Every Wednesday, I rearrange the colour-coded pens and precisely aligned office accessories on my colleague’s desk. It’s a thing to look forward to.
I think it was Craig Jarrow at Time Management Ninja who said that the most important thing you do with your day is deciding what to do with your day. I believe that, which is why I spend the first few minutes of each busy day carefully budgeting my free time so that I can actually get stuff done.
I make sure I put aside a little bit of time each week for those tiny tasks such as doing my expenses, reading magazines or washing my coffee mug.
Last week I had five minutes set aside to renew a magazine subscription. I had my subscriber number, account number, name-as-it-appears-on-the-mailing-label and some other mysterious strings of data just in case. I had my credit card ready and waiting.
I didn’t have, it seemed, my user name and password for the website. I didn’t recall ever having had a user name and password, so I hit the Forgot Password button. My email is not on file. Okay, now approaching my five-minute budget, I set up a new account. No dice. My email is on file. I go old school and pick up the phone. Fifteen minutes later I have finally persuaded this company to take my money. Though I do have to login to get a copy of the receipt, it would seem.
Now I’m 200% over my time budget and will have to wait for another day to torment Danielle by moving her stapler over six inches. Now would not be a good time to ask me if I would recommend this magazine to a friend.
All of this has me thinking about the role of time in our value propositions to our clients and prospects. Ron Tite said in a recent speech that consumers no longer vote with their wallet;, they vote with their time. These days, of course, a small investment of their time in not liking your brand, can mean a big, ugly, public hissy fit.
On the B2B side we spend a lot of our time thinking about user experiences and drawing out of that a value proposition. Usually it’s around value for money, ease of use, great insights or knowledgeable people, but I’m wondering if we should have a second helping of ROTI – Return on Time Invested– instead. We have talked about ROTI in this space before, in the context of selling to time-starved small business owners. I think we need to make this a more central consideration for just about every customer-facing aspect of our activities.
The first thing we need to realize is that by the time our customer or prospect is even talking to us, they’ve already invested a bunch of time in the transaction. The CEB tells us that 57% of the purchase decision is made before the prospect calls – that’s a fair bit of time. In a complex sale, some poor P-Cuber has been writing the RFP for weeks, maybe there’s even a project team in place to acquire and install the purchase. Perhaps the customer has been on our website for days trying to find information, solve their problem or figure out where to call.
Whether they know it or not, these folks have a time budget for dealing us, which means that we have a responsibility to understand what that is and to respect it. If your Sales Squirrels are coming back from their foraging trips crowing about how their one hour presentation went to 90 minutes, perhaps they ought to be asked whether anyone was still in the room when they were finished.
I have whined about the tyranny of handle time metrics in Customer Abuse departments, and I still think it’s a crummy way to measure service. When we think about ROTI in this context, we need to look at the Return part of the acronym. I would bet that most our customers would rather have their problem entirely solved on a 30 minute call than made worse on a five minute call. I know that absolutely all of them expect not to be kept on hold or wandering the storm sewers that pass for most IVRs these days.
We should also be looking long and hard at our products. Do they, can they, save time? They might be super-duper user-friendly and really easy to learn, but if it takes all day to get anything done, are we adding value or just cost? Remember, it’s not just the time they spend using our product or service that we have to count, but also the opportunity cost of that time.
Marketing messages, too, need to start looking at ROTI as a powerful differentiator. Sure, total cost of ownership is a great proof-point, but if all you’re calculating is the amortized cost of your product over its useful lifespan then you’re only doing half the job. If you can also work out the value of the time you save customers versus the competition, then you’ll have a much more compelling offering.
If you’re struggling with a sales team that can’t seem to stay out of the pricing discussion, try training them to talk ROTI and flip the whole thing to a value conversation instead of a price conversation.
Related Posts
Why Time is On Your Side When Marketing to Small Business
Algorithms & Blues in the Obscurocratic Empire
Of Trust, Imagination & Beach Balls
BizMarketer is Elizabeth Williams
You can reach me at escwilliams@gmail.com
or follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
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