Tom Feltenstein

Awesome hospitality is an experience that is random, unexpected, and out of proportion to the circumstances.

It creates positive & compelling word-of-mouth endorsements.  As a result, when your employees deliver exceptional customer service you’ll entice droves of new customers who are eager to experience extraordinary hospitality for themselves.

A friend of mine tells a story about his experience while shopping at a Nordstrom store in Seattle. He was about to try on a shirt, when he received an urgent call from his wife about a plumbing emergency at home.  He quickly purchased the shirt, confident that the size he had chosen would fit, and hurried home to attend to the plumbing problem.

Much to his chagrin, my friend discovered that the shirt he’d selected was too small.  He described the shirt to the clerk who answered the phone and asked if they had an XL in stock.

“Yes, I do Mr. Levin.  If you’d like, I can bring it by the office.”

Lo and behold, the clerk brought the shirt to the office, and it was a perfect fit!

My friend never tires of telling the story of his world-class customer service experience at Nordstrom.

Share Your Awesome Hospitality Stories and Your Customer Service Nightmares

Do you have an awesome hospitality story to share?  Did an employee of yours go beyond the call of duty to dazzle one of your customers?  Have you received out-of-this-world customer service that you’ve described to your friends repeatedly?  How about an horrific experience that turned your store visit into a nightmare.

Tell us your story – the good or the bad – and we’ll send you a gift (a surprise that I promise you’ll enjoy).

And Win a Free Copy of the 10-Minute Marketer’s Secret Formula

Who is the greatest inventor of all time?

Hint:  It’s not Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, or one of the Wright Brothers. Not by a long shot!

It’s always been my opinion that the greatest inventor of all time is the mastermind who created The Last Minute.  Would anything ever get done without this invention?

How many times have you waited until the Last Minute to finish a task that’s been collecting dust on a shelf?  It’s only when the deadline draws near – and there’s no way you can procrastinate a moment longer, that you muster the energy and initiative to finally get it done.

If we didn’t have that Last Minute  – the most brilliant idea ever –  we’d be living in a wasteland cluttered with unfinished projects.

Would DaVinci have finished the Mona Lisa?  Would Edison have invented the light bulb?  Would the Wright Brothers have flown their pioneering airplane at Kitty Hawk back in 1903?  Perhaps not – because they were all perfectionists, like many of us – who didn’t want to send their ideas soaring until we get them just right.

Thanks to the brilliant man or woman who invented the last minute, these great achievers had that extra 60 seconds to enrich our world with their bold strokes of genius.

We’re conducting a global search for any information leading to the identification of this unheralded individual, to whom we should be singing our most flowery praises.  An achievement as remarkable as the invention of the Last Minute should be recognized and celebrated.  Let’s put our heads together and see if we can identify this history-changing person.

Tell us a story, in 500 words or less, describing who you think the inventor of the Last Minute is, and we’ll publish the most interesting and imaginative entry on my blog.  If you happen to know the identity of our unsung hero, more power to you!  If not – just make something up.  Those who submit the Top 10 entries will win a free copy of my popular book, The 10-Minute Marketer’s Secret Formula, which I wrote to help entrepreneurs discover how to mine the wealth within the untapped market that exists within a 10-minute drive of your business  (and to save you the frustration of having to wait until the Last Minute to execute a powerful, sales-generating plan).

Please email your entries to me at Tom@powermarketingacademy.com.  Be sure to put “The Inventor of the Last Minute” in the subject line.

Are you aware that 93% of local store marketing dollars are wasted on ineffective or poorly executed programs with little or no ROI? This dire situation, which has wreaked havoc with franchisees all over North America, has haunted me for a decade.  I finally came up with the solution! And at the International Franchise Association’s national convention on February 7, 2010, I rolled out my innovative plan for franchisees called Precision Marketing. Here it is…I want to take 2% of the franchisee marketing budget, allocate it to a national fund that is spent proportionally back every month in all the franchisee locations.

After merging local and national-fund marketing dollars, we create a 12-month marketing plan that includes a tightly integrated approach of promotions, incentives and tactics customized to each franchisee’s operation.  Through the pooling of all marketing dollars, franchisees get to see a huge economy of these promotions.  This enables franchisees to have programs working on their behalf that they could never do themselves; now these programs are done for everyone!

The real eye-opener for franchisees is when they see that the dollars they send into the franchisor are now being proportionally sent back to their location. For example if the franchisee makes average unit sales of 700K, if your fund becomes a total of 4%, that is $28,000 spent effectively back in their own store!

This is a bold move for a franchise to take, but I’m confident that implementing this system will allow franchisees to provide better service, increase sales, and enjoy the freedom to really focus on what’s important, without having to worry so much about marketing.

I’ve put more information about my Precision Marketing on my website, so click here if you want to read more plus get the five most powerful reasons franchisees are getting on board with this system. Post a comment if you have any more questions or call my office at 561-6501-1315.

In our digital age, marketers must continue to make personal connections with their customers, even though technology can seduce us into distancing ourselves from one another.  If used properly, technology allows us to engage in a more dynamic dialogue with our customers, and to stop interrupting them.  It lets us be available to our customer whenever she needs us, in the way that she needs us, and in the language that she understands.

While my philosophy is very “local,” the basic tenets apply globally towards any industry, including high-tech.  We’ve all got to figure out a way to break through the clutter and to allow our customers to invite us in to speak to them. The days of shouting and interrupting customers are over. Use technology as a tactic to touch your customer and speak to them in a way they understand.

The 21^st century neighborhood is wherever you customers congregate – individuals with similar interests, with similar needs and desires, attitudes, beliefs and values. You can find them in your own block or across an ocean. You can invite them to participate in your blogs and on your Facebook pages. You can find them in churches, schools, libraries, fund raising events, your local chamber of commerce, or in chat groups, phone books, forums… and through other companies who have already found them. But most importantly, and most effectively – you can find them through your present customers.

I’ve always said that your business works the same way your brain works. The single largest detriment is that we fall in love with our product or service. Just for a month I invite you to fall in love with your customer. Look at your business as if you were a customer, think of the interests, values, needs and priorities of your customers – and then you’ll begin to find them. Use your technology to listen to your customers and to find out how you can best fulfill their needs. Devote your life and your enterprise to making their life better, richer, fuller, happier, more meaningful – and the marketing strategies and tactics will begin to unfold from their own lips.

Newspaper articles and blog posts hail Pepsi’s decision to opt out of advertising during the recent Super Bowl as the giant cola manufacturer’s Big Gamble.  I say, “horse feathers!”  Choosing not to waste money on multi-million dollar ads that do not move the sales needle is not a gamble, it’s a sound decision.  Super Bowl ads never have, and never will, generate a strong return on investment.  Although they’re sexy, often controversial, and create a big buzz, these mega-productions are a giant waste of money.

Instead, Pepsi said it has chosen to devote more marketing resources to social media, which is essentially a neighborhood marketing strategy for the digital age.  After all, social media platforms such as web sites, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter gather together communities of individuals who share common interests, engage in intimate conversations, and exchange ideas.   Doesn’t that sound exactly the way people interact in neighborhoods?

Congratulations to Pepsi for finally accepting the neighborhood marketing challenge. Let’s hope more companies follow suit, and choose to spend their marketing dollars wisely.

You can unleash THE SECRET POWER of your internal customers – your employees – with proper recruiting, training, and motivation. Do this, and you’ll turn them into an amazing sales force that will work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, virtually FREE.

The importance of the internal customer is not new. In fact, Henry Ford struggled with the issue of high turnover resulting in delivering poor quality and service to Ford’s customers as long ago as 1914. Ford found it necessary to hire at least 60,000 workers each year just to keep 10,000 people on the line. He paid them 80 cents per day.

Ford decided to gamble—he raised the pay from 80 cents per day to 5 dollars per day. Was he crazy? Maybe just a maverick and an innovator.

Here’s what happened. No longer did the plant have to recruit and train 50,000 replacement workers.

Henry had a waiting list of eager applicants, service and quality improved and profits quickly doubled.

By Tom Feltenstein

During the start of my career in marketing, I was fortunate enough to work for several years with Ray Kroc, the legendary owner of McDonald’s who revolutionized the franchise business through neighborhood marketing.  Although Ray imparted enough wisdom to last a lifetime and fill countless volumes of literature, I’ve distilled his most valuable insights into the following 7 Lessons.   Please read them carefully, because if you adopt them as the guiding principles of your own business philosophy, you cannot help but win your competitive battles, no matter how formidable your foes are.

1. It’s all local
2. The heart and soul of your business is marketing inside your own walls
3. Community involvement.  Become an integral part of your community by being generous with your time and efforts to lend a helping hand to those in your neighborhood who are in need.
4. Trust your people.  Allow your employees the freedom to contribute their opinions, insight, and knowledge.  Give them the power to make decisions to benefit your customers.
5. A good idea doesn’t care where it comes from.
6. To make it work from top to bottom, it has to work from bottom to top.
7. Deliver a powerful level of service – beyond what’s expected – and you’ve created a tangible bond with a customer that no mass media program can achieve.