The Digital Dealership, Your Audience: Marketing Activities, Part 2
In tonight’s blog post, guest writer Mets Kramer continues his exploration of the digital dealership. Part 2 of a series, tonight we look at marketing activities for your audience.
Digital Marketing to your Audience
Anyone who’s read marketing articles or blogs or attended a course will be familiar with the 4Ps of marketing, along with many similar acronyms. Product, Price, Placement and Promotion sum up the core tenant’s marketers need to consider when creating a marketing and advertising plan. In digital marketing and for the Digital Dealership this is even more important.
In the Digital Marketing world, we often speak about engagement. Engagement is critical to digital marketing success and why reconsidering the basic tenants of marketing is so important. In the digital world, what we see and what we want to see are determined by Engagement levels.
Over the past couple of years, you’ve heard a lot about the engagement algorithms used by social media sites and other platforms. These platforms have two main goals, to create user engagement with the platform and extend the time spent by users on the platform. To do this the platforms have highly intelligent algorithms that present content it calculates will be of interest to people. This is often based on the type of content or early engagement with it. If content has low engagement the algorithm effectively buries the content and, even if you have lots of connections, most of them will not see your content.
Creating content and marketing to your audience through digital media requires careful thought to be effective and this is where defining, segmenting and building strategies for your audience is important. Take a moment at this point to think about how you interact with various types of digital marketing, you’re someone else’s audience segment too, it will help with your own strategy.
In the first part of this series, we looked at defining who’s in your audience, and segmenting them. These segments can be defined by any criteria, from sales volumes to location to fleet size and industry. What’s important is to have segments defined to create strategies. You can define these for known contacts in your audience, but you can also create these segments in the unknown audience. For each of these Segments of the audience, consider the tenants of marketing.
First, what is the Product you want to present to each segment?
Is it the dealership, the experience of the people in the dealership, is it machine inventory or is it services like rental, your shop or parts? Each of these items is of varying degree of interest to your audience. Content should be created for each of the products your dealership has to offer. Your existing customers may want to learn more about service products. Your prospect customers may want to know about the inventory you have for sale or about the brand you represent and the capabilities of that brand. Your unknown audience likely needs to learn more about who you are and about the dealership in general. This will help them to recognize and consider your other products, like machines, in the future. Regardless, it’s important to understand all the products you have to offer as each audience segment will find different values on each product. Furthermore, don’t forget, your content needs to be engaging, so try and use video, audio, closed captioning and imagery.
Second, what channels will you use to place the content for your audience to see, engage with or react to?
There are traditional channels, like advertising sites, billboards and magazines. There are digital channels including email campaigns, your website, Linked In, Facebook, Instagram etc. and there are also physical channels like signage, brochures, posters and even invoices. What is important is to understand what audience you’ll be addressing through each channel and what the purpose of the content is.
The Channel selection can be approached from multiple directions. Consider for each channel, “what audience segments use the channel?” or approached from the other direction, “what channels do your target audience segments use?” You need to determine this for each audience segment.
In the last few years, I’ve seen LinkedIn be corporation and brand development focused, Facebook focuses on small contractor and community focused, Instagram looks to be Brand, Product or announcement focused etc.
Third, what will be your plan combining these 3 main aspects. Audience Segment, Contact and Channel?
For this step it is often helpful to create some matrixes. For each defined audience segment create a grid with 2 axes. One for Product content and the second axis for Channel. This work will help you really think through what content to place on each channel to engage your audience. For your digital channels this is critically important, and the work done to define your audience and your product content will help you make sure the content is engaging. Content placed on the right channel designed for the audience in the channel will always get you higher engagement, and in return, your content will be viewed by more of your audience members.
Finally, as a Digital Dealer, how will you use Information to augment your marketing?
Using and collecting information is the hallmark of a smart and digital dealership. Analyzing information about your audience, including feedback from marketing and advertising efforts, help you to fine tune all the above 3 aspects, content, audience and channel. Here are some examples.
- Add user specific information to Email Campaigns. “Hi John, because you own motor graders, we thought this inventory item might be of interest to you”. This can be done though tagging in the mail software and merge codes. This content will be many times more engaging.
- A Dealer website that recognizes returning customers and provides shortcuts to frequently visited pages or functions, and filtered inventory or promotions based on existing Fleet. “Welcome back Bill, this section lists the functions you often visit; Online Parts, Machine Specs. Your 410 is due for a service, here’s a link to the filter kit”
Spending time analyzing your audience always pays. They can be your existing customers, local contractors or people you don’t know. Building a marketing plan, for each of the audience segments you’re interested in, will help you retain the customers you have and funnel in new customers to your sales and after sales operations.
Mets Kramer
Me*********@*****************ns.ca
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Keeping Up-to-Date and Current in a Learning Business
Keeping Up-To- Date and Current in a Learning Business
I read this article recently and wanted to share it with all of you. It presents some interesting perspectives on employee development and learning. I hope you enjoy it.
To adapt to technology disruptions and meet the modern-day learners’ demands, many organizations are looking at modernizing their existing learning material.
But modernization is not only about repackaging an ‘old wine in a new bottle’, but it should ideally be looked at as a transformational strategy to deliver business results by creating new and unique experiences for the learners. In fact, it should be embraced as an opportunity:
Having said the above, modernization comes with its fair share of challenges. In order to arrive at a robust and proven modernization framework that can be successfully implemented, it is absolutely essential to spend efforts on understanding the key factors that are driving the need for modernization. Here are a couple of factors that could be considered while designing a modernization strategy:
Technology disruptions
There are multiple technology disruptions that are happening all around us. Technology in itself has undergone numerous transformational processes impacting the way learning is delivered, perceived, and consumed. While organizations need to leverage technology to meet the need of the hour; the modernization strategy has to factor in this reality by future-proofing the content for new technological disruptions.
Skill Gaps
The Covid 19 pandemic has suddenly accelerated the need for new workforce skills. According to a new McKinsey Global Survey on future workforce needs, nearly nine in ten executives and managers say their organizations either face skill gaps already or expect gaps to develop within the next five years. Owing to the new generation of learners and needs of modern-day workplace, new skill areas are popping up regularly. Closing on the skills gap and enabling employee growth should be one of the strategic themes of the modernization initiative.
The Modern-day Learner
The profile, preference and habits of learners keep on changing because society, workplace, and technology continue to evolve. While the modernization initiative should account for the needs of the modern-day learner, it should not be limited just to millennials and Gen Z. It should be more holistic, starting right from the baby boomers.
Maintenance
As content owners, one of the key things is to ensure that we are able to maintain content that we are developing. For instance, a pharma company has to ensure that the content is updated as per latest FDA regulations. The other aspect of maintenance is the variety of technology infrastructure that is being used to deliver content. Today you might have a SCORM LMS in place and you design and develop content for it, but tomorrow, if an xAPI compliant LMS comes into picture, the requirement would be to pass data into the Learning Record Store (LRS) of the LMS. The modernization strategy should account for such technology changes and make content available in a format which could be easily transitioned.
Have you come across any other factors which might be driving the need for content modernization? You can write to us at **@***************ng.com“>in**@***************ng.com and we would be happy to have a conversation.
The author of this article, Rahul, is a digital learning enthusiast and is passionate about helping organizations and leaders solve challenges around learner engagement and student outcomes through intervention of learning technologies. In a career span of over 15 years in the digital learning space, he has helped a host of global organizations and educational institutions in implementing new initiatives around their digital learning strategy.
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Friday Filosophy v.11.12.2021
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY v.11.12.2021
Vincent Willem van Gogh March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. In a decade, he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of which date from the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still life’s, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterized by bold colors and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Not commercially successful, he struggled with severe depression and poverty, eventually leading to his suicide at age thirty-seven.
The Time is Now.
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The Hidden Revolution in the Equipment Industry
The Hidden Revolution in the Equipment Industry
With 20+ years of business system design and business intelligence experience, Dale Hanna founded Foresight Intelligence in 2009 to help leading equipment dealers achieve operational excellence and a sustainable competitive advantage through effective use of real time KPI’s throughout the organization. Recently, Dale has added telematics to his passion and is enjoying the challenge of making oceans of disparate data useful to manufactures, dealers, rental companies, and end customers. Dale obtained a BSEE degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and has been engaged in many associations serving the equipment industry. In his first guest blog for Learning Without Scars, Dale writes about the hidden revolution taking place in the equipment industry.
Technology is driving a revolution in the equipment industry that we can easily see: grade control, idle tracking, fault codes, autonomous equipment, electrification, etc. While the advancements are amazing and will continue to be, dealers are noticing brand differentiation becoming more and more of a challenge. In this margin-conscious market, we see the battle of the future being fought on customer experience and we see technology is quietly but rapidly driving that revolution.
This hidden revolution is happening in all areas of dealership operations. Today we focus on how technology is increasing efficiency and enhancing customer experience in the service area, especially during this time of unprecedented labor and parts shortage.
Below are strategies that are giving some equipment dealers a leg up:
Increasing Trust from Your Customers
We all know trust is a vital ingredient in delivering a great customer experience. If you are like me, I used to think building trust was an elusive and subjective endeavor. Chris Voss, a lead FBI hostage negotiator, gave us a formula to build trust quickly and predictably:
Trust = Predictability.
A system that can be configured to your workflow to automatically notify customers at key milestones creates a predictable service experience every time without adding more work for your people. Yes, UPS and FedEx have perfected this. You know exactly where your packages are all the time and the moment they are delivered. It is hard to imagine any shipping company being able to survive without it. Our expectations for the service experience are quickly reaching the same level.
Doing Business at the Speed of Text
When we do not get an email response from someone, what do we do? We text. According to a research report, on average, people respond to a text in 90 seconds and an email in about 90 minutes. Adding an integrated SMS (text) platform is like adding nitrous to your service engine. A fully integrated text platform notifies your customers of progress, provides new quotes, gets instant sign off for additional work, shares inspection results and obtains satisfaction survey results at lightning speed. All the communication history is saved for future reference. With the busy schedule your customers have, who would not appreciate a faster ride?
Self Service Makes Happier Customers
The pandemic has accelerated a trend that was already happening – we want to do more things online, by ourselves, at whatever hours we want, without having to wait on anyone. Providing information your customers need, in the forms they need, always accessible makes them feel informed and in control, both are important elements for happiness. A robust dashboard, easy to use interface, searchable/sortable/exportable data and schedulable reports keep your customers smiling while your people sleep.
Have Your Process Your Way
A lot of service systems were built based on someone else’s ideas, usually from the first few customers the system makers had. Your workflow is what makes your people efficient, and your organization stand out. Today’s technology allows an effective system to adapt to you rather than the other way around. Dynamic dashboards by user and role, quick and easy work order assignment and tracking, Apps for field technicians to easily add comments, pictures/videos, inspections can be required and enforced as a part of your workorder process are all examples of how today’s systems serve you the way you do business.
We Are More Powerful When We Are Connected
So are data and systems. At dealerships, we still use multiple systems to get things done. The last thing we want to add is another siloed system. Any service system today should connect with your OEM system for fault codes, warranty information and even submission, your telematics system for real time dispatching, customer’s telematics system for asset location and hours, maintenance management system to organize all the maintenance plans you sold and your business system for cost and PO information. The more your systems are connected, the more efficient you become.
The current pandemic will end for sure, but our world has changed forever. If we look at carefully, there is an undeniable trend – tech rich companies have done better in general, some has done exceptionally well and taken sizeable market share from competitors during COVID 19. This trend is definitely here to stay. Technology is not only changing things we can see and buy, but it is also changing the way we perform and experience service. Customers will certainly buy more equipment, especially with the new infrastructure bill, and whoever delivers the best customer experience will have the bigger share.
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The Digital Dealership, Your Audience: Marketing Activities, Part 2
The Digital Dealership, Your Audience: Marketing Activities, Part 2
In tonight’s blog post, guest writer Mets Kramer continues his exploration of the digital dealership. Part 2 of a series, tonight we look at marketing activities for your audience.
Digital Marketing to your Audience
Anyone who’s read marketing articles or blogs or attended a course will be familiar with the 4Ps of marketing, along with many similar acronyms. Product, Price, Placement and Promotion sum up the core tenant’s marketers need to consider when creating a marketing and advertising plan. In digital marketing and for the Digital Dealership this is even more important.
In the Digital Marketing world, we often speak about engagement. Engagement is critical to digital marketing success and why reconsidering the basic tenants of marketing is so important. In the digital world, what we see and what we want to see are determined by Engagement levels.
Over the past couple of years, you’ve heard a lot about the engagement algorithms used by social media sites and other platforms. These platforms have two main goals, to create user engagement with the platform and extend the time spent by users on the platform. To do this the platforms have highly intelligent algorithms that present content it calculates will be of interest to people. This is often based on the type of content or early engagement with it. If content has low engagement the algorithm effectively buries the content and, even if you have lots of connections, most of them will not see your content.
Creating content and marketing to your audience through digital media requires careful thought to be effective and this is where defining, segmenting and building strategies for your audience is important. Take a moment at this point to think about how you interact with various types of digital marketing, you’re someone else’s audience segment too, it will help with your own strategy.
In the first part of this series, we looked at defining who’s in your audience, and segmenting them. These segments can be defined by any criteria, from sales volumes to location to fleet size and industry. What’s important is to have segments defined to create strategies. You can define these for known contacts in your audience, but you can also create these segments in the unknown audience. For each of these Segments of the audience, consider the tenants of marketing.
First, what is the Product you want to present to each segment?
Is it the dealership, the experience of the people in the dealership, is it machine inventory or is it services like rental, your shop or parts? Each of these items is of varying degree of interest to your audience. Content should be created for each of the products your dealership has to offer. Your existing customers may want to learn more about service products. Your prospect customers may want to know about the inventory you have for sale or about the brand you represent and the capabilities of that brand. Your unknown audience likely needs to learn more about who you are and about the dealership in general. This will help them to recognize and consider your other products, like machines, in the future. Regardless, it’s important to understand all the products you have to offer as each audience segment will find different values on each product. Furthermore, don’t forget, your content needs to be engaging, so try and use video, audio, closed captioning and imagery.
Second, what channels will you use to place the content for your audience to see, engage with or react to?
There are traditional channels, like advertising sites, billboards and magazines. There are digital channels including email campaigns, your website, Linked In, Facebook, Instagram etc. and there are also physical channels like signage, brochures, posters and even invoices. What is important is to understand what audience you’ll be addressing through each channel and what the purpose of the content is.
The Channel selection can be approached from multiple directions. Consider for each channel, “what audience segments use the channel?” or approached from the other direction, “what channels do your target audience segments use?” You need to determine this for each audience segment.
In the last few years, I’ve seen LinkedIn be corporation and brand development focused, Facebook focuses on small contractor and community focused, Instagram looks to be Brand, Product or announcement focused etc.
Third, what will be your plan combining these 3 main aspects. Audience Segment, Contact and Channel?
For this step it is often helpful to create some matrixes. For each defined audience segment create a grid with 2 axes. One for Product content and the second axis for Channel. This work will help you really think through what content to place on each channel to engage your audience. For your digital channels this is critically important, and the work done to define your audience and your product content will help you make sure the content is engaging. Content placed on the right channel designed for the audience in the channel will always get you higher engagement, and in return, your content will be viewed by more of your audience members.
Finally, as a Digital Dealer, how will you use Information to augment your marketing?
Using and collecting information is the hallmark of a smart and digital dealership. Analyzing information about your audience, including feedback from marketing and advertising efforts, help you to fine tune all the above 3 aspects, content, audience and channel. Here are some examples.
Spending time analyzing your audience always pays. They can be your existing customers, local contractors or people you don’t know. Building a marketing plan, for each of the audience segments you’re interested in, will help you retain the customers you have and funnel in new customers to your sales and after sales operations.
Mets Kramer
Me*********@*****************ns.ca
Did you enjoy this blog? Read more great blog posts here.
For our course lists, please click here.
Friday Filosophy v.11.05.2021
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY v.11.05.2021
Gautama Buddha, popularly known as the Buddha was a Sramana who lived in ancient India (c. 5th to 4th century BCE). He is regarded as the founder of the world religion of Buddhism, and revered by most Buddhist schools as a savior, the Enlightened One who rediscovered an ancient path to release clinging and craving and escape the cycle of birth and rebirth. He taught for around 45 years and built a large following, both monastic and lay. The Buddha was born into an aristocratic family in the Shakya clan but eventually renounced lay life. According to Buddhist tradition, after several years of mendicancy, meditation, and asceticism, he awakened to understand the mechanism which keeps people trapped in the cycle of rebirth. A couple of centuries after his death he came to be known by the title Buddha, which means “Awakened One” or “Enlightened One”. Gautama’s teachings were compiled by the Buddhist community in the Vinaya, his codes for monastic practice, and the Suttas, texts based on his discourses. These were passed down in Middle-Indo Aryan dialects through an oral tradition.
The time is now.
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Cyber Security Incident Response Planning
Cyber Security Incident Response Planning
Learning Without Scars is pleased to introduce our new guest writer, Danny Slusarchuk. His first post for our blog is on Cyber Security Incident Response Planning. Danny Slusarchuk enjoys spending time with his family and being a productive member of the community. He serves on the Oklahoma Venture Forum (immediate past Chairman) and Oklahoma Innovative Technology Alliance boards. He leads the Oklahoma National Guard Defensive Cyberspace Operations Element. Danny founded Standards IT in 2012 and continues to be a managing partner at the headquarters in downtown Edmond. He has been recognized as 20 Edmond Business Leaders under 40 and was a recent Edmond’s Young Professional of the Year award recipient. Danny spoke most recently at the FBI’s Information Warfare Summit and has for 4 years running. This year he spoke at SECCON as well. He was a guest speaker for the Youth Leadership Edmond conference, 45th Field Artillery Brigade Honorable Order of Saint Barbara Dining Out. He was the keynote for Oklahoma Officer Candidate School Class 63.
Cyber Security Incident Response Planning
Let’s understand the why.
Your business is shut down for the foreseeable future and you don’t have the slightest idea how you are going to get back to the way you were operating yesterday. Your customers, employees, and even competitors know you have been hacked. Someone in another country is extorting you for ten Bitcoin to maybe restore your precious data on their good word. To top it all off, your customers have brought a class action lawsuit against your negligent handling of their data.
Do not let that scenario play out solely on the bad actors’ terms. It is possible to do everything right and still get hacked. A living incident response policy and procedure accompanied by routine tabletop exercises and vulnerability assessments can be the difference between surviving and shutting your business down.
The Sans institution provided great cyber security training. The incident response considerations in this post draw from their Global Certified Incident Handler curriculum.
Your plan should have input from all departments that require systems and data to operate. I recommend you nest it with your cyber liability insurance policy and have it legally approved.
Now, if you were to pull out as much of the lingo as possible and boil it down to bullets here is how I would state it:
That was high level steps, and each has significance. Overall, the concept is to prepare, identify, contain, eradicate, recover, and realized lessons learned. The steps also include adding one-time resources like forensics and crisis public relations.
In future posts I will explore specific sections covered in greater detail that will help educate the reasoning behind the order and specific terminology. Cyber liability insurance is only good if it pays out when you need it for example. Yes, there are some gotchas in choosing your protection.
References: https://www.sans.org/cyber-security-courses/hacker-techniques-incident-handling/
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Why Lean Manufacturing Doesn’t Work Today
Why “Lean Manufacturing Doesn’t Work Today”
Guest writer Bruce Baker shares with us the reasons why lean manufacturing doesn’t work today: the reasons are not exactly what you might think…
Whether you own a bookkeeping business, cabinet-making business or legal practice, all businesses are made up of routines, which rely on consistent, one-at-a-time processes. Everything we do that keeps society “together” relies on repeatable activities. Whether it’s brushing our teeth, getting dressed or eating breakfast, all rely on repeatable processes.
For those who are not aware of the practice of Lean, allow me to provide you with a brief history and definition. Lean is the concept of efficient manufacturing/operations that grew out of the Toyota Production System in the middle of the 20th century. It is based on the philosophy of defining value from the customer’s viewpoint and continually improving how value is delivered by eliminating every use of wasteful resources, or that does not contribute to the value goal. In short, taking things one step at a time is the make or break of business and general success in life.
Many have heard before… “take it down a notch…one thing at a time”. Several months ago, I wrote a short article called “Your Interpretation of Time,” where I stressed the importance of how reactive we have become as a society, including business. Our interpretation of time today is drastically shorter, and the general consequences of failure, impressively higher and more extreme than before. This inevitably leads to reactive, narrow, and short-term decision-making. Albert Einstein once said, “When you are courting a nice girl, an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder, a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.”
My bold statement of “…Lean doesn’t work today” is not that the practice and methodology are ineffective; on the contrary. Lean is applicable in every industry and every business and mentioned in the beginning of this article, in your personal life. The practice and adoption of Lean are fantastic when a business and its people adopt this “way of business life.”
A challenge we are all presented with is that if we adopt Lean as a practice, we need to accept that our reactional, short-term, and high-crisis manner of thinking will always stop us from adopting practices like Lean.
Building and growing a business is never easy emotionally, but requires a strict set of routines and processes, and each process must be executed effectively. This can only happen if each process performs effectively in an individual manner parallel to its fellow processes. This requirement is not limited to the business world but the very nature of our world, yet we insist on a short-term, high-crisis manner of thinking.
As I write this article, I sit in a Lean manufacturing training session with Quantum Lean. Lynn (the Lean instructor) mentioned that adopting Lean “takes time” and that “people do not like to change”. Although I completely agree with Lynn, people resist change primarily because they fear the unknown. Statements like “I don’t see the reason to change,” “I don’t have time to wait for them”, “I have so many problems to deal with, I don’t know where to start” or finally, “Oh, I’ll add this to my list of problems I have to solve…I don’t have time to deal with little issues like this now!”
In conclusion, if you have or are anticipating implementing Lean in your business, remember this. It all starts with the leader of the business. If the leader does not make this mind shift, the rest of the team will not make the shift either. Lean is not another tool or method. It is a change in the state of mind and subsequently changing the business’s culture from fighting fires to experiencing the inherent joy of work and life in general.
As a wise mentor of mine once said, “one step at a time, grasshopper….”
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Friday Filosophy v.10.29.2021
FRIDAY FILOSOPHY v.10.29.2021
Many of you will have noticed we have been writing Blogs and recording Podcasts that are trying to provoke businesses to embrace continuous improvement and make changes. Most recently as a result of a Podcast with Mets Kramer. We were talking about how Amazon and Google conduct their businesses. How within Amazon they were constantly reviewing customer needs and wants and making adjustments. They were working on their businesses not just in their business. Mets and I talked about the fact that within our Industry we were problem solvers. That isn’t a bad thing. We were working hard in the business trying to satisfy customer needs and wants. We didn’t find many dealerships that were working on their business. Trying to change their systems and processes. That simply won’t be sufficient. Time is running out on continuing to do what you have always done.
The Time is Now
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Building a New Skilled Talent Decade
Building a New Skilled Talent Decade
Edward E. Gordon, the founder and president of Imperial Consulting Corporation in Chicago, has consulted with leaders in business, education, government, and non-profits for over 50 years. As a writer, researcher, speaker, and consultant he has helped shape policy and programs that advance talent development and regional economic growth. This week, he shares with us the history and the present needs involved in building a new skilled talent decade.
Gordon is the author or co-author of 20 books. His book, Future Jobs: Solving the Employment and Skills Crisis, is the culmination of his work as a visionary who applies a multi-disciplinary approach to today’s complex workforce needs and economic development issues. It won a 2015 Independent Publishers Award. An updated paperback edition was published in 2018.
Recently I spoke at a forum on my White Paper, “Job Shock: Moving Beyond the COVID-19 Employment Meltdown to a New Skilled Talent Decade,” at the Cliff Dwellers Club in Chicago. My presentation and responses to it can be viewed on YouTube at https://youtu.be/gnLBrOiMSYA. In my remarks, I pointed out that history was now repeating itself as workplace technology change is again shifting education and skills requirements.
PAST LABOR HISTORY
During the first decades of the 20th century, a titanic shift in the U.S. economy destabilized society. An industrial revolution triggered by spread of electricity and the growth of factories and offices required workers with at least a basic education in reading and mathematics. Many violently opposed the expansion of public education. Who needs a universal school system? Why educate children, women, and immigrants? You will only cause anarchy by giving them dangerous ideas! Anyway, these people are not trainable. We need them for cheap labor in our factories or on our farms!
As this debate raged across America, more people were persuaded that the expansion of education would benefit society. Starting at the regional and state levels, enlightened community leaders spearheaded the expansion of compulsory tax-supported primary and secondary education. By 1918, all of the then 48 states mandated this standard of public schooling backed by tough truancy laws. The United States was the first nation to attempt to provide a general education to all its citizens. It was a major contributor to the rise of the United States as a world power.
A NEW SKILLED JOB ERA
Another major industrial revolution began in the 1970s as computers and information technology began to be adopted in workplaces. By the beginning of the 21st century, personal computers, smartphones and the internet were everywhere. Automaton has eliminated many low-skill jobs and increased the demand for workers with higher math and reading skills and specialized career training. The seminal 1983 report, “A Nation at Risk,” raised the first red flag that the U.S. education-to-employment system had become obsolete and warned that America needed to provide more students and workers with enhanced education and training for higher-skilled/higher-wage jobs.
However, continuing national testing by the U.S. Department of Education commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card reports low levels of proficiency in math and reading particularly at the 12th-grade-level. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused learning loses of up to a year particularly among lower-income students.
These deficiencies in our education-to employment system plus the 130 million American adults who the Barbara Bush foundation reported read at the 8th-grade level or less is building into a severe shortage of skilled labor. Surveys of employers are consistently reporting difficulties in finding qualified people to fill open positions. A September National Federation of Independent Business survey found that 51 percent of owners had job openings they could not fill, the third consecutive month in which record highs for unfilled jobs had been reached. Moreover, 62 percent of small employers seeking to hire had few or no qualified applicants. In July and August, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported over 10 million job openings. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta projected that the high number of unfilled jobs is costing U.S. businesses to lose $738 billion in revenue annually.
CAN WE DO IT AGAIN?
As the COVID-19 epidemic has severely disrupted schooling at all levels and caused labor market turmoil, there is the potential for forming broad coalitions to reform our nation’s education-to-employment pipeline. Parents and students are more aware of the importance of good educational preparation for the future, and many businesses are fighting for their very survival.
At present although the number of vacant jobs is high, there are millions of Americans who are unemployed or underemployed who do not precisely match the skills or experience companies are seeking for their open jobs and who therefore are excluded for consideration for them. A September Harvard/Accenture report estimates that there are over 27 million Americans whom they term “hidden workers.”
Our “Job Shock” research clearly shows that Regional Talent Innovation Networks (RETAINs) as public-private partnership hubs can effectively prepare more people for the higher-skilled/higher-wage jobs that are vacant across the United States. Their success hinges upon mobilizing a diversity of partners to engage in meaningful collaboration to close skills-jobs gaps. Cross sector coordination is key. The current barriers between businesses and educational institutions need to be broken down to allow the development of up-to-date career preparation options.
America has a long history of community civic engagement. Enlightened local leaders have periodically stepped forward to bolster our republic during times of crisis. Community engagement is again essential to move the United States forward into a new skilled talent decade.
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Quality of Communication Channel
Quality of Communication Channel
In tonight’s blog post, guest writer Ryszard Chciuk walks us through the information our customers need and want to know. The quality of the communication channel directly impacts your customer’s purchases, especially as they move through the research phase before buying.
Ron Slee reminded us (see From Paper to Glass) what he had talked perhaps for decades about the three questions that a customer asks when they need to purchase parts from a dealer:
These are the same questions customers have when they want to purchase something else or they are looking for any information regarding their equipment.
So, what does your customer do when:
Your customer is doing the research.
Mets Kramer in Candid Conversation with Ron Slee (The Digital Dealership) said:
Seven years ago Acquity Group, part of Accenture Interactive made a survey of 500 procurement officers (B2B) with annual purchasing budgets in excess of $100,000. What did they find?
In the 2014 Acquity Group State of B2B Procurement study they also stated:
I am afraid a majority of dealerships are not able to interact with their modern customers in a new way. As a born realist, I think nobody in the construction industry is ready for that, despite everybody is having at his disposal proper technology.
Your existing and, even more important, potential customers changed their search behavior, within the last several years, but you have not noticed that. If you are going to neglect that fact, your company goes into dire straits. Be aware that:
Your company, like most dealerships, from time to time is running sales campaigns. Usually, it is done with the use of an electronic channel. Are you aware, it has no advantages over the 20th-century traditional campaign (with the use of a phone or snail mail)? It is because you present your offer on your static website and it contains extremely exciting form “Please contact us for the price or additional information”. How many times a year do you receive back that form filled in?
You fail because you stubbornly stick to so-called Billboard Marketing. If you want to change that, please read about Digital Marketing. Mets Kramer presented there his view on today’s marketing. Mets differentiates Billboard Marketing from the more 21st-century alike Engagement Marketing.
In fact, it does not matter whether the campaign is run with help of any e-mail platform (newsletters), Google, Facebook, or others. A successful campaign brings your potential customer to your dealership, to have a look at your yard, warehouse, service vans, and workshop. This is the way you can easily initiate customer’s thinking about starting or strengthening friendly relations with your staff. The physical presence of a customer on your street is not necessary. In the 21st century, your website is the main place where this can happen. Does it? Be aware that:
Of course, your IT provider can change static pages into dynamic ones, they can use new software for generating modern layouts with nicer pictures or even short videos, etc. Everything looks wonderful, but it is only face lifting. The question is if you provide your customers with the information they are online looking for.
Mets Kramer, in the series of articles about Digital Dealership (search for “digital dealership” on the blog), reminded me of my dreams about a “digital” after-sales department. I began to think about it at the end of the 20th century and it never became real. In the next article, I am going to present to you some obstacles which I had to struggle with. It’s a pity, I’m certain that after a quarter of the century later, your road is cobbled with similar or the same problems.
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