The Dangers of Spin in the Internet Age

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I was recently involved in a situation with a colleague where we were considering buying one of a number of products for one of our businesses. As part of this, my colleague asked a question of one supplier (Supplier A) in relation to one of its competitors (Supplier B) and providing supplier B’s web address so that supplier A could answer the question properly.

At this point supplier A was the preferred and my colleague was asking a legitimate question that would probably have resulted in a decision in favour of supplier A.

The response we got from supplier A is when it all went wrong and led me to writing this blog in the first place.

The response from a sales person in supplier A suggested that they were the only credible company and any other company like supplier B was simply a new kid on the block and probably wouldn’t last 6 months. The sales person also went on to make suggestions that supplier B was offering loss leading services and other statements designed to discredit supplier B.

Remember that supplier A had been provided the web address for supplier B – it will be clear why in a few minutes.

On reviewing the response from supplier A, my colleague and I decided to check up on some of the statements made, just to be sure and found the following:

• Supplier B has been trading for 10 full years longer than supplier A – this took two web searches and 3 minutes to confirm.
• Supplier B’s business has been profitable every year bar its first year since it was founded and profits continue to grow steadily  - one web search, two documents downloaded and 5 minutes to confirm.
• Supplier B’s mature business gives it economies of scale that mean it can offer its products and services are lower cost while still being profitable – same search as point two. 

So in less than ten minutes supplier A, went from being our preferred choice to rejected for two reasons: 

• First they tried to spin us with a ‘stock’ answer that had not been researched, had no justification and was materially untrue. 
• Second, despite the fact that we gave them everything they needed to give us an honest answer, they chose to spin and as a result we lost faith in their sales person as a credible, honest person, which in turn meant we lost faith in supplier A as a whole.

Would you make a different choice in our shoes?

When selling it is natural to want to put your best foot forward and ensure your company is seen as the best. However in an age when information is so easy to get online about virtually anything, trying to spin a potential customer is both dangerous and I would suggest unprofessional. You will get caught and these days it doesn’t even take ten minutes.

This is just a recent example of something that so many companies and organisations fail to grasp. In the Internet age, the availability of accurate, information about virtually everything including from finance to customer satisfaction means that spin is becoming less and less easy or credible, especially if it is rushed as a way of addressing a potential negative. Anyone with any experience of social media can reel off half a dozen corporate brands that have made appalling mistakes with reactive spin that have cost them dear.

So what is the point of the first negative blog I have written in years? Well simply this, you can do brilliant work creating a positive business, a positive image and a great product, but it can be trashed in a matter of moments unless you are prepared to ensure that everyone working for your organisation takes the same care with your reputation it can very easily be damaged. 

The good news is that this is relatively easy because it is about process and education to make sure your people know how to manage this properly and keep your business' reputation 'in the black' as it were.

As always I hope this helps and it would be great to get the views and experiences of others.

By Tim Sandford

Marketing ROI 2 - Should Marketing (& Sales) be measured on customer satisfaction?

In my last blog, I started a discussion about measuring the return on investment in Marketing, suggesting that when it comes to sales and marketing we may well be measuring the wrong things, or at least ignoring elements that have a direct impact on the ability of sales and marketing to generate leads and sales.

In most cases measurement stops almost as soon as the prospect becomes a customer. At that point the new customer is introduced to a whole new group of people and functions to process the order, deliver the product, support the customer and so on.

These are often tightly controlled departments where the focus is on cost control and limiting the amount of service provided to customers – the opposite of what sales and marketing promise in order to win the customer. There is nothing wrong with that so long as the right expectations have been set from the beginning by sales and marketing. On the other hand if the wrong expectations are set....

There is a generally accepted rule in this space that a happy customer will tell 5 people, but an unhappy customer will tell 26 people about their bad experience.

So here is a wee thought. If you want to make sure that you keep on the right side of your customers perhaps you might want to include customer satisfaction as one of your key measurements and making sure that sales and marketing are part of that measurement.

'But surely that belongs to Customer Service?'

Yes and no is my answer. The yes part is obvious because after the deal is done the customer should be looked after by appropriately focused people.

At the same time, having run a few pretty beefy sales and marketing functions in my time, one of the things that can be extremely damaging is marketing and selling to the wrong kinds of customers in the first place. That is definitely the responsibility of Marketing and Sales.

For one large software firm I did some work with, one of the most costly problems in the business was inappropriate sales to inappropriate customers. It happened because the sales team was under enormous pressure to sell, sell, sell, which coupled with unrealistic sales targets meant that marketing and sales were more interested in making any sale than making sure they were selling the right products to the right kind of customers.

The result was actually a less profitable company with a poor reputation for two simple reasons:

• The cost in time, refunds and so forth to sort out the issues caused by sales to the wrong customers
• The cost in reputation that made it significantly more difficult to generate sales with the right kind of customers.

So bearing that in mind, do you think that customer satisfaction is something that should be included in the measurement of sales and marketing?

More tomorrow, but in the meantime it would be great to hear others’ views on this.

Book vs Blog

Hi Folks

This blog is really as much an apology as anything else for not being able to find the time to write up the articles I promised a couple of weeks ago.

I have spent the last two weeks buried deeply in the book edits and rewrites of a couple of chapters that didn’t quite get the point across the way I wanted it. More importantly though, now that we are bringing more experts in their various fields into the whole Backwards Business Movement we have been reworking a few areas of the programme to ensure that from start to finish every aspect is focused on helping companies develop all their sales, marketing and customer service activities to fit their market’s needs.

It will be another week before I finally get the book finished and published, but in the meantime here are a couple of things that are new:

First, the draft’s of the book cover that the brilliant folks at Pocapoc Creative have been working on for us along with a whole new look for Backwards Business in general. They are at the top of this blog entry and please do Let us know what you think.

The second thing for you to have a look at is the presentation I’ve embedded below. This is a first look at some new developments in the programme and the way we are focusing everything on delivering real, tangible value to our customers.

Backwards business principles from timsandford

When I have the first book finished next week, I promise to get the blog articles I promised finished and posted for you. In the meantime, it would be great to get your feedback and hear your views.

If you would like to subscribe to future entries of the blog just follow this link and we'll send you a copy of each article when its published - http://bit.ly/PKp3S7

The Fruit Fly Product Lifecycle

Fruit flies live for an average of 45 days from the moment an egg is laid. It really is not very long, but here is something that in reality has an even shorter lifespan – an app.

According to a number of specialists in the area apps including Josh Clark who shows in his book Tapworthy that the life of the average app on the average user’s phone is less than 30 days. In that 30 days the user is likely to open the app up to a total of 20 times on average.

And this has what to do with the price of onions?

Well think of it this way. Most of you know about Moore’s law of computing that essentially says speed doubles every two years, well what if there was a similar one for some markets?

The app market is one, where hundreds if not thousands of hours go into developing apps before they launch. When they do launch they have a finite amount of time to make it into the charts and make it big before something better comes along. The worst part of it is that all of this is measured in days now, especially when you consider that there are now more than 19,000 new apps released in the Apple App store every month

Part of this may well be the hype around becoming rich on the back of apps, so there is a kind of ‘app rush’ as everyone tries to get their share.

However I think more fundamentally the desire for new and exciting things in the market is such that consumers in particular are happy to buy and discard purchases in a cycle shorter than the life of a fruit fly.

The point of this little article is to suggest that you might want to ask yourself a question. Do I sell products and services that are not serious investments and will this kind of fruit fly lifecycle start to affect my business?

If it will what does that mean for your products and your business?  What can you do to turn the fruit fly product lifecycle to your advantage?

Next week, I’ll be posting 3 entries on the blog to help you with some ideas about how to turn very short product lifecycles to your advantage. In the mean time I hope this helps and it would be great to hear your thoughts and ideas on the subject.