The 3 Secrets to Building Successful Third-Party Partnerships
This Founder Shares How to Get Out of an Awful Partnership
Partnerships can be very useful to a startup. With the right company, you can expand your sales pipeline, gain access to otherwise cost-prohibitive infrastructure and generally minimize your risk in pursuing growth. However, the reality is that most business partnerships fail for one reason or another. For those interested in beating the odds with a successful partnership, I offer below a few best practices that should help when teaming up with another company.
Related: Before You Form a Partnership, Make Sure Your Bases Are Covered
1. Invest time in researching the right partner.
The best way to find the right partner is through research. Once you have a sense of what external assets would be most useful to your business, you can begin building your list of prospects with whom to partner. But your research should not begin and end with what your business needs. Rather, as part of your research, you should spend just as much time exploring which of those prospects could benefit from a partnership with your business. For a successful partnership to work both parties must find value. So be sure not to neglect this crucial latter element of your partnership research efforts.
ADVERTISING
Related: 3 Signs That Your Partner Program Is Going Belly Up
2. Designate internal champions.
Having the right corporate partner is critical, but it is not enough. No corporate partnership can work unless each partner has its own internal champion dedicated to making the relationship thrive. The right champions should have knowledge of the reasons behind the partnership and the desired outcomes, access to the stakeholders and resources necessary to support collaboration, full commitment to the success of the effort and accountability for results. With the right champion in place you send a clear message to your new outside partner and your team that you take the relationship seriously. This will vastly improve the odds that your partnership will work as hoped.
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Branding Your Business for Maximum Exposure
By Staples
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Office Goals on the Road: From Ugly to Organized
By Staples
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Colorful Room Makeover for a Good Cause
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3. Develop and stick to a structured plan.
Once you have the right partner and the right internal champion, your partnership is primed for success. However, there is one last vital requirement to keep in mind. In short, you need a structured execution plan. Before you begin cross-selling products or seconding staff, you should take the time to work through a detailed roadmap for the partnership. As a starting point, you should clearly identify the short- and long-term objectives of both parties, establishing a clear series of individual and collective milestones as well a framework for measuring the success of the efforts. Once that is done, you should document specifically who is responsible for contributing what resources and when and who is accountable for those commitments. Finally, you must have a regular meeting schedule for the internal champions or a broader group to discuss the progress of the partnership. These meetings should have clear agendas that are circulated ahead of time, and they should address the agreed-upon milestones as well as who has or has not fulfilled their responsibilities. Without a structured communication plan and routine assessment of the efforts of both parties, your partnership may be painfully short-lived.
There are many variables in business that determine success and finding the right external partner cannot guarantee that your startup will experience accelerated growth or even float. However, with a partner that derives as much value as it provides, a capable and committed champion on each side and a detailed plan, you can certainly increase the odds that your new partnership has a positive impact on your business.
read more...
Customer Experience Should Not Be the Job of Just One Person
How This Company Got Over Screwing Up on Its Biggest Sales Day of the Year
The whole world is going digital and it’s having an immense impact on organizations’ abilities to engage with customers. Through digital channels, social media and mobile communications, consumers today orchestrate their own experiences, choosing how and when they want to interact with companies' brands.
This creates a number of challenges for organizations, as they attempt to provide timely, consistent and personalized experiences to customers across channels.
With less than half of companies rating their customer experience as exceptional yet 89 percent saying that they plan to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016, according to a recent Gartner report, businesses certainly have a lot of work to do.
ADVERTISING
Related: Will Your Company Be a Leader of the Customer-Service Revolution?
The solution, however, is not a quick fix. Do not delegate this responsibility to one person by hiring a vice president of customer experience. Someone in this role might sporadically effect change in isolated pockets.
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Office Goals on the Road: Pink Floors Makeover
By Staples
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Cluttered to Creative Office Makeover
By Staples
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How These Entrepreneurs Attracted an Army of Loyal Customers
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But making this one hire would not represent the holistic approach that's needed. Customer experience needs to be the responsibility of the entire business, not just one person or department.
Business leaders should ask themselves if their organization is truly set up to effectively manage the customer experience. Unfortunately, more often than not, the answer is no, as businesses maintain a traditional organizational structure.
Architected over the last 100 years to support conventional ways of doing business, this structure does not cater to the digital world of today. Each department operates as a silo: The sales department doesn’t talk to marketing. Each unit runs its own campaigns and tracks separate key performance indicators for success.
For a company to be truly be successful, every single one of those silos needs to be aligned. And all department leaders along with the executive team must have shared customer experience objectives that they are measured on. Delegating responsibility to help tear down these silos won’t help, as this just adds another layer to the problem.
Instead, the CEO needs to take charge, ensuring the entire executive team is marching toward the same goals when it comes to customer success.
Related: The Tech Surge That's Putting Consumers in the Forefront
Once organizational alignment is established, technology can be used to help foster a customer focus throughout a business. It can further establish internal collaboration by providing a unified view of customer information across the business.
Giving employees a platform for sharing and exchanging information is only a first step, though. Firms should focus on helping people access the information they need and filter out the information they don’t, thus educing the signal-to-noise ratio.
Additionally, organizations should ensure they have the right technology solutions in place to help with customer communication. Every interaction with a customer or potential one should be timely, relevant and accurate. And solutions that assist with web-content management, languages and translation, campaigns and analytics can play a large role in this so that consumer preferences and contexts are considered.
It is critical, however, that all technology pieces are integrated and used together appropriately. Otherwise, the customer experience will be disjointed with inconsistent and irrelevant messaging.
Beyond assembling a team and ensuring alignment, CEOs should think ahead and foresee customer needs. If it's appropriate, make acquisitions to meet those needs or perhaps develop a new product. These radical changes are not made overnight. But to accomplish them, executives need to be on the same page.
In order for a company’s customer experience to be superior, the CEO needs to be the one responsible for oversight over this area. Merely creating a separate customer-focused role won’t fix the problem. Oversight needs to start at the top and the area needs to remain a key priority for an organization’s success. Take the time to make these shifts and customers will be thankful.
read more...
Cultivating an Emotional Connection With Your Customers Is How You Survive Disruption
A new crop of ecommerce startups has redefined personalization.
7 Data Sources You Should Absolutely Be Plugging into Your CRM
Image credit: shutterstock
With big data and powerful analytics, it's easier than ever for companies to target and play to their shoppers. Using robust, open-source technology, brands can build highly personalized recommendations and boost their bottom lines along the way.
But, personalization also helps brands connect with their client base (and vice versa) on an emotional level. Done properly, a brand can lock in faithful customers for the long-term.
In short, the future is personalization with a purpose. The best, most savvy brands will use data and customization to build a bond and turn their customers into lifelong evangelists.
ADVERTISING
Related: 10 Reasons Why Good Customer Service Is Your Most Important Metric
An emotional connection drives loyalty.
First, it's important to understand that an emotional connection is the foundation for brand loyalty.
Sponsored Content
Branding Your Business for Maximum Exposure
By Staples
Sponsored Content
How These Entrepreneurs Attracted an Army of Loyal Customers
By Staples
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Office Goals on the Road: From Ugly to Organized
By Staples
Research shows that companies which can connect deeply with their customers often perform better. In an analysis of 1,400 branding and advertising case studies in the UK, those campaigns which featured only emotional content performed twice as well (31 percent) as those with only rational content (16 percent). Purely emotional content also performed a tiny bit better than campaigns that mixed rational and emotional content (26 percent).
That's not all. In a Harvard Business Review article, analysts found that emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. These customers with a strong bond are simply more invested in your company--and your success. They buy more products, visit your website or storefront more often, are less sensitive to price, and recommend you to more people in their social circles.
One reason for this might come down to a quirk of human nature. Though it's often said that people do business with other people (and not companies), one exception may be those companies with strong personalities. For example, this includes companies which treat their customers like friends or loved ones, cultivating an engaged community, and making products just for them.
The first rule of thumb: the more a company seems like a living, breathing person (and less like a corporation), then the more likely it is to connect with customers. Now if your company comes across as a person (say, a hip friend), and builds things just for your customers--then the game is yours to win.
Related: Steal These 4 Proven Customer-Retention Strategies
How to use personalization to build an emotional connection
Pulling this off isn't easy though. One way to do this is to pay more attention to laying the groundwork for a relationship with your customers. In fact, the most effective companies build in this emotional aspect into every part of their business--especially where it concerns personalization.
Glossier is a great example. The name is a clever play on words, combining the gloss of makeup with the personal curation of a dossier. Founded by Emily Weiss, a reality TV star turned businesswoman, Glossier cleverly built a thriving community around its blog. It helps that the company comes off not as a makeup producer, but as Buzzfeed puts it, "your best friend or benevolent big sister."
Add to that Glossier's tendency to literally build products around customer critiques. One product, Milky Jelly Cleanser, was designed in response to a blog post asking customers for their dream face wash. The lesson: Even if Milky Jelly Cleanser isn't exactly personalizing a product to an individual (more like customizing an item to a group's desires), it still helps buyers feel appreciated and valued. As a customer, think about how you would feel if your suggestion appeared as a product on Glossier's store.
Birchbox is another company that effectively builds an emotional connection through personalization. Its business model is built around the clever use of data to build custom boxes of mini beauty products (full-size ones can be purchased at a higher price,...
read more...
The 3 Secrets to Building Successful Third-Party Partnerships
This Founder Shares How to Get Out of an Awful Partnership
Partnerships can be very useful to a startup. With the right company, you can expand your sales pipeline, gain access to otherwise cost-prohibitive infrastructure and generally minimize your risk in pursuing growth. However, the reality is that most business partnerships fail for one reason or another. For those interested in beating the odds with a successful partnership, I offer below a few best practices that should help when teaming up with another company.
Related: Before You Form a Partnership, Make Sure Your Bases Are Covered
1. Invest time in researching the right partner.
The best way to find the right partner is through research. Once you have a sense of what external assets would be most useful to your business, you can begin building your list of prospects with whom to partner. But your research should not begin and end with what your business needs. Rather, as part of your research, you should spend just as much time exploring which of those prospects could benefit from a partnership with your business. For a successful partnership to work both parties must find value. So be sure not to neglect this crucial latter element of your partnership research efforts.
ADVERTISING
Related: 3 Signs That Your Partner Program Is Going Belly Up
2. Designate internal champions.
Having the right corporate partner is critical, but it is not enough. No corporate partnership can work unless each partner has its own internal champion dedicated to making the relationship thrive. The right champions should have knowledge of the reasons behind the partnership and the desired outcomes, access to the stakeholders and resources necessary to support collaboration, full commitment to the success of the effort and accountability for results. With the right champion in place you send a clear message to your new outside partner and your team that you take the relationship seriously. This will vastly improve the odds that your partnership will work as hoped.
Sponsored Content
Branding Your Business for Maximum Exposure
By Staples
Sponsored Content
Office Goals on the Road: From Ugly to Organized
By Staples
Sponsored Content
Colorful Room Makeover for a Good Cause
By Staples
3. Develop and stick to a structured plan.
Once you have the right partner and the right internal champion, your partnership is primed for success. However, there is one last vital requirement to keep in mind. In short, you need a structured execution plan. Before you begin cross-selling products or seconding staff, you should take the time to work through a detailed roadmap for the partnership. As a starting point, you should clearly identify the short- and long-term objectives of both parties, establishing a clear series of individual and collective milestones as well a framework for measuring the success of the efforts. Once that is done, you should document specifically who is responsible for contributing what resources and when and who is accountable for those commitments. Finally, you must have a regular meeting schedule for the internal champions or a broader group to discuss the progress of the partnership. These meetings should have clear agendas that are circulated ahead of time, and they should address the agreed-upon milestones as well as who has or has not fulfilled their responsibilities. Without a structured communication plan and routine assessment of the efforts of both parties, your partnership may be painfully short-lived.
There are many variables in business that determine success and finding the right external partner cannot guarantee that your startup will experience accelerated growth or even float. However, with a partner that derives as much value as it provides, a capable and committed champion on each side and a detailed plan, you can certainly increase the odds that your new partnership has a positive impact on your business.
read more...
Customer Experience Should Not Be the Job of Just One Person
How This Company Got Over Screwing Up on Its Biggest Sales Day of the Year
The whole world is going digital and it’s having an immense impact on organizations’ abilities to engage with customers. Through digital channels, social media and mobile communications, consumers today orchestrate their own experiences, choosing how and when they want to interact with companies' brands.
This creates a number of challenges for organizations, as they attempt to provide timely, consistent and personalized experiences to customers across channels.
With less than half of companies rating their customer experience as exceptional yet 89 percent saying that they plan to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016, according to a recent Gartner report, businesses certainly have a lot of work to do.
ADVERTISING
Related: Will Your Company Be a Leader of the Customer-Service Revolution?
The solution, however, is not a quick fix. Do not delegate this responsibility to one person by hiring a vice president of customer experience. Someone in this role might sporadically effect change in isolated pockets.
Sponsored Content
Office Goals on the Road: Pink Floors Makeover
By Staples
Sponsored Content
Cluttered to Creative Office Makeover
By Staples
Sponsored Content
How These Entrepreneurs Attracted an Army of Loyal Customers
By Staples
But making this one hire would not represent the holistic approach that's needed. Customer experience needs to be the responsibility of the entire business, not just one person or department.
Business leaders should ask themselves if their organization is truly set up to effectively manage the customer experience. Unfortunately, more often than not, the answer is no, as businesses maintain a traditional organizational structure.
Architected over the last 100 years to support conventional ways of doing business, this structure does not cater to the digital world of today. Each department operates as a silo: The sales department doesn’t talk to marketing. Each unit runs its own campaigns and tracks separate key performance indicators for success.
For a company to be truly be successful, every single one of those silos needs to be aligned. And all department leaders along with the executive team must have shared customer experience objectives that they are measured on. Delegating responsibility to help tear down these silos won’t help, as this just adds another layer to the problem.
Instead, the CEO needs to take charge, ensuring the entire executive team is marching toward the same goals when it comes to customer success.
Related: The Tech Surge That's Putting Consumers in the Forefront
Once organizational alignment is established, technology can be used to help foster a customer focus throughout a business. It can further establish internal collaboration by providing a unified view of customer information across the business.
Giving employees a platform for sharing and exchanging information is only a first step, though. Firms should focus on helping people access the information they need and filter out the information they don’t, thus educing the signal-to-noise ratio.
Additionally, organizations should ensure they have the right technology solutions in place to help with customer communication. Every interaction with a customer or potential one should be timely, relevant and accurate. And solutions that assist with web-content management, languages and translation, campaigns and analytics can play a large role in this so that consumer preferences and contexts are considered.
It is critical, however, that all technology pieces are integrated and used together appropriately. Otherwise, the customer experience will be disjointed with inconsistent and irrelevant messaging.
Beyond assembling a team and ensuring alignment, CEOs should think ahead and foresee customer needs. If it's appropriate, make acquisitions to meet those needs or perhaps develop a new product. These radical changes are not made overnight. But to accomplish them, executives need to be on the same page.
In order for a company’s customer experience to be superior, the CEO needs to be the one responsible for oversight over this area. Merely creating a separate customer-focused role won’t fix the problem. Oversight needs to start at the top and the area needs to remain a key priority for an organization’s success. Take the time to make these shifts and customers will be thankful.
read more...
Cultivating an Emotional Connection With Your Customers Is How You Survive Disruption
A new crop of ecommerce startups has redefined personalization.
7 Data Sources You Should Absolutely Be Plugging into Your CRM
Image credit: shutterstock
With big data and powerful analytics, it's easier than ever for companies to target and play to their shoppers. Using robust, open-source technology, brands can build highly personalized recommendations and boost their bottom lines along the way.
But, personalization also helps brands connect with their client base (and vice versa) on an emotional level. Done properly, a brand can lock in faithful customers for the long-term.
In short, the future is personalization with a purpose. The best, most savvy brands will use data and customization to build a bond and turn their customers into lifelong evangelists.
ADVERTISING
Related: 10 Reasons Why Good Customer Service Is Your Most Important Metric
An emotional connection drives loyalty.
First, it's important to understand that an emotional connection is the foundation for brand loyalty.
Sponsored Content
Branding Your Business for Maximum Exposure
By Staples
Sponsored Content
How These Entrepreneurs Attracted an Army of Loyal Customers
By Staples
Sponsored Content
Office Goals on the Road: From Ugly to Organized
By Staples
Research shows that companies which can connect deeply with their customers often perform better. In an analysis of 1,400 branding and advertising case studies in the UK, those campaigns which featured only emotional content performed twice as well (31 percent) as those with only rational content (16 percent). Purely emotional content also performed a tiny bit better than campaigns that mixed rational and emotional content (26 percent).
That's not all. In a Harvard Business Review article, analysts found that emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as highly satisfied customers. These customers with a strong bond are simply more invested in your company--and your success. They buy more products, visit your website or storefront more often, are less sensitive to price, and recommend you to more people in their social circles.
One reason for this might come down to a quirk of human nature. Though it's often said that people do business with other people (and not companies), one exception may be those companies with strong personalities. For example, this includes companies which treat their customers like friends or loved ones, cultivating an engaged community, and making products just for them.
The first rule of thumb: the more a company seems like a living, breathing person (and less like a corporation), then the more likely it is to connect with customers. Now if your company comes across as a person (say, a hip friend), and builds things just for your customers--then the game is yours to win.
Related: Steal These 4 Proven Customer-Retention Strategies
How to use personalization to build an emotional connection
Pulling this off isn't easy though. One way to do this is to pay more attention to laying the groundwork for a relationship with your customers. In fact, the most effective companies build in this emotional aspect into every part of their business--especially where it concerns personalization.
Glossier is a great example. The name is a clever play on words, combining the gloss of makeup with the personal curation of a dossier. Founded by Emily Weiss, a reality TV star turned businesswoman, Glossier cleverly built a thriving community around its blog. It helps that the company comes off not as a makeup producer, but as Buzzfeed puts it, "your best friend or benevolent big sister."
Add to that Glossier's tendency to literally build products around customer critiques. One product, Milky Jelly Cleanser, was designed in response to a blog post asking customers for their dream face wash. The lesson: Even if Milky Jelly Cleanser isn't exactly personalizing a product to an individual (more like customizing an item to a group's desires), it still helps buyers feel appreciated and valued. As a customer, think about how you would feel if your suggestion appeared as a product on Glossier's store.
Birchbox is another company that effectively builds an emotional connection through personalization. Its business model is built around the clever use of data to build custom boxes of mini beauty products (full-size ones can be purchased at a higher price,...
read more...
![[Aramanda L.L.C. Endorsed-Restaurants]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/3d62ab_413b1829fb5c44e79edf7a194800b4ec~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_285,h_177,al_c,q_80,enc_auto/3d62ab_413b1829fb5c44e79edf7a194800b4ec~mv2.jpg)
What Business Are You Really In?
If you're passionate about what you do, then chances are high you're not just in it for the money. What drives your business forward?
Cultivating an Emotional Connection With Your Customers Is How You Survive Disruption
Image credit: Hero Images | Getty Images
I see many people confused about what business they are in. Entrepreneurs feel that their product or industry defines their business, but is that true? Am I in the newsletter or publishing business? What about the content creation business? After all, we create thousands of pages of content each month. Maybe that's my business. I send a print newsletter to over 10,000 people a month; maybe I’m in education.
The truth of the matter is, I’m not in any of those businesses, nor do I want to be. Those are commodity businesses that can be ripped off and duplicated easily.
Related: Don't Let the Fear of Your Idea Being Stolen Hold You Back
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My real business is helping you to build a community and to develop relationships. The goal is bringing more people into your community and encouraging them to stay there and to refer family and friends. I help you get your community members to buy more products and services from you that will benefit their lives.
It's called relationship marketing.
Sure, I use a newsletter to start to build your community. My company uses content to develop relationships to introduce or remind people of the all the products or services you offer. We run promotions to generate more referrals. We even educate customers with the content we create. But ultimately, we want your customers to feel part of a community and that they have a relationship with you.
Sponsored Content
Office Goals on the Road: From Ugly to Organized
By Staples
Sponsored Content
How These Entrepreneurs Attracted an Army of Loyal Customers
By Staples
Sponsored Content
Branding Your Business for Maximum Exposure
By Staples
This concept of relationship marketing is not an easy sell, but, more and more, you’re seeing larger companies, even billion-dollar brands, implementing this strategy.
Back in early 2014, Dollar Shave Club, the subscription razor service that made the amazingly funny viral video titled “Our Blades are F******g Great,” started sending a monthly print newsletter, The Bathroom Minutes, to each of its 1.1 million active members.
But they already subscribe.
Dollar Shave Club’s senior vice president of marketing Adam Weber explained, “One of our most important marketing vehicles is our actual box,” which includes their product and print newsletter. The Bathroom Minutes combines editorial content with product updates and company news, and informs and entertains to make the brand’s loyal users “feel like they’re part of a bigger community -- part of something more than just buying razors.”
Related: The Psychology of Brand Loyalty: 5 Key Takeaways
Aren’t these guys just in the razor business? Why do they add the expense of a newsletter to their packaging? I assure you they don’t get 1.1 million of them printed and inserted for free.
Break it down.
It’s simple. They know what business they are in: Community. With their subscription business model, the name of the game is customer churn and customer lifetime value. Making sure they improved those areas of their business was a priority, so what did they do?
-
They had a solution for people. Good, inexpensive razors.
-
They created a unique customer experience. Besides good packaging and a good welcome email, they sometimes sent out free samples with your order. They included The Bathroom Minutes each month with messages from the founder at the beginning of each issue. (Based on their strategy, I’m now wondering if I had a consultation call with them in the early days.)
...
read more...
