Caroline Easton – Be the Alpha

In Success & Growth

Top 3 strategic steps to increase income in times of economic stress

January 2021

In times of economic stress, like the current COVID-19 economic situation, most businesses panic, often making extreme and illogical decisions including cutting marketing spend.

This is the exact opposite of what is required. Keeping fear at bay and viewing economic uncertainty as an opportunity unleashes growth strategies which, as your competitors panic, contract and cut costs, will result in even more positive outcomes for you. Now is the time to work smarter and harder; taking strategic steps to increase income and operating with 10X levels of action.

When the going gets tough, keep calm and carry on marketing

Keeping calm and carrying on marketing when the going gets tough, will not only help you survive, but possibly thrive too. In fact, increasing your marketing is our top tip for increasing income in times of economic stress:

Increase your marketing
Adjust your offering
Strengthen your team

1. Increase your marketing

As Peter Drucker said, “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” Even so, during tough economic times most businesses view marketing as a cost and reduce their marketing spend. However, strategic, proactive businesses don’t just maintain their current spend, they increase it. It is these businesses – that market themselves strongly while their competitors are simultaneously making cuts – that do well in tough economic times, achieving even greater long-term return on their marketing investments.

While cutting marketing budgets may save costs in the short-term, it also deprives you of income in the short-term and risks your long-term market share as existing and potential customers forget about you. On the other hand, increasing your marketing spend offers a great opportunity to promote, increase share of voice, strengthen your brand, boost sales and claim additional market share.

It’s imperative to remember that loyal customers are your most valuable source of cash flow and organic growth, and marketing to them cannot be neglected. Reassuring messages that reinforce an emotional connection with your brand and demonstrate empathy are vital.

A well-thought-out, well-executed and adaptive marketing strategy is important at the best of times, yet critically important during an economic slowdown. It is the number one way to increase your income.

2. Adjust your offering

If you aren’t already viewing your company’s operations, offerings and service-levels through the lens of your customer, then it is imperative to do so now.

How are your customers reassessing priorities, reallocating funds, switching brands, and redefining value? Is your current offering viewed as essential, indulgent, postponeable or expendable? Can you streamline or adapt your product portfolio, improve affordability, bolster trust or add essential services without negatively affecting your long-term position?

Look at what you can do better for your customers – with an aim of outperforming your competitors and doing more with less – and get every employee thinking this way. Improvements from an operational efficiency, product offering/quality and customer service perspective will increase employee bandwidth and customer satisfaction, resulting in greater customer loyalty, serviceability and income.

3. Strengthen your team

In uncertain times, it is time to shore up your team. It is time to reassure and inspire your employees, uniting them towards a common goal; after all everyone will likely be required to work harder even if only to achieve the same results. It is time to get rid of those employees with poor performance levels and/or attitudes (replacing, if necessary, from a growing pool of valuable staff let go by panicking companies). And it is time to reassure your invaluable workers that you have their back and to prioritise talent even if it costs more money in the short-term.

All for one and one for all: you need dedicated employees willing to give 110% to the ongoing success of your business, and in return you need to pursue an offensive, expansionary strategy that instils confidence, customer-centricity, resilience and recognition within your teams.

Addressing employee concerns, prioritising customer experience and driving operational efficiencies will improve morale, reduce costs, increase outputs and enable you to become more efficient overall. The companies that strengthen their teams and outputs and enhance their customer experience will see an increase in brand loyalty, customer base and income.

When all is said and done, these three steps will not only help you increase income, enhance your customer experience and improve your competitiveness when the going gets tough, but will also place you in a stronger position when the economy recovers.

Image: Kalen Emsley

In CX, Sales & Marketing

Top 6 reasons to work on your customer experience

December 2020

Did you know that two-thirds of a business’ competitive edge comes from its customer experience (outstripping product and pricing as principle differentiators)? Or that less than one-third of businesses are currently customer-experience led?

So what exactly is customer experience?

Well, it’s not customer service or individual touchpoints as many people may think; it’s the total sum of a customer’s interactions with, and perceptions of, your brand and it involves:

A goal of adding value for the customer and customer loyalty
Implementation internally by the whole organisation
End-to-end customer orientation, from innovation through to service
Proactive development around customer needs

The path to business growth

Embraced correctly, it’s positive impact on business growth is virtually guaranteed. Furthermore, with increasingly disruptive competitors in today’s digitally-transforming world, it is becoming a strategic imperative.

Peter Drucker stated long ago: “The purpose of business is to create a customer, so a business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

Marketing by its very nature is customer-centric (evidenced by the definitions below), so marketing orientation/customer-centricity and a culture of innovation are at the heart of improving customer experience.

Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. – Chartered Institute of Marketing
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. – American Marketing Association
Marketing is profitably using the results of studying short term and long term needs of those who can pay for a one-time, or in most cases, a steady flow of service or product placement. – Wikipedia

Top 6 outcomes for customer-experience led companies

Making the transition to being customer-experience led doesn’t happen overnight, but for those companies on the path to – or already – achieving it, the future is brighter:

Increase pricing – Over two-thirds of B2B and B2C customers will pay more for a better experience
Increase average order value – Experience-led companies have 1.9x higher average order values
Increase customer purchase frequency – Loyal customers are 5x more likely to buy again
Increase number of customers – Loyal customers are 4x more likely to refer the brand to their family and friends
Increase profits – Experience-led companies see revenues increase as much as 10-15% while also seeing costs to serve lower by 15-20%
Increase employee engagement – Heightened sense of ownership, increased efficiencies and satisfaction levels improve employee engagement by 20%

Do you want to embed customer experience as part of your long-term growth strategy? Are your innovation and marketing measures currently viewed as costs rather than investments? Are you struggling to juggle cost-savings at the same time as stimulating business growth? Do you want to understand your customers’ journeys better?

Accalia can help you grow your business by becoming customer-experience led; helping you: Unlock Insights, Create Value, Master Marketing and Accelerate Sales.

Acknowledgements: Deloitte. Forrester. McKinsey. Salesforce. Temkin Group. Image: Doran Erickson.

Read: 12 steps to achieving business growth.

In Success & Growth

Converting vision to success: #BeTheAlpha

November 2020

Let’s be clear from the outset: ‘Be the Alpha’ is a far cry from the negative connotations associated with dominant male leaders or alpha wolves.

It is about achieving success and being the best you can – a purpose, a challenge and a responsibility all rolled into one – and requires leadership that inspires and benefits all.

With purpose, we focus and persevere
With challenge, we develop and improve
With responsibility, we care and achieve more

It is a mentality of aspiring to a desired outcome, determining the best strategy to get there, and executing with tenacity, quality and uniqueness…whilst adapting to challenges and change. Applied at an individual or an organisational level, Be the Alpha has four components:

Aspire
Align
Amaze
and be Agile

For businesses, if you aren’t striving to Be the Alpha – delighting your customers and setting yourself apart from your competition – then you’ll likely be left behind soon enough.

12 steps to achieving business success

Aspire

1. Be visionary – Have a long-term, visionary goal. This is a common trait among successful companies, becoming the unifying focal point of effort that aligns teams and rallies everyone, and it is key to achieving continued growth.

2. Have audacious goals and differentiate – Aspire to greatness. Whether this is through a stand-out product, transformational innovation, remarkable service or ideological branding, it is essential in developing audacious business goals and becoming a market leader.

3. Embed customer-centric leadership – Have a customer-centric, inspiring and united leadership team. This delivers clarity and a shared purpose across the business, and fosters a culture of engagement, customer experience, innovation and performance.

Why do you do what you do? How will you improve your customers’ lives? What is the lasting impact you plan to create for your community and the world?

Align

1. Communicate and collaborate – Organizational alignment is the cornerstone of goal attainment, and drives business success. Develop a system for keeping everyone in the company on the same page; everyone should know the long-term and short-term goals and priorities, and be able to create supporting activities for themselves. Form cross-organizational teams for effective collaboration and improved customer experience.

2. Think like a customer – Thinking like a customer leads teams to innovate and continuously look for ways to add value for them. Even if they don’t know it, customers want something better, and a desire to delight customers will drive innovation on their behalf and elevate you above your competition. From product offering to customer touchpoints, thinking like a customer ultimately improves customer experience.

3. Be data-driven – Successful businesses think about digital transformation from a data perspective, elevating data beyond siloed departments to company-wide business intelligence and analytics. Being data-driven is key to transforming companies, increasing transparency, creating new opportunities and unlocking value.

How will you execute your strategy effectively? How can you collaborate to deliver exceptional customer experiences? How can you leverage data to create opportunities?

Amaze

1. Deliver consistently superior experiences – A product or service needs to be high quality to satisfy customers. Succeed, and those customers can become loyal customers and/or brand ambassadors, thereby increasing customer lifetime value and new business levels. Fail, and they can become major brand detractors. What customers say can make or break companies, so ensure employees lives your brand values and address problems swiftly and effectively.

2. Commit to improving – A commitment to improving customer experience – to differentiating your business by setting the experience benchmark for competitors to follow – brings a multitude of benefits. Embedded through company values, attitude-fit recruitment, training and an empowering leadership style, individuals and teams can deliver internal efficiencies and incremental through to pivotal improvements to your customer experience.

3. Be creative – Continually look for new and creative ways to market your product or service and connect with customers. Stand out from the crowd…inspire people, surprise people, wow people, delight people…whatever you do, make them feel something. Build brand awareness and engagement based on emotional aspects as well as rational benefits.

Why do you care about your customers’ experiences? How can each employee positively impact customer experience and your business’ success? What would you like customers to say about your company?

And be Agile

1. Be attentive to signals – With a strong customer-centric, data-driven culture, an organization can develop signals and act agilely. Signals, from both internal and external environments, provide insights and opportunities, and agility is the capacity to react to them in an adaptive, creative and resilient way. Create feedback loops and add signals to the formal reporting process at a team level to improve performance.

2. Constantly execute and iterate – Performance orientation and continuous learning/iteration speed up decision making and customer responsiveness, whilst normalising uncertainty and change. Your offering will never be perfect, and it certainly won’t be at launch. Post-launch, listen to customer feedback and consider their wants, needs and concerns. Strive to innovate, adapt to changes in the market and stay two steps ahead of the competition.

3. Be willing to take risks – ‘Fortune favours the brave’ as they say, and in the pursuit of audacious goals, risks – no matter how calculated – are necessary. However, not every risk will result in success, so it is important to create an environment where employees can freely experiment and come up with their own ideas, and where failure is embraced as a necessary input to innovation and achieving a competitive advantage.

Which signals should you be tracking? How can you speed up decision making and customer responsiveness? How can you stay two steps ahead of the competition?

Whilst 12 steps may be too many to remember, the 4As of Be the Alpha – Aspire, Align, Amaze…and be Agile – can easily be committed to memory.

Plus, it would be remiss not to point out that taking an agile approach to the 12 steps – adding, removing or adapting as necessary to fit your business – is perfectly spot on, and that our consultancy services are there if you need to dive deeper! Discover Accalia’s services.