Your company interacts with your customers numerous times every day. In marketing terms, each time a customer interacts with your firm is a “touch.” There are good touches that can initiate a favorable impression of your company in your customer’s mind. And there are bad touches that create an unfavorable impression. Few touches fail to elicit some sort of reaction to your company.

Over time, these positive and negative impressions will affect how your customer perceives your company, whether they are receptive to your competitors, how willing they are to increase the depth of their relationship with you, share information, give you opportunities to develop new products jointly, or simply continue doing business with you.

In practical terms, a positive impression might come from your delivery driver bringing a smile to your customers’ receiving personnel by knowing their names and wearing a huge grin every day. A negative impression might come from someone in your accounting department undoing hard work by the sales department with an unfriendly call about an invoice, or the landscaping around your building negating the quality image you promote in your advertising and merchandising.

Remember, every touch counts, for good or bad.

Now ask yourself these questions about each of the touches you have with your customers:

• Do your customers see the same company each time they encounter you?
• Does the impression left with the customer reflect the same value system and Unique Selling Proposition on each occasion?
• Could any of these touches hurt your business?
• How can you better control each of these touches?
• Is there potential for added sales in any of these touches?

As owners and managers, you might well be concerned about controlling all these touches. The fact is you can’t closely control all these touches, all the time without becoming micro-managers and cloning yourselves to be in multiple places at once.

Instead you have to rely upon each of your employees to be responsible for their own actions at all times. I’m not talking about relying upon our employees to be honest and hard working. I’m talking about going above and beyond in everything they do, both on the job and, yes, even off the job. When a company creates a real sales culture that everyone understands and buys into, there is no need to control people in real time. They are doing their best for the company because they know it is best for them.