This Week's Winner is Chick-Fil-A

I don't know what the statistics are but I'll bet they are extremely high that "winners in the marketplace" are focused on their customer's experience as the primary component of operations and marketing. Statistics are collections of individual experiences and everyone knows that 87.4% of all statistics are just made up.

Here is an actually experience from today. I went out to bring back lunch for Lee & I. When I got to Chick-Fil-A I saw 20 plus cars in line in front of me. I started to pull out of line (which was all the way into the street) when I noticed a couple of the employees moving thru the cars in line taking orders. They were sharply dressed including a bright yellow traffic vest and outfitted with headsets. Before I could act on my decision to leave they had my order and had given me a total. They had to do this while walking along beside my car as the line never really stopped. About halfway thru the wait another employee emerged with a tray of bite sized breakfast sandwiches giving each car one for each passenger. Within minutes I was at the pay window; they had my order (correct, including napkins and condiment packs) and wished me a great day. Beginning to end 5 mins.

You wonder if good service works. I am writing about it here and will remember the experience for a long time.

Is your business set up around the people you are trying to serve? Do you know what they value? Is your company culture one of serving the customer? If not you are doomed to mediocrity or failure. I know this....and I am right 99.9% of the time.

Doing What Makes Sense

No...I can't be talking about our government with a headline like that. Although if you allow yourself to believe that it is possible for our leaders to suddenly come to their senses, it is comforting. I actually think the new Johnny Depp movie, "Alice in Wonderland" is a play on Washington's culture.

No I am talking about your business. If that is just you as a salesperson, or if your responsibility is a larger endeavor....do what makes sense. After a while, there is no low hanging fruit. What I mean is there are enough competitors in your market area to make gaining new business difficult. I know it sounds corny to say, but you just have to work hard and be smart. Duhhhh

The working hard part is in touching your customer. What I mean by "touch" is a visit, a phone call, an e-mail or something in the mail. Each is a point of contact that can enhance your image or detract from it. That is where the "smart" part comes in.

You wouldn't think of hand writing your name on a business card to save money. Nor would you X-out words in a proposal. Yet many of you expect a customer to be impressed by the website your brother-in-law did in trade for five sections of shelving for his garage.

Visual Applications is a professional company with a staff of some of the smartest people you will ever meet. They build websites, enhance existing sites, maximize pay-for-click programs....assist in local web. They also do catalog design, e-marketing assets and mail programs. It is all done in-house so the quality and continuity is assured.

Call and talk....conversation is free.
Ron - 214-770-3228
Steve - 972-235-5353

What Customers Expect - Mine & Yours

Visual Applications (my web development company) told me that their research says that people searching on the Internet for a new vendor look for;

• Product information in searchable format
• Service information
• Technical specs (details)
• Contact information
• Performance data
• Company information

Current customers will use your website for phone numbers, hours of operation, credit cards honored or even directions.

Knowing this, it makes sense to use this interaction (a customer or potential customer...on your website) to showcase new products or deep content for even better customer service. Also this is a perfect time to instill confidence and credibility in your company.

How can we know .....we track....

We use Yahoo Analytics Developer edition which we have branded “CatStat” which is Catalog Statistics for short. Used appropriately it gives us great data that we use to assist our clients.


This extensive tracking gives us useful information to further expand the products and deep content that our clients demand. Our catalog application “Catalog Explorer” populates this deep content with rich attribute selection capabilities.

It all starts with the goal of adding value for your new prospective clients and your existing client base. The design pulls them deeper into the site.

New sites with the Catalog Explorer application.

http://www.promor.com/

http://www.mattestusa.com/

And last but not least our Catalog Explorer with CASTERS.
demo.catalogexplorer.com





As mentioned we do have the populated Generic Caster Catalog Content available as well.

http://proofs.visualapp.com/casters/catalog/Catalog.aspx






A selection on any product here would drill down to a specific product. That product would have all the information (including multiple photos) the customer would need to make a decision. A couple of clicks and they have a printed page of specs to turn in for a PO, or a couple of different clicks and they send an email to you with questions or quote request.



Follow the links on this blog or contact me or any of the folks over at Visual Applications. We can go over the catalog or any other web service you might be interested in.



Good selling.

Social Media

To add to the already confusing landscape of advertising and marketing we now have social media. Wikipedia defines in part " Social media uses Internet and web-based technologies to transform broadcast media monologues (one to many) into social media dialogues (many to many). Literally, it was a speech and now it is a conversation.

Should we spend money in this arena on material handling, forklift sales and other B to B industrial type businesses. Lets first look at some recent data;

Business Week states that while the trend is still growing it is slowing considerably. MySpace, the largest reached a peak of 72 million users in October but was down to 68.9 million by December. The total number of people using social networking websites is still growing at around 11.5% but that is down considerably from past growth rates.

Last year the ad spend was up 155% to $1.2 billion according to E Marketer and is expected to grow 75% to $2.1 billion in 2010. On January 31 Google announced that they did not generate as much on social networking sites as they had expected. Google has a $900 million deal with MySpace to place ads on their site but many "in the know" say G is loosing money on the deal. One reason given is that users pay little attention to the ads as they interact with "friends". As a matter of statistics only 4 out of 10,000 MySpace users respond to the ads. This compares with 20 out of 10,000 on general web traffic.

OK, back to us. Should we chase business in this arena. I have a difficult time believing that the purchasing manager of a local distributor of pet supplies is going to be motivated by my "pay per click" ad that happens to be on the same page as the exploits of his high school buddies. You might say...."if they do not click, I do not pay". There is a cost involved with the process of chasing the click. I believe that money should be spent, but in another area. Remember this the next time a salesperson is trying to convince you to mount a "TWITTER" campaign ...when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

There are several areas to spend money where the viewer is motivated and pre-qualified. Spend it there. You knew that didn't you?