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Let’s Get Serious About Our Employees #MarketingMonday

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Some thoughts for your consideration:

You have seen over the past two to three weeks a change in the approach to the blog. We have been exposing Vimeo based film clips. You have seen our promotional trailer, the animation of Socrates, an introduction to the company and a video clip on market segmentation. I want today to present a situation and then pose some questions in the Socratic Manner. Socratic teaching forces people to come to their own conclusions.

Employees transition through three or four stages in their career:

  • Enthusiastic Beginner
  • Disillusioned Learner
  • Capable but Cautious Performer
  • Self-Reliant Achiever

 

Unfortunately, it is their immediate supervisor that has a direct impact on this transition. Too often we get stuck at the Disillusioned Learner as a result of the style of the boss or the lack of any interest from the boss in the employee.

 

As individuals as we move from school to work we have to overcome a series of things that I will call “personal obstacles.” These things come from our families, our friends and peers and our schools. I have often said we are taught to be obedient in our developmental years and when we get to the workforce we are asked to think on our own.

 

These obstacles normally are

 

  • We are told everything we want to do is impossible
  • We are afraid of hurting those we love by pursuing our own dreams
  • We are afraid we will fail in pursuit of our dreams.
  • We are afraid to succeed.

 

One of the important questions we need to ask of ourselves is “what would I do if I wasn’t afraid?”

 

In our training approach, we are developing an employee development program that will take each employee in the parts and service groups from the enthusiastic beginner to a self-reliant achiever. My question is “how do you achieve that today?

 

The time is now.

Marketing Monday v2015.1

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We haven’t done one of these in a long time.  For Marketing Monday v2015.1 we are catching up.

With the flurry of activity this past year it has been a little difficult to get ahead of the curve. Some of the recent activities:

We have launched learning Without Scars. This has been a very nice step in the progression of our offering learning products and services to the capital goods industries. We have updated all of our classroom seminars: there are eight. We have added to our list of webinars: there are now sixty one. We have started down the road of converting all learning products to a web based platform: we will have seventy five of them. We are moving toward the translations of our offerings first into French and Spanish.

We have developed an internet based replacement for the twenty group business we ran called insight (M&R) Institute. We have created, in a partnership, The Capital Goods Sages. This is going to be an internet business modelling business. This will be available for use in late 2015.

And finally, we have re-purposed our consulting website to bring it in line with our other businesses.

Have a look and let us know your thoughts. We are here to serve you.

www.rjslee.com

www.learningwithoutscars.org

www.thecapitalgoodssages.com

The time is now.

 

Product Support Marketing: A Guide…#MarketingMonday

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Let me introduce you to#MarketingMonday.  With the arrival of Learning Without Scars and our embedding the blog in the www.learningwithoutscars.org web site we are kicking off a fresh series of activities. You are by now quite familiar with my Friday Filosophy. Well this is the first of our #MarketingMondays. We will post a new blog each Monday on Marketing.

How many people understand marketing in the Product Support world?

Let me start with a definition of marketing. Marketing is “the selling of products or services – the business activity of presenting products and services in such a way as to make them the primary choice of the customer.” Marketing is basically the selling of products or services.

We should start with the basics of marketing – the 4 Ps:

 

  • Product
  • Place
  • Price
  • Promotion

These are the ABC’s, the fundamentals, the foundation of most of the marketing class work done today. As with most everything in our world the 4 Ps have evolved. Today there is a new approach called SIVA:

 

  • Solution
  • Information
  • Value
  • Access

SIVA is much more customer focused. More recently, there has been an addition to the 4 Ps and now there are 7 Ps as  process, physical environment and people have been included. We will discuss these in more detail over the coming weeks and months.

I want to also address market share. This is the ultimate measure of success in the parts and service world. I will provide you with methods to be able to calculate the market share for parts and service. Not with the precision of capital goods market share, i.e. Boeing plane share, or Freightliner Class 8 share or Chrysler 300 market share, but very accurately.

We will discuss the significance of customer retention, and how we can influence that in our operating world. What influences customer defections, recovery methods, and the strong influence that retention has on the profitability of your business.

We will also cover market coverage methods. The “how to” manuals for setting up personal and telephonic territories. This will also cover compensation methods and options to consider.

In other words, this blog is intended to be able to cover everything and anything about marketing parts and service. I hope you will join me on this voyage.

The time is now.