Understanding Loyal Behavior

We did a project for a manufacturer of moisture-resistant cardboard boxes. These are the wax-coated cardboard boxes that food products are transported in. In that particular industry, there’s something called “wet stacking strength” which indicates the number of days a box can stand inside a refrigerator or freezer before it collapses. Certain segments of the food business care deeply about wet stacking strength, and if a box manufacturer falls below standards (which is typically around eight days wet stacking strength) that segment will drop the box manufacturer like a stone. Poultry producers, most notably those distributing chicken parts, are one of those groups.

Chicken parts are sometimes in a refrigerated truck for eight days. Imagine if our box company made a product that couldn’t hold up that long? The poultry producers would stop buying those boxes in a heartbeat. But the lettuce producer buying the boxes doesn’t care about wet stacking strength to the same degree as the poultry producer. They don’t need boxes that last eight days, because lettuce only stays in the truck for a day or two.

Even if a client’s poor perception is not enough for them to completely drop the box company, they can still marginalize it by using it in a limited capacity or using it strictly as a backup supplier. You know how this works.

You’re probably marginalizing a few companies yourself right now. 

According to one source, consumers carried an average of 3.7 credit cards in their wallets.

How many cards do you have in your wallet? How many do you actually use on a regular basis? If you have three or four cards but use only one or two, why is that? I would argue that your lukewarm relationship with the unused card companies has placed them squarely in the transactional zone, which might as well be called the Zero Growth Zone. You’re not dropping them, but you’re not using them either. Consequently, they’re not getting nearly as much business from you as they could.

In our own research, we find similar results. Looking across multiple industries we typically find only 10-30% of buyers consider their salesperson and/or account management team to be their Trusted Advisor. Breaking this down even further we see the average company has 34% of their buyers “At-Risk” (Transactional + Antagonistic). Keep in mind, the rewards escalate quickly as you move from Transactional to Predisposed to Trusted Advisor.