Blog - Glover Strategic Marketing

Mastering Client Experience for Long-Term Loyalty

Earn more lifelong clients

Glover Strategic Marketing takes the time to evaluate the entire client cycle to ensure your clients have the correct experience.

We need to remember that marketing is not just advertising or sending email to your customers. Every moment the customer engages with your company or your products, they are forming an opinion of your brand. Can you say without a doubt that your clients are experiencing what you want as your brand’s image?

I conduct an in-depth analysis of your client’s experiences from the moment they first engage with your company/product/brand, through the buying cycle and all the way through to after-sales support and re-ordering. What makes or breaks a good client’s relationship with your company may surprise you, and as most of us know, loyal, repeat clients are essential to the success of most businesses.

What Comprises the “Client Experience”

Many critical points of interaction influence your clients’ views on your brand. Depending upon your industry or profession, below are some of the ways your clients may interact with your company:

Marketing and advertising
Your website
Sales team
Sales processes
Accounting
Customer service
Re-ordering
After-sales support
Tech support

Any of these interaction points with a company can make or break an experience for a client. A good sales experience may win a client, but a poor after-sales support experience can lose a lifetime client for your company.

But it’s not always obvious why good clients leave. For example, it could be someone in accounting or tech-support who is very good at their area of expertise, but who unknowingly offends clients. Do you really know the experience your clients have when they speak with employees throughout your organization? To reach your ultimate success, you must understand a client’s complete journey.

Let’s Talk

When you’re ready to move from reactive growth to a clear, repeatable revenue strategy, let’s start with a strategic conversation.

In this no-pressure discussion, we’ll look at your company’s goals, growth challenges, and opportunities for stronger alignment between leadership, marketing, and sales. You’ll leave with greater clarity and practical insight — whether we decide to work together or not.

If you’re serious about scaling intentionally, this is the place to start.

Let’s Connect!

Good Service Can Be Your Best Marketing Tool

“Customers don’t make up stories about you or your business. It is you who create them. The customer simply retells them.” Jeffrey Gitomer

So, how is your customer service?

And we aren’t talking about how you handle complaints. How are you treating your customers from the moment they engage with you? What stories are your customers saying about you?

“These stories create the basis for the most powerful form of advertising known to mankind. Word-of-mouth. It is estimated that more than 50% of American business is based on this ad form.”

Everyone has heard of Word-of-Mouth marketing, and most businesses strive for a thriving referral business. What are you doing to make sure your business is worthy of a referral?

Jeffrey Gitomer published a great article about your customers’ stories about your business. Read it here.

7.5 advantages of great service

If you feel it would be too much work to build a business worthy of positive word-of-mouth attention, I want to share Jeffrey Gitomer’s 7.5 advantages of great service with you.

1. It’s free. Great service costs little or nothing, but it’s worth a fortune
2. It builds goodwill. Consistent service creates and builds reputation.
3. It builds customer loyalty. People will actually look forward to the next time they will do business with you. Happy to do business with you.
4. It creates memorable experiences that will be retold time after time. Stories create the basis of word-of-mouth advertising.
5. It makes your customers salespeople for your business. And they are one thousand times more effective than any employed salesperson on your team.
6. It leads to referred business. People are guided and influenced by the success, satisfaction, and happiness of others.
7. It makes it harder (impossible) for competitors to steal away customers even at a lower price. “Loyalty through extraordinary service” is a powerful yet overlooked motto in business today.
7.5 It creates a clear distinction between two companies engaged in the same business. Yours and your biggest competitor.
Jeffrey Gitomer Read it here.

Let’s Talk

When you are ready to grow, I can help. Contact me today for a free one-hour consultation. Uncovering areas of opportunity and developing strategies are some of the many things Glover Strategic Marketing can help you achieve. There is no obligation and no pressure, just a frank discussion of your company’s needs and goals. Plus, I guarantee it won’t cost you anything to work with Glover Strategic Marketing. So what is holding you back from growing your business?

How Do Your Customers See Your Business?

As a Strategic Marketer, customer perception is huge. One of the things I come across with organizations that have been around for many years, is that the leadership knows how the company should be perceived but they don’t know if that is how their customers see them.

Often one of my first tasks when working with a new company is to understand how aligned (or unaligned) the customer’s perception is with the leadership’s vision of the company. Without a doubt, the further the gap between the customer and leadership perception, the more likely it is that the front-line employees (customer-facing employees) of the company are just as misaligned.

As you can imagine, when leadership, front-line employees, and customers are all aligned in what the company stands for, how they serve their customers, and their offerings; massive growth is easily achievable.

The flipside is also true.

When customers, front-line employees, and leadership all have different opinions of the company, ideas on how the customer should be served, and are unsure of the offerings; growth and momentum are difficult to achieve.

Customer Preception Can Grow Your Business

If your customers only think you offer concrete services, yet you self-perform all structural work as well, you are missing out on business.

If you offer different types of equipment and your customer only refers to you as “X equipment dealer”, you are unaligned and unremarkable in your customer’s eyes.

If your sales employees never mention any of the services and locations that don’t directly benefit their paycheck, you are doing your customers a disservice and are unaligned.

Alignment is critically important. Many organizations are uninformed about their own unalignment. While it can be easy to discover if your customers and front-line employees perceive the company the same way as the leadership, many are unaware.

Why would someone have a different perception of my business?

If your customers and employees don’t know all of your offerings or locations, that could be an indicator that you may be unaligned. If your customers and employees can’t explain your offerings and message or say something that doesn’t reflect the message your leadership would use, you are clearly unaligned. If your customers and employees aren’t given a consistent message about who you are, they will create their own, and it may not embody who you are.

When you are ready to grow, I can help. Contact me today for a free one-hour consultation. Uncovering areas of opportunity and developing strategies are some of the many things Glover Strategic Marketing can help you achieve. There is no obligation and no pressure, just a frank discussion of your company’s needs and goals. Plus I guarantee it won’t cost you anything to work with Glover Strategic Marketing. So what is holding you back from growing your business?

Lowest‌ ‌Cost‌ ‌Isn’t‌ ‌Always‌ ‌the‌ ‌Cheapest‌ ‌ ‌

How to sell to prospects with the lowest cost isn’t always the cheapest

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that your reaction to the title of this article is one of 3 things:

So true!
I wish I could convince my prospects of that.
What? That doesn’t make any sense.

A different way of saying it is “penny wise is often pound foolish.” On a funny note, when I was little, this proverb was baffling until I understood that the “pound” that is being referenced is not a weight, but rather a monetary unit.

In business, and in our personal lives, we often come across situations where we go with a cheaper option because we aren’t educated about the purchase or have a momentary lapse in judgment.

Penny-wise is often pound foolish ~ Proverb

Everyone has their own story of money mistakes that cost them more in the end because we were trying to be penny-wise. However, we don’t often win when we are aware of the benefits of a higher-cost item and choose to be pound foolish.

We also come across prospects that make a bad decision and stick with it because “I’ve already dumped this much money into it…” Even when our choices – once provided with more information – are proven to be bad, we will continue making them to save face, to hold out hope, or out of sheer determination.

So how do I get my prospects to stop purchasing based on the lowest price?

The first step is to understand where the prospect’s thinking is, regarding their buying decisions. Your prospect may not have enough information to understand they are spending more than they should in the long term (penny wise, pound foolish) or your prospect is being stubborn in making a new decision because of sunk costs (in for a penny in for a pound).

In for a penny in for a pound

A good question to ask is if they know about your options and how your competitors stack up. If they are responsive, you are dealing with a penny-wise prospect. If they become defensive, you are most likely dealing with a sunk costs prospect.

The next step is to speak to their thinking and their needs. The same message will not work for both prospects.

Penny Wise Prospects

For the “penny wise, pound foolish” prospects, help them understand the amount of money they are wasting every month with a competitor’s solution. Help them understand how quickly their investment will start saving them money in the long term. Don’t forget to factor in non-monetary benefits as well.

Sunk Cost Prospects

For your “in for a penny in for a pound” prospects, the discussion can become a hit to your prospect’s ego if you aren’t careful. The discussion can’t focus on their past decisions but rather focus on how there are now options that are better for them, options that were unavailable (or at least not widely known) at the time of their past decision.

Then, remove the risk-of-change for your prospects. Offer extra training or onboarding to make the transition easy and painless for your prospect.

When you are ready to grow, I can help. Contact me today for a free one-hour consultation. Uncovering areas of opportunity and developing strategies are some of the many things Glover Strategic Marketing can help you achieve. There is no obligation and no pressure, just a frank discussion of your company’s needs and goals. Plus I guarantee it won’t cost you anything to work with Glover Strategic Marketing. So what is holding you back from growing your business?

Big changes vs Little changes

Do you think your marketing needs a silver bullet? Do you think you need to pivot? Or could it be that your business just needs key tweaks to become the business of your dreams?

Small marketing changes can result in the biggest wins

Little changes can make the biggest impact on your business when implemented with targeted and consistent focus.

When your business has been achieving a level of success, but not performing as well as you would like, you are faced with a choice. Continue as you have and hope you stay afloat. Make a big change and see if that is what will work. Or lastly, make tweaks and changes until you get it right.

Since you are here, you aren’t planning on just maintaining the status quo. You want to do better. There are times where making a big massive change is necessary, for example, what Blockbuster should have done after the rise of Netflix. In 2020, many businesses were forced to completely change their business model and pivot their business, or risk shutting down.

However, while massive business changes can be effective in the right situation, big changes in your business often require so many changes that your business becomes something entirely new. Not all company structures can handle those changes well and often fail.

To make a massive pivot in your business can be a fatal business move. It can be especially fatal when it isn’t a “do or die” situation where every person in the business is aware of the stakes and working towards keeping the company afloat.

So if big changes aren’t needed. What small changes can I make?

Start making small changes that make your organization a better company. The challenge is discovering where the tweaks need to be, but by no means impossible.

Get Started

Understanding how your offerings fit in the marketplace along with your customer’s needs, are key to making sure you are maximizing your ability to serve your customer.

Begin evaluating your organization. Assess your strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace, offerings, service, process, customer base, team, etc.

Keep what is good

Evaluate what is working well and understand why it is working so well. Talk to your customers to understand why they do business with you. Make sure you don’t alter anything that could jeopardize what you do well.

Start with low hanging fruit

Evaluate your biggest weaknesses. Are you doing or not doing something that will be an easy fix? Starting with the easiest things to change can start the momentum of change in your organization.

Develop a culture that is willing to make small changes regularly and you will start to see momentum in your revenue, customer recognition, sales, employee retention, and profit.

As little changes take hold, you can implement impactful changes within your organization. Stay adaptable and test new changes that may have a big impact throughout your organization.

When you are ready to grow, I can help. Contact me today for a free one-hour consultation. Uncovering areas of opportunity and developing strategies are some of the many things Glover Strategic Marketing can help you achieve. There is no obligation and no pressure, just a frank discussion of your company’s needs and goals. Plus I guarantee it won’t cost you anything to work with Glover Strategic Marketing. So what is holding you back from growing your business?

How Do You Convince People to Buy?

How to Sell When Prices Increase

People don’t like to be sold-but they love to buy – Jeffrey Giomer. So make it easy for someone to buy your product or service and feel good about working with you. So, how do you get people to buy?

People will always need to buy products and services. However, don’t confuse value and price and assume people will not buy because prices are rising.

The value and price can be very different, and as long as the value outweighs the cost, people will buy.

Value vs. Price

For example, when you have flown to an important business meeting and realize you have forgotten your toothbrush, you will pay $10 for a dollar store toothbrush because the benefit of having a clean mouth outweighs the inflated cost.

Another example, interest rates used to be over 14% in the mid-80s, but people still bought houses in droves. So it was still worth it to the new homebuyers to have the home they desired.

Homebuyers, businesses, and consumers are still buying even with higher material costs.

How to get people to buy

With the current supply chain challenges and higher material costs, many industries are feeling the pinch. So how do you convince people to buy?

Well, you don’t.

Buyers that are unsure will always find a reason not to be sold. However, if these buyers are helped to buy what they want, they are much more likely to buy with the person that makes it easy.

Your serious buyers need the reassurance that you can provide the service/product they desire. So please don’t make your buyers worry they would regret working with you.

At the end of the day, what is a 5% – 30% increase in prices when your customer can solve their problem, earn them money, or make their dreams a reality. A minor price increase isn’t going to change that.

If you worry that your products and services do not provide a high enough value, why are you selling them? Could it be that your offerings do provide tremendous value, but your sales team and customers are unaware of how beneficial your offerings are to them?

Try Framing Your Offering

It could be that you need to work on how you present your products. This could be a messaging challenge, a sales challenge, or both.

One way to quickly highlight the benefits and value of your product/service is by framing the product in a way that makes buying an easier decision for your customer.

For example: “Would you rather get started today knowing that you can start saving hundreds a month, or do you want to think about it and risk wasting more money?”

Or: “We can get started on the build today and lock you in at this price, we could wait, but prices have gone up 5% every month this quarter”

Don’t Forget to Ask for Help.

Now, please don’t feel like you have to do it alone. If you are having a hard time convincing people to buy but don’t know how to make the jump to an easier sales approach, ask for help.

When you are ready to grow, I can help. Contact me today for a free one-hour consultation. Developing sales strategies and effective positioning are some of the many things Glover Strategic Marketing can help you achieve. There is no obligation and no pressure, just a frank discussion of your company’s needs and goals. So what is holding you back from growing your business?

11 Big Questions to Ask When You Want to Grow Your Company

11 Questions to ask when you are ready to grow your comapny

Questions to Ask When You Are When Trying to Grow

Are you ready to tackle growing your company, but growth hasn’t been organic yet? It may be time to take a deeper look into your organization and ask yourself different questions.

So, what should you be asking when trying to grow your company? I recently had a fantastic conversation with a prospect who is tasked with growth but needed to get on the same page with all the company leaders about growth.

During the conversation, my prospect realized he needed to be asking his leadership better questions about their goals and challenges around growth.

11 Questions to Ask About Growing Your Company

If you are considering putting more effort into growing your company, here are some questions you should consider:

Are your current offerings good enough?
Can your current sales process handle growth?
Who is your customer?
How is your location(s) performing?
Do you have the correct people?
How is your current marketing?
What is going well in your business right now?
What is holding you back from growing?
What does your desired growth look like?
What are you willing to do to see growth?
Why do you want to grow?

I encourage you and your team to set aside time to review your answers to these questions. You may unexpectedly uncover new opportunities to improve your business. These are the top questions to ask when your organization is considering growth, and if you are interested in going deeper, I can send you a handout with more questions.

Let’s talk

If you are ready to grow and want to uncover how to do it effectively, I can help. Contact me today for a free one-hour consultation. Asking the un-asked questions and developing customized, effective growth strategies are some of the many things Glover Strategic Marketing can help you achieve. There is no obligation and no pressure, just a frank discussion of your company’s needs and goals. So what are you waiting for?

Why should you care about your brand?

Photo by Patrik Michalicka on Unsplash

I regularly come across companies that have not invested time or energy into their branding. They then struggle to compete with their competitors and stand out in the minds of their customers. Good branding can be the deciding factor that allows a good company to grow instead of becoming stagnant and dying.

For most business leaders, the term “branding” makes you think of logos and colors. For many, branding is perceived as the visual components of the business identity. However, branding is so much more.

Where the name comes from

It goes back to when people would take a hot iron and brand cattle to prove ownership. Each brand was a unique symbol that cattle owners used to represent themselves because writing a name on a steer was impractical. Since then, branding has evolved to include what you want people to think and feel when they see or interact with your company, not just a symbol as a stand-in for your name.

A large part of branding is how you differentiate your company from others. It’s what makes your company unique in the eyes of your customer.

What is branding

Branding Mag explains branding best, so I’ve pulled out great points, but you can read the whole article here.

“For the most part, a strong understanding of branding requires a decent grasp of business, marketing, and even (human) relational basics. Branding is such a vast concept that a correct definition that truly encompasses everything that it represents would not bring too much clarity to the subject just by itself. But, for the sake of lowering the propagation of obsolete, incorrect, and incomplete information about branding, we offer a more complete definition:

Branding is the perpetual process of identifying, creating, and managing the cumulative assets and actions that shape the perception of a brand in stakeholders’ minds.” Source

Such a great definition.

But branding doesn’t affect my bottom line, or does it?

Good branding has a direct and positive impact on your bottom line.

“Branding is important when trying to generate future business, and a strongly established brand can increase a business’ value by giving the company more leverage in the industry. This makes it a more appealing investment opportunity because of its firmly established place in the marketplace.” Source

The goal of branding creates trust in the marketplace because it is all about your reputation. How much do your customers trust you, your company, and your offering? The more a customer trusts your brand, the better the brand’s perception becomes, which results in a stronger brand.

And once your customers trust your business, you will see more referrals and word-of-mouth growth. Branding makes it easier for your customers to be familiar with and feel confident in your business.

“Branding can change how people perceive your brand, it can drive new business, and increase brand value – but it can also do the opposite if done wrongly or not at all.” Source

Now what?

It is easy to understand how beneficial good branding is for your business. However, this article only scratches the surface on the multilayered nuance that is good branding. But don’t assume that only big companies with lots of money can do branding correctly.

I encourage you to ask your customers what sets your company apart from your competitors and why they buy from you. If the answers aren’t what you were expecting, vary from person to person, or don’t match your current branding, then it’s time to get help. Poor branding can cost you exponentially more in reputation, trust, and your ability to gain new customers than the investment of receiving an expert’s help.

Let’s talk

If you are concerned that your lack of branding is hurting your business, I can help. Contact me today for a free one-hour consultation. Developing a brand and branding strategy are some of the many things Glover Strategic Marketing can help you achieve. There is no obligation and no pressure, just a frank discussion of your company’s needs and goals. So what are you waiting for?

Change is Constant be Adaptable – Video

Change is constant. Change is one of the only consistent things in our life.

But we fight against change in business. Unfortunately, in most large organizations, change is viewed as the enemy.

We add processes and bottlenecks into our business to reduce, if not eliminate, change.

I love books like the eMyth that talk about documenting your process, but if your processes are so rigid that there is no easy room for improvement, you are probably missing out.

Change is an opportunity for growth.

Are you allowing growth to happen, or are you stifling it with stiff processes and procedures?

Now that we have all experienced the disruptive nature of a global pandemic and cannot wait to get back to normal, what are we hoping to return to? What is normal?

The world has changed quickly, and businesses can afford to pretend things haven’t changed.

The next time something happens big or small, like a worldwide global catastrophe or a loss of your key clients, how will you thrive?

Businesses that are thriving right now have found opportunities to serve their customers better, and they’re going to continue finding ways to serve their customers better.

As 2021 progresses and we continue to find stability, question if your processes truly serve your customer or are they outdated?

I don’t want you to miss out. So let’s talk about how you are going to build a culture of adaptability into your organization.

I work with companies just like yours as a profit multiplier. And I want to talk to you so that you can become a stronger organization in any market.

When you are ready to grow, I can help. Contact me today for a free one-hour consultation. Developing a strategy to develop a culture of adaptability is one of the many things Glover Strategic Marketing can help you achieve. There is no obligation and no pressure, just a frank discussion of your company’s needs and goals. What are you waiting for?

Donate for A Month of Marketing Strategy

Donate to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation for A Month of Marketing Strategy

For any donation to JACE’S JITTERBUGS CF Fundraising Page, I will provide one month of marketing strategy. We can discuss your business challenges, ideas, and goals so that your marketing can be more effective to produce more results.

This offer ends May 22, 2021.

For the last 14 years, I have been a profit multiplier for businesses. It is my calling and my passion to help good companies become great companies. Read more about Glover Strategic Marketing.

The CF Foundation is near to my heart as my son was born with CF. The CF Foundation is a fantastic organization making a lot of progress, but there is still no cure for this devastating disease, and many lives are cut far too short. We’ve come so far, but there’s still so much work to do.

Let me know you have donated or ask me your questions with a quick message.