This book appeared a relatively long time ago and is not the last work of Igor Mann. Nevertheless, you cannot pass by it, because it is devoted to a topic that many (for some reason) are somewhere in prostration. And this book was written by Igor in collaboration with his young colleague Dmitry Turusin.

Points of contact are the first impression of your business. And as Coco Chanel said - "You don't get a second chance to make a first impression."

This book will definitely help you make a good first impression. It doesn't need to be read as fiction. It should be known with every sentence.

Yes, it is relatively small in volume, but this does not detract from its merits. At a minimum, there is no “water” and philosophical reflections on what everyone knows even without the author.

Another thing that captivated me about the book was that so many phrases can be elevated to the rank of aphorisms.

So, “Points of Contact”...

Every time a customer contacts a company, there is a specific “touch point.” It could even be something that doesn’t immediately come to mind:

• secretary's voice
• seal
• documentation
• instructions for using the product
• site loading speed

In total, Igor and Dmitry highlight a large number of points of contact, there is even a separate list, the beginning of which is already filled out for you. All that remains is to continue filling it, taking into account the specifics of your activity. Are you ready to find 100 points, at each of which the fate of your client is decided or not? Igor and Dmitry's book to help!

You and I understand that each individual business has a different number of contact points.

A simple rule - than larger company, the more points of contact with customers. Imagine how many points of contact a retailer has network company national scale...

The whole point is that each of these points must appear before the client in an appropriate way. And if at the very beginning I spoke only about the first impression, then the company’s task is to maintain such a positive impression always, and not just at the moment of first contact.

Because if the third or fourth contact of the client disappoints, a big risk immediately arises, will there be a fifth contact and all subsequent ones...

The main advantage of this book is that after reading it, there is a desire to urgently reconsider your points of contact and put them in order. It’s as if we were given some kind of magic kick-off.

A separate bonus is the presence in the book of special fields (and even pages) for your own notes. It's like a combination of a book and a workbook.

In principle, the book contains enough pleasant surprises for people with systems thinking.

Well, according to the laws of the review genre, I should now say what (in my subjective opinion) is missing in this book. Perhaps it would be great to add more in the next edition real examples from our domestic marketing. And show what is a bad point of contact and what is an excellent one (and why).

But, on the other hand, the presence of specific examples provokes a desire to imitate them. How good or bad this is - decide for yourself.

10 iconic quotes from the book “Points of Contact” by Igor Mann and Dmitry Turusin

1. It’s very bad if you are no different from your competitors: in business, being like everyone else is a losing strategy
2. No website - and those who actively use the Internet are no longer your clients
3. If Commercial offer doesn’t catch on, it’s immediately sent to the bucket, or to “deleted emails”
4. A business card can be made of metal or turned into a discount card - in this case, the likelihood that it will end up in the trash bin is sharply reduced
5. It takes years to earn trust; it only takes one wrong move to lose it.
6. Almost nothing can be improved in 24 hours. Don't get excited - be patient
7. Ask your new hires—those who haven't yet become blindsided—to walk through the customer journey and critique your touchpoints.
8. Working on touch points should never end
9. Nothing stimulates creativity and drive in a company like the rapid implementation of ideas generated during brainstorming sessions.
10. A particular point of contact may become more or less important depending on time (seasonality, life cycle stage)

Verdict: Every marketer should have this book.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the copyright holders.

© Igor Mann, Dmitry Turusin, 2013

© Publishing, design. Mann, Ivanov and Ferber LLC, 2017

* * *

Introduction

Since 2002, when my first book, 100% Marketing, was published, I have been developing and popularizing the topic of touch points.

In my opinion, this is a greatly undervalued marketing asset.

Positioning, differentiation, segmentation, life cycle, marketing communications, marketing without a budget are considered in great detail, but contact points remain on the sidelines.

In my seminars I say (and listeners can attest to this): “Start your marketing at the touch points!”

Contact points were discussed in my books “Marketing Arithmetic for First Persons” (2010) and “Marketing Without a Budget” (2011).

In our consulting projects, my partners and I at LeadMachine, Marketing Machine or Kongru always start our work with an audit of contact points.

In general, the topic is really important, necessary and eternal, but articles about points of contact began to appear only recently. There are no more than a couple of dozen official publications.

The impetus for writing this book was an article by my co-author Dmitry Turusin in the magazine “Company Management”, in which the laws and consequences of contact points were formulated. Dmitry worked on this topic at the University of Edinburgh, devoting his undergraduate work to it.

I added to his materials a description of my own technology for working with contact points, we argued about some rules (I had no questions about the laws), diluted our observations with examples, interviewed drivers of contact points (unfortunately, there are still few of these specialists in our country ) – and, in my opinion, we succeeded great book with very high efficiency.

Study it carefully.

Analyze your touch points.

Think about the laws and observations that apply to your business.

We are confident that the book will pay for itself a thousandfold in the first week of using the concept of touch points and working on them.

Have fun reading and improving your touchpoints!

Take the first step and don't stop.

Our book will make this path easier for you.

Improve yourself.

There should be no excuses.

Igor Mann

What are contact points?

Contact points are the numerous and varied situations, places and interfaces where the client comes into contact with the company.

Every time a customer contacts a company in any way, at any time, a touchpoint occurs.

At the point of contact, customers make critical decisions for your business:

Whether to start working with you or not;

Continue to cooperate with you or switch to your competitors.

Surprisingly, touchpoints are of no interest to marketing theorists, and therefore few marketers (practitioners) apply this concept.

Research in the field marketing communications, positioning, differentiation, marketing mix, segmentation are not so important (not at all important!) if work is not done with contact points.

To paraphrase Chekhov's hero, successful business all contact points must be perfect. If the company does not have required points contacts or they are bad, then there are no clients, no income, no business.

Every entrepreneur, company manager and marketer needs to know the points of contact and manage them correctly.

This is extremely important for business.

Points of contact are moments of truth.

The former head of Scandinavian Airlines, Jan Carlzon, seems to have pioneered the use of the term “moments of truth” (and he has a book of the same name – see Appendix 5).

By moments of truth, he means any contact during which the customer has the opportunity to express an opinion about the quality of service.

Jan Carlzon proclaimed: “We are not trying to make one thing 100% better. We want to make a thousand things 1% better.”

Following this principle, he transformed a struggling airline into one of the best in 22 months, contrary to the Theory of Constraints, which states that bottlenecks require improvement.

At the point of contact, the client may change his mind about working with you. At the point of contact, a competitor can bypass you (and immediately surpass you in revenue).

At the point of contact you can gain or lose a client, strengthen your relationship with him, confirm your high reputation or, conversely, disappoint him.

The book covers of the Mann, Ivanov and Ferber publishing house, which were designed by Tyoma Lebedev, have already become a textbook example.

White, bright, recognizable - they, as a point of contact, greatly contributed to increasing sales of the publisher’s “white” series and continue to do so.

Points of contact must be addressed.

And do it systematically.

Your job is to provide clear, emotionally powerful, and positive interactions at your touchpoints that will make them remember your company, tell others about it, and buy your products.

Points of contact: three laws

Back in 1993, Jack Trout and Al Ries, in their book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing,” talked about the basic laws of marketing that they strongly recommended not to violate. Jack Trout is still convinced that these laws do not change either qualitatively or quantitatively.

But if they exist for marketing in general, then they can also exist for its individual tools.

Let's look at three laws that should guide your touch point marketing.

Law 1. Each entity (business, product or service, department or employee of a company) has more than one point of contact

If you see only one point of contact in the object you are improving, then you definitely (don’t go to the doctor!) should rest and a little later look at the object with a fresh look or ask your colleagues to help you find other points of contact.

Let us illustrate for clarity.

Business contact points:

Product contact points:

packaging (perhaps, just to appreciate Apple’s packaging, it’s worth purchasing something from this company’s products), layout, design, name, barcode, instruction manual, warranty card.

Service contact points:

title, presentation, booklet, customer reviews, cases, publications... and employees who offer the service.

Employee contact points:

height, build, smile, neat appearance, hairstyle, uniform, badge, posture, speech patterns.

Law 2. Contact points form contact chains

Any point of contact consists of several smaller points of contact, and those, in turn, of even smaller ones.

Contact points form a chain of contacts - this law should be known and used.

Law 3: Points of contact must be managed

If a company needs a result in some process, then there must be someone who will manage this process (plan, execute, control).

Working with touch points is no exception.

Start managing your touchpoints correctly and your marketing and business will become more effective.

For example, in the Atlant-M automobile holding there is an employee who is responsible for periodically assessing contact points, as well as their continuous improvement.

Does your company have such an employee? You will have problems.

Any law - be it the law of physics or the state - presupposes consequences, amendments and rules that explain and complement it.

If our book were a dissertation (Dmitry Turusin may continue to work on this topic), we would use the word “consequence” or “rule”.

But we will keep it simple.

Let's call what we discovered while working on this topic and the three laws simply observations and share them with our readers.

One observation - one short chapter.

This book structure will help you focus on the most interesting points related to touch points and work more effectively with them.

Points of contact

Touch points are the moments where your customers and potential customers come into contact with your company.

And at this moment they decide, by assessing the attitude towards them at these points of contact, to work with you or not to work, to continue cooperation with you or to switch to your competitors.

It would seem that there are few points of contact: printed company materials (booklets, brochures, leaflets), Business Cards employees, letterhead, contract template, sign at the entrance to the office, the voice of your secretary and his style of communication with clients, company website, template for your corporate presentations, price list, commercial proposal.

The task of any company is to make sure that the client’s contact with the company at each of these points is as effective, positive, impressive, pleasant, simple, and fast as possible (see the chapter “Contact Points” in the book “Without a Budget”).

In 2009, Marketingmashina was contacted by a company planning to hold a large advertising campaign.

Its manager read the book “No Budget” and decided, with our help, to test all touch points before the start of an advertising campaign to find out how effectively each point works.

We worked for two weeks, recording and assessing the contact points of this company (by the way, in reality there were twice as many of them as in the list initially presented to us).

Presenting the results to the company's top managers, we started with the identified errors and failures at the points of contact, as the CEO asked us to do.

After listening to us for about ten minutes, he sighed heavily and moved towards the exit. At the door, he addressed his team: “Well, I don’t want to spoil my mood any further. Take into account everything said here, write down the deadlines and those responsible, show me the plan. There will be no advertising campaign until the touch points are in order.”

He was right: if this company had not put its touch points in order, it would not have received the required number of requests and would not have been able to convert them into contracts.

Pre-audit touchpoint audits have paid for themselves many times over.

Product life cycle

Each product goes through four stages: market introduction, sales growth, saturation and decline.

Depending on the stage at which the solution is located, different strategies are used: product, pricing, promotion and working with channels.

What's important here is:

– understand that every decision will “die” sooner or later;

– bring the product to market correctly.

For the Mann, Ivanov and Ferber publishing house, it is very important to be able to properly introduce a new book to the market.

We used to do this intuitively.

And then they created a special model, which they called “Blockbuster” (with light hand Mikhail Ivanov).

Using this model as a checklist, we could check all the necessary elements involved in creating a blockbuster - a book with the highest possible sales volume.

We could also constantly improve this model, taking into account new elements and features based on newly acquired experience.

My advice is to create such a model for launching each new solution in your company.

The target audience

This is the audience you will address when you begin to advertise yourself, choosing the time, communication channels and appeals.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the division of the market into parts, groups, segments, within which consumers have the same or similar requirements, requests, needs, needs.

Companies work not with markets, but with segments. Outlining and understanding them is one of the most important tasks of marketing.

Here’s what Theodore Levitt said about this: “If you don’t think in segments, then you don’t think at all.”

Peter Doyle echoes him: “If a company fails to divide the market into segments, then the market will divide the company into segments.”

There are many segmentation criteria: psychographic, demographic, geographic, behavioral. You can read about them in any marketing textbook.

What's important here is:

– know your segments;

– make specific offers to them;

– enter new segments.

Positioning

Read Jack Trout's book Positioning. Battle for Minds" is a classic of the genre.

Differentiation

In business it is bad to be like others.

It is necessary to be different, to “build out” from competitors.

This is differentiation.

Read Jack Trout's book, Differentiate or Die, the best book on this topic.

To differentiate yourself from others, Trout, in particular, suggests:

- to be first;

– own property;

– be a leader;

Much is possible even for a very small company.

It is rightly said: “It is better to be different than to be the best.”

Entering the saturated, highly competitive business book publishing market, we positioned our publishing house as follows: “We are different.”

We ordered cover design from Lebedev Studio (when many of our competitors did not care about this detail at all).

We published books on a one-book-a-month model (others did as many books as possible in the same time period).

We decided to actively promote each of our books (others, at best, invested in promoting potential bestsellers).

We number our books.

We placed (and place) high demands on the quality of translation and editing.

In general, we began to do everything that many others did haphazardly.

We were the first to do many things in the business literature publishing market.

We are almost five years old. We are among the leaders in our market.

Being different is profitable.

This is the simplest communication model according to which advertising (and indeed any communication with any client) should be built: attention - interest - desire - action (see the chapter “How to determine that advertising is done well?” in the section “Budget. Planning. Efficiency ").

80% of marketers don't know this model.

That is, it doesn't sell.

USP (unique selling proposition)

A USP is the reason why a buyer should buy your solution over a competitor’s solution.

“What is our USP?” is a question that you can and should ask a marketer every time you discuss a new or re-launch of a particular solution on the market.

In response, you should hear a short and vivid phrase - an original reason (reasons) that motivates you to buy and sets you apart from your competitors.

Of course, these 10 terms are not the whole of marketing.

On my blog (www.igormann.ru) some time ago I published the following comic marketing alphabet:

B Rend

IN visualization

D differentiation

AND innovation

TO client-oriented

L coolness

M marketing

N ovators

ABOUT brotherly bond

P positioning

R results (ROI)

WITH segmentation

T product (service, solution)

F ocus

C spruce audience

H four pi (4P)

YU score

As you can see, not even all the letters are used.

If you, having mastered the required minimum, begin to study other terms, you will thereby benefit your business as a whole.

Marketing

I hope you already understand what it is (see the chapter “What is marketing?” in the “Basics” section).

4P marketing complex

The foundation of marketing is its basic elements: product, price, sales channels, promotion, on which much more rests.

Surprisingly, the most important thing has been forgotten – the client.

It is obvious that the word client begins with the letter “c” and not with the letter “p”, like all elements of the 4Ps (product, price, place of sale, promotion) - but was it worth depriving the marketing complex of its most important element on this basis?

Approximately 50 years after the advent of the 4P system, the 4C system appears.

P turns into S.

Product = Customer value (the product turns into value for the customer).

Price = Cost to customer (price is included in the cost for the client).

Place of sale = Convenience to buy (place of sale (sales channels) - convenience of purchase).

Promotion = Communications (promotion - in communications).

The client appears in this model, but in the background.

The main thing you need to know here:

– The marketing mix must be a system - not a single element should be lost.

– All elements of the marketing mix must be congruent and balanced. (What about Chekhov? “Everything in a person should be beautiful: face, clothes, soul, and thoughts...” The same with the marketing complex: “In the marketing complex everything should be good: the product, the price, and sales channels, and promotion.")

– The marketing complex, despite its apparent theoretical nature, can be used for completely practical purposes (see the exercises “Let’s compare complexes” and “You have 5 minutes left” in the book “Without a Budget”).

Do you want to quickly and easily improve your business?
Pay attention to the contact points! They arise every time a customer comes into contact with a company in any way, and have a decisive influence on whether he wants to do business with you. The more your company has an online presence, the more points of contact there are online.
Igor Mann, guru Russian marketing, and his colleague Nadezhda Pominova will tell you all about how to get the most out of them and turn your visitors into buyers, and buyers into loyal clients.
You will be surprised what efficiency resource was hidden in a site that you have long known!

Why should you buy this book?

• “Smart” touch points will improve Customers’ impression of your company, and therefore increase sales.
• In the book you will not find a drop of water - only specific points of contact, only chips, only tools, only inspiring examples.
• The authors have collected many examples from the experience of leading companies in Internet marketing and recognized experts in this field.

Reader reviews

Entrepreneurs who have recently gone online or are just planning to create their own website. You, ladies and gentlemen, need this book like no one else. As a general guide to Internet marketing, a guide to creating a website and a checklist at different stages of promotion.

Polina Beletskaya, Marketer, copywriter and translator. , http://web-likbez.com/

One of the most rewarding things in marketing is communicating with your Clients, future, present and past. After all, it is for the Client that we all work. How can the Client contact the company? Exclusively through points of contact. When you control and develop your online touch points, you control Customers' opinions about your company. After all, some review on a musty forum or a ridiculous picture of an employee on social media. networks can put an end to winning the next Client. Online contact points are a kind of checklist on how to put the company’s image on the Internet in order and how to manage it. In this work, Igor and Nadezhda provided the best leadership.

Vitaly Myshlyaev, Internet marketer, co-founder of the Internet marketing agency “LeadMachine”, author of the iMarketing system together with Igor Mann., http://myshlaev.ru/

The system is built on a series of letters, and represents good example...points of contact. The letters are beautifully formatted, arrive exactly on schedule and involve you in working with the book. Moreover, through these letters the book is presented in an exclusively practical format - I had time between letters to think about what I had written, discuss something and test it in practice.

Vadim Bugaev, founder of the “Books for Business” and “Reading for Practical Use” projects, http://www.read4practice.ru/

Strength“Points of contact” in the structure: all tools are packaged in sections. At the end you get a checklist from which all you have to do is make a plan and implement what doesn’t exist yet.

Maria Leontieva, business consultant, author of the blog “The best solutions for business and career development”, head of the educational project “Business Art”., http://mariyaleontieva.com/

The book will definitely not become an academic textbook. According to it, wise teachers will not tell the theory to university students. Because there is no theory in the book.
Each chapter is written as practical as possible (take it and do it), and at the end of each chapter the authors “finish off” with chips and tools that will help polish the contact point discussed in the chapter.

At the end of 2012, the book “Points of Contact” was published, which allowed readers to quickly and easily improve their marketing and their business.

Let me remind you that contact points are numerous and varied situations, places and interfaces where the client comes into contact with the company.

Every time a customer contacts a company in any way at any time, a touchpoint occurs.

At the point of contact, customers make critical decisions for your business:

Whether to start working with you or not;

Continue to cooperate with you or switch to your competitors.

The concept of touchpoints has gained many followers and fans.

And my colleague at the LeadMachine company (SilaUma group of companies) Nadezhda Pominova, inspired by the iMarketing 1.7 seminar, took the initiative to write a book “Online Contact Points.”

A logical initiative and the right idea!

After all, out of 10 key points of contact, even for the most offline company, at least two are on the Internet!

What can we say about those companies that are actively working on the Internet!

Yes, almost all of their touch points are online!

Nadezhda and I sat down and mapped out the main points of contact online in the MindNode program (memory maps), and this is what we came up with:

After reading this book, you will learn how to improve these contact points - how to work with them, what mistakes can be avoided, what “tricks” they contain.

We hope that you have already read the book “Points of Contact”, therefore, bypassing the theory of this book, its rules and observations (and all of them are not in the eye, but in the eye!), you took it right off the bat!

You're lucky with the format - it's better than a book, it's a pushbook.

You will be accompanied by our colleague, the implementation fairy, who will help you read the book to the end and implement all the ideas in the book to the maximum in your business.

We wrote the book together, but for the dynamics of the presentation we decided that the story would be told in the first person.

We played “rock, paper, scissors”, and now you know why the book was written from Nadya’s point of view :)

Happy reading and good luck implementing your ideas!

If you have questions, ideas, comments, please write to Nadya and me:

Most often, a website is the main representation of a company on the Internet. To find the necessary information: assortment, prices, work schedule, contact information, customers most often visit your website, which means that maximum attention should be paid to the contact points on the site.

Domain name;

Favicon;

Site search;

Feedback form;

"Thank you" page;

Page 404;

Wi-Fi page.

The URL and domain extension are very important touch points for your website. They largely determine how quickly and easily your company can be found online.

1. Company name and website address. It is best that the address of your company's website matches the name.

Do you know the Internet provider Dom.ru? By typing dom.ru in the address bar of your browser, you will not get what you expect. Here's what you'll see:

The thing is that the Dom.ru website address does not match the company name, so to find it, you will most likely have to use a search engine.

2. Memorability. Your website address should be easy to remember.

If it completely matches the company name, this makes the task much easier.

A very successful example in terms of memorability is the domain name otkudaikuda.ru, this is a service that tells you how to get from one point of the city to another.

And it’s not just that the name reflects the essence of the service. “From where and where” is a phrase that has been well known to us since childhood, because we all read “Fedorino’s Mountain” by Korney Chukovsky.

3. Transliteration. When choosing a URL for your site, remember that people will not only follow links from search engines, but also enter the address of your site manually - this is the so-called direct traffic.

Make sure that users cannot make mistakes. If the name of your company contains the letters “zh”, “sh”, and even more so “s” and “shch” - this is not an easy task. Of course, it is better to avoid such sounds altogether, but if this is not possible, try to follow the generally accepted rules:

4. Selecting a domain zone. The domain zone is the last two (sometimes three or even four) letters after the period in the site address.

They can reflect territorial affiliation (ru, ua, uk, us, etc.), or they can indicate the field of activity: com - domain general purpose, biz – commercial organization, not limited to one country, etc. Choose a domain zone in accordance with these features.

If your company operates in only one country, choose a domain for it that matches that territory.

The bad news is that you are unlikely to be able to get a short domain name in the .com zone - everything is already taken there.

Therefore, now other domain zones are gaining more and more popularity: io, me, etc.

You've probably heard about the company "Loyalty to Quality", right?

The direct traffic to their site is huge, but they are not happy about it. Why? The address of their website vk.ru is very similar to the address of the VKontakte social network vk.com, and many people end up using them by mistake. As a result, there is an extra load on the servers due to non-target visitors. It is unlikely that you will be able to avoid this altogether, but still remember about such instructive cases.

Catch another chip

It is becoming increasingly fashionable to include the domain zone in the name. It turns out, for example, heatma.ps. This way, users won’t have to remember which domain zone your site is located in.

A favicon is an icon that appears next to the page title in the tab. It's probably easier to explain with a picture:

If you haven't thought about it before, now is the time! You might say, “Pfft...why would I worry about something so small?” But imagine that the user has so many tabs open that the panel in his browser looks like this:

A favicon allows the user to quickly assess where they should click to get to your site.

It will also be displayed in the bookmarks menu.

Therefore, remember a simple rule: no favicon - no visual reference.

No landmark - no click.