As we gear up for an intensive recruitment effort to find our new General Manager for Initiating, Opening & Sustaining Client Relationships (which others might call a GM for Sales and Marketing) it was timely to see this “8 ways to build customer loyalty” article posted on Inc.
Maintaining a high retention rate is critical to our business, and something we’ve done reasonably well over the past 12 years – but there’s always room for improvement (it’s not 100%).
These 8 pointers will be another useful reference in the months ahead…
Though 2 very busy years has elapsed, not much has changed (in that respect) from when I drew this diagram back in early 2010:
It was obvious to us, then, that we first needed to overhaul our department for “Discerning, Developing and Delivering what the customer wants”.
This took some time, but we have done so (as such, that side of the organogram looks very different now). As alluded to here, we’re starting to see early signs that clients are being delighted with product upgrades again.
Given that we’re now gearing up to make our first hire at the top of our department for Sales & Marketing, it was a good coincidence that I happened upon the article “Ending the war between Sales and Marketing” published in HBR back in 2006.
“The only reason to go into business is to make money. …
If you’re lucky, you’ll make that money doing something you love. If you’re really lucky, it will also lead to some greater good – but don’t let delusions of grandeur get in the way of your profit and loss statements”
(p92 in my copy, my emphasis added)
This statement, on the one hand, is very sensible – but, on the other hand, is a direct challenge to many others who empathise that a business must have a purpose that is more than just making money, if it is to be sustainable, and successful:
I’ve made this post as we’ve had inquiries periodically over the intervening period, asking whether we’re going to be kicking off the recruitment process soon. Hence for those others who might be interested, this post is to keep you updated.
The short answer to the question is “not just yet”!
I am very keen to have this person onboard, as he/she will be a key contributor to achieving the ambitious vision we’ve set for the business.
However we’ll be generating a higher ROI through 2011 if my focus remains elsewhere for a little while longer… read more »
As I have noted elsewhere, our customers mostly like us, and what we do – the results we received from the survey we recently conducted were largely what we expected, in this sense.
When I find a bit more “spare” time, I’ll summarise some of the feedback here.
It’s a nice thing, but one we can’t take for granted.
From my perspective, we’ve already disappointed some of them on too many occasions. I really want major improvement in the months ahead.
If we are really going to make “Customers First” our prime reason for being, we need to have an explicit measure of the extent to which we really do live by this motto. When we have this measure, we will drive the company by this measure.
Hence it was with interest that I stumbled upon this presentation titled “Ideas for Building Better Software Businesses” from Dharmesh Shah (of HubSpot) at the Business of Software conference in 2009:
Note that Dharmesh (as an additional service to his customers and fans) has prepared this page from his “OnStartups” blog to list some of the key points in the video.
I like this approach of “going the extra step” to make the message more understandable.
The following notes are specifically about his suggestions for the Customer Happiness Index (CHI):
Note that there is plenty of other good stuff in this video (you have to get to minute 47 before he mentions CHI), which I might have a chance to talk about at some other time.
Technically speaking, our recruitment process has not even begun yet.
However, back in January I did mention that we hoped to have our GM M&S in place before the end of the year.
As a result of the interest generated when we kicked off the process of recruiting Derrick as our GM for DDD WCW, a number of people contacted me about this second position. Some of these have kept in touch with me to keep tabs on our progress with a view to being considered when the process begins.
In case there are other interested people out there, here are some details of our status.
General Manager for Discerning,DevelopingandDelivering What the Customer Wants
it is hard not to be curious. In particular, I’d never had a job title that needed an acronym before - “GM 3D WCW” has a sort of geeky attractiveness about it, so I had to come and have a look.
Since that time, our business has been evolving fairly rapidly – with a fair number of changes already completed (and a number still to go) in order to ensure that we really can deliver on our primary core value of “Customers First!”.
The title is a bit of a mouthful, so he will shorten it in most cases – but he will certainly be specifically focused on delighting our growing customer base with the software we develop.
I will let him introduce himself in his own time, so stay tuned for more …