Be Different or be dead

March 25, 2013

7 important things that will make customers pay attention to you

Source: Pexels

7 important things that will make customers pay attention to you.

How do you keep your customers paying attention to you and what you have to say?

We are overloaded these days.

We are bombarded with too many messages flogging stuff to buy, events to attend and causes to support that after awhile nothing resonates with us. We don’t stir. We don’t react. We become numb.

The lines that distinguish one source from another get blurred. Everything blends into one big noise. Our Individual wants and desires are ignored. The Herd speaks with a common voice to everyone.

We turn our backs.

If we are getting desensitized to our environment, think about what we are doing to our customers. Do their eyes glaze over when we speak to them? Do they shut our “buy requests” out because they can’t relate to what we are saying?

Customer fatigue can and must be avoided if we want have people respond enthusiastically when we reach out to them. And if we want to give them meaning when they engage with us

Here are 7 steps to keep people focused on what you have to say.

▪️ Don’t speak to the crowd. Speak to ME. I am like no other. I’m not ‘average’. Unless your words address ME, specifically, they go in one ear and out the other.

▪️ Speak about the things that are important to ME. I’m not interested in listening to stuff that I don’t care about. And I’m less interested in stuff that appeals to others.

▪️ Speak to the problem you can solve for me or the value I will receive. I could care less about how it works.

▪️ Don’t insult me by thinking that I am only interested in price. If you pitch a lowest price claim to me, I will tune you out fast.

▪️ Your pitch must clearly state how you are different than the many others competing for my attention. I will respond to uniqueness; you are invisible to me if you are like all others.

▪️ Show me in words that you are socially responsible and that your support and kindness lines up with my ideals.

▪️ Prove to me that you believe in keeping humanity in your organization. That you care about engaging with me personally. Encourage me to speak with a real person - not a machine.  Welcome my calls rather than siphon them off to a chunk of technology that is there to reduce your costs.

Do these things and I might just stick around, pay you and spread your word to others.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.25.13 at 09:45 am by Roy Osing
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March 18, 2013

Why a successful business plan depends on avoiding ‘yummy’

Why a successful business plan depends on avoiding ‘yummy’.

If you chase yummy incoming activities, your business plan is toast.

So, here you are. You have completed your business plan and now you must determine the tactics you need to see your brave idea turn into reality.
You start with a clean sheet of paper and decide to brainstorm on all the things you need to do to implement your new plan.

Good idea? Well, it can be, or it can create a lot of activity but little movement forward.

It’s ok to create a list of possible actions that you feel should be taken, but then you must purge the list down to the critical few actions to focus on that you believe have an 80 percent chance of achieving the results you want.
You simply don’t have enough resources and bandwidth to do an effective job on 25 things you have on your brainstorming list.

Multitasking is deadly when you are trying to implement the game plan of your ‘new baby’.

If you can’t define the critical few actions necessary to achieve progress towards your business plan goals, it indicates that you really don’t understand your strategy and the specific execution levers are necessary to get you going.

Spend time debating this issue because if you merely throw possibilities at the wall and then try to implement every one of them, your energies will be spread too thin and you will be unable to move forward.

Determine 3 things (or maybe 4 or 5, but not a dozen) that will produce 80% of your business plan results and get on with them — Roy’s Rule of 3

Spend time on Roy’s Rule; it will pay off handsomely for you.

Beware of yummy

Once you’ve defined the few critical things that you believe will get your startup off the ground, be prepared for distractions that will pull you away from your game plan. This always happens as you learn more about what your strategy means, and when others find out what you’re up to and present you with added opportunities.

If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any — Jim Collins, Author

For example, you’ve decided on the customer group you want to target and out-of-the-blue comes someone who is not a target customer reaching out to you to ask for your attention.

They want to explore adopting your product solution and of course they have questions that they need answers to which will take time and effort on your part to accommodate — they will drain your scarce resources.

This happens all the time. A client of mine decided to focus on the Vancouver market where access was easy and market growth was attractive. Then they received a call from an organization in South America who found out about their innovative solution and wanted to explore partnership opportunities with them. Clearly not on strategy. But oh so tempting to chase!

‘Yummy incoming’  is the over-the-transom stuff that comes up that we are tempted to chase.

Another client developed an innovative wireless technology for a particular application in the security market segment. When other companies learned of their plans, they reached out and presented them with other potential applications for their technology.

The CEO was delighted with the additional interest and decided to evaluate these new opportunities but in doing so diffused the efforts of his team and reduced the focus on building the security solution. The end result after about a year of toiling over at least a half dozen applications was nothing advanced. The security opportunity faltered and investors pulled their funding. yummy was the instrument of their demise.

What do you do when yummy appears and has the potential of pushing your business plan off the rail?

How to beat yummy

Here’s how to keep yummy from diluting the effectiveness of your business plan:an action plan to consider.

▪️ Give yourself one day — no more — to do a quick and dirty evaluation on whether or not yummy has any potential. It’s important that you maintain the discipline to not burn endless resource cycles on the possibility that there could be a significant opportunity vis-a-vis your current focus but you have to make the call fast so the impact on your current momentum is minimized.

▪️ If you decide to chase yummy , go back and review your business plan. If Yummy looks like it has potential, change the focus of your business plan.

If you decide to try and have it both ways — trying to stay on your original path and also chase yummy — you won’t succeed in execution your business plan and you probably won’t do a decent job chasing yummy . 

You can’t have more than a handful of number one priorities. Multitasking is bad news for most organizations but it’s deadly for startups. And don’t for even a moment think you have the luxury of taking on additional resources to implement yummy . You don’t.

▪️ Explore whether or not the organization representing yummy is prepared to contribute resources to evaluate the potential of their idea and to help implement it if it turns out if it offers as much value as your current strategy. They may be willing to partner with you in the development of their idea and in the go-to-market action plan in return for a piece of the action.

Remember, every minute yummy consumes your time is a minute less you have to spend on the focus you’ve decided on to execute your overall strategy so resist the temptation to deviate from it without compelling evidence that you will be better off doing so.

Chasing stuff is not healthy. Busyness may be comfort food, but remember that you created a game plan to avoid eating it.

Successful businesses focus on their business plan and don’t chase things that are interesting and cool but are clearly off strategy.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.18.13 at 09:57 am by Roy Osing
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March 11, 2013

What stupid words should never be uttered in customer service?

What stupid words should never be uttered in customer service?

There are certain things you should never say if your intention is to create an amazing and memorable customer experience.

How many times have you heard people in customer service jobs make comments like these?

— It’s not in my area
— You can’t sit here, this section is closed
— Booths are only for parties of 4
— I already told you
— I’m going on my break
— It’s our policy
— You can’t do that
— I’m new here
— I have no idea
— It’s over there
— We can’t do that
— No
— The special deal doesn’t apply to you
— The sale is over
— I’ll have to talk to my supervisor
— The clothes in the Mannequin not for sale. They are are for display purposes only
— Can you eat that much? (actually asked of me at The Sentosa Golf Club in Singapore)

I am sure you can add to the list from your own experiences.

A successful customer service culture has its own vocabulary, and the above utterances are not included. Customer service leaders must seek out and eliminate any of them that are spoken.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.11.13 at 07:48 am by Roy Osing
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February 4, 2013

How people can be better at getting things done

How people can be better at getting things done.

Bre Pettis understands that success is all about shipping stuff.

Getting it done. Executing rather than over-intellectualizing.

Doing it rather than talking about it. Producing not pondering.

Here is his Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion;

2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done;

3. There is no editing stage;

4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it;

5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it;

6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done;

7. Once you’re done you can throw it away;

8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done;

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right;

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes;

11. Destruction is a variant of done;

12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done;

13. Done is the engine of more.

I’m done…

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.4.13 at 10:22 am by Roy Osing
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