Nothing Happens Until Somebody Sells Something!
Mary Kay Ash
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In my introductory post, 12 Vital signs of Organizational Health, I listed the 12 signs. Here is sign #12:
A healthy organization excels at serving its current customers, and finding its next customers.
Jonah Berger has a really funny, and oh-so-true line in his book Contagious:
The thing restaurants are best at is going out of business.
That’s it in a nutshell. If you have a great product, or a great service, and you do not have anyone willing to pay you for it, you are out.of.business. (And, by the way, if no one is willing to pay you for it, maybe you don’t have such a great product or service after all, and you should be out of business).
Now, of all the facts about business success (make that business survival), in today’s world, it is this – there is a lot of competition out there for the money that your customers might spend with you. So many others want your customers. They will woo, seduce, steal your customers away from you. They want your customers as much as you want your customers.
With apology to Al Pacino (Any Given Sunday):
You’ve go to fight for your customers. You’ve got to claw, with your fingernails, for your customers. Because, when you add up all those customers, that’s going to make the __________ difference between WINNING and LOSING; between LIVING and DYING.
If you don’t get new customers; if you don’t keep the customers you have; if you don’t keep the customers you have very happy (otherwise, someone else will take them away from you); if you don’t turn your current happy customers into amkbassadors for you… you are out.of.business.
The traditional terms for this are marketing, and sales, and customer service. These days, there is a slight shift toward the term “customer experience.” (I like that term). But there is little doubt about this – if you don’t get everybody on the same page, with an almost fanatic passion, about your customers – if you are not truly customer centric — you will find yourself out of business.
In Joseph Michelli’s fine book Prescription for Excellence: Leadership Lessons for Creating a World-Class Customer Experience from UCLA Health System, he includes this counsel:
Each day I think about one thing: what can I do as a leader to make sure that our quality of care is the best it can possibly be – you guessed it – for our next patient?” (Dr. David Feinberg, CEO, UCLA Health System).
“Our next patient.” “Our next customer.” How can I improve my business so that it can be the best it can possibly be – for my next customer?
The newest book by Daniel Pink should be a must-read for your executive team.
{A word about the phrase “must-read.” Yes, this is a terrific book. But this is the more crucial consideration. Your executive team needs to have some crucial conversations, about some crucial topics.. Your team needs these crucial conversations about crucial topics on a regular basis – the “rhythm” of regular meetings. A good book discussion is a tangible way to have such conversations, and make sure that there is genuine substance to those conversations. If your are not meeting to have those conversations, the world will pass you by in a heartbeat.}
So, the newest book by Daniel Pink should be a must-read for your executive team: To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others. Here are a few key excerpts:
People are now spending about 40 percent of their time at work engaged in non-sales selling—persuading, influencing, and convincing others in ways that don’t involve anyone making a purchase… roughly twenty-four minutes of every hour to moving others. People consider this aspect of their work crucial to their professional success—even in excess of the considerable amount of time they devote to it. Most of us are movers; some of us are super-movers.
When organizations were highly segmented, skills tended to be fixed. If you were an accountant, you did accounting. 494 The same was true when business conditions were stable and predictable. However, in the last decade, the circumstances that gave rise to fixed skills have disappeared. (In other words, everyone is in sales).
To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources—not to deprive that person, but to leave him better off in the end.
What is my company about? What is my product or service about? What am I about? Knowing is the prelude to improving.
Sales and theater have much in common. Both take guts.
Now, you probably already know most of what it takes to pull this of. The problem is that you are just so busy doing your work that you do not have/take/invest the time in providing the actual work of building your business up – acquiring new customers, and keeping those customers very, very happy with your organization.
Let me put it this way: if you are so busy doing your work that you don’t have time to find and serve new customers, then, forgive my bluntness:
You idiot! Finding, attracting, winning, and serving customers is your work!!!
So… it has to start with you. A while back, I wrote this short blog post: How to Market Yourself. I repeat it here in its entirety:
It almost doesn’t matter. Seriously – it almost doesn’t matter. Market yourself any way you want to. Use social media, use the D-R-I-P method. Use the farming approach of a good real estate agent. Refine your elevator speech. Get serious about using Constant Contact.
Yes, of course there are ways to do it that are better than other ways. But it almost doesn’t matter which approach you take.
If you really want to market yourself – then, market yourself.
Do some marketing of yourself every week (nearly every day!). Carve out some actual time for marketing yourself. Write; meet; network; send out stuff. Put your body inside a bunch of elevators so that you can give that wonderful new elevator speech. Write blog posts, and put them up on a blog. And send out notes to everyone in your known universe to let them all know that you are writing good stuff on a blog. Full your pockets (or purse) with good, attractive, memorable business cards – with the address of your blog on those cards – and hand them out at those networking events.
Go to those networking events.
Just market!
If you don’t market yourself, who will?
So… acquire your next customer. Keep that customer very happy. Turn that customer into an ambassador for you. Give that customer easy tools to help make that happen.
Remember sign #12: A healthy organization excels at serving its current customers, and finding its next customers. If you do not excel at serving your current customers, and at finding your next new customer, you will be out.of.business before you know it.
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You can purchase my synopses of Prescription for Excellence and To Sell is Human (and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell — another good book to bring in to this conversation) at our companion web site. Each synopsis comes with a multi-page comprehensive handout, and the audio of our presentations from the First Friday Book Synopsis. You can order the synopses from: 15minutebusinessbooks.com.
First Friday Book Synopsis 