3 Ways to Always Be Connecting

ABL - Always Be Listening

It is cliché but true: your customers are your greatest resource. There is a wealth of knowledge in what they tell you, not what they tell you, NOT what they say. 

Listen to your customers' problems, not their solutions. Customer solutions are imaginative but impractical, like shopping for a unicorn in a pet store.

Go beyond the problem to what they need and want.

ABR- Always Be Optimizing

Use two-week micro-goals sprints to optimize your consumer's journey. Combine sprints to create optimization cycles. The trick is to work backward from your primary KPI.

Let’s say you are a D2C company whose main point of sale is your website. The primary KPI you should optimize is conversion.

Sprint 1, optimize for Time On Product Page (TOPP) or whatever your leading conversion indicator is. See if increasing TOPP improves conversions.

Sprint 2, look at the results. If the conversations didn’t improve, rethink your assumptions. You just learned you don't know your consumer journey, a valuable lesson. Rethink and redo.

If it increases, optimize for the leading indicator of TOPP, usually page views. Rinse and repeat the process three times, and you will have a six-week optimization cycle. We have used this tactic with small companies and big brands.

ABE- Always Be Evolving

The landscape and market are changing fast, and you are either moving or going backward; there is no status quo. Take some time out every month with your core time, a few hours, to answer these questions:
What has changed?

How does it affect our consumers?

How does it affect people in general?

How does it affect us?