From the Desk of John Kumpunen

Your product or service sucks because people aren’t raving about it. You inbox is not filled with thank you notes. You have uncommonly high attrition rate — did you know that 68% of the customers who leave, leave because of perceived indifference on your part. They felt neglected and went somewhere else.

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Why we need marketing. Less than 1% of products are so good that they will rise to Seth Godin’s “Domain of WOM Excellence”. These are products that are ranked so good, people rave about them, and they sell themselves. They’re on CNN, CNBC, and Oprah.

The flipside of the coin is: “My product sucks“.

Sure, it takes a big boy to say: “My product sucks, I need to improve it, and make it so good it sells itself” . We tend to become so wrapped our own designs, it’s very difficult to step back and rethink from scratch. I know. I do fair bit of industrial design and small-farm inventions, tools, etc. always looking for a better way to do things. Like most idea people, I live for the aha breakthroughs when you sleep on it and slap your forehead in the morning.

Authentic marketing is not the art of selling what you make but knowing what to make. It is the art of identifying and understanding customer needs and creating solutions that deliver satisfaction to the customers, profits to the producers and benefits for the stakeholders. — Philip Kotler

It takes even a bigger boy to admit your service sucks because people aren’t raving about it. Because your inbox isn’t filled with Thank-You notes. Because they don’t send you tons of unsolicited testimonials.

… but, in these days of super-competition, it is an extremely healthy operational baseline. Assume failure (and statistically you’re right) and figure out what you would have done differently. What would have made you the new Google?

Now think what would have made a difference — more education, more face-to-face, more grab, more honesty, less greed … what would have made you the talk of the town and created a line-up of life-time customers?
WOM-selling: what would have made your customers rave about your service or products?

TAKE AWAY: There is no magic formula, no guru tactics, no hidden secrets. You simply need to 1. ask YOURSELF “is this the way I would like to be serviced” 2. ask your customers what you could do differently to make them happier 3. read about excellent companies and their tactics of customer retention. Ask a million questions and somewhere between their lies, their trying to please you, and their honest answers is the the Product, the Mind-share Positioning, and the Tested Selling Sentence that rock their world.

Get them as excited about your products as you are. You are, aren’t you?

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