Most people have heard the expression about treating someone like a mushroom, which means you keep them in the dark and feed them a lot of BS. While mushroom marketing is much the same whether intentional or not, frequently business owners are in the dark about what their marketing is really doing and there are various people feeding them BS. The BS can come in lots of forms which includes a lot of technical double talk from marketing vendors or from internal staff giving you their best guess about where new business is coming from, how new prospects are treated, or what isn’t working. This kind of feedback is subject to an enormous amount of prejudices, biases, or just a lack of any real insight. Most of these individuals are not being intentionally deceptive, but the business owner remains in the dark about what’s going on with their marketing.
One of the key ways to avoid mushroom marketing is to establish well-designed tracking mechanisms which would include having the ability to listen to new customer interactions and to determine if procedures are being followed properly. We frequently find that even well-intentioned employees are only as effective as the training, evaluating, and the feedback systems allow them to be. There’s an old business expression: “employees respect what the owner and managers inspect”. The most significant ways to show your employees the importance of customer service is to provide continuous and effective feedback. This should be a proactive activity on an on-going basis to avoid major reactions to a random negative comment or negative review on social media.
Mushrooms can be a great feature in a delicious meal, but it is no way to develop effective marketing. Here are a few suggestions to get rid of mushroom marketing in your business:
- When undertaking a digital marketing company or any marketing program, try to determine what your specific goals are and the measurement you’re going to use to determine their success. Determine in advance what data is available and what is the most relevant. Set up a system to get that information and ignore the rest.
- Have a call tracking system in place which includes call monitoring so you can hear the specific customer interactions. Have a systematic approach to taking a reasonable sample of all calls and use what you hear to provide constructive feedback and specific praise to individuals who are being effective.
- Have a consistent real-time customer satisfaction system to ensure that you’re hearing directly from your customers about how your company is doing. Use the KISS approach: “Keep It Simple Stupid”. Today’s consumers simply do not have the time or inclination to provide detailed feedback about every aspect of their experience with your company. Getting higher response levels with a few critical well-crafted questions is more than enough to give you the insight you need.
- Make sure that someone in the organization has a primary responsibility for ensuring that you’re getting this feedback and insight continuously.
If your entrepreneurial organization does not have the staff or expertise to consistently execute the above strategies, then hire a company who can. The team at Customer Focused Marketing Group keeps business owners out of the dark and in the know so that they can make calculated decisions regarding their marketing investments.
