Last post we explored the pretend customer lifecycle circle and found the Arsenic Hour at 6pm. It’s here that even the cleanest deals can die at the hands of bungled installations, capricious customers and obnoxious staff. This is dangerous territory and ought, in my opinion, to be declared a no-fly zone for marketing.
Marketers, being generally lazy, seldom need permission to not do something; however, a few years ago we went out and bought those efficient new marketing automation systems. So while we may be killing time updating our LinkedIn profiles, those fancy CRM, CLM and data-mining systems are grinding up recency, frequency and spend data into a toxic goo that it is auto-spammed straight at the very people we should be careful not to upset. Being Creepy at this point is really, really stupid.
The Arsenic Hour demands contact, lots of it, between our new customer and our company, but it needs to be very specific, very carefully timed, very, dare I say it, manual.
If you sell highly customized stuff for lots of money, you should consider for each new account, a very specifically documented Arsenic Hour. The team managing the account needs to document every single step from getting the nod to earning the right to go ask for more business. And in each step there needs to be a specific acknowledgement of the things that can go wrong and how that risk is being managed. There also needs to be very specific instructions for marketing for each step. What, if anything, can be communicated to the customer? How? How often? Which messages?
It’s a little harder when you sell a commodity, particularly a lower-priced one where there may not be an account team or even a sales person. That’s where your CRM system needs to be reigned in. A good one should let you define the Arsenic Hour and what you would want to send a customer during this time.
I recommend you start with your early life churn (ELC) reports. These will tell you why customers bailed in the first few months, and should highlight the points where any Creepiness on your part may have sent them over the edge. Good examples would include selling a product for one price and then hitting the same customer two months later with a new-customer only-offer at a lower price. It’s just wrong. Or clearing out some old merchandise at a lower price and slamming your customer with an email touting the virtues of the new line of products they didn’t buy.
Tenured customers will take far more abuse than new ones (now that they know you, a poorly timed newsletter is probably the least of their issues). New customers need a different set of communications to get through the Arsenic Hour
- Reassure them that your product or company was the best choice and they won’t be fired anytime soon for picking you
- Introduce them to your technical and account support services
- Guide them through their first billing statement (especially if your systems turn out less-than-pretty documents)
- Invite them to join your online forums, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, customer councils and other inclusive things that don’t cost anything or put them on your auto-spam list
- Send extra information about known pain points for new customers. For example, if your fancy application doesn’t work on iPads, make sure new customers know you’re working on it. (it is helpful if you actually are working it)
- Say thank you by having one of your senior people fire off a nice handwritten note (okay, so it’s an email and you wrote it and got their assistant to send it from their account –it’s the thought)
Historical data should give you a good sense of how long your Arsenic Hour needs to be. Depending on the product, company and type of customer, it’ll be anywhere from two weeks to three or four months. You may need to build in a panic button, though, if things are going badly. Say you’ve sold a lump of hardware and installation has gone off the rails. Or your consulting gig was pushed back a few weeks because a key team member left. Or some idiot spilled oil all over the body of water you were supposed to photograph for a project. These are all good reasons to be Not Creepy for a while longer, which means your system needs to include a way to stop the assembly line and keep the customer from sliding into the next phase where Creepiness is a risk.
Related Posts
Don’t be Creepy to Your New Customers
It’s Time to Kill Off Your Dreary Customer Reference Program
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
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