Well, when’s the last time you put your budget on the scale? Just like our bellies, our spending can start to grow over time without much notice, and we don’t know how bad it is until something exposes it- like being invited to the beach, or a meeting with the accounting department!

In our recent “Ultimate Recession Planning Toolkit,” MSP outlined several great ways to get your business’s budget- especially marketing- into shape for the coming economic downturn. We give you specific exercises that can trim the “holiday fat” and get you ready for anything- like the following advice about advertising during a recession:

• Temporarily switch media: In order to stay in the public’s mind for less, look into moving your budget from TV to a less expensive medium like radio, print or in some cases the internet.
• Buy in Bulk: Find out what kind of discounts you can get now by making a large purchase before your budget shrinks.
• Negotiate Long-term Deals: Media outlets will feel the pinch as well, and will be looking to make money. If you prepare by saving now, you can meet with them to lock in a low price for a long-term contract.

So go check out our advice on the heavy lifting, stretching and other activities that’ll get your balance sheet all sexy for the beach season, er, recession.

“Does your Marketing Budget Make you Look Fat? Five Exercises for a Leaner Organization“

Clip coupons. okay, not exactly coupons, but find good deals on business services. Everyone from Costco to Microsoft is catering to the small-to mid sized business market. Make those companies win your business by comparison shopping. This idea is great when you’re talking telephone or cellular phone plans,suppliers, or even interest rates on company credit cards.

Increase your prices. Not everyone can do this. But if you can back up your price increase by better products, service, and quality, you’re likely to keep your customers.Most people are accustomed to the idea of getting what they pay for. ( i have herd the advice of increasing your prices 10 percent per month until u lose 10 percent of your business. Then stop. You might try it again when you  improve your products  services. The concept is interesting and it may have some value for your business.)

Be clear about your payment terms. From the get-go, institute a consistent and firm payment process. Most customers appreciate your professional approach if the way you do business is clear. You may consider letting your clients make payments over time, but the cost of having customers who pay late is significant, not only on he cash side but also on time spent on collections.

Ask for more business. Do your clients and past clients know about all the services you offer? not only should you educate your customers annually bout what you offer, but also ask for more business. Chances are, you’ll get it.   

• An understanding of what your customers want
• The knowledge of how to meet the customers’ needs
• The delivery of the product or service customers want

Many of you reading this may already be doing most of these activities. Great job! If you aren’t, it’s okay. Take some action to formalize your process. Studies show that companies that link these activities together achieve greater levels of performance when compared to their competitors. A company that increases its market focus by ten percent can see a growth of between 17 and 20 percent in overall performance.

Want to evaluate how market-focused your firm is? Check out this free, online assessment tool.

To write your positioning statements, follow these steps:

1. Select the target customer group you want to focus on.
2. Develop a list of needs your customer group has that you intend to meet (if not already included in your customer profile).
3. List your product/service’s benefits that uniquely meet these needs.
4. Use the lists of customer needs and product/service benefits to finish this sentence: When this customer group thinks of my product or service, I want them to think: ____________________.
5. Evaluate your positioning statement by making sure it’s simple, clear, and consistent.
6. Get the word out to everyone by consistently communicating your positioning message in everything your company does for this customer group.

Don’t forget: The customer himself does the real positioning by paying attention and deciding to buy your product/service. What you do have control over is assessing what positions exist in the customer’s mind and then determining which of those you have the best chance of occupying and defending based on your own strengths.

• What are we doing that’s great? What is working?
• What isn’t working and needs improvement?
• What else would you like to see from our company? What else could we do to make your life easier?
• If we ceased to exist, what would you do? What would you be giving up?
• If a friend was in search of <fill in your type of company>, would you refer us? Why or why not?

Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, reportedly spent five days every month interacting with customers in his stores. This amount of dedicated time kept him close to and in touch with his customers needs and wants. Although I doubt his customer attention was the only reason for Wal-Mart’s runaway success, it surely played a big part.

Gathering feedback from a variety of sources results in an objective, comprehensive picture of who your customers are, what they want, and what they value. However, collecting the information is only half of the  equation. Ensure that everyone in the company knows what customers are thinking by sharing customer feedback through the organization. By spreading the news, everyone will start to make better more informed decisions. For your strategic plan, you can use the information you collected over the years to make calculated decisions that have broader implications.

Below are three generally accepted organization-wide strategies.

• Providing the lowest cost through operational excellence
• Providing the best products or services through continued innovation
• Providing complete customer solutions through intimately knowing their needs and wants

In case you’re tempted to execute all three, think again. That’s called being stuck in the middle or riding the fence. Executing a stuck in the middle strategy is like being in the middle seat of a five-seat row on a 747. You don’t know whether to crawl over the mom with he sleeping baby to the right or over the guy with his laptop on the left. It’s not a good place to be! Companies that find themselves in this position usually end up in a financial crisis or reorganization. That said, this doesn’t mean you don’t do the other activities well. You just don’t focus on them as much as the one that are central to creating value for your customers.

A value-creating strategy should be selected for each target customer group that you serve. For smaller organizations or departments, select one strategy for your whole company. Managing multiple value propositions can be nearly impossible.

Selection your organization-wide strategy really comes down to determining what your customers value the most about what you’re providing them. The low prices? Your cutting-edge products? Your ability to deliver a service that fits their needs exactly? Take a look at each option to see which strategy is the best fit for your company.

• Be a strategic leader. Lead by example and prioritize your strategic plan over everything else. Stay committed.
• Cut out the jargon. Make sure everyone in your organization really understands the plan.
• Hang your one-page strategic plan in the break room or another central location.
• Involve your staff in the final development of the plan. Ask for and use employee ideas.
• Create a "champion" or owner for every goal and action. Make strategy everyone’s job.
• Ask your employees to create the action items to support their assigned goals.
• Review the plan with management or the group. Align the organization with the strategy.
• Use a scorecard to monitor progress monthly.
• Schedule regular updates. Hold a monthly meeting, one-on-one with the team leaders, where you only discuss strategy. Hold a quarterly full staff strategy meeting to report on the progress.
• Challenge underlying assumptions. Revisit and refine the strategic plan three months from now.
• Hold yourself accountable through a mentor, personal coach, or business organization.
• Link strategy to performance.
• Continually scan your environment to identify changes that may impact your strategy.
• Reward success! Throw a party when significant goals are reached.

The Anthropologie customer is affluent but not materialistic. She’s focused on building a nest but hankers for exotic travel. She’s like to be a domestic but has no problem cutting corners (she prefers the luscious excess of British cooking sensation Negella Lawson to the measured perfection of Martha Stewart). She’s in tune with trends, but she’s a confident individualist when it comes to style. She lives in the suburbs but would never consider herself a suburbanite."

Can you visualize Anthropologie’s customers? Without a doubt! Now don’t worry if your customer profile isn’t this specific. In fact, it probably won’t be. Not everyone in this company’s market exhibits all of these traits; that would be too narrow. Nevertheless, this example illustrates the power behind really, truly knowing your customers. You can immediately see how this profile helps the company select which products to carry in the store, what messages to use in the advertising campaigns, how to price the merchandise, and what type of customer service drives repeat business.

Considering the time and effort you invest in
your business, it may be hard to stand back and see your company from a
different perspective. Discover strategies that will help you to
understand how customers experience your business.

By Tara Remiasz

Imagine you’re traveling for business. After your flight takes off
and you settle into your seat, you suddenly smell freshly baked
chocolate chip cookies. After a while, you see the flight attendants
handing the cookies out to everyone. When you finally take a bite of
your cookie, you congratulate yourself for choosing an airline with
such a great perk.

Several years ago, an employee for Canadian Airlines International
devised the idea that baking and serving fresh cookies would be a great
way to enhance the customer experience, says Paul Levesque, author, CEO
and founder of Customer Focus Breakthroughs Inc. based in California.
The idea of serving fresh cookies may sound simple, but it required a
solid understanding of the customers’ experience before the idea could
be developed.

Often times it is difficult for owners and workers to grasp the
customer experience because they are so ingrained in the minutia of
running the business. Here are some strategies that will help you to
see your business from a customer’s perspective.

Break It Down
Levesque says he had consulted with Canadian Airlines
International about how to brainstorm customer service ideas. It is
likely that a process like the one he taught Canadian Airlines
International personnel was used in the brainstorming session that
produced the fresh cookie idea. According to Levesque, you cannot
separate employee motivation from the issue of customer service. Asking
employees how to improve customer service has two inherent benefits: 1)
Because of their daily dealings with customers, workers possess unique
insights into the customer experience. 2) Employees will have a
stronger desire to see initiatives enacted if they generate the ideas,
as opposed to just following a mandated policy.

Ask employees to break down the customer experience into each step
in the transaction, Levesque says. For example: First, the customer
arrives in the parking lot. Second, the customer enters through the
front door. Third, an employee greets the customer. And so on. Each
step will be based on the type of business you run, whether it is on
the Internet or a brick-and-mortar operation.

Once the customer experience has been broken down into each step,
it’s time to apply three customer service principles to each phase of
the process. You and your employees should consider how your business
can exceed expectations, make the customer feel important and tailor the experience to individual categories of customers.

Levesque offers an example of how all three of these principals were
realized when he visited the Magic Kingdom and spotted a braille map of
the entire park. The existence of this map went beyond what most
patrons probably expected, demonstrated that visually impaired visitors
are important, and that the Magic Kingdom considers how to enhance
everyone’s experience.

Ask Your Customers
Perhaps the only people who can vouch for the customer
experience better than your workers are the customers themselves.
Former customers can provide you with a wealth of information on how to
improve operations, says Erica Olsen, vice president of marketing for
Reno, Nev.-based MyStrategicPlan.

Olsen suggests having a third-party call former customers for
feedback. Instead of directly asking ‘Why don’t you frequent our
business anymore?’ she suggests couching the question in terms of ‘We
are trying to become more effective as an organization and would value
your feedback.’

When you conduct surveys of existing customers, it’s essential that
you ask if the primary job was done correctly, she says. Often times,
surveys focus on specific details and overlook basic questions such as
how well a business achieved its central goal.

There’s no magic number in terms of how many surveys you should
conduct, but Olsen suggests that you do enough to see patterns in
people’s answers. Allow yourself the necessary time to gather feedback,
rather than conducting too few interviews before making changes. She
also stresses the importance of giving something back in return for
your customers’ feedback. By offering a discount or small gift card,
you are in fact acknowledging that you value your customers’ time.

A Little Help From Your Friends
Andrew Field, CEO and founder of PrintingForLess.com, Inc., in
Livingston, Mont., also endorses the idea of conducting surveys. Field
suggests using a one to seven rating scale that covers how a certain
transaction went, and also how important that particular transaction is
for the customer.

In addition to tapping employees and customers for feedback, Field
recommends professional mystery shoppers or simply employing the
services of friends and family to mystery shop your operation. Field
learned the value of mystery shopping accidentally, after his mother
placed an order for brochures from his company. When the box of
brochures arrived at her door, Field’s mother was dismayed to find that
the box had been damaged in transit and some of the brochures had been
ruined. Several of Field’s sales reps confirmed that this problem
occasionally occurred with their clients’ shipments. Armed with this
new information, Field’s company instituted a policy of shrink-wrapping
bundles of paper goods and then double boxing each shipment.

Whether you decide to use a professional mystery shopping service or
friends and family, the key is to obtain objective, unbiased
information about how a customer experienced your company. Be sure to
obtain feedback on everything from how the customer was greeted to the
quality and timeliness of service.

Trader Joe’s is committed to providing selective products that cannot be found in grocery stores. It does not carry commodities such as soft drinks. The company prides itself on the quality of its private label products, which account for 70 percent of the product offerings. Personnel at Trader Joe’s scour the world for products free of preservatives, artificial colors or flavors or genetically altered ingredients. They taste-test all foods considered for private labeling. If the taste testers are unanimous in their high recommendation of the product, Trader Joe’s buys it and relabels it. The result is assured quality that other groceries stores do not attempt.

The value that Trader Joe’s offers to customers includes “taste, quality, private labeling and price” according to the CEO Don Bane, and the strategy is successful. Grocery stores measure profitability by sales-per-person hours. Whereas Whole Foods bragged about 52 sales-per-person hours as referenced in the article, Trader Joe’s averaged 212 during the same timeframe. It is clear that the unique branding strategy of Trader Joe’s differentiates itself from all other grocery store chains, and that differentiation as a corporate strategy can produce dramatic results.

If you love TJs, tell us why! If you don’t, I’d like to hear that too!