It was the marketing manager's job to help the concierges personalize their service, track their activities, and create monthly goals. The initial plan targeted office managers. The concierges made presentations one office at a time. Meanwhile, back at headquarters, Naylor was starting to rank individual buildings and tenants -- a crucial one-to-one component. Who was using the service the most? Which buildings or individuals were the most profitable? Could she get more of their business?
The "executive focus" program, conceived in late 1992, was a more detailed and professional attempt to gather information about individuals and industry-specific issues -- what lawyers need versus what accountants need, for instance -- so that the concierges could double their efforts to target services, offers, and information to specific people. Naylor took inspiration from envelope king Harvey Mackay, whose exhaustive "66 questions" customer profile delves into everything from spouse's name and hobbies to business goals. The concierges started with a list of five individual executives to get to know. The new client dossier was more detailed than the old service card. "How does the client enter the building?" was one question it asked (via the lobby? parking garage? side door?). It prompted concierges to note how clients preferred to receive service information, as well as the names of the client's clients.
The executive-focus program looked good on paper, but some concierges were afraid to ask questions, lest they resemble uncouth salespeople. The new program didn't take off until Capitol Concierge held its first-ever executive roundtable, in January 1993. For many concierges, it was a one-to-one-marketing turning point -- hearing from both current and prospective clients about how, why, and when they'd like to be personally contacted about services. "It was very liberating for concierges to hear them talk," says Naylor. It was the encouragement hesitant concierges needed to call a tennis fan with news of the Washington Tennis Classic. Or to remind a busy working mom of her car-inspection date -- and take care of it before she even thought about it. "That's not selling," Naylor had always told the concierges, "that's proactive service." Hearing it from the horse's mouth, they now believed her. It also became clear that concierges could help tenants with their own customer-retention needs -- in essence, helping them do relationship marketing.
Top-performing concierges, who'd already mastered the art of anticipating client needs, were tapped to be roving coaches (there are 3 now) and team leaders (there are 15). But for all the new programs, teamwork, and prompting, it became more and more obvious that some concierges were unhappy and just plain no good at the work. "We had to let some people go," says Naylor, who was clearly reluctant to do so. She faced facts: "We had to educate ourselves on how to hire."
In the summer of 1993, Naylor brought in a hiring consultant to learn about personality testing. Could the best concierges be cloned? Well, not exactly, but the most effective ones seemed to have certain characteristics in common -- and isolating them proved helpful in recruiting. Debbie Pearson, who knows by name some 550 of 800 people at 1350 I Street, was tagged as the ideal concierge. Dana Wright, working with the consultant, studied the habits and demeanor of Pearson and a handful of others to come up with a composite personality profile. The ideal concierge was extremely outgoing but a solid team player. By the end of the year, Wright could match the characteristics of prospective hires against the ideal. The predictive index is the company's most powerful tool for reducing bad matches. With the ideal profile in mind, Naylor and her managers began seeking out exemplary retail workers in malls, handing out business cards listing four reasons they should work for Capitol Concierge.
In fact, Naylor and her managers became so good at hiring, a new problem arose: corporate customers were stealing their employees. "Sometimes you wanted to say, 'Quit it!" says Wright. But it was a price they were willing to pay. Naylor wanted to spend her time and money training the kind of people who would be in demand.
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The fixes worked, or began to, anyway. Capitol Concierge finished 1993 with $3.8 million in sales, 70 employees, and the 475th spot on the Inc. 500. Its net profit? In the 1%-to-5% range. Not great, but on the rise. The business model, once so cloudy, was now clear. The company would make its money as a commissioned broker of products and services. Vendors paid an average of 15% of sales to Capitol Concierge, which in turn shared the profits with the individual concierges. Vendors even participated in training and staffwide rap sessions. All of that was good for relationship building. But not good enough. The concierge channel -- sales of individual services -- grew only 33% in 1993, to $1.7 million in sales. That was still way off Naylor's projections, given the increase in the number of Capitol Concierge-served buildings. Without service-sales growth, profits wouldn't hold up.
Capitol Concierge's new marketing motto was "Consider It Done." But Naylor wasn't done. She realized she had to automate -- another one-to-one linchpin -- to get the most out of relationship marketing. The knowledge that Mr. Hall sends Oceana roses to his wife and to clients throughout the year resided in a marketing notebook somewhere, but that didn't make the information accessible enough to ensure it could be capitalized on. To finish solving the service-sales problem, Naylor realized, she had to build a centralized system that automated the collection and use of information gathered in the field through sales transactions or marketing questionnaires. Unfortunately, she considered managing technology to be one of her weaknesses.
It seemed as if all her colleagues in the Young Entrepreneurs Organization had already become automated. In 1993 Naylor and her managers began visiting companies to study their computer systems. They took a course on how the Ritz-Carlton hotel chain approaches database marketing. They started asking around for the names of programmers.
