Getting Closer to the Customer
April 18, 2025
Phil Krone
Please join us Wednesday, November 1, 2006 in downtown Chicago for a free workshop that will help you Get Closer to Your Customer .
Bernard Liebowitz, Ph.D, of Liebowitz and Associates and Philip Krone, President of Productive Strategies, Inc. , will discuss how you can use strategies to form solid, long-lasting relationships with your valued customers.
Philip Krone’s presentation uses case studies from his thirty plus years of marketing experience to demonstrate highly-effective strategies he and his clients have used to foster customer intimacy. Topics include:
- Overcoming commoditization
- Strengthening the core business
- Selecting customer intimacy as a leadership discipline
- Using customer research to reposition the offering
- Using disintermediation as a strategy
- Using advisory boards
- Attaching value to a product or service
- The role of sales skills in supporting all of the above
Bernie Liebowitz will discuss the execution to support the strategies selected by your company. Points of discussion include:
- Knowing who your customers are
- Structuring your company to get closer to the customer
- Managing your customer performance grid
- Ensuring buy-in from everyone in your company
- Eliminating the Sales/Manufacturing conflict
- How structure supports your value-added services
The program begins at 7:30 a.m. with a continental breakfast at The Union League Club, 65 W. Jackson, Chicago, IL. The program will conclude at 10 a.m. There is not cost for this workshop.
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Asking the questions that give you the confidence you need to win in sales.
This faith-based not-for-profit achieves 40 percent year-over-year growth for 17 years by applying well-known business principles, one in particular. Why can so few businesses even dream of such growth?
Are you selling business to business or business to government or both? There are similarities but also differences that need to be recognized to optimize your results.
Last year after a talk I gave at the Small Business Expo on Business to Business Selling (B2B) , a woman asked for my card because she wanted to meet to tell me about her business and learn more about mine. When we eventually got together she shared that her start-up company’s goal was to console consumers who had suffered the loss of a loved one directly, as she had. But my talk had inspired a new idea: assist funeral homes to improve their services by showing more empathy to their customers who were struggling as she was. I sensed that my talk gave her confidence that, despite the challenges, her business could succeed. What I didn’t realize was that this small assignment for a start-up would eventually have such a big impact on her business as well as an industry.
To date we have covered the Sales, Information, Tactical, and Marketing Plan Levels. Although the fifth level is the last to be discussed, it is often what sets a business in motion when it is founded. Today we will illustrate marketing to support a vision by discussing two very successful businesses.
As a reminder, the Five Levels of Marketing are (1) Sales, (2) Information/Data/Analytics, (3) Tactical or Campaign, (4) Marketing or Program, and (5) Vision/Strategic. We’ve explored each of the first three levels in separate columns in August, September, and October. They are available on our website's Productive Insights collection.
Using intelligence from prior levels leads to revenue-building sales campaigns on the ground in real time.
Tracking key types of data each month provides insights that can build a highly productive marketing plan.
The Five Levels -
Sales: Prospecting, qualifying, discovery, presentation, demonstration, proposal writing and closing; Information/Data/Analytics; Tactical or Campaign; Marketing or Program; Vision/Strategic
If you believe you have ADHD, you can be more successful by scheduling fewer first meetings and spending that time on more second and third meetings with qualified prospects. For our client, that meant cancelling half the medical CFO conventions his sales rep was planning to attend and investing more time following up with the CFO prospects he had already met. When your discovery is not productive, step back and restart at the point the discussion began to be about whose system is better. That’s an argument you are not going to win. Don’t waste years in prospect meetings in which you ask the same questions every time and get the same answers. Either decide that your product or service isn’t right for this prospect and move on—or broaden your discovery to find a need behind the need. In this hospital case, the hidden need was a fear that because no outside vendors had audited their system they might be in violation of regulations that an outsider would spot right away.