Be Different or be dead

February 9, 2012

How a winning career can be made in 5 simple steps

Source: Pexels

How a winning career can be made in 5 simple steps.

If you’re not happy with the progression you are making in your career, follow these 5 steps that will power you forward.

1. Define the position you want in 24 months. Sales Director? VP Marketing? Call Center Manager? Having a target will focus your efforts in developing the action plan you intend to follow.
If you don’t have a specific target, your efforts will be diffused and your progress will be slow.

2. Find a mentor. Everyone needs advice and help; pick one who is skilled in your target position.

3. Identify the foxes — the key decision-makers in your organization that will likely factor in to your next career move. Treat them as your target market. Get to know each one of them and what makes them great. Make sure they know YOU.

4. Make a list of 3 things you need to do over the next 90 days to make you more qualified for your target position. And do them. Avoid having a grocery list of things to do; you don’t have the time or energy to get them done.

5. Create your personal ONLY Statement and work it every minute of every day. ONLY is how to define your uniqueness among the crowd of people competing for scarce jobs. “I am the ONLY one that…” will serve you well in an environment where generics run.
If you can’t create your ONLY, you won’t get noticed and your career goals will likely elude you.

Try these today.

I guarantee they wIll make a difference.

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

• Posted 2.9.12 at 10:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 6, 2012

3 simple ways to make your ONLY statement better

Source: Pexels

3 simple ways to make your ONLY statement better.

The ONLY Statement is the ultimate manifestation of your distinctiveness; of your uniqueness that will separate your organization from your competition.

If you can’t claim that “We are the ONLY ones that…” you’re part of the competitive herd awash with sameness and commodity suppliers

Jerry Garcia, of The Grateful Dead said it this way: You don’t want merely to be the best of the best. You want to be the only one’s who do what you do

If you’re not spending copious amounts of time creating your ONLY, you’re not using your time wisely.

And you’re falling deeper and deeper into the commodity herd.

You won’t be noticed. You will be ignored. You will be dead. It’s just a matter of time.

Follow these 3 steps to create your ONLY Statement.

Speak to what what people crave — Talk to the critical wants of the customers you have chosen to serve — your target market.
Remember it’s not about what you supply to the market; it’s about what your customers desire and want. Do you know the top three things they covet?

People today generally have what they “need”. The battle is over how to address what they “want” in a manner that ONLY you do.

Talk about value — What benefits, solutions, memories, joy, experiences and happiness are you creating? Pushing products and services has no role in The ONLY Statement. We are seeking to claim uniqueness in the way we impact the lives of those we are trying to serve.

And remember, price has no place in the ONLY Statement either. Price claims can never be distinctive. Easy to copy. Commodity behaviour.

Make it specific — At the end of the day, your ONLY has to be delivered by people. They need to clearly understand what it means in granular terms.

They need to be able to determine the appropriate behaviors necessary to “live” The ONLY. Leave helium-filled statements, vision-type claims and aspirations at the door.

“We provide the best customer service” is way off target. Means different things to different people. Probably is untrue. Can’t be measured.

If your ONLY can’t be translated into a detailed picture of what it looks like in the field. Trash it.

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

• Posted 2.6.12 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 2, 2012

3 amazing ways to delight your customers

Source: Pexels

3 amazing ways to delight your customers.

Creating maniacal, loyal customers is not about price. And it’s not about products and services that actually work to specifications.

People expect things to work and they expect to pay a reasonable price for it. That’s the price of admittance. That’s what any organization must do to play the game. If you can’t provide stuff that works all the time at a price people are willing to pay, you don’t have a business. Period.

If your quest is to attract a band of loyal followers that will do business with you forever, you must create a dazzling experience for them whenever they touch you. You must focus your attention on how they FEEL when they engage with you as opposed to what they GET from you.

How can you create an environment that is capable of creating dazzling service experiences?

1. Recruitment

Recruit people that have an innate desire to serve their fellow human beings.
Customers can’t be delighted if a frontline person really doesn’t want to serve. and you can’t train people to like people.

They either do or they don’t. You can train them to ’grin’— with a smile in their voice — but you can’t teach people to actually and honestly like others.

Dazzling service experiences are delivered by individuals who actually want to make the customer feel important.
To make them feel that they are listened to. To honor them. To do whatever it takes to see their eyes light up. 80% of your recruitment budget should be dedicated to this task.

2. Rules and policies

Design your rules, policies and procedures to serve the customer.
Every organization has dumb rules, rules that make no sense to customers. Rules that annoy and infuriate them and drive them to leave kicking and screaming to others.

Rules have a legitimate management control purpose but if they drive business away because customers are unwilling to abide by them what ‘s the benefit?
The issue is the customer element in rule design is missing. Management control drives the process. Give the customer an equal say in rule design. Engage them to help. They will be impressed that you are open enough to involve them and you will be on your way to dazzle.

3. Empowerment

Be flexible. Empower people to bend the rules on the customer’s behalf. Even if you have designed a rule system that optimizes on the customer experience, you will still have control-driven ones that remain. Empower your frontline to bend them when it makes sense to serve a customer.
Trust them to do the right thing to preserve the dazzle objective.

The end game is to deliver a mind-blowing service experience not to enforce the rules that get in the way.

Dazzle = Serving People + Rules that Serve + Caring Empowerment.

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

• Posted 2.2.12 at 10:59 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

January 30, 2012

Why you shouldn’t benchmark others if you want a great strategy

Source: Pexels

Why you shouldn’t benchmark others if you want a great strategy.

Benchmarking is viewed as a necessary process for most organizations. There are benchmarking consultant experts and courses you can take to learn how to benchmark proficiently and gain the maximum benefit.

In my view, benchmarking is a simple concept as is its process:

▪️Identify the organization that excels in some aspect of your operations that you believe requires improvement — customer service, business planning, customer engagement, sales management, accounts receivable, advertising planning and so on;

▪️Map (understand deeply) their system or process to understand exactly how they perform the operation;

▪️Define the actions you must take to incorporate their operating system into your operation with the objective of replicating their level of efficiency.

Benchmarking might help you improve your operations efficiency but it won’t make you stand-out from your competition.

Benchmarking can be problematic on several levels:

#1. Benchmarking is copying not strategy

It’s ‘sucking up’ to an organization or individual recognized (by someone presumed to be the thought leader) to be the best at performing a particular function and is therefore the organization you should aspire to be.

It doesn’t make you special. It may help you improve your position in the crowd of hungry competitors by being more efficient at something, but it won’t help you stand out from them by being more relevant or unique.

Copying is the enemy of being different. The maximum benefit you can achieve by copying is best in class levels of performance which may return better operating results than previously obtained but unless you vault beyond these levels true differentiation won’t happen.

#2. Benchmarking keeps you in the crowd, it doesn’t separate you from it

The herd is a place where organizations go to blend in with others; to conform with what others do and to lose the DNA attributes that make them special.

Even if you are the ‘best of breed’ you’re still in the herd. It’s just that you execute a process better than any other herd member; you’re still rubbing shoulders with your sameness brethren.

And because you’re tagged ‘the best’, you have no motivation to break away from the herd; you find consolation in it.

The world is becoming a home for best practice addicts and as a result it’s boring and benign.

#3. Benchmarking is the instrument of compliance

Benchmarking results in conformance; it sucks any unique thinking you may have out of your system and replaces it with the need to capitulate to the leader of the herd.

Rather than look for a unique solution to your problem, you look for another herd member that has put in the work to create a solution that works for them and you assume you can boilerplate it and it will work for you.

When you copy someone or something, you relegate — subordinate — yourself to them. You roll over, put your ‘paws in the air’ and subsume yourself to the leadership of someone else. Looking up when you’re lying on the ground isn’t a very liberating place to be.

#4. Benchmarking won’t differentiate you from your competitors

It has no strategic value in moving the organization to a position in the marketplace that ONLY you occupy.

“What are our competitors doing?” is often asked when organizations are thinking about improving how they conduct business, and the benchmarking process ensues — adding zero space between them and their competitors.

And, of course, if you’re chasing another organization, you’re adding nothing to the kitbag of things that make you ‘special’ in the eyes of your customers and encouraging them to spread your word to others and attract new business.

If you copy someone, all you do is lower the bar.

#5. Benchmarking prevents innovation

If you’re a copycat, you’re not an innovator. Benchmarking does little or nothing to stimulate innovation and creativity which seem to be values organizations covet in today’s world of uncertainty and constant change.

In fact benchmarking kills real innovation because it has performance improvement using the standard of another as its end game as opposed to revolutionary changes that determine new strategic outcomes.

We need to get our thinking straight.

Few organizations today stand out, which is sad; few are deemed to be really special by their customers.
Being remarkable isn’t a strategy on the radar of most, or if it is, it’s an elusive goal because leaders allow people to use traditional tools — like benchmarking best of class — to do their jobs.

Uniqueness, remarkability and being special come from being different than your competitors, not copying what they and others do, even if they perform certain functions more efficiently than you do.

We need to change our ways and stick copying where it belongs.

Let’s:
— Start thinking about being different than best in class, not copying best of breed;
— Covet being ‘different than breed’, not best of breed;
— Think about doing what others are not doing, not looking to other’s successes;
— Go in the opposite direction that others are going, not following in their footsteps.
— Define best in class to be the highest bar to be different from, not emulate;
— Purge boilerplates from our toolbox and break new ground (and maybe be the author of a new boilerplate).

Copying is the enemy of being special and remarkable.

And as leaders, let’s change the conversation in our organizations; purging the notion of benchmarking and copying as ways of achieving strategic progress by asking these types of questions of our teams:

▪️”What can we do to be different from the crowd of competitors?”;
▪️“How does what you’re proposing make us stand out from the competition and be special to our customers?”.
▪️“What crazy ‘insane’ thing is a different business to ours doing and how can we use the basics of the idea to morph it into a special idea for us?”

Benchmarking is absolutely the wrong thing to do when the end game for most organizations seems to be uniqueness and remarkability, but there are ways to ‘bend the curve’ and go in the right direction.

Start the change now, though, because time is not your friend.

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

• Posted 1.30.12 at 10:20 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink