Please don’t say I didn’t warn you. School started up this week and with it, of course, the fundraisers. My children will be on your doorstep within the month; their tiny noses pressed against your screen door selling you a magazine subscription.
Like the cookie dough, cowboy steaks (which aren’t actually made of cowboy – I checked), grapefruit and coffee, the magazine campaign will pit siblings against one another, test the loyalty of neighbours and the bonds of friendship as children are whipped into a frenzy to outsell the class next door. There will be tears when someone’s brother scores the coveted travel alarm for selling a Reader’s Digest subscription or wins the super-sized stuffed armadillo for the most single-day sales. My mother will need to change her phone number, again.
But you, my friends, will buy. You will buy because it’s going to build a playground or purchase a wheelchair lift or, in nicer neighbourhoods than mine, tip the porters on the Grade Two winery tour in Piedmont.
About two months after the marketers behind this stuff pack up their Lord-of-the-Flies campaign manual and head out of town (and they should be deeply ashamed of themselves, but that’s another post), you will wonder where your Modern Tea Cozy magazine is. A month after that you will be calling me to see if my children are in prison for fraud.
I will assure you there are countless better reasons to lock up my kids, and a week later you will receive an envelope from Modern Tea Cozy and it will be, that’s right, a renewal offer. On the one hand, you will be relieved to know your subscription order went in. On the other hand…
We all know the drill. My lawn care company calls me weekly offering to top dress, aerate and make a crop circle in my grass for $200 but can’t be arsed to just treat the weeds as asked. Insurers want to bet on my demise before the ink is even dry on my auto policy and the lead management firm with which I’m currently negotiating a contract, is calling on the other line to set up a sales appointment. “Sorry,” says the embarrassed rep, “marketing just gives us these lists.”
Ah. There we go. Marketing, wake the hell up! You’re upselling customers who don’t yet have your product and stalking others who are already giving you money. This is bad and you know why.
Tragically, the cause is that you’re so darn efficient. You’re efficient because you went out and got that nifty new campaign management module or CRM tool or database mining software. And it’s doing just what you told it to: it’s rocketing customers from the bottom of one funnel into the top of the next.
Which would have been fine a few years ago, before you were efficient, because funnels took a while and a name could sit there for months or years before it landed on a call list or a data pull. Now, lacking context and guidance and the intervention of something that thinks (even occasionally), a new customer looks like a tenured one even if they haven’t actually yet used your product or service.
While you may have your customer’s cheque in hand, contract signed and account team in place, that’s about all you have. There’s no engagement, no history, no investment of time or emotion. And likely so little money at stake that bailing out isn’t going to hurt the customer at all. This is the time to be Not Creepy.
There are countless reasons a customer could walk away during contract finalization, initial set-up, installation, training, testing, first or second billing cycle. The reasons can be as simple as a project manager not getting along with your account team or a Corporate Overlord suddenly getting cold feet about the budget and asking to scale back the purchase. In the public sector, an election can put everything on hold and, sometimes, push RFPs back to the first step. This stuff happens and there isn’t a ton you can do about it except be Not Creepy.
Let’s take a look at our friend the customer lifecycle chart. It looks a bit like this:
Good marketers everywhere delude themselves that this somehow resembles reality. Reality, naturally, is far messier but let’s plough ahead. Assuming June Cleaver is in the house and all is right in Fantasy Land, we have just closed the deal, wiped the champagne off the receptionist and loaded our new BFF into the CRM system. It’s about six o’clock Customer Lifecycle Time. And that, my friends, is the Arsenic Hour.
June is considering dropping rat poison into Ward’s gimlet and someone in your organization is about to call the customer to tell them their thingamajig is out of stock, they failed the credit check, and the new version doesn’t work with iPad. This is not the moment to do something Creepy like fire out a newsletter, invite customers to a focus group or call them up with a nice juicy upsell.
What we need is a No-Fly zone here at the bottom of the fake lifecycle. The circle, at least in terms of customer communications, perhaps needs to look more like a horseshoe and the bit with the gap is the part where you are Not Creepy.
More on the perils of over-automating next post.
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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
tboehm30 says
I like your writing style. Thanks for the post. I think back to dealing with Cable, Phone, and Internet Providers – aaarrrgggh.
bizmarketer says
Thanks for your kind remarks. I agree, cable companies are champions at celebrating arsenic hour.