How much do you know about marketing?

I come across so many business owners who simply confuse marketing with sales and focus solely on “selling”.  Yes, I know that the end result is to make a sale but there’s more to selling your product or service than making a sale.

Let’s start with a definition of marketing that I have used for more years than I can remember:

Marketing is “A management activity that identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer requirements, efficiently and profitably”. 

>>> Note the words:  “identifies” “anticipates”; “satisfies”; “efficiently”; and “profitably”. <<<

Customers’ needs are anticipated and identified by undertaking marketing research and segmentation and then a marketing mix is developed to satisfy customers - efficiently and profitably.

Businesses that adopt this marketing concept, centre its activities on the needs of its potential customers.  Its financial success will depend on satisfying those needs.

A marketing orientated business will develop a structure designed to identify and interpret customer needs; to create goods and services appropriate to those needs; and to persuade potential customers to purchase those goods and services.

This involves integrated marketing, i.e., using different marketing variables in a balanced and co-ordinated manner.

Additionally, all parts of the business will need to appreciate that they have an impact on the customer, and are therefore an essential part of a marketing process.

Are you ready to focus on your customers?  I hope so.

My friend just sent me this link click here and it cracked me up. As an Internet Marketer, you may feel like nobody outside your online buddies understand exactly what you do all day at home. And, sometimes you feel a bit like an alien trying to tell people stories about your day-to-day life.

Well, Jimmy D. Brown hit a home run. He’s created 15 comics about what it’s like to be an Internet Marketer. Some will make you laugh out loud and some will make you groan, but all are worth taking a minute to peek at.

Totally free and totally funny.

Check them out here:

Your customer service level is a significant measure of how well (or how bad) you serve your customers. Thus, it is a crucial determinant of how well your business will do - particularly how good you are at retaining customers and generating repeat business. Indirectly, it also contributes to your referral business - how well you serve existing customers will influence their inclination to refer you to their friends, family and acquaintances.

The following are five ways by which you can test your customer service level. This list is not exhaustive, but this should give you a fair idea of how good you are at serving your customers.

Can you readily fill orders through your inventory?
If you have great customer service level, then you should easily be able to fill your customer orders. You should keep careful note of what your customers order and whether you have the item they are requesting at the time you receive the order. If you are almost always “out of stock,” then you are failing to serve your customers the best way possible.

In a business with diverse number of products, if you are able to fill the order for approximately 95% of the time then you are doing fine. If you are a business that offers only one product, 100% fulfilment of normal orders (barring abnormally large orders) should be your goal.

Can you deliver your customers’ orders in time?
Another factor that you should measure to test your customer service level is the efficiency of your service or how fast you are able to deliver the product or service which has been ordered. If you are almost always missing your target delivery dates, then your customer service delivery chain needs major work.

You should compute the proportion of customer orders that have been delivered on time to the total number of customer orders. This calculation should be time-bounded. For instance, for a month’s total number of orders, what percentage has been delivered on time? If you register that 95% of the time, your customers receive their order at the designated delivery date, then your business is doing fine.

Can you successfully resolve your customers concerns?
For great customer service, you need to respond to your customers’ inquiries and resolve their concerns. A simple way of testing this would be to measure the proportion of the number of customer inquiries that have been effectively resolved to the total number of customer inquiries received.

Do you respond quickly to your customers’ mails/emails and phone calls?
How fast you respond to customers is another means of measuring your customer service level. If you are able to respond to your customers within 24 hours (less is even better) of receiving their call, correspondence or email, then you are doing great.

Do you pass according to your customers?
Finally, your customers themselves can tell you whether you pass or fail when it comes to fulfilling their needs. You can actually conduct a customer survey. The survey should focus on customer service issues so you can measure how well you are able to serve your customers from these customers’ point of view.