When Del Webb at Ave Maria began selling lots, they called my company to make informative and persuasive testimonials like this to help sell those open lots throughout the real estate developer’s 80+ acre community.
Author: Aaron Belchamber
Are you really achieving your true potential?
Your company might be doing great, business wise, but something feels off. The fact is, as a business owner, you can’t do it all. You might feel you are missing opportunities to increase profits or make needed improvements, perhaps you know what you need but are perplexed how to get there with your current resources and work force. Perhaps you need someone with a fresh perspective, you need an “agent of change” for the improvements you believe your company needs to make to stay competitive.
We’re not about taking credit, we’re about reallocating and repositioning your current resources and helping you find the gaps to help you fill things in — all while positively influencing your current loyal employee base. You may have a great team around you, but being inside the bubble tends to skew their perspective and you find they all get caught up in their tasks and creativity has probably waned. Perhaps worse, as someone with absolute power of your organization, you unintentionally have created an army of “yes men” who never seem to disagree with you or challenge your ideas — to the detriment of your future growth. After all, if no new ideas are presented or considered, chances are opportunities for future business growth died after the first “oh, you’re new here, just do what the boss says, he’s always right.”
Are you burdening your most talented with menial tasks?
Sometimes, a company’s best ideas come from an outsider asking questions and mixing with the existing leaders in its organization. How can one expect new ideas and positive change to come from within when an organization’s most talented and passionate are burdened with multiple responsibilities and “pick up the slack” ad hoc jobs while a large segment of the workforce seems lulled into a culture of complacency? You know, the ones who seem to just be happy to continue “business as usual” even when “usual” means “mediocre” and few good ideas?
It’s always the same — management thinks many of their complacent employees just lack the inspiration and motivation but the employees believe they lack the incentives. Sounds like a communication gap, and by the way, communication is a vital part of leadership’s responsibility. So, if you want to blame your company’s “culture of complacency” on your veteran workforce, as the leader of your organization, you just might be in denial. What systems and policies do you have in place that may have enabled and compounded this complacency? And why was mediocrity ever tolerated before? These are tough questions, but realize it is not that most of your employees lack potential, or the will or talent, it is probably a lack of communication and your inability or unwillingness to incentivize to motivate your workforce positively.
“Cheap luxury” – an oxymoron
On more than one occasion I have also met CEOs or top managers of high-end luxury car dealerships, jewelry stores, and other high-end luxury companies who are very successful in business. They expect to sell their products at luxury prices, but some are notoriously cheap employers. It can turn into a PR nightmare when word gets out that they expect consumers to pay a premium for quality but they don’t recognize or appreciate the value of quality provided to them. They think they’re being shrewd businessmen, but what they’re actually buying is a parity in production output for what they’re paying, then they later wonder why their workforce is complacent. The God complex is alive and well in corporate America, a product of today’s entitlement “Me” culture and the seeping of such Antionnette hypocrisy riddled throughout society from government and their corporate bedfellows to public unions practicing their form of arrogance fueled by ignorance.
Agents of change (the good kind)
Even while your competitors might be looking for new inspiration and creative, fresh ideas, you might feel like there are just too many people in your organization stuck in a rut to move forward. I personally have been part of incredible metamorphoses in different organizations and understood how to set goals and motivate a team to transform into a better, more efficient, more effective company.
Micromanagers who operate in the macro seem to stifle innovation and creative new ideas most. If you are a micromanager in a high level leadership role and you are not willing to admit your own contribution in the very complaints you have about your workforce and if you are not willing to change yourself, go find a consulting firm that will tell you what you want to hear, we’re not interested in being part of an initiative doomed for failure while wasting each others’ time. This kind of leader always knows best, so they would never need us. They lack the vision and understanding that future potential opportunities lost can never be measured and their egos will overshadow their ability to see this reality.
Ignore the latest marketing hype
Invest in SEO! Build backlinks! SEM! Expand your Facebook presence. You need to Foursquare if you have a store location! You have to do this, invest in that, run these ads, reach this target so many times.
Just stop. Yes, there’s a place for all of the above and most of the aforementioned probably apply to your business, but when you’re talking about your company’s marketing, you need to ask yourself the most important “factor of 60” question of all: How do you rate your customer service? Are you being honest with yourself?
Are you being honest about your customer service?
Nothing is more important than how your organization interacts with people, no matter what kind of organization you are. One-to-one in person, through a chat, on your website, or over the phone, the real question is: How do your previous customers rate your customer service? Do you know? If you do know, to what extent and detail and what did you learn and what corrections did you make? How long ago did you address the quality of your customer service?
If you do not know how previous customers rate your service, why don’t you know? Chances are, there are more than a few negative reviews about your company on Yelp, Google or Yahoo. Customer service is the single most important factor in all of marketing and it is something you can actually fully control in your business that will show in future profits — or losses.
Training your employees is a critical investment, focusing on continuously improving customer service is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Revisit customer service to build positive cheerleaders
If you do not have an across-the-board A, 90% or whatever is the equivalent to your company’s rating system, you need to first work on this before spending more money on getting people to reach your cashier or go on your website to only be disappointed. If you aren’t familiar with this scenario, you probably don’t go out much, because a large percentage of cashiers, waitresses, call center representatives, financial advisers and bank tellers are rude, incompetent, or even dishonest.
You spend money to research your market, positioning your brand and products, and mobilizing a targeted demographic to only get them to visit your store and be treated rudely at point of sale, or have shelf stockers completely ignore their obvious need for assistance. Or perhaps you got them on your website with clever marketing to browse around and your website is slow, confusing, or worse, doesn’t even have what your marketing told them you had for them.
These negative experiences will quickly turn your profits into losses because not only will they probably not shop with you again, they will potentially become an anti-cheerleader through negative word-of-mouth, or worse, a public antagonist with 500 friends on Facebook only too happy to expose you for ruining their day while still on their smart phone as they make a beeline to your store exit.
That bad taste left in your customer’s mouth will cost you 12 times as much in lost business and negative referrals. Since it generally accepted that it costs about 5 times as much to find a new customer as opposed to getting an existing customer to come back, that means one negative customer interaction could sway your potential profit from this single individual by a factor of 60 times!
Customer service is that potent and critical of a force in marketing. If you underestimate its value in your marketing efforts, chances are you are mystified at your profits and sales closing ratios and you wonder why they don’t line up the way you think they should, but of course measuring your sales closing ratios is another discussion, because unless you count traffic you’re not measuring that either.