Let's Check Out Those Customer Quirks!

Where Are Your Customers Headed?

The Wall Street Journal sure has a way of describing who the customer is today.  Do they not?  It seems as though they include at least one major article in their daily publication that covers that subject.  They have placed one writer after another onto their pages of print to give some brief descriptions about who the real customer is today.  In fact if you check them out, they support their customer descriptions with complicated charts and detailed data-mined information gathered from hi-tech giants like Google, Amazon and E-Bay.  This gives their opinions added credibility.  It all appears like a pretty sophisticated consumer review for the small business reader to acquire.  I am a junkie, so it all plays well for me.

What about you?  How much of that information does the small business owner truly absorb?  How much of that information becomes part of some strategical planning?  How does the small business leader use this timely marketing information intelligently?  I think maybe the answer to that question can be summed up rather clearly...small business.  Small business is just that...small business.  Do not become offended, however.  I belong in that world.  I am an owner of a small business.  I consult with small business models.  I write business plans as well as employee rules and regs for small business owners.  I am a small business junkie.  The Wall Street Journal and the kinds of business giants like Google and Amazon do not offend me, however.  Instead, they inspire me.  I get it.  We are different.

Small business is small for a number of reasons.  One of which may actually be that they truly do not know who their customer really is.  Many small business owners, in their heart, believe they know who their customer actually is.  I often catch myself thinking in this exact same way.  For a number of logical reasons the small business owner today drives what they do every single day in their work performance patterns not truly knowing who their customers actually are.  When I worked inside my small business model, I never stepped out of my daily world of activities to truly examine my potential customer profiles.  I did all of my daily stuff because I thought I already knew who my customer was.  I was convinced about who I was attracting.  That was good enough for me.  Hence, smaller business.

Giants like Google and Amazon have developed the incredible habit of reaching higher for new customer support.  They have no problem crossing new consumer lines.  They do not become complacent with harboring the current customers they entertain.  These giants reach for new customers every single day.  They study their quirks, their habits and their actions.  Once they get it down they target those groups and go for broke.  The big business world wants it all.  They include your customers in their sights.  That much I know is very true.

You may actually own a small business and you may actually believe you know who your customer truly has become.  My warning for you?  Look out, the giants you despise in your business world have placed those same exact customers you serve smack dab into the cross hairs of their marketing plans.  Your customer has been added to their design.  What's more, they are very good at what they do.  Worse yet, they own the capital to make it happen.  How does this picture pan out for your future?  Limited at best.  It is what it is.

This brings us down to one simple solution.  Get to know the quirks of your future customer potential.  Check out your customers.  Who are they?  Who can they become?  Why would they consider shopping with you?  Better yet, why would they purchase from you?

I think it is about time we check out those customer quirks.  Let's humor ourselves.

Page two.

In Business, There Is Always Something New To Work On

Just pick up CNN Money/Fortune Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek or any other publication related to business and you will find a constant barrage of suggestions and recommendations offered to the worlds business leaders.  Daily issues and challenges are everywhere.  There is no end in sight of things to write about.  The world of business has become very complicated, indeed.

I rubbed elbows yesterday with a small business owner.  It was Thanksgiving and we were attending a small dinner of celebration.  He had some interesting insights about the current state of small business affairs.  His view of the current challenges faced by small business was simple, direct and very determined.  I do not believe anyone could have entered that room and changed his mind about his views.  They were as dried in his mind as concrete is on a sidewalk.  Solid.

As determined as his perspectives were delivered, I still suspect he does not believe them as much as he was willing to deliver and protect them.  If you know what I mean?  I think he was more 'wanting' to have his views be correct than was his interest in admitting his uncertainty about what to do next.  Sometimes we say what we do not mean.  I am guilty of that error from time to time.  I know many times in my life others have left my side saying in their minds, "Did he hear what he just said?"

Business owners know one thing is for sure, the future of 'comfortable profits' is traveling around some very risky territories.  No simple profit patterns of steadfast solutions are waiting to be performed.  The work to produce consistent profits has become one of the most elusive elements business owners can truthfully count on.  Troubled balance sheets are easy to produce.  Terrible income statements seem all too ready to appear.  Inconsistent consumers and tricky competition have become too frequent along the trail of business travels.  Profits have become extremely elusive and short lived when they appear.  It is not easy.

My son-in-law recently asked me, do you ever run out of enough relevant business subjects to talk about?  My quick answer was, "No."

In business, there is always something to work on.  There is no end to the challenges business owners face.  There is no business model that once it reaches its final design, it is done doing what it needs to do...all that remains is to deposit the profits.  As it stands, a lot of things have a huge impact on the outcomes of profit.  Those various things are comfortably filled with layers of twists and turns that will never cease to find new challenges to place smack dab in front of the business mind.  Challenges are everywhere.  Profiteering is an elusive painting of art that is extremely hard to consistently produce.  That canvas is forever changing.  No business mind has been able to escape the troubles that arise to interfere with the simple ideas that produce profits.  There is always something in business to talk about.

Page two.

Why Are Markets So Uncertain For Small Business And Retailers?

Let's Help The Consumers Achieve!

Retailing used to be a simple process.  Someone in a little area had a special love for baking cookies or fixing cars and before you know it, off they go to open up a small business.  Since they liked windsurfing, they decided to open a windsurfing shop!  That’s what they know.  That is what their true passion is.  That is how most small business models got off the ground.  It was a simple passion to do what they knew and loved to do.  It was very simple.

Once they opened up shop, hung a shingle outside to let everyone else know who they are and what they did, they began the process of moving money around.  Not knowing how to move money around properly, they began the slightly confusing trek to operate their business model...emotionally.  This process lead them to discover the art of finding a ton of little nose bleeds.  Some nose bleeds were more serious than others.  Moving money around for keeps was not as easy as one might expect.  In most cases, the home wallet took a small beating.  Hopefully the passion did not fall into the same ditch.

If the passion survived the economic ditch, and after a bit of time and experience, some necessary adjustments were made.  The adjusted small business models began to deliver a little bit of business returns.  Most of those ‘self-taught-business-adjuster-types’ eventually found their way onto the plus columns of their properly recorded balance sheets inside their business books.  Those were the ones able to survive what mistakes they could constantly find.   The school of hard knocks ultimately helped them to mold their ways into becoming part of the small army of pretty savvy operators.  Their business models had become worth something to parade around town.  They learned the art of employing a few people and their futures where no longer as dim as once before.

What happened?  Where are these savvy small time business owners today?  Where are the people they once employed?  A good deal of them have all but disappeared.  Many are so strapped down with operational debts, ever increasing business costs, lost consumer buying abilities and complicated patterns of consumer diversity that they cannot see the forest of growth opportunities through the immediate line of towering trees.  It has all become overwhelming.  Hope has become delegated lower down that pole of priorities.  Survival has become the current fire of attention.

For those remaining in the small business game, they are the sharp ones.  Even the lucky ones have taken on too much water to survive.  What’s more, the remaining sharp ones are working their way through the maze of economic change, through the effort to find useful technological advancements and trying to discover some of the more clever trials the new consumers have quietly become accustomed to using in their desire to honor where they go to buy what they buy.  All of this small business effort has quietly become the new daunting challenge.  It consumes the life of the owner’s clock and spits out little rewards that do not always measure up to the return the owners had once felt tolerable.  Job creation is not one of their current concerns.  Survival has taken up all of that space.

The uncertainty of effort coupled with the uncertainty of returns has become such a dominating part of the daily pattern for most small business owners that hope is dwindling fast.  These unwanted patterns have spurred the need for small business owners to become more innovative in how they learn to find better ways to process what they do.  It has unfortunately become more than fixing cars, baking cookies and surfing the winds.  The small business owner has recently discovered that they must learn how to behave like they are writing a thesis for the Harvard Business Review, or MIT, hoping to get at least an A+ on the paper.  If they fail writing a great paper plan, their business model will certainly fail.

 

Even then, the consumer markets remain uncertain.  So why are the consumer markets so uncertain?  Holy cow, all of this thinking has become very complicated.  Does anybody dispute this truth?  Let's get real.  We aren't in Kansas anymore.  In fact, even Kansas is complicated.

Let’s take a cleaner look at what small business owners and retailers are facing.

Page two.

What Is The First Thing Your Customers See?

Be Careful Who You Decide To Chase Away...A Zero Deposit Is A Zero Deposit!

There are three parts to the answer of this question.  What is the first thing your customers see?

In every business a certain list of duties become very important things to do.  Those things not only become very important to do but can rarely be found written somewhere in the business plan.  They became important to the business model as they evolved with time.

Those 'special' duties of consideration occur with their own volition, in their own space and time inside their own 'special' art of attraction policies.  Those 'special' considerations eventually grow and become part of the personality each business successfully creates.  They become in large part, the driving cloud of your business atmosphere.  In most successful business models, you will find an atmosphere of 'special' considerations that is significantly different than anything their competitors provide.  The really successful ones do it differently.  Their business atmosphere reflects a wholly separate set of 'special' attraction considerations.

If you are blessed enough to experience how the growth of your business model becomes directly tied to the atmosphere your model generates, you will be one of those who can share this wonderful effect better than I can articulate.  For those who have experienced this kind of success first hand, make sure you share with the readers how you made that kind of thing happen in your business affairs.  To the business leaders who have never experienced this effect, it can be a very invisible thing to see.

Now, back to the three questions of description.  There are three questions that can help to describe the title of this post, "What is the first thing your customers see?"

Number one, what do your marketing efforts say to your customers?

Number two, what is the impression your customers get when they enter your establishments for the first time?

Number three, what does your business say to every one of your repeat customers?

Answering all three of these questions will help you to evaluate how your business answers the question in the title of this post.  What your customers see when they glance at your business is as important to them as what you decide to do next.  The day you forget the value of this impression is the day you misunderstand how to market your wares properly.  That kind of misunderstanding will cost your business its pursuit of greatness.  Hands down.

Too many business owners get all wrapped up with the distractions of life and limb long before they lift up the importance of knowing what their customers see.  I chit chat with a lot of small business owners who spend too much time manipulating how their time is spent, placing their ego's above the art of proper business balance and directing their personal opinions to the front of the consumer line.  These small business owners suffer greatly in their pursuit of economic success.  They may not actually see how they have placed untold limits on the shoulders of the atmosphere their customers see.  What's worse, in most cases even the customer cannot easily articulate why they do not prefer to do trade within the halls of these broken business atmospheres.  The 'special' duties of consideration are null and void.  Somehow those customers know it.

To some, this might be too slippery to discuss.  It might be too heady to consider.  Whatever the case, the effort to improve the view the customers see becomes less important to the leader who finds it too hard to understand and therefore, manage.  A kind of 'oh, well' sense of attitude takes over the drive to improve.  This allows the harder working competitors a better chance for gaining more.  Each business model faces these critical realities.  What is the first thing your customers see?

Let's examine your answers to the three questions posed.

Page two.

What Goes Through The Mind?

What goes through the mind of a business owner who is having serious economic challenges in their business model and failure has become a very real and dominating consideration?  What are they thinking about?

I have been in those shoes before.  I have felt what they feel.  I have experienced how empty and troubling those thoughts can be, while at the same time, how heavy they can feel.  It is an awful place to live.  I know, I have stood for a very long time in those kinds of troubling shoes.  I have walked down the halls of not knowing what to do next.  I have worked beyond hard to push flashing and terrible thoughts out of my mind to remain on track with my level headed sensibilities.  Not always succeeding at that effort.  Losing control and allowing my temper to take over.  I have crashed hard, cried, worried so deeply that at times I almost blacked out with the high pressures of this kind of stress.  I forgot who I am and began lying about who I was and how I was doing.  I did not want anyone to know I had failed.  It was utterly shameful...but very secret.

What goes through the mind of a business owner who is having serious economic challenges in their business model and failure has become a very real and dominating consideration?  Too many wrong things.

The first trick to initialize the process for healthy repair is to flat out admit it.  Just simply sit down and admit that help is very much needed.  That is where the real work begins for becoming a better business owner.  When the light of admission finally goes on the darkness of not knowing begins to shine.  In my case, it was the very first time in my business career that I was able to shed some light on where I was not able to do well.  No more cover-ups for the skills I lacked.  Get them out and noticed immediately.  That way my business team can begin the work to help solve problems where those weaknesses occurred.  My leadership magically grew well when I allowed them to be good where I was not.  It is an utterly amazing thing to watch happen.

What goes through the mind of a business owner who is having serious economic challenges in their business model and failure has become a very real and dominating consideration?  Emotionally wrong thinking goes on in the mind of a failing business leader.  We get quietly consumed with the fears that surround how we feel about losing control.  We feel threatened by knowing what others see.  We work overtime to protect what those fears want to reveal.  Our emotions grow larger and our denial works harder as we subconsciously manifest clever ways to survive.  We inadvertently change our personal being in an effort to protect who we want others to see.  We get out of ourselves and become someone else that nobody close to us recognizes anymore.  Conflict becomes how we manage our closest relationships.  Conflict becomes the way we manage our business affairs.  Conflict becomes how we treat certain customers.  We pick and choose who we want to serve.  Conflict arrives to quietly rule how our business model survives.  It all becomes a terrible spiraling effect.  It becomes the drain that drives the business.

What goes through the mind of a business owner who is having serious economic challenges in their business model and failure has become a very real and dominating consideration?  What happens to their future when all of this stuff takes over?  That depends.  It depends on how that business leader responds to these daunting challenges.  The next steps they employ to begin the process of repair become the new beginning to a better path their business model will travel.  The steering wheel still remains in their hands.  Turning that steering wheel still becomes their next choice.  Regardless of how deeply my business was challenged when I was faced with sheer destruction, I still had my hands on the wheel of its direction.  It was still up to me to decide where to go.  It still remained in my influence to go get some help.  It still remained in my influence to consider changing my ways.  It still remained in my influence to correct what I did not know.  It still remained in my influence to admit what I could not see.  My habits began to be challenged.  My ways began to be destroyed.  My being felt like it was disrespected and I also felt like everyone else was trying to flip it over.  I had a grip on the steering wheel that nobody else wanted to touch, in the way I wanted them to touch it.  I felt lost and alone.

What goes through the mind of a business owner who is having serious economic challenges in their business model and failure has become a very real and dominating consideration?

Page two.

Be Careful...It Might Be Irrevocable Passion!

Your Weird Idea Might Be Found!

The world of marketing is crammed full of great ideas.  I have a few of my own that I would like to share.  However, good ideas do not always work.  For one reason or another, they can fail miserably.  I have a few of those skeletons on my business trail also.  In fact, I think I have a lot more failed marketing skeletons on my business trail than I do in left over good ideas worth pursuing.  That might be something to think about.

I have taken a quiet stroll through some of the small business models located in a couple of little cities in the northwestern United States.  I have chatted with the owners of those small endeavors.  It is easy to strike up a simple conversation with them.  After a moment or two, they get real comfortable sharing their business passion with their audience, me.  That is when I discover some interesting things about marketing.

I can certainly appreciate it when a small business owner gets a bright idea.  I have a whole basement full of them.  Business owners tend to think that just because the idea sounds cool and interesting  it is also able to be translated into the market with great potential.  Unfortunately, that plan does not always work out so well.  A lot of great ideas and wonderful thoughts turn out to become very poor in the area of producing increased sales.  The longer a person remains in business the more they discover this relative truth.

One of the more challenging things for a small business owner to overcome is the inability to control the balance they must supply to the cool ideas they develop in their minds.  This is a requirement of success that often times goes unnoticed.  It certainly does not receive the overall respect it truly deserves.

Why is that?  Why do small business owners fail to recognize how to properly examine their market needs for cool ideas?  How do they do this step well before they invest time and money into trying that cool idea out?  Why do so many small business owners wait to discover not enough people in their market cared about that cool idea as much as they did until well after they have thrown a lot of time and money at the dud?  Why does that happen so much?  I think my travels may have found one of those driving reasons why this happens.  Passion.  Unbridled passion.  Irrevocable passion!

We see the world of business made up of extremely successful business leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Zukerberg of Facebook and the likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin founders of Google.  They were extremely passionate about some very forward and zany ideas.  They moved well before the market was ready to accept what they had rolling around in their minds.  It worked.  It not only worked, it worked extremely well.  That is one of the reasons why our passion to produce a sewing alterations shop into a healing boutique with beer, food and drum music in a laid out hippie den looks very much like a good idea in a small, rural farm town.  The only problem remains...no customers.  It is a very cool and progressive idea!  I grant that.  The passion for telling me why it is so cool is wonderful and deeply driven.  I also get that.  But marketability?  Oops.  That is looking much more like a flat tire in the remote heat of a vast desert.  Not good.

How does a small time business owner truly prepare themselves for the right kinds of effective check and balances needed when they go to the creative drawing board with new innovations?  Wow, now that is a big time challenge.  On one hand, standing ovation for the small business owner who produced a great retail environment surrounding the passion to get that alteration sewing shop converted into such a beautifully progressive supporter of this great idea.  What an amazing job done on a silver nickel.  Yet on the other hand, pray for the deeper requirements of understanding as to why the neighbors have all pitched in to help that small business owner make the next monthly rent payment.  How long can that kind of relationship remain?

Be careful...it might be irrevocable passion.

Page two.

Managing A Sales Staff, Anything New?

Sales Meetings Galore!

Where has the time gone?  The minute I turn around another ten years has gone by.  Does this seem normal?  Where did all the time go?

Guess what?  Time flies.  There is so much to do and so little time.  The next thing we know, a decade has passed.  First one, then two and now three decades have gone by us in what seems like a flash.  Does this sound familiar in your business world?  It does mine.

Time has traveled so fast that sometimes we do not notice the changes that have occurred around us.  Some of those changes are huge.  Some of them are so subtle that we usually do not notice them until we go back and try doing something we used to do and it no longer fits.  Our old ways become obsolete.  They don't work anymore.

I think I have discovered one of those subtle changes.  The art of directing a sales staff effectively is no longer useful in the ways we used to do it.  Trust me, many sales managers are still trying to force a round peg into a square hole.  The way sales managers rally their troops to get motivated in going out to sell stuff to their customers has always been a predictable pattern to witness.  We pull them into a 'rally' room or a joint conference call and begin encouraging them to share their success stories with the others.  We might even play roll a situation or two.  Then we get to the brass tacks of the numbers.  We check to see what the current numbers of performance are with the wrap up emphasis directed towards our goals today.  We get closing commitments from those in attendance about what numbers they plan to achieve today and we send them out with a rah, rah set of encouragement.  We believe we have fired them up!

Oh, I forgot.  We also share any product specials and announcements since we have all of them together at once.  That is how we used to manage our sales staff.  Guess what?  I still see this kind of format and methodology still heavily used.  Everything else in this world has changed a great deal but the motivational work a sales manager does is somewhat the same as it has been performed for the past few decades.  Not much change here.

Well I am not satisfied with this type of leadership in sales.  Are you?

Is it time to reconstruct how we lead our valuable sales teams?  Just because we have new electronics and upgraded technologies does not necessarily mean we have developed better innovations for motivating our sales staffs of tomorrow.  In most cases, we are still doing the same patterns only with newer tools.  Today we use laptops, smart phones and online web cams.  Yet the sales meeting is much the same.  Gather together and share some unique and challenging common experiences, have a laugh or two, maybe dry run a play rolling situation, discuss some issues, review the numbers and set our daily goals...then pat them on the back and tell them to get out there and knock 'em dead.

Not much has changed in this world of directing sales.  Or has it?

Let's take a deeper look.  In a recent Google attempt I reviewed several top sales management websites.  Did you know what I found?  They all say about the same kinds of things.  They described various ways how to motivate the sales staff.  They offered importance to the methods needed to blend recognition with income.  They all have a favorite pattern of metrics for performance measurements they like to employ.  Each site had a various set of suggestions to describe how to manage routine meetings, motivational gatherings and information sharing opportunities.  I found a good deal of a lot of the same stuff that has been occurring for decades.  In a business world of change, the methods for motivating a sales staff apparently has not found much change inside the halls of its work.  Is it time for someone to develop a new set of useful innovations?  I wonder.

Management has seen a lot of emphasis surround the idea of best practices.  New ideas, new techniques and new ideologies have evolved.  Some very good ones have surfaced while some not so good ones came into the light.  That happens when innovation is pushed.  Some new ideas drift foul.  They once looked good when they first hit the air but with time, they curved well off the course of the expected desires.  Sometimes we simply fail.  Big deal.  Now we know what will not work.  To many innovative leaders, this is good news.

Who is trying out some new sales management innovations?  Anyone out there doing some unique and useful stuff?  Let's see.

Page two.

Business Innovation Is Not A Fundamental Step

Innovation Is Not Magical.

I wonder how many business leaders sit down at their desk and once in awhile ask themselves if they are doing the right steps to perform their tasks?  How many business owners take time to reflect on the kinds of things they are doing to run their business model?  For those who sit down, take the time to re-evaluate what they are doing, good for you.  Once in awhile, taking stock of the things we work to do is a forward step to making sure we are productive leaders.  It is an essential task to perform if winning is desired.

Meanwhile, if some important responsibility is discovered that has become noticeably missing in the leadership process, reflection can help to find those missing parts.  The truth is, business leaders get busy.  Time and again some of the important yet fundamental strokes they perform get quietly omitted as they take on new surprises, added duties, complicated tasks and responsibilities.  This is a natural occurrence.  The life of a business leader can easily be filled with high adventure.  High adventure can become very distracting.   Welcome to leadership.  Maybe it is time for reflection.

There is a lot of time spent on making sure the work a business leader performs is up to speed performing the things the business needs to see done.  This is often times secured by the way the business leader arranges their time management structure.  An effective approach to managing a useful method for time structuring is not only helpful to a business leader, it is vital.  Managing time well is essential for success to become sustained.  This kind of respect to leadership can be daunting.  It is an art that requires a lot of good practice.  Time management.

Some of the things a business leader includes in the personal performance review are viewed routinely because they help that leader discover to see if the use of time is as efficient as is possible.  There are certain  components of leadership that are included in that kind of review.  For example, the business leader must review the art and science of studying the numbers.  This task must be part of a daily routine.  However, be very careful in creating too much art in this process.  The banking industry fell in love with derivatives.  Unfortunately, the process of shifting paper to chase that product actually produced nothing, with the exception of the friendly returns those derivatives offered when they performed well.  The bank had no direct control of how well those derivatives could perform.  The creation and movement of that paper did not produce anything new and of sustaining value.  The lack of useful productivity associated with the work involved could not measure up to the value that was being perceived and marketed.  Time worked its magical wonders and those efforts imploded to their real value, which was less than what was artfully being traded.  Be careful of injecting too much art into the management of your numbers.  Stick to knitting here.

Another component worth daily consideration is the review process the leader uses to evaluate the performance metrics of the human resources employed.  Business success is all about improving relationships.  The relationships with staff, customers, agencies, suppliers and every little pocket of connectivity comes front center to those business models who perform well, consistently.  Get the calendar of daily duties rubbed up next to this responsibility.  Those who strategically avoid this area of responsibility have a lot of internal challenges to deal with.  Trust me.  Those who avoid this area of work may become business leaders with the ability to perform well in most market place positions, but they will never be a part of a great growing company that can sustain incredible growth patterns.  It takes great relationships to do that kind of work.

One more component worth daily attention are the areas of product and distribution.  Set aside daily time chips to manage these business affairs.  There is nothing more important to business success than knowing what to produce, when to produce it and how to get it to where it wants to go.  This is fundamental.  Work on making sure this kind of fundamental becomes part of your daily management routine.

Now for the reason this post was written.  The one fundamental that cannot be placed on the reminder list of duties.  The one component to success that should never become a listed item on the time structure calendar.  The business task that cannot serve well to become something that is forgotten once in awhile.  Innovation.  Innovation is not a task, a component to success or a fundamental to be remembered once in awhile.  Innovation is a mental state of mind that is the driving character of who your business model becomes.  You are either innovative or you are not.  It cannot be added to your time structure calendar for Wednesday's and Friday's at 10:00 A.M. to be reviewed.  Innovation does not work well this way.

Unfortunately, I meet many business leaders who try to perform innovation in this fashion.  They actually have it structured into their weekly calendar like reviewing their e-mails first thing each day.  Innovation simply does not work well in this fashion.  It only works best when it becomes who you are.  Innovation should become as natural as flushing the toilet.  You should never need to remind yourself to do it.

Page two.