Nigel Moore, Impact Washington COO
It’s not only a prerequisite to have a meaningfully unique value proposition in terms of survival or as a way to beat the competition globally. The article republished below, written by one of the world’s great marketers, Jay Conrad Levinson (the father of Guerrilla Marketing and author of the Guerrilla Marketing series of books), talks about price selling, unmistakable differentiating quality, promise with backup and making sure the customers’ unique needs are met. Our Innovation Engineering toolset allows us to address and have meaningfully unique discussions with our client companies both before and during engagement to bring them into the 21st century of global competitiveness.
Rather than wowing the awards judges, my hope is for guerrillas to wow their accountants with dynamite numbers. One way to do that is never to sell on price. Says author Lawrence L. Steinmetz: “If you think you can match or sell below your competitor’s prices, you need to understand that you will have an ongoing, lifetime gun battle of survival which, sooner or later, you are going to lose. There is nothing that is ever going to make that go away.”
He believes that competing on price is like being a gunslinger in the Old West. No matter how fast they were, they eventually either slowed down enough or met someone even faster and then joined the other losers on Boot Hill. There is no way you can continue to offer the lower price and avoid your own personal Boot Hill.
The way to increase your profit margins is by becoming the first and only choice for your customer and prospect. That means you negotiate for the work rather than bidding on it. And the surefire way to do that is to distinguish your business by excelling at customer service.
Easy for me to say. Not as easy for you to do, unless — you can develop your competitive edge in five areas:
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Competitive, but not necessarily lower, price
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Quality that is unmistakable from the moment of ownership on
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Service that truly does transport customers into a state of bliss
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Marketing that is aggressive, constant and omnipresent in all media
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Delivery of absolutely everything you promised and then more
A survey of 500 executive women reported that 79 percent say good service is their prime consideration in selecting a restaurant. A MasterCard study reported that of the top ten reasons diners select the restaurants they do, six have to do with service, three with food quality, and only one with value. None were about the lowest price.
In the area of quality, guerrillas recognize that the true quality comes when you customize the product or service to the client’s unique needs. Peter Drucker reminds us that quality in a service or product is not what you put into it, but what the client or customer gets out of it.
In the area of service, one-to-one service is the only name of the game. There is hardly any relationship between good customer service and real customer loyalty. To earn that loyalty, an element of emotion must enter the equation. Your customers must love you and you must be able to meet and exceed customer expectations more than create perfect products.
The best way to render superlative customer service? Let your customers train you. Let them teach you exactly what they expect, what they want, what they need. Learn from them so you can treat them the way they pray you’ll treat them. Customer service can only be taught by customers. And only world-class listeners are able to learn from that. They learn then to address the needs of their customers rather than their own needs.
Tags: customer, innovation, manufacturing, marketing, service
