Be Different or be dead

May 24, 2012

How a trauma can be a great teacher for marketing

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How a trauma can be a great teacher for marketing.

Riots. Horrific Accidents. Shootings. Natural Disasters. All of these events can have a damaging impact on a person. And in most cases, experts are brought in to counsel the victims and others that are touched in some dramatic way.

Trauma counselling operates on the simple premise that each person’s reaction to a cataclysmic event will be different.

And to effectively treat that person you need to first, understand their reality and second, design a remedy that reflects their specific needs.

If personalized treatment is a natural thing in trauma cases, why do organizations have difficulty doing the same thing for their customers as business as usual?

Why do they continue to push a single product solution to each of their customers?

Why do they create vanilla services they then try to market to everyone?

Why do they behave as if individual needs, wants and desires don’t exist and that everyone is the same?

Let’s take a page from trauma management and apply what they do to everyday business.

Trauma marketing principles:

▪️ Each person in your target market is unique in some way. Attitudes. Biases. Beliefs. Lifestyles. Discover their uniqueness. Define it precisely for each and every one of them;

▪️ Build the ‘remedy’ that fits their profile precisely. ONLY for her and no one else. Built for her. To reflect her character mould;

▪️ Treat them with care and sensitivity. Ask for feedback on your remedy. Adjust it to better fit her requirements;

▪️ Pretend you are entering a disaster scene and have to treat distraught people who may be scarred for life.

Look for their special needs and cater to them accordingly.

People are all different; personalize the solution and treat with care.

Interesting that we can look to other professions to see how they deal with humans and get insights into how our customers should be treated.

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

• Posted 5.24.12 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 21, 2012

5 easy ways to waste your time and blow your career

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5 easy ways to waste your time and blow your career.

Having a successful career requires that you make the best use of the time you have available.

But if you really want to be ineffective, and a time waster here are 5 things you can do:

Put a to do list together of at least 10 things to be done
This will show your intent to do a lot of things but will guarantee that you will make little progress in any of them despite the huge amount of time you spend on them. Brainstorming and then multitasking is a great way to look really busy and waste time.

Kiss up to your boss
Focus on what THEY want. Ignore the priorities of the organization and just look to your boss for a sense of what you should be doing. Devote your day to asking what you can do for them. Ignore your business plan.

Write activity reports on what you’ve been up to
Include every move note detail — meetings, who were there, conferences attended and so on.
Share your reports with everyone you can think of. Make sure people know you’re a busy bee.

Send emails when you have something to say
And make every message sound complicated because it communicates how important you are.
Never have face-to-face meetings with people even virtually. They can be upsetting sometimes and could force you to answer questions you’d rather avoid.

Stay late at the office
And make sure everyone knows you’re doing it. The more time you put in, the more activities you are engaged in. Therefore you get the most out of the time available. And be sure to include your hours in your activity reports along with a complicated sounding reason you decided to put in the extra time.

It’s not easy mismanaging your time, but if you follow these 5 actions you’d be surprised about how little you will accomplish.

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

• Posted 5.21.12 at 10:22 am by Roy Osing
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May 16, 2012

Why your language must change if you want to be customer focused

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Why your language must change if you want to be customer focused.

If you are like most organizations, you have your own language.

Whether you are in the communications business, the law profession, or medicine, over time people develop a vocabulary specific to you; it is understood by all.

The problem is that your unique language is reflective of looking inward to your products, technology, systems, and operating procedures rather than outward to your customers.

If you don’t ‘customerize’ your language you can hardly say that you are addicted to serving customers in every way possible.
The words and music don’t match.

In addition behavior can’t change to be outwardly directed to the customer if the internally focused language implies the opposite.

A few examples.

‘Calls processed’

Most organizations have call center operations which typically handle sales and service responsibilities. The productivity objective of most call centers is to process as many calls with as few resources as possible. Other metrics include call speed of answer and average call handling time.

The common denominator of this operation is the word ‘call’. You process calls. You answer incoming calls as fast as you can. You try and minimize the length of each call to maximize productivity.

The problem is that the customer is missing in action. If the call is the focus with implied productivity measures, it is hardly a wonder that taking care of the customer on the call gets lost as a priority.

Employees are more interested in call productivity — because they are rated on it — than creating memorable experiences for customers.

The solution is to eliminate the call processing mentality and start talking about serving customers.

Start talking about the number of customers served; customer wait time and customer serving time.

‘Customer commitment’

At least the customer is in this expression, but it lacks the personal dimension that is so important in serving customers well.

I like the word ‘promise’. Companies make commitments; people make promises. There is much more serving power in customer promises than customer commitments.

The productivity metrics become much more meaningful and visceral under the promises notion. What % of customer promises did you keep? How many promises did you break? Who in the organization is the best at keeping customer promises?

WOW! Much more powerful and easy for employees to relate to than the company commitment paradigm.

To change your language to reflect a customer focus, follow this action plan:

▪️ Develop a dictionary of your current language;

▪️ Identify the word/expressions that you understand but which lack the punch of passionately serving customers;

▪️ Create customer words to replace the internal jargon focused ones;

▪️ Change internal success metrics to reflect your customerized language. For example measure promises kept rather than commitments met;

▪️ Communicate to employees why you are changing your language; emphasize that serving customers is a critical element of your business plan.

You can’t have it both ways: saying that customers are your most precious asset yet through your language highlighting the internal fabric of your organization.

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

• Posted 5.16.12 at 09:13 am by Roy Osing
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May 14, 2012

How do great leaders make incredibly fantastic teams?

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How do great leaders make incredibly fantastic teams?

A critical element of leadership is creating strong teams to get the right things done

Effective teams are effective because they have a leader who has figured out that delivering the right things is the objective. It’s all about execution.

Here are 5 tips to building a strong and effective team.

Create your business plan to standout from your competition — Engage your team in the process.
Let them play an active role in shaping their collective future. Shared visions are more likely to evoke the energy and commitment necessary to execute well.

Top- down direction-setting is required, but should be carefully orchestrated and focused to those areas where leadership must be in control. Shared accountability bonds people together and gives them permission to call on each other when things go off track.

Keep it alive — Teams flourish when they are winning the battle, so the leader’s job is to ‘win a battle every day’. Let everyone know. Share the victory with the team.

Bash internal barriers — Well-oiled teams have a leader who removes obstacles preventing people from getting things done.
Priority #1 is to eliminate the grunge that fosters inertia and stands in the way of advancement. Effective teams are effective only if they execute well.

Be the Chief Barrier Basher for your team.

Translate your strategy for all employees — Paint a picture of what it means to the team and each member of it. Effectiveness comes from every team member working in harmony and having a direct line of sight to the strategy of the organization. Everyone must be moving in the same direction.

The leader’s job is to define roles that eliminate the possibility of dysfunctional activity which gets in the way of progress.

Shout out the people and achievements that show that the strategy is being successfully implemented — Reinforcing the behaviours and people that stand for the new direction will build stronger teams with better performance.

Effective Teams = enlightened leadership = shared vision = flawless execution = shared accountability

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

• Posted 5.14.12 at 10:09 am by Roy Osing
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