Friday Afternoon - Information

If cash flow is the lifeblood of a business, information is its sensory input. Obvious, right? Not always. How many times have you met with clients who 'knew what their customers want.' No iffs, ands or buts. They won't allocate marketing dollars for research and are convinced that because they've been in their marketspace for years, they have the pulse of their customers.

Only to find out that after 6 months of well-planned marketing campaigns, you're not hitting your goals, not drawing in the customers, not stealing marketshare, not boosting profits. Oops.

If you've got a good client, you can go back to them and convince them that they need to execute customer polling/research/feedback. They don't know what they thought they knew (even if YOU knew it to begin with).

Part of any management system is the monitoring and feedback loop. For any system or process to succeed, you need to track, monitor and oversee the ultimate results as influenced and effected by your strategies. The 'bottomless well' customer who throws millions at strategies without a care of the results is either a: political or b: destined for chapter 11 or c: surviving not by their skill but by luck (for which there is something to be said). To justify your value to your customers, you have to be able to demonstrate that you're moving them closer towards their established business goals. That means tracking and monitoring, followed by strategy and tactical modifications when the results (after sufficient time has passed) are not what was planned or expected.

In short, the more information that you and your customer have about their clients, the stronger your strategies will be and the happier your clients will become. (There's a book in here somewhere... or fifty.)

I bring this up because we had a customer who wasn't generating our expected returns on one of the strategies that we had recommended to them. They were following on our recommended tactics, timing and management, but the results just weren't there. A review of the system showed that the message was reaching the targeted audience, the audience still had a need for the service, but the end-customer just wasn't doing what we expected. Upon review, we implemented a client polling and tracking system for a short run and found out that our initial base needs-assessment (supplied by our client) was significantly off-base. We were able to change the message in the campaigns to address the correct need and, blammo!, we started hitting our numbers. It helps to work with good clients.


Have a great weekend-
Shawn