Minding Your Own Brand

The Forgotten Customers... Continued

Treat Your Buy-In Customers as if They Are Buying Customers.
You don’t think twice about working hard to make your buying customers happy; it takes planning and it is something you do all the time. Why not include your buy-in customers in the planning process? Whether it is incentives, recognition, courtesy or whatever, if it works for the buying customers adapt it to fit your buy-in customers as well.

Create a Continuous Buy-In-Customer Maintenance Plan.
Preventive maintenance versus as-needed maintenance; we’ve done the comparison and we have learned that over time prevention is less costly, less intrusive and vastly more productive. Supporting the intellect, integrity and enthusiasm of your buy-in customers is more than incentives, recognition and courtesy. It is about giving them an opportunity to share in the triumphs and challenges the business faces; an opportunity to maximize their own potential. Institute a plan, which encourages employees to share their ideas, to challenge perceived weaknesses and to make the business greater than it is. Investing in the intellect, integrity and enthusiasm of your employees will reap lasting rewards for all.

Don’t forget, our customers come in a variety of forms. We must continue to put our best forward in an effort to attract, maintain and most important of all, to sell to our buying customers. At the same time let’s not forget our buy-in customers and how valuable they are to the bottom line. Remember, without them we are in business alone; it doesn’t have to be that way.

1. American Psychological Association (APA):
Customer. (n.d.). Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Retrieved March 22, 2007, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/customer

Ed Drozda, principal of E & D Associates is dedicated to facilitating business success. Whether an organization is struggling to set goals or find ways to achieve them, E & D’s talents and expertise successfully help companies and individuals explore new and creative ways to increase customer and employee satisfaction; decrease staff turnover; and boost overall revenues.
Ed can be reached by phone: 508-695-2146 or by e-mail at ed@4eandd.com.

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