In a previous article we talked about Why Brand Introduction Fail.  This articles digs a bit deeper in the the Customer Support question.

Introspection: Customer Support Questions

• Is your field support and customer support team trained and up-to-speed on all of the products?
• Can they technically support the product line?
• Can they cross-over competitive information?
• Do the support people Do you hear them saying “I don’t know the answer to that” and end the conversation with or do they say “I don’t know the answer let me find out and call you back in 10 minutes”  Do they end the call with "Are your happy with my your level of service today?”
• Are they responsive?
• Are they proactive?
• Do you have a Standard Operating Procedure on quote turnaround ( 2 hours, 24 hours, 2 weeks)? 

​Inside Customer Service and Support can take on many variations. I've listed a few for you to ponder. ​

Customer Service IS the Problem 
​It once took me 6 months trying to figure out why we weren't getting more orders and why were where having order delays. The end-users loved the product, the outside sales people loved product, the owners of the distributors loved the product.

​It wasn't until I found out that the inside sales people placing & expediting the orders HATED dealing with the customer sales people at the manufacturer's order desk.  We had a flat tire where the rubber met the road.  

It only takes one component to fail for the system to break down.

Fearful Customer Service Problem 
Their is some internal political issue with a POLICY of the manufacturer that is so out of the norm that you can't even understand what is demotivating everyone.

Here's an example: At the end of a quarter every call made for an guarantied test trial application is responded with "I'm not sure if that's a good test."  Even in cases where the promo video that the company produced for the sales people has almost the exact application featured! Finally, after much prompting you find out why:

• "The accountants are really tightening up on trial applications/test tools"
• "My boss is really riding me on any testing right now"
• "I've gone over my trunk stock budget" 
• "We didn't anticipate the great response to the product so we're trying to control sales"

Don't create a promotion if you can't get the support of all of your internal departments.  

The New COST CENTER Problem 
​Sometimes, as companies grow or get sold there are new people who very well versed accounting and legal. If they don't fully grasp what has made the company successful they can wreak havoc at the sales generation end of the business.

In most cases, it's good business, stuff the company should have been doing all along, but in others, it's policies and procedures that just create roadblocks to doing business.

I was sent this video back in 2006 by a very astute owner of a manufacturer.

You're contemplating a new product launch and you're digging into where you think you might be able to sell your product.  At some point, you are going to want to determine what size company your are targeting.  This post should provide you with some food for thought.

To understand the above Pie Chart you're going to need to spend just a few minutes looking.  That Pink area on the right with the bar graph depicts only those companies in the pie chart with greater than 100 employees.

That is in the entire US machine shop market.

As you can see, the bulk of the business is in small business.  Machine Shops with under 20 employees.  Granted, it's great to get the really big machine shops to convert to your products and implement it throughout their facilities, but the smaller companies are going to require much much more work to get to them.

If you decide that you want to target the smaller machines shops there's both good news and bad news:

The Good
Smaller Shops can make decisions quicker.
The owner is generally the decision maker and not far removed from the production floor.  
Payment is generally quicker.  Larger shops tend to be slower pay than small shops that value the importance of maintaining credit.

The Bad
You will have to make many more calls and learn to establish credibility and rapport.
You can't hide any minor errors or omissions.  Each of your products that are purchased are going to be needed and quality is going to be expected.

,Is there trust in your business relationships?  Trust is that "gut feeling" stuff. It comes out in the one-on-one conversations.

Ask yourself: Is something being held back? Are direct answers given? Do you give them? Do you get them?

In the Agents and Distributors minds they are constantly re-evaluating each conversation and each slight policy change. 

• "Is the manufacturer asking lots of questions because they want to sell directly to my customer?
• "Am I being eliminated?"
• "Do they want to move the business to a competing distributor?"

Is the manufacturer "throwing their weight around" and not really acknowledging that the distributor runs their own business?
​Does the agent or manufacturer call the end-user directly.... and not tell the distributor or independent rep? Do they visit end-users on their own? Is there communication when they do?

The most successful brands are built on a foundation of trust and loyalty. Each party knows where the other stands. You can actually watch the relationships grow.

In the early phases it may be that the distributor or the agent calls up the manufacturer and asks for something... The reprimanding parent response is "You know we can't do that! We can do xxxx." To which the smiling reply is "I know, but I had to ask."

Later, as the relationship evolves, when the distributor or agent calls up they say "Hey, we just promised this program and that promo with this product, I know I need you to approve it but I already quoted it while you where on vacation" and the response "Great Job, what else ya need?" 

Perhaps, more than any other part of the business relationship, TRUST IS THE MOST IMPORTANT. 

Whose Customer is is anyway?
Many times manufacturers who use the industrial supply chain become confused as to who their actual customer is.  The customer is the one who writes you the check.  If you are selling directly to the end user of your product then that end-user is the customer.  If you are using a wholesale supply sales channel, the person writing you the check is YOUR customer and the end-user they are supplying your products to is THEIR customer.  

The "Agent" or "Regional Manager" 
An agent or territory salesperson has a relationship with his customer: The distributor channel. It's where they live, It's where they put food on their table. Most of the smart independent agents, and even the factory guys, realize that the relationship is the most important aspect of their livelihood.

Agents realize that Management comes and goes, manufacturers change gears, different managers come on-board with their own ideas and their own relationships, but the one consistent thing is their customers and that trust they have built up.   Although you as the manufacturer may be writing the regional manager the check, they realize that that check is being generated from the relationships they have in the territory.  If the regional manger has put down roots.  Has a house, has a Family, has kids in school, They have "gone native."  They are going to be more loyal to the territory than to you. It's good to remember that in all of your conversations with them.

The Distributor 
Distributors are even more protective of their turf. They have their territory marked and that IS how they perceive it. It's THEIRS.   When a distributor brings someone into their customer it is akin to bringing your first date to meet your parents. You are coming into THEIR home, you are being extended the relationship that they enjoy. When a manufacturer tells them "That's MY customer not yours" they are pretty offended and, like a dog, they'll probably come back and bite you. They own the relationship. 

I was sent an invitation to connect with someone who’s newsletter I have been receiving for many years.  I found the information very informative and helpful in many cases.  However, when I talked to him about his locked down connections he told me “I don’t want my competitors to see who I know”  I explained that

• A. I wasn’t a competitor,
• B. Perhaps he should be connected to his competitors if he is that unsure of his customer relationships and
• C. It’s difficult for me to trust people who don’t seem to trust anyone else, as I find that the people most paranoid about trust are almost always the most untrustworthy people I meet.

Remember, you don't have to connect with everyone.  Just because you've been friends with them in-person, that doesn't mean that they are just as friendly on-line.

This was  a special report I created for the 2010 International Manufacturing Technology Show exhibitors.  ​I'm reposting it here for the 2012 IMTS Show exhibitors.

If you are selling through a distribution channel then the DISTRIBUTORs are the FIRST customer who’s needs you should meet. I’ve seen many manufacturer’s who have great products, great catalogs, and yet they can’t figure out why they are not selling more.  Somewhere there is a hurdle.  

Sometimes the hurdle is in the last place you might expect because you don’t see it every day or feels it’s effects personally.
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You’ve paid for the catalog, you’ve paid for the marketing, you’ve found a good distributor, you had a great sales meeting and the outside salespeople are excited to go show their customers your product.

What happens next?
The end-user customer asks for a quote. Now that goes directly to the inside people at the distributor. They now have to create a quote, and when they do it,  they don’t want to have to enter the same information over and over again. If one customer wants something “just like my buddy Joe got at his place” they have to standardize.

Here’s a couple of cases where the manufacturer slipped up:

Distributors work with many many manufacturers and are very familiar with how jobs are “routed” through a facility. So when a distributor talks to a vendor and the vendor says “If you want it in black just add a “B” to the part number at the end. If you want it in Gray – just add a “G” There is no charge extra for that either, just add a “G” to the end. That’s what our guy use on the floor”

Aside from the above discussion about how computers would understand a “-G” vs. a “.g” there is a larger perception problem in play here. What may seem like a rather simple way to designate what color you want actually raises a big red flag for the distributor. They know that the way one person writes a “G” could look like a “B” to another person.

Even if the “guys on the floor” know enough to ask someone to double check, distributors know how important accurate information on the floor of a plant is to efficient delivers. It’s the real basis of “lean” “SPC” “ISO” etc. Again, what the manufacturer perceives as a “simple easy to use, ‘just add a letter’ system” what the distributor hears is

​“Our shop routing process is a real mess so this vendor is probably going to be late or mess up an order at some point. I’ve got to keep an eye on them”

For further Reading check out: The Future of Industrial Classification: UNSPSC

“We’ve been doing it this way for years and no one else has complained”  If I’ve heard that once I heard it a thousand times.  Maybe, they stopped complaining years ago and maybe, just maybe, your never even heard the complaint.  Let’s look at some dollar and cents.

If someone at an end user keys in an order and faxes it to a distributor, that distributor keys in the order and faxes it into the manufacturer.  The manufacturer keys it into their system.  The product ships and a hard copy of the invoice is sent to the distributor who must key in some more information,  then the manufacturer sends out a printed copy of the invoices to their agents.  The agents then key in the sales again.  

That’s an awful lot of repetitive keystrokes folks.  

​It’s pretty easy to see why moving to electronic databases and communication is happening and is going to move to a standard.

Details Details
But there is ONE error in the picture. Can you see what it is?  To be honest, you would probably not even catch the error.  Take a look at the FORMULA in the highlighted cell.  It’s a formula and not text.  The pricing columns all have dollar signs in them.  That’s a nice thing to do if people are going to read it but the computer has to import it.

There have been cases where distributors said “Wow this is a great file and ready to import!”  but then the import went south with strange errors.  It wasn’t the dollar signs,  it was the rounding.  There was multiple column pricing for quantity breaks.  

Everything was a formula and when it was converted to text it had numbers that where out 6 decimal places. Because the formula’s where all based upon one cell as a baseline, the rounding errors got bigger and bigger and when the import happened the pricing was up to .27 cents off on certain items.  That can add up if they standard package quanity is 144 pieces. Why did it happen? Because when the import was done it only imported the first two decimal places.

Once you’ve completed your spreadsheet save all of the fields as TEXT and this problem will go away.

Details Details and more Details
Some other things to consider: What software system do your distributors use to run THEIR BUSINESS?  It’s a good idea to ask.  You may have field length issues when importing.  

​If you have a Description 1 field that is 100 characters long but the field in the software only permits 43 characters, with the rest being parsed, that information IS NOT going to be in the database.  If you have one critical dimension at the end of the description and upon import an entire group of items is parsed all of the part numbers will be different but the descriptions will all be the same.

“Well, we can’t make 100’s of special prices list for EVERY distributor” you say.  You don’t have to.  Just find out what the software is at your key distributors and accommodate them.

“Again, no one has really complained about this before so we don’t think it’s a big issue”

When do you update price lists? When you introduce a new product or have a price increase. Right?

Now, what does a good outside sales force do when there is a change?  They have a sales meeting with the distributors to review the new products (and new catalog) and get the distributor salespeople pumped up to go out and sell.  In many cases this is happening as soon as the new price list is put out… in some cases your sales force is brining it with them.

Is the IT person in the room for the meeting?  Generally the answer is no.  Does your outside sales force commonly work with the IT people at a distributor?  Do they even know who does it if you ask them?  Generally, the answer is no.  When the IT person gets the file, if they discover it’s going to take some time to clean up it gets put on the backburner, especially if their primary responsibility is accounting or other back office work.
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So what happens in the field? Your salespeople go out, make calls with the distributor salespeople and get some orders.  They place the orders.  The price list isn’t updated so they spend the next couple of days fielding questions, dealing with distributor inside salespeople and your customer service people.  They aren’t selling.  You’re losing money and you’re getting a “difficult” to deal with reputation.

They have “wired” their social media sites together. 
In all reality you can only be in one place at a time.  Different users will be using different channels at the same moment.  You notice that when you channel surf on TV that you see the same commercials sometimes?  It’s just like that. In order to maximize your exposure you “connect” the sites to each other so you don’t have to post the same thing over and over again.

Remember when I explained that Twitter was a “junction box”? This is how it “connects” Twitter
permits the sharing between sites better than most any other social media site.

Here are a couple of examples of dashboard app’s:

• Co-tweet
• Hootsuite
• MarketMeSuite
• Seesmic

They have Pre-programmed “Tweets” and announcements.
If you already do a newsletter email or product announcements electronically, you have content to use.

Two very good examples of how this can be done is to take a look at Criterion Machine Works or TechniksUSA Blog sites.  Once a blog is posted it is automatically tweeted, posted on their Facebook page and appears in a number of social media outlets.

...Automatically
The Blogs can be programmed to post at a given time and, once the switch is flipped on the timer, everything else happens seamlessly.

That however, is not where it ends.  Unlike just sending it out there and hoping people read it, now your customer can interact back with you.

Think of social media like your cell phone. You should check it a couple times a day with your dashboard application and see if you have messages, comments, or questions and then “engage” the customer in some “conversation.”

Just as there are a number of dashboard app’s there are an innumerable number of “analytics” to gage and measure success in real time.

In fact, some of the dashboard applications I mentioned earlier have the measurement tools built right into them. Measuring is actually pretty easy.

Without going into a tremendous amount of detail on measurement tools, be aware that the list of measurement tools practically exceeds the number of social media outlets that exist.  Just for Twitter there are sites like Analytic.ly, Twifficiency and Twitteranalyzer.

Facebook has built-in analysis tools for their Page.  Your ROI is really going to be determined by what you put into the effort.  

​Just like a salesperson, the more you engage, the more return.  If you sit in the office and just send out emails and don’t follow up to engage into the conversation not much is going to happen.  “Engaging” is the key to ROI and the analysis tool sets are all going to measure this kind of activity and report on it.

You already know that that is not realistic.  But that is the same kind of thinking that is taking place in Social Media.

“Hey, we can just set up a Twitter account in a few minutes”

Well, yes you can, but, just like the first time buyer of a machine tool, there’s still an awful lot to learn. The sooner you start learning, the farther in front of your competitors you’ll be.  This is a pro-active approach.  Too many b-to-b companies, particularly exhibitors at IMTS, took a reactive approach. They jumped in and created their “social media brand names” without first having personal accounts so they understood how it works.

So the best way to learn is to set up some social media personal accounts.

Facebook – “That’s for kids.” Step back from any preconceived notions and think about this from a business standpoint.  There is a war going on.  Two data collection monoliths, Facebook & Google, are each trying to outdo each other. 

In April 2010 Facebook announced at their annual “F8” conference the “Open Graph”: That’s why you are seeing the “LIKE” button appear everywhere. Here’s why that’s important:  If you recall the first time you got a day planner you learned that you should not only put your business appointments down but also soccer games, weddings and personal events.

Time management 101. Your life is 24 hours a day. Facebook at it’s core is personal. But your personal life affects your business and vice-versa. Facebook collects personal data and associates it with your interests. If your title is “CNC machinist,” it permits advertisers to target that.

Although Google has a massive database, they have not “aggregated” demographics as deep down as Facebook. They are both competing for ad space. If you were at IMTS in Chicago and logged into Facebook, you may have seen some ads running.  But you would have only seen them if you were with in 5 miles of McCormick Place, between 7pm -10pm, were male, between 35-55, and had some keyword in your profile indicating you were in our industry.

​The “pay-per-click” cost .60 cents each and had a cap on the amount spent by the advertiser. Yes, you can do that level of targeted advertising. Creating a Facebook Page is a way to become “engaged’ and be in front of your customer when they get home from work.  The busiest time on Facebook is Wednesday and Friday evening, but we’ll talk about that more later…

They are “IN” all for the above digital spaces and probably another 1,000 more.

Have you ever purchased something online?  Have you looked down at the product reviews and decided against the purchase of something because of the reviews?  Then, did you think  “Wow, I wonder why that manufacturer isn’t reading that and fixing it? They’re getting really bad press”  The problem is that the manufacturer may not even know about the comments to address them. But B-to-B  consumers ARE researching and engaging each other.
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There are a number of free products out there to use to search for who’s talking about what.  I would recommend going to Social Mention and type in your company name and brands and see what appears.  You will find that you can drill down and drill down more and then drill down even more into exactly who is talking about what where.

Start with a personal account on:

• Twitter –  Set up Twitter account and follow some people. You can follow @RPMconsultants where we tweet about social media or my personal Twitter account, @bernardtmartin where I tweet about Education, STEM, F1, Economics and Foreign Affairs. You can then check out who we follow, learn some basics, ask some questions.
• Facebook – Set up a personal account, be sure to set your account settings to “friends only” across all categories and then search for “International Manufacturing Technology Show” or “AMTDA” on Facebook.  Look at whom they have made favorites on their Company page.  Hit the “LIKE” button.

• DON”T go out and set up accounts in YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for your company right this minute! That’s would be like a customer saying “I want to buy the CNC with the Green Paint, I like that color.”
• Set up your personal accounts and then go to “Knowem” Search for some available names.  I’ve talked to many machinery distributor owners and employees over the years and heard “Yea, our website name is WAY too long, but it’s what we’re stuck with.”

Unlike registering your web address, your URL, with a service that reports to one central agency for verification, called ICANN, there is no single service registration of your “Social Media Brand name”
Places like Knowem allow you to search for brand names.

You want to use the same Brand name in ALL of your social media spaces.

​There are several considerations in the selection of THAT name:

• Shorter is better. Remember Twitter on permits 140 characters in “tweets” You don’t want to eat up half of it with your company name and be limited on your message.
• Use the same name in all social media spaces. That bears worth repeating. Remember that long tail search discussion?

There’s a big difference between watching Golf and playing Golf at a professional level. Social Media is no different that other professional efforts: Once you become in engaged in it you learn that it’s probably not as simple as you first thought.
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In the course of talking to prospective clients I’ve found a mixed bag of comments that all go something like “I got plenty of people who are on Facebook all the time, you can create an account in 5 minutes”

Unlike when you registered your website with a registrar for your unique URL, which was all overseen via ICANN, there is NO singleplace that you can register all of your SOCIAL MEDIA brand name. The key to words there are “Brand NAME” and not “Brand NAMEs”.  You have to create a profile in each SM space you want to present your brand individually.
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As a marketer you already know the importance of using consistent images and names.  It becomes even more important in social media because you want people to find you when they use a search engine.  If you have a mixed bag of names your message may not reach the people you want to reach and, like two ships passing in the night, you will never engage in conversation. One very good service to use to begin the process is Knowem. However, Knowem doesn’t help you establish your brand in your industry specific niche forums.

I’ve talked to some very well-known major companies about their Social Media efforts.  When we sit and look at their SM spaces we discover that they’ve “jumped into” social media “Oh yea, we’re there!” But then we dig into it only to find that they have set up their company name as personal account and not created a COMPANY profile at all.  They at risk with not only with the loss of the SM account but also the loss of all of the conversations that they are engaged in already.
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Just like entering a new foreign market there are cultural “rules” that should be followed.  By not showing respect for the local culture, and taking the time to understand it in advance, you risk creating a negative brand image that could take years to recover from to get back to zero.  Don’t burn your bridges and not even realize that you’re doing it.  Social Media spaces have their own culture. You are entering a cyber world.  Be sure to have a good understanding of how things work before you make the trip.

Once you have selected a brand NAME in your various spaces, you will need to have a good understanding of how the various “Status Updates”, “Wall Posts”, “Tweets”, “Blog Posts”, etc all connect together.  The people you want to reach may be in one SM space while you’re posting, at that moment, in another. Determining which posts are shared and which are not becomes a very important decision.
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There’s quite bit more to think about that I’ve put into the slide show below. Take a peek at it:

The above slideshow presentation should give you an overview of how to start your social media efforts.  It outlines the reach and scope of social media (SM) for those new to the space.

Once you have gotten into the new cyber world to market your brand, stay acutely aware that the landscape in social media is changing.  I’ve compared it to the 1849 Gold Rush in San Francisco.  Everyone is new, Everyone is from somewhere else.  What was the “best place” last week is not the “best space” this week.  That’s led some to say “Let’s wait, and not be on the bleeding edge”  The Bleeding Edge was several years ago and it was yesterday. The onslaught of new users hourly entering the social media cyber world is beyond compare.

Here’s an example, when I started using Slideshare as an add-in app on my LinkedIn profile it was NOT a social network.  It was a place to put slideshows to pull up on customer & client computers.  NOW, it’s a social network…. and the added functionality is expanding weekly it seems.  Every social media site is doing the same.  As they grow, they are becoming more and more niche, more and more industry specific, more and more topic specific.  Getting IN is critical at this point so that you, and your company, can establish your brand as a thought leader and engage and develop relationships…. but, you MUST stay engaged and continue to drill down as the individual spaces evolve.

I recently had a conversation with a client about YouTube and how it has evolved.  I showed them Don Fitchett‘s YouTube Channel Business Industrial Network. Don has been in that space (and many many others) for some time. He has over 430,000 upload views, has 1500 subscribers staying current with his latest news and he has over 5,000 friends.  That didn’t happen overnight.  Don is continuously engaged with his clients and potential clients.  Now ask yourself two questions:
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• If I wait for the dust to settle how many customers might my competitors pick up and I won’t know about it?
• If I jump into the space and don’t understand the culture, or have a plan, what will it cost me?

The conclusion that should be drawn after reviewing this is that developing a structured Social Media Strategy and Tactical implementation plan is crucial to your company’s success.

Without a plan you may find yourself creating a negative brand image within the space and end up spending more money trying to undo what you created and start over.

I look forward to your comments and questions.
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Special Thanks to @RonDavies for blogging about “Knowem”