We neglect at our peril a lack of support in any stage of the buying process. Their ultimate satisfaction will take into account each good and bad experience they had. Their willingness to undertake the experience again will be highly influenced by their initial experience in its totality.
In a market composed of poor products and services, the least worst will get the business. But in a market where there are excellent products and excellent services, those with the best customer experiences will gradually build market share and become dominant. If we have a bad experience, we will switch vendors if we are told of another who provides a better customer experience.
What we do know about creating good customer experiences is that they are highly correlated to customer expectations. If there was one glaring reason why customer experiences are poor, this is the main culprit. Setting the wrong expectation or allowing the customer to set their own expectations based on misinformed assumptions, is where the whole customer experience goes badly wrong. It matters little that you have a good product or service or that you did everything right in your estimation. If the customer was expecting something else, you are doomed to fail even before the sale has been made. This is a situation which is very difficult to recover from. However, again, this is mostly self-inflicted.
It is the vendor who should be setting the expectation through their marketing messages. What problems do we solve? Who do we solve it for? How do we solve those problems and at what cost? We have to take responsibility for the way in which customers see us. If we get the message right, we will receive enquiries which are a good match for the type of business we are good at. If we get the positioning and messages wrong, we end up with the wrong prospects, disappointed customers and a poor reputation. We certainly fail to reach our goal of repeat sales and referrals.
Not all customers are repeat buyers. If we expect them to need our services in the future, we should work to encourage a relationship through our communications. If, however, we don’t expect them to continue patronage, we should still keep in mind their potential to refer us to others. Just because they may buy from us once, does not mean they cannot be a useful source of future business.
A longer term view of customer relationships does require us to re-evaluate our entire marketing and sales processes. Our measure of success must be the desire of the customer to buy from us again and to recommend us to others. The research into high growth ventures shows that this is a characteristic of high growth businesses. These firms go the extra mile to satisfy customers and have, as a result, much higher repeat sales and referrals than lower growth businesses.
If we ask ourselves ‘what does it take to drive repeat sales and referrals? We must inevitably come back to the satisfaction of the customer with their customer experience. It follows logically that we can improve the customer experience if we not only deliver on our product and service promise but make the entire customer experience our primary focus in marketing and sales.
The adage ‘your customer is your best salesperson’ is certainly true when it comes to high growth ventures. This is an important mantra for our marketing and sales strategies. What does it take for every one of our customers to actively promote our firm to others? While I doubt that you can ever achieve 100%, this should be our target. An objective like that focuses the mind, forces us to listen to our customers and requires us to step up to fixing those parts of the entire process which are letting us down.
Whether this is a new perspective or whether we need to renew our pledge to ourselves to hold this up as our gold standard, this is what will make the difference between those firms with mediocre performance and those with outstanding performance. If the firm can achieve a high level of repeat sales and referrals, it will not only dramatically improve marketing and sales productivity, it will improve profits, reduce sales cycles and improve the resilience of the firm. These are all very worthy objectives. It only requires the willingness to put it into action.
Tom McKaskill is a successful global serial entrepreneur, educator and author who is a world acknowledged authority on exit strategies and the former Richard Pratt Professor of Entrepreneurship, Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. A series of free eBooks for entrepreneurs and angel and VC investors can be found at his site here.
