The New Rules
I recently had the pleasure of visiting with a client in Schenectady, NY. This very traditional American city was both the birthplace of my father and where my grandfather began his lifetime of employment at General Electric. It turns out that holding down a steady job as a mechanical engineer all through the great depression molded my grandfather into a very loyal employee.
Driving past the Schenectady plant and then seeing dozens of historical pictures displayed at numerous downtown merchants got me to thinking. It appears that the GE campus where he began has not changed much in the decades since. At least the old sepia tone pictures look an awful lot like the place appears today. However, I have to believe that there are a number of things that are different at least regarding how customer interactions are managed. They did not have self-service web portals, predictive analytics, or automated lead routing back then. And, I know for a fact that GE does today.
The drive back from Schenectady to Boston is fairly long, and that gave me ample time to think some more. What I ended up with was the conclusion that there are actually a whole bunch of things that are different today with regard to managing customer interactions than before, but you don’t need to go back a century to find the differences, things have changed intensely in just the last few years.
And to take this one step further, things aren’t just different – the rules have changed! Companies have to manage the process of attracting and retaining customers far differently for today’s college grads entering the job market as compared to the way they needed to be managed as those same grads were just getting out of high school. I hope the professors at the B schools have been keeping up because we are not driving our father’s Oldsmobiles any more.
Is anybody keeping track of the new rules for marketing and selling? Just four years ago not that many people were doing a Google search to buy CRM, but they are doing it today with wanton abandon. Somewhere in that example of buying behavior is a new rule. Bounce back rate wasn’t a household term back then either, but it is becoming normal talk at the dinner table these days. That means that marketing rules have changed in some way. Shortly resumes are going to be a mainstay on YouTube, and I’m not talking in .pdf format. Finding new sales reps for your team is going to require a movie critic rather than a recruiter.
The rules have changed, and some of them are changing at a rate that is hard to adapt to. Stay tuned – I am going off in search of the new rules and I’ll be sending postcards from the edge.