C.J. McClanahan
Treating Every Customer the Same
Think carefully about the following 2 questions:
How do you define a great customer?
Who are your top 10 customers?
Most business owners struggle to find a good answer to these 2 questions. I often hear, “Let me run a report and get back to you”. Why is this lack of clarity a problem?
If you aren’t intensely focused on your most valuable (profitable, strategic market position, refer you a lot of business, etc – it is different for every company) customers, you are probably treating every customer the same. But shouldn’t all customers be treated equal? Not if you are interested in maximizing profits. I am not suggesting that you hang up on a customer if a “top 10” customer calls, but, remember the 80/20 rule – 80% oprofits are probably coming from 20% of customers. Identify your most valuable customers and dedicate 80% o company’s time to servicing them. It will significantly improve the bottom line.
Who are your best customers?
How much time do you spend with them?
Is that enough?
Being Consistently Inconsistent
What if you could be a fly on the wall in the break room after your next staff meeting in which you passionately rolled out 3 new initiatives?
Is it possible that you would hear the following phrase – “Don’t worry about it, he’ll forget all about these ideas by the middle of next month”?
Now let me ask a really painful question – Have you been the business owner who has forgotten all about those great ideas just a few weeks later? We all have.
As a business owner, we are constantly coming up with great ideas to improve our company! The problem is that we are always coming up with great ideas to improve our company! As a result, your staff never knows which idea you will really latch on to and enforce on a regular basis. So, they tend take all of your initiatives a little less seriously (aka – ignore) than they should. Unfortunately, you can’t get too mad at them because you can barely remember all of the edicts you have issues in the last 60 days!
The cure for us business owners who tend to overwhelm our teams with new ideas is to be consistent. This probably means that you will need to slow down just a bit or at the very least you need to group your ideas/initiatives into two categories.
Rules (thoughts or initiatives) that must never be broken. For example, you may roll out a plan that states that you will always return a customer’s call within 2 hours. Improvements that should be adhered to whenever possible. For example, it would be great if we spent the first hour of each day reading blogs so that we can get up to speed with industry changes. Now that you have your categories, it is imperative that everyone on your staff (and especially you!) understand the difference between a must and a should. It will help you be more consistent in an inconsistent world! Do you provide your staff with the same direction every single day? Does this lack of consistency create confusion? How much more productive would your company be if you were better at delivering a consistent direction?
C.J. McClanahan
ReachMore Strategies
317 576-8492
cjm@goreachmore.com
