Darrell Amy's Blog, page 3

Creating a Sticky Message Is Like Making Maple Syrup

Is your company message delicious and sticky? Or, is it watered down and bland?

As a child one of my favorite events of the spring was making maple syrup. As the snow would begin to melt, we would head out into the woods. Holes would be drilled in trees for the spouts that would gather sap into buckets. Then, we would drag 40 gallon barrels through the woods to collect the sap.

In the middle of the forest was the sugar shack. This housed a firebox with a vat on top. The sap would be poured into the vat. Over the following hours the sap would be boiled down to create the most delicious substance on earth: maple syrup.

It takes about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup. The sap tastes like the melted ice after finish a soft drink. There is a little bit of sugar, but no one would say it is delicious. Maple syrup, however, is sweet, smooth, and sticky—pure joy.

Your company message needs to be delicious and sticky. Creating this message is very similar to making maple syrup.

Here are three things we can learn from the process of making maple syrup.

1. Start With the Your Ideal Clients

Maple syrup begins at the source: the trees. In your business, the trees are your clients. What is important to them? What outcomes do they want? What are their biggest aspirations? What are their largest challenges? These are the ingredients for your message.

Look, you can make fake maple syrup by mixing some high fructose corn syrup with some artificial maple flavor. You can buy it for about $3 a bottle. Guess what? We all know it’s fake.

Similarly, you can sit in a conference room and mix up some corporate buzzwords to create a marketing message. To your clients it will be as genuine as cheap pancake syrup.

Start with what your ideal clients want. Listen to what they say. Write down their specific words and phrases. These are the ingredients to your message.

(More ideas in this article: Value Is In the Eye of the Beholder.)

2. Boil It Down

In Find Your Yellow Tux, Jesse Cole says that we need to simplify our message. You know your message is good if a five year old can repeat it back to you.

How do you simplify the message? You take the raw ingredients of what your clients want and boil it down. This takes time. Bit by bit, you remove the non-essential parts. What remains is the good stuff.

With maple syrup, the process of boiling slowly removes the flavorless water. What remains is the sweet syrup.

Most corporate messages are watered down. They need to be distilled. 

Start with a 30-second elevator pitch. Then, Cole recommends that you boil your message down to a sentence. You know you’ve arrived if you get it down to a word.

3. Test Your Message

In the sugar shack a seasoned expert is responsible for tasting the syrup. The taster determines if it is good. 

The taste-testers for your message are your clients. As you distill your message, get feedback from your ideal clients. Does it resonate? Do they get it? Are they inspired? If not, keep boiling it down.

Maple syrup takes work. Creating a focused message that resonates with your ideal clients and prospects takes work as well. In both cases, the work is worth it. At the end you have something delicious, unique, and valuable.

The Top Question For Business Leaders: What Business Are We In?

Harvard Business School professor and the father of modern marketing, Theodore Levitt, asks a powerful question that every business leader, sales representative and marketing manager must answer: What business are you in?

The answer to this question will determine the future of your company. At this critical moment when the needs of your customers are changing, this question needs to be answered correctly.

The reality is that what you sell and what people buy are different. As I say in my book Revenue Growth Engine, "Buyers don't buy products, they buy the outcomes the products deliver."

Theodore Levitt would famously walk into his marketing class holding up an electric drill bit. He would tell the class that no one has ever purchased a drill bit, but what they bought was the hole. Some take it a step further and say that they aren't buying the hole, they are buying the ability to hang a picture on the wall so they can look good to their friends. Others takes it even further, observing that the reason we want a picture on the wall is because of a primitive need to be part of a community, which will help ensure our very survival.

The point is, the buyer only bought the drill bit because they wanted the outcome the drill bit provided: a hole, a picture on the wall, the admiration of their friends, the ability to survive or some combination of the above.

What business are you in? When industries answer this question incorrectly, they set themselves up for failure.

Theodore Levitt also used the railroad industry as a case in point. The companies thought that they were in the railroad business when what customers were really buying was transportation. Had they seen this, they might not have lost business to transport trucks, buses, cars and airplanes. Instead, they would have seen the railroad as a means to deliver the outcomes their buyers wanted: getting conveniently and cost-effectively from point A to point B.

Gasoline stations can also be used as an example. Many think they are in the gasoline business. The reality is that nobody wants to buy gasoline. It is expensive, smelly and damaging to the environment. What they want is the outcome of being able to get to work, drive the kids to soccer practice or go on vacation. Gasoline is just a means to deliver that outcome. As soon as someone comes up with a better way to get the outcome, gasoline stations that don't adapt are dead.

Dell thought it was in the computer business. As a result, it focused on creating an amazing supply chain that could deliver a cheap computer. Apple realized that it was in the business of helping people create ideas and share them. Computers (and iPhones, iPads, Apple Watches, Apple TV and the related services) are just a means to deliver the outcome its buyers want. As a result, Dell is struggling while Apple dominates the stock market.

Most businesses think they are in the business of delivering a product or providing a service. For example, if your business sells copiers, you may think that you are in the copy machine business. If you are an accounting firm, you may think that you sell tax preparation services. If you are an IT company, you may think you sell technical service.

The way to get the correct answer to this question is to consider the outcomes that our customers want. If you sell copiers, the outcome your customer wants may be an efficient office and professional documents so they can grow their business. This type of business might ask the question: What else could we deliver to help our customers get these outcomes?

If you sell tax preparation, the outcomes your clients want are to reduce their tax burden, get a faster return and reduce the risk of an audit. Rather than market the tax service, what if the agency's message led with the outcomes they deliver.

If you sell IT services, your buyers probably don't understand what you do. The outcomes they are buying are uptime so they don't face the cost and frustration of downtime stopping their business. They are buying security so they don't face the cost and embarrassment of a data breach.

What business are you in? What outcomes are your customers actually buying from you?

In the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, these questions will be especially important because the outcomes that your buyers want may have shifted. Recent Gartner research gave insight into the shift in outcomes buyers want. Before the crisis, 2019 research showed that "55% of organizational redesigns were focused on streamlining roles, supply chains and workflows to increase efficiency." After the crisis, the desired outcomes have shifted to things like agility, flexibility and resilience.

Avoid being short-sighted. Focus on the outcomes your clients want and you have a much greater chance of earning their attention and their business. In the process, the shift of perspective might also allow you to see new ways to deliver the outcomes your clients want, creating new business opportunities.

Why Right Now May Be the Time To Adjust Your Growth Strategy

I’m not sure who first said this popular quote: “Hope is not a strategy.” (Who Said Hope Is Not a Strategy?)

In one of my favorite strategy books, Blue Ocean Strategy, the authors observe that companies are rarely open to changing their strategy because they are heavily invested in the status quo. 

What prompts a strategy change? A strong leader and/or a serious crisis.

Most companies are in a serious crisis. Some have seen a drop in revenue. Others have seen a dramatic increase of demand. In either case, this is time to reevaluate strategy. 

The fact is, most companies should have reevaluated their strategy long before the crisis. The inertia of a growing economy and relatively easy growth created an environment that leaders were reluctant to change.

Well, guess what? Things have changed. That means now is the time to evaluate our strategies.

How do you adjust your business strategy? (These are concepts I’m organizing as I prepare to lead a Revenue Growth Strategy Boot Camp this fall.)

Understand The Value You Currently Deliver To Your Ideal Clients

First, consider your current strategic position in the market. Where do you sit in the eyes of your ideal clients? What do they think about you? The goal is to clearly define the value that your clients get from using your product or service.

How do you do this? You go into your client’s office and observe. Watch how they interact with your product. Talk with them about the value they are receiving. Pay attention to the perspective of each decision maker and influencer.

Look For Addition Value You Could Offer

What business outcomes do your ideal clients and prospects want? What challenges are they facing? Just as your business has changed during the crisis, chances are their business has changed as well. The prize goes to the company that understands the shifts in what ideal clients value. 

Shift Your Outcomes Curve To Match

Every company has a list of benefits that they offer to clients. Some of these benefits are meaningful. Other benefits are not important to your clients and prospects. Rate each business outcome you deliver on a scale of 1-10. (Better yet, ask your ideal clients to do this!) Then, transfer that information to a line graph or bar chart. You now have your outcomes curve.

Once you discover the outcomes that your clients want, adjust your product and services offering to focus on the outcomes that your clients value. 

Look For New Sources of New Revenue

With an understanding of your new value curve you can look for new sources of revenue. As I discuss in Revenue Growth Engine, there are only two ways to grow revenue: get net-new clients and cross-sell more to your current clients. Your new value curve can be applied to both.

With net-new revenue growth, where can you find more clients that would value the outcomes you deliver? Could you grow geographically? Could you leverage the new acceptance of virtual selling and delivery? Could you take some of this online? Maybe you could sell your offering to different types of buyers.

With cross-sell growth, what else could you add to your product and services mix to help clients get the outcomes they want? 

This is the time to evaluate your strategy. Stay tuned for an announcement about a special Revenue Growth Strategy Boot Camp where we will work through these concepts (and more) together. 

What We Can Learn From T-Mobile About How To Keep Customers and Grow Revenue Following an Acquisition

The reason to buy a company is to take what you purchased and grow it. Unfortunately, what often happens is that companies let the customers of the companies they acquired slowly get picked off by the competition. Instead of growing the new base of customers, the new base dwindles away.

You can buy a business but you cannot acquire customers. Keeping customers requires trust. After an acquisition, that trust must be built.

When we buy something big, we all experience buyer’s remorse. It’s that moment of time where we are nervous that we made a bad decision. (You may have some buyer’s remorse on the company you bought!) At that moment, the sale is very vulnerable to cancelation.

The same thing happens to customers after an acquisition. The customers of the acquired company get acquisition remorse. They are nervous. The customers of the company you acquired are vulnerable.

Sprint has provided my cellular service for over 10 years. Recently, T-Mobile acquired Sprint. Personally, I identified with the Sprint brand, seeing it as a maverick against the giants, AT&T and Verizon. I enjoyed the benefits of unlimited data and good pricing.

Following the acquisition, I’m nervous about T-Mobile. I don’t know much about their brand. Right or wrong, I see T-Mobile as a discount carrier. I’m concerned about losing my unlimited data and favorable pricing.

Several months into the new relationship, I’m impressed with how T-Mobile is handling the transition. In this article, here are a few things I’ve noticed that we can learn from T-Mobile.

Explain the Main Benefit

The first thing T-Mobile did was explain the benefits of the acquisition. I received several emails and letters explaining that the combined resources of the companies will allow me to not only keep my unlimited data but also get access to a more robust 5G network. They have backed this up by carpet-bombing TV commercials to reinforce that the new company has more 5G coverage than AT&T and Verizon combined.

I’ll admit, as a customer I was nervous that Sprint was falling behind in the race to the fast internet that I want. The primary message of the acquisition is that we are not vaulting ahead of the established players. As a trailblazer, I like this.

What is the main benefit that your acquisition offers your customers? T-Mobile buying Sprint gives me more 5G meaning I get to stay ahead of the tech curve. This helps alleviate my nervousness. What benefit could you offer?

Offer Perks

The week that T-Mobile announced the acquisition to Sprint customers they rolled out T-Mobile Tuesdays. The very first perk was free access to the MLB Network for the rest of the season. Now, as I watch the Blue Jays, I feel goodwill towards T-Mobile. Since then, they have given me magazine subscriptions, 10 cents of gasoline, a T-Mobile face mask, and even a free Whopper. Every Tuesday, I look forward to the notification on my phone that tells me I have a new perk.

Another perk is Scam Protection. This handy app automatically screens out scam calls. I like that!

What perks could you offer to your customers? How could you build goodwill and make the relationship fun?

This may sound like unnecessary fluff. However, when you buy a business, the customers are nervous and afraid. These are negative emotions. If they are not overcome with positive feelings of goodwill, your newly acquired base is at risk of slipping away.

Build the Relationship

I hope you have a consistent cadence of meetings and touchpoints with your current clients where you stay in tune with their business goals and challenges. (If not, starting Periodic Business Reviews is low-hanging fruit you should go after right away!) Build a relationship with your new customers. Don’t just send them a letter. Learn about their business goals. Get to know their people. Offer Periodic Business Reviews as one of your perks.

Building relationships with your new customers does two things. First, it protects the accounts. Second, it sets the stage for cross-selling additional products and services into the account. That’s where things get good. Not only do you keep the customers from the acquisition, but you also grow them!

Make a Plan

Are you planning to acquire a company? If so, I recommend that you make a customer retention plan before you do the acquisition. It is probably a good idea for every company to do this proactively so that when they do make a purchase, the plan is ready to roll.

The Two Most Important Revenue Metrics Every Company Should Track

Every company wants to grow. At the end of the month, end of the quarter, and end of the year, we all look at our top-line revenue. How much did we grow? 

What we need to be looking at is one level deeper. These are the the two drivers of revenue growth. Unfortunately, many companies do not look at these simple numbers.

What are the two two revenue metrics?

They come from the two sources of revenue. If you boil it all down, there are only two ways to grow revenue:

Net-New: You get more clients
Cross-Sell: You sell more to your current clients 

That’s it. The problem is that most companies tend to be good at one or the other. Some are good at landing new deals. Others are good at developing client relationships. Rarely do you find a company that has the processes in place to do both well.

Here’s why that’s important. If you can show modest growth in net-new business and cross-sell business, you can experience exponential revenue growth. (Download the Revenue Growth Calculator, part of the Free Revenue Growth Tool Kit).

 

So, what are the two key revenue metrics:

Number of Clients
Revenue per Client

Number of Clients

First, you need to be able to answer the question, “How many active clients do we have?” This may take a little bit of work with your finance department, but it is a critical number to have. This becomes your base line. At the end of each month (or day) do the math. How many did we add? How many did we lose?

Revenue per Client

Second, you need to know your revenue per client. The math here is simple. Take your total revenue for a given period (month/quarter/year) and divide it by your number of clients. That’s your revenue per client.

Now, track these numbers. Put them on dashboards in your business. Show them in your management and team meetings. 

Think about revenue growth in these categories:

Set goals for number of customers and revenue per customer
Build marketing and sales processes to drive toward these goals
Compensate and congratulate based on these categories

Remember, if you drive modest growth in each of these two areas at the same time, you can grow exponentially, shortening the time it takes to double your revenue.

How To Make Sales and Marketing Processes More Effective and Engaging

Sales and marketing both have common objectives in the pursuit of revenue: creating competitive advantage and increasing perceived value. Without these, the company’s offerings slide into the slimy pit of commodities, decreasing win rates and profit margins.

How can you build competitive advantage and communicate value? In Revenue Growth Engine, I recommend that you think strategically about the experience you provide your ideal clients before and after they become clients.

In The Experience Economy, Competing For Customer Time, Attention, and Money, Pine and Gilmore recommend looking at your company as a stage and your team as actors. In this model, the script is your sales and marketing processes.

In show businesses, compelling scripts get turned into profitable movies and plays. Boring scripts get rejected.

What about your sales and marketing processes? Would the script you have written for prospects and clients capture the attention of your clients? Or, would the script get ignored?

Let’s face it. If a company has documented sales and marketing processes (many don’t have them but should) most of them are boring.

How can you turn sales and marketing processes into an interesting script that captures attention and builds value? Here are a few ideas.

1. Identify The Goals

What are the goals of the process? List out the results you want to achieve. For example, if it is a prospecting process, the goal is likely an appointment. With your onboarding process, the goals may include reducing buyer's remorse and setting the stage for cross-selling. If you are mapping out a periodic business review process, the goal may be to set a meeting to cross-sell an additional product or service.

2. Map the Process

The next step is to map out the sales or marketing process. (In Revenue Growth Engine I describe four types of revenue processes along with ideas for each of the four areas.) What are the high-level steps to move the prospect or client from where they are now to where you want them to go?

3. Describe the Positive Feelings You Want To Evoke

Now, I know some of you may be thinking, “Isn’t this a bit touchy-feely here Darrell?” Yes, it absolutely is. Why? Because buying decisions are always emotional. Even the most logical of buyers want the facts because they are afraid (emotion!) of making a bad decision. Even if you say, “They only care about the bottom line or ROI,” I would challenge you to go a level deeper and ask WHY they care about the bottom line. I guarantee there is an emotion involved.

At each stage of the process, what is the client feeling? What do you want them to feel? You might write down some descriptive words like confident, curious, or hopeful. You could also write a sentence describing how you want them to feel: “I’m curious about this company. They seem to understand what we are going through and have helped other people I know. I wonder how this could help?”

4. Describe the Negative Feelings You Want to Avoid

Negative emotions block sales. The biggest one is fear. Prospects are afraid of the business and the personal effects of making a bad decision. New clients suffer buyer’s remorse, afraid that they made a bad choice. Current clients fear that they are not getting what they wanted. Renewing clients are afraid they may be missing out. 

There are other negative feelings related to fear: uncertainty and doubt. Can this company really do what they say they can?

At each stage of the process, what are the negative emotions we need to avoid? Write these down.

5. Build the Emotion

Now, think about how you can create the emotions you want at each stage of the process.

In the book,  Sell It Today, Sell It Now, Tom Hopkins shows how the job of salespeople is to reduce buyer resistance and increase buyer acceptance. He gives a framework for salespeople to reduce negative emotions and build positive emotions. This mindset works well for all of your sales and marketing processes.

What can you do at each stage of the process to build positive emotions and reduce negative emotions? Some of this is related to sharing facts: data, articles, case studies, success stories. Other parts are related to flair: pleasant surprises, packaging, SWAG. Combined, these can be used to create a compelling script that builds positive emotion and reduces negative emotion, helping the prospect or client comfortably move forward to the next step.

6. Write Your Screenplay

At each stage of the sales or marketing process, write out the screenplay. What happens? What does the client experience? You can literally write this out as if it were a story. (I model this in chapter 3 of Revenue Growth Engine where we present a fictional story of a prospect as if they were writing the story of their experience of our company.

7. Identify the Props

A movie or play requires props for the story. Your sales and marketing processes require props as well. In the business world, we call this content: marketing assets and sales collateral. It could also include packaging or gifts. What needs to be built to support the script?

8. Automate Where Possible

Processes need to be consistent and predictable. Look at your process and consider how you could leverage sales enablement and marketing automation technology to make the experience consistent.

Add all of this together and you have created a process. However, it’s more than a stale marketing map. It is a movie script strategically designed to build positive emotions and reduce negative emotions. This increases competitive advantage and perceived value, helping boost win rates and profits.

How could you make your sales and marketing processes more like a movie script? What could this mean to your win rates and profits?

Why You Should Consider Reallocating Marketing Budget To Promote Client Loyalty

Looking for creative ways to keep your ideal clients happy, especially during the frustrating challenges that we currently face, is smart business. According to recent Bain & Company research, increasing customer retention by 5% increases profit by 25% to upwards of 95% depending on your industry. 

Wow! That is some compelling data.

In the Bain & Company report, Fred Reichheld says: “Systematically rank all of your customer acquisition campaigns on the basis of their yield of loyal customers. Shift resources towards programs that attract the richest mix of loyal customers.” He goes on to conclude that many firms are wasting half their marketing expenses on disloyal customers who will never stick around long enough to pay back the acquisition investment!

What could you do to increase client loyalty and thus improve your profitability? Here are some ideas to consider.

First, Identify Your Ideal Clients

The first step is to identify your Ideal Clients. As Mike Michalowicz says in The Pumpkin Plan, not all clients are created equally. Similar to Pareto’s 80/20 rule, there is a segment of your clients that are a great fit for your company. They value what you do. They are loyal. They are candidates for everything you sell. They give references. 

You need to clearly identify these clients. Mark them in your ERP, CRM, and marketing automation systems. Make sure everyone knows that these are your A-list clients.

While you are doing this, create an Ideal Client Profile. This will help you identify the prospects (aka future Ideal Clients) for your sales team’s target account program. (You can find an Ideal Client Profile worksheet in the Revenue Growth Engine Free Tool Kit.)

Next, Invest In Creating an Ideal Client Experience

Once you have identified your ideal clients, consider how you could improve the experience they have with your company. Here are five ideas to get you started:

1. Create a Client Loyalty Program 

As a speaker and growth strategist, I travel a lot, making me an ideal client for an airline. I enjoy the perks of the American Airlines AAdvantage program. In addition to gathering points for vacation travel, the airline also gives me free luggage checks, priority boarding, and an occasional upgrade. Most of all, my status makes me feel special—something that is even more apparent when I have to fly on another airline where I get relegated to cattle class. When it comes time to book travel, I will go out of my way to fly American because of these perks.

What could you do to create perks for your clients? In Revenue Growth Engine I talk in detail about how you could enhance loyalty and drive additional purchases through a client loyalty program. Look at other client loyalty programs you are a part of (airlines, credit cards, grocery stores, restaurants...) and consider what aspects of these programs could be adapted to your own business.

2. Introduce an Element of Surprise 

Good service is expected these days. In The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore make the point that just like products have become commodities, in many cases, great service has as well. They assert that the path to differentiation is by creating a great experience. 

One aspect of a great experience is the element of surprise. They define this as, “the difference between what a customer gets to perceive and what they expect to get.”

Go to a Cajun restaurant and you will probably get a lagniappe, “a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of purchase." What small things could you do to surprise and delight your clients? 

3. Conduct Periodic Business Reviews 

Many companies assume their clients are OK as long as they are not having problems. When there is a problem, they jump to solve it, patting themselves on the back for responding.

What if you took a more proactive approach. Every company has problems that you could solve. That’s likely how you earned the business in the first place. Why not go back and ask them about other problems in their business?

A Periodic Business Review is a regular meeting with your Ideal Clients where you ask about their business, review your performance, and then collaborate to find new ways you could help them solve problems. While you are there, you also set the stage to ask for referrals.

I continue to be shocked at how few companies actually do this. They say, “We provide great service,” but in practice, ignore their clients outside of reacting to support requests. What would it look like if you added a Periodic Business Review process?

4. Help Them Grow Their Network

Every one of your clients wants to grow. My guess is that you know people that would be great clients for them.

Think about ways you can help your clients grow your business. Send them referrals. As you do, you become more than a vendor to them, you become a partner helping them grow their business. 

5. Become a True Business Resource

Every company wants their Ideal Clients to see them as a value-added partner, not just a vendor providing a commodity.

How do you earn the right to be seen as a value-added partner? You add value! Look at the collective knowledge of your team. How could you harness that knowledge to help your Ideal Clients improve their business?

Share that knowledge with seminars, webinars, private portals, and special events for your Ideal Clients. Position your team as a resource to help your clients solve their problems and achieve the business outcomes they want. As you become a true business resource, you build loyalty.

What Could You Do?

Client loyalty boosts profits. What action items could you put in place to enhance your Ideal Client Experience and build loyalty?

Originally published on the C-Suite Network.

A New Way To Create Competitive Advantage: Reduce Customer Sacrifice

The Big Idea: Pay attention to client sacrifice if you want to increase your competitive advantage.

In a tight economy where buyers tend to pay closer attention to where they allocate their budget companies, must consider how they add value. Organizations that get this right differentiate from their competition and build client loyalty, leading to increased revenue and profit.

How do you build your competitive advantage? Typically, we think of our product or service. What features do we offer? What are the advantages of these features? And, how does the client benefit?

While these questions are important, the reality is that product differentiation is at best short-lived. Service differentiation can be a challenge as well, as most companies offer similar types of services.

So where do you go to create a sustainable competitive advantage? 

In the book, The Experience Economy: Competing For Customer Time, Attention, and Money, authors Pine and Gilmore assert the next frontier of value lies in the experience your clients have with your company. Better client experience equals a stronger competitive advantage.

(More ideas on Client Experience: The Key To Differentiation and Growth: Client Experience.)

When we talk about customer experience, we often measure things like customer satisfaction. While metrics like Net Promoter Scores are helpful barometers, they may fail to expose the true picture of what it is actually like to be a customer.

In addition to measuring customer satisfaction, Pine and Gilmore recommend we take a different perspective, considering “customer sacrifice.” They define this as, “the gap between what a customer settles for and what she wants exactly.”

Every business transaction includes some level of frustration and friction--sacrifice. When we buy things in our personal lives or for our business, we always make tradeoffs. We sacrifice things because we have to. 

As we emerge from the fog of mass-marketing and enter the era of mass customization, consumers are looking for products and services that fit their needs. This higher level of expectation could be used to your advantage.

What if you could reduce the number of sacrifices your clients have to make? If you could do this, you could create differentiation and build competitive advantage. 

How could you do this? Pine and Gilmore recommend cultivating learning relationships with your clients. The more you learn, the more you can customize your offerings to reduce the sacrifice you ask your clients to make. 

This learning happens inside relationships. Relationships are built from interactions. The more interactions you have with your clients, the more opportunities you have to learn about what they want.

In The Pumpkin Plan, Mike Michaolowicz says that in order to create and sustain relationships with ideal clients (big pumpkins) we need to obsess over what our ideal clients want. In light of the topic of client sacrifice, we might think about our ideal clients need through the filter of what they have to sacrifice to do business with us.

Revenue Growth Podcast guest, Matt Dixon, author of and Effortless Experience, says it this way: "While most companies have for decades been pouring time, energy, and resources into the singular pursuit of creating a replicating the delightful experience for their customers, they ironically missed the very thing customers are actually looking for... the effortless experience."

What are the benefits of reducing the sacrifices our clients have to make? Pine and Gilmore list the following:

Premium Prices
Reducing Discounts
Greater Revenue per Customer
Higher Number of Customers (at lower acquisition costs)
Increased Customer Retention

This is a compelling list!

They go on to say: “Companies that systematically reduce customer sacrifice—eliminating the negative cues of the relationship—heighten the experience their customers have when using their goods or partaking of their services, the fulfilling needs left unaddressed by their mass-produced counterparts.”

In Revenue Growth Engine: How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth, I recommend that companies map their Ideal Buyer Experience and Ideal Client Experience. At each stage of engagement, you are challenged to consider what the client is thinking. 

A good follow up question might be to consider what you are asking the client to sacrifice at each stage of the engagement. Then, consider ways to reduce or eliminate the sacrifice, replacing it with delight.

The end result will be true differentiation in a tight economy where buyers may tend to be more selective about their purchases and relationships.

This article originally published on LinkedIn.

Is Your Sales Differentiation Strategy Dog Poo?

By Guest Author, Lee Salz

If you are a follower of my articles and blogs, you know I reside in Minneapolis, but I’m not originally from here. I grew up in the New York/New Jersey area. I don’t need to tell you how brutal the winters are here as the media does a great job of painting that picture. When I moved here, I was not issued Minnesota skin. I still have my East Coast skin. I can deal with the cold, but there are some things I won’t do in subfreezing temperatures.

A great example of something I won’t do in the cold is dealing with my dogs’ poo. I have two, shelter-adopted dogs that weigh about sixty pounds each. From Thanksgiving until March, the dogs “do their business” in my backyard, and I don’t clean it up until Spring. Before you say, “That’s disgusting,” keep in mind the climate in which I live. The poo is covered by snow most of that time and is completely frozen.

As you can probably imagine, there is a lot of poo that needs to be picked up come April, and I have no desire to clean it up myself. Luckily, there is a niche industry that provides dog poo clean-up services for your home. I’ve used the same company for the last ten years for a “Spring clean-up,” and I’ve greatly appreciated their service.

However, one part of their service experience has always bothered me. After they clean up the poo, the “picker-upper” leaves massive garbage bags on the side of my house. It is my responsibility to put the bags of poo in the trash to discard it. It is a rather unpleasant experience. Plus, it makes my garbage cans stink as it defrosts in my garage.

This year, the company I had been using for the last several years was unresponsive when I tried to schedule service. Coincidentally, I received an email from one of their competitors offering the same service for the same price, so I contracted with them for clean-up. Who would have thought poo clean-up would be a competitive industry?

The “poo picker-upper” came to my home, provided the clean-up service, and was leaving with the poo which was puzzling given my prior experience. I went outside and asked what he was doing as he had the big bag with him. What he said next made my day! “We discard the poo for our clients.” You would have thought I just won the lottery; I was so excited.

That afternoon, the owner of the company called me since I was a first-time client for a customer service call. I asked him if he competes with my former service provider to which he said he did. When I asked if he knew the biggest difference between what his company offers and theirs, he was silent. I then shared with him what it is. You take the poo!

While he acknowledged that he knew they were one of the few companies that discard the poo for its clients, he recognized they were not positioning that difference with prospects. Had he positioned that differentiator with me upfront, I would have been willing to pay more for his service.

To stand out from the pack, he could ask a positioning question like:

"Once the dog poo is picked up, how do you expect it to be discarded?"

Most people would expect the poo pick-up company to handle that part of the service which is not an industry standard. And, it opens the door to use Sales Differentiation strategy to win more deals at the prices you want.

In my work with corporate clients, it is very common for me to find a troubling sales situation. The executives and salespeople are very passionate about their set of differentiators, but ineffective in helping to develop that same passion with prospects. If you can’t help prospects see your vision, you may as well not have differentiators because the decision is going to come down to the lowest price.

In Sales Differentiation, I teach a five-step process to develop a communication strategy that helps the person on the other side of the desk become as passionate as you about your differentiators. Grab your copy today!

Lee Salz on the Revenue Growth Podcast

Lee was a recent guest on the Revenue Growth Podcast where he discussed strategies for differentiating in a sea of sameness.

Merit Kahn-Emotional Intelligence and Sales

Have you ever wondered why two salespeople can leave a training program and one is a high performer while the other struggles? Our guest today has the answer to this question and more.

Merit Kahn is the founder of Merit-based Business and the creator of the Merit Method for Sales Mastery. Merit is an expert in bringing the science of emotional intelligence to sales teams and leaders. She’s an author, a contributor to the Sales Experts Channel, and a fellow advisor at the C-Suite network. She’s passionate about helping salespeople master their mindset, mechanics, and motion.