Targeting Norm

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Christie, you're absolutely right when you say your job is to accelerate the process whereby customers fall in love with your people and decide to buy from you. That's what I call selling. Thinking beyond the deal at hand and figuring out how to find and close more deals is also part of selling. As for making what's special about your company more visible, I'm all for it. But if that isn't selling, what is it?

Then there were those like Seamus Kennedy of Hersco Orthotic Labs, in Long Island City, New York, who thought I was being bullheaded when I refused to redo my brochure:

"If you haven't changed your brochure in 12 years," writes one reader, "it needs to be redone. Your company is no longer the same."

If you haven't changed your brochure in 12 years, it needs to be redone, if only because your company is no longer the same. The people are different, the technology is different, your ideal customer is different, the reasons to use your product are different. You cannot expect potential customers to see your business for the value and opportunities it can deliver if the brochure sends an image of stasis.

I agree, Seamus, that a company changes as it grows, but that doesn't mean that the vision and values behind it change. Suppose, for example, that part of your vision is to remain on the leading edge of technology. The technology will change constantly, but the idea of being on the edge doesn't change. Our 12-year-old brochure is as accurate a reflection of our vision and values today as it was when we wrote it. That's consistency and commitment, not stasis.

Donald Bishop of Gardens Are... in Marlborough, Massachusetts, supported my decision about the brochure and shared my skepticism of marketing, but he thought I should get advice from my customers before doing anything:

I had a chuckle when I read your article about redesigning your website, redoing your brochure, painting your trucks, and so on. Have you tried asking your customers what they think? I asked our customers, and I was surprised to find that they preferred the old-style logo to the new up-to-date version. They liked our nonanimated, not flashy, easy-to-use website. They had no opinion about our trucks. The bad news is that we'd already spent a lot of money getting a makeover that right now sits in a box. Maybe you should ask your customers what they think of your materials.

Nobody believes more strongly than I do in the value of listening to customers, but why would I ask the ones I already have about our sales tools? I want to know what they think of our service, not our brochures, our website, or the writing on our trucks. Who cares what they think about those things? Then again, I'd like to have customers tell me what attracted them to us in the first place. That's information I can use.

On the question of repainting our trucks, Scott Conley, CEO of the Cradlerock Group in Stamford, Connecticut, suggested that I rethink my position:

In your recent column about marketing, you wrote, "Can anybody seriously argue that customers make choices based on how a supplier paints its trucks?" Two years ago I would have responded, "Of course not," but after a debate with my staff (including my wife) similar to the one you're having, I was convinced that the answer is yes. We discovered that we were often being prequalified by relatively junior associates at our prospects, and I've learned the hard way that most of these folks will make some filtering decisions based precisely on things like how a supplier paints its trucks. Since I got wrestled into upgrading our "image," we've gotten through to more of the real decision makers, who (to your point) are usually more interested in substance than style.

I'd never tell you not to listen to your wife, Scott, and I can't argue with the good results you've had since you've repainted your trucks--but I would suggest that the timing is a coincidence. Unless you previously had filthy, rundown, burned-out vehicles with the paint chipping off, I doubt that you're getting more access now simply because you've spiffed them up a bit. Very few companies would allow a junior associate to prequalify suppliers based on things like the way they paint their trucks (as opposed to, say, the quality of their service). A junior associate who is judging suppliers that way is not likely to become a senior associate--or even have a job for long.

Not surprisingly, some readers also took issue with my column on the unimportance of names ("The Name Game," November 2005). One of then was Scott Smith, president of BizStarz in Sacramento:

Enjoyed your contrarian column about business names, but I felt you contradicted yourself. You rattled off an impressive list of small businesses with such creative names that even you can still remember them long after first hearing about them. Then you (correctly) criticized large companies for choosing bad names such as Accenture and Avaya. Obviously no name will save a very bad company. However, a very bad name will cause significant problems for even a very good company. So although a company name may be less important than many new business owners start off thinking, it is still a major determinant of a company's ability to generate interest in its products and services.

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