Perfect Problems
I spent Wednesday in New York City at an event put on by one of my heroes. I’ve religiously been following his blog for years, read a bunch of his books and have followed some of the folks he finds most inspiring. And still I had a few amazing epiphanies during the discussion. It was fantastic and I wish I could just bottle it up and share the whole experience with you. Since I have not figured out how to bottle my experiences Harry-Potter-style, I’ll share one thing that really opened my eyes.
It’s the idea that there are very few perfect problems and the things we think of as impossible are usually not. Do you have a few perfect problems in your life? Problems like – business is declining and my customers seem immune to everything I’ve tried to get them back. Or the economy is down so my business is down. Or I think I’d like to move to a new location but, I don’t know if it will be better or if the investment will ruin me. Perfect problems are perfect because they’ve been with you for along time. You’ve had a chance to think and worry about them over and over and over. You’ve analyzed every aspect and yep, there’s no solving this one. Have you told your problem to a total stranger? Amazingly they might be able to solve it for you. Or try coming up with solutions to all the objections that feed into your perfect problem and try knocking them one by one off the list. Or in the words from the NYC talk – push to the edges of your box, your industry, your profession and that is where innovation is.
He told this really great example of a Korean restaurant in Manhattan 15 years ago. There were a dozen other Korean restaurants on the same street. They looked at their “box” and decided to really push one of the edges. So they decided that they would stay open 24 hours a day. Koreans flying in from Korea are up at 2PM and they are hungry. It created some buzz because no one else was doing this. There were write ups in the New York Times, etc. And no even today this restaurant is always more crowded than any other Korean restaurant because they pushed on the edge of their box.
Where are the edges of your box? Can this kind of thinking help you turn your perfect problem upside-down? It sure is helping me think better about my perfect problems. If you’d like to talk about this some more I’d be happy to connect – kaisera(at)entermail(dot)net.
By the way – my hero is marketing guru Seth Godin. He’s worth a follow and will help you think more about how to build a group of like-minded people, get things done, create your art, and innovate.
Add comment May 19, 2012
How to Get a Return on the Money You Spend
Are you wondering if you are getting customers from placing an ad or attending an event or getting a mention in the paper? There’s tons of highly analytically and usually very time consuming and costly ways to measure the ROI of your marketing dollar. And I’m not going to recommend any of those.
If you can, simply list all the outreach you are making and try to match the number of increased leads or customers gained as a result of that outreach. Then compare your total costs verses the revenue gained (or your estimate of lifetime customer value). Your list could look like this:
| Tactic | Total Cost | Lifetime customer value |
| Presented at North East Association of Landscapers | $1,250 | 6 new customers at $5,000 |
| Ad in Landscape Now | $5,450 | $0? |
| Blog | 3.5 hours per week | 3 new customers at $2,500 |
Another way to see if a particular tactic is working for you is to temporarily stop doing it. I’d try this on low-risk stuff. Don’t suspend a critical ad to devastating financial impact. So say you regularly advertise in 15 newspapers and you’re wondering if a few small regional papers are even worth the few hundred dollars each? Try cutting one down per advertising cycle and see if there’s any drop in sales. If there’s no drop in sales you can likely cut the ad permanently with no adverse effect.
Things have a way of getting piled on our lists and never leaving. Take a regular look to see if it’s worth your time and money to continue each one of your marketing tactics.
Add comment May 16, 2012
Responding to Customer’s External Pressures
We are STILL in this recession and it’s affecting nearly everyone’s businesses. So how do you grow when your customers have less disposable income? Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Consider a chiropractic office that sees its customers cut down on visits or avoid “tune ups” because of the additional cost. To borrow an idea from my local car wash, perhaps a way to increase visits and good will would be to offer a loyalty reward punch card – 10 visits and the 11th visit is free.
Or for the area health food store – keep track of annual customer spending and give your top customers a $25 gift certificate.
Perhaps a change of marketing message will work better for your business. A used-clothing shop selling second-hand designer fashions could change their message from “designer clothing for less” to “most items are 75% off retail,” emphasizing the price drop (or similar language stating the overall benefit to the customer).
Consultants should boost their businesses by staying in touch and keeping relationships current. Send a former client news or articles that might be of interest and let them know you are available.
Sure the recession is a huge external pressure that consumers and businesses are dealing with. But, money is still being spent, so help them find new ways to spend it with you!
Add comment May 9, 2012
Your Personal Brand
I was talking to a HR program director yesterday (one of my organization’s customers) and he was talking about “building his personal brand”. And I was thinking “hooray I’m so glad he’s thinking about this” because I’m not sure many folks do think about this.
You have a personal brand and you express it by the way you dress, carry yourself, speak, smile, work, interact, communicate, manage and promote yourself. Some professionals have a good brand – competent, hard-working, smart, etc. And some have a GREAT brand, innovative but, also can be counted on to deliver and always give much more than expected.
This post is mostly to let you know that you have a personal brand and your personal brand is something you’ve got to work on, manage and grow. I’ll continue sharing tips on what you can do to make your personal brand better. One of the nice things about continually improving your own personal brand is you’ll be improving the brand of your company as well.
Add comment May 2, 2012
Personal and Professional Goals
It’s good to know what your personal goals are and whether they mesh well with the goals of your organization. For example, do you want your company’s work environment to be amazing for your staff, your partners and customers? Does accomplishing this mean a sustained push of crazy-long-hour-work days? What if you really want to work 30 hours a week and enjoy your family? Are your company’s services highly sought after and growing fast but, you prefer managing a smaller team and a smaller organization?
It’s okay to be out of sync for a little while, but not for your entire career. Give yourself permission to acknowledge that your personal goals can change. I’m a new mom, so I’m looking for more quality time to spend with my son. However, when I get into work and find myself immersed in new product development or strategic planning, my “I-want-to-be-on-a-winning-team-workaholic” side kicks into gear. I want to do what it takes to be amazing.
And maybe your personal goal is to work 15 hours a day to create an amazing company – that’s ok, too. The key message here is to know what your personal goals are—so you can sync your professional and personal goals for the long haul.
Add comment April 25, 2012
What is Customer Research?
It is a method for gathering insights from customers and potential customers that shows you what they need and how you can help them best. You can take these insights and use them as the basis for more insightful and accurate business decisions and goal development.
Do you have a bunch of burning questions about your business? These are a sampling of some of the questions I have heard from small business owners. Can I move locations and still keep my customers? I’d like to launch a new product or service but, will they like it? How do potential customers find my business? Can I stop advertising in this newspaper? Did my customers have a good experience and will they tell their friends?
The good news is you can get these answers. There are many ways to get customer response so it’s a matter of selecting the option that’s right for your customer and you. Here are a few of the top options for gaining customer insights:
Short/In-person – Perhaps you could ask one or two questions at check out like: “I’d like to move to a bigger, nicer retail location it’s about 4 miles from here in the town of x. Would you still shop at my new store?” The pros are you’ll get many answers fast. The potential con is that your customers may not be completely truthful because they don’t want to hurt your feelings so assume you may be getting a slightly skewed response.
Longer online/on paper – You’ve got a bunch of questions so you may want to conduct a longer survey. In order to tabulate the results easily try to make as many of your questions a check box selection i.e. “yes/no” or “select the answer that best fits” or “rank these options”. Keep in mind the fewer questions the better chance you have at getting more responses. Research pros will tell you you’re looking for at least 50+ responses. The benefits of this format are you can get many questions answered and if done right the results are relatively easy to sum up and analyze. The cons are your survey could lead you in the wrong direction if you haven’t anticipated the right answers to select from. And there could be “sample bias” which means if the survey goes to all your customers perhaps only a sub-segment like your super loyal customers will actually fill out the survey and their answers may not be indicative of all your customers.
Longer/ on the phone – This format is particularly useful for gaining insights for somewhat higher dollar purchases or complex transactions. Phone interviews work well if you’ve got a bunch of open ended questions like: how did you decide to make this purchase? What problem where you trying to solve? What could we have done better? The pros with phone interviews are you can have a real conversation where you have the opportunity to follow up and clarify statements and ask for more information. In addition this process may ultimately lead to the best, most accurate answers but unfortunately it is super time consuming from the preparation to interviews, to note taking, to analyzing and reporting.
Conducting customer research will not take away some amount of risk (if you’re interested in how even big companies can flub up – read about the launch of New Coke). However, if done right, you will have far more information about your customer’s needs than you had before you talked to them. And these insights can help you make far better business decisions about how to serve your customers better.
Photo Credit: Pedro Ribeiro Simões via Compfight
Add comment April 18, 2012
Getting Better at Running Your Business
Photo Credit: Al_HikesAZ via Compfight
I just learned that there are two different mind-sets when developing personal goals. The first is called “Be Good”. The “Be Good” mindset revolves around proving to yourself and/or others how good you are at a given task or attribute. So an example from our school days would be, “I’ve got to ACE this test to prove that I’m smart”.
The other mindset is called “Get Better”. In this mindset you are focused on improving your skills, knowledge, efficiency, etc. An example would be: I can’t do a pull-up now but, I’m going keep working a little harder at the gym so I can do a pull-up by the end of summer.
Both mindsets play a big part in how we reach our goals. The “Be Good” mindset is highly motivating but, works well only for semi-easily to achieve goals. If a person is in ”Be Good” mode they tend not to set stretch goals (who wants to prove you can’t do it?). The “Get Better” mindset works well for goals where the path is unclear. People in the “Get Better” mode of thinking tend to be more flexible, more adaptable and try harder when the going is rough.
This makes me think that the more small business owners can adapt a “Get Better“ mindset the more successful they will be. When you think about your small business goals – frame them around improving, getting better, refining and correcting.
This is just a small sample from what I’ve learned from Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals by Heidi Grant Halvorson Ph.D. and you can find it on Amazon.
Add comment April 11, 2012
Becoming More Efficient
I’m taking online learning classes through Lynda.com for Word, Excel and PowerPoint and this may be one of the more important things I’m doing this week.
I got my undergrad degree in 1995 – so that’s 17 years of self-teaching with each upgrade of the Microsoft. Version after version my skills are falling behind. Things that I used to do quickly I now take time to hunt for. And I had this feeling I could be pumping out work that looked more professional but, I just didn’t know where to start and didn’t have the time to hunt around.
Photo Credit: D. Sharon Pruitt via Compfight
It is hard to set aside the hours to take the classes. However, the good news is, learning this stuff is easy and it’s easy to apply. The better news is in just 2 hours I learned a ton of time savers and short cuts that are bound to knock far more hours off my usual work.
When your revenue is dependent on your output, brushing up on your computer skills is a relatively easy way to become far more efficient while producing work that’s more professional looking.
Add comment April 4, 2012
Smooth the Path
Have you ever wanted to buy something but the website was confusing or the store clerk was disinterested or you couldn’t quite tell if the product would fit you from its description? Sites like Amazon.com have realized that small positive changes in user experience can mean millions of dollars more in sales.
So take a step back and think about how you offer your products or services. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Is there any part of the process that could be confusing, difficult or unpleasant? Is it simple, easy and nice to do business with you? Your customer experience can be even better if you ensure that your:
- Interactions with customers are helpful and friendly
- Website is easy to navigate and looks good
- Product copy is helpfully descriptive
- Pricing is easy to understand
- Delivery is easy and convenient for the customer
- Promotions and ads are all short, simple and easy to understand
Simplify, stay away from heavy sales jargon and be happily helpful. Consistently doing the little things to make each interaction easier for your customer creates more opportunities—and desire— to do business with you.
Add comment March 28, 2012
Bathrooms are Important
I recently visited the bathroom in an upscale grocery store and GACK! It was dirty. Paper and water were everywhere. The plastic toilet paper covers were broken or missing and there were no paper towels. As I cruised the rest of the store, I found myself being hypersensitive about empty shelves for some of my favorite staples and felt unusually crabby toward an ambivalent staff person I approached for some help.
My visit that day was really disappointing. Companies with an upscale and expensive image should make sure everything is polished and professional, not to mention CLEAN and organized. In the same vein, if a company’s focus is on great customer service there can’t be a grumpy day. Or if a full-service shopping experience is your competitive differentiator, there cannot be empty shelves and dirty bathrooms.
A friend was telling me about a restaurant in her neighborhood that recently closed down. “They were confused,” she said. “Serving beef wellington and tacos? The prices were high, but the atmosphere was – ehh. There were plastic flamingos in the window!”
People return to a business because it meets their needs and expectations each time. Any surprises should be pleasant ones. Know who you are and act like who you are – every time. Unhappy customers may not give you a second chance.
1 comment March 21, 2012