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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In the world seemingly on a rudderless course steered by automated ‘personalized’ marketing; we are inundated with the latest and greatest sales behavior predictions using social media, networking, blogging, video platforms… a digital cornucopia of the ‘it’ factors pointed at customers that will buy.

Beware of sales behavior predictions.

Some of the statistical data is downright poor and maybe that’s because simple statistics rely too much on buying habits under a limited number of situations, markets or conditions that bear little resemblance to what you sell. Few experts are willing to debunk these easy and simple hypothetic links e.g. a social network platform that works for selling Pepsi may have little relativity for selling houses.

Yet many a marketing guru would have your company totally revamp its selling process based on these statistics; worse yet with relatively ‘green fielding’ methodologies in lieu of tried and true methods.

Social Media Sales Stats: Does this mean the end of Wal-Mart?

Even when demographic and econometric modeling is added, a statistic hypothesis of a certain sales behavior doesn’t necessarily mean anything. For example, Twitter touts 200 million users. Even with such screaming growth, does this new wave of internet marketing spell the end to Wal-Mart? Hardly, for many solid reasons, not the least is new internet platforms are a figurative drop in the bucket. The 176 million living and breathing customers that visit Wal-Mart stores weekly and ‘stay’ awhile and ‘buy’ vastly outnumber Twitter and MySpace.

Stats tell you what customers aren’t buying.

Car crashes killed 34,000 people in 2009 and in 2008 there were six million accidents, about a one in five chance it will be your time. No one could possibly sell cars based on these statistics alone. Car manufacturers avoid the poor statistics and replaced them with items that do not change the statistical facts: zero interest loans, free this and more that. They have used poor stats to their benefit: ignore what customers aren’t buying.

Great stats can fail to sell.

Airlines can statistically prove air travel is many times safer than traveling by car. However, many a travel plan is based on a perceived and intense decision not to fly for safety reasons. As infinitesimal as the risk may be, the buying decision for air travel is not based on favorable safety statistics. So airlines ignore statistics that won’t sell: a hugely favorable safety statistic is something they can’t sell because many passengers aren’t buying it.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner
Maximize your statistical edge: “Sell a ‘Trend”

Even with exposure to the unlimited ‘customers’ on the net, selling a trend is possibly the only edge over blanket numerical statistics. What makes a trend is selling to good markets and ignoring weak markets, niches or products with proven methods and options that accentuate your edge.

At MosaicCRM we rely on tried and true statistics, particularly in the two vital areas of activities and sales opportunities.

• Market Analytics show aging, margin, unit volumes and revenue distribution is a single step
• Track Stalled Opportunities as an indicator of competition, sales programs and sales cycles
• Identify Customer Buying Cycles to minimize the selling cycle and maximize personnel deployment

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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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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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Mirroring our Masters

In America over 77 million dogs have owners. Then it’s not so unreasonable to imagine that in the scheme of modern urban life that they have an affinity to look like their owners. During a recent lunch my guests discussed this phenomenon and for an added wrinkle we even went so far as to match a few business associates with the dog they owned. One commented how uncanny it was that their General Manager looked remarkably like his mutt. Upon further reflection the business too was beginning to look unremarkable, like her GM. This was not an appealing spectacle.

How does the leader look?

With dogs or business, one reason we might mirror our master is that we tend to seek out those things that are most familiar to us and readily adopt those traits. Some may argue that it starts out when owners pick their dogs, or staff, they unconsciously choose them because they truly reflect the owner, or boss as the case may be. The lesson learned is be careful of what you want your business to look like as it will invariably reflect just how the leader looks.

The Customer’s perception is everything.

I believe the same logic applies for customers: a reflection of them. They find what appeals to them and what doesn’t. This is beyond nettlesome because the ‘look’ or perception for most customers is everything. Worry too about the fact that most people don’t necessarily act in accordance with your reality quite as much as they do on their own individual perception of ‘reality’. To that end, our customer’s reality, good, bad or indifferent, is formed to a large extent by what companies do and not what they say.

Follow the bouncing ball.

As business management and customers accelerate even further away from each other, success is often influenced to an immense degree by decision makers who have little experience or a ‘look’ for sales. In fact, your surroundings can begin to look astonishingly unfriendly, even somewhat dog-eared; particularly when the company’s current nirvana is simply the latest Guerrilla tactic that entirely ignores ‘reality’. Or the brains behind the new budget has patently little appreciation for brand or value; like the premier airline I flew last week whose management believes a fraction of an ounce of pretzels, a half of a can of soda, with questionable housekeeping and seats so close I could perform dental work will, of course, endear me to fly with them again.

Solution: Perception Truths.

If you find yourself or a client in this position what are you to do? Well there are a few Perception Truths I devised you can always use as a fall back.

• Brand Personality: Product Excellence and Superiority a.k.a. Value

Be ever vigilant for someone mucking it up. Your fundamental task is to correctly identify the customer’s preference for brand over price.  Look for customer clues where they value the significance of a great reputation, or beneficial cost of ownership matters like durability, warranties, multi task applications and even pretentiousness and esteem are striking buying qualities. If you’re not attracting enough of these types, then either you, the company’s marketing or its business style needs correction.

• Service

Practically nothing beats a high level of customer satisfaction, it’s not hard to understand why: customers want a pleasant buying experience together with attentive and responsive customer service, from both the sales and support staff. Lose this and you have lost the profitability associated with ‘value’ …and likely the customer. Now tell me again how much airline ‘A’ saved on those pretzels?

• Costs

Everyone knows that better products cost more and cheap products are made up of cheap bits and pieces. When it comes to cost, it’s the thing your customer perceives as price, your task is to hone in on what’s superior about your product or service. That’s because surprisingly few customers will bother to take the effort to figure it out on their own. Worse yet I am given to wonder why some salespeople can’t let go of customers that have little conscience of cost.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

There is no better tool than a well configured CRM program to monitor and manage perception truths. At MosaicCRM, we add simple yet effective fields to account monitors and specific reports in these key areas:

• Buying Qualities:
  

  Monitor and record customer preferences and translate that data into optimized sales cycle management tools

• Service Factors:
  

  Customer satisfaction, service and Case Management components tie the entire company relationship to the customer experience

• Value:
  

  Monitor where you are wining against competition, one click recording of sales factors, value milestones, even managing road blocks

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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When business was flying and financing was easy, getting the sale was sufficient enough and adopting a strict CRM protocol, along with a lot of other ‘protocols’, usually went by the wayside. Fast forward a couple of years into a deep recession to upset that status quo: Account Retention and Acquisition protocols are absolutely vital to success, mainly because nobody has the money or enough runway to wing it or buyers who have money or time to chance it.

1: Break the Outlook habit to optimize sales potential.

CRM users always gripe it is time consuming to enter data. Well, in comparison to what, Outlook or a spreadsheet? Outlook is pathetically inefficient and like cigarettes, has everyone addicted to it and a habit that needs to be broken. There is no possible way a contact manager or excel can be more efficient and effective than CRM to optimize sales.

• Use CRM to maintain a customer relationship e.g. manage all things related to revenue

2: ‘Vital’ information minimums.

As a company, detail exactly the vital information needed to acquire and maintain a sales relationship with the customer. You don’t need a record of every voice mail message, or the type of dog the contact has. Yet typically vital info is ignored e.g. full names, telephone numbers, email addresses, decision making authority. The lack of vital communication factors makes for a crippled CRM database that can only reference historical data and not the future.

Warning: The Social media craze might be killing your efficiency. So much of the contact/account data included in these programs is useless to your mission. Rarely will it qualify or add to a sales opportunity. Be very wary here of value versus results.

• Set out the required info
• Insist on 100% compliance

3: Monitor Results, not Activities

It is simply all about the results and not the volume of activities. The value of recording activity numbers with non-result actions e.g. leaving a voice mail message or sending a generic email is negligible.

• Your CRM must be monitoring next step ‘results’ of activities.

4: Ratios

What is working really boils down to ratios: how many calls develop how many appointments that result in so many proposals etc. Sloppy activity management will come home to roost in a big way.  Measuring results is the only way to can find out e.g.

• Power Caller User: 100’s of calls and low appointment results are telling in so many ways
• Least Resistance User: Low Calls-High Email is this opening opportunities or not?

5: Get Maximum Activity Coverage

Scheduling one activity at a time by ‘opportunity’ is a really hard way to plan ahead. You’ve profiled and rated accounts right? Good, then sort your database and start scheduling en masse. Plus, dedicate a given time every week for scheduling.

• Insist there is a scheduled activity at all times for every Key Account, Pipeline Opportunity Account and Qualified Prospect. It is impossible to argue this from a sales person point of view… even harder to explain why not to management.
• Monitor activity ‘results’ associated with Opportunities: what’s open, closed, lost, a maybe… this is the most important criteria with which to measure activity efforts.
• Add another activity when completing one.

MosaicCRM Experts Corner

Helping users achieve their activity objectives and making each one count is the hallmark of MosaicCRM. Here are a few built in systems we deploy to manage customer retention  and acquisition activities:

• Automatic Reschedule: Past due activities are automatically rescheduled by the system
• Mosaic ‘Marvel’: This tool pre-configures any number of specific activities by specific users in one click. Superb for customer retention routines, lead nurturing and prospect hunting.
• Daily Activity Manager: One simple screen for adding and completing all activities
• Dynamic Activity Objectives: Set number goals for Calls, Appointments, Presentations and Email and get instant monitoring by day, week and month
• Activity Results: Monitor results achieved by activities across the board or by individual
• Comparison Results: Activity comparisons for scheduled, completed numbers and overall database coverage
• Priority Alerts: All activities affecting accounts are profiled  and instant alerts issued

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Mastering Simplicity

At MosaicCRM we try to imitate a paper clip: master simplicity and keeping it simple. The traditional paper clip is a wonder of simplicity and the essence of form follows function. For over a century, it still works in spite of the fact that a lot of imitators have come and gone. Seemingly everybody’s got a simple this CRM or a simple that CRM to sell. The reality is there’s nothing simple about selling. Making CRM look simple, however, is the mark of a professional.

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Written by
Bill Noonan, CEO MosaicCRM

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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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