Prospects and customers buy for different reasons more often than you may think, yet many sales people use the same pitch for both. Our research shows they differ in buying values about 75% of the time. This leaves the door open for the competition when relevance is ignored. There are variations on the theme for…

While this may sound like blasphemy to companies who organize internal teams to come up with their company’s mission, and to the CEO who is told good leaders define and share their vision, I’ll ask a simple question:  once a vision or mission statement is clearly articulated,how many companies enforce and revisit the goals of…

In asking thousands of CEO’s of small, medium sized businesses, “do you invest in good solid customer research?”, I am astounded to learn that less than 5% have done so.  Then when I ask the 5% for more details as to what they learned from their study, I often find that they, in fact, did…

When Uber first came on the scene, it was a big hit with consumers and a disruptor to the taxi and rental car companies. I personally use them on nearly 100% of my business trips. Uber grew at a staggering pace until they got multiple bad headlines.   Around that time, I became aware of…

I confess, I was eavesdropping on my plane seatmate’s PowerPoint for a minute or two and saw this quote: “Branding is out, Results are in!” I so wanted to applaud and interrupt him but he was dug in on his work. I don’t know if it was his original quote or from another source but…

Each time I fly, if I am in the airlines’ frequent flyer program, I receive a customer survey almost upon landing. Or maybe everyone gets it. I can guarantee you that no passenger feedback form is telling the airline they approve of “the new airline industry”. Customer feedback is useless to them, so why do…

It is a fact of life that your company, any company, is going to have complaints. It doesn’t make you bad people, it just means that a customer experience didn’t measure up as expected. It doesn’t surprise us that solving issues is often an important driver in a buying decision. Yet it does surprise us…

When it comes to making a buying decision, where does trust rate as a criterion? A recent Wall Street Journal interview with a couple of business consultants tried to address the question using the travails of United Airlines as an example of a company that has lost public trust. The downturn in business for United…

Do you feel commoditized? Are you fighting the price game every time you have a new opportunity? We see so many companies succumb to price pressure because they don’t have a relevant value proposition. Often they miss the opportunity to provide solid confidence building in the sales encounter. Nothing grabs the attention more of a…

Last blog post,  I wrote about the disintegration of loyalty programs, specifically mentioning Delta and Marriott hotels. This is a trend happening across industries. When a company provides a diminishing return of rewards to loyal customers, shouldn’t that company be concerned with how they are perceived and how they deliver customer service?   In other words,…