The Science of Customer Connections

Manage Your Message to Grow Your Business

Jim Karrh

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781632657794
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

Engaging, practical, and immediately useful for any business and its messengers on how to talk about their business and connect with their customers.

The vast majority of word of mouth happens offline, in everyday conversations. In The Science of Customer Connections, Karrh offers simple concepts plus practical guidance for individual professionals, teams, and complex organizations to be part of those conversations in ways that grow their business.

With clear language and a sense of humor, Karrh guides readers step by step to create:

• A message that is memorable, interesting to buyers, and built to share
• A growing set of messengers who include your story in their everyday conversations
• Management habits that build consistency and scale

Readers will be equipped to engage customers and employees, build trustworthiness, and grow profitably—without necessarily having to change their business model, offerings, pricing, distribution, or people. Instead, they can quickly elevate the way that everyone close to the business talks about it, consistently resulting in stronger cross-selling and upselling of additional products and services, higher customer satisfaction, and more consistent employee engagement.

Inspirational real-world examples are presented from entrepreneurs and career changers, growth companies, and large global organizations.

1

YOUR MESSAGE CAN BE YOUR BUSINESS ADVANTAGE—If It Isn't Hiding Somewhere

EVERY BUSINESS PROFESSIONAL, and every organization, has a message worth sharing. After all, if we didn't have something valuable to say and offer, then what would be the point of the business?

Your business also needs to grow—whether that growth is measured in revenue, profit, opportunities for increasingly interesting work, or deeper engagement with customers and communities (or all of the above!). Growth, however you define it for your business, is better for everyone. Rising revenue and profit means more financial reward as well as fuel for investing in the future of the business. Building more options and opportunities means you can work on the products and projects that you want (and shed those that are a drag or distraction). Customers, clients, and members appreciate their relationship with you even more because they like dealing with others who are successful.

Growth is also necessary. The alternative is decline and decay; no team or organization can just stand pat or decide to catch its collective breath for a few years. Competition and disruption in the marketplace simply won't allow that to happen.

As important as growth might be, it isn't easy to come by. Many leadership teams focus on major strategic moves such as new product or service lines, locations, technology investments, acquisitions, or partnerships. Any or all of those might be a consideration for your business. But while you and your team evaluate those sorts of big bets, know that there is also one big growth opportunity that tends to be overlooked: how the very people who are closest to your business talk about the business every day.

As Jonah Berger noted in his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, only 7 percent of word of mouth happens online. That's right—despite all of the attention we pay to social media, there is thirteen times more word-of-mouth activity in the offline world. I would never suggest that the online side of things is not important for your organization. But the numbers are clear, and it isn't even close. If your organization is looking for above-average growth, then why not set your priorities squarely on the area with thirteen times more opportunity?

If that statistic surprises you—and it does surprise many businesspeople—then consider this very reasonable explanation. Online conversations are easy to see (and record, or even search). Our offline conversations, by contrast, tend to go unnoticed. We chat in hallways, at sporting events, on neighborhood walks, and in innumerable other settings. Those everyday messages might be invisible, but they are impactful on what we believe and how we act. And they are, to a large degree, manageable. By knowing where to look, and by following some simple habits, you and your team can lead a consistent competency that in turn puts you in the middle of those extra growth opportunities.

Across dozens of organizations—large and small, corporate and nonprofit, across industries—I have seen how improving everyday business messaging can both grow the business and improve the engagement of all the people in it. You don't necessarily need to change your products, prices, distribution strategy, geographic reach, organizational chart, or the people themselves.

I have heard executives variously describe this as “the secret sauce,” “the missing bullet,” and “the missing piece we didn't realize was missing.” I have come to recognize it as a potential growth engine that is hiding in plain sight.

The great news is that effective business messaging isn't all that mysterious in practice. It does, however, require the leadership to become very intentional about (1) everyone's understanding of the most important “must-knows,” (2) building base skills for leading customer conversations, and (3) socializing and managing the effort in a way that everyone becomes confident in his or her role. That's why a plan and playbook are so helpful in building success. By the way, if you're a leader or solo professional, then you might also need to shed some widely held but false and damaging assumptions along the way.

While advising many very competent and hard-working business professionals over the years, I have found that many get uptight when it comes to their messaging. They don't know quite how to approach it. They are excited about their actual work, yet in the everyday opportunities for them and their teams to talk about the work they find frustration and misses. Some have tried leaving this whole messaging thing to their marketing departments or an outside agency to figure out—and report that the essence of what they want to say gets lost in the creative fog of slogans, taglines, and advertising copy. Others have let the sales or development teams run with the message in a whatever-sells approach—which led to as many different messages as there were messengers. Some leaders have taken the messaging burden on themselves alone, believing they are the only one who really “gets it” well enough to share it.

None of those approaches can fully scale your business for growth. Lack of clarity means you will likely lose lots of deals and potential relationships (and lose pricing power in the deals you do win). Inconsistency erodes your brand and reputation. And no business will prosper over the long haul with a frustrated, burned-out leader and a core message that is stuck in the office.

This very day, there are probably competitors whose offerings aren't any better (or maybe not even as good) as yours but who are grabbing more opportunities simply by virtue of having more and better conversations. That's not right. It does not have to persist.

Your path to far more effective everyday business messaging is right there to follow. Neither you nor your colleagues have to be trained communicators, brilliant conversationalists, extraverts, or “slimy sales-y” (as one client described what she wanted to avoid). Nor do business leaders have to be some sort of messaging hero in a cape, unless of course that's their wardrobe thing. You can create growth opportunities through a simple, practical approach, taking into account all of the noise in the marketplace as well as the inherent anxieties, limitations, and unrecognized strengths of the people around your business. Furthermore, your efforts need not be perfect. Just by being intentional and consistent about the everyday message, your business will be establishing an important, long-term advantage.

You will need a plan. By a “plan,” I do not mean a dense strategy document, a bunch of statistical research, or a flowery creative guide. Rather, your plan will be based on the best things that people are already doing today as they talk about the business with other people. It will synthesize all of the things you and your colleagues could say (which is probably overwhelming) into a few conversational nuggets that real human beings can remember and use when the moment is right. It will be based on sound research into business messaging and what makes it tick.

You'll want to get started. It's not like the world is going to be less noisy anytime soon.

THE MESSAGING WORLD IS TURNING FASTER

We can agree that there is no shortage of communication activity in our markets. Of course, people have always had a proclivity to talk. In the past, the settings were more likely to be hallways, street corners, club meetings, church social halls, barbershops, salons, and a non-mobile phone. (My mother had a certain chair where she would sit, usually with a cup of coffee nearby, for phone conversations with friends.)

The explosive growth of social and digital media has smashed most of those previous limitations of accessibility, location, and time constraints. Today, the practice of sharing and consuming messages takes ever-larger chunks of most people's time. Social media, as the primary example, has crowded out other foundational elements of everyday life. How much so? The marketing agency Mediakix added together the average time spent each day on YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter, and then projected the total over a typical young adult's lifetime. They concluded that an average person will spend more than five years of their lives on social media! That total still trails the time spent watching television but came in well ahead of the total time those same people will spend on eating/drinking, grooming, socializing, or the necessary evil of doing laundry. Insert your favorite joke here about the people who live on social media not smelling very good.

Our attention spans are shorter than ever as well. This long-term trend has only accelerated in recent years, and message creators of all stripes are trying to keep up. As just one example, a research team led by Cornell University psychologist James E. Cutting found that from 1935 to the modern day movies have progressively used shorter scenes, more motion and movement, and darker settings. The research team concluded, “We believe that all of them have been created by filmmakers seeking to control the attention of their viewers, and possibly to enhance viewer involvement in film.” Now filmmakers even have to deal with audiences who are using their mobile devices and social media during the movie. (Have you been to a theater lately?)

Back in high school, I needed money to help pay for a car and gas; I found a job in my small hometown as a deejay for a country-music radio station. I learned a radio term that applies very well to our digital communication environment today. The “signal-to-noise ratio” compares the level of the signal you desire to send (such as, in that case, a Willie Nelson song) to the level of background noise (such as static). The higher that ratio, the better. Today, the opportunity for “noise” to mess with your intended signal is greater than ever. The noise in your messaging system is in part due to the ways that those technological leaps in communication are absorbing the hours in our days. It's also a function of our more limited attention spans and propensity for distraction. One of today's country-music stars, Kenny Chesney, had a big hit with his song “Noise.”

So this is the increasingly noisy conversational world where our businesses reside. We can't get away from it. The smart strategy would seem to involve something other than just shouting louder—to instead get our message into more of the natural, common conversations where noise levels are less imposing and audiences might pay attention.

But what about your team's capacity to talk about the business effectively in those settings . . . in other words, what can your quality of signal be?

MESSENGERS AND MANAGERS ARE CHANGING, AND NOT ALWAYS FOR THE BETTER

Most people have a natural inclination to seek, process, and share information. The massive demand for social media and wireless communication services provides plenty of evidence for that. Yet the level of communication skills that people have (or rather, lack) today is posing a big challenge to employers.

I hear a lot of complaints from executives and team leaders about the lack of communication and conversational skills in their organizations. They see problems popping up in many important settings: job applications full of errors, interviews in which candidates can't convey a clear thought, reports or emails that expose writing problems, and employees' seeming unwillingness to talk to colleagues or customers face to face. “We have trouble,” an HR leader told me. “This wave of new workers seems most comfortable talking with their thumbs.” (She was demonstrating a texting motion on an imaginary smartphone while saying this.) This isn't good for those businesspeople or the business overall.

Younger workers get much of the criticism. Although some of that might be natural generational friction, it's also true that Millennials show an abrupt break from their predecessors when it comes to communication. (By the way, my view is that categories such as “Millennials” are often used too broadly but because a lot of research into younger workers was defined that way, I have to report it as such in order to be consistent. I trust you'll recognize the larger point.) A Bank of America study found that, on an average day, 39 percent of Millennials interact with their smartphone more than with anything or anyone else; that compares to 29 percent of other Americans (still not necessarily good). Our devices are a common way to avoid other social interactions, too; more than 70 percent of Millennials admit to doing that, compared to 44 percent of other Americans. This does not necessarily portend the end of Western civilization, but as you'll see detailed in later chapters it does require an approach to messaging that takes new realities of engagement into account. Leaders need to prepare their younger workers to coach and lead others, and quickly. Those who simply moan about “kids these days,” like Granddad on his porch, won't be able to adapt.

Business leaders need to find their best combination of improved signal and lower noise in the middle of this new communication environment. Organizations themselves are learning to play in a more mobile, digital world. But individual business professionals also need to communicate and work effectively across age groups, personalities, locations, and cultures. This tension begs a couple of questions: Can we simplify and clarify our understanding of business messaging so that a leader can know where and how to address it in his or her organization? And can we present information in a way so that diverse work teams can harness more messaging opportunities?

BUSINESS MESSAGING SITS ON A THREE-LEGGED STOOL

Some businesses seem to have figured this out better than most. Their customers or clients tend to be not just satisfied but actual raving fans, proudly and frequently sharing their experiences with friends. The employees have a clear sense of exactly what the company does, whom it serves, and for what benefit; their clarity in turn becomes an organic, gravitational pull for recruiting new employees. The vendors, alumni, and other friends of the business likewise are pretty muc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: YOUR MESSAGE CAN BE YOUR BUSINESS ADVANTAGE—If It Isn't Hiding Somewhere
• Part One: A MESSAGE FOR GROWTH
• Part Two: A LOT MORE GREAT MESSENGERS
• Part Three: A NEW SET OF MANAGEMENT HABITS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR