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It’s a typical issue amongst businesses of all sizes, startups and franchises. It plagues the shopper experience, strains sales teams, and overcomplicates or creates unnecessary billing. What could have began with simplicity in mind after staying on the core of your messaging has became expanded service offerings, sometimes without clear reasoning or need. An overcomplication of services or products, typically by adding too many, depleting servicing of the core offerings, and other complications arise, removing the benefit of access and ease the core customer base has enjoyed. All can lead to a drop in sales, dissatisfaction, and, if prolonged, continued lack of market share.
Related: Why Simplicity Matters in Product Development
Why do businesses stray from simplifying their services?
Too many startups and businesses get stuck on this ongoing trap of trying to match competitors or pondering that more services or products increase sales. Competing franchises commonly do that with advantages and even services or products naming. The constant pull to innovate, offer and announce something recent, and be more top of mind to intended audiences can pull businesses into continuous change and unique offerings that distract from the wonderful, existing services already offered. Moreover, efforts towards brand realignment or placing your complete brand into recent messaging that aligns in another way from the core audience regarding values, market segment, or need may cause significant disruption and even PR nightmares.
What may be done to maintain a balanced service offering and customer experience?
There’ll all the time be a necessity to innovate, higher serve an existing customer base, and maintain market share in an ever-increasingly volatile market. Constant change will remain consistent. Nonetheless, that doesn’t mean that each brand’s response to change is a change of its own. Depending available on the market segment, consistency could be the best, most profitable strategy to stand out within the loud noise of change from competitors.
In business, and albeit, in life, there is usually nothing easier than reacting to change with more change. Change occurs for no reason, an impulse to change for the sake of change (without strategy), or change because someone (likely a competitor) is changing or revamping their offerings to the market. Simply because another person is embarking on change for the sake of change doesn’t mean what you are promoting also needs to change. Best steps first — map or remap your customer experience strategy.
Start with breaking down barriers in your current customer base. If a startup, an important a part of any customer experience strategy right after mapping how customers find you is how easy it’s for those potential customers to purchase first, purchase well (best fit for his or her needs), and buy again. Start to construct key messaging around how your startup fills a necessity higher than what’s currently available and the way your services are more accessible to utilize than anyone else. A part of that key messaging should include a commitment to consistency and reliability with systems that constantly offer simplistic processes. As a startup, you take market share from others for a reason. When growth happens, remember what first propelled that growth.
For an existing business through the startup phase, the magic happens when simplicity may be maintained. Recent employees have to be hired through launch and scale, and extra layers and systems are established. It is really easy to construct layers which have added complications. With each layer, a founder or CEO must understand that it represents one other wall between the shopper base and revenue. While it’s true that just some employees are customer-facing and even revenue-generating, their importance in keeping the business streamlined, simplistic, and consistent matters as much as hitting sales goals or keeping accounting up to date.
Related: Here’s Why You Should Embrace Simplicity as a Strategy (and three Ways to Do It)
Use simplicity as a sales strategy
Stop trying to be every thing to everybody. It is a phrase used often and commonly neglected. In case your startup or existing business is winning with clear key messaging, has a core audience that is still loyal and advocates in your brand, and scale looks like your brand continues to be a market leader for the solutions offered, don’t let up on that core. Use it as a selling point within the sales strategy your brand incorporates. Too often, sales techniques and selling points sound more like an encyclopedia than bullet points of solutions. Or worse, service offerings are only repackaged solutions already offered that only add complexity and don’t differentiate your brand from competitors.
A simplified sales strategy — including the sales funnel, offerings, and ease of customer access and journey through the sales process and repair after the sale — is rare. Think in regards to the last time you needed assistance from an enormous Fortune 500 call center or online support. If the shopper journey experience your brand has developed is a greater experience over rivals, use it in sales! Most have been dissatisfied with service from others previously, and it’s neglected by many in sales as a selling point.