Establish Touch Points to Deliver the Wow! Experience

Channels are pipes that connect your products and services with your customers. They establish the touch points to deliver the customer experience.

In every industry, customers have channel preferences as well as an actual history of buying behavior. These preferences and behaviors define the outer boundaries of what could possibly work in terms of new channels. In order to establish the right touch points, there are three pieces of information that you should look for:

• How do customers purchase a specific product today—through which channels?

• How will customers purchase a specific product in twelve to eighteen months?

• How much flexibility exists in selecting a channel

You've already gathered answers to these question while drawing a detailed customer journey. Here, I'll present a four step process to distill this information into actionable program. The diagram below lays out the four-step process. It starts with a structured brainstorming session to identify all the channel possibilities, which are then weighed against the customer intelligence we gathered in the last step to align our channels with customer buying behavior.

Let’s look at each step in detail:

Brainstorm Possible Ways to Sell Your Product(s)

One common characteristic among all the companies that have limited, and limiting, ways of selling their products and services is that they fail to consider the full range of channel opportunities available to them. You don’t want to make this mistake. You want to look into every feasible channel opportunity, and carefully select the right ones. Here is a structured way to brainstorm these opportunities:

• Identify all of the channels that you are using today for different tasks in the sales process including lead generation, sales, support, service, and account management.

• List all the channels that your direct competitors are using. You can find this information right on their websites. You should also have some of this information from the research work you did in the last step.

• Look for comparable products in other industries and list all the channels that companies are using to sell them.

• Ask yourself these questions:

  • Who can sell our product? (offline/online retailer)

  • Who can sell our products to our retailers? (distributors)

  • Who is selling comparable products or services to our target market, and can we partner with them? (alliances)

  • Can we collaborate with our competitors to increase market size? (coopetition)

This structured thinking will give you a near-exhaustive list of channels that you can use to reach your target market. The list below shows a few possible channels that are available for a sample camera bag manufacturer—and channels that its competitors are using, as well as channels used to sell comparable products in other industries.

• In-house sales force

• Manufacturer's reps

• Distributors

• International distributors

• Retail camera store chain

• Offline and online camera rental shops

• Trade shows

• Box retail stores with photo printing services (CVS, Staples, Wal-Mart, etc.)

• Internet/eCommerce website

• Internet affiliate program

• Online bag retailers

• Camera stores with an online presence

• Holiday gift catalog

• Workshops hosted by individual photographers

• Photography schools

• Mail order

• and so on and so on…

As this simple list shows, there are many ways to reach more customers and deepen your relationships with existing customers using some very innovative channels. The challenge is how to narrow down this list to a practical set of go-to-market options. That’s what next two steps "Applying Customer Filters", and "Channelizing a Product" are for.

Related:

• Table of Content
• Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
  
• The Billionaire Code
  • Secret of World Class Companies
    
  • Impact of Using Secrets of World Class Companies
    
• Cracking the Code
  
  • Customer Experience
    
  • Customer Engagement Channels
    
  • From Multiple Channels to Integrated Multichannel Selling
    
  • Benefits of Integrated Multichannel Selling Models
    
  • Customer Relationship Lifecycle
  • Integrated Multichannel Selling Models
    
    • Reduced Costs
      
    • Improved margins
      
    • Broader market coverage
    • Rapid revenue growth
      
  • In Conclusion
    
• Implementation Plan
  • Renovation or Innovation?
    
  • Implementation Process
  • Baseline Current Go-To-Market Activities
    
  • Protect & Renew
    
    • You've Got Customers. Now What?
      
    • Net Promoter Score
      
    • Customer Profitability – A look from inside
      
    • Finding Treasures
      
    • Customer Life Time Value
      
    • Calculating Customer Life Time Value
      
    • Unearthing the Treasure
      
    • In Conclusion
      
  • Plan for New Sales
    
    • Targeting the Right Market
      
    • Market Segmentation
      
    • Prioritizing Target Markets
    • Align with Your Customers
      
    • Example of Customer Experience Mapping
      
    • Mapping Customer Experience
      
    • Drawing Customer Persona
      
    • Customer's Moments of Truth
      
    • Identifying Appropriate Levers to WOW Customers
      
    • Establish Channels to Deliver the WOW Experience

Reference:

• Six Disciplines for Excellence by Gary Harpst
• Co-opetition by Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff