Consistency is everything in business and in life. People aren’t fans of surprises when it comes to most things. If you can consistently do something great, you’re going to be valuable to someone. At the end of the day, we’re all in the business of consistency. The people and businesses who get good at this will be rewarded. We work exclusively with financial advisories and institutions to build better sales and marketing organizations by helping them get and close more leads.
We’ve got lots of clients, and different teams servicing them. In order to replicate a high standard of service throughout, we manage to, and measure, five very specific metrics.
Number one: The number. Are our clients meeting their monetary goals that were established at the onset of our relationship? This should be infinitely clear and is black and white. How much revenue should you be producing as a result of our work? It also makes our clients as accountable as we are.
Number two: The luxury of service. This is not black and white, but we expect our managers to be active and intuitive in regard to our level of service and our personal relationships. We live in a world where people expect fast and efficient service. This is a matter of commitment.
Number three: Comprehensive use of services. Are our clients utilizing the breadth of our services or just bits and pieces? If they’re not, they could be getting them elsewhere, and we could be in jeopardy, or worse, they might not be getting the full value of our services.
Number four: Depth of relationship. We call this our 3 by 3 rule, which means that we want to know at least three people within our client’s organization, and we want the client to know three people in ours. If you have a smaller staff, maybe it’s 2×2. The point is depth of relationships helps everyone.
And number five: The likelihood of referral. How likely would a client be to refer us to someone else? At the end of the day, this is a biggie, and the first four roll up into this one.
Every month we rate each of these five metrics for every client, and every one of them gets a score. We call it our Net Promoter Score. This allows us to do our best to keep everyone on the same page, staff and clients. We all share the same definition of what good is supposed to look like. It’s our way of keeping our brand reputation consistent and valuable.
If you have a growing business and want to sustain consistent growth, our advice is to be consistent with managing a set of metrics that you can measure. It takes discipline but will make your life easier, with fewer surprises.
About the Author: John grew up in Schenectady, NY & received a scholarship to Norwich Academy. He began his broadcast management career at WOR, learning spoken word marketing from the best in the business with a specialty in financial and long form. John managed broadcast sales for some of the best known sports teams in the world, at the most legendary stations. However his true passion is in the world of direct response advertising to baby boomers and their parents. In this space he has worked with some of the best brands in America. John lives in Boston with his wife, Melissa who is also a broadcast executive, and French Bulldogs Lou and Sal.
