When I get on a plane, I’m glad that pilots use checklists. Even though they’re experienced, a checklist makes sure everything is covered and that nothing falls through the cracks. Checklists are proven to work.
Think of a system as a more robust and complete checklist. Whereas the pilot checklist deals with pre-flight testing, the entire system would be the mechanism in which the entire airline company adheres to from end to end.
As an aside, there are basically three ways to grow your business:
- You gain more customers.
- You get your existing customers to spend more money with you.
- You get your existing customers to purchase more frequently.
Note that reactivating old customers that no longer buy from you can be considered a new customer or existing customer, so they would fall into the three methods described above.
So the marketing system, in our case, deals with the end-to-end system of marketing, profit centers, and ROI. Everything that can possibly affect the three ways above to grow your business (and the reverse: keeping your business from shrinking) is part of the marketing system.
To illustrate what I mean, let’s do a quick simple exercise. For each role below, put a check next to it if you think marketing should influence that role.
- The handling of inactive and dissatisfied customers
- Customer service
- Support
- Human resources: the hiring, firing, and promotions of employees
- Issuing refunds
- Product fulfillment
- The layout of your business: your store, waiting room, etc.
- Appointments and follow-up
- Product packaging
Ok, you’ve probably guessed by now that marketing should influence ALL of those roles.
Customer service has a chance to ask for cross-sells, up-sells, and reduce refunds, among other things. The same goes for support. Despite what you may think, the handling of inactive and dissatisfied customers is not the sole responsibility of operations. They are, in fact, opportunities to make more sales and promote referrals. You need to keep your front line service folks plugged in with your marketing campaigns to take advantage of these opportunities.
For example, a department store ran a holiday promotion using full-page newspaper ads, which showcased their increased holiday inventory and price reductions. Their prospects were also offered the easy option to phone in their orders.
Well, when the phones started ringing, the telephone operators knew nothing about their special offer. As a result, customers were unhappy and sales were lost, all because one store manager forgot to tell the telephone operators about the promotion.
Fulfilling product orders sounds like a job for shipping. That may be, but by putting package inserts in with the shipment, you have additional opportunities to sell even more. Your customers just bought from you. They’re pleased with their purchase. They’ve done business with you and they feel good about it. Isn’t now a good time to ask for another sale?
How about your store layout? Your waiting room design? Instead of boring magazines and pictures from Sears on the walls, why not plaster your waiting room with photos of past customers and testimonials. The smart car salespeople use this tactic all the time. If you look at their offices, you’ll see countless photos of happy customers posing with their brand new cars. Talk about the power of their prospects mentally putting themselves in that picture!
Product packaging. I grew up less than a mile from Stew Leonard’s famous supermarket in Norwalk, Connecticut, and over the years I watched the store grow. Where traditional grocery stores would sell upwards of twenty or thirty thousand items, Stew Leonard’s focused on one of their specialty niches: freshness. They carried only two-thousand items.
Every day they brought in fresh fish, cleaned it up, nicely packaged it, and proudly displayed it in their freezer cases, labeled “FRESH FISH.”
Now Stew Leonard’s was a store that wisely listened to their customers, and when sales of the fish weren’t as high as they had hoped, they turned to their customers to find out why and what they wanted.
Well it turned out that it was a perception issue. Their customers told them they wished Stew Leonard’s carried real fresh fish, like the ones on slabs of ice at the farmers’ market. So the store started packaging the fish in two different ways: 1) the way they always had, and 2) unpackaged on a slab of ice in a small display unit with a sign reading “Fresh Fish Market.”
Their results? Sales of fresh fish more than doubled, proving that how they packaged their fish was at least as important as the other factors involved.
What about appointments and follow-up? Issuing refunds? These are all opportunities to sell even more. No opportunity should go untapped. And your marketing system should reflect that.
And if you think Human Resources should be left with all the hiring and firing decisions, think again. Even a dishwasher or busboy plays an integral role in the business of a restaurant. Whether or not they interact directly with customers is irrelevant. Your customers still see the results of their actions.
There’s an old story about a janitor who worked for NASA in the seventies. One day upper management was giving a tour to some government officials, who were evaluating the funding that NASA needed. They stopped and asked the janitor what he did for NASA.
“I helped put a man on the moon,” the janitor replied.
It’s that kind of mindset that you absolutely must instill in your employees if you want to make sure your business is positioned for growth. All roads must eventually lead back to marketing. Why? Because it’s the only way your business will grow. Your “marketing umbrella” needs to touch all aspects of your business.
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