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Guest post by: Rich Gaasenbeek Become an Author

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It’s amazing how many companies want to launch into a direct mail campaign or trade journal ad campaign without ever really knowing what they want to say. Without knowing what they want to say, they default to generic “boilerplate” communications which is a mixture of platitudes pulled from their dated corporate brochure, with their logo big and bold at the very top. In fact, there’s a direct co-relation between the size and prominence of the company’s logo in its advertising, and the vagueness of its message. The bigger and more prominent the logo, the less clear the company is on its message.

Before spending a dime on any form of marketing, a company first needs to be crystal clear on what makes it worthy of the customer’s business. This may sound like a “messaging” issue but it’s not. At its core, it’s an issue of business and marketing strategy.

So what does it mean to “have something good to say” and how do you get there?

Having something good to say really means that you’ve understood your customer at a very deep level, and have aligned everything about the way you do business to satisfy or exceed the needs and expectations of your customers. This goes well beyond the traditional “features, advantages, benefits” of your products or services. Of course, your products and services must be providing some value to your customers or you wouldn’t still be in business. But to excel, you need to address real client wants and needs in a way that is superior and in some way unique versus your competition. Beyond products and services, real alignment with your customers extends to all facets of your operations: your hours of business, payment terms, return or cancellation policies, customer service and technical support options, even the verbiage and tone of your communications.

So what’s stopping so many companies from being in alignment with their customers? Absolutely nothing. Other than the willingness to ask the right questions, and the willingness to truly hear the customers’ answers. Most customers are delighted to provide you with honest feedback, provided they feel you are sincere in your interest. Repeated “customer satisfaction surveys” that seem to change nothing will dampen any customers enthusiasm for communicating with you. But if you approach them with a sincere desire to learn more about them and how you can serve them better, you’ll be amazed at what they’ll tell you and what you can learn!

The hardest part is to truly HEAR what the customer is saying. We all tend to “hear what we want to hear” and that can be a real problem when asking for customer feedback. Sometimes, they’ll tell you things that you absolutely do NOT WANT to hear – and that is usually the most important feedback of all.

We all enjoy hearing how wonderful our product is and how nice our customer service reps are, but what do you do when you learn that something you’ve based a big part of your business strategy on – is wrong?!?

For instance, you spent the better part of the past decade becoming ISO9001 certified, and you lead with this clear proof of your high quality standards in all your marketing, only to learn that it’s actually fast delivery, a wide range of products, and flexible payment terms that are your customers’ top three buying criteria, with quality a distant fourth? This is not an easy thing to learn, but you’d better learn it sooner rather than later, or you’ll eventually be out of business.

So ask customers what they truly care about, what issues are making their lives a pain, how you could help them better, and how you could be of more service. Then be prepared to truly listen, and most important, be prepared to ACT upon what you hear. Figure out how you can align your business more fully with the needs of your customers and you’re on the way to accelerating growth and greater profitability.

You’ll also truly then “have something good to say” and you’ll be ready for the second building block of effective marketing, which is “saying it well”, the topic of my next post.

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