Sales Laundry

Archive for April, 2009

How much time does your sales team spend on revenue producing activities?

 According to CSO Insights in their Optimization:2007 Survey Results and Analysis report the actual amount of time a sales person is actively engaged in selling averaged just under 36%.  My own experience would suggest that sales professionals’ time spent on revenue producing activities is closer to 30%.  The best run sales organizations that I have experience with engage in revenue producing activities, at best, no more than 50% of the time.

 If you don’t know where your sales team stacks up, it is time to measure.  If you find your sales team is engaged in revenue producing activities at or below 25% of the time, then there is a distinct possibility that you could almost double your revenue producing activities and lower your Cost of Sales considerably.

 If you find you have room for improvement, here are some of the most common things that eat a sales professional’s time.

 Building Proposals/Quotes – Look to offload this function to a non-sales role or to a low cost sales role where the proposal building experience could be used as a training tool.  If that does not make sense for your business, build common templates and boilerplate text to simplify the process as much as possible.  Think about your likelihood of winning a project vs. the amount of time you are going to spend on the RFP.

 Lead Generation – The same CSO Insights survey highlighted the fact that 18% of a sales professional’s time is spent generating leads.  This subtopic is worthy of several posts in and of itself.  If leads are being generated for sales within your organization, look at the quality and quantity of those leads.  A large quantity of poor leads is almost worse than no leads at all.

 Sales Meetings – Many sales meetings continue well beyond their expiration date. Is there a defined agenda for each meeting?  What items could be better communicated in a less time consuming way?  What items could be eliminated completely?  Eliminating four hours of meetings could give you 10% of your week back.

 Managing the Internal Sales Process – In the early days of my B2B sales career I spent as much as five hours a week walking a signed proposal through our internal processes, getting items ordered, following up on backordered items the order desk failed to tell me about, making sure all of the items arrived, setting up delivery, coordinating installation, making sure we invoiced for the correct items/amounts, making sure we had applied payments correctly to make sure my commission check would be correct and assisting with collections when it became necessary.

 Map your own internal processes and look for ways to streamline your workflow and get sales disengaged as much as possible from this process.

 CRM Software Data Entry/Retrieval – CRM software, when designed well CRM can be a fantastic tool.  Designed poorly, it can be an agony inducing, time sucking vortex that is worn like a boat anchor around the entire sales teams neck.  

 Work with your sales professionals and watch how valuable data is recorded and retrieved.  Look at the areas they use most frequently and the specific steps they go through to get to that data.  Does that process make sense?  If not, do your own ROI calculation on getting customizations done vs. the sales time lost.

 One Software-as-a-Service CRM package I have personal experience with could waste as much as five or ten seconds on every click as data moved back and forth across the web.  In my own pursuit of efficiency, I found that I was losing up to half an hour a day to those delays.

 Expense reports and other administrative paperwork – Look at all of the reports and paperwork you ask your sales professionals to create and ask yourself two questions.  Do we really need this report?  Does it make sense that our revenue producers are spending time on this as opposed to selling?  If it makes sense, great!  Carry on.  If not, look for ways to improve or eliminate the process.

 One more point before we wrap it up.  Finding, offloading or eliminating these non-revenue producing tasks is only half the battle.  Before you begin, establish a baseline of calls/meetings and other revenue producing events so you have a gauge on which to measure your progress. 

 Recovering five to ten hours a week for each sales professional to spend on revenue producing activities is only beneficial if they actually spend that time on revenue producing activities.  From my experience, you will need to break out your training hat and work with what could be up to 40% of your sales staff on the best ways to use the “extra” time.

 Every time I have done this exercise I have been amazed by some of the low value tasks that eat up enormous amounts of time and unnecessarily increasing my Cost of Sales.

 One more last, last point.  To maximize the benefits of this process, do not let this exercise turn into a micro management tool.  Remember your end objective is to increase “customer-facing revenue producing time” not “looking over my shoulder, wondering who is watching me time.”

 We have barely scratched the surface here but I hope this gets you thinking, measuring and doing.  If you have a “best practice” that helps you measure your revenue producing activity percentage or keeps you or your sales team engaged in revenue producing activities, I would love to hear about it.  As always, give me your thoughts and let’s get smarter together.

 Click here to learn more about CSOInsights and their annual studies.

Photo courtesy of http://fasteddie.wordpress.com

In training new people to become sales professionals and developing them into successful sales teams, or building sales engines as I like to call it, I have found that how you allocate your sales team is just as important as the training and development that gets them ready for a sales career in the first place.

The default way to allocate sales professionals seems to put the strongest relationship builders and highest income earners on the largest companies/named accounts in a territory, and then allocating the balance of the sales team in support of those large account representatives or scattering them across the remaining territory, engaged in outside sales, inside sales, or sales support typically based on their years of experience.

This approach can anger and annoy customers and prospects alike. This method can also be an incredibly inefficient way to field a sales team that unnecessarily raises Cost of Sales.

What if we divided sales teams not by the size of the customer but by the way a customer prefers to buy?

Your company has customers that could care less about your sales team or interacting with them because the customer knows your products and their applications as well as you do, perhaps better because they interact with your products every day. Does it make sense to deploy a “relationship building” sales professional or a dedicated sales team to this large customer and raise your Cost of Sales by providing your customer sales resources they do not want or value?

Nope.

Regardless of the client’s size, if they are ultimately only concerned about bottom line cost, then provide a method to purchase for them that meets their needs. Let them order through an inside sales representative or build a nice functional online purchasing mechanism that makes sense for you and will let them do business with you in a way they prefer.

For those clients that value the expertise of your sales professionals, big or small, deploy your relationship builders and subject matter experts, delivering the products your customer needs and the support the customer values and is willing to pay for.

If you are thinking ahead a bit, you might envision a scenario where a very expensive relationship building sales professional could be assigned to a small opportunity with a company valuing your expertise that could be as wildly unprofitable as anything we have mentioned previously.

Your right. So, don’t do that. You need more than a sledge hammer and a flyswatter in your bag of sales tools. Allocate internet sales, inside sales, junior account managers, senior account managers, Subject Matter Experts, Field Overlays and your Sales Top 10% where it makes the most sense for your customer and the most profit for you and your sales professionals.

The one guiding principle of this model that needs to be understood is that regardless of how sales people and resources are deployed, they must meet or exceed the accepted level of service the customer requires. Under deliver and you lose the customer, exceed their expectations beyond the point of where a customer cares and you are unnecessarily raising your Cost of Sales again.

Before you begin a full sales retreat and cut your head count or risk alienating your customers by trying removing some of the perks customers have come to expect from a relationship with you, I urge you to reassess how you sell your products. Is it possible to cut your Cost of Sales by reorganizing your sales team to sell the way your customer wants to buy and continue to grow your company while your competitors are running for cover? I don’t know, but I certainly hope you will tell me when you find out.

Image is the sales team for Microbizz and provided by Microbizz.

Before a decision to purchase is made, be it a newspaper or multi-million dollar project, a buyer has to evaluate the risks of making that purchase.

The basic types of risk are:

1. Physical Risk – The risk of injury by using the product or making the purchase.

2.Financial Risk – The chance you could lose money, or have to repair or replace an item.
3. Functional/Time Risk – The risk the item will not perform as expected or deliver the benefits promised or risk related to the passage of time and the possibility of rapid obsolescence.
4. Social Risk – The risk associated with what friends, co-workers, the boss, a spouse will think and do if a purchasing decision is made, including the risk of being fired from a job based on a purchasing decision. Hence the old tagline “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.”
5. Psychological Risk –The risk of experiencing “buyer’s remorse,” feeling bad, feeling guilty or other negative emotions for making a purchase decision.

All five of these risks are part of every purchasing decision. How you build your case to offset these risks for your buyer will determine how likely and how successful you are at closing the sale.

Bob Taska, a world class customer service driven car dealer, in his book “You Will Be Satisfied” took an interesting approach to eliminate some or all of all five risks when the quality of cars coming from Lincoln-Mercury were showing up on his lot with more than a few defects attributed to poor assembly from 1967 through the early 1980′s. He began a practice of what he called “blueprinting” the new cars, or rebuilding each car to the manufacturers design specifications. He advertised and sold his “blueprinted” cars at a 5% premium to cover his costs, developed a unique product, eliminated the risks associated with buying a Lincoln-Mercury at the time, developed a loyal following, and earned enough credibility to sell his cars from that point forward without the typical haggling associated with a car purchase.

Assess the Risks of Doing Business with You

Take a step back and look at your company, your brand, your products, your service, sales team, your overall reputation and what your customers are saying, accurate or not, identifying your strengths and weaknesses in each risk category from your perspective. Then repeat the exercise from a customer or likely prospects perspective.

Depending upon your sales cycle, you may want to look deeper than just the prospect you are meeting with. Will your prospect need additional risk mitigating information to defend his or her purchasing decision or materials they can use to help sell your solutions internally to people you may or may not have access to?

It would be a mistake to lump your company, your staff and your products together as you make your assessment. Weigh each one (Company, Product Category, Team, Product) separately to get a more honest assessment as strengths in one area may offset weaknesses in other areas.

Example 1: The strength of the IBM brand could offset some of the risk associated with a new, never heard of computer product. On the other hand, the IBM name would not carry much weight if that new product was a loaf of bread.

Example 2: A trusted sales professional could add credibility to a product with his long term clients by putting his/her stamp of approval on the product just as a less-than-reputable sales professional could add so much risk for a potential prospect that they would not even want to hear about the product.

Example 3: Toyota’s strength in building quality cars and being dominate in the electric/hybrid car category, thanks to the Prius, would most likely offset some risk associated with a brand new electric/hybrid car.

Example 4: The (social) risk I place on buying a $10 toy for my daughter is medium because I am concerned about buying something she will like, that will not be a waste of money (financial risk – medium.) The risk my 8 year old daughter places on buying a $10 toy is high, because it takes her a while to earn $10 (financial risk – high) and she has few opportunities to go to the store and shop (psychological risk – medium to high, functional/time risk – high,) and her friends might make fun of her when they hear about it (social risk – high) so it takes her a long time to make a buying decision. If there is a Pogo stick or Rollerblades involved, now there is physical risk to contend with as well.

How Risky is it to do Business with You?

Risk is part of life and certainly part of the purchasing decision. Take the time to make an honest assessment of the risks of doing business with your company from the prospects perspective and uncover the areas where you might be vulnerable.

What can you do to eliminate the risks associated with your products or services? How can you add enough “credibility” to your new company to outweigh the risks of doing business with you vs. a name brand leader in your field?

I would really like to hear what you come up with. Need some ideas? I am just a quick email away val {at} saleslaundry.com.

Image courtesy of thesituationalist.wordpress.com

NOTE:  This article was written by Alex Kjerulf on his site PositiveSharing.com.  It is a point of view you don’t hear very often and worth the read so I tacked it on the wall here.  

When the customer isn’t right – for your business

One woman who frequently flew on Southwest, was constantly disappointed with every aspect of the company’s operation. In fact, she became known as the “Pen Pal” because after every flight she wrote in with a complaint.

She didn’t like the fact that the company didn’t assign seats; she didn’t like the absence of a first-class section; she didn’t like not having a meal in flight; she didn’t like Southwest’s boarding procedure; she didn’t like the flight attendants’ sporty uniforms and the casual atmosphere.

Her last letter, reciting a litany of complaints, momentarily stumped Southwest’s customer relations people. They bumped it up to Herb’s [Kelleher, CEO of Southwest] desk, with a note: ‘This one’s yours.’

In sixty seconds, Kelleher wrote back and said, ‘Dear Mrs. Crabapple, We will miss you. Love, Herb.’

The phrase “The customer is always right” was originally coined by Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridge’s department store in London in 1909, and is typically used by businesses to:

1. Convince customers that they will get good service at this company
2. Convince employees to give customers good service

Fortunately more and more businesses are abandoning this maxim – ironically because it leads to bad customer service.

Here are the top five reasons why “The customer is always right” is wrong.

1: It makes employees unhappy

Gordon Bethune is a brash Texan (as is Herb Kelleher, coincidentally) who is best known for turning Continental Airlines around “From Worst to First,” a story told in his book of the same title from 1998. He wanted to make sure that both customers and employees liked the way Continental treated them, so he made it very clear that the maxim “the customer is always right” didn’t hold sway at Continental.

In conflicts between employees and unruly customers he would consistently side with his people. Here’s how he puts it:

When we run into customers that we can’t reel back in, our loyalty is with our employees. They have to put up with this stuff every day. Just because you buy a ticket does not give you the right to abuse our employees . . .

We run more than 3 million people through our books every month. One or two of those people are going to be unreasonable, demanding jerks. When it’s a choice between supporting your employees, who work with you every day and make your product what it is, or some irate jerk who demands a free ticket to Paris because you ran out of peanuts, whose side are you going to be on?

You can’t treat your employees like serfs. You have to value them . . . If they think that you won’t support them when a customer is out of line, even the smallest problem can cause resentment.

So Bethune trusts his people over unreasonable customers. What I like about this attitude is that it balances employees and customers, where the “always right” maxim squarely favors the customer – which is not a good idea, because, as Bethune says, it causes resentment among employees.

Of course there are plenty of examples of bad employees giving lousy customer service. But trying to solve this by declaring the customer “always right” is counter-productive.

2: It gives abrasive customers an unfair advantage

Using the slogan “The customer is always right” abusive customers can demand just about anything – they’re right by definition, aren’t they? This makes the employees’ job that much harder, when trying to rein them in.

Also, it means that abusive people get better treatment and conditions than nice people. That always seemed wrong to me, and it makes much more sense to be nice to the nice customers to keepthem coming back.

3: Some customers are bad for business

Most businesses think that “the more customers the better”. But some customers are quite simply bad for business.

Danish IT service provider ServiceGruppen proudly tell this story:

One of our service technicians arrived at a customer’s site for a maintenance task, and to his great shock was treated very rudely by the customer.

When he’d finished the task and returned to the office, he told management about his experience. They promptly cancelled the customer’s contract.

Just like Kelleher dismissed the irate lady who kept complaining (but somehow also kept flying on Southwest), ServiceGruppen fired a bad customer. Note that it was not even a matter of a financial calculation – not a question of whether either company would make or lose money on that customer in the long run. It was a simple matter of respect and dignity and of treating their employees right.

4: It results in worse customer service

Rosenbluth International, a corporate travel agency, took it even further. CEO Hal Rosenbluth wrote an excellent book about their approach called Put The Customer Second – Put your people first and watch’em kick butt.

Rosenbluth argues that when you put the employees first, they put the customers first. Put employees first, and they will be happy at work. Employees who are happy at work give better customer service because:

• They care more about other people, including customers
• They have more energy
• They are happy, meaning they are more fun to talk to and interact with
• They are more motivated

On the other hand, when the company and management consistently side with customers instead of with employees, it sends a clear message that:

• Employees are not valued
• That treating employees fairly is not important
• That employees have no right to respect from customers
• That employees have to put up with everything from customers

When this attitude prevails, employees stop caring about service. At that point, real good service is almost impossible – the best customers can hope for is fake good service. You know the kind I mean: corteous on the surface only.

5: Some customers are just plain wrong

Herb Kelleher agrees, as this passage From Nuts! the excellent book about Southwest Airlines shows:

Herb Kelleher [...] makes it clear that his employees come first — even if it means dismissing customers. But aren’t customers always right? “No, they are not,” Kelleher snaps. “And I think that’s one of the biggest betrayals of employees a boss can possibly commit. The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.’”

If you still think that the customer is always right, read this story from Bethune’s book “From Worst to First”:

A Continental flight attendant once was offended by a passenger’s child wearing a hat with Nazi and KKK emblems on it. It was pretty offensive stuff, so the attendant went to the kid’s father and asked him to put away the hat. “No,” the guy said. “My kid can wear what he wants, and I don’t care who likes it.”

The flight attendant went into the cockpit and got the first officer, who explained to the passenger the FAA regulation that makes it a crime to interfere with the duties of a crew member. The hat was causing other passengers and the crew discomfort, and that interfered with the flight attendant’s duties. The guy better put away the hat.

He did, but he didn’t like it. He wrote many nasty letters. We made every effort to explain our policy and the federal air regulations, but he wasn’t hearing it. He even showed up in our executive suite to discuss the matter with me. I let him sit out there. I didn’t want to see him and I didn’t want to listen to him. He bought a ticket on our airplane, and that means we’ll take him where he wants to go. But if he’s going to be rude and offensive, he’s welcome to fly another airline.

The fact is that some customers are just plain wrong, that businesses are better of without them, and that managers siding with unreasonable customers over employees is a very bad idea, that results in worse customer service.

So put your people first. And watch them put the customers first.

Early into my sales career I found myself working in a regional electronics and appliance store trying to figure out how to sell the stuff I was surrounded by but had ignored my whole life growing up, appliances.

The #1 reason I wanted to know how to sell appliances was not for the noble purpose of being a knowledgeable source of information for customers; it was for a far more selfish reason, I wanted to beat Davis.

Even on my first day as a trusty new representative, I could see Davis was not a man to be trusted. He had shifty eyes, a smirk like he knew something you didn’t, and a good decade of experience on the rest of us. Picture Snidely Whiplash without the top hat.

Davis was the number one sales rep my first month at the store. He was also number one each and every month he had ever worked there. He was a selling machine and was being paid stupid money compared to the rest of the sales team.

How could a guy that looked about as trustworthy as a snake in a cage full of furry mice continually outsell every other guy on the floor? Why didn’t the customers see right through that stupid grin?

Trying to figure it out, I asked each and every other rep what they thought his secret was before my first two months was at an end.

“He just lies and tells them stuff to get the sale.”

“He has been here so long he has repeat customers that wait for him.”

“He steals sales on your day off.”

“The owner throws extra special customers his way.”

“Customers just don’t understand what a shyster he is.”

“He has good product knowledge.”

And finally…

“He is just good.”

It seemed easy to believe the repeat customer part, or that he had built up a client base that would come back to see him, but that did not make sense if he was lying to every customer he sold to.

The only thing I could see as a tangible difference was his product knowledge, so I set about learning about every item in the store. Anytime a manufacturer’s rep would come in the store I would quiz him about every feature and benefit to every box in the building that we carried.

I studied owner’s manuals (this was long before the Internet) and product sales literature. I watched the TV commercials to see how they were pitching the products. I even went to other appliance stores to watch reps, ask questions, and in general try to be an information sponge.

Finally, after six months of careful painstaking study I knew the story and feature set behind every product in the building and I thought for certain the very next month would spell the end of Davis’ streak of consecutive months at being number one.

I beamed with pride the first day of the month because I crushed Davis’ totals. I sold $2000 worth of merchandise, Davis sold $359 worth. Of course, it was a hollow victory, as that had been Davis’ day off and his one sale was a customer coming back with his card to buy a TV.

Day two, though, I was ready. I had a two pronged attack planned. I had massive product knowledge and I was fast, so I could out run Davis to the customers. I was certain with knowledge and speed combined, Davis would be doomed.

Davis crushed me.

Day 3. Davis crushed me.

Day 4. I was off. Davis crushed me.

Day 5. I was working. Davis crushed me.

With few moments of triumph, which I had already accomplished a time or two before I set my new strategy in play, that is how the entire month played out.

Finally, I decided Davis must have access to product knowledge through his experience I just did not know, so I decided to ask him how to sell Maytag washing machines, because Davis sold them better than anybody and they were expensive compared to the other brands for the most part.

What Davis said that day changed my perception of sales every subsequent day for the rest of my sales life.

He said “When a customer likes the Maytag’s, I sell them a Maytag. When a customer likes the Kitchenaid, I sell them a Kitchenaid.”

Don’t worry; it took me a bit of thinking to unlock the brilliance of that statement as well, so I followed up his statement with a very succinct question.

“Huh?” David laughed at me, looking at me like I was a little boy playing a game for the grownups.

“When the customer likes the Maytag, I tell them about how the small agitator in the Maytag washer is easy on their cloths, because friction with the agitator makes the cloths wear out more quickly. Maytag moves the water through the cloths, not the clothes through the water. Plus they are easy to repair yourself with front access and pieces that are user serviceable.” He said. “When a customer likes the Kitchenaids, I explain how the large agitator in the washer does a fantastic job of churning the cloths and scrubbing them clean as Kitchenaids move the cloths through the water and there are no belts that need replacing like there are on the Maytag’s. Get it?”

“Yes.” I said. I lied. It took even more thinking that night to figure out what he just said then it hit me like, like, like a truckload of Maytag washing machines.

I realized I had done all the research; from Consumer Reports to vendor reps and manuals, etc. and I had decided, based on my expert opinion, which products were the best and those were the ones I tried to sell everyone. If they did not see the brilliance of my logic, I would continue to whack them over the head with facts demonstrating why I was smarter than them and why they should pick the product I was recommending.

As a result I only sold customers I could shoehorn into what I thought was best, and I was taking way too long with the ones that were not listening, meaning Davis was selling more and getting to more customers.

Davis would steal a sale or two on your day off if you would let him, but he never tried to swim upstream with a customer unnecessarily to get them to buy what he thought was best. To his credit, the one the customer bought was the best one because that was the one that got him paid, not the guy at the appliance store across the street.

If you are selling multiple brands of essentially the same basic product, try to understand what each individual brand of that product type is trying to hang their hat on, so to speak.

There will be products selling on no other value than being the lowest price in the category, there will be products that try to offer a unique feature or service that they will try to differentiate themselves with and there will be the top of the line, feature rich models.

Which one should you sell? All of them. Ask your qualifying questions and listen to the answers. Let their needs and wants drive what you sell, not some preconceived notion of what you think is best.

Listen then educate, never dictate or pontificate.

I love cheesy sales one liners.

Image courtesy of newsday.com

For your 3 minutes today I will show you one consistent way to come across a little smarter to your prospect in a meeting and how to put them a little more at ease.  Planning is part of the conversation, so with that I am kicking us off with one of my favorite quotes on the subject of planning.   

 “You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan–even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all part of the plan.”

-          The Joker (Heath Ledger) “The Dark Knight” 2008

Everyone, prospects included, likes to know there is a plan.  Everyone is happier, still, when they know what the plan is.  It must be hard wired in our DNA somewhere.

 Plans are everywhere.  Go to church?  They give you a church bulletin that lists everything that is going to happen, and we feel better knowing.

 Getting the car repaired?  As soon as we give them the keys we want a plan.  We want to know what they are going to do to it and when it will be ready.

 Going in for Surgery?  It is not quite as frightening when the doctor tells us his plan.  The same is true for every aspect of life, right down to our economy.  When everything falls to pieces and chaos ensues we move to the brink of panic until there is a plan to rally around, no matter how miserable the plan is.

 Want to seem a little bit smarter on your next account call?  Pre-plan the sales call.

Want to look like an expert and put your prospect a little more at ease?  Pre-plan your sales call and explain the details of the plan to your prospect up front and get natural human nature working in your favor.

Example: 

“Hello, Mr. Jones.  It is great getting a chance to meet with you today.  I have done some research, but if you don’t mind, I would like to ask you a few questions to get a better understanding.  Is that alright?”

 “Sure.”

 “Great.  I’ve got five or six basic questions that will fill in some gaps for me and give me a better understanding of your company.  That should take us about 15 minutes, depending upon your answers.  After that we should spend about 20 minutes drilling down into some specifics and identify a few areas where we might be able to help one another, leaving the balance of our time to wrap up any loose ends.  Do you have any questions before we get started?”

 When I was taught this it was called the Predict and Prove Method or the Sandwich Technique.  The objective is to predict the basics of what will occur in the meeting, prove your prediction by executing the meeting properly, and then following up at the end to confirm the fulfilled prediction with your prospect.  End result?  You look smarter and your client is not wondering where or when your sales odyssey will end.

 Got it?

 Good.  See you Monday.

 “I love it when a plan comes together!”

– Col. John “Hannibal” Smith (George Peppard) “The A-Team” 1983

Yesterday I wrote about looking at what you sell with new eyes and finding ways to simplify the buying process for your customer.  To spur your creativity I am going to tell you what another company is doing to simplify a process they invented.

For years, I have written off Domino’s pizza as “college pizza” or the pizza you order when you are too broke to order anything else.  After looking online for pizza delivery one night, I decided to give Domino’s a shot for nostalgia purposes alone.

 What I found on their site was an evolution of Domino’s original pizza delivery model, making plain old pizza delivery arguably more personal, more consistent and flat out easier on the buyer.  I got my pizza and another great example of making buying easy all in 30 minutes or less and I am happy to say their idea was more innovative than finding a new place to stuff cheese.

Domino’s pioneered pizza delivery and in the process brought about the age old process of keeping a stack of expired pizza coupons in the drawer by the telephone, scouring the coupon sections of telephone books, calling in and asking about the specials, placing your order and getting the standard 40 minutes to an hour estimated delivery time.  Domino’s changed all that by integrating online ordering like their competitors, but unlike their competitors, they developed the “Pizza Tracker” (see image.)  

Click Thumbnail for Full Size Image

 I was able to build my pizza with a simple graphic interface; my coupon was automatically deducted from my purchase price, I confirmed my order and paid in less than two minutes.  It was an easy process that started delivering unexpected value for me as soon as the “Pizza Tracker” loaded up.

 The “Pizza Tracker” tells me that Li is doing the prep work on my pizza and shows my pizza moving from the Prep phase through the Bake phase and Box phase.  At 5:21 Li hands my pizza off to Scott who departs the store at 5:23 and arriving at my house at 5:33 with a ring of the doorbell.  

•  No more calling. 
• No more errors relaying the order. 
• No more coupons to track.
• No more wondering where your pizza is.
• No more calling back an hour later realizing they forgot your order or made it carry out by mistake.
• As a bonus, you get the names of the people that are working to make and deliver your pizza.

 The pizza met my expectations, it was the easiest order I have ever placed, and I got unexpected value out of the “Pizza Tracker” feature that was just part of the transaction.  Getting to see my order processed in real time by real people made me feel more confident that my order was going to be correct, and get to me on time.   More importantly, I will likely be back to order again.

Not resting on their success, Domino’s has found yet another way to simplify the pizza purchase process.  Forget the computer, that is so 400 words ago, now all I need is a remote and my TiVo.

 If Domino’s can improve the art of pizza delivery, how can you improve the process of buying your product for your customer?  Can you make a change that brings a measurable competitive advantage and wins additional loyalty from your customer base?

 *Domino’s Pizza is the world’s largest pizza delivery company with 19% of the domestic pizza delivery market, inventing the pizza delivery category.  Pizza Hut, largest company by sales, holds 17% of the domestic pizza delivery market, Papa John’s nails down third with a comfortable 10%.  Source: Domino’s Investor Presentation – April 2008