Merge

If you watched any football over New Year's weekend, you probably saw ads for Domino's Pizza Turnaround Campaign .  If you don't feel like watching the whole documercial, here's the synopsis, Domino's listened to customers that told them their pizza wasn't any good, so they changed it, "from the crust up," as they put it. (We'll actually look at the marketing effort behind the change in the Friday blog).  This became their company rallying cry, something they could circle the wagons around. This begs the question, would you change your core business principles if your clientele told you it wasn't good anymore?  Would take a lot of guts, wouldn't it?  What about the folks who actually like your pizza, do you risk alienating them?  I'm guessing Domino's only knew one thing for certain, that doing nothing would result in just that, nothing. 

But what if your customers don't say your offerings are bad, but you feel there is a better way?  Earlier this year we made this leap.  We didn't like our own pizza, so to speak.  We took a look around and decided we needed to do better.  Not different, better.  "Different can be kinda weird," to paraphrase Toby Stansell of Oobe from his great talk today at the Pulse Leadership Signature Series.  We agree.  We looked at the way websites had always been done, ie. build a pretty website for the client and "call us if you need us."  Our clients were happy, we delivered exactly what they wanted.  But what we noticed is that the largest growth came to those clients we spent the most time with after the site was launched.  They didn't just need a website or a pretty destination, they needed measurable outcomes and a partner to help achieve them. 

So we changed.  There was no public outcry that our product or service was awful, in fact we were doing very well, producing great sites and strategies for our clients, and they were happy.  But that wasn't good enough, we wanted bigger things for them, so the Partner Model was born.  From it, we have seen partners like Heavy Salvage and Regional Finance experience tremendous business growth.  We are also very excited about our new partners like Find Great People and LivN Nsidout, whose initial sites will be launching soon.  

Bottom Line:   The only way to see transformational growth is to actually transform--not just to be different, but to become better.