Blog | The Age of the Customer – by Jim Blasingame | Prepare For The Moment of Relevance

Bring your customer’s customer into focus

When you take a photograph, the resulting product is two-dimensional: tall, wide, and flat. But in most cases, you want the photo to actually show depth, where images in the foreground and background are all in focus.

In photographic terms, the range of focus front to back is called depth of field. The best way to expand depth of field so more of the subjects in the photo are in focus is to add light. Light contributes to depth of field.

If you were given a photo of people who were the most critical to your success, you’d easily recognize your customers in the foreground in perfect focus. But as you look deeper into the photo you’d notice the images behind that first row increasingly drop out of focus with each receding row. The reason is that for most of the history of the marketplace, businesses have gotten away with having a very narrow customer depth of field.

When the coin of the realm was to be competitive, that meant you spent all your time thinking about how to serve the person in the foreground, the first row of your business world: your customers. But as I’ve revealed in the past, being competitive has been trumped by being relevant. And in The Age of the Customer, perhaps the most important component of being relevant to business customers is helping them serve the most important person in their photo: their customers.

Let me say that again with Blasingame’s New Law of Customer Relevance:

If you want to have customers for life, help your customers help their customers.

The way to accomplish this is to increase the depth of field of your customer photo. Light up the view beyond the first row of customers so that the second row is completely in focus. This three-step process works every time:

1. Identify the customer of your customer.

2. Find out what your customer needs to do to become relevant to their customer.

3. Whatever the answer to #2 is, help your customer do that.

Executing this approach is how you acquire customers you almost can’t run off. Because when you help your customers help their customers, they know you’re doing more than just delivering stuff; you’ve become part of their team – integrated and committed, like a true stakeholder.

And if you want to pull off the customer relevance hat trick, light up the third row of your business’s photo: Help your customers help their customers help their customers.

I’ve done it – it’s a beautiful thing.

Write this on a rock … Achieve sustainable success by bringing more customers into focus.

“Follow me home” is a solid gold gift

First, let’s establish two maxims: one classic, one new.

Classic: The cardinal rule of customer acquisition – it’s not your customer’s job to keep your business top-of-mind, it’s yours.

New: Every year your website becomes less of a destination and more of a distribution center – develop a strategy that doesn’t depend upon prospects and customers returning to your homepage every time they need/want something from you.

It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one – everybody knows that. The bad news is, with all of the mega-corp algorithms, online competitors, and cyber-clutter, keeping the attention of even our most loyal patrons is getting harder every day. But here’s the good news: For every example of how technology makes business more complicated, there is a corresponding tool or application that increases efficiency and productivity. Even for small businesses.

One prime example of how to stay on the radar screen of people who already know you – users, prospects, customers – is to practice what I call the “Follow me home” strategy. Once someone determines they like your business, they’re increasingly willing to give permission for you to “Follow me home” with digital information and content, by email (newsletters), texting (updates), social media (useful content), etc.

“Follow me home” supports three critical elements in 21st-century customer relationships.

Emotional: At the heart of “Follow me home” is trust that a business won’t abuse this privilege. This is a gift – value, protect and perform on this.

Practical: “Follow me home” conveys that you understand people have other options, are very busy, and want reliable companies to help them stay connected.

Technical: Elements on your website that make “Follow me home” easy (“Subscribe to our free newsletter”, “Follow us on Twitter, etc.), score the online hat trick: values, thought leadership and technical capability.

Getting a “Follow me home” invitation from a prospect/customer is good for your business in three important ways:

1. Prospects/customers have invited you to connect with regular, useful content and appropriate marketing messages.

2. Since research continues to show that a prospect has to see several impressions before converting to a customer, “Follow me home” becomes a powerfully efficient and effective conversion practice.

3. “Follow me home” is the first step for users to pre-qualify themselves as a prospect.

New technologies make delivering on “Follow me home” requests easier than ever for small businesses. But, of course, you have to give users/prospects/customers a reason to say, “Follow me home.”

Write this on a rock … “Follow me home” is a buying signal waiting to happen. Are you listening?

Mobile computing will dominate your future

What if I told you that seven-of-ten of the prospects and customers in your market can’t find your business? You’d be very disturbed by that, wouldn’t you?

Now, what if I told you that three-fourths of the calls your prospects and customers want to make to your business are not getting through? Would I be able to see the veins in your neck as you raise your voice to declare that such a thing would be impossible?

Well, in the past year or so, addressing small business audiences around the country, I’ve asked this simple question: “How many of you have a website that conforms to the small screen – a mobile website?” I’m sorry to report that the number of attendees who raised their hands – across multiple industries – was in the vast minority.

To dramatize how unfortunate this response is, let’s go to the research: During 2018, well over 200 million Americans will use a smartphone. And that number is projected to grow to over 80% in three years (Statista).

So what are all these people – very likely, including you – doing on the tiny screens of these magic wands we hold in the palm of our hand? Besides making calls, texting and sending emails, they are:

1. Shopping online – making decisions about what they want and who to buy it from.

2. Navigating to businesses – like the previously unknown business that popped up in a local search.

3. Buying stuff – and paying for it by touching their index finger to one tiny button on the screen. It’s called “One touch” and customers l-u-u-u-v it. Whether they know the business or not, they can one-touch with PayPal and Amazon, plus other preloaded credit/debit financial sources.

You may be saying, “Well, duh!” Everybody knows that.” But your protest doesn’t count unless you would’ve raised your hand when I asked about who has a mobile site.

And I can hear you further protesting that customers can do all three of those things on your regular site. But, again, no points. Customers don’t want to do either one of those three things on your regular site while looking at the small screen of their smartphone. And they don’t have to because there are hundreds of competitors – from Amazon to Amy’s Boutique – whose mobile site conforms to the small screen while delivering a one-touch payment option.

If you don’t have a mobile site – not a mobile app, which you’ll probably never need – the news gets worse: when a hungry person speaks these word into a smartphone, “pepperoni pizza in East Peoria,” search engines know what kind of device the request is from, and move non-mobile-ready sites way down the search results. This person wants a hot phone number, big directions on a small screen, and one-touch pay. (Re-read the first two paragraphs.)

It’s been 25 years since you and I first had access to the Internet, and a decade since we’ve had smartphones. In the Age of the Customer, where being relevant to customers is trumping being competitive, a big part of relevance is being fully accessible and high-functioning when a prospect or customer wants to connect with you based on their expectations. And every day, that expectation is increasingly manifesting in the palm of a hand.

Finally, if you don’t have a mobile site, I have good news: You can get one in a few days for a few hundred dollars. You must be ready for mobile primetime. Your prospects and customers expect it.

Write this on a rock … Mobile computing wasn’t any part of your past, but it will dominate your future.

Storytelling – older than the marketplace

Cogito ergo sum. French philosopher Rene Descartes proposed this idea in 1637, which translates to “I think, therefore I am.” Certainly, the power of abstract thought is what separates humans from other animals.

Anthropologists now believe Homo sapiens succeeded, unlike other members of the genus Homo, Neanderthals, and Cro-Magnon for example, because their (our) brains had a greater capacity for speech and language. Today Descartes might modify his philosophy to “I think and speak, therefore I am.”

In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith proposed the written word as one of the three great human inventions; the other two are money and mathematics. But long before humans were writing we were telling stories. And these stories – told, memorized and retold over millennia – became the headwaters of human development. We, humans, love to tell stories almost as much as we love to listen to them.

Another thing that’s older than writing is the marketplace. Long before Madison Avenue ad copy, merchants were verbalizing the value and benefits of their wares. Surely early business storytelling was the origin of modern selling skills.

In 1965, Intel’s co-founder Gordon Moore made an observation that became Moore’s Law: “Computer processing power doubles about every two years.” But in his 1982 watershed book Megatrends, futurist John Naisbitt posed this seemingly paradoxical prophecy: “The more high tech we create, the more high touch we will want.”

So what does all of this mean? It means that even when compounding is the metric for the pace of growth for high tech generations, the most successful businesses will consistently deliver high touch to customers with one of humanity’s oldest, analog traits – telling stories. And it won’t even matter that the stories are delivered and consumed using high tech platforms.

Here are Blasingame’s Three Cs of Business Storytelling:

Connect – Use stories to connect with prospects and convert them into customers.

Convey – Use stories to convey your relevance, humanity, values, and expertise.

Create – Use stories to create customer memories that compel them to come back.

Storytelling is humanity in words. And since small businesses are the face and voice of humanity in the marketplace, we have a great advantage in the Age of the Customer. No market sector can execute the Three Cs of Business Storytelling to evoke powerful human feelings more than small businesses.

Regardless of how they’re delivered, stories don’t have to belong. I just told you five different ones in the first half of this article.

Write this on a rock … The Holy Grail of business storytelling is called “earned media,” when someone tells your story to others.

Are you practicing the Age of the Customer prospecting rules?

Since 1993, control of the three major elements of your customer relationships – product, information, and buying decision – has shifted from your business to your customer. This marketplace transition is, by definition, a Biblical proportion paradigm shift from the original, 10,000-year-old Age of the Seller, to the new Age of the Customer.

This shift has created many disruptions across the marketplace, but none more than to the discipline of professional selling. More specifically, the element that has been disrupted most is business-to-business prospecting.

If your sales effort isn’t getting the job done, it’s probably not because your sales team isn’t working hard enough, or has forgotten how to close – a process that has not been disrupted. It’s because the rules of prospecting have been turned upside-down. Here are four facets to this prospecting shift:

1. The era of buyers accepting prospecting cold calls is over. Cold calling was never high-percentage, but in the Age of the Customer, it’s a fool’s errand.

2. After 10,000 years of needing a salesperson to provide critical information to make an informed decision, buyers are acquiring much of that information on their own, online.

3. Prospects are now self-qualifying themselves and pre-qualifying prospective vendors. In the Age of the Seller, a prospect might have considered a dozen vendors, but in the new Age, that number might be as few as two, maybe even just one.

4. Here’s the cold-sweat, scary part of this new reality: Vendors are being ruled in or out before they know the prospect even exists.

Prospects like this new empowerment because it saves time, contributes to their decision-making journey, and reduces contact with uncompetitive, and therefore, irrelevant vendors. Consequently, getting in front of a prospect for a first meeting, which once was relatively easy and almost automatic, now requires more time, effort and strategy to address the following new rules of prospecting.

1. Prospects require demonstration of some level of relevance before granting an introductory meeting, let alone a sales call.

2. Research isn’t complete until you’ve discovered how to be relevant to that individual prospect. Don’t rush this step; the prospect decides what’s relevant.

3. Networking – in person and online – is non-negotiable. You must become a professional networker.

4. Prospect development and nurturing must be practiced with patience and a dialed-down sense of urgency. Desperate salespeople conduct desperate prospecting, which not only doesn’t work, it burns bridges.

5. Since prospects now presume the vendor they choose will be competitive, don’t lead with any element of the price/product/service value proposition. That won’t get you through the door.

6. Don’t be afraid to demonstrate your corporate values. Today, what your company stands for is a major relevance factor.

7. “Contribute first, contract second” is the Holy Grail of relevance.

Even the best salesperson – who will still need every classic, selling skill to close the sale – is useless if he or she can’t get in front of the prospect before the qualifying decision has been made.

Companies that expect to meet sales goals now have to put more emphasis and resources in training, equipping, budgeting and measuring prospecting skills. Perhaps for the first time ever, consider breaking out prospecting performance as an element of the overall compensation plan. Remember, you can’t close them if you never get to talk to them.

Write this on a rock … Which Age is your sales organization prospecting in?

How “the Cloud” can empower your small business

One of the greatest products of human society is the marketplace. Webster defines it as a place where goods and services are offered for sale.

Over millennia, innovations took markets from local to global, and now to the 21st century iteration – virtual. Virtual markets are powered by “cloud computing,” aka “the cloud,” and accessed via the Internet and a handy interface program presented on a screen of some size.

Historically, as trade expanded markets, products led the way because services were difficult to convey to the last mile of consumption. But technology has helped services catch up, and now digital services are delivered efficiently from the cloud. And more than anything else, this last reality is helping small businesses compete and grow in ways that were formerly the domain of larger companies.

Here are five cloud-based resource categories that help your small business operate more efficiently, competitively, and profitably.

1. Processing power

Robust software can be purchased incrementally and accessed as needed. Advantages include increased capability, most recent updates and expensing instead of capitalizing.

2. Information power

Cloud-based communication, customer development, community building and financial applications help small businesses acquire and manage information quickly and strategically.

3. Sales power

Cloud-based e-commerce has never been easier or more cost-effective for small businesses to offer, sell, and even deliver products and services 24/7/365.

4. Talent power

More and more, 21st-century jobs don’t require employees to be under the nose of management. Cloud-based employee search capability improves candidate acquisition, and cloud-based communication and collaboration tools help virtual working relationships succeed.

5. Asset protection power

Business assets used to be largely tangible, like inventory, equipment, etc. Today all businesses are increasingly creating opportunity from intangible assets. But for small businesses, protecting intangible, digital assets has been problematic. Cloud-based data backup services work automatically, securely, productively and cost-effectively.

As useful and productive as cloud computing is, it isn’t without weaknesses. For example, when you learn of cyber-breaches like the ones that happened to Yahoo! and Equifax, those were cloud breaches. We’ll leave the big guys to their own cloud security chores. Out here on Main Street, your worst cloud security weakness is you – and your people. The humans in your business. The strong passwords, firewalls, anti-virus programs, etc. in the world won’t save you if someone on your network opens a phishing email or similar e-bomb. What’s the solution? Training. Reminding. And continuous reminding about what to click on and what not to click on.

The bad news is the cyber-criminals are moving down market. They’ve arrived on Main Street, but not with real people – just computers using algorithms to attack any dummy who answers an automated ping. Essentially, if you don’t let one of these guys in, they won’t get in.

It’s likely that most small businesses use cloud resources more than they realize – which is a good thing. But with all of the cloud power available, every small business should become more aware of how to use cloud-based services and seek these options for their growth and profitability strategies.

Write this on a rock … Power your marketplace performance with the cloud.

Naisbitt’s Razor: The great small business advantage

On my radio program, beginning in 1998, I started interviewing telecom experts on something called broadband Internet connection. It would be the replacement for dialup over POTS – plain old telephone service. At that point, like the Internet itself, the “big pipe” was so new that less than 4% of households and almost no businesses had broadband Internet connection.

Reporting on this emerging capability, I made the easy prediction that the world would change when broadband became ubiquitous and broadly adopted – which it did. But the harder prediction – which I didn’t make – would have been that the real game-changer would take the form of mobile computing on the tiny screens of magic wands we call smartphones. Today, with mobile networks delivering fourth generation connectivity – 4G – almost everywhere, and 5G on the way, mobile computing has disrupted the marketplace in unprecedented ways by giving consumers exciting new expectations.

But perhaps what caused mobile computing to make a quantum leap is found in this slogan: “There’s an app for that.” Anyone with access to paved roads and/or electricity knows this refers to an application that converts content otherwise consumed with a browser on a PC, to a hand-held devices, like a smartphone or tablet. Mobile apps have proliferated because they’re almost always handier – and sexier – than their website counterparts.

A generation before my broadband prognostication, a real prophet, John Naisbitt, published his landmark book, Megatrends (Warner Books, 1982), in which he prophesied, “The more high tech we have, the more high touch we will want.” I’ve termed that quote, “Naisbitt’s Razor,” and it foresaw a kind of unlikely equilibrium between digital technology and analog humanity. This will be on the test: For a small business to find success in The Age of the Customer, Naisbitt’s Razor must be at the heart of your business strategy.

The bad news is there’s that tension from the unlikely equilibrium between tech and touch – read: difficult to maintain. The good news is, Naisbitt’s Razor is never more elegant than when delivered by a small business. So, how do you maintain that balance in the face of pressure from a marketplace that seems to be in love with tech, like sexier mobile apps? The answer is, not either/or, but both/and.

If you want customers to keep your business at their fingertips wherever they are, there’s an app for that you can buy or build. You must at least have a mobile site. But when a customer relationship calls for a welcoming smile, or prior knowledge, or hands-on expertise, there’s no app for that. Nothing’s more high touch than a smile, which can only be delivered by an analog human, and whenever possible, face-to-face.

If a product tutorial video would help a customer in the field, there’s an app for that. To be able to interpret the troubled look on the face of a customer as a clue that you’ve yet to heal their pain, there’s no app for that.

If customers want to check an order status, whenever and wherever they are, you have to deliver that information in the tiny screen of their smartphone. When customers return over and over because you add so much value when they’re physically in front of you, or your employees, there’s no app for that.

Naisbitt’s Razor – high tech AND high touch – makes it imperative that you blend the sexy digital power of mobile computing, with the compelling humanity of a handshake. The good news is that no one can deliver and maintain that equilibrium as powerfully as a small business. Congratulations.

Write this on a rock … There’s an app for high tech, but there isn’t one for high touch. You have to deliver both.

As CEO, you’re the futurist of your business

Every small business owner should display in a prominent place this John F. Kennedy quote: “Change is the law of life, and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

As the CEO, you’re the futurist of your business, and the product of a futurist’s work is foresight.

Professional futurists are neither inspired by God, clairvoyant, nor have ESP. But they do look at the world differently than the average person. They typically see things before others do, largely because their focus is influenced by the following factors:

Extreme curiosity: This isn’t first by accident. Curiosity is to foresight what oxygen is to life.

Orders of implication: Futurists imagine the impact of multiple possibilities from a single scenario that hasn’t happened yet.

Collaboration: Futurists study the work of other futurists, work together, and welcome peer reviews.

Foresight tools: Some resources are sophisticated, some not so much.

As you can see, there’s nothing supernatural about these. Nothing you don’t already have or can’t acquire, at least at the level of CEO futurist. Let me lower the intimidation factor and make foresight easier with CEO foresight tools. You’ll recognize the first two:

Curiosity: The only person who’s more curious than a futurist is an entrepreneur. Curiosity is your most powerful tool-unleash it.

Watch for implications: When you see something new – a thing, idea or a development – unfocus your eyes and imagine the short and long-term implications. Play the “what if” game with your team.

Read: Professional futurists call it scanning. Read everything you can get your hands on about your universe and your customers’ universes. Start connecting dots.

Pay attention: This is the first cousin of curiosity. You pay attention to your business every day. Now add what’s outside your four walls to your scan.

Experience: Never underestimate the foresight value of past successes and failures, especially to the implications element.

Peer relationships: This includes CEO roundtables, whether formal or informal, but also attending industry events to listen to and compare notes with other CEO futurists.

Intuition: This is the love child of experience and curiosity. You have intuition, plus experts say you can grow it. Intuition is educated by experience and employed by curiosity.

These CEO foresight tools will help you track trends for opportunities and disruptions in areas such as: demographics, customer behavior, society, production/supply, politics, technology, and global events impacting large customers.

With tomorrow, next year and the next decade in mind, use questions like these to include your stakeholders in the foresight process: What will my industry look like? What will my market look like? What will happen to my existing customers? What will my new customer profile look like? What will be their expectations? What kinds of products and services should we sell? How will we capitalize growth? What kind of technology will I need? What will be the greatest opportunities? What will be the greatest disruptions?

Use the tools, ask the questions, uncover and prepare for the possibilities that will allow you to take advantage of opportunities and minimize disruptions. Leading change as the CEO means applying the foresight tools of a futurist in order to avoid surprises. All surprises.

Even if a surprise turns out okay, you still shouldn’t celebrate. In fact, you should be just as frightened as if it turned out badly. Because it got through your foresight filters unnoticed until it manifested in front of you. That means a bad surprise could do the same thing.

Remember Blasingame’s Law of Surprises: Surprises are for birthdays — this is business.

Write this on a rock … “The future doesn’t fit in the container of the past.” Rishad Tobaccolwala

Do you know how to load your Sales Pipelines?

Here’s an ancient marketplace maxim: Selling is a numbers game.

A maxim is a generally accepted truth and this is one because of two realities:

1. There are hundreds – if not thousands – of things that can cause a fully qualified prospect to not complete a transaction, at least not on your time parameters.

2. Regardless of how many bumps you encounter on the path to a signed contract, it’s still your job to produce enough gross profit from sales revenue to stay in business.

Enter the sales pipeline: a planning concept that helps managers and salespeople forecast sales for any given period – week, month, quarter or year. Think of your sales pipeline as overhead plumbing with faucets positioned at the time intervals your operation requires. And from these faucets you draw the mother’s milk of any business – sales revenue.

But there’s one pesky thing about sales pipeline faucets: they all come with screens that only allow sales from qualified prospects pass through, while poorly developed prospects are blocked. So if you’re counting on revenue pouring out of a faucet when you turn the handle on the day you need sales, you must load only qualified prospects into your pipeline to begin with.

A qualified prospect has answered enough questions – directly or through research – to allow you to determine that they will likely purchase what you sell from someone in the forecastable future. Before you place a qualified prospect in the pipeline, you must know at a minimum:

What’s left to do for them – demonstration, trial, proposal, final close, etc.;
Anything else that has to be done to move them to customer status.

Your appraisal of all of this information will help you forecast which faucet you should expect a particular sale to pour out of this Friday, next week, next month, next quarter. Once in the pipeline, a prospect is either on track to become a sale, a lost sale, or a forecasting mistake to be removed.

Alas, in the absence of professional sales management, poorly trained salespeople will try to forecast low-quality prospects. And any company that counts on such practices is headed for a cash flow crisis and ultimate business failure. Not because the product wasn’t good, or the price was too high, or because of Amazon. But because the sales team didn’t load the sales pipeline with enough qualified prospects.

At this point, let’s refer to The Bard. In Act I, Scene III, of Hamlet, arguably Shakespeare’s most important work, Polonius famously says to his son, Laertes, “This above all, to thine own self be true.” If your sales team is honest with each other and management about a prospect’s qualified progress to faucet-conformity, you’re setting yourself up for success. If not, well, you know.

Sales has been and always will be a numbers game. But in the Age of the Customer, it’s increasingly becoming more of a quality prospecting game. Consequently, how much revenue you draw from your sales pipeline depends on the two elements of the 21^st century sales success calculus: quantity x QUALITY = your ultimate sales performance.

Here’s Blasingame’s Law of Sales Pipeline Success: Load the pipeline with enough (quantity) qualified prospects (quality) to flow through the faucets of your sales pipeline whenever you need them (success).

Write this on a rock … Load your sales pipeline with quantity and quality, and to thine own self be true.

The velocity of change and new customer expectations

And when I die, and when I’m gone, there’ll be one child born in this world to carry on, to carry on.

— “And When I Die,” by Laura Nyro, performed by Blood, Sweat & Tears.

As we know, change has been the one constant of existence on planet Earth. Each generation gives way to the next, so that over time fire became electricity and the wheel morphed into a computer.

For most of the history of the marketplace, change progressed at a pace slow enough to allow the creator of a model – a product, strategy, skill, etc. — to make a living with it for a lifetime, possibly even passing that model on to his children. But within the past century this paradigm began to shift.

During the second half of the 20th century, the life expectancy of a typical model generation was compressed into a calendar year. So while you were delivering the current year’s model to customers, you had to simultaneously create and prepare next year’s model to be ready to launch January 1.

That was a nice trip down memory lane, wasn’t it? Buckle up.

Since 1993 (the year the Internet became available to the public), an unprecedented confluence of innovations has further compressed the time between model generations. This compression produced high anxiety and frustration for any business that was in love with its model. Indeed, the life expectancy of a model that not so long ago would have been a calendar year was now measured in terms of an Internet year, which is 90 days — or less.

The headwaters of this increased velocity of marketplace change is innovations that are driving new customer expectations. And these innovations have become so seductively elegant and seamless in our lives that customers often don’t even realize their expectations are changing at all, let alone how fast.

But what about your business’s anxiety and frustration? Well, even if customers know, they don’t care. Because they worship at the throne of WIIFM. What’s In It For Me?

I have good news! You can avoid anxiety, frustration — and failure — if you know what your customers’ evolving expectations are, which you can determine by asking them these five questions – every day:

1. What do you want?

2. How do you want me to tell you about it?

3. When do you want it?

4. How will you use it?

5. How do you want it delivered?

Comparing the answer to these questions with what customers told you yesterday will provide all the information you need about current and future products, service and technology, including — especially — your social media and mobile strategy.

Let me put all of this in one sentence: If you want to know what your business should be doing tomorrow, next month and next year, ask your customers. They already know. And if you do what they tell you, you’ll be able to sing these new lyrics without any blood, sweat or tears:

“And when our model dies, and when it’s gone, we’ll produce a new model in this world to carry on, to carry on.”

Write this on a rock … Customers will tell you about their changing expectations – let them.