Posts Tagged ‘customer’

From the time the idea of a company was developed, those who control the purse strings (finance) and those who manage the income (sales, operations, and marketing) are often adversaries.

A frequent igniter of these tensions is a situation where an operations or business group wants to quickly move forward with a project (XX optimization, for example) which requires a capital investment.

Before approving funding, however, the finance organization must complete its due diligence by quantifying the benefits outlined in the business case. This timing gap often creates a bottleneck and uncertainty about the projects’ implementation and/or timing.

These bottlenecks can be avoided by all stakeholders working together to build a strong, interactive relationship around the project.   Keys to building this relationship are education, communication, and ultimately, including the finance team in your project.  The capacity to master the first two skills will lead to your finance organization becoming a trusted advisor and consistently being invited to serve as an active participant in your strategic initiatives.

Education

It’s a two way street.  With over a dozen years of providing strategic financial support, I have consistently found that education is the first step in building bridges to a better working relationship.  It is as much a necessity for the financial person to understand what the operations groups do, and vice versa.  While working at a for-profit healthcare organization, I held a weekly course for 10 weeks in order to educate the IT infrastructure group management team on the objectives of the finance group and how a working knowledge of finance objectives can add value to the IT organization and help them – and the company overall – to become more successful.  Once the course was completed, the IT management team understood why and how their involvement in budgeting and financial planning is important to the company’s operations, why their participation in the ‘month-end close’ process is crucial to meeting the goals of the company, and also why the building of business cases for all projects is essential for long-term financial planning and overall success.

I have also found that, from the financial team side, learning what the operations groups do, and how they do it, is vital to the success of a financial analyst.  By fostering an active relationship with my ‘customer’ – the operations team – and understanding how they manage IT facilities, call centers, or manage hardware environments, I was consistently able to develop a better relationship with these supported groups – and we always celebrated our successes together.

Communication

This begins with the education phase and continues to build a foundation of trust.  Once the financial representation and the operations groups understand what the other does, it becomes easier to support the others’ efforts.  The key to effective financial communications is to remain consistent with operational or business partner requirements, and to be cognizant of the execution of new requirements and their execution. Make no mistake – the execution of these objectives can be difficult at times; this means the month-end close process must run the same way each month, and the systems of the budget process are changed as little as possible each year.  The information required to develop a business case is the same, regardless of the project.  In the event any strategic change does occurs,  any corresponding  changes in financial requirements need to be carefully considered and communicated so as to not to compound further disruption to the organization. Once consistency is achieved, the analyst and the group he or she supports can get to real work, the work of optimizing the business and reaching the ultimate goals of the company:  profitability, social goals, etc. This is the trusted advisor stage.

The trusted advisor

This is the ultimate goal of the financial representative, and where the fun begins.  As an analyst, I remember my colleagues consistently stating that the most boring part of their job was the “regular” work.  My experience is, once you have a system in place for achieving positive results in a routine activity such as the month-end close, that task often becomes mundane. For a corporate finance person, the interesting work is that which includes participation leading to realizing corporate goals.  Ways in which the financial analyst can participate in this process include performing lease vs. buy analyses for new equipment and software purchases, finding savings within a project, conduct audits to make sure the company is ‘getting what it pays for’ from each of the many vendors and service providers, and also establishing metrics and key performance indictors (KPIs) to put dollar figures on operational measurements and use this information to make key business decisions, etc.  Serving as a trusted advisor to the operations management team can be exceptionally rewarding; it allows an analyst to be creative and to develop solutions that help to both ensure a successful project and contribute to the company reaching its goals.

Achieving the role of trusted advisor and building that relationship between finance and the operations groups is important to the success of the entire organization.  The more adversarial the relationship, the more difficult it becomes to complete the work – both the monotonous (yet necessary) work and the creative solution work.  Once these barriers are eliminated – from either the operational or financial end (or both) – all jobs become easier, more efficient, and much more rewarding to each employee.  Motivated employees will not get excited about doing the same job every day. To them, variety and professional growth are the spices of life, and job functions in all areas of the company become more efficient when the relations between all groups within the company are high

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Matthew Carmen launched Datacenter Trust along with Marc Watley in February, 2010 and serves as Co-Founder & COO as well as Managing Partner of their Financial Intelligence practice. Datacenter Trust is a recently-launched consulting and services delivery firm, providing outsourced server hosting, bandwidth, cloud services, and IT financial intelligence and analysis services to growing businesses

Tagged as: active garage, advisor, Communication, customer, datacentertrust, education, finance analyst, hosting, IT Finance, Matthew Carmen, operations, operations management, profitablity, social goals, Trust

Have you ever nailed something? I mean, you got it down to a few simple keystrokes or a few lines in a paragraph. How sublime is the feeling of accomplishment? All the effort seems worth it when the faces of those who use your brainchild say, “Yes, this is it!”

On the flip side have you ever created a train wreck of a solution? One so clunky you’d like to just shoot it and put it out of its misery? Or have you ever had a customer say, “All you have to do is…” and you start wondering what she was smoking for lunch?

The differences between getting it just right and failing miserably can sometimes be reduced to two words – simple vs simpleminded. The two seem to sit very close to each other and may be hard to distinguish. Let’s take a look at them and examine the boundary between the two.

DaVinci, Simplicity, and Telephones

As mentioned in the first post in this series, DaVinci summed it well:

The sophistication is reflected in the simplicity.

A client’s VP of Sales, when talking about what comprises a successful product, said it in today’s terms, “The product should be so simple that my grandmother can use it without reading the instructions.” It is referring to what is sometimes called seamless performance. In other words, the product performs so well and delivers such high quality results it actually disappears. Landlines are a good example. When I pick up a good old-fashioned, copper-wired phone my minds eye is focused on the person I am calling and the call itself. The phone literally disappears from my consciousness. That is simple.

When I use my cell phone…well…that is another story. There is just a touch of stress, barely perceptible that is saying, “I wonder if this will go through and if it does what are the odds it could drop out?” It’s ever so subtle but it is there.  If you don’t think this is true for you try making this simple observation the next time you want to make a small, important call to someone about whom you care. Pay attention to your feelings when it can’t get through or is dropped as you are ready to breathe out and talk. Is it frustrating? Do you feel disappointed? Where does anger fit?

Simpleminded

So where does simplemindedness fit into all this? To answer this let’s go back to “simple.” When something is truly simple it means all the principles and disciplines required are present and combined in a balanced manner to create a product that performs as expected. For simplemindedness to be present all that is required is to leave out a principle, have some principle inadequately represented, or have the relationship between design elements be off balance.  It’s that simple! Sticking with cell phones, battery life and bandwidth represent the second and third situation, respectively.

What’s the Answer?

If we pick up the cell phone situation and bring it over to the realm of relationships with clients, peers, vendors and other stakeholders there is a way to keep simplemindness out of the relationships and subsequently the product. Know the disciplines, principle, and balance between them that is required to move from customer need to functional specification to design specification to production. With this information you are forearmed and prepared to fend off the “all you have to do…” declarations that key stakeholders may make. You can push back in a very sane manner that is business-like and respectful.

Share you comments! I’d like to know what you think. In addition to commenting on this post you can also send a response via e-mail to gwmonti@mac.com or visit www.ctrchg.com.

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With over 30 years experience, Gary Monti consults/teaches/mentors/speaks in change management and project management with a focus on compassion and respect in the workplace. The work is grounded in project management, chaos and complexity theories combined with Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Tagged as: active garage, Change Management, customer, da vinci, design specification, functional specification, gary monti, leadership cancers, production, seamless, simplemindedness

Welcome to the tenth post in this 12-part series on QUALITY, titled #QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture.

Here are the first nine posts, in case you would like to go back and take a look:

1. Quality #1: Quality is a long term differentiator
2. Quality #2: Cure Precedes Prevention
3. Quality #3: Great People + Good Processes = Great Quality
4. Quality #4: Simplifying Processes
5. Quality #5: Customers are your “Quality Partners”
6. Quality #6: Knowing what needs improvement
7. Quality #7: Productivity and Quality
8. Quality #8: Best Practices are Contextual
9. Quality #9: Quality of Relationship and Communication

#QUALITYtweet Formal inspections can be a

huge waste of resources if you have not invested

in getting it right the first time

The goal of any process improvement initiative is to prevent same problems from occurring again. New problems are an opportunity to identify areas of improvement but same problems occurring repetitively is a sign of stagnation.

As someone rightly said, “Quality can never be inspected in a product; it has to be built first.” Processes have to help identify the quality expectations from the customers and translate those expectations into a practical action plan to build/verify quality constantly.

Inspections done at the tail end of product life cycle can eat a huge chunk of your budget because later the problems are found, costlier the resolutions. On top of that, if you have not “engineered” quality in a product, inspections can be a huge waste. You can never verify something you have not built upfront.

In manufacturing world, it is very unlikely to find that a component is inspected after it is integrated in the product. The very idea of inspecting everything after completing all product development is a dangerous one – one that has many business and financial risks associated with it.

This is where “prevention” is always better than “cure”.

Don’t get me wrong. Inspections are still one of the best ways to find problems. The timing of inspection is very important.

When inspections are done earlier in development process:

• Fixing problems is less costly
• Early identification of critical risks helps you manage them proactively
• Lower risk of failure at the end

Following are some very simplified guidelines on how inspection activity can be leveraged to generate value and lower risks for your customers. Each one of these points can be a process in itself.

• Know customer’s quality expectations early and educate team
• Clarify the exact customer requirements (and be ready for change)
• Give thoughtful consideration to a robust product design
• Plan actions to ascertain that quality expectations are built in the product
• Inspect Early and Inspect Often in cycles
• Each cycle of early inspection reduces risk of failure
• With this, final cycles of inspection can focus on “value-delivered-to-customer” rather than “defects-found-at-the-tail-end”.

The process of inspection can be your biggest asset if you have invested early efforts in building quality and then inspecting it. Else, it can be a huge waste.  Reduce this waste and you will automatically start forming a culture where “building quality” always takes precedence over inspecting. Your journey towards a quality-oriented culture begins there

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Tanmay is a Software Quality Management professional based out of India. He hosts QAspire Blog and tweets as @tnvora. He is also an author of the book #QUALITYtweet – 140 Bite-Sized Ideas to Deliver Quality in Every Project

Tagged as: active garage, asset, business, customer, defects, development, engineer, inspection, integration, manufacturing, product, qaspire, quality, resources, services, stagnation, tanmay vora, tnvora, value

Welcome to the ninth post in this 12-part series on QUALITY, titled #QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture.

Here are the first eight posts, in case you would like to go back and take a look:

1. Quality #1: Quality is a long term differentiator
2. Quality #2: Cure Precedes Prevention
3. Quality #3: Great People + Good Processes = Great Quality
4. Quality #4: Simplifying Processes
5. Quality #5: Customers are your “Quality Partners”
6. Quality #6: Knowing what needs improvement
7. Quality #7: Productivity and Quality
8. Quality #8: Best Practices are Contextual

#QUALITYtweet How NOT to deliver total quality:

Focus on quality of product without focusing on

quality of relationship and communication

In an increasingly service oriented business environment, what you sell is not just a product but an experience. People may forget explicit details like specifications or price, but never forget the experience they had when they bought the product.

Experience extended to end-customers largely depends on attitude, values and behaviors of each individual who interacts with a customer. One of the most important challenges is to keep this group of people aligned to organization’s quality system and values.

Communication is the backbone of organization’s success in marketplace. Effective internal and external communication within an organization ensures that:

• Your employees understand your value system
• They understand what is expected out of them
• They are motivated to walk an extra mile to deliver excellent service
• Your customers know your value system
• You build trust-based relationship with your people and customers with consistent communication
• Manage expectations with your people and customers.

How can you motivate your teams to deliver excellent customer experiences through simple communication processes? Here are a few ideas to consider:

Train:

Training your internal team can be your biggest tool for clearly explaining the process of communication and how important it is for the business. Consistently train your people on value systems, leadership, quality management, effective communication, what works in customer management, what not, expectations management and cultural aspects of client’s location. Clients also need training on how best they can use your products. Companies organize client workshops to educate them about different aspects of product/service. Train consistently to streamline communication.

Support:

Once your people are trained, you need to support them in doing right things. Supporting can be a simple act of being there with your people when they talk to customers. Help them improve and share feedback on how are they doing. Some companies may see this activity as an “overhead” but it is an “investment” in your people.

Monitor:

Once you have confidence that your people will be able to do the right communication, monitor them. Take periodic feedback from them. Communicate consistently to ensure that they are motivated enough to continue doing it.

Delivering consistently superior experience to your customers (via quality of products and communication) results in a long-term relationship based on trust. In business, as in life, relationships are crucial. Quality of your relationships is as important as quality of your products, or perhaps, even more.

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Tanmay is a Software Quality Management professional based out of India. He hosts QAspire Blog and tweets as @tnvora. He is also an author of the book #QUALITYtweet – 140 Bite-Sized Ideas to Deliver Quality in Every Project

Tagged as: attitude, behaviors, business, client, Communication, customer, end customer, experience, marketplace, monitor, motivate, price, product, quality, service, specifications, support, train, Trust, values

Welcome to the eighth post in this 12-part series on QUALITY, titled #QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture.

Here are the first seven posts, in case you would like to go back and take a look:

1. Quality #1: Quality is a long term differentiator
2. Quality #2: Cure Precedes Prevention
3. Quality #3: Great People + Good Processes = Great Quality
4. Quality #4: Simplifying Processes
5. Quality #5: Customers are your “Quality Partners”
6. Quality #6: Knowing what needs improvement
7. Quality #7: Productivity and Quality

#QUALITYtweet The best practices are contextual – they

worked well for someone in a given context. Are you

applying them in the right context?

Imagine a doctor prescribing a standard medicine based on common symptoms without carefully analyzing other ailments and patient history. A doctor knows the best medicine to cure a particular ailment, but he would look at a patient’s context and then decide if the “best medicine” is really best for a particular patient.

Process managers play a role of doctors for the organizations. They have to identify all possible problems (symptoms) and then suggest a solution (medicine). Best medicines for different types of ailments are termed as “best practices” in business.

Best practices are a set of processes that, in a given context, have the best likelihood of delivering quality products or services. In equation of context identification, some of the variables are:

• Your goals as an organization
• Market segment you operate in
• Your target customers
• Nature of your product / services
• Types of customer you already serve
• Team capabilities and internal alignment
• Management commitment and sponsorship to improvement initiatives
• External market pressures (e.g. recession)

The list can go on. Best practices often tend to ignore these variables because they worked in past for someone in a particular context. Their context may be different, but never a static one. Implementing best practice without considering organization’s context is like prescribing a standard medicine without looking into symptoms. Both can be equally dangerous!

So how are best practices useful? Studying best practices can give you some very useful insights on possible solutions for your business challenge. They offer alternative perspectives on ideas that can minimize your risks.

For process improvement experts, having access to best practices can be their biggest asset. But their ability to apply those best practices in an organization’s context is absolutely mandatory for success. As a professional, there is no fun in having a best practice for everything and a solution for nothing!

As an organization, you can leverage best practices by carefully studying them and mapping with your unique business challenges. For this, improvement managers need to understand nuts and bolts of business. Once the context is understood, best practices can become your best guide so that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. Depending on context, you can either implement a best practice as it is or select portions of a best practice that can be most useful for your context.

Simply believing that a best practice will work for you just because it worked for someone else in the past and applying them in vacuum can harm you more than it can help.

There are no silver-bullets in business and things like context and innovation does play a huge role. As one of the Dilbert comic says – “If everyone is doing it, best practices is the same thing as mediocre”.

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Tanmay is a Software Quality Management professional based out of India. He hosts QAspire Blog and tweets as @tnvora. He is also an author of the book #QUALITYtweet – 140 Bite-Sized Ideas to Deliver Quality in Every Project

Tagged as: active garage, alignment, best practices, capabilities, context, customer, external market pressure, inspection, leverage, market segment, organization, process, products, qaspire, recession, services, tanmay vora, target customer, teams, tnvora

Welcome to the fifth post in this 12-part series on QUALITY, titled #QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture.

Here are the first four posts, in case you would like to go back and take a look:

1. Quality #1: Quality is a long term differentiator
2. Quality #2: Cure Precedes Prevention
3. Quality #3: Great People + Good Processes = Great Quality
4. Quality #4: Simplifying Processes

#QUALITYtweet Look for and keep

excellent customers, for they will

drive your process excellence

A process-oriented customer will never prefer to work with a team that disregards processes. There is a natural alignment between process-oriented customers and process-oriented companies. When this alignment happens, your customer can be your strongest ally in process improvement journey.

I have seen a number of projects where customer introduces some very innovative and simple process elements that end up being a part of organization culture over a period of time. Somewhere, excellence of a customer does have a solid impact on quality culture of the organization. In this regards, an organization becomes as good as their customers are.

Companies typically begin their journey by serving small and then mid-sized enterprises. When they get to the next level, they aspire to get larger customers. Larger customers will invariably demand a certain level of process maturity. This aspiration to get larger customers can drive the process improvement journey of the organization, even if it is only from a sales perspective.

The key is to ensure that:

• Processes help you gain larger/mature customers. (sales efficiency)
• Processes also help you serve those customers the way they want. (operational efficiency)

When these two activities are consistently performed, processes attain a maturity and form the culture of an organization.

Core of a continuous process improvement culture is to seek constant customer feedback (formally and informally). The key objective of customer feedback is to identify processes that are effective (and consolidate them) and improve processes that are ineffective. In customer-driven organizations, customer feedback is taken very seriously.

Looking for and keeping excellent customers is a very sound strategy to drive your process excellence and create a strong differentiation in the marketplace.

How are you leveraging your customers to improve your processes?

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Tanmay is a Software Quality Management professional based out of India. He hosts QAspire Blog and tweets as @tnvora. He is also an author of the book #QUALITYtweet – 140 Bite-Sized Ideas to Deliver Quality in Every Project

Tagged as: active garage, customer, customer driven, customer feedback, enterprise, excellence, feedback, operational efficiency, process maturity, process oriented, qaspire, sales efficiency, tanmay vora, tnvora

This is the first part of a 12-part series titled ‘#QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture’. This series will provide 12 relevant insights on how organizations can improve their quality culture through people, processes and leadership.

Introduction to #QUALITYtweet – 12 Ideas to Build a Quality Culture

Relentless focus on quality helps you build a sustainable organization that delivers value – to customers and people working with the organization. Quality is a long-term strategic differentiator.

Yet, most quality models heavily focus on methodologies, metrics and complex processes. This series is a collection of 12 chosen tweets from my upcoming book “#QUALITYtweet – 140 Bite-Sized Ideas to Deliver Quality in Every Project” and ideas that expand 12 tweets from the book. These insights will help you frame your quality strategy by effectively leveraging processes, people and leadership to build a customer-centric organization.

Moving on to the first QUALITYtweet…

#QUALITYtweet Quality is never a

short-term goal. It is a long-term

differentiator

Quality is not a goal – it is a differentiator that can transform an organization into a remarkable one. If we study the anatomy of any process improvement or change initiative, it involves short term and long term objectives. Long term objectives generally map with organization’s vision and values while short term objectives are steps that lead to those long-term objectives. Yet, many organizations fall in a trap of setting short term improvement objectives that don’t map to any long term goals.

Here is a litmus test to identify if an organization’s quality goals are short term:

1)      Top management looks at processes as an overhead that can reduce overall efficiency of doing the “real stuff”.

2)      Quality Certification is seen purely as a tool to generate more sales, with no deliberation on how it can help improve efficiencies (and hence improve bottom-lines on a longer run).

3)      Quick and often unreasonable results are expected out of process improvement group.

4)      The question often asked is, “How can we correct this?” and not “How can we prevent this next time?”

5)      Process improvement exercise is triggered only when major problems are encountered.

It is said, “There are no shortcuts in life” – this adage aptly suits the quality improvement initiative as well. Process is a framework which people use to deliver quality products and services. Organization’s quality culture evolves when good people consistently follow a set of continually improving processes.

I have seen companies who perceive process implementation as a loss in immediate productivity because people will have to spend time in maintaining process artifacts. They miss a very important point that undefined and ad-hoc processes only lead to unpredictability of outcomes. It hurts organization’s brand. None of the process models including ISO 9001:2000 and CMM guarantees short term improvements. With a consistent effort and commitment from the top management, maturity of process happens gradually, just as we mature gradually as human beings.

Economists say that the best way to get good return from the stock market is to have an investment timeframe of a few years and not a few months. Short-term gains may be a stroke of luck – but luck is has never been a sustainable strategy! Same principles apply to your quality improvement initiative. Without a commitment to improve and long term thinking on processes, you may have successes based on individual heroism but never a sustainable model that delivers consistent quality.

Most successful organizations are built on a solid process framework. Companies that avoid power of processes soon hit the glass ceiling. People build the organizations and process helps organizations scale up smoothly.

Today’s marketplace demands that you consistently exceed customer’s expectations. You can run the organization on chaos or you can have systems that help you/your people become more effective. It is a choice that makes all the difference!

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Tanmay is a Software Quality Management professional based out of India. He hosts QAspire Blog and tweets as @tnvora. He is also an author of the book #QUALITYtweet – 140 Bite-Sized Ideas to Deliver Quality in Every Project

Tagged as: active garage, CMM, companies, customer, differentiator, framework, ISO 9001:2000, long term, processes, qaspire, qaspire.com, quality, short term, software, tanmay vora

We all understand that customer is a priced asset. And most companies have tried to listen to the customer for forging innovation. The only caveat to this is – that how we have listened to the customer in the past is irrelevant now. There is new phenomenon that is emerging with social media. Pushing out “listening to them” campaigns alone is just not going to cut it. You need to adapt to the new skills to listen actively… and in doing so, you need to give up the old ways – because only the adaptive survive in the marketplace.

It is the recession that tests your listening skills. Many companies have suffered because they were not competent in listening to their customers – e.g GM, Linen N Things, Circuit City etc.

Here are some ways you can listen

1.   Engage in a continual dialogue:   A company needs to keep engaged through company’s own Web portals, blogs and experts’ blogs.  The rising chorus of social network users (4 out 5 US adults online interacted with a social site in ‘09 – Forrester) continue to up the expectation for brands and companies with respect to presence and interaction online. The 24×7 consumer and social technologies have enabled new-media users with an ongoing interaction cycle that necessitates attention from brands.

2.   React quickly. A new study that was just released from Cone reports claimed that among new-media users, a staggering 78% of them interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools — up from 59% the year before… and that these users are conversing with brands more often: 37% say they interact at least once a week — which is up from one in four when Cone did the study last year. There are huge quantities of information and opinion people distribute on the internet. You need to be able to collect and process this information and respond quickly to any feedback or misaligned information that could potentially hurt your brand.

3.   Cut through the clutter: Segmentation and being knowledgeable about your target customer helps you understand exactly ‘who your customer is’. Their psychographic and demographic profiles can help you determine how to listen to them. Acknowledge the importance of cutting through the clutter to reach overloaded consumers.

Securing brand equity in the recession requires companies to add resources and capital to innovation and communication. This downturn will accelerate efforts of agile and smart companies to listen to consumers’ needs to keep their brands from slipping.

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Contributed by Deepika Bajaj, President and Founder, Invincibelle, LLC and co-founder, ActiveGarage (the company behind 99tribes). Deepika is also the author of the book DiversityTweet: Embracing the growing diversity in our world. You can follow Deepika on Twitter at invincibelle

Tagged as: active garage, Branding, Communication, customer, deepika bajaj, downturn, engage, Innovation, invincibelle, listen to customer, listening, listening skills, listening to customer, react quickly, recession

Just as in the world of Real Estate it is all about “location, location, location”; in the world of marketing it is all about “consistency, consistency, consistency”.

In conjunction with a sound brand strategy, you need a clear and concise message that resonates with your customers. These messages need to be integrated across your brand and into every customer touch point.  Now, you don’t need to use the same words over and over. However, each communication needs to reinforce the key messages that have been developed to support the brand.  It is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts – when the brand is consistently conveyed across multiple touch points, the customer is left with a clear understanding of what the company, product, service, or solution is and how it solves their problem. Simply put, they know what your brand is about.

Unfortunately, as marketers we often get bored with the messages we’ve developed.  We’ve spent hours fine-tuning them and testing them.  Finally, our campaigns launch and the messages are out there, but by that time they feel old and stale to us.  There is a difference between a “fresh” message (with unique language, a clever play on words, a connection to a current event) and a “different” message (not aligned with strategy, not related to existing messages, different for the sake of being different).  Research shows that it takes anywhere from five to nine impressions for an individual to actually internalize a marketing message.  That means they need to see it over and over again.  Not the same words, but the same idea supported by the same brand.

For example, an article in a trade publication mentions the company and their new product; the customer sees an online banner ad, they click on it, and get to a landing page with a compelling offer; they do a Google search to see what else comes up and there is a link to your latest white paper; at an industry tradeshow the company has a booth and is hosting a panel discussion…and the story continues.  With consistent use of key messages across multiple touch-points your customers comes away with the sense that your company is worth their consideration.

Now you have a place to start engaging and driving purchase decisions.  This model holds true for consumer and business marketing.  People are people, whether they are buying high-end mission-critical software or a new plasma HDTV for their living room.  They have a problem.  Through your consistent messages, you have convinced them to consider your product or service as they evaluate their options.  You still have to convince them that your product or solution is really the only one that really addresses all their needs – from technical specifications to user support, maintenance and financing (again, these apply to consumer and business purchases.)

Again, consistency is key.  Your customers need to see and feel that your company is honest and trustworthy.  If there is a disconnect between what you say and what they experience, you will lose the sale, and worse, probably the customer.  So, while consistency in messaging is important…consistency in execution is critical, too.  Both pieces of this puzzle need to be addressed in order for the whole thing to work.  If you only focus on the messaging, then your experience will fall flat.  If you don’t explain your differences and benefits, then you won’t get the chance to display your stellar experience.  No matter how you look at it, consistency is the key to growing you brand and your business

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This article is contributed by Laura Lowell, Author of the Amazon bestseller ’42 Rules of Marketing’ and the upcoming ‘42 Rules to Build Your Brand and Your Business’. You can follow her on twitter at @42_rules.

Tagged as: active garage, Brand, brand strategy, Branding, Communication, Consistency, customer, engagement, financing, laura lowell, location, Maintenance, purchases, technical specifications, Trust