The Scottsdale Chamber’s kickoff event of Next Steps Scottsdale – Help Shape Tomorrow’s Scottsdale is tomorrow, September 15 from 7:00am – 1:30pm at the Doubletree Paradise Valley Resort.

Building an Action Plan for Economic Growth

Great places reinvent themselves. Great places reflect a set of core principles derived from the community itself. Great places address their immediate challenges in light of the greater goal. Scottsdale must not just be great now but rather must be great in perpetuity. Mediocrity is unacceptable.

 Great places also shine a light on what is happening, everyday.  That is why the launch of the Scottsdale Airpark Business News portal AirparkBiz is so timely. 

 Be sure to check out www.AirparkBiz.com to get the latest on what is happening at Next Steps Scottsdale and beyond, as well as the business events shaping the Scottsdale Airpark.

Did you know that the Scottsdale Airpark is the second largest economic center in Arizona?  And some project that it will be the largest by the end of 2011.

You probably would not know that based on the lack of consistent business news coverage that the Scottsdale Airpark receives. 

Well, those days are over now with today's launch of the Scottsdale Airpark Business News portal:

www.AirparkBiz.com

Check it out.  Porvide feedback.  Enter your company on the directory.  Submit news items about your company.  It's time we all really knew what business was going on in the Airpark.

The same scenario plays itself out around twice a week.  Four of us from the office decide to go out to lunch together.  We invariably look at each other and say "Where do you want to go?"  And then there is a moment of silence since no one wants to choose.  Finally someone says "pizza" and then another says, "No, I had that last night." 

We have been to roughly a dozen restaurtants in the area and typically frequent five of them.  Question: Where are the messages from these restaurants (email or text), telling us about their specials, deals, new items, chances to win prizes - anything???

Then we let the driver choose, walk in, sit down, order, eat, pay and leave and NO ONE at the restaurant tries to engage us, learn more about us, or try to get our contact info.  Do they even want our repeat business?

There are too many options and most restaurants are doing nothing to stand out and become a first choice when we ask the question, "Where do you want to go."

I love my wife.  I want to be loyal and keep her.   And part to of me also has NO desire to be out there marketing myself.

Funny enough if you think about it, most marketing and sales campaigns are designed for the new customer. 

But have you considered the following?

• 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your customers and clients
• On average, companies lose 10% of their customers each year
• 68% of past customers said they left because they did not feel loved
• Acquiring new customers can cost as much as 5 times more than retaining current customers
• A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect as decreasing costs by 10%
• Reducing your customer defection rate by 5% can increase your profitability by 125%

 Plus, customer profitability tends to increase over the life of a retained customer.

 Let’s hear it for loyalty and retention! 

It’s time to rethink our marketing and sales strategies, and the marketing systems that we use to drive our strategies.

I was speaking to my teenager over the summer about college.  He was saying how he was excited and ready to for school to start.  I said great and began to ask him questions about his ID, payment of classes, books, length of commute, traffic, parking availability, parking passes, etc.  Basic questions.  He became uncomfortable and we sat down and began to find the answers.

Recently I have been speaking to executives about what they feel about the state of their business.  Most are excited and ready for success as the economy recovers.  I usually say great and then begin to ask:

• Does 80% of your revenue come from 20% of your customers?
• How would you describe your best customer?
• Are you making a profit on the bottom 20% of your customers?
• What is your conversion rate of prospects to customers?
• What does it cost your company to find a new customer?
• What is your customer satisfaction level?
• What is your customer retention?
• What percent of your customers have left in the past five years?
• Why have these customers left?

Ok, these are basic sales and marketing questions.  But, how many executives have you met over the years would be able to give even reasonable answers to these questions? 

Now the real question is: Are they actually going to find the answers and then do something with that information?

It used to be simple.  Build a cool web site and maximize your SEO (search engine optimization) and your customers would find you when they were browsing for a particular product or service. 

In case you haven’t heard, the web is dead.  No, not the internet as Prince proclaimed, but the web is dead.  Our lives are now focused on apps that simply use the internet for delivery.  Think about it; Facebook, Twitter, podcasts, RSS feeds, Skype, IM, streaming movies, etc.  We are now about getting, and less about browsing.

Most companies are good at what they do.  They make a good product and/or provide a good service.  But most are not good at the fundamentals of business.  As Peter Drucker said, “Business is about creating and keeping a customer.” 

So how does a business create a customer in this new environment?  How are you going to crack these semi-closed platforms?  I can tell you, it isn’t easy and it’s getting harder.  But it can be done.

 Just when you thought you were figuring it out, the rules change.  The smart companies realize this and adapt.  They focus on their core competencies and align themselves to take advantage of it.

Ok, so IBM wants to build a smarter planet.  And I have to give them props – IBM gets it.  Data does matter.  It is the way to making smarter decisions.  It is “better than guesswork, more accurate than intuition, the stuff of great insight”.

 According to IBM, “Every day we are creating 15 petabytes of new data. That’s 8 times as much data as there is in all of the libraries in the United States combined.”  Ok. I am sufficiently overwhelmed.  I do not have the desire to try to make sense of that, nor do I have the means to pay IBM to make sense of it for me.

But unfortunately most end up doing nothing with data and still rely on the guesswork and intuition.  You know the old adage, “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.”  Well, how do you analyze 15 petabytes of data?  One byte at a time. 

I say crawl . . .walk . . .run.  Start small and see real ROI.  Use real objective data to find out the cost of keeping a customer, the cost of finding a customer, or the effectiveness of your last marketing campaign.  Capturing data, engaging with clients and analyzing information is not scary, and there are affordable solutions that exist today. 

Building a smarter planet is a wonderful goal, but right now I think most people would rather just start with making a smarter marketing decision.