Julianna
Is the focus of your business your customers? Long time customer advocate Becky Carrol thinks it should be – enough to start a business and a blog around it. Carrol’s Customers Rock blog is a great resource for anyone looking to take a more strategic role in their marketing by putting customers first. She recently posted on the endless tug of war between sales and marketing that ends up with each blaming the other, and no one winning (least of all the customer).
Valeria Maltoni asked recently, who owns the customer? In my opinion, no one at the company owns the customer. The customers own themselves. They are in charge of whether or not they continue to purchase. They are in charge of the relationship, if any. In that case, it is imperative that sales and marketing work together. The goal is to understand the customer so deeply that everyone wins: sales+marketing and the customer. Only then will a relationship have any chance of taking hold and growing to meet the needs of both company and customer.
If you’re a small business, this creates a great opportunity. Rather than playing the sales vs marketing tug-of-war, you probably are your own sales and marketing departments, or you have one to two people working on each side. This makes it much easier to understand both sales and marketing and have the two aspects work closely together. The most important point here is the role the customer should play in your business – whether it is your sales rep, your CEO or your customer support staff, when your customers get great service, it’s the best marketing you can get.
On a related note, and another cheer for small business flexibility – Check out the Getting Real ebook (read it free online), from Web 2.0 design heavyweights, and creators of great apps like Basecamp and Backpack, 37Signals. They hammer home great points about how being small and receptive to change is one of your greatest assets:
What might take a big team in a huge organization weeks to change may only take a day in a small, lean organization. That advantage is priceless. Cheap and fast changes are small’s secret weapon.
While Getting Real is focused around designing/creating software, it’s core ideas can be applied to any business and it’s a great book for sparking inspiration. From Hiring, to Writing, to Promotions, you will probably have at least one “ah ha” moment when reading these short essays.