Enterprise Mentoring and Marketing
A while back, I wrote a book called All Employees Are Marketers. Like its title suggests I believe that every employee in a company is responsible for sales and marketing. In fact I’d go as far as to suggest that your entire workforce should indeed be seen as your salesforce. When you take a company of around 200 employees,
It’s quite likely that only a small handful, between 10 and 20 of those actually have the words sales and marketing in their job title. However, its important to understand that everybody else in that company, regardless of their job title is responsible for creating an environment, which makes customers want to repeat by and recommend. In a few minutes, I‘ll explain how you can make this happen in your business with the help of Enterprise Mentoring.
If you think about when you book a room in a hotel, you can clearly see why all employees in an organisation are actually marketers. Aside from word of mouth marketing and independent review sites such as tripadvisor, your decision as to which hotel you choose is typically based on marketing and advertising.
The hotel will spend an enormous amount of money trying to attract your attention, whether that’s through newspapers and magazines, online marketing or other forms of advertising and promotion. However once you’ve made your decision to become a guest of that hotel, the work of the traditional sales and marketing team has been done.
It’s now in the hands of everybody else in the hotel to look after you and influence whether you want to repeat stay at that hotel, or recommend it to your friends, family and business associates. It’s down to the reception staff, the concierge, and the porter…
It’s down to the the chefs and kitchen staff who prepare fresh food for you, its down to room service to deliver your in room dining quickly, its down to housekeeping, cleaning and the maintenance teams. Every employee in the hotel now influences whether you want to repeat stay and recommend the hotel.
Seldom is the full revenue and profit in a business taken in just the first transaction. The real money comes from creating a relationship with a customer and maximising their life-time value. Business is not about a one-night stand, its about a long-lasting happy marriage between a customer and a company.
But customers will only ever repeat buy from you and recommend you as a company if the service you offer is excellent and above, if it’s at a gold medal standard. That is the promise I’m sure you make in terms of your outbound marketing and its certainly the standard which your customers expect to be served at. it is the standard we can help you achieve with enterprise mentoring.
If you deliver anything less than excellence, its all too easy for your customers to go elsewhere. That said, very few companies can claim to consistently deliver excellent service time and time again. More often than not customers would argue that the service the get and the experience they receive is at best inconsistent, or at worst – poor. Why is that?
It’s because the experience a customer receives is not solely dependent on your external marketing. Your customers experience is based on the interaction they have with your employees, and employees are human beings with emotions, feelings and attitudes. If at any point your employees have lower levels of motivation, engagement and morale, this immediately impacts on your customers experience.
Research by the Gallup Organization cites that in a company only 29% of employees are are passionate about driving your business forward. 17% are disengaged and damaging your company. The remaining 54% are middle men and women who neither over perform or underperform.
If you apply those percentages in a football team of eleven players, this means that only three players are actively trying to win, two players are sabotaging the match, and the remaining six are indifferent as to whether you win the game or not. These middle men and women are up for grabs and present you with the opportunity to deliver a greater level of service for your customers.
From a financial and customer experience perspective this means is that customers are getting an inconsistent experience and therefore the chance of them willingly coming back to repeat buy from you is either very low or unpredictable. As are the chances of the positively recommending you to their friends and family.
So the question is, what can you do? How can you consistently create an environment for your customers so that they want to buy from you time and time again, and postively recommend you, rather than saying negative things about you? And how can enterprise mentoring help you
We believe the answer lays in developing the attitude, mindset and belief of your employees, so they look at your business fron a new perspective. The change which is needed is not new skills, but its a new mindset.
If you can instil in employees a new business-owner way of thinking, so that employees share the same passion, drive and ownership as if they were somebody like Sir Richard Branson and were serving customers as he would. That is not an easy thing to achieve, but an approach we have found to work is through mentoring… more so, enterprise mentoring.
Traditionally mentoring only happens at the CEO or board level, but by using a blend of low-cost technology, and your own line-managers who become mentors to your employees, you are able to get this new mindset and attitude right down to your front-line so the experience your customers receive is one which is extraordinary and unforgettable.
With Enterprise mentoring, your employees actually receive two forms of mentoring. Firstly, they receive 20 digital mentoring sessions which are delivered through Mp3 players, mobile phones, through the internet or on a CD Rom. The digital mentoring sessions bring the best-of-the-best business thinking to your front-line and can be studied at a time and place which suits your employees, either at work, at home or whilst travelling.
Once each mentee has studied one or two digital mentoring sessions, mentees get together in small mentor groups (of around 5 people and discuss all they’ve learnt and apply the lessons back to their work. These mentor groups are led by line-managers or other designated mentors and are the key to creating lasting change in employee behaviour.
To learn more about our approach to Enterprise Mentoring, and how you can get business owner thinking into your front-line employees, join us at one of our workshops and discover the tools and techniques you can use to create passionate, creative and engaged teams who give your customers more and more reasons to repeat buy and recommend you. See us online right now at www.enterpriseleaders.com.
Category : Blog
