Employee Influence

Marketing face-to-face can be difficult for many (most?) people. I know I feel a sense of envy when a door-to-door salesman appears completely at ease talking to me about their product on my front porch!

Welcome to Full Contact Marketing.

Full Contact Marketing is any face-to-face meeting with any (potential) customer. It can be door-to-door sales or working a trade show booth or taking orders over a counter. Often, Full Contact Marketing is considered just customer service.

But it is so much more!

Your poeple on the front lines represent your business brand more than any advertisement or PR campaign ever could. People relate to people. And if that relationship goes bad…

Front line people = Your brand

Are you inspecting your people before they go out to represent you? Do you offer coaching to help them polish their pitch, service and appearance? How can you inject confidense into your Full Contact Marketing program?

I used to work for an international chain of stores and by far the best experience was working under Melissa Fish. Melissa was a world-class manager who broke all company records moving from $0 - $100,000 per month in revenue in less than 6 months!

How did Melissa do it?

• Trust
• Clear job positions
• Clear chain of command
• Training!
• High expectations
• Transparency!
• Honest, open dialogue with every employee (even - especially? - the front line)
• Extra helpings of care

Melissa’s trust created an atmosphere of employee ownership. Nobody wanted to disappoint Melissa. Not because she was the boss. Because she was honest, strait-forward and opened the whole operation to every employee. We all felt like we made a difference. And we all learned how the business operated.

In those days I was surprised by the level of transparency at this one branch. I had worked at other locations and none of them had the same spirit of employee entrepreneurship that this one did.

In fact, when I left that job to return to school, my Introduction to Business course was a breeze because I already knew the topics, I only had to apply labels to them! My whole business career was jump-started by Melissa.

Melissa, if you are reading this, thanks!

PS. On the topics of “big picture” I’m taking this weekend off from posting in celebration of my wedding anniversary. See you next week!

“If you take care of your employees, your employees will take care of your customers, and profits will take care of themselves.”

J. Willard Marriott

My Business Professor loved this quote. He would bring it up often as an example of leadership that sees through the clutter.

When you are trying (fighting!) to reach a goal, it is tempting to “control the situation” instead of trust your people.

Tip: If you can’t trust your people, what is it about your leadership that needs work?

(Follow-up Tip: Get started on it right now!)