Patty Azzarello

Big Help for Small Business: Developing Your Brand: Why Bother?

The only thing your competition can’t copy or under-price is your behavior, and how you serve your customers. THIS is what branding is about. And if you’re not doing it, you’re losing business – period!

Branding is one of the most misunderstood concepts in business. The top four misunderstandings about branding include:

1) Brand = logo
2) Good brand = logo that you see a lot
3) Branding = spending a lot of money
4) You can tell people what your brand is

You can’t “tell” people what your brand is. Your brand is a set of values granted to you by your customers based on their experience with you. And “you” means all your employees that touch the outside world. You have a brand whether or not you know it. If you want to find out what it is, ask your customers:

• What is your impression of us?
• What do we always do consistently?
• How does our sales process make you feel? What do you observe when we’re selling?
• How does the way we respond to problems make you feel?
• What do you notice about the way we present ourselves? In our store? On our website?

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Background
When Microsoft Canada unveiled Windows 2000 in April 1999, the beta version was ready to ship immediately but the final release was still months away. Using market research figures, Microsoft estimated that companies take an average of nine months to make a final decision about a software upgrade.

In order to shorten that time frame and prepare companies for ordering as soon as the final release was available, Microsoft ran a campaign to get end user customers to use the beta version for testing and evaluation purposes. In this way, Microsoft Canada would be able to process orders and generate sales of Windows 2000 immediately — as soon as the final release was ready to ship.

Challenge
Microsoft decided to run a major lead generation campaign with a select group of fifty reseller partners. The campaign consisted of two parts: lead collection via the web and telemarketing. The challenge was finding a tool that would efficiently distribute more than 1000 leads to these partners and also provide the tools needed for effective lead tracking.
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Where the CRM Experts Meet

One of the best ways to gather important information about CRM solutions, techniques, and trends is to hear about them directly from the experts themselves. This Fall, many exciting and educational industry events will enable you to do just that! Below is a list of some of the coming season’s biggest conferences:

Gartner CRM Summit
September 17-19, 2007
Hollywood, FL

The 9th Annual Help Desk Professionals Conference & Expo
October 22-24, 2007
Phoenix, AZ

Achieving Contact Center Excellence
October 22-24, 2007
Park City, UT

SSPA Services Leadership Conference
September 30-October 1, 2007
New Orleans, LA

The North American Conference on Customer Management
September 30-October 3, 2007
Orlando, FL

The CRM Advisor

You ask the questions, and our resident CRM guru shares her wisdom.

This week’s question: “When should I get my IT department involved in my CRM project?”

A: Any CRM initiative is more likely to succeed when all key stakeholders are involved in the project from the very beginning. This includes not only managers and end users from functional departments, but IT support staff as well. Read more »