For many businesses, particularly those providing services, more than 85% of business comes from personal referrals and recommendations. Yet many businesses spend thousands of hours, and dollars, trying to acquire new customers, and relatively little time and effort nurturing and retaining their existing ones.

Valuing and retaining your current clients and customers is essential. Not only will you benefit from their continued custom directly, you are also more likely to benefit from any new clients or customers they recommend. And given that it’s 6-7 times more expensive to gain one new client or customer than it is to retain one, retaining your existing clients and customers, and being highly recommendable, can have a huge positive impact on your profitability.

Clients and customers who already trust and respect you:

• are more likely to acknowledge, and value, what you provide and the benefits they gain from dealing with you
• may be more willing to accept your prices, terms and conditions without question or negotiation
• are often more loyal
• require less ’selling to’ and
• are more likely to continue doing business with you, and even increase the amount they spend, as their trust in you increases.

They are also significantly more likely to recommend you to people they know and trust giving you an opportunity to gain new clients whilst reducing your acquisition costs and improving your profitability. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many ways to create, and maintain, a winning reputation, some of which are specific to an industry, or even a business or individual. However, the seven ‘Reputation Branding Essentials’ below apply across the board and can help you develop and maintain a reputation that will open doors rather than slam them shut!

1. Keep abreast of changing values and expectations
People’s expectations are constantly changing. What they value in you, and your products or services, today may not be what they value tomorrow. Read and research widely and actively engage with those you want to create lasting relationships with regularly to stay in tune with them.

2.  Aim for ‘win/win’ outcomes from every interaction
Focus on nurturing a long-term relationship rather than a short term gain. For example, if you know another provider may have a better solution than you, recommend them. The level of trust your client or customer will have in you will go up and your reputation will be enhanced immensely.

3.  Make it easy for people to recommend you
When someone recommends you, they are putting their reputation on the line. Make people feel good about dealing with you and you’ll enhance your chances of being recommended. Deliver on your promises and focus on building high-trust, high-value relationships. Acting with integrity will also help you be recommended more often.

4.  Never ‘bad-mouth’ or be disparaging about others
Bad-mouthing your competitors or others is a major reputation loser. No-one likes a gossip. News travels fast, especially online and people will think “if they say those things about them, what might they be saying about me?” If you don’t have anything good to say, it’s better to say nothing at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Very occasionally companies or organisations provide excellent examples of how to create a competitive edge simply by being who they are. The email below – a genuine email sent to a genuine customer, who then sent it to me – is one such example. (Personal details have been changed.)

Being friendly without being overly familiar, and allowing your personality to shine through, is almost always a reputation winner!  Congratulations to 1-day for a memorable, ‘feel-good’ response to an every-day event.

From: David at 1-day
Sent: Thursday, 6 May 2010 7:29 a.m.
To: Richard
Subject: Invoice from 1-day for PSP game

Dear Richard

Thanks for your order with 1-Day! Invoice # ABCDEFG.

Your product has been painstakingly removed from our shelves, the dust wiped free, and carefully placed inside its packaging. It has gone through a number of checks and all with contamination free sterilised gloves.

A hush echoed through the 100 staff as the final tape locked down the packaging. We all linked arms and swayed in time (except for Luke who was swinging his hips in the opposite direction to everyone else) and sung the 1-day version of ‘I’m leaving… On a jet plane’. Real tears were shed by some of us, who are still coming to terms with the fact the product has left the building for good.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve ever wanted to stand out from the crowd and create a competitive edge no doubt a well-meaning advisor may have said ‘be different!’ Whilst this may be useful advice for some, in terms of reputation branding, it’s not necessarily a smart strategy to follow.

Novelty and innovation can set you apart, attract attention and make you memorable – for a time. The downside of this is that being different and straying too far from the accepted norm can raise doubts in the minds of those you most want to influence.

Being different is risky. Being distinctive, on the other hand, can make you memorable for all the right reasons, help differentiate yourself from your competitors and enhance your competitive edge if whatever it is that makes you distinctive is viewed positively. If the distinction is not viewed positively, it can leave you being perceived as odd, strange or risky. Inappropriate differentiation can raise doubts that can be hard to overcome.

So how can you create a positively distinctive edge without being riskily different? Read the rest of this entry »

When a company decides to have an official presence on Facebook, or other online social media network, they open themselves up to two huge opportunities:

• They can connect and communicate with potential and existing clients and customers keen to engage in a dialogue with that company and build trust in the process.

• They also run the risk of getting offside with ‘fans’, friends’ and ‘followers’ big-time if they fail to understand the ‘rules of engagement’ and try and use what are perceived as ‘big-brother’ tactics in the process.

The fall-out that’s occurred, which is neatly summarised in Bernard Warner’s blog post at SocialMediaToday.com, demonstrates how the internet can become a bitter battlefield where wars are won or lost based not on words, but on behaviour.

No matter how much a company or organisation may want to control their image and reputation online, it’s almost impossible to do – especially via Social Networking sites such as Facebook.

Attacking its commentators is unlikely to have endeared Nestle to the 90,000 or so ‘friends’ it has (had?) on Facebook as Rick Broida points out at bnet.com.

I’d hazard a guess it would have earned more respect, and perhaps even enhanced its reputation, if it had responded in a way that said ‘we hear you, we welcome your feedback, and we’re actually quite pleased you’re taking the time to let us know how you feel’.

Read the rest of this entry »

Should you ‘reduce, reuse and recycle’?  From a reputation perspective, if not an eco-perspective, the answer, in my opinion, is yes.

You might think people may have had enough of whatever it is you provide, but what’s more important is not that that they’ve tried, or heard, it before, but that it remains relevant to them.

For us as service providers, too, the temptation to develop or provide ‘new’ stuff can be extremely tempting. We think clients and customers may tire of our offerings and want something that’s ‘new’ and ‘improved’.

And we may grow tired ourselves of offering the same things day in and day out. However, clients don’t necessarily want ‘new’ stuff. What they want is relevant stuff.

As a product or service provider, your job is to remind your clients and customers just how relevant whatever it is you provide continues to be them. The core of your key messages probably won’t change. Nor will the benefits, or uses, of whatever you provide. What will change is how you frame your offering to make it relevant to them right now.

So if you’re trying to think up ‘new’ ways of doing things, think too about how you can re-frame, re-package and re-communicate what you already provide so that it remains relevant and valuable to your clients and customers. It’s a reputation-winning strategy.

Whatever you offer may need tweaking, but it probably won’t need abandoning altogether.

Think creatively and remind yourself, and your clients, of what’s great about your offering by linking it to current trends and positioning it as a ‘must have now’. After all, an anagram of ‘Relevance Rules’ is ‘Revenues Recall’.

Much like the Kryptonite bike lock debacle back in 2005, the Sons of Maxwell ‘United breaks guitars’ video  continues to be picked up on the web and damage United’s reputation.

When the airline damaged a $3,500 Taylor guitar and refused to accept liability, or provide any kind of compensation, Dave Carroll hit back where it hurt – right at their reputation.

According to a Mashable blog post written just after the video was posted in August last year, the video accrued around 3.2 million views and 14,000 comments less than 10 days after it was uploaded.

Today the clip’s been viewed more than 7.5 million times and continues to circulate on the internet in a practical demonstration of word-of-mouth becoming word-of-mouse.

Read the rest of this entry »

New Year resolutions happen every year, but predictions generally only occur at the turn of a decade. Knowing what might happen before it actually occurs would certainly be handy.

If we could predict what might happen it would certainly give us a competitive edge.  We could be ‘one-step-ahead-of-the-game’, give us an opportunity to maximise every opportunity and put all our efforts into those things likely to generate the greatest reward – whatever we might want that to be.

Moving from the ‘noughties’ to the teen years of the 21st Century  gives us a opportunity, not only to look back on what happend between 2000 and 2009 – think iTunes, the social media explosion and wireless internet – but also to look ahead and predict what might happen during 2010 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »