Study customer responses. We try to look for the trends. You try to gather as much as you can about what people are saying about it. What are the, ‘Yeah, buts,’ if you will. ‘Yeah, I like their technology, but … ’ — pick that up, and then how do you address that? Maybe there’s something we’ve got to work on with technology to take care of that.
You can’t get yourself to where you think, ‘I know I’ve got a good product, if only they would listen to me and if only they would buy it’ because you’re not doing something right if you’re doing that.
Give employees feedback on customer meetings. I have an ‘all-hands’ meeting once per month with all employees to communicate where I have been and what I heard from customers that is important. This gives all employees a sense of what is important to specific customers as well as allowing me to reinforce again and again that quality and delivery and cost are the basics of any business.
I use the specific business relationship to reiterate how the customer sees our performance and what challenges we need to accept to keep the customer believing that we are the best.
This also works to let employees know when the customer thinks they are the best and motivates them to achieve even higher results. Everyone likes to be associated with a winning team.
Encourage employees to build solid relationships with their customers. You’ve got to do it throughout the whole organization. Our culture is you’ve got to know your customer, because most of what we have is a relatively new technology. Having them read about it on a Web site or in a magazine is not going to cut it.
You have to go talk to them and you have to show them all the different things the technology is capable of. Then you see if they have that glimmer in their eye that, ‘I can use that.’
Marketing is a science of creating the need for the sale. People don’t know they need to buy something until they get told what it is and they get shown how to use it.
How to reach: Maxwell Technologies Inc., (858) 503-3300 or www.maxwell.com
