April 16, 2012

3 Ways to Protect Your Endangered Species

Who’s on your Endangered List?
Your Top Ten revenue producers. The folks that give you a disproportionate amount of your cash flow. The people who have been loyal to you for years. They give a damn about you and what you do.

The people who, if you lose, will cause major harm to your business. The people who, when they leave, will spread a negative word about you to their friends and associates.

What are you doing to protect them from competitive assault and to immunize them from catching someone else’s Value Virus?

Here are 3 things that have worked for me.

1. Engage with them REGULARLY. Call them personally. Never delegate this to others. They are extremely important to your well-being so what is more important than giving them your PERSONAL ATTENTION? Nothing! Book it on your calendar. Make it matter. Put it ahead of everything else. NEVER postpone or cancel.

2. Offer any Special promotion the them FIRST. Never try to entice someone to leave their current supplier and come over to you with a Promotional Deal without providing a better deal to your Loyalists FIRST. It’s an insult to your Fans to offer a carrot to a non-customer while ignoring those who made you successful.

3. Establish a dedicated Service Line for the Group. Special Customers deserve special treatment everyday. Your “Endangered Species Team” is all-ways on for them, 24X7X365. If they have literally ANY issue, your Team will be there to take care of them. Make a big deal of this. Communicate The Team internally and explain why you are doing it. Have a personal face-to-face meeting with each Endangered Customer and tell them what you are doing and why. This is your opportunity to reiterate how important they are to and how much you “love ‘em”.

3 things that will prevent your most critical loyal customers from entering the zone of extinction.

Have a go. You have everything to lose if you don’t.

Cheers,
Roy
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Posted 4.16.12 at 05:06 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 14, 2012

Momentum Management Can Be Deadly

Cut the Crap
Plan on the Run
Avoid Aspirational Intent

It is very easy to get into the relaxing position of staying the current course of your business. Continuing to manage your organizational affairs with the assumption that what got you here will get you where you need to get to. This is momentum management.

The reality is of course that the marketplace rarely lets us get away with this. It is always changing as a result of demand, competitive and economic factors. The most common case is economic fluctuations which can ravage businesses that continue to do things the way they have always done them assuming that eventually they will pay off.

When things are going well (growing demand for your services, loyal customers and healthy market position) we can disguise certain inefficiencies but when things are not going well we stand raw naked in the marketplace completely exposed and will be punished for our inadequacies.

I particularly like how Steve Gedeon from Ryerson Entrepreneur Institute Ted Rogers School of Business described this situation. He says ‘When the wind is blowing fast enough, even turkeys can fly. But as soon as that wind dies down, the turkeys start dropping.’

The point is that in the face of constant unpredictability you need to be driving change in your organization, you need to be a Change Leader.

You need to be forcing organizational discontinuity to prevent the momentum management dilemma from happening. I appreciate that change, particularly being the forcing agent of it, is uncomfortable. But if you want to be identified with moving your team successfully into the future and avoiding the recessionary road kill you really have no choice.

Th essence of Change Leadership is to BE DiFFERENT. To initiate new creative ways to cause an overwhelming distinction between you and your competitors. To Stand-Out not Fit-In.

And to take responsibility for this change within you organization. To take risks. Yes, to make mistakes but to learn from them. To be the BE DiFFERENT champion to which all Momentum Managers would like to aspire to, but never will due to the inertia they possess and the momentum they wish to promulgate.

Cheers,
Roy

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Posted 4.14.12 at 05:18 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (1)

April 12, 2012

“Delivering Happiness” by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh

I rarely find an organization that practices what I fundamentally believe is required to distinguish oneself in the market to succeed and survive. My regular reader will know that I am relentless in advocating proven and practical BE DiFFERENT Practices to create distance between yourself and the competitive herd. I am a ‘SIMPLE’, ‘EXECUTE’ and ‘ONLY’ strategy hawk, a ‘VALUE’ marketing guy, a ‘relationship’ sales believer and a ‘dazzling experience’ customer server.

This book is evidence of a leader that also believed in these principles and built a phenomenally successful business by relentlessly applying them.

Tony has created an interesting and enjoyable read by his informal captivating writing style. You don’t have to ‘fight the words’ on every page. You find yourself easily consuming page after page effortlessly. The recounting of his early years and what he did to prepare himself for ‘The Show’ was informative and to the analytical hemisphere in each of us made it easy to predict his future as a business entrepreneur.

But what impressed - no, WOW’d - me was the rich examples of what he did to establish Zappos as a DiFFERENT Company; one that focused on a single value dimension to attract and build a loyal customer base; one that literally created a culture that served his chosen strategic direction.

In no particular order, here is a sample of the climax learning moments for me in Delivering Happiness:
> Never outsource a core competency. He unlike others resisted the economic temptation to outsource his call center operations.
> You always have a choice of which table to sit at (from his Poker days). Choose the table - pick the customer group to serve - that maximizes your chances of success. WHO to SERVE.
> He had an audacious goal of generating $1 Billion in revenue by 2010. This growth goal drove all activity in the business. An excellent example of HOW BIG in action.
> Lifelong learning through the Zappos Library. People make their business - everyone’s business!
> THE strategic driving force behind Zappos is to create WOW experiences for customers, employees, suppliers and owners. Tight strategy. Easy to understand. Easy to relate to.
> All activities are aligned to the service experience goal. Direct Line of Sight for all people in the organization. Random Acts of WOWNESS are expected and are a part of performance management.
> When Zappos can’t supply what the customer wants, they are directed to research their competition. They are driven by the relationship NOT the short term sale. Lose a Sale BUT Save the Customer.
> The language of Zappos is all about the customer. NOT Call Centers, BUT The Customer Loyalty Team.
> They created, published AND - more importantly - PRACTICE the Ten Core Values of Zappos.
> The #1 Core Value = Deliver WOW Through Service
> The power of 1%, a blog posted by Alfred the CFO/COO. A brilliant example of ‘get a nano-inch of progress FAST. Increments of advancement add up to impressive performance improvements.
> Weirdness is promulgated as a differential advantage. Tony’s words “We want the company to have a unique and memorable personality”.
> Build a pipeline of people rather than thinking of individuals as assets. You need to build a steady stream of people with the skills and competencies you need. A Pipeline Team delivers courses to various departments.

As an Author I was WOW’d by the way Tony and crew distributed the Advanced Copy of his book for comment. Delivering Happiness was made available to bloggers who post blog articles regularly with a ‘promise’ to blog the book on the Publication date June 7, 2010. What a slick method of, first, getting the Advanced Copy out to a large group of people; second, receiving complementary promotion of his book, and, third, gathering a repository of Critical Praise testimonials for his book. Brilliant example of how Authors can use Social Media to leverage their work. Nice!

Rarely have I seen such a cornucopia of ‘stuff’ that not only mirrors the business practices I believe in but which also have been executed in the real world. Tony has personally breathed life into the notions that people espouse as the right things to do. He did it and he nailed it in his book.

I strongly recommend Delivering Happiness to anyone looking to build something successful and memorable.

Cheers,
Roy
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Posted 4.12.12 at 05:00 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 9, 2012

The 15 Faces of The YOU Marketer

The YOU Marketer:

1. Is driven by individuals - The YOU - not “markets”.

2. Listens to what The YOU has to say. Avoids doing a whole lot of talking.

3. Puts YOU before “me”.

4. Is ok with the possibility of creating a unique product or service for each YOU they serve.

5. Drives IT to “mass-customized” serving systems, capable of uniqueness delivered to thousands of customers.

6. Reserves “Customer Appreciation Day” celebrations for The YOU who have demonstrated their loyalty to the company for many years.

7. Resents mass media advertising as an impersonal and unproductive way to communicate with The YOU.

8. Is an active user of Social Media tools, but only within the defined strategic context.

9. Favors Relationship-building over trying to flog predetermined products and services.

10. Believes a strong relationship with a YOU will deliver a growing and steady revenue stream.

11. Is ok with criticism.

12. Can take a “punch” from The YOU when a mistake has been made or a promise broken.

13. Is a strong advocate for The YOU inside their organization, doing battle for them on the inside. Protecting Them from frustration and a waste of their precious time.

14. Has a high level of Pain Tolerance.

15. Does whatever it takes to try and eliminate any “Dumb Rules” in their organization that piss customers off.

Mass Marketers are a dying breed. They deserve to be. They’re irrelevant to The YOU.

Cheers,
Roy
Join me on Twitter
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Other Articles You Might Like
We’ve Only Just Begun
3 Aha’s For Success
Just Because He’s Dressed Up Doesn’t Mean He’s Pretty

Posted 4.9.12 at 05:54 am by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)