

1. If it is an important business based context where a lot rides on the responses, keep the emails formal even if the other party becomes more relaxed. They are the customer, they can do what they want!
2. Get someone else to read the written information in case of mis-understandings.
3. Triple check each response to make sure that it is not inaccurate or misleading.

Have you had any close calls with your written or verbal communications? What did you do? What did you learn?

Photo : http://www.flickr.com/photos/katclay/ / CC BY 2.0

To me, value proposition is simply the value a customer receives when buying a product and/or service. It applies to both new business and to servicing existing customers. A business has to create this value proposition for its customers and make sure that the value proposition is viable and sustainable.

How do we translate the concept into our pricing models and offerings?

The subject is broad and deep, so for purposes of this blog, I will focus on the strategy we are taking as we consider the commercial pricing for MyProjectTracker.

So how much to charge to give value?

The correct answer is “As much as someone is willing to pay”. That’s all very well, but what happens if you are in the situation where you really are simply not sure.

For us, we had lots of on-line references we could check out to see what they were charging.  This gave us a bit of a start, but was it the correct value? Some of our features are richer than those of our competition, some are less rich – how were we to ascribe value?

Frankly, we were a bit lost! So we did what anyone should do when you feel like this, we did a survey and asked our potential customers. And guess what? They all came back with what they deemed as fair product value. Not surprisingly, the numbers that were entered pretty much came out in the same kind of area as our expected competition.

We then looked at the opportunity for our customers in terms of time saved and more effective management. Feedback from a number of our potential customers estimate that the product will be save  around 3 man days/month in efficiencies for their companies. That has to be worth around EUR750+ which will give a return on investment within a couple of hours use a month.

So we hope that we will be providing good value in our product. The next question is how to maintain that value vs the competition. This is where the intangibles come into play; customer service, staying on top of the product capabilities and releasing relevant product modules/services into the market, ensuring that the team lives and breathes the customer – pretty standard stuff really, but amazingly forgotten by many.

Have you asked yourself recently “do I over a good value proposition and does it relate to existing as well as new customers?”. Both are equally important!

Photo : wetwebwork

Project management is about delivering your work in such a way that it delivers to the three turquoise boxes above to deliver to the one in the middle, the person who really matters in all this – your customer.

If your business can honestly say it is tracking these things in some shape or form, then you are performing effective project management – well done. You might not call it that, you might call it;

1. My customer.
2. My current job.
3. My delivery.

Or a host of other things. But you are doing project management.

If you are not tracking the big three (time, quality and budget), then you need to start now otherwise your business will fail in the longer term.

Fail you say?

Yes, because if you are not tracking these things, how do you know if a project is profitable? How do you know your customer is happy? How do you know if you deliver on time? If you don’t know the answer to these questions, then something may already be broken and your business could flounder before you understand why!

How you track them is up to you, the key is that you do!

Are you using project management in your business? What aspects do you find difficult?

Picture : Low quality image to make the point by me!

If you are not a parent, do not leave this little analogy on how project management and parenting have real elements of similarity- this is all still relevant to you.

Project management begins when a concept is to be taken from an idea into a reality.

Parenting begins in a similar way. Certainly for the first child, the parents have only a vague notion of what it will be like. Then they hear those famous words from the mid-wife or doctor saying “it’s a boy or it’s a girl or it’s triplets (ahem!)”  and it brings them firmly into the world of parenting.

In business parlance, parenting would be a program of work to deliver a well-rounded individual out into the world.

A parent tries to deliver this rounded person through identifiable project management activities all requiring different skills (planning, implementation, change management, coaching, mentoring, disciplining (!), budgeting) – in fact all of the key attributes of a successful project manager.

Ok, so a parent doesn’t produce a project management plan, send status reports or produce any of the “stuff” that project managers do, but it most certainly is done in the heads of all the Mums and Dads out there. A parents’ ability to react to an ever-changing environment would get a project manager an award in a large program of work.

Many of us in the business environment are parents who want to do the best for our children. We go out of our way to ensure their needs are met and make our own sacrifices to enable them to achieve their potential.

Why is it then that many of us fail to deliver our business commitments in the same organised way?

Are our customers any different to our children in their expectations of us? No, they expect us to do what we said we were going to do and to do a good job for them. Isn’t it our role to ensure that our customers are not demanding attention in the manner of our friend in the picture?

By applying the same level of project management capability into our daily work life that we do as parents, we will deliver what our customers need, will react more positively to any changes and engender loyalty.

Can you think of other similarities?