The Thing That’s Worth Measuring

Josh is a sales assistant at a sports store in the city. He proactively solves customer’s problems while they browse, taking the time to answer questions about the equipment they’re considering buying. If one of those interactions results in a sale Josh adds a new barcode containing his employee ID to the product. This is…

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Lessons From The Best In B2B Brand Storytelling

It’s easy to think of great examples of B2C (business-to-consumer) brand storytelling. The list of B2C companies that leverage storytelling to engage with their customers’ grows daily. The perception in many B2B (business-to-business) companies is that it’s easier to engage with customers through story when you’re selling running shoes with a dose of ‘Just Do…

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Why Are Your Customers Here?

The city centre bookstore manager complains to her colleague on the phone about people wandering in on their lunch break to browse because they have nothing else to do. “They’re not coming in for anything in particular.” she sighs. She’s right, for two hours every day hundreds of office workers with nothing else to do…

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Everything To Everyone

While I was consulting with a client last week we got talking about people who had built powerful personal brands and the reasons for their success. When we stopped at one in particular, her reaction was immediate. “I don’t like him.” she said, as her nose wrinkled. Of course, she has never met this person,…

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Why Startups Fail

Take a look at this list of reasons startup founders give for failing. These are just some of them. The cost of customer acquisition, ahead of its time, wrong positioning, not enough income, no problem solution fit, wrong target market, low customer adoption, too early, not enough demand, no real audience and too much ego.…

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Are Your Marketing Goals Aligned With Customer Objectives?

As marketers, we often skip the important step of assessing our marketing goals against customer objectives. As a consequence, we fall in love with our message and forget to question what it is the customer needs to know or wants to hear. It’s not hard to check if this is true of your company—simply answer…

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The Difference Between Saying You Care And Caring

I’m not sure when we became defensive about customer care became. I suspect it might have been when we began to put more distance between the customer and us. In the days when there was a cash register that rang with ‘real money’, when we sold eye-to-eye and transacted hand-to-hand, instead of digitally, we had…

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How We Drive Change

When we want to improve our diet we monitor what we eat and how much we exercise. When we want to change a toddler’s behaviour we look for opportunities to praise the good, instead of constantly shouting down the bad. We measure and reward the behaviour we want. In organisations, the things we measure and…

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How Will You Win?

All success at some level is about winning. Not necessarily coming first, but certainly reaching some kind of goal or destination. The truth is that most of us are terrible at articulating exactly what the plan to get there is. The ability to do this is probably the single most important competitive advantage of all…

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The 4 New Stages Of Customer Engagement

The commercial reality for any business is that sales keep the lights on. We’re still following rules that were proposed in the late 1800s by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in order to do that. “The mission of an advertisement is to sell goods. To do this, it must attract attention, of course; but attracting attention…

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