Create a strategy
Once Kleimann had gathered data from his customers, he needed to evaluate it and create a strategy around it to move Odyssey forward.
“You might come up with three ideas in one area and only one idea in another area, but that one idea may have a much larger impact on your average client than any one of these three over here,” Kleimann says. “It’s important to weight those, and a committee approach to that is really the best. You can’t do them all. There are limited resources in any business, so it’s figuring out the ones that serve them the most.”
He created a committee that consisted of himself and the director of each core discipline — seven people in total. With a committee in place, then you have to identify criteria by which to evaluate your feedback, and it’s important to do that before you start sifting through it all.
“If you start looking at the data before figuring out how you want to measure it, you may not be as objective with it,” he says. “Figure out those things you’re trying to accomplish that will drive the business, drive the intended results and figure out how to measure that data in a way that it can help you accomplish that goal.”
The main metric for Odyssey was that the idea had to have a direct effect on the client. In some cases, that meant changing a process within Odyssey that would affect the rate it charged customers. In other cases, it meant developing systems and programs to help the client’s processes. Lastly, everything needed to be simple and ease the interaction between the client and Odyssey.
The committee members used these criteria to score and rank the ideas they got from the feedback. Through this process, Kleimann and his team clearly saw how to become more effective for their clients. They realized that many of their clients were blue-collar companies, but they really needed to target white-collar companies.
“Make sure that you thoroughly understand your customers and the differences that may exist within your client base,” he says.
While he had nothing against th
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blue-collar companies, the white-collar organizations used more systems and training because the cost of human capital was higher than that in the blue-collar organizations. Since they needed more systems and services, those companies could help Odyssey better refine its offerings than the blue-collar companies could.
“You’re selling that or providing that to someone who doesn’t understand the intricacies,” he says. “A Jaguar may look like a Hyundai under the hood to somebody who doesn’t know anything about mechanics.”
The data also showed him that the average client had about 25 employees, so Kleimann started marketing to larger organizations that had 500 to 1,000 employees. By gaining them as clients, their systems were already more sophisticated and could help Odyssey put systems in place so that their clients wouldn’t outgrow them.
“It’s not just we wanted to be serving larger clients,” he says. “It was we wanted to learn everything we could learn to help our core business, and it has. It’s helped us a lot, so look to new markets as a learning opportunity.”
