Customer Communication – Velocity Media

6 October 2015

How to convince customers to believe in you

It doesn’t matter if you are pitching an idea, promoting a product or delivering a service, to make a sale your customer needs to believe in you. But with only minutes to win them over, where do you start?

1. Communicate your why

If you are like many of us in business, there are hundreds if not thousands of people who do what you do. But not all of them do it for the same reasons you do.

To inspire, attract and recruit the customers you want, you need a cause or passion that is much bigger than the products or services you provide. Give your customers something to aspire to and believe in. As leadership expert Simon Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

2. Show your passion

Have you had the privilege of being around someone who is truly passionate about what they do? It is infectious. You can’t help but get excited and passionate right along with them.

When you get passionate about your business, you engage and excite your customers in the same way. By showing you believe in your products and services, you give your potential customers permission to believe in them too.

3. Speak ‘to’ them not ‘at’ them

Ultimately your customer wants to be heard and understood; that is why it is so important to talk to them and not at them. Your potential customers are people with real issues, frustrations, and needs, and they have come to you to get help.

For this reason, switch your focus from selling to solving. Instead of talking about generic features and benefits, ask questions. Get to know them, their business and the reason they need your product or service.

Their answers will give you the clues you need to develop a personalised pitch, which in turn will give them the belief you are the right person or company for the job.

4. Tell stories

To increase your customers’ belief in you, you need to establish your credibility. While you can talk about your background, qualifications and experience directly, telling stories is far more effective.

To show you understand a potential customer’s needs, share stories of how others with similar goals or frustrations used your product or service and the results or outcomes they achieved.

If you find yourself pitching a new concept or idea without any existing customer stories, then try using metaphors to increase their interest and understanding.

5. Be relatable

Be mindful of body language, the tone of voice and the words your customers use as this will indicate how they like to communicate and do business. If they have a relaxed approach, be relaxed. If they want to get straight to the point, then get down to business. Meet them at their level.

But don’t stop there. To be more relatable, you also need to find points in common. Do you share interests, passions or opinions? Have you experienced or solved similar frustrations? Do you have shared contacts? Are you in a similar phase of life or business? We all want to do business with ‘like-minded’ people.

Amanda

24 March 2015

Five reasons to call your customers regularly

The way to succeed in business is to be constantly in touch with your market. The moment you lose touch with them or start making business more about you than your customers is the time you risk becoming irrelevant.

While business can get busy, and email can seem like a quicker option, nothing beats picking up the phone and engaging in conversation. Don’t think you have the time? Here are five reasons you should be making the time to call your customers regularly.

1. Uncover needs and trends

Businesses and people change over time. What they once valued or needed may no longer be valued or needed. The only way to prevent yourself from losing customers to competitors or becoming irrelevant in your industry is to be in contact with your customers and find out what is happening in their lives and businesses.

The more you genuinely care and want to help, the more they will open up to you about their struggles, worries, frustrations and challenges. This gives you valuable insight into the minds and needs of your customers and helps you find or create the right solution for them. It can also help you identify trends, and market opportunities as similar struggles and needs appear through your discussions.

2. Upsell products and services

As you uncover needs you will also uncover opportunities to upsell (increase the amount they spend), cross-sell (get them buying more) and resell (keep them coming back).

A customer won’t always think of you as their needs change and may not even be aware of the other products and services you provide. Talking to them over the phone gives you the opportunity to educate them on all of the different solutions you can provide.

3. Gain testimonials and case studies

Another key benefit of staying in touch with your customers is that you get to know the results they are achieving with your products and services. Customer testimonials and case studies are incredibly valuable in your sales process because they prove how you can help. This proof reduces the risk felt by potential customers and gives you powerful marketing messages to use.

As you are talking to your customers, casually ask them how your product or service has helped them. More often than not your customers will be flattered you value their opinion and be happy to give you a testimonial.

4. Identify improvements

Some business owners fear their customers’ feedback, so much so that it prevents them from following up after purchases. But the feedback your customers share with you, whether it is positive or negative, is the key to building a better business.

Your customers, who have experienced your products and services firsthand, will provide priceless insight into the quality, affordability, customer service and benefits you offer compared to what else is available in your industry. And if you choose to listen, help you create greater products and services that are more competitive and relevant to your market.

5. Build relationships

Never underestimate the power of a trusting business relationship. You have already invested time, money and energy into getting your customers; why not do everything in your power to keep them as well?

People want to be valued for who they are and not just how much they spend with you. A quick phone call to see how they are going is a great way to build a relationship with your customers and inspire loyalty and trust.

These days so many businesses have an agenda when they contact their customers. However, you leave an indelible mark when you call just to see how they are going.

Amanda

10 March 2014

How to turn a mistake into a marketing opportunity

While mistakes in business can fill us with dread and embarrassment, like many other times of trial and adversity they can be turned into an opportunity to showcase the professionalism, integrity and authenticity of our business.

So how do you recover with your reputation in tact after you’ve dropped the ball? Here are three tips to help you turn a mistake into a marketing opportunity and win the respect of your customers and business associates.

1. Remember mistakes can be the best teachers

When money is coming in, the phone is ringing, our customers are happy and everything is going smoothly we don’t always look for ways to improve, change, update, innovate or leverage to make our business work better. After all if it’s working why mess with it – right?

Just think about it, when are you more motivated and driven to change your marketing approach or bring in sales, in a slow month or a busy month? What about adding value to your customers and increasing your level of customer service? Are you more likely to think about it when you have a happy customer or an unhappy customer?

When are you more innovative and creative in business, when it’s business as usual or you’re under threat because of a mistake, wrong decision or competitor?

Creativity and innovation thrive when we are under fire. There is nothing quite like making a mistake or facing adversity and the accompanying pain or embarrassment, to get us out of our comfort zone and into our creative, innovative and strategic problem-solving zone to find a better way.

So take the education, learn the lesson, find a way to make it better or prevent it from happening in the future and make the change.

2. Realise mistakes can humanize you and help build rapport

The fact is we all make mistakes, and provided it is small, there is limited damage and the intent was innocent, mistakes can actually work for us, making us more relatable and approachable to our customers and business associates.

To give you an example, many years ago I told a potential customer they could get “one product for the price of three!” – a bargain right?! This silly, slip of the tongue completely broke the ice, gave them a good laugh and allowed me to build a good rapport with them over the phone which lead to an ongoing relationship and ongoing sales.

Who hasn’t made a typo, got tongue tied, sent an email to the wrong person, forgotten to do something, misspoke, or made a wrong decision? The key is in how you handle it, recover from it and make up for it.

Could you use the mistake or blunder as a rapport builder, a case study to help your customers avoid the same mistakes themselves or as an opportunity to showcase new and better procedures, methods or measures?

3. Use your mistakes as an opportunity to show your character

There is something inspiring about a person who takes responsibility for their actions, faces the consequences and tries to make it right. It shows character.

So if you do make a mistake own it, if you make the wrong decision fix it and if you have an unhappy customer, address it. Be professional, admit your mistake, apologise and make it right.

By being open, honest and accountable for your mistakes you not only protect your reputation, you can end up having more people want to work with you simply because of the attitude you have and actions you have taken.

Amanda

1 December 2013

Five ways to stay in touch with your customers – and have them look forward to it

When it comes to increasing your sales and overall profitability, one of the best places to start is to increase your level of customer interaction. The more contact you have with your customers, the more likely it is that they will buy from you and refer you to others who need your products or services.

It shouldn’t be just any old customer interaction though. You need to be strategic, targeted, value-driven and compelling – without appearing to be desperate, spamming or annoying.

Not always the easiest feat, but to help you here are five proven ways to maintain regular customer contact and how to use them more effectively so your customers look forward to hearing from you.

1. Newsletters

While some will argue the trusty newsletter has had its day, I tend to disagree. If you are going to make it work in this day and age of endless emails though, you’re going to have to shake things up a bit.

When producing your newsletter, e-zine or e-news always come at it from the perspective “What’s in it for my customer? What information, tips and offers can I include that will make my customer want to give up 5, 10 or 15 minutes of their life to read this every month?”

Think industry insights or a market update, some key tips that could be helpful and implemented the day they receive your newsletter, a relevant article and a call to action by way of a special offer.

You want to keep it short and succinct, and where possible in the reading pane of their email. If you do have any long articles or pieces of information you want to include, publish them as a blog post on your website so you can provide a short sentence or two with a link to “read more” in your newsletter to save space and increase your website traffic.

2. Special offers and competitions

A special offer for the month can be a great way to stay in touch with you customers and get them buying from you. Competitions also have the benefit of getting customers to engage with you by sharing your brand both online and offline.

To hold your customers’ interests and ensure the best results, make sure your special offers are different each time and your competition prizes are desired items that are relevant to your business.

3. Emails using auto-responders

Not only are auto-responders an effective way of interacting with your customers, they can also save you a lot of time in the process.

You could have a set email sequence start from when a customer or potential customer first enquires, becomes a customer, signs up to your mailing list or downloads a resource from your website so there is a clear process leading them to a sale or repeat sale.

Or you could use it to give a quick weekly tip, update, thought, special offer, or all of the above to add more value to them.

For optimum impact, make it concise, poignant, relevant and educational. Also use a value-driven or fear-based headline in order to stand out in an overcrowded email inbox.

4. Social Media

Social media is perhaps one of the best ways to stay in touch with your customers as it’s the most accepted regular form of contact, and a more “social” form of contact, making rapport building quicker and easier when done right.

On social media, most people are anticipating regular updates from you – normally daily updates and possibly even multiple daily updates depending on your business. No other communication method has as much expected or allowed regular communication with a customer, making it an extremely valuable tool.

To use it effectively and maintain your customer’s interest, you need to do more than post special offers and sales pitches. Look to inform, entertain and add value to your customers first, and then add some business promotion in.

5. Blogging

While it is a slightly more passive way of communicating with customers as they are coming to you, when you post relevant, interesting and educational content regularly, you can build a loyal readership that will keep coming back for more.

To make it a little less passive, give readers the opportunity to subscribe to your blog by email or RSS feed. This way they can have updates sent to them immediately instead of potentially missing something when they are left to come back on their own.

To monetize your blog and covert your readers to customers, add a call to action or special offer that relates to what you wrote about in the post as a P.S. at the end of your blog post.

How do you stay in regular contact with your customers? What works best for you?