The Small Touch That Makes A Big Difference

A young sales executive gets the break of their career. They have a meeting with a new customer for an account that could be worth £20m a year. On the last leg of their journey to visit the customer, they hire a chauffeur who will drive them from the airport to their destination. They have one hour to finally prepare and compose themselves before meeting the buyer. They sit in the car and try to focus but the driver is chatty. He doesn’t stop talking about his weekend of hell shopping with his wife and is oblivious to his passenger’s despair.

Quite often a travel agent or a PA will use the Internet to book a chauffeur-driven car for an executive who is travelling on business. Most of the time, the only thing they have to rely on is the presentation of the chauffeur companies' web site. It can be a daunting task and it can be very easy to find someone who looks acceptable enough and then proceed with the booking.

A good question to ask however is whether the chauffeur provider can send more than one car if necessary or if they can send a fleet of cars maybe – this is just a hypothetical question and the booker will never need such a request but what it does is gauge if other drivers will work with the company. This is a pretty good indication of their capacity and how well established the company is in their local market. It is probably best to ask this question by phone too and measure the response. A slight hesitation can reveal a lot.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter what car you drive, how early you arrive or how smooth you are over speed bumps. As a chauffeur, you must be able to read people and be attentive to their needs. It is something that is often overlooked by someone hiring a chauffeur service and something that is never valued if you never need to travel yourself. Believe it or not, drivers are not all the same and a good driver can be of enormous value. Just think of the young executive on the way to the meeting and wondering how they will break the ice. What if their chauffeur has valuable local knowledge, knows the £20m customer sponsors a sports team that just got promoted and knows exactly when to drop it in to a brief conversation?

A Very Perfect Ten

Last week I wrote about preparing a ten minute presentation. It went better than expected. The reason being, my focus was well and truly drawn to what makes DrivenByQ better than the competition.

In a nutshell, we specialise in corporate travel, supporting companies who require external chauffeur services. Our bespoke ‘cloud’ software helps manage their bookings while keeping our overheads low. For customers this means three things.

1. DrivenByQ increase efficiency
2. DrivenByQ improve quality
3. DrivenByQ reduce cost

Focussing so closely on these points proved especially useful this week when I visited a customer. They already employ our service but were unaware we had branched out. By explaining how we operated differently to their current (main) supplier, they understood the benefit and promptly agreed to increase use of our service.

Giving a presentation to a business club was a great opportunity. Little did I realise it would secure bookings before actually delivering it. Perhaps I should prepare a few more?

A Perfect Ten

Next week, I have a ten minute presentation to a business group. In that time I have to inform the members about DrivenByQ, where we are positioned in the market, what makes a perfect customer and what is our unique selling point.

Originally I began writing pages and pages of information but of course, that would be impossible to communicate and incredibly boring. Instead, I have decided to write as much as I can and then pick out what is important. It is probably a good idea to make the presentation entertaining too.

As usual I will be using Power Point to display some bullet points and pictures which will keep things on track. As an introduction, the history of our company in the last six years will be covered (briefly) then the focus will turn to how we came to target the niche for which we cater. Finally, the presentation will detail our mobile technology, fantastic customer service and where lean principles save so much money.

Taking people from A to B is the part that everybody understands but the booking process really intrigues people. They still find it unbelievable that we take very few phone calls and don’t have administrative staff even though we have such a good volume of work. If I start waffling on about cloud computing and collaborative communication technology though, do you think they might fall asleep?

The X Factor

A chauffeur arrives to collect their car from a valeting service. As they approach the vehicle the paintwork gleams in the sun light. Close up the glass is spot free. Stepping back again the attention to detail in the alloy wheels is perfect. There is something missing though, one important, finishing touch that makes all the difference.

In the last blog I mentioned we were probing new geographic areas in order to continue our growth as a company. One thing identified as part of the process in converting leads was that our marketing material and image needed to be stronger. This was to help deliver our message more comprehensively in a shorter space of time.

We need to conclude the lengthy process we initiated about a year ago and finalise a logo strong enough to represent our future aspirations. It is a known fact that committees take much longer to reach decisions, especially if discussing something emotive which is close to their hearts but the final outcome is better all round.

We have been very close to a finished article for quite a while. The problem was that we were missing that special something. Just the same as when you see two clean cars but one looks better. Then you notice that all-important sexy, tyre shine. After all, isn’t it the little things which make all the difference?

Looking Good

Suppose you grow to be one of the larger companies in your area and you pass the stage of operating as a one-man-band or small team. You start looking at growth on a larger scale. The question then arises should you change the marketing?

Smaller chauffeur companies don’t always include marketing, sales or advertising in their budget. The reason is that personal recommendation carries so much weight that natural (organic) growth usually takes over and if you only focus locally, then expenditure on marketing and advertising is unnecessary.

Over the last six years we have secured most of the major account customers in our local area. We realised about a year ago though, to keep growing we needed to look further afield and examine other geographic areas. After six months of probing, now is the time to consider our findings and question if our past strategy is still robust enough to carry us in to the future?

The chances are personal recommendation will not be as decisive as we previously found but it still needs to be part of the strategy. The difference is that we need to convince new customers much more succinctly we are the best of the best. Maybe it is time to recognise our image will play a much bigger role and as such, we should reconsider how we are perceived through our marketing?