8

GROWTH IS A TEAM SPORT

Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.

Steve Jobs, Former CEO, Apple

We touched briefly on some means to appeal to customers in today’s online world, but as the latter continues to evolve at lightning speed, with new software, Websites, apps, and tools being introduced almost daily, it bears taking some time to discuss how some of the more commonplace tools can be used to attract and appeal to your ideal customers. Reflecting back on my earlier example of Larsen and Shaw, although a manufacturer with origins that dates back to the early 1900s and operating in what most would consider a highly traditional industry, Mary Jane Bushell and her team recognized the value of introducing more modern online tools such as social media and online chat to provide more options for customers to understand and engage with them, their products, and resources. In order to introduce these tools, however, Larsen and Shaw were strategic in making sure to consider which platforms were most likely used by their existing and potential customers. In this chapter, we’re going to explore exactly why being active in today’s online world is important, considerations unstoppable organizations make in doing so, the approaches and methods they deploy, and most importantly, the role employees play in helping bring an organization’s brand promises and commitments to life through higher sales and more revenue.

Why Informative Selling is Dead

When considering how employees can offer value to both existing and potential customers, it’s not just about the experience they provide, but also how they can entice customers through their knowledge of the product or service, and how they share this knowledge in a way that can be enticing or appealing. There are two assumptions that unstoppable organizations make that differ from what most organizations and their leadership are focusing on today; namely, that every employee in the organization is involved in sales and marketing to some extent, and that to be effective in this role, every employee must fully understand not only the value of the product or service, but how they can influence a customer’s decision to buy or remain loyal. This goes beyond our previous discussions on why connecting an employee and their role with the value they offer to customers is important, and ensures that every employee is versed in how they influence the buying decisions and loyalty of existing customers. Let me share two contrasting examples to demonstrate this point.

A couple of years ago my wife and I decided to move. We contacted our intranet and telephone provider in order to have our services moved. I contacted our provider approximately six weeks before our move date to request the transfer. After waiting on hold for nearly 10 minutes, I had the opportunity to speak to a customer service agent to arrange for the transfer. It took another five minutes to provide information to verify to the agent I was in fact who I said I was, following which I explained our upcoming move and my desire to arrange for the move date. The agent replied, “I’m sorry sir, but our new software doesn’t allow us to book moves so far in advance. If you can call back two weeks before your move, our new process will ensure you have a dedicated liaison to assist you with the move, and we can schedule everything at that time.” After challenging this approach and the likelihood of something going wrong, I was reassured this new process was pain-free and would meet my needs. Having no further options, I hung up and rescheduled to make a second call two weeks prior to our move. The call in its entirety took about 25 minutes.

Two weeks prior to our move, I contacted the provider again, spending virtually the identical amount of time on the phone on hold, re-explaining my situation. I was transferred to a “specialist” who took down my information and reassured me we were good to go. Twenty-five minutes later, I hung up satisfied that everything was set. Unfortunately, the day before our move I was contacted by the provider’s scheduling department who left a message advising that the installer for our area was ill and unable to perform the installation on the scheduled day (Friday), and would return on Monday at 9 a.m. to complete it. This would have been fine if not for the fact that:

1. We had no intention of spending the weekend without Internet and phone.
2. The new program “guaranteed” installation on the date organized, as long as notice was given two weeks prior to moving, which we had done.
3. Neither my wife nor I were going to be home Monday at 9 a.m. to meet the installer.

As I’m sure you can imagine, at this point my wife and I were quite perturbed. I attempted to contact my designated “liaison” four separate times, leaving a message three of those times during the next 48 hours with no response and no return call. On Monday, my wife rearranged her schedule, as did I, to meet the installer, who upon his arrival and hearing our story suggested that the installer in the area was not in fact sick, as it was he. He told us that the scheduling department, seeing that we were the only installation in our area on Friday, changed his schedule and moved him elsewhere for the day, choosing to wait until Monday when there were other installations scheduled near our area. All of the commitments made were changed on account of more efficient scheduling. In effect, the scheduling department misled us because of their obligation to schedule installers in the most efficient means possible.

When you break this entire situation down, there are some clear gaps.

1. The marketing department who were pushing the new “dedicated liaison” approach had failed to mention in their advertising that the “contact us two weeks prior to your move” was not optional, but now a necessity because of the software functionality used by the customer service agents.
2. Whoever had purchased and set up the software used by the customer service agents had either selected a solution that did not provide agents with flexibility to override the scheduling for customer convenience, or had not properly trained customer service agents to ensure they were notified of such functionality.
3. Customer service agents, known in this situation as “liaisons,” had apparently never been told that they were to promptly return all customer calls. Two years later, I’m still waiting on Samantha to return my call.
4. The scheduling department, clearly pushed and rewarded to ensure efficient scheduling of installers, were completely disconnected with the promises being made by both marketing and the customer service agents (or liaisons).
5. The installer was also unaware of the marketing campaign and the promises made, and had not been coached on how to respond to customers in the event the intended system broke down. We appreciated his honesty, but the light he shed on the truth only served to build our resentment for the service provider.

This is a perfect example of a clear breakdown in communication between departments. The employees and their respective departments in this instance were either unaware of or completely oblivious to how their roles work together to support the customer. Each person I spoke with personally was quite friendly and attempted to be helpful, but was not clearly aware of how their actions and words influenced the value my wife and I received, or didn’t receive. A few questions, then, remain for us to consider when it comes to avoiding such a catastrophe in your organization, namely:

1. How does this type of disconnect, between a well-strategized marketing campaign and the actual execution of the strategy, happen? What are the contributing factors?
2. Why in this instance were so many employees in different departments seemingly oblivious to how the program was supposed to operate, at least according to what was outlined in the marketing materials?
3. What is the severity of this incident specific to how it may have influenced existing and potential customers in their decisions to either buy from or remain loyal to this provider?

In a day and age in which customers have easy access to information about your products and services through the click of a button, a failure such as the one to deliver on a customer’s expectations can be devastating. As we discussed in earlier chapters, in an age where information is easily accessible, our expectations relative to what we value have grown, as has our ability to contrast what we expected to receive versus what we actually received. Consider that 15 or 20 years ago, had this provider created a similar program, the only way we might have known about it is through a written flier, likely double-paged, which contained a few details about the program and then some other promotional material. The only way to validate this information was to call a customer service agent and talk about what we had read. Today, I can go online to obtain the same information, but typically in much more detail. With this additional information, I could also visit social media pages to validate the offer, as well as review comments and Google reviews, and within a few short minutes I could see what the company’s competitors were doing in contrast.

Informative selling—telling customers what is valuable about a product or service—is dead as customers can access this information today by themselves in various formats. Instead, the key influence on an organization’s ability to sustain and grow its revenue and customer base is to ensure that information shared online and through various marketing campaigns and programs is:

Relevant—built in the field with the employees who are serving customers. They know what customers want and need, and more importantly, understand what they are capable of delivering within the constraints of existing systems, processes, and time.

Clear—language should make sense to both customers and employees, avoiding legalese and overcomplicated words. I call this the “slap you upside the head with a wet fish” approach. You should know and understand when it happens.

Aligned—marketing messages shared across different marketing materials and between different marketing platforms must align with one another, with zero variance. In addition, the information that is portrayed must directly reflect what was discussed and shared by employees. Any inconsistencies only serve to confuse both customers and employees, reducing trust of the source and leading to mistakes and misinterpretations.

Not following these three golden rules of providing information that is relevant, clear, and aligned, in an age where anyone can go online and virtually kill a company’s brand within minutes if their experience is not what they expected, is too risky. Refer back to my earlier mention of United Airlines ruining Dave Carroll’s guitar, resulting in Dave writing a song and creating a video about the situation that has well over 15 million hits as I write this.¹

Not doing what you say you are going to do not only detracts from value, it creates doubts about the authenticity of your organization, its products or services, and the people who work within it; worse yet, is committing something to customers that you are unable to reasonably deliver through your employees (or for which your employees fail to understand how they can deliver). Your employees are your conduits to your customers; they interpret what you say you will do, and in turn explain and act upon their interpretation with your customers. If there is lack of clarity, alignment, or realism for your employees, then revenue will diminish as a result.

Why Every Employee is in Sales and Marketing

Because customers today are so “connected,” it has never been more important than now to ensure that marketing campaigns are “realistic.” Making promises that can’t be consistently delivered, or that haven’t been identified as possible through your employees, is simply a recipe for disaster. Unstoppable organizations such as Blommer Chocolate of Canada realize that developing and successfully delivering on commitments, be they to customers, shareholders, or even a parent company begins with employees. Doug Harper is the general manager of Blommer Chocolate. In Doug’s journey with his team in building a highly engaged workforce, he has ensured each year that goals and objectives that are developed by the leadership team are cascaded downward with a significant amount of input and ideas from employees in terms of the goals and how they plan to accomplish them. During our interview, Doug shared that being a small chocolate factory (there’s a book in there somewhere—Doug and the Chocolate Factory?) the name of the game is consistently high quality chocolate in volumes that meet the committed targets. With goals and targets set, Doug and his leadership team ensure that employees are empowered as self-directed units to work together on problem-solving team challenges that in turn support improving daily operations. The combination of employee involvement in the planning for and execution of goals, along with the empowered teams, not only builds higher levels of employee engagement, but has also ensured that every goal was successfully achieved in the most recent fiscal year.

Doug’s approach makes sense when setting corporate objectives. But what about connecting employees with helping the organization deliver on the claims and promises made in marketing materials and sales campaigns? This is where involving employees at all levels of the organization, more so than just those in sales and marketing departments, can guarantee that marketing materials, campaigns, and brand strategies consist of specific points of value that are not only appealing to customers, but also reasonably achievable by employees. In circumstances where I have helped CEOs and executives build their marketing and sales campaigns, we have commenced with employees from across the organization along with ideal customers, working closely with marketing and sales in order to assess and develop campaigns, programs, and promotions that fully describe an organization’s goods or services. This approach involving customers occurs in four specific stages, namely:

1. Soliciting customer feedback and information.
2. Soliciting employee feedback and information.
3. Connecting feedback (from both customer and employee) with the value proposition and brand promises made by the organization.
4. Collaborative design of supporting marketing and selling materials and approaches.

In stage 1, customer feedback can be collected in various ways, including:

• Direct contact customer interviews, best completed face-to-face or, if not possible, by telephone, with questions related to the value of the product or service and their experience.
• Customer surveys, typically done electronically and presented in the first three months of the customer’s experience, with questions related to understanding the value of the product or service to the customer.
• A customer advisory board consisting of a handful of long-standing customers who hold a trusted relationship and will provide feedback that is both forthright and honest relative to the pros and cons of the product or service, its quality, effectiveness, and ability to satisfy the original value commitment.
• Customer testimonials, gathered as part of the process of customer attraction and retention, at various times in the product or service life cycle, the information which can be used to further assess the points of value sought and derived by customers in different companies and segments.

In stage 2, employee feedback is collected in various ways, including:

• Employee interviews, best done in person, to understand the gaps in perception between what customers expect to receive and what they actually receive.
• Employee feedback methods such as a feedback form process on the production floor where employees fill out forms and submit them for review by a peer group.
• Employee idea boards, sometimes called “imagine” boards. Employees are encouraged to write down any and all ideas related to providing customers with a better experience or more value with the existing products or services.
• Offering specific areas on a company-wide intranet where employees can input their ideas to be shared with others and assessed by a group of peers is also a best practice.
• Focus groups consisting of a cross-section of employees from different work areas focused on a specific product or service and how to fully describe and define the value the product or service can provide.

In stage 3, all of the input gathered is connected with the value or brand promised. This is most effectively done by creating a team that combines a cross-section of employees from various departments, along with those from marketing and sales who come together to review feedback and assess how it can be applied to create relevant and valuable marketing materials. During these sessions, the guidelines for the team to ensure they reach a consensus and the best possible outcome include:

• Disagreement on the meaning of feedback collected is to be addressed directly with the individual(s) who provided it, rather than any assumptions being drawn.
• Feedback is to be “bucketed” into categories by the team, creating value streams that can be used for different segments of customers or different applications of the product or service. For example, the feedback about the value of the large size of a new car might be best used to appeal to older generations who seek more room for comfort, as well as young families who need to carry around more toys and other ancillary items for their children. The feedback may have come from a single source, but if categorized and divided, it can provide insights into the value received by different segments of customers.
• The team is not to assess feedback against existing materials, but instead develop new materials, slogans, and information pertaining to the product or service. Starting with existing materials can sway opinions and decisions as to what feedback is relevant and what isn’t. In this process, we want the group to start from what they have and what they know to be true, not what has been defined by others in the past.
• Ideas that result from the collaboration between employees and marketing and sales are to be tested with other employees and customers before ever being defined. This field-testing ensures that groupthink does not result in inadequate information.

With ideas fleshed out and further validated, the final stage is creating marketing and selling materials that use the new found information. Unlike the previous stages, employees take a back seat to the expertise of marketing, allowing them to update or create marketing vehicles that will reach the intended audience. Although employees are comfortable and acquainted with the value the products or services will bring to customers, in reality they are not necessarily the experts in how to reach the customers, although they will often have valuable input. In this situation, let marketing draw upon their expertise of how to reach existing and potential customers, and share these avenues and ideas with the teams in order to obtain feedback and further ideas. Although it may appear there is a risk that marketing will ignore feedback that may downplay or completely dismiss the ideas they create, that is not the case. In reality, by following the previous stages, a collaborative union amongst team members will have evolved—one in which employees have formed trusted relationships and can share and accept openly feedback from others. The risk that marketing will run off with some harebrained idea is unlikely if not impossible at this stage.

For a printable version of this exercise, visit www.unstoppableorganization.com.

It was only a year ago now that I did some work with a service-based organization following the approach above. We formed a collaborative group of nearly 15 employees from marketing, sales, accounting, customer service, event planning, and operations to collect feedback from customers (both existing and potential) as well as employees on the value the organization provided. This feedback, collected through stages 1 and 2 of the process, was then reviewed and discussed relative to new marketing and selling strategies. These discussions fueled revisions to existing marketing materials and selling approaches with customers, as well as arming employees with greater information, which allowed them to become more effective at servicing their customers and providing value. Aside from creating new materials, updated content, and descriptions on their Website, some examples of how feedback influenced employees in supporting marketing and selling were as follows:

• Accounting began engaging with customers when contacting them regarding outstanding payments, using a scripted approach to best understand the value customers perceived from the service, and how receivables might ease their payment burden through options such as discounted terms, and alternate payment options such as approved credit.
• Operations began to partner with sales in attending prospective customer meetings, bridging the gap between what sales wanted to promise and what operations could reasonably deliver. In this instance, pricing quoted for customers became more closely in-line with costs as operations and sales collaborated on the quoting process.
• Customer service began attending customer meetings with sales, reducing the risk of their being placed in the “middleman” position and becoming more acquainted with the various contacts within the organization, assisting them in being more effective.
• Event planning changed their approach from signing up sponsors in preconference to doing so during conference meetings, committing to engage with sponsors who attended shows, seeking to build stronger face-to-face relationships and, in turn, signing sponsors who were happy with attendance and traffic for future events on the spot.

These are only a few of the examples that resulted from employees participating in this process. The list of ideas and actions that came from this collaborative approach to forming marketing and selling strategies was astounding. Further, employees and customers became a significant component of the marketing and selling process, ensuring that the information and content presented to customers was relevant, clear, and aligned with what was possible. More importantly, as the process progressed, all employees of the organization became more in tune with what and how they offered value to the customer, becoming in essence an informal component of the marketing and selling teams.

Creating Your Marketing and Selling Machine

Engaging employees and customers in developing marketing and selling materials, which in turn feeds marketing and selling activities, isn’t new; but in my experience, it’s rare. Unstoppable organizations recognize that to have employees work in isolation is detrimental to their growth. If every employee is only an expert in their role or department, then it usually results in viewing their role, or at least that of their department, as the most important in the organization. In reality, all roles are necessary if an organization is to provide value to its customers. There’s a story I read that outlines this premise. During a tour of NASA many years ago, a man was mopping the floor near the offices, strategically placing “Slippery When Wet” signs as he mopped. When the man was asked how his role contributed to putting a man on the moon, he said without hesitation, “My job is to reduce lost time accidents by ensuring the floor is slip free and people are aware of hazards.” Though the truth of that story may be dubious, the message is clear. This is a far cry from someone who might respond with, “I’m just the caretaker here.” As we’ve discussed repeatedly, when we make an effort to involve employees in the growth of our organization, we create not only a more engaged employee, but also indirectly benefit through developing an additional marketing and selling resource someone who is committed to ensuring existing customers are satisfied, and potential customers are aware of why they should engage their company. Your people, in effect, are your extended sales and marketing team if you provide them the information and knowledge.

I’m the first to admit that it is unlikely someone in accounting will want to hit the road and begin taking potential customers out for lunch. However, when your employees truly understand their role is to influence customers to repeatedly buy your products or services, the results, at least from a growth and revenue standpoint, can be powerful.

Our local Nissan dealer is a great example of this. After several years of having a manager oversee the service department, Shawn Ringel decided to shift the dealership’s focus to directly supporting the advisors who were in fact the key to creating a more positive customer experience. He reconfigured the service team, removing the service manager role and instead investing in adding a service advisor to the team. He stepped in temporarily to work directly with team members and the entire service department to make sure they had everything they needed to provide the best possible environment for customers. After meeting with each of the service technicians, the service advisors, and several longstanding and forthright customers about their experience, Shawn began working with the advisors to introduce changes that were identified during the interviews. New screens were installed at the back of the service counter, allowing customers to clearly see all pricing and service options; new methods for service technicians to report their time on jobs were introduced, a direct result of recommendations made by the technicians. And of course, Shawn spent time with the advisors introducing them to various reports and data that had only previously been accessed and used by the service manager. By eliminating a layer of management and engaging both with employees and customers, Shawn was able to collaborate with his team to create an environment in which customer satisfaction (and in turn customer sales) increased. As he says, “The improvements were not my ideas; I only acted as the conduit between our great employees and fantastic customers. My role was to ensure there were no barriers to improving our customer’s experience, and as a result, our employees are more focused on satisfying our customers than ever before.”

This is a powerful example, but I realize that you might doubt the power or ability to introduce this approach because your business focus is selling direct to other businesses (B2B) versus consumers (B2C). Let me reassure you that the process is the same, as are the results. I can share with you an example of a large distributor, whom I worked with just over a year ago. When I met the division president, we discussed their challenges related to growth, which he summarized like this: “Shawn, if I could get my sales people to think like service, and my service people to think like sales, I’d be all set.” The key issue impacting growth, he explained, was that sales often misquoted jobs, forcing service to spend additional time on jobs, often consuming additional materials. Knowing this inconsistency was not the customer’s fault, costs were generally not passed along to the customer and, therefore, a substantially high number of jobs were in fact underquoted. The company was losing money.

Following the stages set forth earlier in this chapter, I began interviewing several customers to obtain their feedback on the company, its products (hoses), installation, and repair services, as well as perceptions of employees that the customers contacted. There was a clear trend. Customers experienced what the division president had referred to, as sales and service would often complain about each other while in the presence of customers. For example, if sales quoted a job, service would complain about sales and their inability to quote when arriving to install the hoses. In turn, if service did a repair and made recommendations on replacement of hoses, sales would often push back and tell customers, “Service really shouldn’t be trying to sell to you.” I then interviewed employees from the sales, service, and customer service areas of the business to understand how we could further improve the customer’s experience. Feedback from each of sales and service was that the other group didn’t understand how to properly quote work; feedback from customer service was that they were often the referee between sales, service, and the customer, placing them in a very uncomfortable position. The three departments clearly demonstrated that there was a lack of awareness amongst the organization as to the value each role played in servicing the customer. This was leading to internal disagreements and infighting that was at times severe. Morale was low and several key people shared their desire to leave the company.

Armed with this information, I returned to the division president with a simple suggestion: create a quoting team that consisted of someone in sales and someone in service. For every new customer account, sales would always take someone from service with them when doing any quoting. For anyone in service already onsite who identifies an additional need, they would revisit the customer site with sales to further assess the situation.

Following the practices we outlined in Chapter 6 and 7, we spent time with employees in sales, service, and customer service, sharing with them customer feedback and helping each employee understand how their role contributed to the customer’s experience. In addition, we spent time with the teams brainstorming ideas on how to further increase the value customers were experiencing. As you might imagine, the results were astounding. Through some collaborative discussions came several recommendations on how each role could work more collaboratively, resulting ultimately in customer quote values increasing, while time on customer installations was reduced. Customer complaints about defects or incomplete service diminished, and overall customer satisfaction improved. Most importantly, through these exercises the organization realized additional selling and service opportunities that led to higher revenues. By creating a more collaborative team of employees focused on adding value to the customer, sales and revenue grew. As you might also imagine, this collaborative approach resulted in improved morale as infighting amongst employees was reduced dramatically.

Creating a marketing and selling machine isn’t about putting more people in the marketing or sales department, but instead is about helping employees understand how they do and can influence customers, and involving them in connecting their capabilities with the value customers seek.