It was 4:45 p.m. on a warm Friday afternoon in Traverse City, Michigan. The owner of Ferguson Lawn Supplies and Equipment, Ken Ferguson, and his son Chuck, were just about ready to close for the day. The phone rang and as Chuck answered it, he was greeted by a very desperate voice. It was Bob Jenkins, the general manager of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, one of their customers. The reason for his call to Ferguson Lawn Supplies and Equipment was that they had a very big problem. As Bob Jenkins explained, the Grand Hotel was getting ready for a very prestigious golf tournament that was scheduled to start the next morning. Their one and only Jacobson greens mower, the one that they used to trim the putting green on each hole of the course, had broken down. A few of the spring-loaded spreader fingers that actuated the pressure plate of the clutch assembly had been shattered. The golf course needed to have it repaired immediately, because the greens had to be mowed the next morning at 5:30 a.m.

In the extremely competitive business of lawn supplies and equipment, the Fergusons had a large area to cover. It included the upper half of the state of Michigan and the upper peninsula. Mackinaw City was 110 miles away, not including the ferry boat ride across the straits to the island. In addition to that, no motorized cars or trucks were allowed on the vacation island. It was going to take a minimum of four hours for them to reach the golf course via service truck. Chuck knew they needed to act fast if they were going to help solve this dilemma. After briefly conferring with his dad, Chuck asked Bob Jenkins if he could have the mower loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon and hauled over to the small airport that was located on Mackinac Island. The general manager answered yes, but asked Chuck to explain. Chuck replied that in an emergency like this, the Fergusons could use their family airplane to fly the repairman with the parts necessary to repair the mower.

After Chuck hung up the phone, he quickly called down to Larry, his top mechanic, to see if he would be willing to work a little overtime. Larry eagerly agreed. As an extra measure of service, they decided to pull out the back seat of the airplane and load up a brand new Jacobson greens mower to take along as a loaner. Chuck and Larry took off, and when they landed, they were greeted by a very worried Bob Jenkins. Chuck’s mechanic, impeccably dressed in his dark blue uniform, shining tool box in hand, went right to work on the disabled mower. It was repaired within 15 minutes. Bob was ecstatic. Then, in a grand gesture, Chuck and his mechanic unloaded the brand new Jacobson greens mower. They explained that they wanted to leave it as a backup (free of charge) just in case anything else went wrong with the repaired mower. They would pick up the loaner on the next service call. The general manager was more than satisfied. The next morning, the greens were mowed and the players commented on how beautiful the golf course looked. The prestigious golf tournament was a success. As it turns out, the brand new Jacobson greens mower never left the island. The general manager thought it would be a good idea to have a back- up mower just in case they ever needed it again.

The story doesn’t end there. A few months later, Ken Ferguson and his son attended the Annual Turf Grass Conference at Michigan State University. As they were sitting at their table finishing their dinner, one of their main competitors walked over and said, “Ken, I don’t know how you do it. I don’t know how you keep the Grand Hotel golf course account. We’ve been calling on that place for years. We buy that general manager the best steaks, bring him the finest scotch, and we still can’t get any of his business! How do you do it?” Ken Ferguson looked up at him and replied “Uhh, I don’t know, it sounds like you’re doing everything right to me. I wouldn’t change a thing.” Through this lesson, the message is clear. By going the extra mile for our customers, by being there when they need us, we will keep them as loyal customers for a long, long time.

About the Author:
Tom Borg is president of Tom Borg Consulting Development & Training. He is a small business consultant, trainer, and author.

Over the past 27 years, he has worked with his clients and helped them to change their business paradigms. Tom shows small business owners how to “think outside the box,” tap the potential of their managers and employees, and take action to help make their businesses more profitable and successful.

He is author of two books, Making Service Count – Leveraging Customer Satisfaction to Make Your Small Business More Profitable and his second book, How to Keep a Positive Attitude in a Sometimes Negative World. His business articles have been published in over 47 countries and have appeared in local publications such as Crain’s Business, the Detroit Free Press.

When businesses decide to move forward on a purchase, they base their decision on a value assumption of what they feel they’ll get out of the product they buy. While there are those businesses that always purchase the cheapest available option, there is no way to consistently get good value and quality by always going for the lowest possible price. Eventually, they’ll get burned.

Understanding how price is linked to value can help your company position its products and services to garner the attention of prospective customers.

Increased Competition from a Global Economy:
We’ve all heard about the global economy. While we know what it means, sometimes we are not fully aware of its impact. We tend to operate in our own little world, and see our competition as being closer to home, or at least relegated to whom we know and see.

In truth, your competition is but a few clicks away; if customers can find a product they perceive as being a better value, your company will lose business.

A global marketplace brings global competition — customers don’t lack for options to select from, and they no longer have to accept the status quo. Your company has to be faster, smarter, and better at everything in order to keep your customers, and sell to new ones.

Case Study Analysis:
Does your product last longer? Does your product offer more benefits to customers and allow them to save money? If you’ve ever had a product that does these things, but not been able to turn these selling points into sales, then you’ve failed at putting these product attributes front and center in the eyes of your customers. Effective supporting documentation about your product or service can help you address this.

Now, we’re not talking about infomercials — you need solid, substantiated data that illustrates the benefits of the product or service your company is offering. It’s not enough just to say it does what it does. Customers hear that same pitch from everyone. Instead, give them proof. Keep it simple and provide them real case study analysis on how the product works.

Social Proof in the Form of Testimonials:
Anyone can get a testimonial from a customer. A company could sell the worst product in the world and still find someone, somewhere, to say it’s the best thing since Wonder® Bread. Therefore, forget about the simple and straightforward testimonial that says the product does what it does. Been there, done that.

What you need is to provide your customers the ability to speak directly with other customers who’ve benefitted from working with you. Perhaps you conduct a teleseminar with a client, and allow them to share their results — and field questions directly from other prospects during the call. If you have an active forum or community within your website, this provides an excellent platform to allow customers to share their results. Focus on developing excellent customer service both before and after the sale, and the raving fans and product evangelists will follow.

Product demonstrations that matter:
Forget the controlled demonstration. Take it a step further and perform a product demonstrate at your customer’s facility. Being able to show the product is one thing, but having the ability to troubleshoot problems for your customers is something else entirely.

Customers need to feel taken care of — if they see your product and your sales people as the solution to their problems, they’ll come to see your company as a valued and trusted partner. Your sales team must be seen as experts in their field. If they are seen as experts, they’ll have the ability to make your products shine.

Selling products and services is all about solving problems — alleviating the concerns and apprehension of customers. While your company may be both professional and reliable, your customers may have dealt with companies that were less than dependable. Focus on addressing those concerns and providing proven solutions, and you will consistently turn more prospects into customers.

About the Author:
Traci Hayner Vanover, aka The Promo Diva®, is a business consultant and publicity expert specializing in working with small businesses, authors and startups. Drawing on over twenty years experience in the fields of marketing and promotion, Traci’s blog, located at http://www.PromoDiva.com, blends helpful tips and resources with a healthy dose of humor. Traci is the founder and publisher of Entrepreneur & Self-Employed Business Journal.

In today’s economy, many businesses struggle to stay afloat, much less profit. But when the going gets tough, the tough get creative — businesses are finding new ways to motivate employees, attract new customers and keep their current clients happy.

Believe it or not, sales and discounts hurt businesses more than they help. With so many businesses offering sales, it takes a steep discount to stand out from the crowd. Put items or services on sale too often, and customers will wait for another sale before they buy, meaning that the company will make less money per purchase.

What does drive sales? Well, happy customers. Customers are much more likely to use a company with friendly, capable employees. So instead of devaluing their product, companies need to find ways to improve customer service while drawing in new customers and keeping old ones.

One Wisconsin bank seems to have found a solution — in travel incentives. The Madison Branch of Anchor Bank hired a company called Motivation Advantage to run a travel incentive promotion in all of its 60 locations. Motivation Advantage designed a three-day, two-night package that customers could use for a trip to nearby cities and states, or as far away as Florida or California.

The promotion offered vacation getaway packages when customers chose the branch for a loan. But the bank made sure that its regular customers could also qualify for the travel incentive, either by taking out a new equity loan or refinancing an old one.

Employees also participated. Those who encouraged customers to sign up for loans could earn vacations.

Travel remains a large motivator — everyone wants to get away for a while. Ninety-one percent of Americans take a vacation every year, making travel incentives especially appealing. Savvy companies can use such incentives to boost employee morale, retain valued customers, attract new business and launch new products.

For more information, visit www.motivationadvantage.com.

As I teach MBA and doctoral-level courses in management and leadership, I like to remind students that my favorite oxymoron is “business ethics.” I also remind them that I’m mostly kidding. I’ve spent many years as an entrepreneur with and without partners. I’ve contracted to organizations of all sizes, bought and sold businesses and started them up from scratch. I can say with complete confidence that the single most significant, ongoing crisis in American-style business is a large and expanding deficit of ethical behaviors.

The Philosophers’ Big Idea
We have many options available to us when considering ethics. As a branch of philosophy, some of the greatest minds of all time have mulled over and presented their ideas in the context of everyday life. Business leaders and managers have easily adopted these approaches and continue to define and refine what it means to be ethical in daily practice. Some do their best to maximize the good for all according to an accepted set of rules. Some carefully consider the consequences of their decisions and actions in the organizational context. Some don’t really care about what happens to organizational members as long as the outcome is an inflated bottom line.

One ancient and eminently useful approach available to us today is virtue ethics; it is based solely upon the virtue, or moral character, of a person and was originally presented in Western literature by Plato and Aristotle. Virtue ethics took a back seat for many, many years to utilitarian (consequentialist) and deontological (rule-based) approaches. Now, with the advent of leadership approaches such as Servant Leadership and my own Middle Way Management, virtue ethics is making a comeback worthy of Elvis in ’68.

The Virtuous Person
What is a virtuous person? This question lies at the heart of virtue ethics and is probably debated more than the legitimacy of virtue ethics itself. Aristotle presented the idea that the ultimate goal of the virtuous person is living well (his term is eudaimonia, but I won’t bore you with the definitions here). Of course, in ancient Greek thought, this was not related strictly to physical comfort, pleasure or luxury, though these could be the outcomes of being a virtuous person. No, a virtuous person is someone who always does the right thing for the right reasons.

If we think about virtue ethics in the context of organizational culture, we see that the rules (policies and procedures) and consequences (strategies/tactics and planned outcomes) have already been created for us. These constraints are necessary for an organization to operate efficiently and effectively, yet how do they influence the virtue of organizational members? As many of you are intimately aware, managing people is a delicate undertaking that requires compassion, empathy, patience, and kindness on the part of the manager. HR policies and procedures are the beginning of the people management process, while virtue ethics allow us to practice in meaningful ways on a daily basis within those necessary constraints to discover equitable and fair outcomes.

In the end, virtue ethics is a way of being, rather than a way of doing. Rather than asking “What are the rules for proceeding?” or “What are the consequences of my actions?” when confronted with situations requiring ethical choices, the manager who practices virtue ethics will ask herself, “What sort of person am I?” For instance, an employee who consistently shows up late for work when his timely arrival is crucial to the success of the organization may be managed in two ways: 1) according to organizational policies and procedures with little to no regard for root causes or 2) with compassion and care while seeking to understand root causes and then finding a remedy within the constraints of company policies. Interestingly, both of these approaches offer a maximization of good for all parties concerned, even the organization, yet only one of them relies on the personal virtue of the manager to find resolution.

Big Decisions for a Small Business
Over the years, I’ve come to the decision that I will never have another employee – period (perhaps I will regale you with the stories behind this decision in a future post). This puts me in the same position in which many of you find yourselves: Singletons in a sea of organizations. As such, we are left asking ourselves how the people management aspects of virtue ethics apply to our work lives; they do, but in different ways. In our cases, we can call upon virtue ethics in every business relationship and interaction. As we engage in commerce with customers, suppliers, competitors, government regulators, and others, we are in a position to frequently ask that important question: “What sort of person am I?”

Like you, I have many examples of how asking this question might have saved me and others from imminent grief. If you have not considered this question in any kind of detail, take some time out of your busy day and begin the process of defining yourself within a virtue ethics context. This way, the next time you are confronted with an opportunity to exercise your morality, you will be crystal clear on what to do and why you are doing it. This may seem like an effort at defining the obvious, yet I know from personal experience that my workload has prevented me from making decisions in the past based upon what sort of person I am. In the rush to make a decision, any decision, I have compromised my ethics and inevitably regretted the decision. Now, I am able to pause and ask the question before making any ethical decision.

Virtue Ethics in Action
As you think about virtue ethics, you may be wondering how one might fit them into an existing leadership or management approach. In my case, I have settled on virtue ethics as the foundation of a new leadership approach I’ve created called Middle Way Management™. While Middle Way Management is based upon Buddhist ethical concepts, it is very much linked to Western ideas about virtue ethics, especially when and where the rubber meets the road-during daily practice. Middle Way Management emphasizes the practice of managerial compassion as a way to relieve suffering at the individual and organizational levels (yes, organizations can suffer, too). As a Middle Way Manager™ goes about managing team members with compassion, he must remain mindful of his values and of the sort of person he is because both are basic parts of his daily practice. In this way, Buddha meets Aristotle and both leave us examining ourselves in fundamental ways that increase our chances of success in the competitive marketplace.

What sort of person are you?

About the Author:
Darin R. Molnar, PhD is an entrepreneur and founder of Middle Way Management, a more compassionate way of leading and managing people. He regularly contributes to the Middle Way Management Blog on the Middle Way Management website and is completing the first book on the approach, Middle Way Management: Where Compassion Meets the Bottom Line, due out Q4 of 2010.

Dr. Molnar teaches at three universities where he oversees courses in business management and ethics, organizational behavior, and leadership at the undergraduate, MBA, and doctoral levels. He enjoys fishing for salmon and steelhead with his four children whenever time and the fish allow.

A lot of companies go about marketing all wrong. Companies love to look at their competition and figure out how they are better, and why not — you need to be better to thrive. But when this emphasis merges with your marketing efforts, you need to do a vanity check.

What is Marketing Vanity?
We’ve all seen marketing vanity in action. It’s all very well saying things like “Our logistics processes do x, y and z, which means that we are more effective at jargon, jargon, jargon.” But when you are speaking to your customers, you sometimes need to reexamine what you are trying to achieve.

The thing about customers is that they are basically selfish — not in a bad way — it’s just human nature. They don’t care about your company and what makes it better than any other company, all they really care about is how your products or services can satisfy their needs.

Have a look at your home page, or your brochures, or whatever else you use to communicate with your customers, and be honest with yourself. Is your sales speil driven by ego? Or is it focused on selling the benefits of what you do?

How to Construct Customer-Focused Copy
Producing good copy, for your website or anywhere else, is a subject that I could write dozens of posts about, and maybe I will eventually. But it all comes down to thinking carefully about what your customers want when they arrive on your site, and showing them that you’ve got it.

So rather than saying “our logistics process use state of the art…” you might say something more to the tune of “We get stuff to you faster than anyone else” or maybe even turn it into a guarantee “Guaranteed 36-hour turn around after payment is received.”

Ok, so you can work on the specific wording a little bit, but you can see how the first phrase is focused on the company, whereas the second and third are focused on spelling out exactly what the benefit is to the customer.

Summary
In marketing there is a place to talk about your company and show off a little. Some customers are going to want to know more about you before they do business with you. This is exactly what your about us page on your website is for.

But when ever I land on a website and the home page is a big block of text explaining all about the company and what they do, I can’t help but cringe. Focus on the customer, and embrace the notion that less is more. Customers only care about what you can do for them, so that’s what you need to tell them.

About the Author:
Mark Johnson is an internet entrepreneur who spends his time blogging about business, internet marketing, SEO, blogging and just about anything else related to making money online. Visit Mark’s Marketing Blog. Latest post: Use Google custom search to increase your Adsense CPM.

In his Word of Mouth Supergenius class, “How to Inspire Word of Mouth with Customer Service,” Lane Becker shared how his company used awesome customer service to get their customers talking.

Lane covered how to make the customer relationship personal, how to set clear expectations for online interactions, and how the best way to gain your customers’ respect is to not be afraid to say sorry.

Word of Mouth Supergenius is produced by GasPedal.

The new year is a great time to get your marketing back on track.

Cloud Marketing Labs, an outsourced marketing department for small technology businesses, has released a new book “6 Marketing Mistakes That Are Killing Your Technology Business — And What You Can Do About It.” Below are six tips, from the book, that will help jump start small business marketing efforts in 2010.

Measure everything.
Wasteful marketing can be a real drain on a businesses’ budget. Before you start any type of marketing, set up a system in which you can measure the success, or failure, of each marketing strategy and tactic.

Have a good lead generation system.
Never in the history of marketing as there been so many ways to attract customers to a website, or store front. The trick is to sort through the clutter to find what works for your business and your customers. By knowing your customers, you’ll know exactly in which medium your business should advertise.

Every business that struggles to find customers does so for at least one of these 6 reasons. This book was written to give business owners a practical guide to a successful marketing system.

Know your customers.
Building a marketing system without knowing your customers is like building a house on marsh land. It will collapse immediately. Knowing your customers will allow you to determine how best to get your potential customers attention. Get out of the office and interview them. Find out what problems they have, what magazines they read, which websites they frequent. If you bury yourself in their world, you will build the foundation for a successful marketing campaign.

Compete on value, not price.
Too many business owners think that consumers simply want the lowest priced product or service. Once you find what your customers’ value, then you can charge a premium for it.

Speak about your customer’s problems, not your products.
Often, business owners build an entire marketing system around the product specifications. For instance, the website and brochure will speak endlessly about how fast a signal processor is, or how much data a product can store. Instead, these brochures should speak about the customers problems and how you, as a business owner, can solve them.

Offer multiple products for multiple customers.
Not all customers are the same. Some customers may want an introductory offer, while others can’t wait to tell their friends about you. By treating every customer the same, you are doing a disservice to your business and your customer.

To receive more detail about these six marketing tips, download “6 Marketing Mistakes that Are Killing Your Technology Business — And What You Can Do About It” at http://www.cloudmarketinglab.com.

Bold Software has announced new enhancements to BoldChat Basic, a live chat offering designed with small businesses in mind.

New features of the product include the ability to send proactive invitations, a summary report that’s automatically emailed to the customer and a set of live chat benchmarks that help business owners understand what they should be getting from their product – with recommendations to help get them there.

BoldChat Basic Provides More Value to Small Businesses
Cost effective and easy-to-deploy, BoldChat Basic was designed to make it easy for small businesses to reap the benefits of live chat at their websites. By offering a set of new and enhanced features to BoldChat Basic, Bold Software is adding value to the live chat implementation and helping small businesses maximize their online connection with website visitors.

BoldChat Basic’s new and enhanced features include:

• Website owners can, with the simple click of a button, target a website visitor and send them a proactive invitation to chat.
• Customers can choose from a gallery of more than 70 such invitation designs.
• A new summary report including critical data is automatically generated and emailed each week.
• The report also compares their site’s activity against BoldChat-recommended benchmarks, and provides guidance for live chat optimization
• Basic includes the ability to encrypt chats to ensure the confidentiality of chat sessions with e-tailers
• Website owners also have the ability to search complete chat and visit histories

BoldChat Basic Special Pricing
Customers who are on board by February 28, 2010, will receive the first two licenses for $29, which is typically the price for each license. For as long as they are a BoldChat Basic customer, they will continue to receive this special pricing. This promotional offer was designed for the business owner who experiences a busy holiday season and would benefit from an additional BoldChat Basic license. For more information about Bold Software, go to www.BoldSoft.com or call 1-866-753-9933.

Doddle is a new internet telephone innovation, allows users to make VoIP calls anywhere in the world via Doddle’s web based Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) phone directly from their webpages.

With Doddle’s free online phone service, no registration is required and VoIP is as easy as accessing a webpage. Users just begin using.

Doddle’s web based phone allows anyone to add phone capabilities to their web applications, including websites, portals, social networks and blogs such as Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, Blogger and more, so that web visitors can make calls directly from the webpage. Twitter tweets can truly make sounds with an instant call link.

“Doddle gives a voice to your website by turning it into an internet telephone. It lets your website visitors make your telephone ring!” says Paulo Vicentini of Doddle.

All that is required is to embed Doddle’s free linked phone gadget, which empowers users’ webpages with a webphone/click2talk feature. The options and features provide a completely customizable solution for both personal and business use:

• Webphone for blogs, homepages, social networks and virtual business cards
• Internet service and VoIP providers, IT companies, SOHO
• SIP compliant phone: seamless integration with VoIP providers
• Compatible with VoIP Analog Telephone Adapters (ATA/Hardware)
• Server side integration: J2EE (Java) /.NET / PHP / Database
• JavaScript API (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux)
• No need to keep computers powered on to receive calls
• WebPhone, Click2Call, Call Me Button, PhoneBooks, etc.
• VPN Support

Doddle’s web-driven phone makes it possible to quickly add SIP-based calls features in web applications. There is no desktop application to be downloaded. Doddle’s webphone is supported in all major browsers for both PC and Mac. Doddle offers several free widgets: webphone, call button, and iGoogle. Fully customizable versions are also available.

Doddle’s webphone improves channels between online visitors and sales and support teams by allowing online visitors to talk to a representative directly from their browser via the company’s website, making the distance between online visitors and contacting the company just a click away. Doddle also makes IVR menu navigation easier.

Doddle uses open standard SIP VoIP protocol, allowing clients to use their own VoIP account or even a homed IPBX and telephone adapter. The phone is fully skin-able and can be easily modified to match the look and feel of existing web applications. Doddle’s web 2.0 interface makes customization and branding easy.

Doddle’s innovative VoIP and web application solutions are accomplishing a new internet trend by enabling telephone communication built into web applications. For more information, visit http://www.doddlephone.com.

Imagine if your customers felt compelled to purchase from you. How might that change your business, and your bottom line?

We see this approach everywhere, but small businesses rarely take advantage of this concept. Perhaps they are not aware of how to implement such a program, or simply aren’t convinced it will work. The reality is that small businesses may actually be better equipped to implement these programs, and can begin to see real benefits in fairly short order.

Reward points are used by credit card companies, gas stations, book stores, airlines, and almost any large chain in order to reward the loyalty of their client base. These companies understand the importance of brand recognition, and incentive-based compensation for being a loyal customer. These points are redeemable and can be applied as credits or used as a form of payment.

So, how can you go about doing the same thing?

Creating Unique Promotions:
Steer clear of those complicated card and points systems used by the major chains and corporations. To some extent, these programs have backfired — the sheer number of programs, coupled with the often complex terms and processes have made them difficult and inconvenient to the very customers they are meant to attract. If your system becomes a burden on the customer, they won’t use it — the best practice is to keep it simple and unique to your business.

We must first come up with a system of rewards for clients who continuously achieve and exceed expectations. You may already use a similar approach with your own sales department by providing quarterly bonuses for achieving or exceeding quarterly sales forecasts and budgets. You will provide bonuses every quarter to your best customers, much in the same way you currently do with your sales department.

The most successful companies have distinguishable characteristics and appeal that separate them for their competition. What unique offering does your company possess that your competition does not? Start with this first, and progress from there. To help guide you along, below are a couple of ideas on how to present these reward programs and administer them to your top performing customers.

Volume Incentives and Back-End Rebates:
Offering volume discounts is a perennial favorite among retailers and customers alike. When a customer purchases a larger quantity of merchandise, they are offered a lower price. Some customers may offer to commit to a quantity order over a set period — but what if they don’t meet that quantity by the end of the time frame? Rather than offer the customer the discounted price in advance, you could instead provide a credit to the customer’s account for attaining a certain level of business within a given quarter. Once the customer meets that volume, you immediately apply a rebate to their account. If you are selling a product, you apply a credit based on the number of products purchased. This accomplishes the same incentive, but does not present the same liabilities for the retailer.

Offering Free Consulting or Tech Support:
Perhaps instead of a product, you are selling a service. You can employ the same approach by offering free consulting or technical support if the customer attains a certain sales volume within the quarter.

Don’t offer this for free — and be sure that you assign a dollar value to what the customer is going to be receiving. Be firm with the condition that the customer must attain and meet their requirements. If you simply provide this free without conditions, there is no incentive to attain the specified sales volume.

Free Units with Volume Purchases:
Another popular incentive includes offering free units with a specified volume purchase. This is another effective way of providing incentives for your customer to continue purchasing from you. The free units could be the same product purchased, new product introductions or popular accessory items.

Don’t look at this type of an incentive as a loss on the cost of the item offered for free. Instead, view it as a way of guaranteeing the 30 unit volume.

Exercise caution in throwing around the word “free.” You want to make sure that the customer is aware that they are receiving something of value — in order to do this, you must be sure to assign a dollar value to the item. If the customer doesn’t value the incentive, they won’t work for it. Never offer up any reward when the client hasn’t earned it.

Monthly Progress Reports:
It is extremely important that you provide monthly updates on how your customer is progressing. Make sure to send your customers a balance sheet of their volume, and how far they are from achieving their goal. Discuss their volume requirements with them. This will help ensure that they are an active participant in meeting the goals you’ve set together. Many companies will include this information on invoices, or direct mailings. Keeping your customers updated will provide both a reminder of the goal, as well as the motivation to strive to attain it.

It’s important to be aware of those customers who show real initiative in taking part in your program. If they are a couple of days away from attaining the goal, but are at the end of the quarter, work with them to extend the reward program a couple of days so they can be rewarded for working with your company so closely. This small gesture will pay long-term dividends.

Retaining customers is essential to growing your business. Moving from simply a transactional sales approach, to a valued partner willing to reward customer loyalty, will put your company at the front of the line. Everyone needs to feel a sense of accomplishment, and customers are no different. When you work alongside your customers, you are able to strengthen the relationship and create long-term loyalty.

About the Author:
Traci Hayner Vanover is an author, publisher, consultant and publicist, with over 20 years experience in the fields of sales, market research and promotion. Traci’s work has been featured in national magazines, books, ebooks, and websites. She is the publisher of Entrepreneur & Self-Employed Business Journal. When she’s not working on ESBJ, Traci works with private clients as a publicist, copywriter and consultant. You can visit her blog at http://promodiva.com.