Customer Loyalty – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Does the Client Believe It’s Working?

In the advertising sales game, few things are worse than an unexpected cancellation.

The agreement was signed with great fanfare a few months ago. The ad looked great, the digital campaign’s performing well, and you’ve settled in for a good, long relationship.

Then the email comes out of the blue. “It’s not working. We need to go dark for a while.”

If “it’s not working” comes as a surprise, you may need to take a look at how you communicate results.

Your perception of the campaign matters less than the advertiser’s. Does the client believe it’s working?

A Quick Medical Analogy

A recent Seth Godin blog post pointed me to a New York Times article on “sham surgery.”

Sham surgery is a research technique in which patients (who are informed about and consent to this) are led to believe they are undergoing a surgical procedure. The procedure is supposed to treat a real medical issue such as back pain or asthma.

The malady is genuine; the surgery may not be. Some patients get the real surgery; others just get anesthetic and an incision.

A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half…

…Such findings show that these procedures don’t work as promised, but they also indicate that there’s something powerful about believing that you’re having surgery and that it will fix what ails you. [Orthopedic Surgeon Stuart] Green hypothesizes that a surgery’s placebo effect is proportional to the elaborateness of the rituals surrounding it, the surgeon’s expressed confidence and enthusiasm for the procedure, and a patient’s belief that it will help.

If the patient thinks it worked, it worked.

It’s much easier to keep an advertising client when the client believes the campaign is working. Ensuring this is up to you…and the elaborateness of your rituals.

It starts with managing expectations.

What is the advertiser hoping to achieve with the campaign? Are their goals measurable? Are they realistic?

Do you know what they are?

Find out. Before the campaign starts.

If it’s an increase in sales, what sales? How much of an increase? By when? Doubling sales is great, unless the client expects sales to triple.
If it’s traffic to the website, how much traffic? To which page? How much are they getting now? Is there a mechanism on the page to take prospects to the next step in the buying process?
Are there any holes in the sales funnel — places where a customer might get confused or repelled along the way? The best idea can fail if it’s implemented poorly — you can read about a promotion I botched years ago here.

Are you checking in regularly with the advertiser to to see how the campaign is producing?

Don’t be afraid to ask — the client already knows (or thinks they know) whether it’s working. You’ll be in a much better position to address the issue if you know what they’re thinking.

Are there any unusual, emotional or quirky ways the client is measuring results? For example:

A savvy TV rep on the West Coast told me that when clients see their own commercial, they’re much more likely to feel like its producing. He makes a point of asking new advertisers, “What’s your favorite show?”
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If the client is a loyal viewer of one particular program, the AE always figures out a way to squeeze a spot or two into that show.
For years, I wrote all the radio commercials for a big home improvement contractor. Sales were important to him, but even more important was the good-natured ribbing about his commercials from his friends at the country club.
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Business could be up 20%, but if the other guys at the club didn’t tell him how funny he was on the radio, he truly believed the advertising wasn’t working.
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My eventual conclusion: it was his money, this was how kept score, and Job 1 was to make his golf buddies laugh. I wasn’t proud of this, but seven years of commission checks helped ease the pain.

You’ve got a much better chance of building a long-term relationship if you make sure your customers see the results of the campaign.

Because if the client doesn’t believe it’s working… it’s not working.

[reminder]

How to Recover From a Massive Screwup

Something bad is going to happen. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or next week. But if you sell advertising for a significant length of time, somebody will screw up and you’ll have to clean up the mess.

salespeople have to mop up the mess — Photo by Focus Pocus LTD

The dust has finally settled on the United Airlines “doctor dragged off the plane” affair of April 2017. I won’t focus here on the incident itself — pretty much everyone agrees that what happened to David Dao was outrageous.

For those in the media sales business, the real lessons are in United Airlines’ response.

It is unlikely that your company will ever administer a physical beating to a paying customer. But you will one day check your email and find out that something’s gone badly wrong. Such as:

Your client’s commercial didn’t run the week leading into their biggest sale of the year.
The wrong spot ran for a month — or longer — before somebody caught it.
The production department missed a crucial deadline.
Your company’s credit office — which is now a computer chip in a Cheyenne, Wyoming basement — denied credit to your big new direct account.

Handled correctly, a service failure can sometimes increase customer loyalty — a phenomenon known as the “Service Recovery Paradox”. It’s tricky to accomplish, and requires some training.

Customer support expert Len Markidian points to Disney’s approach to service failures:

Their approach to service recovery is a five-step process, easily remembered with the acronym H.E.A.R.D:

Hear: let the customer tell their entire story without interruption. Sometimes, we just want someone to listen.

Empathize: Convey that you deeply understand how the customer feels. Use phrases like “I’d be frustrated, too.”

Apologize: As long as it’s sincere, you can’t apologize enough. Even if you didn’t do whatever made them upset, you can still genuinely be apologetic for the way your customer feels (e.g., I’m always sorry that a customer feels upset).

Resolve: Resolve the issue quickly, or make sure that your employees are empowered to do so. Don’t be afraid to ask the customer: “what can I do to make this right?”

Diagnose: Get to the bottom of why the mistake occurred, without blaming anyone; focus on fixing the process so that it doesn’t happen again.

It’s fair to say that in the first 24-48 hours after the incident, United didn’t bother to Hear or Empathize. They eventually got around to Apologizing and Diagnosing. They are now attempting to Resolve, but there will be lots of lawyers involved.

If you’re dealing with an angry client, and there’s even a small chance that the situation is your station’s fault, here are some “United Lessons” to heed:

If you’re not sure what happened, find out before expressing your opinion. United dug itself a big hole early in the process by issuing statements that blamed the customer. No law says you have to issue a verdict right away. Promise the client you’ll get to the bottom of it… and then get to the bottom of it.
Make a point of accepting all of the blame, even if it hurts. If you think your customer’s partially at fault, resist the urge to say so. If your client goes from angry to angry-and-defensive, you lose.
Don’t point fingers. United CEO Oscar Munoz could have pointed out that the incident didn’t happen on a United Airlines flight — the United Express flight was operated by Republic Airways, a separate company. The flight crew and gate agents were Republic employees, not United employees; the people who dragged Dr. Dao off the plane worked for the Chicago Aviation Police. To his credit, Munoz understood that regardless of the legalities, this was a United Airlines problem. Your client won’t care if it’s the fault of Production, Accounting, or “Corporate.” If it happened at your station, and you’re the Account Executive, it’s your problem to fix.
Deliver the message in language your customer uses. If your response sounds like corporate-speak it will come off as insincere. When Munoz said, “I apologize for having to re-accommodate these customers,” he lost everybody.
Make it right — give the client much more in return than they lost — and do it quickly. United took three days to offer refunds to the passengers of Flight 3411, and lost the chance to generate some goodwill. If you’re not sure what will make the client happy, ask.
Figure out what caused the problem, and how you can prevent it from happening again. United has announced some significant policy changes to make sure that paying customers already in their seats can stay. If you don’t have the ability to change policies, you may have to get creative.

Bad things happen to even the best salespeople. With the right mindset, you can correct a big mistake and position yourself as a true professional.

[reminder]What’s the worst customer service fail/mess you’ve ever had to clean up? What did you do to resolve it, and what did you learn from the experience?[/reminder]

How Customer-Focused Are You… Really?

Everyone says they’re customer-focused. The stark reality is that most of us aren’t.

radio sales tip: be customer-focused — photo by uismolinero/dpc

Sales coach Gavin Ingham recently expressed a frustration common to those of us in the sales training business — our clients want advice on how to close sales, but don’t seem interested in earning the right to make the sale in the first place:

As a sales speaker, I often get asked by sales directors what they should do to make more sales. How do we convince the client? How do we demonstrate value over price? How do we negotiate a better deal? How do we shorten buying cycles? Etc etc. All of these have one thing in common and that is that they are all about you. They are not all about the client.

I rarely (for rarely read never) get asked for help that is client focused. People do not call me and ask how they can better understand their clients, they call me and ask how they can close more sales. People do not call me to understand why their clients went elsewhere, they call me to ask how they can convince their clients to buy from them. People do not call me to ask me help them understand why they did not engage their clients, they call me to ask how they can persuade and influence more effectively.

This may sound like semantics but it is a BIG deal.”

It is a big deal. Salespeople already know what they want to sell, and why they want to sell it. What many of them never bother to find out is what their customer wants to buy, and why they would want to buy it.

Two Easy Customer-Focus Tests For Salespeople

1. Look at the last couple times a customer turned you down and went to the competition. Do you know why — from their perspective, not yours — they did it? (Advice on what to do about that is here.)

2. Think about the last couple of times a customer cancelled an order in mid-campaign. Do you know why — from their perspective, not yours — they cancelled?

I often hear from salespeople who just took a big cancellation and want advice on how to change the client’s mind. Unfortunately, it’s too late by then.

The best time to reverse a cancellation is before the cancellation happens. Click To Tweet This

Cancellation prevention requires knowing what the customer’s goals are for the campaign. Knowing about challenges to implementing the campaign, and working with the client to address those challenges. Constantly checking in to make sure that results are meeting expectation.

In short, cancellation prevention requires true focus on the customer

If you don’t know why the client cancelled, or went with the competitor, you may not be as customer-focused as you think you are.

What did you miss, and how can you do better next time?

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[reminder]

How a Shoe Store Owner Gets Free Facebook Advertising

I was meeting with the owner of an upscale ladies boutique in a southeastern state. Although the store sold all manner of women’s clothing, the largest revenue driver was shoes.

Apparently, ladies love shoes. Who knew?

The conversation had just turned to social media, and I asked the owner how effective the store Facebook page was as a marketing tool. “It’s okay, I guess,” he said. “But I found a much better way to use Facebook.”

He had my attention. I bit. “How do you do that?” I asked.

“My customers all have cell phones, and just about all of them have a camera. Whenever a customer tries on a pair of shoes and decides to buy them, we ask if they’d like us to take their picture — with their phone. Women like to show off their new shoes, so most of them say yes.”

“Do they let you post those pictures on your Facebook page?” I asked.

“Some do, but I don’t really care about that,” he replied. “What makes this work is that as soon as they go home, they post that picture on their own Facebook page. And they usually mention that they got the shoes at my store.

That means that we just got a free Facebook ad, and it gets seen by 500 of my customer’s friends. Two or three times a week, someone will walk into my store and ask to try on a pair of shoes that their friend posted on Facebook.

All of this costs us nothing – we don’t even pay for the camera!”

The store owner has stumbled on a great way to use Facebook in its most effective form – to accelerate word-of-mouth. It’s a technique that can be used in a variety of consumer settings:

A furniture store can take pictures of a customer’s new couch, in the customer’s home.
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A car dealer can shoot a photo of a happy couple standing next to the new SUV they just bought.
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A window company can take pictures of a homeowner posing in front of her newly-installed windows.

The key is to take the picture with the customer’s phone, not yours.

Rather than begging people to “like” your Facebook page, you can intersect with existing consumer behavior. Happy customers love the show off the things they just bought… on Facebook.

Who knew?

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“Showrooming” in Reverse How Online Shopping and Research Can Benefit a Bricks-and-Mortar Business

One of the biggest threats to brick-and-mortar retailers in 2012 is “Showrooming”: consumers who walk into a store with a smartphone to look at merchandise and make use of the expertise of the staff… and then make their purchase online from Internet retailer at a lower price.

Conventional wisdom holds that because of the “Showrooming” phenomenon, the Internet is a huge threat to bricks and mortar retailers. There is a great deal of validity to this argument, but an interesting counter-argument has emerged:

Dan Kennedy’s marketing newsletter tipped me off to an article in Internet Retailer Magazine about the opposite phenomenon. The article discusses Patagonia, who saw a great deal of traffic to their iPad app without a corresponding jump in sales via the tablet. Mark Shimahara, Patagonia’s Internet Marketing Manager, initially thought that there was a problem with the app itself.

“But after talking with store managers,” he says, “we realized that people were using the phone application to do their window shopping and would show up at our stores with the device in hand and product on their screens, saying, ‘Do you have this in stock?’ It’s a great example of how we are entering the age of omnichannel marketing.”

Staples Inc. faces a similar situation, though involving small-business owners, the office supply chain’s core customers, says Brian Tilzer, vice president of e-commerce and business development. He says small businesses increasingly use Apple and Android smartphones and even tablets to research products, check inventory and otherwise prepare for what he calls the “in-store shopping experience.”

30% of consumers, the article reports, begin their product search and research on Amazon.com, while another 13% begin that search on Google. Some will buy online, but others will wind up into an honest-to-goodness bricks and mortar store. Maybe yours.

Conclusion? For local business, Internet shopping is both a threat and an opportunity. To make it pay off, you need to have:

A strong online presence. Even if you are not selling over the Internet, you need to be easily found on the Internet.
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The inventory, staff expertise, and customer centric mindset necessary to convert those Internet window shoppers into paying customers when they walk into your store.
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The ability, and the willingness, to aggressively capture customer contact information when they visit your business in person or call on the phone.
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The ability, and the willingness, to follow up with those customers after you have captured their contact information.

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Email Phil Bernstein here.

Like what you’re reading? There’s more! Sign up for Phil Bernstein’s free advertising and marketing e-newsletter here. As a bonus, I’ll send you a copy of my newly-revised and expanded e-book, The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Advertising and How to Fix Them when you subscribe.

Become a Facebook Fan of “Doctor” Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert here.