May 9, 2022

Why rare qualities in people result in amazing careers

Why rare qualities in people result in amazing careers.

Ever asked yourself these questions?

— “Am I intelligent?”
— “Am I qualified?”
— “Am I skilled?”
— “Am I competent?”
— “Am I good enough?”
— “Am I capable?”

Probably, at some point in your working life, one of these questions has crossed your life.

But have you ever asked yourself “Am I rare”?

You may not have, and yet this is the most important question of all to ask.

RARE people are:

▪️The ONLY ones who do what they do
▪️Special
▪️Unique
▪️Memorable
▪️Unforgettable
▪️One of a Kind
▪️Distinctive
▪️Stand outs in a crowd
▪️Weird in an amazing way

All the qualities of someone who is noticed in the crowd.

Someone who will attract attention.

Who others will notice.

Who will have a chance to show what they’ve got BEFORE others more commonplace.

BE RaRE.

BE the topic of conversation and object of someones attention.

BE the ONLY one who offers unique solutions to problems.

BE contrarian.

BE creative not a copycat.

RaRE is the prerequisite to success.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 5.9.22 at 04:11 am by Roy Osing
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April 25, 2022

Why winning customers is more important than keeping them

Source: Pexels

Why winning customers is more important than keeping them.

How do you build a loyal customer base that is impervious to the sirens who try to lure them away from you with their enticing promises?

I’ve spent considerable space in this blog talking about how to build customer loyalty.

The challenge tends to be multifaceted in its set of solutions with no single silver bullet that will do the job.

Here are some specific tactics I’ve mentioned in other articles on the topic:

— recruit people who like to serve humans.
— abolish the dumb rules, policies and procedures in your organization that your customers don’t want to play by that only piss them off.
— create an empowering rule system to ‘say yes’, not one that is controlling and ‘says no’.
— listen to the frontline and do what they say you should do to improve how customers are served.
— put in place a service recovery strategy that is enacted whenever you screw a customer over.

If you fix your OOPS! and surprise me with something I don’t expect, I will forget the mistake and remember what you did to atone for your sins.

— allow frontline people to bend a rule in favor of the customer when it makes sense to do so.
— give your special marketing deals to your loyal customers first before offering them to customers if your competitors (this is a classic lie most organizations tell: they say they want to encourage and reward a customer who has been loyal to them for many years, but refuse to offer them the same special deal they offer someone who they want to attract from a competitor).
— pivot you’re call centers away from call processors with cost management as the priority to ‘loyalty centers’ where caring for people is the key— and don’t outsource them.
— forget about what your competitors are doing to take your customers; worry about what YOU are doing to KEEP them.

Although these tactics are proven to be effective in retaining customers, for long term benefits they need to be expressed within a cultural context.

They need a cultural framework that defines the people in the organization should value loyalty above anything else and that they should behave a certain way in order to earn it.

In my experience, this cultural context is best expressed this way:

In order to build long term customer loyalty, we must do whatever it takes to ‘win the customer’s business every day’.

In other words, if we want the customer’s loyalty forever, we need to have a ‘win their business everyday’ mindset that permeates the entire organization.

▪️We need to earn the right to serve them, not expect that since they are a customer of ours today, they will be a customer tomorrow.

▪️It’s an active expression connoting proactivity rather than a passive approach to ‘managing the account’.

◾️It’s a drive to take action to retain their business rather than assume the business is ours and react when we think it’s in jeopardy.

The key words in this value statement are: ‘Whatever ‘- ‘Win’ - ‘Business’ - ‘Everyday’

‘Whatever’ — there are few limits when it comes to keeping the customer on our side in every department of the organization.

Everyone’s job is to go all out to find appropriate ways to do what the customer wants.

And notwithstanding that every organization has rules and policies, there is substantial latitude given to step outside the rule system and do what’s needed to meet the customer’s needs.

‘Win’ — treat every customer engagement as if it represented a new sale. Expend the same amount of energy engaging with an existing customer as you would trying to win a customer away from their current supplier.

It’s amazing to me how much time and money most organizations invest in trying to either lure someone away from another company or win back a customer who was lost to a competitor.

The extra effort and cost made to ‘offer 3 months free service’ or ‘give away a TV’ should be reserved for loyal customers first and everyone else second but it is rarely done.

‘Business’ — get away from the notion of ‘managing the account’. Your actions with an existing customer are to expose problems and opportunities for them and new business for you.

It’s a proactive approach you take for every encounter you have with a customer who has been with you for some time.

The questions you ask all point to uncovering the issues they have that can be accommodated by your product and service solutions. The ‘How’s it going?’ call isn’t that at all; it’s prime objective is to create business value for the customer.

‘Everyday’ — winning their business isn’t an occasional act; it must be practiced every time out. You can’t take time off from this obligation. Every customer engagement must have ‘winning their business’ as the expected outcome.

Most organizations declare how important customers are to them and that they want to serve them in an exemplary way. Yet the culture of these organizations tells a different story; it values other principles.

In fact look at their performance planning system. Does it specifically measure an individual’s performance in the above categories?

If someone is not recognized and rewarded for how they contribute to and achieve the outcomes needed to build customer loyalty then nothing productive happens towards this goal.
Serious organizations ‘bake’ these behaviours into their rewards system rather than simply declaring their aspirational intent.

Only a ‘win the customer’s business everyday’ culture will produce a stream of loyal customers.

I challenge you to look at your actions and test them with the approach I advocate here to determine whether your organization is serious about procuring loyal customers or merely stating the intention but continuing to do the same-old, same-old things you’ve done in the past.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 4.25.22 at 03:34 am by Roy Osing
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April 18, 2022

The 5 most important decisions a leader must make

Source: Unsplash

The 5 most important decisions a leader must make.

As a leader, you do have a choice as to how you spend your decision-making time; there are numerous possibilities when it comes to which decisions to make yourself and those that you leave for others.

How do you determine the ‘my decision’ areas?

The criteria I used was payback. Where could I add the greatest value to the organization? 

It’s not about what you enjoy doing or where your strengths are; it’s about where others will realize the maximum benefit if you focus your decision-making time there.

You may be amazing at financial analysis and enjoy dabbling in numbers, but if marketing is a critical element of the organization’s strategic plan, for example, you need to leave financials to someone else and re-vector your decision making efforts.

Make the call on these strategic issues; they must be owned by the leader and no one else.

#1. The business plan

The strategic game plan for the organization.

Leadership value starts with deciding on the organization’s future.
And it should be created by the leader and not chosen from a number of options submitted by management.

What business you intend to be in and how you intend to differentiate yourself from your competition can only be decided by the leader who is directly accountable to ownership. It’s not something that can be delegated to business development folks.

#2. Values

The values that shape culture.

Values describe how employees behave with each other on the inside of the organization and externally with customers.

The leader must decide on the values critical to their strategic success and they must make the call on eliminating the traditional values that are no longer appropriate.

#3. The talent in the organization

The talent that gets recruited.

Strategy and values are the determinants of the people you recruit.
The leader must have their fingerprints on the people strategy. They must decide if it will do the job; it can’t be delegated to human resources.

The wrong people in critical roles will drive your strategy to fail. I used to participate in candidate interviews; a great way to monitor how your expectations are being met, as well as a great learning experience for the other managers in the room.

4. Architecting the customer ‘moment’

The customer moment architecture.

If the leader isn’t personally involved in defining what the customer transaction with the organization looks like, dysfunction results; everyone does their own thing and offers up their own version of serving the customer in an exemplary manner.

The truly great leaders don’t delegate the architecting of the customer moment; they own how customers are to be served.

The leader must decide what the moment looks like at the frontline level where customer perception is controlled. Leaders generally don’t like to engage at this level of detail, but this micromanaging is essential.

5. Aligning activities to strategy

Aligning activities to the strategic game plan of the organization.

This is where most things go wrong. The strategy says one thing but the people in the various functions behave in a manner inconsistent with the chosen direction.

The leader must decide on an alignment plan developed by every department in the organization; it’s the only way synergy is guaranteed.

Strategy, values, people, customers and organizational synergy. What could be more important to decide on for a leader?

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 4.18.22 at 04:11 am by Roy Osing
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March 27, 2022

Is my new book really audacious in this reader’s view?

Review of ‘Be Different or Be Dead

‘The Audacious Unheard of Ways I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES’ by Roy Osing, Morgan James Publishing, New York, New York, 2022.

Full disclosure, I am a retired TELUS team member who, from time to time, reported through to the author, Roy Osing.

First off, I can tell you this book describes the actual field-tested and unique approaches that Roy and his team successfully employed. I witnessed many of these methods deployed.

They all were absolute game-changers.

Secondly, this is the ‘how-to book’ you need to create an exceptional business and have an exceptional career. I once read the 2013 book “The Three Rules – How Exceptional Companies Think” by Michael Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed.

That book reported results from a massive analysis across all industries of over 50 years of company performances exactly WHAT decision approaches (rules) make a company exceptionally profitable.

Roy’s book answers the next logical question, HOW do you implement this? Both books advocate the same approach, but Roy packs his book with hundreds of implementation recommendations.

‘The Audacious Unheard-of Ways I Took a Startup to A BILLION IN SALES’ is the latest in a series of seven ‘Be Different or Be Dead’ books.
It pulls together Roy’s valuable advice on how to propel an enterprise to be more than resilien; to stand out, despite super fast-changing business environments (such as COVID recently provided).

‘Audacious Ways’ provides unique and innovative approaches to strategic planning, marketing, sales, and customer service. This book is perfect for individuals starting a career, team leaders, or entrepreneurs running any enterprise.

The book contains six sections that permit easy revisiting the task at hand. Each section contains twelve to fifteen whole chapters devoted to detailed implementation approaches supported with clear rationale. Here are the six sections and a quotation as a taste of the content.

Leadership — How leaders can get results in today’s environment…
“It’s not that those textbooks on leadership are wrong, it’s just that they’re not good enough to make a standout leader.”

Careers — How you can have a fantastic career and make lots of money…
“In school, you do well when you follow rules and fit in; in business, you succeed when you’re different from everyone else.”

Business Success — How to make your business wildly successful…
“Long-lasting advantage comes from being the ONLY ones that do what you do.”

Marketing — How to make your marketing powerful and not boring…
“Brilliant marketing is delivering what people CRAVE in a way that is DIFFERENT than anyone else.”

Sales — How the sales team can deliver unbelievably significant revenues…
“The role of sales must change from the flogger of products and services to the ‘gatherer of friends.’”

Customer Service — How to create breathtaking and memorable customer service…
“You service cars: you SERVE people – dazzle ‘em and take their breath away.”

Descriptors from this book to describe the ideas, the approaches, the results are:

Simple. Inspire. Be Contrary. Explain. Stay Humble. Be Loving. Logical. Brave. Face Reality. Helpful. ONLY. Innovate. Empower. Listen. Build a Team. Hire People Lovers. Befriend Clients. Be Proactive. Shed Crap. Kill Dumb Rules. Forget Perfection. Recover Fast. Lead by Example. Hands-on. Learn Customer Secrets. Trust. Amaze. Have fun. Challenging. Practical. Proven. Long-term.

You will find this book gets you on the right path and prepares you for the real world, and with so many successful implementations to choose from, you will return to this book again and again.

Well worth reading, but please don’t stop there. Start implementing this book tomorrow.

— Cam Anderson is a Retired Web Operations Manager at TELUS Digital and Founder of FutureLegacies.ca and MyArtClub.Com

The ebook—‘e-Audacious’— was published Feb 1, 2022 and the print version will be available May 31, 2022 with the audio version later.