I recently worked with a team to answer an RFP. I asked if the potential client wanted to research the reasons why people in their target market were not buying, despite obvious benefits to them and to others. The answer was, "No." How can this client grow market share unless and until they do something different? Shouldn't we at least check to make sure we have all the reasons for rejection? Without changing, expecting to grow the business is insane!

We recently presented to the annual meeting of the Public Relations Society of America, and to a ProVisors group. The "Popcorn Story" worked well with both groups, as it always does. I started thinking, why is it so difficult for people to think of customer needs when they are in a business frame of mind? The example always works. People almost never think of the customer when they are thinking of business metrics. And yet, when they are asked to think of their own needs with respect to a movie theater, they can come up with an extensive list immediately. Why do we have these two separate parts of our brain? Can they be brought together? Are we insane, with two completely separate personalities, the "business" person and the customer?

The key to the success of any executive is the ability to listen and translate what he or she hears into action. People are in pain. Both your customers and your employees hope that you will hear them and understand their pain. Listening is not always easy. It takes practice and rehearsal. Market intelligence can provide the background, but you need to learn active listening skills, and practice them, in order to succeed as an executive.

Psychologists and sociologists have repeatedly found that people (your employees and your customers) are more motivated to avoid pain than to seek pleasure. Stanford University researchers (Knutson, et al, Neuron Magazine, January 2007) investigated how people were motivated to buy products. These researchers found that the customers were trading off the hoped for gain with the immediate pain of the price. These two emotions were located in different parts of the brain, but were rationalized to allow the purchase decision. Many examples of this type of logic exist in marketing and advertising: “Here’s to the road warriors with spines of steel and delicate backs” (Courtyard by Marriott), “Is your cholesterol out of whack” (Crestor by AstraZeneca), and “Unburden your back” (Kensington Notebook Computer by Toshiba).

Have you noticed how inflated Internet ratings are? It may be that the people who rate things are those who are interested in them, so they rate them high.

For example, people who rate romance novels are probably those who read a lot of them. So, even a mediocre romance novel is rated pretty good by them.

The "average" rating for a book on Amazon is 4.2 out of 5. Are ALL books really that good? ...or are those who are rating the books friends of the author? If you average 4.0 out of 5, what's wrong with you?!

When Amazon started selling milk a few years ago, the ratings were outstanding! "Worth its weight in gold times infiniti!" What does this mean?

Even staplers received outstanding ratings, with only one rater rating it "average." Are there no average staplers out there?

Some companies are using such ratings and Blogs as "Voice of the Customer" research. How wise is this? Some companies have actually been caught inflating their scores by having employees rate their products.

It makes you have new respect for traditional surveys, doesn't it, even with their inherent flaws? I suggest that some of the more traditional methods should be used, until and unless we can find a way to deflate some of these ratings. What do you think?

I witnessed a sales call involving a customer who was not happy. The company had had to call for service frequently, causing irritation and lost revenue. The supplier wasn't happy, either because those numerous customer service calls eroded its profits.

The salesman was able to salvage the customer by making some shrewd additions to the deal and taking what I call an integrated approach. The contract required the customer to get training on the equipment, and it required customer service and product design to study the problems the customer was experiencing and provide the customer with feedback on proposed solutions.

This was a very successful sales visit for all concerned. It increased the loyalty of the customer, as measured by customer satisfaction scores and increased sales. Executives at the client company felt they were being valued. Yet, most traditional metrics of sales activities would not have shown the benefits of the integrated approach.

Have you ever had a dead customer? That is one who has not bought from you in some time. Perhaps they have even stopped returning calls. What do you do?

I recently completed a sales training seminar where the homework was to call such customers and ask if was OK to delete them from my database - ask for a "No" as opposed to the usual asking for a "Yes." The technique worked extremely well, with several relationships becoming active again (with projects!) which had been dormant (dead) for 5 years or more! Sure, some customers opted out of being contacted, but they were not interested any more and not likely to become clients. Ah, but others opted back in!

The Chief Marketing Officer Council (CMO) recently found that fully two thirds of those who responded to their benchmarking survey had no system for re-activating dormant or dead customers! I found this surprising. What it tells me is that a great many accounts are languishing in a large number of companies without closure: are they a real prospect or not? The trainer that I had said that those who keep these customers in their dormant state are living on "hopium" - a drug that makes you think these customers will come around someday, some how.

I have always been intrigued by company loyalty programs. I have noticed that even in my own behavior, loyalty programs do influence where I go and what I will buy, even to the point of the credit card I use.

Somehow, it seems almost too good to be true to buy a ticket on Southwest Airlines, getting one step closer to a "free" ticket and using an American Airlines credit card on the purchase to get one step closer to a "free" ticket on that airline at the same time. Similar behavior and thinking causes me to purchase all of my office supplies, including computers, from one vendor. That vendor gives me a 10-percent rebate monthly on my total purchases. That makes my next month's supplies seem to be greatly discounted when I use the rebate coupon.

It seems to me as if these loyalty programs achieve what they were designed to achieve: They cause me to make repeated purchases with the company involved because of the program— even if other objective criteria, such as price, might have otherwise caused me to go elsewhere.

When Cadillac was audited by examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1990, the examiners picked an employee at random from 7,000 employees at our Hamtramck, Michigan, plant. The man was putting in windshields. The examiners approached the worker and asked him who his customer was. He asked, "Do you mean my internal customer or my external customer?" I could have kissed him on the lips!

He proceeded to discuss how he talks to his internal customers. He talks to the worker next to him in the assembly line at every break to discuss how things were going. And he talks to the guy on the assembly line who supplies him.

He talked to the external customer, too. He told the examiners how we had arranged for each person on the assembly line to come off the line for a half hour a month to call customers who had ordered a Cadillac. In his calls, he described how their cars looked and how he had just put in their windshields. In this way, the customers got excited and the employee felt connected to the customer.

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