/ / , /

Seven Ways to Connect with Customers

Sometimes it is not enough to provide an outstanding product or service. More often, your personal approach is just as important. Some of the most successful business owners create a unique connection with their customers and prospects by providing their own custom touch to the marketing process.

Below are seven tips on salesmanship that may help you develop a special relationship with potential customers.

  1. Tease Out any “Red Flags”. It may seem counter-intuitive, but an early step may be to look for reasons NOT to do business. Before you give your sales pitch, take time to research your prospective client and forge an honest assessment. Here, any serious “red flags” may immediately come to the surface, giving you the option to walk away before you invest a lot of energy, time and money. In order to accomplish this, have to ask the right questions in an initial survey or meeting and don’t be afraid to dig deep into the answers with follow-ups. Here, you may discover that the customer’s needs and expectations are not a good match for the services you provide or, more importantly, you may set a solid foundation for the legitimate goals that you want to collectively achieve.
  2. Be Responsive. When a customer or potential client reaches out to you be sure to respond, even if the subject seems frivolous or you can’t provide an immediate solution to a problem. Responding in a timely and consistent manner demonstrates your undeniable commitment to a customer’s needs.
  3. Court Your Clients. In order to spark the interest of a potential customer, you may have to develop a way to hook them somehow. This may be by sending them an interesting article that’s related to their business or highlighting a positive customer testimonial and suggesting ways to maximize its effect. In any case, it is also important to give them the time and space to respond and be respectful of their busy schedule.
  4. Make Your Business as “Close to Home” as Possible. The best way to connect with a new client is to use the “corner store” approach, by remembering the little things and shared references to create an maintain a bond. Use casual conversation and genuine interest to discover common missions, places, values, or passions and make the customer feel that she is seen as more than just a potentialdollar sign.
  5. Communicate on Multiple Levels. While it’s often much quicker and less stressful to email, phone conversations and face-to-face meetings can be far more effective in creating and maintaining meaningful connections. Further, it is important to use other means of communication like social media or online customer sites to lend your support and/or help spread the word on your customer’s business.
  6. Focus on the Big Picture and Look Long Term. Sometimes it’s easy to go on a tangent and get lost in a particular small detail, while losing sight of the real goals of a business arrangement. The longer arc of developing a vision for the future is just as essential as the pressing daily tasks which may require immediate attention. Like many things in life, it takes patience to develop fruitful and lasting customer relationships. Resist the temptation to rush the process and bring the relationship to a level it has not naturally matured into. Take the time to explain how your service benefits the prospect over time and exhibit patience in cultivating a business relationship which slowly works towards achieving those goals.
  7. Be Especially Loyal to Your Most Loyal Customers. This is something that is of particular importance here at 33 Dimensions. We see big companies make fantastic offers to “new” customers while excluding those who have been loyal and true over time and this method baffles us. We do the complete opposite and have always had an unwritten policy to offer the absolute best rates to those who have been in good standing for the longest amount of time. While both are important to growing a business, we place a higher stock in maintaining the business relationship with those who have built a positive bond of longevity than be preferential to the “shiny new” prospect.

/ , / , , , , , /

Cornerstone Coffeehouse Redesign

Cornerstone Responsive Design 2014

33 Dimensions has redesigned the website for Cornerstone Coffeehouse in Camp Hill, PA, making the site fully responsive and offering a better overall user experience.

The design starts with a simple landing page, which displays the three main services offered by Cornerstone – Coffeehouse, Culinary Kitchen, and Catering. The coffeehouse option leads to a WordPress site with a multi-level drop down to navigate to all the various store menus, blogs, music, art, and calendar of events at the popular establishment.

Visit Cornerstone Coffeehouse website

/ , / , , , , , , /

Two Website Lessons from 2013

If there are two lessons that everyone should come away from 2013 learning about websites, I would say it would have to be these:

  • 1. There is absolutely no such thing as a “free” website!
  • 2. A website should not cost over $600 million!

I will tackle the second point first because that is much easier to grasp. Of course, what I’m referring to is the “Obamacare” website Healthcare.gov, which amazingly did not work when it was launched on October 1st (it is now about 75 days later and the jury is still out on whether it actually works).

To be exact, it was reported by Digital Trends that the contractor CGI Federal received $634,320,919 to construct Healthcare.gov. Now to appreciate this amount, it is more money than Facebook spent in its first six years of existence (you know, the years went it went completely viral) and it is also more than the amount spent building two more recent services – Linkedin and Spotify – combined. All that money spent and it didn’t work for at the least its first two months of existence.

As a small business web developer, I’m sure I could have figured out a way to get competent developers to complete the site on time and working for, I don’t know, about 1/1000th of that cost! But they never asked me.

Now for the first point, the opposite end of the money spectrum. There is absolutely no such thing as a “free” website! Whenever you hear such a claim to “build a website for free”, what you are actually getting is a new example of an old trick that big companies do to try and squash small competitors (in this case, small business web developers like myself) by cleverly masking a false offer. You’ve surely seen or heard of these free website offers, many from three-letter companies that start with the letter ‘w’ and only disclose the fact that you have to pay a monthly fee in order to keep your “free” website in the cluttered disclaimer at the end.

For companies who are serious about starting and staying in business, such offers do not stand up in the long run for two primary reasons. First, you lose the ability to expand unless you pay the fixed price arbitrarily set by the company. This ties in well with the second reason, you ultimately do not own anything – neither content nor domain name. It is almost akin to those fake houses on a Hollywood set, nice enough to look at but totally impractical to live in.

So, if you’d like a website which is neither free nor $600 million, check out a quality website developer like 33 Dimensions and you will actually get what you pay for (if not more!)