Six Ways to Build Sustained Growth

Learning the Lingo of Success

The Choice: Sell Stuff or Add Value

If you have not yet figured it out, all of us as customers of various companies have had it with vendors who want to sell stuff to us without a wit’s care about our needs, our interests, or our situation. These companies have a thing or two to learn about us, and until they do, they will continue to struggle with declining sales and profits.

Do you think I exaggerate? Think again.

How many of our Fortune 50 companies would you guess have been able to sustain even a modest increase in sustained growth? The answer is an appalling and surprising 5%. The flip of that is 95% of large US companies are stalled. This alarming stat is from the prestigious Corporate Strategy Board in their now-famous Stall Points research report.

But other research shows a similar pattern:

1. Chris Zook and James Allen reported in their book, "Profit from the Core," that only 13% of 1,854 companies they analyzed had achieved sustained growth.
2. Richard Foster and James Allen reported in their book, "Creative Destruction," that only 16% of 1,008 companies achieved sustained growth.
3. Jim Collins reported in his book, "Good to Great," that only 9% of 1,435 companies achieved sustained success.

What Should We Have Learned? What Did We Miss?

Customers, including ourselves, are no longer passive targets. The Internet has destroyed the old way of selling. But while this is pretty obvious to all of us, too many of us have continued running our businesses as if this was just a bad dream. One part of our brains tells us things have changed, but another part of our brains clings madly to traditional business as usual. The numbers above tell us to wake up.

Where’s the Love?

For most companies, customer loyalty is just a marketing campaign, and the customers see right through it. Now they collaborate with one another in a myriad of online communities. These social media are where the customers live. They can search to learn about their problems, compare one solution against another, check with peers about their experiences, use online alerts and syndication readers to pull information to their computers, and watch videos of customer testimonials and customer anger. They can go deep into their buying processes without us even knowing they are looking at us. Or worse yet, they can make a purchase and never even put us on their list for consideration. We didn’t show them love for the past few decades, so they figure why should they bother with us?

Customers Now Buy Based on Trust; Not on Features

We have a choice. We can be part of their solution, or we can continue trying to pry ourselves into their buying cycles using interruptive, impersonal, out-of-sync practices. What prospects want now is knowledge and guidance on how to get to their goals, accomplish their needs, alleviate their pains, and achieve their goals.

If we can shift our mindset to believe that our product features are all that really matter, and if we can alter our actions to address this new world, we can yet again find a path to sustained growth. A quick example? Amazon doesn’t sell books. They help customers make informed purchase decisions. That is how the customer conversation has changed … and we need to learn a new language, a new lingo, if we are to get in this ballgame again.

This approach shifts the customer experience from an interruptive, pushy experience to one that gives customers valued resources that address their needs and interests. By changing the customer conversation from product-centric to customer-centric, we can create a relationship where you are seen as a thought-leader that is sincere in your desire to make them more successful. You move up the ladder compared to your competitors as the most trusted resource. When it comes time to buy, they will be more inclined to buy from someone they trust.

This relational experience changes the marketing dynamics.

We show customers how to be more successful.

We help them buy smarter … sometimes from our competition.

We built trust between our clients and their customers.

Learning the New Lingo for Building Business

For simplicity and to keep this article less than book length, I suggest there are six strategies we now must practice to create sustained business growth.

1. Demand Generation. We need to build demand for what we are selling. We do this by delivering targeted, outbound actions with customer-centric content and offers. Multi-stage campaigns that track prospect behaviors and use these to further learn about what our customers find to be valuable to them. Use this knowledge to further segment customers into slivers that are fine-grained enough that they know you are talking to them and not to the masses.
2. Syndication. Create customer-centric content that prospects and customers pull to them through RSS feeds (really simple syndication). Put another way, businesses are now in the business of producing and publishing content as much as they are in the business of producing products or delivering services.
3. Thought Leadership. Remember what I said about customers buying from companies they trust? Establish your management team as the trusted experts about issues that are of most importance to your customers. Managers now need to be speakers and authors who talk and write about solutions to customer issues … a lot different than writing a product brochure.
4. Social Networks. You have to be where your customers are. Join into interactive conversations with customers, using online media where they hang out and where they go to find trusted referrals for products and services. Do you have a FaceBook account? Are you enrolled in LinkedIn? Do you Twitter? Are you on You Tube or Veoh?
5. Search Engine Optimization. Buying cycles increasingly begin on keyword-driven search tools. The requirement is for you to get your company on Page One of Google, et al. You have to learn to write for humans and spiders (the electronic robots that weave their way through the Internet and locate and rank content).
6. Website. This tool has to change perhaps more than anything else you are doing. Most websites are designed from a company perspective, delivering little more than fancy electronic brochures about our wonderful products. That day is over. Caput. The website is now where you must deliver services and capture prospect and customer data so you can continually refine and improve the customer experience.

Of course, there are a lot of other things you need to change to get back into a place where you can create sustained growth. Your customer service must be exemplary. Your sales force must be taught how to sell with this new mindset. Your products must deliver an experience that thrills your customers. Your terms and policies must make it easy for customers to deal with you.

There’s a long list of things to do.

But mastering the six changes above will go a long way to rebuilding your relationship with customers and enabling you to deliver a consistently perfect customer experience.

By Dale Wolf