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

The original social media is face-to-face

Ever since Samuel Morse invented the telegraph in 1844, new communication technologies have sought relevance in an increasingly noisy universe.

Today there is actual management pain from an embarrassment of riches of communication options. This discomfort is especially keen when connecting with customers electronically: Should you email or send a text message? How about IM? And when should you use one of the social media options?

But from telegraph to telephones to Twitter, there has been one constant that has retained its relevance and impact: in person connection. As I’ve said before, face-to-face contact is the original social media.

For small businesses, social media adoption has always needed to be tempered by ROI reality. And as useful as each new communication resource proves to be, they are after all, merely tools to leverage our physical efforts, not eliminate the basic human need for interacting in person. Consider this story:

A sales manager (whose gray hair was not premature) noticed the sales volume of one of his rookies was below budget for the third consecutive month. Of course, he had questioned the numbers previously but had allowed his better judgment to be swayed by plausible explanations. Now there was a downward trend.

Upon more pointed probing, the manager discovered the reason for loss of production: too much electronic contact and not enough face-to-face. The rookie was relying too heavily on virtual tools and missing opportunities to meet with customers in person.

It turns out lack of training and rubber-meets-the-road experience left the rookie uncomfortable and unprepared to ask for and conduct face-to-face meetings, like proposal presentations. Consequently, he wasn’t benefiting from how the success rate of growing customer relationships can increase when certain critical steps are conducted in person. This manager immediately developed a training program that established standards for how and when to integrate all customer connection tools, including the face-to-face imperative.

If your sales could use some help trending upward, perhaps your salespeople need training to get in front of prospects and customers, particularly at the critical step of gaining an initial meeting. Like the manager above, you may need to establish specific and measurable standards for when face-to-face meetings should take place.

There is one connection option that has borne witness to all of the others and continues to be as powerful as ever: face-to-face.

Prepare for the Moment of Relevance

If the Age of the Customer is a sword of change, the Moment of Relevance
is the tip of that cold steel, indifferent to the very existence, let alone success,
of any Seller. In a universe where you’re one of potentially thousands of brands
trying to get noticed, every Prospect is asking these two rude questions:

If you want to have the maximum opportunity for your brand to be successful in the Age of the
Customer, I recommend doing the following:

• Whatever you do to go to market in the pursuit of your business model,
know that every person you hope to influence to buy from you is asking
these two questions, consciously or subconsciously, right now.

• On a prominent wall of your office, post an image that represents a
Customer, as you see on the previous page, with those two questions
as captions in balloons.

• Make sure every employee believes that their professional success
depends upon their efforts to address these questions.

• Re-enforce and re-execute the above, plus your own steps every day.
In the Age of the Seller, your brand could take a holiday. In the Age of the
Customer, it doesn’t have that luxury; you’re under the relevance microscope
24/7/365, on Main Street and Cyber Street.

The greatest danger to any brand in the new Age is not being uncompetitive,
but rather, being irrelevant.

Expert Gail F. Goodman shares insights from Age of the Customer

In his new book, The Age of the Customer, Jim Blasingame reveals why all managers must re-examine their business through the new and evolving expectations of customers. And this is now happening often before you even know the customer exists, at what Jim calls “the Moment of Relevance.” Let Jim help you bring your business into the Age of the Customer.

Gail F. Goodman, CEO, Constant Contact, author of Engagement Marketing: How Small Business Wins in a Socially Connected World

The Rules of Selling Have Changed

During the Age of the Seller, getting an initial meeting was the easy step,
while closing the sale was more involved and required the most skill. But Age
of the Customer influences have shifted the way buyers prepare themselves
to purchase products or services, from needing assistance from a salesperson,
to being able to pre-qualify themselves by themselves. Buyers are avoiding
prospecting calls from all but the short list of vendors they have identified as
worthy in their information gathering process.

Armed with Age of the Customer resources, buyers now have access to most of the information they require to make a pre-qualifying decision. This unassisted information acquisition results in disruptions to the selling process and the cold-call looks a lot different today.

Posted in: Sales

Expert Jay Mincks talks about The Age of the Customer

As Jim Blasingame proves in his new book, the Age of the Customer has changed the rules of selling. Since nothing happens until someone makes a sale, understanding these new rules is essential to success, and no one delivers that understanding better than Jim. In fact, chapter 16 alone is worth the price of this book.

Jay Mincks, Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing, Insperity