Is the difference simply one of I versus E – Introvert vs Extrovert, with the E’s making up the greater portion of heavy participants?  Perhaps it’s a combination of psychological factors and simply time.  I can barely answer my email, much less think about composing a meaningful post to send out to the world.

Perhaps the clue lies in the word meaningful. I’m not a casual poster or tweeter.  I’m discerning about what I think I have to offer the world.  Mostly because I think it’s a reflection on me and I want to come across as knowing my stuff or having something worthwhile to say.  I don’t want to be confused for just another social gadfly who likes to hear themselves talk.  This is different from being discerning about what other people might want to hear.  In other words, my discernment is internally focused versus externally focused.

A case could be made that social media participation helps to make people more externally focused. For her coming book, “Alone Together,” MIT professor Sherry Turkle interviewed more than 400 children and parents about their use of social media and cellphones. Among young people especially she found that the self was increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather than internally developed: a series of profiles to be sculptured and refined in response to public opinion. “On Twitter or Facebook you’re trying to express something real about who you are,” she explained. “But because you’re also creating something for others’ consumption, you find yourself imagining and playing to your audience more and more. So those moments in which you’re supposed to be showing your true self become a performance. Your psychology becomes a performance.” Referring to “The Lonely Crowd,” the landmark description of the transformation of the American character from inner- to outer-directed, Turkle added, “Twitter is outer-directedness cubed.”

I’m in favor of anything that gets people out of themselves and focused on other people, but it’s the performance part of this that makes me a little nervous. Does Turkle’s research suggest we ultimately become whoever we think the audience wants us to be?  Sounds a little dangerous, and particularly so, if the audience has questionable values and intentions.

How might we help enable the good stuff – more external focus, but balance this out with a strong sense of self and ability to both add meaningful discourse and inspire that in others?

I’m interested in what you think. Please add your comments.

– Pam Holloway

If you want a quick way to determine where you fall in the seller-focused versus customer-focused continuum, look at what you pay attention to, and in particular what you measure and reward.

For example, is your focus all about the numbers – sales volume, profitability, earnings or share price? Or is it all about efficiency – production costs, price per widget, productivity, leanness? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then you are probably seller-focused, not customer-focused. I’m not suggesting that you stop paying attention to profitability and operational efficiency. Those are vital to maintaining your business. I am saying that those things are no longer enough. Such data is important – but only to you, not the customer.

Operational efficiency is important. But, customers don’t care how efficient your operations are; they only care about the end result – how well it produces the outcomes they want.

Quality is obviously important, but not the quality of the production process. What’s important is the quality of the end result. And, that quality can only be defined by the customer, not by you

Price matters to customers, but it’s not price per se, but value-for-money and cost to own or use that matters to the customer.

Change your focus or become a dinosaur

The seller-focused approach is an obsolete remnant from the Industrial Age, and the post-WWII production frenzy. Both were times of mass markets when the customer had limited options and no control. But, that model has already changed. Slowly over the years, power began shifting from the corporation to the customer, as more choices became available. But, in the past two years (with the birth of social media) we’ve seen a radical change. Power and control have been seized by consumers.

This fact is evident in the vast universe of consumer written product reviews and consumer blogs. The buying public now relies on those sources for information, rather than the one-way sales pitches delivered by the companies. Strangely, many companies have yet to realize this change. In order to capitalize on this new dynamic, companies must shift their focus!

The Risk. Continue to focus internally on production and profitability and you risk finding yourself doing a really good job producing something customers don’t want. You’ll have great profit margins for a product that no longer sells.

Conversely, when you shift your focus to understand customers and involve them in the design, development and marketing of products, you’ll be better positioned to meet current and future needs. When you proactively measure your ability to deliver what your customers want, you’ll be well on your way to becoming truly customer-focused.

What does the customer care about?

Research by Redline Advisors indicates that customers consistently look for four or five specific types of attributes in virtually all products, whether tangible or intangible:

• Ease of use
• Timeliness
• Certainty (consistency, accuracy, reliability, predictability, safety)
• Cost to own/use
• Variety/choice

In spite of that research, companies rarely measure their product attributes from a customer perspective. As a result, organizations are unable to proactively address customer wants and expectations. As those wants and expectations evolve and change, data-focused firms risk losing more and more of their market share. How willing are you to put that at risk?

Revisiting Rewards

In most companies, rewards are focused on production and volume. The more widgets you make at a cheaper price, the better. The more people you call on and the more widgets you sell the better. Again, there’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach or these kinds of measures. It’s simply that business has moved on and this type of measurement breeds and rewards goals that are no longer relevant.

Bringing it all together with the customer at the center
It is unrealistic to expect organizations to dramatically change overnight. That said, companies that don’t begin to shift their focus place themselves at risk of quickly losing customers. People tend not to buy from firms that fail to solve their problems or meet their wants.

One simple way to adjust your direction is to begin adding customer-focused measures. Rather than give rewards based on short-term goals, reward sales people based on their network of key relationships, the value-add they provide the customer or their contributions to a customer information databank.

A second way is to begin to think and communicate in terms of outcomes rather than products . So rather than focus on what the product is, focus instead on what it does. As Peter Drucker said “Customers don’t buy products, they buy results” or as we like to say – customers don’t buy drills, they buy holes.

And, a third way is to refocus marketing so it is accountable for results. Borrow a page from direct response marketing and continually test to improve results. What drives results? Delivering to the target market a product that those people want, and communicating the benefits in a language that they are comfortable with. Give them choices and initiate a dialog with them.

Customers are constantly looking for better ways to achieve the outcomes they want. If you as the producer continue to concentrate on the process of making widgets, or the mass marketing of those widgets, rather than on delivering high value outcomes, your future success is clearly at risk.

As our friends at Redline Advisors remind us, “Do you think customers will be buying your lamp oil after some enterprising Edison invents the light bulb?”

*This article was inspired by work done by Dar Schwanbeck at Redline Advisors in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Please see www.redlineadvisors.com and his article Seven Steps for Creating a Customer-Centered Culture.

2. The more you know/learn about the prospect, the more relevant you can show yourself to be to him.

3. Always give options that are relevant to the prospect.

4. Deliver your information in a specific, psycho-logical way.

5. Always gather information before you make any comments.

6. Always ask “linked” follow-up questions. They show your expertise and wisdom.

Can it be rebuilt once lost?  Yes, but if you’re the type of person or company that gets into trouble in the first place, are you the type of person or company with the ability to make the kinds of changes that will enable you to rebuild trust?

These kinds of changes are fundamental, values-based and don’t happen over night.  You can’t buy your way back into trust. Nor can you talk your way back in.  It happens slowly as a result of authentic demonstrations of trusted behavior.

Imagine that you have a “trust fund.”  When you demonstrate trustworthy behavior, you add to that fund.  When you breach trust you take away from it.  A trust fund is generally built slowly over time, but can be depleted quickly by catastrophic breaches, like BP’s disaster in the Gulf.

So the best thing you can do, whether you’re a company or an individual, is to make sure you are continually adding to your  trust fund so that when something negative occurs, you have some padding or trust in reserve. In the event that you essentially wipe out the entire account, as BP has, you have to get busy putting trust back in.  How do you do that?

Start with putting real people in real people-to-people situations.  Give the community (both large and small) an opportunity to get to know the real people of BP, and to see how they are actively working to solve the problem and rebuild the communities damaged by the spill.

CEO Tony Hayward has said on several occasions that “BP takes full responsibility….. and will do whatever it takes to…..”  but these are simply words. Words do not by themselves rebuild trust. We need to see actions.  Give us examples of what taking responsibility actually looks like.

Rebuilding trust is not an easy task, but it can be done and it must be done in order for a company to survive. We’ll talk next time about the effect of trust or lack of trust on the bottom line, and how we can use this motivator to change behavior.

-Pam Holloway

1. They are interactive – or at least should be.  It’s a conversation, not a presentation or declaration
2. They are dynamic and context rich – about what’s going on now, ever-changing and always fresh
3. They are exploratory and free flowing – you go in with a topic in mind perhaps, but you let the conversation guide you and you stay “open” to new ideas and new directions

If you do nothing more than begin to think of social media as a tool for helping you have a conversation with your customers, you’ll be off on the right path.  As you sit down to write, think about what you would say if you were actually having a two-way dialogue.  Imagine the other person or persons who will read what you write and what thoughts or questions might go through their mind.

Get “real” and stay there.  The more your conversation looks like marketing, the less effective it will be.  The single worst thing you can do is simply insert pieces of your marketing and advertising into a social media conversation. Remember this phrase – authentic conversations. That’s your aim when you sit down to make your way in the social world.  More on authentic conversing later.

– Pam Holloway

We could divide every firm into two parts: 1) the firm’s capabilities and 2) the firm’s credibility. Capabilities are products, features, technology – which are encapsulated in the formal marketing messages. Credibility is the firm’s character and qualities.  That is often encapsulated in the informal a corporate identity message. Who is the firm? What do they do? What’s their story?

Every firm has formal and informal messages. Traditional marketing is the formal message. If all you have is a sales pitch, you will lose big-time in the coming years.  What you say to people in friendly conversation about your firm is the informal message.  And, THAT is what you’d say in social media.

We have a new client in Houston. They do employee benefits – an old-line, traditional industry. I explained social media to the owner and he literally jumped over the phone. He had never considered how an informal message transmitted through an informal medium could be so important to him. In the next few weeks he and I will get together and develop a package of micro-messages that articulate the messages he wants to make about his firm.

We might develop 50 statements that his internal marketing person can then drop into various social media discussions. In that way, he builds a reputation for having great wisdom and relevant expertise.

Pam and I believe that many firms that don’t use social media just don’t understand it.   As in every new technology, it’s not about the damn technology!  It’s about People!  The technology is simply different types of gathering places.  Where are your future customers?  That’s where you need to start “lurking” and figuring out how to add value.

– Michael Lovas

It measures 10 moral values as well as 3 moral philosophies and is backed by The Times (UK Times) and PwC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers). You get a 4 page PDF report and The Times will promote it world-wide in the next couple of weeks.

Love Roger’s title: Corporate Philosopher in Residence and Professor of Organisational Ethics.  That sounds like a job for me!

Lest you think adding a blog, in an of itself, helps “connect you” or build trust, guess again.  According to studies by Forrester Research company blogs are one of the least trusted sources of information about a company.  Not only do blogs rank below newspapers and portals in the Forrester study, they rank below wikis, direct mail, company email, and message board posts. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them. If you’re a corporate blogger or somebody who advises companies, you might want to pay attention.

And why don’t people trust company blogs?  My guess is because they quickly recognize the lack of authenticity and real dialogue.  We expect a brochure or a website or an ad to be marketing, but we secretly hope a blog isn’t.  If it “feels” like another marketing ploy, then our hackles go up immediately and any trust that might have been established is lost.

My advice to clients is if you can’t do blogs right, don’t do them at all.  And by “right” I mean a genuine conversation with real human beings responding to real customers.

To turn your activities into a systematic strategy, just equip your current clients with the right language to use when they talk about you to their friends and colleagues. No politician goes into public without being well versed in his/her “talking points.”  All you’re doing here is giving the talking points to someone else.

The language you give them will include two connections: values and relevance. After all, you might share values but not be trained to help them. Or, you might be an expert in what they need, but possess vastly different values.

Ultimately, you want to give your clients a reason to talk about you with other people, and in order for that to be effective, they need to know what to say and how to say it.

Doesn’t that make sense?  Pam and I are writing a book on the psychology of referrals.  If you want to learn how to get more referrals, just send us an email:  michael@aboutpeople.com

Whose value is it, anyway?

Part of the disconnect lies in who defines the value.  If you believe that “you know best” and can decide what constitutes value for your customers, then you could be imposing your definition of value on them.  And, unless you’re a talented psychic, what you perceive as value and what your customer perceives as value are probably very different.

In the end, value is personal.  It’s a perception, like credibility and likeability.  And it’s not your perception that matters, the customer’s perception of value is the ONLY one that matters. Now, let’s look close-up at a more effective way to define value and present it.

You can’t add value to the customer until you truly understand your customer

Now, here’s the next wrinkle – You can’t add value unless, and until, you truly understand that customer. And we’re not talking about basic demographics or sales information, we’re talking about real knowledge of his/her business, industry, challenges and personal values and criteria.

If you find that maybe you don’t know as much as you thought about your customers, you’re in good company.  The fact is, few salespeople really understand their customers well enough to create meaningful value.  This is true in all sales but especially in high-end B-to-B sales.

Here’s what happens. Sellers often lose important sales because they lack credibility in the eyes of the buyer. And, the main reason they lack credibility is they simply do not understand their customer’s business.  Amazingly, those same sellers insist they are adding value.

It’s a simple fact of psychology; prospects are not going to listen to you pontificate about how important you are to them, or what you can do for them, once they recognize you do not understand them or their business. And, there’s no way to hide what you don’t know.

As Barry Farber says in State of the Art Selling, “You cannot relate to a man in business without understanding his business.  A man in the oil business wants you to understand the oil business, and what a drilling rig is, and what upstream and downstream means, and what crude and refined is, and what’s OPEC and domestic, and who his competitors are, and his recent history – has it been good or bad and why.  Too many salespeople don’t know anything about business, let alone the client’s business.”

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