Page 71 - 25148.pdf

Four Greatest Ideas for Keeping In Touch with Your Market • 59

Publish a newsletter or refer your customers and prospects to one on a Web
page. It takes time and you have to work hard at it so that it does not become
actually or perceptively out of date. People tend not to read a company de-
scription on a Website that has not been updated for a year or more.

Idea 39 - Get everyone to talk to customers regularly

The way to keep every member of your staff in touch with reality is to allow veryfew
of them to be completely unexposed to customers. You can do this individually by
insisting that your product developer attends customer progress meetings, for ex-
ample, or en masse by inviting the customer to come and speak at the annual com-
pany get together. I have seen engineers, for example, completely transform the way
they think about their work when they are given a real insight into what the custom-
ers are trying to do, and how they look at your offerings.

Do you know how to get very expensive advertising space free of charge? Easy -
when you, or anyone of yours, are meeting someone at an airport always display a
professional placard with the name of your company on it. Do it even if you are
meeting your mother. If you do this for 20 minutes at Heathrow, for example, some
300 influential business people will have read your company name.

Idea 40 - Speak to the press

The trade press, and indeed the national press, are always looking for stories. They
have a lot of white space to fill regularly. Feed them what you can. Study the trade
press and get to know the journalists. Eventually they will start to ask you for com-
ments on stories they have got from an alternative source. This gives you a profile
outside your organisation and is good for improving your 'gravitas'. To my knowl-
edge, and astonishment, a mention in the British Airways in-flight magazine is read