Let’s explore the link between marketing and selling. Of course, one should lead to the other, but the relationship is more complex than that. If a customer’s view of your brand is the result of all of their interactions with you, it will of course include all of the interactions they have with you when they are not buying anything. I’m going to write a bit more in a later post about Net Promoter Score but if this powerful measure of customer attitudes tells us anything, it’s that every interaction with the customer is critical. Whether I recommend a particular brand or not is a function of my own, direct, personal experience with that brand, and that changes every time I interact with them.
A special case happens when we are selling, and particularly when we are using direct marketing techniques. I’ve been reading the excellent article on Ian Brodie’s blog on downselling. In it, he talks about creative ways you can switch over time to selling a smaller or lower commitment version of your product if the customer is not going to buy your main service. The reason that the article made me think about consumer direct marketing is that it represents an example of how to creatively respond to a situation which happens all the time in consumer marketing but for which we are singularly unprepared – the situation where we make a sales pitch to a customer, who then doesn’t buy from us.
Think about it. A really terrific response to a direct press ad, a direct mail campaign or a telesales campaign to consumers might be 10-20%. That means that every time we run a campaign, 80-90% of the customers we contact are declining to buy from us, at least at that time. And the scale of this activity is simply huge. I calculated that over one five-year period I was responsible for over 1bn direct marketing contacts, and that was in one country for one brand. The sheer volume of sales messages we are addressing to consumers who then do not respond to them is enormous.
Of course, one response to that realisation is to try to increase the success percentage, and hence the whole industry of direct marketing was born.
As brand owners, however, something else is going on. It may well be that for many actual and potential customers these unsuccessful sales calls and advertising presentations are the most frequent interaction they have with your brand.
So here’s the question for today. What brand-building impression are we giving our customers when we make a sales approach to them which they reject? Consider this example. You are running a campaign to contact your existing customers to tell them about a discount they are entitled to on an additional product that you have for sale. On the face of it, everyone is a winner – you make additional sales and your grateful customers get a discount to reward their loyalty. However, if I asked one of your customers after they had been made that offer but rejected it, what would they say? Would it be:
“Those great guys at brand x rang me to tell me about a discount I’m entitled to that I didn’t even know about! I’m not going to take it up right now, but great to know I get rewards for being an existing customer”
Or would it be more like:
“Some wide-boy from brand x rang me up to sell me something and I told him to get lost. Aren’t those guys happy with what I’m paying them already?”
For many brands, and reflecting on the experiences I have had as a consumer, I think the second answer is closer to the mark, don’t you?
So there you have it – the interaction you might be having with your customers more frequently than any other – the unsuccessful sales approach – might be actively turning them off your brand.
What can we do about it? A lot, I think. We can actively design our sales messages with the brand take-out we desire in our minds. We can change the way we incentivise, measure and control our sales teams. We can creatively use “downselling” and other techniques to still get a positive outcome from the customer. We can test and learn, with our CRM systems, the best sequences of messages and follow-ups for our brand. Is your CRM system today optimised around the brand impression you want to give your customers, or around maximising short term conversion rates? I bet I know the answer!
If every customer interaction is critical to the customer’s view of our brand, then marketing suddenly looks a lot more all-encompassing, and a lot more difficult, than it once did. We’ll explore that a bit more next time.
