For some reason my Twitter accounts, both professional and private, are flooded with Tweets and posts about Customer-Vendor relationships. As an ad agency this topic hits us right between the eyes. Let me take five minutes of your time to give you the VLG take.
Sales
Call it a first take or first encounter, but first impressions last for years. A customer might leave for three years and pop up unannounced looking for marketing help. What do they remember? Surprisingly, the majority remember the sales process. This presents both an opportunity and a problem. The opportunity to win back a customer is without a doubt the greatest feeling in the world, but here’s the problem. The world and our business evolved over the last three years. We’re a technology driven company, so failure to adapt to change, failure to innovate is not an option. It also means we’ve tweaked our business model, adjusted pricing, and improved the overall product we deliver. Returning customers have expectations that are no longer aligned. This ignores the pressure to oversell and over promise to win a customer back. It’s very tempting to exaggerate a bit. We’re proud of the work we’ve done, but we have to temper that with reality. What can we do to help our customers succeed?
Engagement
You’ve hired VLG. Now what? The business development team hands the relationship off, in part, to the account management team. Now it is time for us to meet expectations and exceed them whenever possible. Typically, our standards exceed those of our customers–to a fault in some cases. This is also were we define our relationship. Is it us versus them, or are “we” going to build something beautiful together? It really depends on the customer. We would love to be a “we,” but some customers prefer an arms length relationship. We built our business to accommodate both. However, common sense dictates that if “we” build a project together the result is likely better. If it turns into a polite us v. you relationship the end product doesn’t really satisfy the expectations–ours or our customers. I want a customer to trust us to the point were they’d order me a stack of business cards so I can run around town singing their praises. I want to be our customer’s biggest fan.
Steps
We run all clients through an important deep dive during the post-sales engagement. Keep in mind VLG is not focused on branding or identity creation. So, the easiest thing to nail down is the marketing message, the calls-to-action, the campaign objectives. Campaign success really boils down to the following.
1. How quickly and how well do we understand our customers’ personalities—the people, not the companies?
2. How quickly and how well do we know the target audience—yes, the company, but also the people?
3. How we do 1. and 2. separates our products and services from the competition and results in winning campaigns.
It turns out we have two audiences, you (the customer) and them (your customers). Hopefully we can work together to get them to buy. Agree? Disagree?
