Problem #1
Lack of Customer Focus
Have you ever considered how crazy the Super Bowl TV ads are?
These companies are spending millions of dollars on ads that do little more than try to cut through the clutter and be talked about. It would be one thing if the ‘talk’ was about the company’s products and the features & benefits, but it’s not. Instead the goal of a Super Bowl TV ad is to be memorable because it’s entertaining.
People have been conditioned to expect entertainment. And, between 6-gazillion TV channels (and still hardly anything worth watching) and an even BIGGER time-vampire called the Internet (can you say ‘Facebook’?) today’s consumers are jaded because there are so many things competing for their attention and time.
The reason I started Online-Access was to exploit all the new high-tech methods to better get my marketing message across. That’s the upside of high-tech media and tools. The downside of our high-tech world is the lack of customer focus.
The Solution? Use Technology, but Change the Delivery.
Instead of depending on the customer to find our message and keeping our fingers crossed that they won’t be distracted, let’s deliver the message in person to them in their home. In fact, let’s use a very ‘old school’ delivery method: our technicians.
Every single day we have techs who achieve the goal of every door-to-door salesman: to get a prospect to open the door for him and let him in. Not once, but multiple times every single work day with all the advantages they have:
- Unlike a salesman, our techs don’t have built in ‘sales resistance’ – they are seen as experts
- Our techs have a level of rapport and trust that a salesman can only dream of having
- Our techs deal with people every day who are already pre-focused on their home’s mechanical needs
- Plus, they are already dealing with people who expect to pull out their checkbook or a credit card to give them money.
For in-home sales, it should be a ‘slam dunk’ for us in the heating, cooling or plumbing industry because we have all of these advantages.
While our mission to help customers and prospects find you is important – as we do with your PagePilot website – I reasoned that if we can leverage technology to ‘sell’ a company on the web to everyone why not leverage technology to sell a specific product on a one-on-one in-home basis?
And the technology to use for the message? Devices that are already found on many service vehicles: iPads, android tablets, or laptops. These devices have flooded the field for technical and bookkeeping apps, and are just waiting to be harnessed for tech sales. Just as long as it can overcome…