Recently I had the opportunity to do a keynote presentation for a professional businesswoman's luncheon organized by the University of Georgia's Small Business Development Center. I would say this was a group of successful women running traditional (not high-flying Web 2.0 types) small businesses. The theme was around how small businesses can "supersize" themselves by way of utilizing technology. The focus was on leveraging the web to implement a CRM strategy to find, catch and keep enough good customers to grow and survive.
I receive many polite head nods as I talked about things like blogging, social media and networks, and search engine optimization/marketing. The kind of polite nod that says "this is nice and all that but it looks time consuming so when do you expect me to do all this while putting out fires and running my business?" And that precisely what someone asked me. So I answered a question with a question, and asked if you're spending more time on routine administrative tasks than on finding good customers and cultivating better relationships. To that she (and many others in the room) replied YES! So I asked a the group how many of them have done a Google search this week, and about 85% of the hands went up. Then I asked how many have used the Yellow Pages. Only a few hands went up. So I think the importance of showing up in searches hit home then more than it did by spouting off the latest statistics on the number of searches taking place (although I did through that at them as well).
After all that I popped up the slide below to illustrate the importance of driving processes like lead generation and qualification.
When the folks took this slide in and began to think of how they use the web, it became self explanatory as to the importance of doing business online in terms of ecommerce and/or converting online leads to offline interactions and sales. And even though it's easier and cheaper than ever to leverage websites to improve productivity and profitability, the main driver that many small businesses cite as the number one reason for doing so is to meet customer expectations. Customers and prospects alike now have the power to initiate contact with those companies they find and research on the web. So if you don't show in searches AND provide enough information to move them to contact you, chances are somebody else will.
Now that I had them thinking a bit I through I popped this last slide up for them to take in:
So the main premise of the Pyramid of Customer Loyalty is that you build your most profitable and long lasting business relationships when you are able to devote more time to really understanding what your customers value. By doing this the nature of your relationship will go from vendor-customer, implying just a financial relationship open to outside competitors, to trusted partner/valued advisor. This is where your customers view you as important to their business, and in fact become your biggest supporters inside and outside of their organizations, bringing you leads without you asking them to do so. This is great stuff, but it can only happen if you can put the time in to focus on how to deliver what's important to them. And in order to do this, you must find ways to automate the routine and time consuming processes of finding and catching new customers. Using the latest tools like blogging, wikis and the like to extend your reach and provide richer communications channels to showcase your knowledge and expertise can be a great low-cost, effective way to do just that. And if you use the web to generate and determine good leads from deadbeats, you'll free up time to turn customers into clients, and clients into advocates and partners. That may make it worthwhile to do a little light blogging.