Be Different or be dead

July 30, 2011

What important habit does a great leader practice every day?

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What important habit does a great leader practice every day?

“...any regularly repeated behavior that requires little or no thought and is learned” — a habit

Leaders should always be looking for something that will step up their game, that will continue to make them relevant and standout from the crowd of other leaders who are content to led from a textbook.

There are bad habits. And there are good habits.

You acquire a habit. You do it and you can’t help it. You do it without thinking. A habit tends to be an involuntary response. It becomes part of who we are — integral to our DNA.

If leadership in organizations were to mandate that this habit be acquired, our consumer lives would eventually be a whole lot more satisfying.

The Habit?

Call a customer every day.

It’s rather easy to learn. Easy to do. And the rewards are unlimited for any organization wanting to separate themselves from the faceless competitive herd.

One phone call — no, not an email — to someone who is loyal to you and does business with you regularly.

A 15 minute conversation or longer if you are lucky enough to have the other person actually want to talk to you and will accept your call.

A connection at the same time everyday. Calendarize it so it becomes a part of what you naturally so each day. 1232

The call content is pretty straightforward. Ask a question - Listen - Make notes - Ask a question - Listen - Make notes - Ask - Listen - Take notes…..

After the call, do something with what you’ve learned. If you don’t take action you have wasted the customer’s time. And make this habit matter to others in your organization.

Get others in your organization making the call as well. Spread the habit. Infect your colleagues with it.

The call is not a run-of-the-mill habit.

It actually has a multiple ROI for your 15 minute investment:

▪️ The customer is flattered you called and continues to be loyal and give you their business;
▪️ They tell their close contacts you called them which draws then to you and you censure more business;
▪️ You learn a secret or two during the conversation which not only allows you to serve them better, it also provides you with insights on how you can better serve others and attract new business;
▪️ By getting others in your organization to ‘make the call’, you take a giant step to creating a customer-centric culture which will increase your chances of success and survival in the long term;
▪️ You learn a fact or two about your competition (if you ask the right questions) which allows you to stay one step ahead of them.

You imprint the habit on others to scale the benefits. Wow! A scaled habit. Who would have thought? You improve something in your organization that serves the customer. You earn the continued loyalty of a fan.

Not bad for a habit.

This is one habit you never want to kick.

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

• Posted 7.30.11 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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July 18, 2011

Why customer ‘secrets’ are absolutely critical to business success

Why customer ‘secrets’ are absolutely critical to business success.

Successful organizations know more about what people want than their competition; they use information — customer ‘secrets’ — as the power ingredient in their value proposition mix to separate themselves from everyone else and to achieve incredible levels of performance.

The winners are the insightful ones because there are two tiers of information available to organizations; the first tier is common, and the second one rarely gets used.

Tier #1 is the ‘needs-layer’; it consists of what people need.

Tier #2 is the ‘secrets-layer’; it consists of what people want.

A typical organization talks about the importance of determining what their customers need and delivering appropriate solutions accordingly.

The theory goes: identify what a person needs; build a product or service that delivers the needs and provide it. Simple enough.
The problem is that every competitor is doing it and no one in the market gains any sustainable advantage.

And the added challenge is that the needs of most people are already satisfied; most people already have the things that sustain their everyday lives.

So how can you be successful in attracting them if you and every other market player are using the needs-layer as the basis for your marketing efforts?

You can’t.

People are now more than ever doing business with organizations based on their wants and desires; products, services and experiences they ‘covet’ and ‘lust for’ as opposed to what they need.

And the successful organizations understand that it’s the secrets-layer of information on people that provides the insights they need to get and keep an advantage over their Tier #1 competitors.

So, what’s a customer ‘secret’?

A secret is an individual thing; it’s not a mass thing. Crowds don’t have secrets; individuals in the crowd do.

My secret is not likely to be the same as yours because we are different people with different backgrounds, different competencies, different lifestyles and, in organizations, different financial and market challenges.

A secret reveals itself as a habit, bias, dream, hope, skill, competency, lifestyle choice, family priority, ego drive, friendship affinity, recreation preference, entertainment choice, or in the case of an organization, inventory problems, cash flow margin challenges, employment equity concerns or product quality issues.

If we can discover the secrets of individuals or business decision makers, we will be in the enviable position to deliver something that they can’t get anywhere else (since others are still basing their offerings on what they learn from needs-layer information).

What does it mean to marketing?

A secrets-layer focus changes both the process we use to obtain information on people and the type of information we gather.

The focus of research must be to discover the secrets that every person has, with the trust and conviction that sustainable competitive advantage will result from using this information to develop products, services, packages and other offers (as an aside, packages solutions can only be created if we holistically understand what people desire.)

Marketing strategy must move away from periodic needs based research of mass markets to continuous secrets based learning of individual people

And the secret learning process must be continuous; information is constantly streamed into the organization as a result of ongoing customer engagement as opposed to conducting periodic studies which only provide a snapshot in time of what people are wanting.

What does it mean to customer service?

Secrets-layer information feeds the service recovery process — what the organization does in response to a service blunder that royally screws the customer. The objective is service recovery is to turn the service OOPS! into a loyalty building event where the customer is more committed to the organization after the mishap than they were before it occurred.

The service recovery process looks like this: fix the problem fast (studies show that a response is necessary within 24 hours) + surprise the customer with something they don’t expect.

If you can’t respond to an OOPS! in 24 hours you lose and chance of enhancing customer loyalty

And the essential ingredient of a surprise is the secret-layer; some fact or fantasy you have discovered about the screwed over person that they would be startled to learn that you know about them.

What is critical to get full value from the secret-layer in service recovery is that secret information is available to the service organization in real time.
When a mishap occurs, “What secrets do we know about this customer?” must be answered quickly so the recovery process can conclude within 24 hours.

Use the secret to personalize the process of apologizing for the mishap and ‘atoning for your sin’. Make it special. Show them that you put thought into what is the right way for you to make amends.

And they will quickly forget about the OOPS! and all they will remember is how amazing they felt when you recovered in a personal way.

What does it mean to sales?

A secrets-layer focus means that sales must be held accountable for gathering customer secrets, leveraging them as a customer engagement tool and reporting the information back to their colleagues (like marketing and customer service) who are then able to use them as needed.

Even though sales is in a great position to ask the right questions of customers, listen, take notes, and record what they discover, they are rarely asked to perform this function. They continue to be expected to perform their traditional — and commonplace — role of pushing products and services to their markets and hitting their short term quota.

And unfortunately, this traditional role contributes virtually nothing to enable an organization to stand out from their competition and gain a strategic advantage.

Notwithstanding the fact that the process exposes opportunities to grow revenue, secret gathering is an excellent way for a salesperson to deepen relationships with their customers.

The mere fact that it’s the secret discovery process is highly interactive means that relationships are automatically strengthened (with the caveat of course that fulfilling promises made is done promptly and to the customer’s satisfaction).

The way to get sales to be ‘secret agents’ is to build secret gathering into sales performance and compensation plans otherwise it won’t get done.

Sales bonuses should assign a material weight to this component to get sales attention - I suggest at least 25% of the sales bonus should be based on secret gathering effectiveness and that a customer report card be used as the measurement vehicle.

What does the discovery process look like?

The fact is that people are willing to give you their secrets every time you engage with them if the right approach is taken. 

All you need to do is to show that you are more interested in them than you are in pursuing your own agenda. By your actions tell them that you are a ’human being lover’, and that you are interested in their story.

The secret floodgates will open.

The secret gathering process looks like this:

Ask a question > listen > record what you hear > ask another question > ask another question > repeat.

The point is that we have all been taught to be in the transmit mode, anxious to tell the other person what we have been up to, what we have to sell and the attributes we possess.

To really learn about someone we need to make a right-angled turn from this behavior. We need to be open to others and focus on learning what THEY are all about.

As a way to get started, create a secrets manual on each of your high value customers

Have fun with the idea. How about a secret agent award to honor the person who discovers the coolest secrets every month?
Or an annual recognition award of someone who excels at continually maintaining and sharing their secrets manual?

A sustainable advantage is the most difficult thing for any organization to achieve in markets overwhelmed with intense and aggressive competition.

It’s ironic that most organizations look to the text books on strategy for the solution. They all look to technologies, products, services, branding and a plethora of other tactics to one-up their competitors, yet there is one rather mundane and non-sexy thing that can be done to attain incredible strategic success: discover the secrets that decision makers house and protect — and exploit them to grow business.

Secret gathering is strategic and it should be developed as a core competency in your organization if you want to standout and power up your business.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 7.18.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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July 16, 2011

3 easy things you need to know for startup success

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3 easy things you need to know for startup success.

So you have a cool idea that you think people will love. You think it will make you lots of money. You want to start your own business.

How do you go about it?

Here are 3 things you should do to at least increase your chances of success:

1. Make sure your idea is different

Before you do anything to move your new idea forward, make sure it’s different from what others in the market are doing. If you don’t have an idea that offers people something different from what other products are available, you will most likely be one of the startup failure statistics.
If your idea is the same or similar to what others offer, you simply won’t get noticed. Your competitive strategy should be based on uniqueness: to be the ONLY one that does what you do.

2. Keep your planning horizon short

Think in terms of what you want to achieve over the next 24 months. Your financiers may want a 5 Year Plan but you need to keep your eyes on short term goals. execution is critical and is enabled through a focus on “What am I going to do in the next 30 days?”.
Remember: the 5th year of a 5-year plan won’t show up if you can’t find a way to navigate through the vagaries of the near term.

3. Create a base of support for your idea

You need to garner a crowd of supporters for your idea. People who love it. People who want you to succeed. People who are willing to commit their time and energy to spread your word to others.
Use them to start your marketing efforts. It’s the most inexpensive and effective way to get going. And if you have trouble organizing a group of support for your idea then maybe it’s not a good idea.

Key concepts: ONLY competitive positioning, monthly goals and fan marketing.

Good luck!

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

• Posted 7.16.11 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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July 4, 2011

How worthless activities in your business can be removed in a simple way

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How worthless activities in your business can be removed in a simple way.

So you have developed a new business plan for your organization. You have communicated it far and wide. You seem to have buy-in. But progress to the brave new world is slower than you expected.

Your analysis of the situation produces the overwhelming feedback that people don’t have the time to take on any more work.

There are only so many hours of the day and they have no more to give. In addition, people are saying there are too many priorities. They don’t know what to do with so many demands of their time.

Sound familiar? Ever been here? Too much work. Too many number one priorities. The symptoms that CRAP abounds in your organization.

CRAP is work that is no longer relevant to the new strategy you have created but for some reason it continues…. and continues…. and continues. Sucking up energy and hours of the day that could and should be devoted to doing the new stuff necessary to progress the organization.

Some people like CRAP.

▪️ CRAP is comfortable.
▪️ CRAP is familiar.
▪️ CRAP is fun.
▪️ CRAP is the old world.
▪️ CRAP may have got you recognized and promoted.

CRAP needs to be destroyed in order to be able to take on the new challenges. The biggest source of resource to do new stuff is the time currently being spent on doing CRAP

There are three things you can do to eliminate it.

1. Assign a Cut the CRAP champion

You need one person whose sole reason for being is to identify CRAP and get rid of it. In fact their compensation plan needs to be based on how much CRAP they are able to dispose of. No CRAP; No PAY.
You say you don’t have any CRAP? You haven’t looked close enough.

2. Create a Cut list

Identify those things that are now active which are candidates to cut. Do a complete inventory of all projects on the table. Evaluate each in terms of consistency with the new direction. Build a criteria for the evaluation. And make the Cut list as long as you can.

There will be a tendency for people to rationalize everything as being necessary. don’t fall into this trap otherwise you won’t uncover new available time. Be sure to record the people working on the CRAP because they represent potential resources for re-deployment or exit (if they are unwilling to accept a new assignment and the new strategy).

3. Create a Keep list

This list must be kept small in order to get new bandwidth for new things. Be brutal on what goes on this list. If a project is less than 80% aligned with the new strategy put it on the Cut list.

The Keep list must only contain No Brainer Work that is so obviously necessary that it attracts no debate whatsoever. It’s ok to move a project from Keep to Cut easier than from Cut to Keep. Pressure must be on resourcing the critical few things that are necessary to have an 80% impact on the new strategy.

You now know what you have to do.

STOP the Cut stuff and reassign to the Keep Stuff..

And tell everyone in the organization what you have done and the new time you have found for them to be able to implement the NEW.

And keep the Cut the CRAP champion on stand-by for an audit in 12 months to make sure the CRAP doesn’t creep back in.

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

• Posted 7.4.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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