Letter on the Third — July, 2018
Dear Datamax Family,
Imagine taking a bowling ball and rolling it down the alley, but there’s a sheet over the pins. You know you hit some pins, but you don’t know which ones, or how many. This is similar to what happens when many companies – including us at one point – create competitive advantage statements without doing their homework.
All that changed for Datamax with the launch of our Competitive Advantage Program. With that in our grasp as a way to both measure and corroborate our talking points with clients, we then knew exactly which pins we hit, which we didn’t and, most importantly, how to improve in the next frame.
The journey to developing this program began about 5 years ago at a Copier Dealers Association (CDA) Meeting. Fellow dealer owners were discussing how much we were all struggling to differentiate ourselves, and what a competitive advantage really means. For example, “locally owned” is not a differentiator – a lot of people can say that. We brought in Jaynie L. Smith, author of “Relevant Selling,” to do a presentation for the CDA, and she asked us all a lot of questions like, ‘How do our customers buy?’ and ‘is that information the same as it is for prospects?’
From there, under Smith’s direction, we developed a list of 28 attributes we considered important to potential buyers: Everything from “correct billing” to “service response time” to “offers a Managed Services Program.” Next, a double blind survey was conducted for buyers from all over the nation to find which of those attributes ranked near the top.
At Datamax, we took Smith’s direction and dug even deeper to build our program. Robert Caldwell and his team took the top attributes (which included resolve their issues quickly, high speed response to their support/service requests and equipment repaired on the first visit) and developed a software program (DCAD) that literally tracks these metrics and more, for all of our locations. This process not only keeps us accountable, but it offers complete validation behind the message we’re sending to clients. We share these statistics on our website and discuss them out in the field all the time.
You can read all about how we developed our Competitive Advantage Program, and the metrics we utilize every day, in this month’s Rave Review here. But for me, this program is ingrained in our culture at Datamax, and something we all need to be aware of. It’s nice knowing not only that what we’re measuring matters most to customers, but also discovering areas we need to improve. As clients, they respect what we inspect.
The construction in East Texas continues. Phase Two of our renovation in Tyler is set to begin in July, and includes a remodel of the showroom, reception area as well as the conference room. We also held our health care roll-out plan meeting there last month, and looking forward to providing these benefits to all employees. We’re excited about these next steps in further integrating folks in Tyler, Longview and Lufkin.
As I always say, the best is yet to be. And that certainly includes our family in East Texas.
Your Raving Fan,
