Author: Ian McGonnigal

  • Brand Experience: How to Attract & Keep More Customers

    Brand Experience: How to Attract & Keep More Customers

    Auditing your company’s Brand Experience regularly can close more sales, more quickly, improve the ROI on your sales and marketing investments, drive customer loyalty and advocacy, and grow your business by 10% more than your competition – all while reducing expenses.

    According to “Experience is Everything” by PwC, 73% of consumers reported that a positive brand experience is key to brand loyalty. Additionally, consumers are willing to pay a 16% price premium on average for products and services from companies where they have a good customer experience. Adversely 60% of survey respondents reported they would stop doing business with a brand after a poor experience.

    There are many who believe a Brand Experience is just a marketing deliverable – an event, an activation, a web site, a social media campaign, etc., and on the surface, they’re correct. However, Brand Experience is not a ‘thing’ but a way in which your brand behaves. Marketing deliverables are points in time. Brand Experience is points over time, and it is owned by everyone in your company. Sales, marketing, product management, customer service, logistics, finance… everyone. Customer Experiences are owned by the customer, and while Brand Experience is brand behavior, Customer Experience is their reaction to brand behaviors, among other environmental factors, such as brand perceptions, social reputation, influencers, etc.

    When it comes to measuring Brand Experiences, many companies turn to surveys, focus groups, consumer panels etc. The data garnered from these approaches is certainly valuable. However, it is only a starting point. Each and every touchpoint with your prospects and customers should be reviewed and improved regularly, and tethered to business data. Understanding everything from sales volume and velocity, to customer retention, longevity, lifetime value, etc. is paramount to ensuring you’re measuring and improving the right things.

    So what is a Brand Experience Audit? Quite simply, it’s going through the brand engagement process first hand, as a prospect or customer would. It also includes examining any customer or business data available to identify challenges, and opportunities for improvements. Finally, it includes prioritized, actionable recommendations on how to improve the Brand Experience. The challenge is, it is exceedingly difficult to conduct a valuable audit internally, as there are inherent biases that exist for employees, and they often do not have the outside perspective from other similar and dissimilar brands to draw experience and performance comparisons from. Bottom line, find a trusted advisor who can help.

    Here are seven the areas where a Brand Experience Audit should focus.

    1. The Employee Experience – Happy, well-trained, employees make or break the Brand Experience. Surveys, interviews, knowledge reviews, and observations can help identify opportunities for improvement here. Note that often there is an inherent mistrust between employee and employer, so reliance on truly neutral parties and anonymity can play an important role in success.
    2. The Marketing Experience – Marketers love measurement and surveys. But to truly understand what’s working and what’s not, it’s important to walk a mile in the customer’s shoes. Audit your events, trade shows, website, email outreach, social activity, campaigns, and everything else. You may find you’re not balancing the line between value and spam very well, and you’re providing too much or too little content at the wrong times in the process.
    3. The Sales Experience – Have you ever bought a car? Similar to marketing touch points, looking at the type and level of content your team is providing to prospects is important. Here, it’s not often what the content is, but how the content is delivered. Also – remember that it’s about the customer and their problems, needs, opportunities, not your company’s products and solutions. A robust audit here can drive up sales productivity.
    4. The Partnership Experience – Are your partners lucky to be working with you? Sure. But are you lucky to working with them? Absolutely. Audit your relationship from your partner’s perspective to understand the value they receive from working with you. Look at shared business, product fit, investment in each other, etc.
    5. The Product Experience – If your products or services suck, you won’t be in business very long. Look at everything “in real life” from design, to functionality, to impact, to usage and value to the customer. Also, how a product or service is delivered or implemented plays a role.
    6. The Customer Support or Service Experience – “When things don’t go well” is not a problem but an opportunity. The service or support experience and make or break a relationship between a customer and a brand. No one wants to be put on hold or hours only to speak with “Jerry from Banglore” who knows nothing about you, or your problem, and offers up a warranty replacement, but only if you provide a receipt from 17 months ago and pay for shipping both ways. Walk through the process in real life. If you’re surprisingly delighted at how easy it was – you’re doing it mostly right. If they don’t have to engage support or service in the first place, you’ve nailed it.
    7. The Relationship Experience – OK, you’ve got a customer, how do you grow the relationship, or even keep them? How are you rewarding loyalty, supporting advocacy, and sharing relevant and timely content that will entice them to do more business with your company? This can be the culmination of Marketing, Sales and Customer Service or Support Experiences. It can include Partnership Experience. Audit Relationship Experience throughly, as this is where most of your business comes from.

    I recommend you audit your Brand Experience annually at the low end, to quarterly at the high end. You can also adopt a rolling, or phased approach focusing on one area at a time. It’s important to note however, customers do not experience any one of the seven areas identified above in a vacuum. They are looking at the total relationship with your brand. Are you looking at your customers in the same way?

  • Sales Meeting Strategy: Celebrate. Educate. Motivate.

    Sales Meeting Strategy: Celebrate. Educate. Motivate.

    It’s January. You know what that means. No, I’m not talking about hitting the gym or cutting back on those french fries (although that wouldn’t be a bad idea). It’s sales kickoff season – where countless companies bring their sales teams together to talk about what happened last year, share the latest updates to their products and solutions, and set new sales targets for the upcoming year. Do you have a sales meeting strategy?

    If you’re lucky, your company understands the value behind an effective sales meeting, and invests appropriately in the experience. In other cases, the sales kickoff is a simple gathering, and there is little attention payed to the experience of the sales team because they’re “employees” and “have to be there”.

    I believe that excellent customer and brand experience begins with excellent employee experience. The sales kickoff is an incredible opportunity to start the year off with a bang. If you’re smart about the continuity of engagement throughout the year, you can avoid the dreaded “make or break” Q4 scenarios we’ve all lived through, and see sales productivity, continuous objective achievement, and improvement throughout the year.

    When planning a sales conference, there are three crucial elements to success. In some cases, your company may have gone overboard and you need to simplify. In other cases, your approach will need to be augmented to ensure you’re covering all three bases at a minimum.

    1. Celebrate. Salespeople are competitive by nature. As you design and build your experience, remember this. Sure, the primary motivation for hunters is the rewards of the kill, or compensation. But compensation alone will not foster continued motivation. Top-performers who only receive financial recognition will be on the lookout for the opportunity to gain greater recognition elsewhere (your competition). Additionally, employees who are not top performers may get frustrated and leave for the same reasons. They still have a role on your team. Ensure your sales kickoff experience not only recognizes top-performers, but the achievements of everyone on the team and the team as a whole.
    2. Educate. The pack is only as fast as the slowest wolf. The sales kickoff is the ideal place to educate teams on new products and solutions, sales techniques, tools of the trade, and improving themselves. Use a variety of proven learning and development techniques, tools and technologies, including role-playing, peer coaching, access to real customers, etc. Think beyond the talking head or product breakout session. Make it immersive and interactive. The sales kickoff should be a point of accentuation for a broader, more robust program that lasts throughout the year.
    3. Motivate. Here’s where many companies fall short. Is your company investing in an experience that truly excites sales teams to attend and participate? Are they getting content they cannot get anywhere else? Is there something really cool that gives them a reason to believe? An experience that makes them feel like they are part of a thriving community, and that makes them proud to be a part of it will goes a long way. Here’s a simple trick: Ask yourself: “Will the experience be something they’ll tell their friends about outside of work? Will it be something they’re excited to share on social media?” If not, you might be missing the mark.

    Three simple concepts to make your sales conference a success. Celebrate. Educate. Motivate. With the right investment and approach in the sales kickoff experience, the return on investment to your bottom line will be impressive.

  • Use It or Lose It: How to Spend Your Marketing Budget

    Use It or Lose It: How to Spend Your Marketing Budget

    It’s Q4 – what are you doing with the rest of your marketing budget? Should you build assets, invest in a last dash experiment, optimize your approach, or forward invest?

    As both a brand-side marketer and service provider, I’ve learned that no one ever got rewarded for giving the rest of their budget back to the company. In fact, just the opposite typically occurs – you are allocated less budget the following year because you’re “so efficient”.

    So really, you have a few choices. Here’s a quick breakdown of the pros and cons of each.

    1. Create more assets – The bane of every marketer’s existence is having enough diversified content to keep the machine running. Whether it’s social assets, website content, event content, sales enablement tools, thought leadership, photography, video, podcasts, or  what have you, there is never enough. This of course would be a solid investment that addresses a huge pain point, but there is a risk in developing content that is quickly outdated in today’s fast-moving, living-in-the-moment, real-time world. Recommendation – consider this, but make sure the assets you create are as future-proof (at least in the intermediate-term) as possible.
    2. Experiment – Ah, yes, the “Hail Mary”, the cool, innovative thing that could make the quarter or even the year if you’re falling behind. Sure, it could work, but more often than not it becomes a waste of effort, time, and budget. Most likely, your sales cycles are longer than a quarter, so any impact would occur next year. Please know I am not against experiments, in fact, quite the opposite. I recommend all marketers allocate 20% of their annual budget to innovation. That said, be smart about it. Plan, strategize, and make sure your experiments are well-thought-out. Understand the risks, and do everything you can to nurture the idea to ensure success.
    3. Optimize your approach – While we all should be measuring and optimizing our tactics and programs throughout the year as we go, in the heat of battle, this is often neglected. Q4 is the perfect time for closing, reflecting, planning, and optimizing for the next year. As a strategist, this of course is my favorite. The time, money, and effort you allocate here pays returns well into the future. If you get better every year, and make a larger impact to the success of the company, your budget and career will grow. And, if you’re really good. You become famous – well, marketing famous – someone will blog about you. 🙂
    4. Forward invest – If you’re one of the few, lucky marketers that can keep your budget and roll it over onto the next year, Godspeed. If not, there are a few opportunities here.
      • Hire talent – go and get that person for that capability you need now. It gets them onboard and allows you to absorb recruitment costs this year.
      • Use your agency as a bank – There, I said it. No one admits this, but most marketers do it. Agencies are happy to help you create amorphous scopes-of-work to get through procurement for projects that are started this year, but actually roll into the future. There is risk here though. I know of some agencies that have kept these forward investments on the books for years without delivering any value – the reasons are many, but often are on the brand side.
      • Hire the consultant – We love being engaged in #3 above, and this is the perfect time for us to engage with, and help you, before you’re in the heat of battle again.

    Botton line– Always use it, but be smart about it. How have you spent your Q4 budget? Please comment below.

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