First of all why is customer satisfaction so important? Customer satisfaction is proven to lead to customer loyalty. Customer loyalty leads to increased shareholder value and asset efficiency. So you keep your customers happy and your business will grow along with the income.

For a customer to increase your earnings they need to be loyal. Loyalty isn’t just a person who repeatedly buys from you, it’s where they consciously evaluate and buy and brand regularly over others.

Example: I regularly buy my shopping from Tesco when I am at work. This is not because I like Tesco because the truth is I can’t stand it, but it is convenient. If Asda opened up nearby I would prefer to go there, EVEN if it was a bit further out that the local Tesco. This is because I am loyal to Asda.

If a customer buys from you once it is considered a transaction-specific experience and is unlikely to get a customer to switch to you unless you exceeded their expectations greatly. Even dissatisfaction with a single transaction is unlikely to lead to a customer switching unless it is extreme.

Example: You are a loyal customer of Pizza Hut. You visit regularly but one time you walk past Pizza Express and decide to give it a go. Psychology shows that you want to like the experience but not as much as Pizza Hut as you want to confirm your ideas and beliefs that Pizza Hut are the better choice. This makes it harder for Pizza Express to gain your loyalty. However you find that the taste, the quality, and the people create far more of an experience. The price is great and they went above and beyond your expectation to deliver the best pizza experience you have had. You allow yourself to rate them higher than Pizza Hut and can in an extreme case become loyal.

In most cases the experiences customers have will either slightly exceed their expectation or just fail to meet it. This results in the customer feeling unmoved and there will be no change. When customers fall into this area it is called the “zone of indifference”. There is a bowl shaped diagram below which better explain this. If a customer’s feelings fall into the gentle slopes of the bowl they are indifferent. If your business greatly exceeds or grossly fails to meet their expectations then you will have a loyal or very unhappy customer.

How is Customer Satisfaction Determined?

Satisfaction should be judged (with loyalty) over a number of experiences. There is a formula to determine customer satisfaction which is:

PERCEIVED QUALITY – CUSTOMER EXPECTATIONS = CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

As customer satisfaction is a result of cognitive and affective evaluation a business must meet their informational needs and their expected feelings.

The customer will judge a business typically on three areas; Product, Process and After-sale service. This means that businesses will have look at each and every stage they interact with the customer and aim to maintain high levels of service and information to keep their customer happy.

Product performance is evaluated by the cost, the technical sophistications, the durability and the ease of use.

Process performance is evaluated by the interpersonal interaction with the business and ease to purchase.

After-sale service is evaluated by the customer’s judgement of quality of the service and evaluation of the interaction experience with the service provider.

Apply the customer satisfaction formula to each of these areas and you will be able to judge where the company fails to meet the customer’s expectations.

Is it that simple? Unfortunately not. What I’ve written so far explains what the business should be aware of from their end to make improvements. The strength of the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty is STRONGLY influenced by characteristics of the customer such as gender; age; income; involvement and variety seeking. If you want to better understand how these characteristics affect purchasing behaviour and loyalty please read Customer Traits Affect Customer Satisfaction.

In this article I discuss the effects that customer traits have on customer satisfaction so that businesses can better understand how to target their customers.

The strength of the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty is STRONGLY influenced by characteristics of the customer such as gender; age; income; involvement and variety seeking.

GENDER: Women’s purchasing behaviour is found to be strongly influenced by their evaluation of personal interaction processes. Compared to men, women are more involved in purchasing activities paying more attention to the information given and attitudes of the sales personnel.

AGE: Information processing declines with age. Older people have restricted information-processing capabilities therefore they are more likely to rely on their crystallized abilities (their knowledge of specific problem content as a result of learning and experience over their lifetime). Younger people rely on the information available to them. Remember “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks”.

INCOME: Generally the higher the income, the higher level of education that person will have had. The higher the income, the more the customer focuses on the quality of the relationship with the service provider. The lower the income the more focus there is on the product. This is because the monetary risk will be perceived as higher and therefore the focus is on the quality of the product over the sales pitch.

INVOLVEMENT: The amount of involvement a person has with the product. The more relevant or important the product is, the more time is invested researching information and therefore the significance of a sales pitch is greatly reduced. The sales person can help to confirm ideas and beliefs thought by the customer (which will increase the likelihood of the purchase). Overall however product satisfaction becomes far more important.

An example of this is the time invested in buying a chocolate bar at a petrol station. You are in the queue and people are behind you. The cashier recommends the latest range of Maltesers and due the low importance and relevance of the product you go with the cashier’s choice. Now try buying a car with £30,000 that you saved. The sales person is telling you about the latest range of Vauxhall cars. However due to the importance of the product and the amount of money which you will have to invest you have done your research. You have spent hours trailing online, spoken to people about the cars you narrowed it down to and gone with your gut feeling on a Ford. The sales person is highly unlikely to change your mind on something which you have so much time and money invested in.

VARIETY SEEKING: Under certain conditions everyone has a need for variety in his daily life. When a customer seeks variety, they have wants and needs that often can’t be filled best by one brand. Customers will switch regardless of their satisfaction with the original brand e.g. a customer at a vending machine who is very satisfied with their Twix bar may fancy a change and purchase a Lion bar. There is little a company can do in these cases but continue to be reliable for when the customer returns.

Knowing these five characteristics of a customer could dramatically change the marketing techniques businesses use. There is no point throwing an overwhelming amount of information towards an old man. However there may be a benefit to having a persuasive and informative sales person when dealing with a middle-aged affluent woman.

I’ve mentioned The Benjamin Franklin Effect and Attitudes Come From Actions before which all play a great part in better understanding psychology. Now I want to share some marketing psychology so take a look at how to change a person’s mind.

Kevin Dutton, author of Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art & New Science of Changing Minds explained that there was five key elements that could be used to persuade someone to your point of view:

SIMPLICITY: Keep your message short, sharp, and simple. Shorter messages are easier to absorb and retain.

PERCEIVED SELF-INTEREST: Focus on the benefits that the person you are speaking to will get from doing what you want. If there is little for a person to gain, they are less likely to be persuaded. It’s better to give positive enforcements rather than negative ones.

For example: you may want a friend to go halves on a plate of nachos but they aren’t particularly hungry. In this instance it would be worth pointing out that the price is great if split into two and so even if they aren’t hungry they could enjoy a light snack for a bargain. Or mention that they haven’t enjoyed nachos with you in ages (or ever) so why not enjoy doing something/ reminiscing together. You could tempt them with the idea of nachos, suggest putting a topping on that they’d enjoy.

INCONGRUITY: Surprise the person. Instead of saying the nachos are £4.50 say they are 450p.

CONFIDENCE: If you sound like you don’t believe what you are saying, then how can you expect people to believe you? You must sound confident in what you say. Even when the person knows your facts are wrong, they will be more convinced that you are right. A great example is David Attenborough. If he told you that they discovered that oxygen never existed you’d be likely to believe him due to his confident and authoritative voice.

EMPATHY: Try and imagine how that person feels and it will help you persuade them. Nod when they nod, let them know that you are on their level. After all we are inherently more likely to trust people who come from a similar (tribe) background.

Hopefully you will use these tactics for good and not for bad but these are methods which are seen daily in advertisements. The mother worried about her child catching a virus in the Dettol adverts. The car salesmen who comes from wherever you have come from. The politician visiting the local communities. Becoming more aware to what is around you gives you the power to decide yourself and not be persuaded so easily by future marketing (hopefully not putting me out of a job!)

Examples to get you started. Read the words below and feel your attitudes toward them (a flow of associations and feelings whizzing through):

• Chocolate Cake
• Condoms
• Terrorist

How did you form these attitudes? Well for the majority of things, your Attitudes came from Actions. These Actions led to Observations which led to Explanations and then Beliefs. The things you do create your beliefs.

To give you an idea of this think about the majority of men who tend to like football. When these men were boys they may have played football with their dad. This fun interaction instigated warm feelings and associations with playing football. The actions led to attitude and therefore the liking of football.

Behaviour into attitude at the lowest level begins with impression management theory. This is where you present to your peers the person you wish to be. You signal to them through buying and displaying the sort of things which give you social capital.

For example if you are wealthy you might buy a Mercedes, Bentley or Aston Martin to portray this. If you want to appear like a gangster you wear a hoodie, tracksuit bottoms and trainers. These items you invest in then influence you to become the type of person who would own them. Why would you do this?

You invest time, money and effort into portraying yourself as you wish to be. This is critical to feel included in society. Having the feeling of being excluded (the last person to know the gossip, the person not invited out for drinks) is a painful and diminishing attack on your emotions. You are always thinking about how you appear to others, even when you are alone.

Research has shown that when you become a member of a group, a fan of a brand, the user of a product– those things have more influence on your attitudes than your attitudes have on them. This is because your attitudes are shaped by monitoring your own behaviour, not being able to identify the cause and trying to make some sense of it. You analyse a situation that has happened as if you are watching a film, or an episode of Eastenders. You watch your actions and witness your thoughts trying to understand your motivations. From this you form beliefs about yourself.

To help you better understand this, try imagining a time where you recently got frustrated with someone and reacted in a way that was unacceptable even to your standards? You could have snapped at someone on a train for having to ask them to move their bags off the seats. It could have been that you failed to ask someone at work if they would like a hot beverage when you normally do ask them. Just think back to an incident and the way you tackled the emotions of disapproval that swamped you afterwards. You relayed the scene, you watched yourself do what you did and you discouraged yourself from doing it again in the future, or encouraged yourself to be more savvy next time. You made a judgement of what happened and formed a belief that you were or weren’t that kind of person. This is known as Self Perception.

Self perception even affects your posture and the way your muscles in your face tense. All these unconscious decisions inform your perception of who you are and what you think.

So it’s time to draw this into something marketing. If your attitudes, need to be socially accepted and future opinions are based on the actions you take now or have taken, then branding and marketing need to acknowledge this. The marketing campaigns need to get you to learn to like buying their products and form attitudes after the action has taken place.

Sure companies do this already, but to understand we are all so easily manipulated makes it a pretty scary thing, right?

For those of you who are unaware of the Benjamin Franklin Effect, it is a psychological finding: you grow to like people for whom you do nice things and hate people you harm. Take a look at these two links for more understanding: Wikipedia, You Are Not So Smart.

Benjamin Franklin had an enemy at his next election and he wanted to turn his hater into a fan. Franklin loved reading and knew his enemy had a rare and curious book. He sent a letter requesting to borrow the book and the rival was so flattered that he did send the book to Franklin. Franklin returned the book as promised with a thank you note.

The next time that Franklin and his enemy met, the enemy spoke to Franklin for the first time and maintained a friendship thereafter. How did Franklin do this?

The Benjamin Franklin Effect is the result of your concept of self coming under attack. The enemy went through the cycle of cognitive dissonance. It’s where a person goes through a painful confusion about who they are, so resolves their feelings by seeing the world in a more satisfying way. To explain this a bit better I want you to understand what happened to brains in a study where people were shown statements which opposed their political stance. Their brains literally started to shut down. When their ideology was threatened their brain could not cope.

When you do something you cannot find a logical, moral or socially acceptable explanation for, you ask yourself “Why did I do that?” and if the answer conflicts with your ideology and damages your self-esteem a justification is required. This is where you see the world in a different way and try to find peace within yourself.

A great example of cognitive dissonance is unpaid internships. People who work for free are proven to work harder as there are no outside rewards (such as pay) therefore these people create internal ones to justify their worth.

In Benjamin Franklin enemy’s case, he made himself believe that he actually liked Franklin as he wouldn’t have lent a rare book to a guy he didn’t like.

This is the case for the team I work for. Juggling the amount of workload which fluctuates from one week to the next, means it’s tough to make it viable to employ a new member of staff. Therefore our alternative is to find ways to improve our processes.

I was advised by someone I met through networking to visit this website:  http://www.davidco.com

This website refers to process changes, and how to make tasks easier. It is a real benefit and the podcasts available are a great listen. My advice to you: invest time in reading through the articles and take this quiz to find out where you are: http://www.gtdiq.com/index.php

Another new website addition to help is http://asana.com/. I highly recommend you use this as an online checklist tool. The system allows you to create a checklist and order projects. You can assign work to other members of staff and monitor what the status. For more information check out this Mashable article which is where I discovered Asana from: http://mashable.com/2011/11/02/asana/

Change management must be approached as a long term plan. Do not waltz into the office one day with an idea you have and expect people to be on board. You will struggle to implement successful change with the team working against you. Change management must be carefully planned. It must seek to benefit the business needs and therefore the first step in any change management situation is to evaluate the importance of this change, the costs and the benefits.

Once you have assessed that change will benefit the company needs, you must instigate a plan to support the training and the needs of your employees. They must understand the importance of the change. If they fail to understand, they may perceive the change as management being irresponsible, laying down the law and being unsupportive. Therefore it is essential that you spend time communicating your ideas with the employees.

Let’s get the team on board. Sit down with your employees and explain the problem. These people will be using the new procedure and therefore may have relevant feedback and ideas to improve the system. Utilise the team to help develop the solution and empower them so they feel like they have a large contribution. This will keep the team engaged and they will support each other to improve the system, rather than supporting each other to work against management. Once the project is completed it will also require less training as they will have helped to create it.

Monitor the change. Once the change has been initiated you must monitor it to ensure that it sticks. It’s far too easy to go back to the original system or idea as the employees knew how to work with it. Even if this new system is more practical, it raises standards and everyone can see it would benefit the company, people will ultimately return to what they know if you do not market the change regularly and encourage employees to use it.

What are the benefits of internal marketing?

• Firstly internal marketing can improve overall performance levels
• It unites the company, the brand and the employees forming stronger working relationships. Business culture, the structure, the management styles, vision and strategy of the business, and the social needs
• It empowers employees giving them accountability and responsibility
• It improves employee retention and individual development
• Encourages staff to improve their service to external customers by better understanding their valuable contribution to the success of the business
• Improves communication throughout the company

What is internal marketing?

Chances are you have been marketing internally already (even if you didn’t realise you were), but better understanding what you are doing and how to improve it will ultimately give you better results and allow you to see what marketing techniques work better than others.

An example of internal marketing is when you have introduced “casual clothing Fridays”. One day a week employees are entitled to come into work in their casual clothing. It costs the business nothing (unless someone dresses inappropriately and it results in a law suit) however empowers the employees to express their individuality. Working in comfortable clothing has been proven to increase productivity by 7%. Staff are more inclined to move around and sit more casually, which in turn allows them to free up barriers and focus more on business needs. Limiting employees to this opportunity once a week gives them something to look forward to and there have been suggestions that introducing such a scheme towards the end of the week reduces absenteeism.

Internal marketing is therefore marketing an idea or initiative which contributes to the positive workforce of the business.

“Internal marketing (IM) is a process that occurs within a company or organization whereby the functional process aligns, motivates and empowers employees at all management levels to deliver a satisfying customer experience. Over recent years internal marketing has increasingly been integrated with employer branding, and employer brand management, which strives to build stronger links between the employee brand experience and customer brand experience. According to Burkitt and Zealley, “the challenge for internal marketing is not only to get the right messages across, but to embed them in such a way that they both change and reinforce employee behaviour”

Burkitt H & Zealley J (2006). Marketing Excellence: Winning companies reveal the secrets of their success p.295

Six Key Attributes of Successful Internal Marketing

1)      Senior Members Involvement

Leadership begins at the very top and all lower level efforts tend to go amiss unless the leaders are involved in the process. Therefore point 1 is critical to grow a successful marketing communication. Understanding as an employee that your manager, senior manager etc. want you to feel more comfortable and cared for will improve your likelihood to work more productively and feel more appreciated. So high level staff should interact with all employees; face-to-face, over the phone, via email. Make an effort to show these people exist and you will benefit from the improved attitudes towards you and performance levels.

For instance, working for my previous company (let’s call it Hell) was like being chained to a desk and told when to sit and stand. Feeling like a caged animal was upsetting, de-motivating and exhausting. The director worked alongside me and was often off for three weeks at a time, returning tanned (and towards the end burnt which added mild humour to the workplace) and would stroll in after 11am while I’d been forced to start far earlier, working 7.5 hours a day with half an hour break. To make things worse I would be expected to leave late to complete work which he’d decide to give me ten minutes before work ends. He would typically call me in for meetings at 4.50pm and keep me in the office until 6pm. It extended to the point where I was forced to cover the phones alone (not even part of job role) while everyone else was allowed to go for lunch so I would spend my half hour of freedom sat alone outside. Result of working there: Had no loyalty to the company, hated working for the Managing Director, and felt completely unappreciated.

Now let me give you an example of the company I left Hell for. Aside for the hour long lunches, the freedom to go into the games room to relax if feeling far too stressed, the friendly meetings held at reasonable times and the ability to go to the toilet without being questioned, we wear casual clothes every Friday. We call our Fridays “doughnut days” and everyone gets to munch on a variety of delicious doughnuts courtesy of the Managing Directors. The MDs even come and sit in the kitchen area with all the employees.

Even with these basic principles and rewards in place it can be seen that there is a huge contrast in the way staff interact and appreciate each other. Hell had huge political issues within the office which held only eleven employees! No-one particularly liked the MD, and the office manager would impose ridiculous rules which split the office into an even wider divide. At this location which I shall call Heaven, we have our differences but work closely as a unit. The MD interacts with the team, shows his personality, is reasonable and understanding and therefore even when mistakes are made (even by him) no-one makes snide comments or tears the office into two.

So as a high level employee (if you are reading this) question how you interact with your staff and whether you could get over your dislikes towards one person which is causing tension with everyone. I say this as there is always one or two people you will dislike in the office. Typically someone on the same level as you, but you just have to live it with I’m afraid (or read my future articles about the psychology of employees coming in 2012).

2)      Horizontal structure (Integrated Organisational Structure)

Bureaucratic organisations such as the Police have so many formalities that it relies on departments doing their jobs. There is little interaction between different departments and the MDs and senior level managers would be calling security if a long term lower level employee was to say “hello”.  The comparison to those who have never had the opportunity to work in a structure like this is like living in a high rise building of flats. You may know the few neighbours on your floor but chances are you will never speak to any of the remaining 400 people who live in the same building. For the next twenty years that you live there they all remain strangers.

Horizontal structures encourage communication between departments including the senior managers. It maximises involvement and commitment as you work as a unit. It also empowers employees with decision making processes and allows them to a have a suitable social life which makes work are far more bearable place. Problems are resolved far quicker and actions take place quicker, allowing companies to adapt to the external environment more successfully than the vertical structure.

I used to work for the Police and dealt with previous victims of crime on the phone to take surveys to monitor the Police success levels with interacting with the General Public. All ran smoothly if I stuck to my specific role but I was not empowered to do any more than complete the survey and make calls. When a customer would complain about the Polices’ inability to respond to their enquiry in a proficient manner and demand I act on it I immediately had problems. I would have to consult my manager who would consult their manager. This would take half a day to a week. Then I would have to give the customer’s details to my manager who would give the details to her manager. Her manager would then have to pass on the information to the relevant department and along the way the message would either get interrupted or completely lost. When a chain is this long things have more opportunities to go wrong. Worst thing is, my name would be given to the customer and I never had a clue about the end result. Employee Empowerment? Pah! They haven’t heard of the words.

In contrast, a perfect example is again where I work. When I first came to work here the company was smaller and easier to manage, but with the increase in employees comes the need for supervisors and managers. We sit the managers of the departments on the same table as the people they are managing. Departments are encouraged to interact with each other with shared information and team meetings. We empower our employees to make decisions and understand that with this comes mistakes, which if learnt by the employee can lead to a stronger team and a new opening for a supervisor/management position in future.

Vertical structures do have benefits but I’m not old fashioned and I much prefer to give an element of responsibility and accountability to my team. It reduces the amount of day-to-day business as usual activities I have which in turn frees up my time to think of how to improve the business further.

3)      The feedback Practise

Marketing internally is difficult to calculate. You can rely on monitoring the staff turnover and absenteeism for figures but to better understand how your customers feel you are best asking them. When hiring people it helps to find out their ethics, self-esteem, team working and empathy skills and allow the manager of the department/team to meet with them to see whether they would fit in. The feedback from the manager is essential in determining whether the new candidate would be looking for a new job during work hours as he/she is so desperate to get out in a few months time.

Retention can be improved through training and communication with employees. A better working environment will undoubtedly satisfy the first three levels of Maslow’s hierarchy theory of needs and encourage personal esteem needs to be met. Happy employees equal a happy brand image and healthy brand equity.

I’ve worked for several companies which never asked for an opinion from the day to day operational level employees and from it they have made costly mistakes changing processes that did not need changing. The poor training given to the new changes, the appalling communication to why the changes were made, and the reluctance from employees to change led to huge costs in either reverting back to the original process or to retraining (and in many cases rehiring) employees. Had the management team spoken to their department, they could have prevented this. Had the management team spoken to their department they could brought some extremely useful money saving ideas to the table too.

Part of my ever changing role here is (simply put) to help improve the company improve. I lack the understanding of the day-to-day operations and procedures in place. I know my team knows the very well but having being recently given the role, my knowledge is limited. So I hold regular meetings with my team, I speak to my employees individually and ask them what problems they have noticed. Once they report their issues I work to resolve them. In doing this so far I have seen an improvement in work performance (as staff feel recognised, empowered and like the fact they get a say and its considered), moral, communication, teamwork and will to progress with the company. One member of my team has already excelled so much that they have become responsible of a small team.

Feedback has been critical in my career path. I used to voice my opinion as a low level employee (even if I wasn’t asked- risky but it got me noticed) which often got me excelled to a management position very quickly. I listened to my team and trusted them, took on board their ideas and worked towards a solution. As a manager now I get feedback from my team, the departments I monitor and from the MDs to get a 360 degree look at the company. The more I learn about the company, the quicker I can do my job.

4)      Brand Communication

The larger your company the harder it is to manage communications. The brand identity may get diluted throughout the employee chain. Managing Directors may know what they want the brand to say but by the time it reaches the external customers, it’s gone through a few stages of Chinese whispers the message gets distorted. Managing the brand internally is a critical ingredient to delivering the right message to the external customer.

Ensure that the brand identity is clearly outlined and email employees regularly with friendly discussions and threads to encourage communication. Not only will this support point 3 (feedback process) and allow employees to engage more freely with each other but it allows you to advertise to them.

The only example I can think of bad branding internally is where I have worked for companies with no comprehension of the brand and therefore no commitment to promoting the company to their employees. In fact working at Hell was very much like this where the MD thought lower level staff should be treated like dogs… bad example really as dogs get treats.

Good branding lies where you make efforts to keep your employees happy. We hold meetings where we speak to the team to identify problems and to inform them of our plans for the upcoming weeks (empowering the staff with knowledge keeps them feeling secure in their roles and content with us for informing them). It also shows that we listen to our employees and act on ideas that they give, and in turn they are contributing towards the brand identity.

Promote promote promote! Like my doughnut Fridays at work is a promotion you can introduce anything that comes to mind that sounds either fattening or fun. Rewarding employees is a great way to improve the moral and opinions of the employees to the brand. However do not encourage one department to introduce an idea alone; the whole company must do it as a whole to avoid rivalry and (unhealthy) competition between departments.

Final Note:

If you have time, then ideally a structured approach to internal marketing will enable you to effectively monitor the successes of your actions. However in my opinion it’s more important to get started on simple improvements which you are most likely already doing. Get your internal customers on the company’s side and it will give you the time to develop the business as a whole.

HTML5 is the next major revision to HTML. HTML5 had been designed to simplify coding through introducing a few additional semantics. The benefits of these additions are that they provide logical structures to a document. HTML5 improves interoperability and reduces development costs by making precise rules on how to handle all HTML elements, and how to recover from errors.

Some of the new features in HTML5 are functions for embedding audio, video, graphics, client-side data storage, and interactive documents. HTML5 also contains new elements like <nav>, <header>, <footer>, and <figure>.

New HTML5 Tags:

1. <section> – breaks a document into its logical sections
2. <header> – represents a header section, note that this represents a document header, and is different from <head> tag which is a HTML header
3. <footer> – represents a document footer
4. <aside> – represents an “aside” section that is unrelated to the rest of the document

Formation and structure is key. Adobe warmed the crowd up with an introduction to web design and how it will be changing over the next few years. This allowed everyone in the room to be on the same educated platform making it easier to pitch the sale. Using journals and lots of references to well respected authors, the speaker convinced the audience that the future will be websites created mainly for mobile devices etc. Facts to support evidence are a great tool used by many large corporations to educate their customers, for example Dettol kills 99% of germs; the 99% adds fact to the statement making it more accurate and therefore realistic.

Once everyone is convinced with the future changes that are predicted by Adobe, they then take you straight into the problems that designers and coders will face and then “BOOM!” as the American speaker said, here is Dreamweaver offering you the solutions.  Problem creating and then problem solving is a great way to market. Typical examples of this is Dettol adverts, telling you how germs can spread, promoting the little child touching the surface and then putting their hands in their mouth, and the Dettol bottle fixing the problems that could be caused. An element of fear is spread to the parent’s responsibility of keeping their child germ free. Same goes with Adobe, they indicate an element of chaos with the changes in the future while offering a  safety net if you follow them.

So we have two strong influential formations and the third is the icing on the cake. Although you may be convinced that the way websites are created is going to change, and that Adobe has the solution, you may be worried about the previous versions, their complexities and whether the flaws still lie. Adobe Dreamweaver is a large investment, so surely you could find an alternative? Well at the event Adobe gave a live walkthrough of the product, asking the audience to participate with any questions they may have. They spoke to the individual and tackled their doubts right there, driving any negative and unreasonable ideas right out the door. Any justification you had to not buy the product has now disappeared leaving you with justified reasons to buy the product. This closing part of the formation is what I call the hard sell. Many of us have been through the hard sell and the skilled sales person will have you unaware they are even doing it. The used car salesman will make it intrudingly obvious; “we can throw in a full tank of petrol now if you buy it now” or “this deal is only available today and we are closing in ten minutes”. A disgusting sales technique which targets the vulnerable through pressure of disappointment, lost opportunity and inability to displease their sales person. Then there is the hard sell which takes a smarter approach: “we can help you, we are always here and this item is here at your convenience”. You do not feel obligated or rushed, however the sales person has discovered who the gatekeeper, the decision maker, the influencer, the purchaser and the end user is (Decision Making Unit) and will have carefully planted seeds to help you justify to these people why you purchased this item. Any doubts you had they will have tackled leaving you feeling confident in the product and the sale. So to conclude, the key to a successful sales pitch in a presentation is to follow three rules:

1)      A clear introduction which creates a story of where people were, where people are now and where we will be in the future will educate the audience to maximise your selling influence

2)      Problem evaluating is crucial to raise awareness to any problems that people may face in the future. It also helps to raise some fear factors to increase emotions. The tempo and control you have over another person’s feelings is not to be undervalued as a business. If there is a genuine fear factor to be added in your sale, take your audience on a journey through a life without the problem solving product you offer, and one with. It will draw them closer to the brand and they will begin to overcome any justification barriers themselves because they want the product, thus saving you half the battle.

3)      Questions and answer time is a great way to close a presentation and welcome any challenging questions. Push the audience to ask you a question. Tell them they cannot leave unless five hideous questions are thrown your way. It will make them think decisively and allow you tackle them head on. Once they leave the room with those doubts, your chances of a sale decreases, so get those questions!