Within days of receiving my PC Magazine renewal invoice, I saw an insert in the actual magazine with a better, lower rate. I called up PC Magazine and told them I wanted to renew my subscription at the lower rate. No problem. The customer service representative asked for the little code on the postcard insert and processed my renewal order.

Lowest Price

If you’ve put an offer out there for customers, you need to honor that even if you subsequently raise prices. Naturally, some prices are “limited time offers” but those need to be clearly stated as such.

I was happy I wasn’t hassled over a few pennies but my renewal experience left me wondering why I even had to request the lower rate in the first place.

Reward Existing Customers

Why didn’t PC Magazine just invoice me at the lower rate from the start? Probably because they wanted more of my money. Your company may assume that customers will automatically fork over the amount you’re asking because they are existing customers. However, if you’re caught in the act of trying to squeeze more out of a faithful customer, they may just lose that faith in you.

New Versus Existing Customers

I see too many offers these days for “new customers” or “new subscribers only.” What about your existing customer base? Incentives are nice to turn prospects into clients. However, don’t let those same incentives alienate your current customers.

For example, look at SBC, now merged with AT&T, the provider of my home DSL Internet service. If I was a new customer, I’d get a greatly reduced rate. As an existing customer, when I renew my annual service, I get to pay a higher rate. Situations like this could lead customers to leave and take advantage of a competitor’s introductory rate.

Use Incentives for Current Customers

Remember, it is cheaper to retain your current customer than it is to gain a new one. Nurture your current customers and treat them as valued individuals. Offer existing customers their own incentives and benefits for which “new customers” aren’t eligible. This will build up a special “member’s club” atmosphere that perpetually encourages customers to stay faithful to your company.

A few weeks ago I took a motorcycle riding course. To start the class, the instructor wanted everyone to introduce themselves and specifically address three things:

• our expectations for the class
• any concerns we had
• our motorcycle experience, if any

These three topics allowed our instructor to tailor his lessons to our individual needs. He was able to adjust the complexity of topics to our understanding and experience.

As I was a motorcycle novice going into the class, I surely would have been left behind or at least confused had the instructor not found out our individual situations and adjusted accordingly.

Just like my instructor had his class as an audience, you too, have an audience. Your audience is all those people to whom you market your products. Your customers are the audience. In fact, anyone with whom you do business is your audience.

You’ll be able to sell to more prospects, close more deals, and make happy customers if you better understand their individual situations.

Identify

To begin, you need to understand your customer’s circumstances. You can do this via several methods:

• Do some background checking on the customer before your meeting
• Lead prospects down a self-selecting path that clearly identifies the type of customer they would be. This can be done via direct mailings, websites, or phone trees that funnel the customer to a proper classification.
• Ask the customer
• Infer expectations based on the situation, environment, or first impressions. (Be careful with this one because you could be wrong.)

Expectations

Everyone comes to your business with a set of expectations. They may have heard about you from a friend or read about your service on a blog. Any way you slice it, the customer is expecting a particular outcome.

If your company can meet that expectation, you’ve got the sale. On the other hand, if you can’t meet the expectation, you’ll have some negative consequences.

There are two potential paths your customer can travel: you can meet expectations or you can’t.

Meet Expectations

If you’ve identified the customer’s expectation as one you can meet, it is your lucky day. Just do what you do best and everything should be fine. The bonus is that once you know the customer’s expectation, you can exceed the bare minimum and look like a hero (e.g. underpromise and overdeliver).

Reset Expectations

When you realize that you can’t meet your customer’s expectations, you need to reset the expectation. Clarify what exactly you can deliver and what you won’t. Ideally, you can help the customer understand that you can provide what they really need and not what they thought they needed.

However, if you realistically can’t meet the demand, you need to admit that fact so that you don’t set yourself up for failure. In this case, try to refer the customer to someone you trust that can complete the job.

Concerns

Once you’ve identified the customer’s concerns, you can customize your marketing or sales message to resolve those doubts. Explain how your product removes any need for concern because of it’s features, warranty, support, guarantee, or you-name-it characteristic.

Address any concerns that you identify so they no longer act as barriers to the sale. Be aware that the customer may not tell you everything she is worried about so be prepared to resolve unspoken concerns.

Experience

What type of history does someone have with your product or even your company? Be flexible in your message when you’re selling to newbies and respect the veteran customer by skipping the basics.

If a customer had a great experience with you in the past, they may be more forgiving of mistakes this time, or they may just hold you to that higher standard. Every encounter with a customer must stand on its own merits. You can’t rely on past successes or hide behind past failures. Leverage your knowledge of a customer’s past experience to create a quality one today and for each subsequent visit.

Do all of your customers speak the same language as you do? If not, you’ll need to be sure you’re communicating clearly if you want their business.

Languages

Obviously if you’re speaking English and your customer Spanish, there will be some communication gaps. When you know your customer base will speak different languages, plan ahead:

• Hire bilingual employees
• Globalize your website by offering content in multiple languages
• Provide language options in your automated phone tree menu
• Include other languages side by side on your product labels and packaging

Dialects

Just because you both speak Spanish doesn’t mean you’ll completely understand each other. I became fluent in Spanish during two years in Chile. However, I still can’t understand some Cubans. We’re speaking the same “language” but the manner of speaking is very different.

When dialect presents a problem, be patient and try to leverage local or regional employees or resources to your advantage.

Vocabulary

Vocabulary is one of the biggest dialect challenges. During my time in Chile, I fell in love with a sweet caramel spread called “manjar” that was served on bread and pastries. Upon returning to the United States, I couldn’t find anything like manjar.

After I moved to Texas, I found out that manjar was known as “dulce de leche.” Different name, but the same product. Regional Spanish variants called manjar a handful of other names. Food manufacturer Nestle recognized this vocabulary issue and incorporated a solution into their product packaging. Notice the multiple names under the main “Dulce de Leche” title:

Be sure that you are using the right vocabulary with your customers. Otherwise they may be looking right at your product and not know it is what they need.

Jargon

A specific type of vocabulary is jargon. Every industry tends to have its own specialized language for describing its processes, products, or services. When dealing with customers, talk in plain, simple terms until you’ve established that the customer has a base understanding of your industry. Then you can venture into using technical jargon.

Use Pictures

Try to supplement your marketing copy and communications with pictures, drawings, photographs, etc. Any visual aid that can accompany your message will help bridge language barriers. When taking advantage of gratuitous use of stock photography, be sure your picture truly matches your message. Unchecked use may be inappropriate unless it really matches what is being communicated.

Personalized Message

When you tailor your marketing, sales, or corporate communications to the audience’s language needs, you’re guaranteed that they’re one step closer to understanding your message. In addition, they will appreciate that you acknowledge them and their specific needs. If you can meet their language needs, surely you have a product that will solve their problem.

Buy Crossing the Chasm from Amazon

Geoffrey Moore’s bestseller Crossing the Chasm dives into the mechanics of marketing your high-tech product all the way from inception to the mainstream customer.

Moore groups customers by where they are most likely to buy in your product’s life cycle. Each of these categories is then analyzed and you are shown how best to market to each of these groups:

Innovators

Innovators pursue new technology products aggressively … because technology is a central interest in their life, regardless of what function it is performing.

This group is obviously the easiest to persuade to try out your product. They become pivotal in pushing your product along to the next group.

Early Adopters

Early Adopters … buy into new product concepts very early in their life cycle … they are people who find it easy to imagine, understand, and appreciate the benefits of a new technology, and to relate these potential benefits to their concerns.

These influencing individuals will help give credibility to your product in your attempts to move to the mainstream public.

Early Majority

The Early Majority … are driven by a strong sense of practicality. They know that many of these new-fangled inventions end up as passing fads, so they are content to wait and see how other people are making out before they buy in themselves.

Late Majority

They wait until something has become an established standard, and even then they want to see lots of support and tend to buy, therefore, from large, well-established companies.

Laggards

These people simply don’t want anything to do with new technology

Don’t waste your energy on this group. In fact, it may be more valuable to focus on a new product by the time you hit this part of the customer base.

The Bell Curve

These groups form a bell curve with Innovators on the left leading edge and Laggards on the far right. The Majority fit squarely in the middle of the curve with the largest amount of customers.

The Chasm

Unfortunately, marketers can’t progress smoothly from one category of customer to another across the bell curve. There are “cracks in the curve” with a huge chasm between the Early Adopters and the Early Majority.

Moore outlines specific strategies for marketing your product as you transition from one group of customers to another. The main focus of the book is, of course, how to cross the large chasm between the Early Adopters and the Mainstream customer.

Today’s Web Boom

I found this book of particular interest in today’s revived Web Application boom. If you’re building the next great web application, you need to read this book. Failure to cross the chasm after the TechCrunch/Silicon Valley crowd will destine your product to stagnate and fizzle out before it reaches the masses of customers needed for long-term growth and profitability.

Read more Crossing the Chasm reviews on Amazon.com

Buy Crossing the Chasm on Amazon.com »

Have you read Crossing the Chasm? Tell us what you thought of the book in the comments below.

This week we celebrate the independence of the United States of America. Today I want you to celebrate independence for your business. You may not be breaking free from an oppressive monarch, but I bet there are some things that are holding your business back.

Competition

Now is the time to break free from competition. Just because they may be bigger than you or have more resources doesn’t mean you can’t be successful in the same industry. Think David versus Goliath or Colonial America versus the mighty British Empire. They succeeded and so can you.

Need a boost? Go read Guy Kawasaki’s How to Drive Your Competition Crazy.

Taxes

Unfortunately, you’ll still have to pay taxes to the government. I’m talking about a different tax that likewise eats away at your profitability. My colleague always describes projects that have no direct business or customer-facing value as “taxes.” These include maintenance, infrastructure upgrades, etc. They are necessities that arise and have to be handled.

Reduce or eliminate these “taxes” through better planning, automation, employing smart people, and getting real in your business.

Customers’ Choice

Your customers have the freedom to choose. They could easily celebrate their independence by walking away from your business. Celebrate your customers’ decision to pick you by encouraging customer loyalty. Reward your best customers and thank everyone who buys your product.

You can turn your faithful customers into your best sales force. For help on this, read Creating Customer Evangelists

Status Quo

Today is the day you need to look at how you do business. I guarantee there are some bad habits you’ve acquired that suck the productivity out of your business. Proclaim your independence from the status quo and the rut in which you may find yourself.

Reinvent the old ways of doing things. Just because that’s the way you’ve always done them doesn’t mean you have to continue that way forever.

Break the Routine

Relax! You work hard everyday and maybe every night or weekend. You need a vacation. A break from your work routine will let you return with a fresh mind and body.

If you weren’t able to take some time off this holiday week, plan a vacation soon.You’ll be surprised how invigorated you’ll feel when you return.