Enough is Enough: The Delicate Art of Customer Contact | VAR Business

Cristina McEachern

Are you driving away customers?

It’s a fine line between keeping up a solid relationship with your customers and potential leads and inundating them with sales calls and marketing materials that eventually annoy them so much they vow never to do business with you again.

The customers have spoken and according to VARBusiness’ Market Insight Report end-users are partial to the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” way of doing business. In fact, 62 percent of respondents said they use their third-party technology providers on a “call when needed” basis. While a little surprising, don’t be too worried because 45 percent say they also view their providers as a trusted advisor for all of their IT needs.

The catch becomes how to balance those two seemingly varied relationship qualities. It’s important to be there for the customer in a trusted advisor role, while at the same time taking care not to be too pushy about drumming up new business.

Jennifer Shine, president of Hoboken, N.J.-based eMazzanti Technologies, says her company has changed its approach to marketing materials and customer “touch.” Shine found that her traditional massive postcard or direct mailing campaigns weren’t really working and most likely customers were simply tossing out her communications.

Every way we touch the client has to bring value to them—either knowledge or training or something they can take away

So to keep up the relationship with customers, she’s changed her tune recently and focused more on providing value with each customer interaction. This means more events and a focused communication approach.

“We’re not just coming at them with a sales pitch, we’re trying to provide value for them in every touch,” says Shine. “Every way we touch the client has to bring value to them—either knowledge or training or something they can take away—so they’re never sitting there reading an advertisement.”

She relies on newsletters to communicate with customers and potential leads, but she makes sure they are industry-specific and that they include stories about how the customer does business as well as input from others in their line of business.

It’s the events that take the cake though. Shine says that when mass e-mails go out announcing new events, about 95 percent open the e-mail within the first ten minutes. Obviously her clients appreciate the high-value approach and are picking up the phone.