Be Different or be dead

August 19, 2019

Why a bad strategic goal to chase is to be ‘the best’

Source: Pexels

Why a bad strategic goal to chase is to be ‘the best’.

Every organization wants to establish a competitive advantage in the markets they serve. And they all look to creating a claim that establishes themselves in the dominant position.

These types of declarations pervade the communications space.

— “We offer the best network”

— “Our services provide the best value for money in the business”

— “Our customer service is better than our competition”

— “We have the best people in our industry”

— “Our sales support is best in class”

These types of claims don’t cut it in today’s world of intelligent discerning customers and intense competition.

A hope and a prayer

They are aspirational statements that don’t provide any meaningful guidance to people in the organization in terms of what they should do and how they should behave to live the strategy.

Lack of meaning

They don’t give customers any meaningful information that helps them understand the competitive claim. For example the largest Telecom Company in Canada claims to have the ‘best network’ among their competitors. Is this useful information to a customer? Does it explain the characteristic of their network that makes it the best?

No proof

They are difficult if not impossible to prove particularly in terms that address customer needs. In my experience, claims of this nature attract internal organizational statistics to ‘prove’ the claim and not specific attributes that are compelling to customers. They talk to the internal audience rather than the external one.

A competitive claim based on how different your organization is, on the other hand, forces you to define in precise terms how you are unique among your competitors.

Through the use of The ONLY Statement, a detailed assessment of the competition is done and is correlated with the critical desires of the customer groups you have chosen to serve. And it leverages the competencies and skills of the organization.

Here’s an example:

“We are the ONLY team that provides integrated safety solutions that go beyond the needs of our customers ANYTIME, ANYWHERE. We are committed to grow our customer’s business. We ONLY serve safety.”

The ONLY Statement informs the organization what specifically it intends to do that is unique in the marketplace and it declares to the customer what specific value and benefits will be delivered to them — it provides a framework for measuring and proving the competitive claim.

Winning is not about comparative and superlative claims in any event. They are not needed. You don’t have to be better than another company or best among your competitors to succeed and survive. You need to be different in some meaningful way.

Provide relevant, compelling and UNIQUE value to those you have chosen to serve and the spoils of the battle will flow your way.

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

• Posted 8.19.19 at 01:27 am by Roy Osing
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August 12, 2019

Why the sales flogger is disgusting and creates pain for people

Source: Unsplash

Why the sales flogger is disgusting and creates pain for people.

Sales product pushers torture customers when they try to force the customer to buy what they’re flogging.

Here’s the profile of the sales pushing technique that inflicts pain on people and diminishes the credibility of the profession.

1. One way conversation — Throughout the engagement process little interest is shown by the salesperson in discovering the customer’s needs, wants and desires. Their primary focus is on driving the product down the customer’s throat with no attempt to identify solutions that might address burning customer problems.

There is way too much fast talk. It’s a sales monologue about the features and benefits of the product. It’s not a conversation with the customer. If the sales person takes a breath during their speech it’s a miracle. It’s full-out transmitting with no listening.

2. Products and prices — The features of the product are highlighted. What the product does takes precedence over the benefits and value it creates. It’s a gee-whiz expose on the cool things the technology can do whether it resonates with what the customer wants or not.
And it’s a pricing pitch with the emphasis being on what the product costs and how it’s cheaper than the competition.

The sales monologue is dominated by a complex technology narrative which typically leaves the customer in a daze with little or no understanding of what the salesperson is talking about.

The flogger is infatuated with their technical knowledge and they beat the customer over the head with it.

3. Twenty-Four hour attention span — The sales engagement has a here and now short term focus; what can they extract from the customer today, right now in the moment?

There is little interest in searching for and presenting any long term benefits; the sales pusher doesn’t really care if the customer returns to buy again.
What’s important for them is to consummate the sale and move on to another potential sale with their sights on making quota.

4. Unrelenting pressure — The pressure on the customer to buy is immense. And in the face of the sales barrage, all the sales target wants to do is to get it over with and escape the pain.
There are no easy flight defences for the customer who sits perspiring, looking to leave the intolerable scene. The flogger is relentless. The customer cannot escape.

All through the process there is implied criticism on the customer if they don’t buy. The unsaid conclusion from the salesperson lurks: ‘Don’t you understand the great deal you’re getting (you must be stupid if you don’t)?’ and the customer feels it.

Actually this picture of the sales push process is really not the salesperson’s fault. They behave this way because it’s what their leadership wants.

Salespeople are compensated by how much product they sell in the short term, with little emphasis on bonding with people.

It’s this fuzzy stuff that these leaders find difficult to quantify in terms of benefits to the organization and therefore they tend to exclude it from the evaluation of sales effectiveness. And they certainly avoid putting relationship building in the annual sales compensation plan.

Sales performed in this way does not paint a pretty picture. Customers hate it and it doesn’t maximize long term value for the organization.

And, ironically, it doesn’t allow the salesperson to realize the full potential of their compensation.

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

• Posted 8.12.19 at 04:00 am by Roy Osing
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August 9, 2019

10 ways top level executives can improve company culture

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10 ways top level executives can improve company culture.

Culture is the one element that glues an organization together, and this starts at the top of the hierarchy—the CEO.

Excellent leaders leave a positive impact on the people they work with. They have the power to influence how people work and act in the organization. With this, they make it a goal to build a healthy company culture that promotes learning, empowerment, adaptability, and of course, fun.

C-suite executives who strive to lead their organization to success value their employees first and foremost. They have this purpose of ingraining a positive culture to inspire and motivate everyone in the company.
When you manage to create a workspace that breathes your values and hold your employees in high esteem, it translates into their work.

Signs that your company embraces a healthy culture

In thriving organizations, their culture goes beyond free gym passes, bean bags on the lounge area, snack bars, free meals, and other perks. They continuously promote their shared values — the company’s DNA — and create a sensible and employee-centric work environment around those and their principles.

When this is instilled, employees are more driven to do quality work, perform the best of their abilities, voice out their out-of-the-box ideas, and grow collectively. Ultimately, you have happy employees, satisfied customers, and a boost in revenue. It’s a win-win situation!

Here are a few indications that you have a positive company culture:

● Low employee turnover
● A sense of employee engagement
● Open and transparent communication across all departments
● Clear mission and values
● Absence of office politics
● Satisfied employees

Below is a visual guide that best illustrates the different ways top executives can improve company culture and motivate their team to shape a more positive work environment. If you want to enhance your employees’ productivity, efficiency, and welfare, start taking notes.

This is how you can hone a roster of future leaders in your company.

— Melanie Alvarez provides fast, convenient advice to high-growth, innovative teams with specialized recruitment requirements in the Philippines. She also connects top-level candidates to Manila Recruitment’s placement services, through social media and digital channels. As a leading member of the client services team at Manila Recruitment, Mel is passionate about helping clients solve their executive, expert and technical recruitment needs in Manila’s dynamic job market.

• Posted 8.9.19 at 04:26 am by Roy Osing
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August 5, 2019

Why brilliant customer service cannot have stupid rules and policies

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Why brilliant customer service cannot have stupid rules and policies.

One of the most effective ways to create memories for your customers and earn their loyalty is to break your own rules to favour them when it makes absolute sense to do so. This opportunity normally arises when your rules clash with what the customer wants; they simply don’t want to play by your rules.

Stupid rules

‘Stupid rules’, are given birth usually by some control freak in the organization with a nonsensical purist view that a customer should behave in a certain way that serves the organizations purpose with little regard for whether or not a customer will react favourably to getting treated in the prescribed manner.

One of my favorite dumb rule stories took place at The Mirage Hotel Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. There is a wonderful deli in the casino that serves the best rueben sandwiches ever but the customer friendliness of their policies sucks.

My wife and I show up late one night and asked the hostess for a booth and were told flatly that our request was not possible since it was their policy to offer booths only for parties of 6 or more.
I get that management wanted to maximize the check value from these specific seats, but in this case the store was empty save my wife and me! Maximizing revenue beyond the two of us was an impossibility!

In my experience the fathers and mothers of dumb rules can be found in staff type jobs whose role is to develop and implement operating procedures to govern, among other things, customer transactions. In these circumstances the objective is to meet internal requirements like efficiency and productivity rather than ensuring rules enhanced the customer experience.

And, unfortunately where customers are not considered the prime target for the rule or policy they become collateral damage in the rule’s application; they are mistreated and tell hundreds of other people how crummy the organization’s service is.

But there is a way to both have your cake and eat it to. You can both realize efficiency gains by applying the rule to the masses and bending or breaking the rule for those few customers who don’t accept it and push back on you.

The apply-the-rule scenario gets you the productivity gains you want from the majority of your customers who are ok with it; the bend-or-break scenario avoids the pain of an unpleasant customer encounter and impresses them and makes them more loyal to your organization.

When loyalty suffers

You’re in loyalty do-do when apply-the-rule is winning. If your frontline employees spend a great deal of their time enforcing the rules, policies and procedures of your organization and, as a result, are constantly saying ‘no’ to your customers nothing good comes of it — loyalty is threatened — and employee engagement is in jeopardy because being a rule enforcer is not a rewarding role to play in any job.

Job frustration can eventually lead to employees finding another organization where day to day existence isn’t so painful.

Employees can’t create delightful moments for customers when they are constantly trying to get someone to tow the line on something they don’t agree with — empower your frontline to ‘say yes’.

I’m not suggesting that a frontline person should break a rule that would violate the law, but they should have permission to bend-or-break an internal policy that has no significant negative long term consequences for the organization.

Test your policies and trust your frontline

Rules and policies impact people differently; each person will react to an enforce-the-rule encounter in a different way: some will be ok with having to comply with the rule while others will go postal.

One way to anticipate how your customers will likely respond to one of your rules is to ask them before it is implemented. Unfortunately I’ve never witnessed a process where detailed due diligence is done to brainstorm the negative reactions that customers may have to a particular rule or policy that is being considered, but there should be.

Given that customers are likely to respond to a rule in ways we never imagined, the only solution (if you want to protect and grow customer loyalty) is empower your frontline people to bend one of your standardized rules, policies or procedures when the customer needs a different treatment; when their needs are quite reasonable but out-of-bounds to what the policy manual says.

To those who think that empowering frontline folks will result in them giving away the shop, stop worrying. They won’t.

In my experience, empowering them to use their judgment and determine when and how a rule should be bent-or-broken actually produces a greater degree of rule enforcement as they typically reserve flexible treatment for those customers who truly need it. Once given the latitude to apply flexibility to policy enforcement, they actually take a more active role in advocating the company’s position behind the policy.

When frontline people are allowed to control the bend-or-break process, the organization is rewarded by a customer who is blown away by how they are being treated and how humane the organization is. And they tell others how truly great you are.

Dumb Rules Committees

How do you go about identifying and killing these ugly loyalty threateners?

Go ask your frontline what dumb rules they are constantly having to deal with. They know them but do you have the courage to listen and do something about them?

I created dumb rules committees in the operations areas of my organization and appointed a dumb rules leader for each committee whose responsibility it was to seek out and destroy (or otherwise modify) rules that made no sense to customers and drove them crazy.

Fun was had by all over this concept. Everyone, particularly the frontline, welcomed this initiative; they all were passionate about the purpose; we made real progress.

We had contests among the committees to see who could come up with the most dumb rules to kill, and we celebrated the winners. The committees were expected to not only identify rules, policies and procedures that annoyed customers, they were also charged with the responsibility of eradicating them by taking whatever action was necessary to get it done.

My role and that of my senior leaders was to remove any roadblocks preventing the committees from getting a rule dealt with.

At least make stupidity customer friendly

Certain rules are required by law or regulatory governance.
First of all do your due diligence to make sure that the claim is real and not the posturing of a champion who doesn’t want their rule or policy removed. If the rule is necessary, however, then at least look for ways to make it customer friendly.

And reconsider how the rule is enforced with a customer; what communications strategy is used. Is it friendly and helpful or is it demanding and intimidating?
Take the time to design the customer communications content to minimize an adverse reaction; it’s not always possible but it is worth considered doing nevertheless.

If you are able to expunge even 20% of the dumb rules you have in your organization, your customers will reward you with their loyalty and your reputation will soon attract new customers as well.

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

• Posted 8.5.19 at 09:07 am by Roy Osing
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