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When customers ask you for information on your solution it is too late! If you are asking this question, then “yes” you are.  Have you ever been in a situation where you find out that a customer is interested in purchasing a solution and you happen to have one that fits their need?  By the time you find this out, you will be playing catch up with your competitors.  In the world of social media, our prospects and customers can connect with experts, industry analysts and their own peers more quickly.    If you are not prepared for this your business will suffer.  So, how do you know when an opportunitiy exists before you hear about the opportunity?  You don’t.  The key is to build an army of advocates.  Advocates are customers of yours that not only love your solution, but are willing to tell the world about it.  They will defend you when others disparage the solution.  They affect more sales than a...

Customer Reference Program – Building Now that you have a good idea of what you need to provide, begin building the program. Start by defining the processes you will use for keeping track of reference accounts, activities those references have completed and the reference requests that your team will receive. If possible, use tools that are built for these purposes. (You will quickly outgrow Excel spreadsheets.) There are quite a few companies that specialize in reference tools such as  Salesforce.com  and Point of Reference. Or, while I like the out-of-the-box solutions, you may have an IT organization capable of building an in-house application. These tools are very helpful in managing your reference contacts as well as the activities they complete for you. We also use these tools to manage all of the customer content that is created, such as success stories. As soon as you have the major processes defined and the tools in place, you need to find out who your refere...

Supplying References for Sales is Top Priority, Right? WRONG .  Yes, supporting sales to shorten the sales cycle and assist in closing deals by providing customer references is important.  It should be a part of any reference-type program.  But, did you realize that most customers have found references to speak with BEFORE the sales person asks you for a reference?  Customers are very savvy.  They have many channels they use to gather information including social media, peer interactions and industry analyst conversations / reports.  So, if you look at the value of providing a reference for a sales deal which is a one to one activity and then look at providing a reference to an analyst which is a one to many, the latter can be much more effective.  Whether you are aware of it or not, your customers are reading and speaking with analysts every day.  If you are not feeding the analysts information about how current customers are using your sol...

Defining Customer References :  Now, this may seem obvious to most of us, but how many times have you heard “ABC company would be a great reference for our product” and then you reach out to speak with ABC and they are still upset at something that happened a year ago!  Welcome to the complicated world of Customer References! I define a Customer Reference as “ A  Person  at a  Company  that is willing to  share  a   Positive  experience with one of your products/solutions” I have highlighted the important words because if you take any one of those four words out of the definition, then they are not really a reference.  Why? First of all, we deal with PEOPLE, not companies.  The people at the company are the ones who tell the stories.  If you don’t have a contact at the company, you don’t have a reference. The company is important.  Someone looking to buy your solution is not interested in speaking to...

For years companies have worked hard to establish customer loyalty programs, grow their loyal customer base and measure customer loyalty as a sign of business health.  When many people think of ‘loyalty’, they think of their pet dog.  “Fido” is always there, no matter how bad a day has been, no matter if you stepped on his tail, no matter if you forgot to walk him that day.  At the end of the day, he will curl up at your feet.  That is loyalty.  Now think about this:  “Fido” has two masters in the house.  He is loyal to both but if he had to make a choice between one or the other he would probably go to the one who fed him, walked him and nurtured him.  His tail would wag harder and faster for that person! So, in business, why do we put so much energy into measuring loyalty if it can be ripped away by another company who is willing to invest and nurture the customer better than we can?  We shouldn’t!  A loyal customer is someon...

Creating your Blogspot blog correctly could be the difference between ranking highly in the search engines and having to struggle to get any traffic at all. When your blog ranks highly in the search engines, it can receive large amounts of traffic without the author having to pay for advertising. By paying attention to a few factors when setting up your blog, it can begin to rank higher and get more traffic. Focus on the Title When writing a new blog post, the title is an important factor in ranking highly. The title of your post needs to include a keyword or key phrase and should be relevant to the content of your article. Search engines look at your title to determine what your content is about and match search engine queries up to titles. If your title matches the keyword typed into a search engine, your site will be more likely to rank highly. Getting Inbound Links The number of inbound links you have also affected your rank. Each time another site puts up a link to you...

There are simple ways to get traffic to your site without pressuring friends and peers to visit your blog site... in this simple blog I will mention few to get Unpaid web traffic tips that most people don't know but it worked for me. 1. Joining forums There a so many forum that you can join and contribute your ideas depending on the topics this is the most important way to influence people   with your cool ideas sometimes it might be really hard but with the help of search engine you can always find something to contribute .. or ask Questions this helps and keeps you active in the forum.. there are so manay forums  but its upto you to join the furum of your choice depending on the benefit of content sharing, since in some forums they only allow users to contribute and share contents but Ristrict sharing of referral links..   free use forum : 1> CODESLIMS FORUM   the best thing about this forum is that it is free and members ...