Be Different or be dead

November 13, 2021

3 necessary actions business owners should take to deal with a scandal

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3 necessary actions business owners should take to deal with a scandal.

The potential for scandal has always been a concern for business owners. However, this is somewhat more pronounced in the contemporary commercial landscape.

The tools of our digital age have not only made information more readily available for consumers to scrutinize, but social media has made problems more shareable. Information about a scandal in your business can spread around the world in seconds.

It’s important to handle a scandal swiftly and correctly. An unaddressed controversy can haunt your business. But it can be challenging to know how best to go about this.

Let’s explore a few ways you can best approach handling a scandal.

#1. Prioritize transparency

Among the most common mistakes businesses make following a scandal, is to desperately try to minimize it. This could involve attempts at a full cover-up or perhaps delivering messaging to suggest the impact of the scandal is not as serious as it is in reality.

However, whatever the nature of the scandal, it is vital that your first step is to be honest. While the event itself may be embarrassing, full transparency is the only way to meaningfully rebuild trust with your consumers, staff, and the community. 

This begins with clear communication. Make a straightforward announcement across all your channels — this should include your social media accounts and website, as well as traditional platforms.

Be open about what the initial knowledge is about the problem and the effect it may have. Importantly, you then need to set expectations for further communications. This could be setting timelines for any further investigations that need to occur or the progression of mitigating actions.

If there are any elements of the unknown, be clear about this and establish how you’ll approach information gathering. Give your staff, consumers, and the public confidence that you are keeping them in the loop.

Along with your communications, you need to put in place access to key materials to support greater transparency and could prevent future similar scandals.

A good example here is the problems that can occur when a private party or business is suddenly in receipt of a large amount of wealth.
It can be easy to make mistakes revolving around the treatment of these funds, particularly in meeting the relevant tax obligations and protecting stakeholders’ assets.

Following a mismanagement scandal, it can be helpful to make resources about the true financial status and actions of the company available to relevant stakeholders.
Provide yearly reports to the public. Businesses are often hesitant to share this kind of information, but it can do wonders for establishing trust.

#2. Adjust your practices

Successfully handling a scandal isn’t about paying lip service to culpability or placating disappointed stakeholders. You can’t just hold out until the worst of the situation has passed and then put your efforts into marketing your way back into prominence.

Contemporary consumers and employees expect to see real and lasting change from businesses following this kind of setback. Understanding and implementing these adjustments is an area where you should be focusing your efforts.

Look inwardly at your company’s culture and ethics. While individual actions may have been directly to blame for a scandal, it is often an ineffective or weak set of core company values that gives such behavior space to breed and thrive.

By examining your approach to your business ethics and being willing to adjust you have a route to affecting meaningful cultural change. This not only manages the current scandal but also lays the groundwork for preventing them in the future.

It can be helpful to engage with a professional that specializes in business ethics so your company can gain greater clarity on how employee interactions, fair treatment, and corporate social responsibility should factor into operations.

Whether they’re an external consultant or a new member of leadership, their insights into designing and implementing ethical frameworks can be instrumental in your recovery. Importantly, their insights should be treated not just as an immediate solution.

You need to work with them to make sure changes are sustainable over the course of years and design periodic assessments to gauge efficacy. 

#3. Be accountable

Perhaps above all else, it is vital you fully accept responsibility for the scandal as a business owner. No matter what kind of leadership style you favor for your business, at the end of the day all business owners share a single trait.

You hold ultimate responsibility for the actions of your company and employees. You need to treat a scandal within your organization as though you as a business leader have caused it personally.

To start to recover from the problem, consumers want to see you’re being accountable for the controversial behavior. 

Take your lumps with gratitude. Accept that the fallout of this issue isn’t just something your company could have been damaged by. It has also given you the tools and impetus to make it better. Seek out meaningful ways you can make reparations (205) to those who may have been injured or otherwise negatively impacted by the events.

An important part of addressing a scandal is to consider it from the mindset of the customer or employee affected. Seek to understand what they need from your company in order to be indemnified for their losses or address their trauma. Part of your recovery is helping them recover. 

Even once you’ve addressed the immediate impact of the scandal, you have to remember that accountability should be an ongoing practice.

Establish an open dialogue with your consumers and staff members. Invite them to reach out if they feel you or the company is not upholding its ethical standards. This shows that you accept the faults of your past and appreciate their role in helping you be better in the future.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, experiencing a scandal is a reality for many businesses and it can be a damaging influence. It’s important to understand that handling these issues is about making genuine efforts.

This includes being transparent in your communications, adopting meaningful change, and establishing a culture of accountability. It’s not easy to get past a scandal, but when you do the work you can not just move on from the problem but come back stronger.

— Jori Hamilton is an experienced writer residing in the Pacific Northwest U.S. She covers a wide range of topics but takes a particular interest in covering topics related to wellness and mental health. To learn more about Jori, you can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

• Posted 11.13.21 at 04:43 am by Roy Osing
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November 8, 2021

How the best salespeople find customers who are leaning their way

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How the best salespeople find customers who are leaning their way.

What’s a ‘leaner’?

It’s a prospect that’s leaning your way after having heard your ’un-sales’ pitch over a rather lengthy engagement period.

And it’s a prospect that, once they fall your way, will never have to be sold again.
They’re all in with you and the organization you represent. They believe you and they trust you. They are convinced that you will forever look after their best interests. They treat you as family, that’s how strong the bond is between them and you.

And as a result they believe you when you tell them that you need a new solution to a persistent problem they have. They believe you when you say a significant new investment in your product will deliver an order of magnitude increase in productivity.

They’re on cruise control with you in the driver’s seat (at least until you do something stupid that destroys all the currency you’ve built up with them).

How does this happen? How do you as a salesperson spot a leaner and secure them as advocates?

1. Look for the cream

You need a high potential leaner because the time and effort you devote to them must have a big potential payback if it’s to make any sense at all.

Work with your marketing colleagues to develop a list of leaner candidates; those targets—The WHO—with the potential to generate substantial additional revenue for the organization.

Start with a list of 10 high potential leaders; don’t try and boil the ocean by having a list longer than you can reasonably manage.

2. Hunt for the fox

This is where you need good detective work to identify the person in each top 10 organization you should be paying attention to.

The fox is the one who will be making the buying decisions and who will decide whether you get the business or not, so be sure they are the right person in the client’s organization you should be dealing with.

It’s important that you don’t spray your efforts among many people in the target organization; focus on the fox to ensure your efforts are justly rewarded.

3. Discover what they crave

The innermost desires of people - what they crave - are powerful influencing agents, far stronger than what they ‘need’ so you need to put in the time to find them.

Fox cravings are essential beacons that will allow the salesperson to make inroads quickly to establish credibility and trust with the leaner.

Everyone else will be generally looking for client needs which are basic and quite frankly boring client requirements—inventory, communication, CRM, and financial systems for example. These relate to basic operational matters rather than the specific wants and desires of the fox, which could be completely different.

They may have a specific problem, on the other hand, that they want solved to make their life easier and more pleasant in performing their immediate role. If you can discover what this craving is, you will differentiate yourself from the hungry sales pack and be in the best position to capture their affection.

4. Know their strategy better than they do

To be successful with any business client, you have to understand their business plan at a granular level to really appreciate the problems and opportunities available to you.

So, take the time to study their plan and to translate it in terms of what it means to the fox and their operations.

Generally foxes are too busy running their operations and don’t spend the time determining how they specifically relate to the overall strategic game plan of the organization, so if you help them develop the critical few priorities they should be concentrating on to make the greatest strategic impact, you will be ‘a friend for life’ and earn their loyalty.

5. The devil’s in the details

People are generally impressed with someone who can remember details, particularly about them and the issues they face and to capture their attention and have them lean in your direction requires that you are concerned with more than their ‘big picture’.

Pay attention to the micro matters surrounding the fox. Make copious notes on ‘pinch points’ that define their reality so you can study them and come up with potential solutions.

First, the fact that you are paying attention to the small stuff and second, that you are offering viable solutions will make you that special salesperson who gets more learners than anyone else.

6. Keep your promises

Strong relationships are moulded by placing more emphasis on the fox as a person than on the organization as a whole.

Loyalty isn’t commanded from a business, it’s earned from the way an individual inside the organization is treated and served.

And at the most fundamental level, it’s about keeping promises. How do you rate as a promise-keeper? When you promise your fox to do something, do you always deliver as promised? Or do you keep some and make others?

Or, so you even know what your promise-keeping performance is? You need to keep track of the promises you make and the promises you keep. Make it a daily discipline and ask your fox for feedback on how well you are doing.

Looking for and capturing a leaner isn’t rocket science; it’s about doing the no-nonsense little things that make a big difference.

You won’t find leaner-gathering tactics in a classic sales textbook, they’re learned from ‘in the trenches’ real life experience.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 11.8.21 at 05:06 am by Roy Osing
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November 1, 2021

6 effective barriers to prevent your customers from leaving you

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6 effective barriers to prevent your customers from leaving you.

Why is there so much talk about the competition?

How to build a competitive strategy, tips for analyzing your competition, how to attain a cost leadership position against your competitors and how to out-sell your competitors pervade the thinking of most business people.

The underlying strategic intent is to build barriers to competitive entry; erect a massive wall to prevent the hordes from entering your markets and taking your customers.

I don’t get it.

You have little real control over what they do. If they want to launch a new product, reduce their prices, introduce a new disruptive technology or enter one of your markets to compete with you, they will. And (unless you intend to fight their actions on legal, regulatory or ant-competitive grounds), you will have no choice but to deal with the challenges their actions pose.

All you can do is try to anticipate their actions and go on the offensive, or respond to them defensively when they happen.

Rather than devote copious amounts of resources, time and energy to issues we have little control over, we should focus on what we have SOME degree of control over.

Rather than build barriers to competitive entry, we should be concentrating on building barriers to customer exit.

This you DO have a degree of control over; you stand a better chance of creating the outcome you want than basing your actions on what your competition does.

Spend your time making it extremely difficult for your customers to leave given a choice they might be offered by a competitor.

Barrier to exit profile

What do barriers to customer exit look like?

#1. Relationships

The emphasis is on building relationships and creating personalized experiences for customers as opposed to pushing products and services at them with a one size fits all mentality.

What customers personally need is given priority over what the common needs of the broader mass market appear to be.
In addition, attention shifts to concentrate more on how people feel when they are engaged with the organization and not solely on the right product or service fit.

#2. Chat

Every manager and executive ‘makes the call’—yes, a phone call!—to customers on a frequent basis to ensure they are being served with relevant and compelling solutions.
It’s an opportunity for the organization to get critiqued on their performance as well as receive suggestions for improvement.

The bottom line is the customer feels valued and respected and are less likely to be enamoured and attracted by a competitor’s value proposition.

#3. Deals

Special offers and price promotions are proactively offered to loyal customers; they are not used solely as a tool to attract new customers as is more often the case in most organizations.

The marketing and sales roles are to be proactive with the customer and present these opportunities before that are made available to the broader base.

People are more loyal when they feel that they are special; getting the deal first will go a long way to shutting the ‘bad guys’ out.

#4. Retention

Customer retention outranks new customer acquisition in terms of priority; the key success factor on the organization’s balanced scorecard is the rate of customer attrition.
It’s always incredibly satisfying to attract a new customer especially when it’s the result of a win from a competitor.

Teams love winning a competitive battle; it’s what makes their juices flow.
The issue is, however, that making your organization irresistible so that customers don’t want to leave can’t be done effectively when there is a strong push to get new customers.

The priority must be on retaining the existing customer base and trust that they will refer you and spread your word to others who will come over to your side — your loyal customers will drive new customers to you.

#5. Policies

The policy system of the organization is built to serve customers not control them. Dumb rules are eliminated in favour of those that facilitate customer engagement.

No one is likely to stay loyal to an organization that is difficult to business with; internal rules that put customers through hoops and policies that make no sense other than to control what customers do as opposed to enable them to get their needs and wants satisfied.

Every employee in an organization has a critical role to be an advocate for the customer and find and fix the internal roadblocks—rules and policies—that annoy customers and make the engagement experience negative for the customer.

And given the inertia that presides in most organizations, to make meaningful change that favours the customer, everyone must take on an advocate role to fight their internal bureaucracy and stand up for the rights of the customer.

#6. Screwups

A HUGE barrier—ironically—to customers leaving is what you do when a mistake has been made and the customer has been screwed over.

Most organizations spend all their time on how to prevent mistakes from occurring (and that’s ok) but few if any have a strategy in place to deal with the situation when prevention goes awry and a colossal blunder happens (and it will).

The fact of the matter is that service blunders that are handled right actually enhance customer loyalty because of the ’impress’ factor.

If an organization responds to a service OOPS! in a way that surprises the customer and dazzles them, they WILL be impressed and they WILL think of the organization in a more positive way (compared to the blunder never happening in the first place).

Impress = Fix the blunder fast + surprise the customer with what they DON’T expect.

Build a barrier to customers leaving by admitting you’ll commit a blunder from time to time and have a plan to recover in an astonishing way when you do.

Going to war with the competition and focusing relentlessly on them may get the adrenalin flowing, but it does so at the expense of your loyalists who have been committed to you in the past and who need you to continue to give them good reasons to stay.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 11.1.21 at 03:25 am by Roy Osing
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