We rarely venture outside of the ‘familiar’, especially for such mundane things as the route to the office, or where we buy our milk, to what we eat. We constantly make decisions based on the ‘familiar’. As for more the important items such as a car or a home, the ‘familiar’ factors become increasingly more important and the degree to which we will pay is premium because ‘familiarity’ is virtually unlimited.

How important is familiarity?

It’s everything. We instantly and consciously (sometimes unconsciously) seek to satisfy our need for familiarity. It’s almost primal. If you don’t think so then why would a giant brand like Disney release blockbuster animations using familiar actor’s voices? The main reason is because it sells. It sells because we are enamored with the familiarity of the voices and the story. It’s a one-two punch that’s for all practical purposes, we find irrestable. This one-two formula works really well in the endorsement world as well. I hazard to guess what portion of the retail price Nike budgets on their endorsement athletes, but whatever it is, it’s huge and nobody is complaining about the results. More than that, it keeps one brand, Nike, ahead of all others by using the personal (and big) brands of the athletes.

Does familiarity breed content or contempt?

Familiarity may breed contempt in some circles but in selling it only creates confidence. If you doubt we buy everything based on the level of familiarity, then put this example into perspective. You get a call to pick up a half-gallon of milk for your kids on the way home. Now on the way to your car, a person unknown to you, dressed in dingy clothes and definitely in need of a shower proposes to you that he has some milk for sale, unbranded of course, and it’s only a buck.  If you’re like most people, this simple product purchase is made only where you trust the vendor and perhaps even the brand. Naturally you will pay five times the strangers price and like Elsie the cow, you feel contented. Whether it’s milk or scotch, or a toothbrush, everything has its ‘contented’ price for the simple reason that we strongly relate to the things we know.

How does a customer decide?

It’s no mystery how most people make their decisions. If a machine made the decision then that’s a different story. However, you are dealing with a human being and most of the human race can’t avoid the emotional side of the buying equation. Get ‘familiar’ with these parameters because we all make decisions based on these factors: 

• Customers prefer to choose familiar things
• Customers rely on the familiarity of relationships

Why? That’s easy. We want to minimize or even hope to eliminate our risk. And besides, customers are only interested in themselves.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

The bigger the decision, the bigger the ‘familiar’ factor comes into focus.

We rely on ‘familiar’ relationships to satisfy our needs, either physical (logical) or emotional (feelings), to minimize our risks. The most pointed ‘familiarity’ example is ‘brand name’ choices. With brand names and ‘known’ references, there usually is little to decide about from a buyer’s point of view.

• With the advent of CRM tools like routine contact scheduling, key date tracking and automated personalized marketing, becoming familiar has become a straightforward job even for the most junior sales member.

Brand yourself. Maximize the risk doing business with anyone else.

Don’t have a billion dollars and a little shy on a $100 million endorsement account? No problem. As a sales person, manager or executive, you can accomplish a level of ‘brand’ familiarity to achieve the one-two punch.

• Try maximizing the risk of doing business with your competition in your customer’s mind. Your prospect must develop confidence that you’re the best choice. Your customer wants the confidence that they should continue to do business with you and not just at the ‘close’ of your sales cycle, but at each point in the sales process.
• This means that you can’t shortcut the business rapport development (familiarity of relationships) or forget about properly designing your CRM database as an information base (familiar things) from which you can then be ‘more familiar’.

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Pipeline Triangulation

Triangulation is the process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end. In MosaicCRM terms, triangulation is the process of determining the points that make up your pipeline and its ability to hone in on opportunities that have a high probability of closing. Click on the Icon for more information on how this works!

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Written by Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Nothing comes close to beating the zipper.  

Tired of ‘innovate or die’ hype? YKK zippers has an interesting branding lesson. The zipper is an old invention with relatively new applications. It was the brainchild of Whitcomb Judson of Chicago in 1893. Only in 1913 did Gideon Sundbach re-engineer Judson’s fastener into a more streamlined and reliable form. And it wasn’t until the mid 1930’s that zippers were embraced and became a viable business success. No other high tech solution has replaced it. Velcro doesn’t come close.

Most zippers have YKK on them. 

If you have wondered why there is an interesting history to the modern version of the zipper. In 1934, Yoshida Kogyo Kabushililaisha was founded. In 1994 the privately held firm headquartered in Japan, changed its name to YKK Co.  In size and complexity the company would rival any major high tech international firm and consists of 80 companies at 206 facilities in 52 countries. They manufacture everything from the brass to the dyes used in the cloth and made over 1.5 million miles of them last year. 

“A fair company on which customer’s can depend.”

This is how YKK describes itself. It makes a lot of sense and is a great message for sales personnel to carry to their customers.  The point here is to state a clear message of who you are. So many companies and personnel fail to get this message across to their customers and suffer because of it. Forget the marketing hype for a minute (because your customers ignore it as well).

What makes you different from Brand X?

How is your company known? How would your company like to be known as? You need the answers to these questions because your customers frame them in another way: What makes you different from Brand X? If you don’t have the answer or simply haven’t learned it, stop everything until you do.

And for goodness sakes, don’t state some slick marketing line. Unfortunately, sales people are often perceived as a little suspicious until the customer gets to know you. Using a slick statement can trigger an even greater defense. Whatever you say, make it real, simple and natural. Branding yourself and your company into a one liner is a hard but valuable task. Take a few minutes and get your team together to create one. Maybe even ask some of your customers for ideas.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

CRM is a good platform to standardize branding though communication protocols that can be imbedded throughout the customer interaction routines.

• ‘Marvel’ allows a prescribed series of activities that are specific to email content, brochure distribution and even talk scripts
• Template files are an easy way to provide branding and content standardization especially when used in licensed or controlled industries to ensure compliance
• MosaicCRM’s ‘Sales Intelligence’ is a suite of modules designed for specific Product Knowledge, Features/Benefits, References and more

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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So began Rod Sterling’s eerie narrative that prompted the viewer to mentally visualize portraiture of the fantasy, horror, or sci-fi of what was to follow next. What’s important to note here is the impressive power of visualization.  The technique wasn’t new either. It worked for decades in radio and was equally effective for the power of television. Today, even the medical establishment has watched the power of mental imagery assist patients in their healing process.

Visualize Your Competition and Relationships.

Great sports competitors have realized for decades that developing their power of visualization is a valuable means to improve their performance.  Sports psychologists agree that to do something successfully; we must first be able to visualize doing it in our own mind. The reason why visualization is so effective is that our brain is not able to distinguish between the real event and the imagined one. When I visualize an event, it’s has a powerful effect of reducing what I am looking at. It’s like any race. There’s a lot of people on the track but in reality, very few are actually in the race.  Visualization has that tendency to focus you on one or two competitors that are truly in the race with you.

Selling provides some unique ways to visualize your competition.

On the literal level, it can very well be the named competitor. How do you visualize the brand competitor and just as important, can you visualize what’s in the mind of your customer? Can you visualize the problem or problems? On the practical level, what does the product look like, how does it perform? Can you visualize your customer using it? If so, how do they look?

On a personal level, can you, like athletes, run through a demonstration or sales presentation? How about dreaming up a few closing scenarios? These mental rehearsals can prove invaluable as preparatory tools.

From a CRM perspective, we spend a lot of time and money ‘visualizing’ our customers.

These visualization tools can be as simple as a standard street map to the complexity scrubbing demographics and target market data. These ‘business geographics’ help visualize what the customer looks like. And everybody does it. The one’s who do it best, like Wal Mart, not only know what their customer looks like, they have intimate knowledge and experience with any and all competition.

Visualization could well be your sixth sense.

Visualization provides you with that sixth sense when it comes to the real thing. It only stands to reason that we can gain a heightened sense of familiarity and the confidence that ‘been there, done that’ promotes. Use these mental dress rehearsals to enhance your skills and improve your ability to better judge business situations. Not so unrelated is the power of positive thinking that results from being a skillful visualizer.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner –

Visualizing your database goes beyond just metal images. To be practical, CRM is the best way to take a large number of disparate data streams and convert these into a very clear picture of your customer, and how and when they buy. To make that happen, here are a few suggestions to follow:

•  Pipeline design and management is clear, concise, easy
• Automate everything that manages the customer buying cycle and sales cycles
• Optimize activity planning with strategic business processes

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Sell More With 100% ‘Real’ Visibility!

Unlike most CRM’s that organize data into lists and simple ‘recording functions’, MosaicCRM AccountPro provides incredible visibility of accounts. This effectively converts prospects into customers with uniquely designed sales processes that match your style, culture and customers.

• Customized business processes that drive successful sales operations
• Highly automated management of Pipelines, Key Activities, Closing Dates, Revenue Streams and Contract Renewal dates
• Strategic activities and objectives that match client buying cycles and preferences
• Maximize sales with structured activity and sales opportunity tracking for New Leads and Accounts

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About AFDB’s: Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie

Visualization has often been related to many forms of mind control. If you are concerned that too much visualizing will leak out of your head and into that of your competitors, or you’re just a little paranoid of the whole Rod Sterling thing, I draw your attention to this product. I know this appears to be just cheap commercialism but it’s not. It’s billed as ‘An Effective, Low-Cost Solution To Combating Mind-Control.’ Still not sold, read on:

“An Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (AFDB) is a type of headwear that can shield your brain from most electromagnetic psychotronic mind control carriers. AFDBs are inexpensive (even free if you don’t mind scrounging for thrown-out aluminum foil) and can be constructed by anyone with at least the dexterity of a chimp. This cheap and unobtrusive form of mind control protection offers real security to the masses. Not only do they protect against incoming signals, but they also block most forms of brain scanning and mind reading, keeping the secrets in your head truly secret. AFDBs are safe and operate automatically. All you do is make it and wear it and you’re good to go! Plus, AFDBs are stylish and comfortable.” What are you waiting for, order yours today!

Do we enhance sales with customer satisfaction or is it customer loyalty? The differences are night and day and the effectiveness of each needs careful scrutiny. To hear the gurus talk about the value of customer satisfaction, one would think it’s the beginning and end of the customer relationship. Maybe that’s because it’s easy to define the satisfaction mission: what business practices result in the highest customer satisfaction.

In turn, the rationale is the more satisfied the customer is, the higher degree of customer loyalty and more loyal customers buy more.  Right? Not necessarily. This is not to belittle the satisfaction process in any way because a lot of our selling is often directly related to the JD Power and Associates or Consumer Reports or similar evaluations about your product and company. This is where it starts to get confusing.

What is satisfaction?

It’s hard to find a constant relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. It depends on the value weight that the buyer assigns to the purchase. It could rate with little or no value, such as in the case of a commodity like cars. If what you sell is a commodity, the satisfaction value will usually be on par with your competition. In these cases it should not be the focus of your sales efforts because in the mind of your customer, he has placed little value on it and hence you are no different from anybody else.

What’s loyalty?

Loyalty is best summed up as the reason the customer wants to return and buy something from you. There is so much less said about customer loyalty relative to customer satisfaction, yet from a sales perspective, it might be the most important buying reason of all time.

Successful organizations have a common denominator: a long history of providing value.

What drives the ‘reasons’ behind customer loyalty? I believe strongly that loyalty is driven by value. And value is what the purchaser deems appropriate at that time.  Herein is the key: you must provide the exact value equation to the customer at the time of purchase. Equally valid is the fact that to maintain loyalty, you can’t rely on past levels of satisfaction. Your customer has likely changed and so has their perception of value. As sales people, our task is to recognize and uncover our customer’s ever changing value system. Change with them or lose them. It’s that simple and it’s that easy.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

CRM is an efficient method to acquire the satisfaction and loyalty drivers unique to your customer. This could play a key role in helping you manage what the customer perceives is the life cycle of your product (buying cycle) and tracking the current ‘value’ of why they want to buy from you.

• Monitor buying ‘reasons’
• Target buying cycles
• Strategic activities and objectives that match buying cycles and customer preferences
  
• Pre-formatted customer/prospect nurturing programs
• Case/Customer Support modules
• Integrate with social network/media venues

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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Protocols for Measuring and Optimizing Activity Results

Helping organizations and their users achieve their activity objectives is the hallmark of MosaicCRM. Our business processes offer a unique and important approach to measuring activity ‘results’.  This differentiation is particularity valuable when it comes to Account Retention and Acquisition: our activity protocols are vital to optimize activity effectiveness and success.

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The Big Brands make it look so very easy…and lucrative.

The hype around social networking has reached a fevered pitch and that should be warning enough to stop and take a closer look. A big part of the SMB interest in social networks is the irresistible allure and appeal of the numbers and dollars; potentially huge followings that are interested in you, your products, brand, culture and of course, want to buy your stuff.

Here’s the rub: achieving this nirvana has so far been limited to a few handfuls of mega brands and trying to imitate them could be economic suicide. It is almost as if social networking is  a damned if you do and damned if you don’t proposition. The ‘perception’ pressures are enormous: if you don’t ‘social network’ then you aren’t with it. If you do and do it half-assed, then the ‘perception’ is equally bad.

Social Networking ‘Things’

Big brands like Pepsi and Red Bull… organizations that attract numbers in the millions are plowing up the social network fields. So if they can do it, why not SMB’s? Well the why nots make for an interesting conversation of ‘things’. As an individual, micro business or SMB, missing any of the following ‘things’ could have a dramatic affect on the success of your social network investments.

• Cultural Thing: Today’s population is a mosaic (pardon the intended pun) of cultures, rarely one taking the commanding lead. However, branding your company with a culture is extremely valuable. Without strong cultural branding, will your social media have any significant impact?

• Generational Thing: it is a multi-generational thing. Big brands go far beyond the obvious as generational interests are not constrained or limited by traditional age brackets e.g. Grandma is having a blast with her IPad as is her granddaughter. Heck, she probably bought it for her granddaughter. As a SMB, good luck figuring out how to get into that conversation.

• Segmented Thing: It is multi-segmented and here’s what makes that interesting: the more segmented your market, the better the conversation you can carry on. Look at Red Bull: multi-everything and multi segmented via dozens of really interesting sports venues, each with a rabid fan following. Conversations here are damn interesting if you are a specific segmented follower and publisher e.g. messages and conversations that are segmented tend to be noticed and generate greater followings.

• Categorical Thing: Yes it is very categorical to be ultimately relevant but it is not so obvious. Carrying on a conversation with an automaker would predict you are in the market for a car. This is categorically correct and very cool if your organization can craft interesting messages and conversations. Costly too.

• Time Thing: Do you have the dedicated resources to be so interesting? Or, like me, is all your time consumed with running the business? There is no part time, something maybe this week approach to commercialized social networking. Also: does your target followers have the time? If they are like me running their business, probably not.

• Multi-Platform Thing: It is really tough to have a multi-presence  conversation on a single platform or network. Each has it’s own methodology, message style, culture and design appeal.

• Money Thing: Ha! Do you really believe the hype all this was cheap, almost ‘free’. It takes enormous sums of liquid cash to support a marketing budget to create, sustain and maintain a social media following. How liquid: it’s practically measured by the hour. Don’t forget the FREE part to keep your followers connected: add on to your budget promotions and discount offers to keep them coming for more.

Social Networking: Is it for you?

How many mega brand companies are like Red Bull? How many companies have a following that interesting? Can a SMB like mine carry on such interesting and dynamic conversations with millions… thousands…maybe hundreds or is it only a few dozen followers.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Fitting social networking into CRM and vice-versa is totally possible, even preferred over  having a second ‘social network’ database. Managing and collecting social network data and transposing this into your CRM program is radically different from the traditional historical based ‘interaction-transaction’ type recording.

Depending on the number of followers and how they are segmented with ‘the things’  will help to set the groundwork for more proactive communication routines within your CRM platform.

• Social networking requires you to adapt CRM to recognize the instant real time data and transpose this into live response data
• More than ever customer centric response models are vital: Re-engineer your CRM to optimize this closed loop marketing process
• Evaluate the type and degree of customer information needed to assist sales efforts in this medium
• Use CRM to spread the results of the customer experience within your organization

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Written by Bill Noonan, Founder and CEO of MosaicCRM.

I welcome your inquiries, questions and comments.

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Word of Mouth had gained our trust.

As consumers, we’ve all experienced and usually welcomed ‘word of mouth’ information from our friends, family and peers. Long ago the marketing guru’s declared you will live or die on the word of mouth reputation of your company or product; and for the past millennium it was a personal experience, often face-to-face and it became a natural extension of our conversations wherever we shared a common interest. It is precisely this long social history and deep relationship we have with word of mouth that social network marketing imitates.

For many consumers ‘caveat emptor’ applies here.

When it comes to social media, technically speaking, it’s no longer word of mouth and it’s never face-to-face. Social Media has the feel of something personal but to a great degree it is entirely manufactured. The big stars and entertainment shows that promote some networks are paid, yet you think it’s personal. It’s an ad but doesn’t look or feel like one. It has little to do with what’s real or who is real and the lines get really blurred. So just when you thought you were following your favorite movie star, guess what: there’s an ad masking as his or her personal favorites.

Word of Net Marketing is often a poser.

The problem is that a lot of online viral marketing that poses as social media is really aimed at creating a ‘buzz’ about the product. Instead of customer’s opinions, you are likely to get skillfully crafted hype by marketing ‘posers’ that, more often than not, stresses what you should think.

In this world you don’t need satisfied customers to promote your product by word of mouth: now all you need is a powerful spin (real or imagined) and away you go! Want to make millions using Social Media? Join the masses of promoters with the fast and easy way to make a killing using social media. Their premise: From toilet paper to elixirs, there’s a surefire way to get your message in front of millions of customers who are eager to buy the product. All you need is their special brand of social media marketing and you’re all set.

Social media does work.

For legitimate social media organizations it works because the ‘buzz’ is real and real customers support the value. On a personal level you can exchange your thoughts about a product easily and usually you are sharing this among other interested users. Perhaps social media marketing is best served up to compliment the traditional word of mouth conversations, calls and personal emails. Just to be sure, I’ll check out anything I learn online face-to-face at the water cooler with my homies.

Will it last?

The life cycle of any latest and greatest media tool is unpredictable for most of the stuff floating around the Internet. I suspect it lasts right up to the time something else replaces it. But based on SM’s ever growing popularity, there’s no end in sight for the magic of social media networking.

MosaicCRM Experts Tips – CRM & Social Media Integration

If relationship marketing is important to your organization, managing and collecting social network data and transposing this into your CRM program is radically different from the traditional historical based ‘interaction-transaction’ type recording. There’s a lot of talk about ‘Social CRM’ but hang on a minute, adapting traditional CRM with all the tools that work is possible, even preferred.

• Social networking requires you to adapt CRM to recognize the instant real time data and transpose this into live response data

• More than ever customer centric response models are vital: Re-engineer your CRM to optimize this closed loop marketing process
• Evaluate the type and degree of customer information needed to assist sales efforts in this medium

• Use CRM to spread the results of the customer experience within your organization

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Written by Bill Noonan, Founder and CEO of MosaicCRM.

I welcome your inquiries, questions and comments.

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