They were there to look beyond all the stats and the information available on an athlete…every scout had the same information. There had to be something else they were looking for that went well beyond the stats. What were they looking for and why did they invest the time to come all the out to watch my son and other boys in person?

Before I give you the answer, think about this in terms of your own business. You have the same information and reports everyone else does, just like all the scouts had the same information on my son. If you only go off your reports and information, then you are essentially competing on the same information all your competitors have…there has to be something more…something different if you are going to survive “commoditization.” If everyone has the same information and can make the same decisions, then the only thing you are left with is price and availability to differentiate…not a good business strategy. This is also called “the race to the bottom.”

From the customer’s point of view, they are looking at your product or service…specs. If someone is looking for just the specs on the product or service you are offering and everyone’s specs “all look the same,” you better be the cheapest or you won’t win. This is simply playing in the “Commodity Game” of business. Most can’t win here…they die.

Back to the baseball scout…what is the one thing scouts look for outside the stats that tell them this person is a “gem” among the rough stones. HEART. If the player they are watching has heart and amazing drive and resiliency and an attitude that smells like a winner, they jump to the top of their list…even if they don’t have the top stats. This is the variable that either enhances or negates the stats on a player. Often times, this is the deciding factor in selecting a player that can go to the next level.

This is what scouts are good at and paid to do…identify the players with heart. They look for those that work harder, give the extra effort, act as a leader on the team, support their teammates when the going gets tough, and are resilient to defeat and failure. You can’t see any of this in the stats. If the scouts didn’t focus on these efforts and only went with the stats, teams wouldn’t need them. Today, we can get more data on an individual athlete today than ever before…and it’s readily available to everyone.

Scouts spend countless hours on the road looking at athletes to validate the stats they see on paper and to assess their heart to see if they can handle the pressures of major league sports. That’s their job. That’s how they decide the winners that will go to the next level and have a high degree of potential success.

What does all this have to do with your customers? Your customers are the scouts!!

Customers can get all the “stats” they ever needed to determine which products/services are good and not so good. They can check out the features and benefits of any given product or service well before they ever have to talk to you…just like the scouts. And if that’s all they use to make their decision, then they are essentially saying they view you as a “commodity” without differentiation. When this happens, they go to the next criteria to make their decision…price and availability.

But knowing that “Heart” is what makes the deciding factor for a scout, they can’t search for this online…or can they? I believe customers can “find the heart” of your organization and decide if they want to pursue a relationship with you well before you know they exist.

How? First, they can talk to people either in person or virtually (through their social media networks) about you. They can find out from them if you have “heart” when it comes to dealing with them. What kind of experience do you offer? How does it “feel” to work with your organization? Why should I choose this one over another one in “your opinion?” These are all “heart questions” that potential customers ask BEFORE they ever engage with your organization.

What answers will your potential customers get from your current and past customers? This is one of the most valuable questions any business owner or leadership team can answer today.

What is the “heart of your organization?” Everything else is just data everyone can get and it’s the same data all your competitors have available on the search engines as well…NO DIFFERENTIATION…the commodity part of any business. However, what they can only get from you and your organization is to determine what your “heart” is. It is based on the type of experience they desire to have.

The key question every leader needs to answer is, “Will you make them feel the way they want to feel when they interact with you?” If you don’t know the answer to this question with 100% accuracy, you can’t be differentiated or unique in the eyes of your customer without competing purely on price. But if you do know the answer to this question and you can deliver it to your customers, you will be viewed as UNIQUE AND DIFFERENT FROM ALL YOUR COMPETITION.

Change your mindset and realize your customers (and potential customers) think like a pro scout. They are only looking for one thing…YOUR HEART. Everything else is just a commodity that can be determined based on price and availability. Show them an experience that will “blow them away” and is “memorable” and “unforgettable.” Do this, and the scout (your customers) remember you and you move to the top of their list. No you have true differentiation in the eyes of your customer…and this takes you out of the commodity game.

Companies like Nordstrom, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, Starbucks, Ace Hardware, and a host of others figured this out a while ago…which is now part of their DNA and why they are viewed as differentiated from their competition. They are no longer viewed as a commodity. You can too…when you start creating an organization that has “heart” that your customers can see, feel, and appreciate.

The post Want to WIN more Customers…Think Like a “Professional Scout” first appeared on WOM10.

These two critical items are directly linked to your customers…TIME and TRUST…and if they are missing today you are at high risk of becoming extinct. I call them the “Twin T’s”. But if you have them, you can lead the competition and become much more differentiated in the eyes of your customer.

Every business leader should do an in-depth analysis of their own business to see how they are doing at managing these two critical assets…today. I guarantee you will find some amazing answers (some good and some bad) to why your customers either love to buy from you, why they may be shopping around, or why they are leaving.

TIME…according to Forrester Research (and others), is listed as the most valuable asset people have and want today. They all want more of it…or at a minimum they want to make the best use of it. We all know we have the same 24 hours in every day but it’s how it is being used that is concerning people more and more. Think of it in the reverse direction, people want to either “make better use of it” or “not waste it.” This is how people are thinking about time and how they are thinking about your business.

Customers are rapidly choosing companies who they feel help them maximize their time.

So the question to ask yourself as the CEO or Business Owner is, “Are we helping our customers make better use of their time when they interact and buy from us or are we costing them time?” If you ask this question in every aspect of your business, you will find out very quickly if you are on the path to extinction or if you are on the path to differentiation.

You might answer the question with a resounding YES and say your sales people and customer service people are very efficient at helping them get what they want when they interact with us. I would challenge you to look further into the process to see if this is actually the case. For example, many sales and service departments in businesses are predominantly “order takers” because the customer calls up with a specific request…I need XYZ. The sales department says great, I can get that for you and have it to you by Tuesday. Seems efficient, right? It is as long as all you care about is taking the order and “assuming” the customer knows everything about it and its use…many actually don’t.

How many times does a customer buy something only to find out it isn’t the right product or service? If you have zero returns or issues, then you could say 100% of the time…very few can say this. Instead, they got the wrong product because they thought this is what they needed…now it gets returned and they start over with the buying process…a huge time waster. But if during the interaction with your people, they had asked some simple questions, such as “Why do you want product X?” or “Out of curiosity, what are you planning to use Product X for?” or “What issue are you trying to solve by using Product X?” or a host of other probing questions, you might just find out they don’t need Product X and they need Product Y.

When this happens for a customer and they realize within a few minutes you were able to save them a ton of time because they were going to buy the wrong product and now you have steered them to the right product they love this interaction…and are much more likely to both shop with you again and tell others about you…the two key goals of delivering an awesome experience.

Looking at TIME in a slightly different way, what if you knew your customer and that based on their buying patterns they always call within a certain time to get the same product. Why would you wait for them to call and waste more of their time ordering the product over and over again? What if you put in an automatic ordering function that shipped the product to the customer when they usually need it again and then just invoice them on a certain date…with the understanding if they didn’t need it they can return it without any cost? And explain to them the purpose is to save them time so they don’t have to continually call in for the same product. You just helped save your customer more of their most valuable asset.

There are plenty more examples of how thinking creatively about the customer can change your relationship with them to one of LOYALTY and ADVOCACY. This is at the heart of why it is so critical to become CUSTOMER OBSESSED in today’s economy. This is at the core of helping your customer be more efficient with their most valuable asset…TIME. If you don’t have a Customer Obsessed strategy, you are most likely a “product/service centric” organization. When you implement a Customer Obsessed Strategy, you change the benefits your customer will get from you…and they immediately start thinking and seeing you as being different.

TRUST…we are now living in the “Trust Economy.” Because of the factor of TIME and commoditization in the market, customers are looking for those they can explicitly TRUST. They don’t want to worry about all the details and increase their risk. Trust lowers their risk and gives them peace of mind. And when someone interacting with you has peace of mind, they want more of it and avoid others that don’t give them this calming emotion.

Trust is a huge DIFFERENTIATOR for a company…possibly the most valuable asset a company can own.

Trust is earned by keeping the promises you make to your customers. When customers feel like they trust you, then they will tell others about you…but not until they trust you. NO ONE wants to tell someone about a company they don’t trust for fear of losing credibility with their friends or colleagues. And if they aren’t sure if they trust you yet, they will tell others that they bought from you but then qualify it by telling them they don’t know that much about you yet.

“Trust is so valuable today that a business should do everything they can to earn it and twice as much not to lose it.”

[bctt tweet=”Trust is so valuable today that a business should do everything they can to earn it and twice as much not to lose it.” username=”BlaineMillet”]

Trust starts at the CEO. If the CEO wants a company that is known for keeping its promises, then it starts with two primary components…processes and the customer experience. BOTH have to be in alignment to be able to deliver on the promises made by their employees. If the processes and customer experience are designed to do whatever it takes to keep a promise, you will build trust…and your customer will see it and feel it with every interaction. You can’t fake trust!

TIME and TRUST are the reasons why Word-of-Mouth is so Powerful today…more than any other time in history. People consider Word-of-Mouth to be a “time savings” rather than a “time waster.” And people only talk about the businesses they “trust”.

For example, you are looking for a great restaurant in either your current city or a city you are visiting. One approach is to go to Google or Yelp or Open Table and do some searching…this takes TIME. You have to do the research, compare reviews, look at the menus, check out the location, and a host of other “time consuming” activities to find something you would feel good about. The alternative is to simply ask your “TRUSTED network” of friends and colleagues what restaurant they would recommend based on your criteria. They shoot back some suggestions with personalized comments about their experience and you pick one that sounds the best for what you want…a significant “time savings” and from a source that is “trusted”.

As a leader in your business, take the challenge and honestly assess how you are delivering on TIME and TRUST to your customers. I believe this will be an eye-opening experience for you and help you see your company the way your customer sees it every day. And as always, if you want to gain more insight into this area and learn more, I’m happy to sit down over coffee and share some additional thoughts.

Amplifying these two key assets could be the game changer you have been looking for to finally differentiate your company from the other businesses in your market…and put you on a path to growth, not extinction.

The post 2 Assets which Lead to either Differentiation or Risk of Extinction first appeared on WOM10.

When you have a “Word-of-Mouth Strategy” in place in your business (or any organization including non-profit) you are purposeful about creating word-of-mouth and you will derive some incredible benefits…well beyond your competition. But when word-of-mouth is left to “just happen” because of some random “good things” that occur in your business from time to time, this is where problems arise. When it isn’t purposeful it is being left to chance…and we all know how well that works out in business.

If you don’t have a purposeful Word-of-Mouth Strategy, you are essentially “NET CASTING.” Net casting is when you want to attract anyone with money to buy your products or services…essentially saying “if you want our product and have the cash we will sell it to you.” While this might sound great because it is increased sales, it is a land mine waiting to be stepped on when it comes to Word-of-Mouth.

Let’s say you are a commercial fisherman and you want to catch salmon…and only salmon…because that is what the market wants from you today and it has the highest profit margin. If you “cast a big net” in the ocean you will definitely catch some salmon…and some carp, and sharks, and a myriad of other fish you don’t want. You have to get rid of them because you don’t have a market that wants to buy them…they want salmon. This is a time waster for a fisherman and is an incredibly inefficient way to try and catch a lot of salmon.

But if you are smart, you don’t cast a big net and hope to catch some salmon. Instead, you buy the gear that is designed to catch only salmon and you invest your time and resources into it so you can avoid catching all the other garbage fish that you don’t want. This is a focused approach to fishing and yields the highest margin for the fisherman.

Translate this into your customer base. Your ideal and most profitable customer…the one you are designed and set up to serve incredibly well…is the salmon. You have built your processes around serving this customer really well and being able to meet their needs and hopefully give them an awesome experience. You have built the business primarily around serving the salmon…not every other type of customer that just happens to have cash. Granted, you will have other customers, but for the sake of the example, your “salmon” customer is number one.

But another type of custoer shows up…a carp customer…and they have money and want to buy your product. But they also want to negotiate some of the aspects of price, delivery, and post-sale services. While they might have the money, they aren’t a salmon and you aren’t set up as a business to serve them in the way they want. This is a key decision point for your company…do you take the new customer and their cash or tell them you aren’t really the best company to serve them?

Unfortunately, the majority of companies will take the cash and tell themselves they can figure out a way to serve them so they can get the revenue. THIS IS A MISTAKE. Three reasons why…

First, these companies don’t have the internal processes to serve this new customer the way they want to be served…period. So they either have to modify their processes to accommodate the new customer or they will try to fit the new customer into their existing process…which usually translates to the new customer always being unhappy and unfulfilled on what they want you to deliver. If you decide to change your processes to accommodate their demands, you have to ask yourself, “what about our primary customer, the salmon, you have designed all our process to serve?” Do you modify the processes so they aren’t exactly what the salmon want and have become accustomed to so you can  accommodate the new customer, the carp? If you do, you run a high risk of upsetting your main target customer, the salmon.

The end result of this approach could cost you more revenue immediately and in the long term. What happens is that you upset your best and most desired customer, the salmon, so they start to think you don’t care about them as much and they leave. You have replaced them with a less desirable customer, the carp, which has proven to not be as easy to deal with and probably at a lower margin. This is where you start to slowly erode your ideal customer base to accommodate a less desirable customer just because they showed up with some cash. This happens all the time in businesses. You might think it is easy to spot and stop…it isn’t. It’s a sneaky process and it comes in very sly and usually unannounced. Look out for this because it can wreak havoc in your business…to the point of extinction.

The second reason this is a bad idea is that the new customers, the carp, are vocal and want to tell others about you. What do you think they are going to say to people in the market? You guessed it…not good things. Why? Because your processes and systems are designed to provide your primary customer, the salmon, with an awesome experience…they aren’t designed to give the carp the experience they want because they demand other things. So they aren’t happy…and they tell other people…lots of other people today because of social media.

They spread word-of-mouth in the market that says you aren’t a great company, don’t deliver a great experience, don’t give them what they want when they want it, and to not buy from you. Unfortunately, in today’s socially connected world, they can tell thousands of people in an instant. While many of these will be fellow carp’s, they also reach some salmon and other potential customers. The word can spread in minutes and while you have developed this awesome experience, it isn’t the right experience for the new carp customers.

Third, your salmon customers are also unhappy and guess what they do…you guessed it…tell all their salmon friends you aren’t that great of company any more and are making changes that don’t really serve their needs. This means they tell other salmon not to be your customers. This is devastating since now you are losing on both ends…the salmon and your reputation.

This is where word-of-mouth is not your friend and can do more damage than good.

And it all started because you chose to take the money from a customer you aren’t prepared to serve in an awesome way…this is why word-of-mouth is not always a good thing…it can be the catalyst to slowly erode your customer base. If you had stayed with serving the salmon and sent the carp customer away, you would sustain far less damage. You might lose some short-term revenue but you will stay solid and continue to grow your revenue by attracting more salmon and building a more solid base of customers in your business. And the vocal carp wouldn’t be telling their thousands of friends and colleagues how you can’t serve them the way they want to be served.

And the salmon will be singing your praises…to other salmon, not carp…and spreading massive Word-of-Mouth.

The morale of this story is simple. Identify the customers you want to serve incredibly well and who you can design and deliver awesome experience to and they will love. Build your processes and customer experience around these customers…period. Focus on these and these only…don’t drift away and start taking on customers that don’t fit these Personas and Profiles. Stay focused on the salmon…turn away the carps.

The OPPORTUNITY is to create positive word-of-mouth because you are delivering what the salmon want with both your processes and your customer experience…and they will tell other salmon about you. This is where Word-of-Mouth works! Now you are getting positive comments from the audience you want and they will tell others in that desired audience about you. You aren’t serving everyone…you aren’t “net casting” and trying to serve everyone…you are focused on the salmon and treating them incredibly well.

Find the customers you truly want to as your customers…those you really want to serve and have a passion for serving. Treat them better than anyone else by designing a customer experience that blows them away every time they interact with you. Find more customers just like them and ignore all the others that show up. When this happens, you build a niche that you own and no one can easily take away from you…you have created uniqueness and differentiation for your company in the customer segment you desire. This works…and it also drives solid and consistent Word-of-Mouth!

If you ever want to know more about this process and how to avoid the carps, give me a shout and we’ll grab coffee and I can give you some more insights to why and how this can happen for your own company. It’s a strategy and it takes strong leadership to ensure its successful execution…but when it happens, you get amazing and incredible results. Are you ready to move your company to being REMARKABLE?

The post Word-of-Mouth is Awesome…but not Always…3 Reasons Why first appeared on WOM10.

The number one factor of why we are nearing the tipping point is TIME. There is a delicate balance between having more choices/options and having less time. For example, if having twice as many new choices costs us twice as much time to sort through them and figure out which one to choose I believe the consumer will choose time over more choices. As Forrester said in their study a few years ago, TIME was the most valuable asset to the majority of people (well over 50%) and if more choices means eating into our most valuable asset, I believe the customer will reject investing the additional time to investigate these increased choices. They will lean in favor of having more time and not investing the time to review more choices.

There is a diminishing return of having more choices because it simply takes too much additional time without demonstrating any significant value.

What does this mean to the companies that are producing all these choices…there will be more casualties. Unless the newcomers and others can create some way to immediately and emphatically show the customer they are superior in some way they won’t get the time from the customer…they won’t be pursued unless uniquely stand out. Being demonstrably differentiated will be critical to capture the attention of the customer without costing them more time.

In addition, because of the complete acceptance and use of social media, WORD-of-MOUTH will become more and more the dominant method customers use to cut through all the choices and save themselves time. Asking a “trusted resource” to help you cut through the choices will dominate going forward. I can guarantee you that almost everyone reading this has chosen the path of asking their trusted networks of friends and colleagues who they recommend for some product/service before they invested the time to dive into an in-depth search, scouting the reviews, and making a buying decision. If you haven’t done this yet, you will, and when you do you will save a boatload of time…you’re welcome.

And we are using Word-of-Mouth more and more every day…in person and through our social networks. I can guarantee you that right now someone on your social networks, like Facebook, is asking one of your friends for a recommendation for something to AVOID spending the time searching and evaluating the alternatives on their own…and it’s increasing every day…rapidly.

As a leader, I would ask you to STOP…switch your mindset and start thinking about yourself not as a consumer but the CEO or leader of one of these companies (maybe your own). You can see this happening and it’s only going to become more pervasive. So the real question for any leader is, “WHAT WOULD YOU DO if you were the head of one of these companies?” Allow me to share some ideas for you to consider and that might get you thinking about how to deal with this trend in your own organization…

Here are 5 ways  you, as a CEO/Leader, can prepare today for this oncoming “tipping point” that his happening all around us…and not just survive, but THRIVE and WIN.

First, absolutely, positively become a customer obsessed company! This is what your customers are telling every company to do today…care about them first and foremost or they will go to one of the other hundred choices available. This isn’t rocket science. This is what the customer is shouting at us in virtually every industry. I have talked to thousands of customers and for some reason there is still a disconnect between what they want and what they are getting. The customer today wants it to be all about them…not about you. Putting the customer in the center of your universe and building all your other processes around delivering and incredible, amazing, awesome, and remarkable experience is not just what they want, it’s what they are demanding. And they are voting with their wallets and their shopping patterns because they have thousands of choices. Show them through every action you do that they are the most important part of your business and you will win and you will beat the competition.

Second, create a Word-of-Mouth strategy for your company. Since the tipping point of TIME is driving customers to use other resources to get things done in less time, this is an absolute must for any organization to develop. Unfortunately, most take it for granted and just “assume it will happen” so there isn’t a specific strategy. It needs a strategy to work…no longer can you rely on hoping it happens. This will become one of the biggest assets of any company well into the future. If you don’t know how to do this and get it started, I would be happy to help give you some insights and guidance…but it needs to happen to avoid the impending tipping point. And in the end, instead of just hoping your customers talk about you, you will actually have a way to make them your marketing agents…and at virtually no cost!

Third, stop self-promoting and start helping your customers any way you can to improve their lives. The era of massive promotion is fading because we, as customers, simply don’t have the TIME to invest in listening to, reading, or watching you promote your company…it’s just more noise that burns up our most valuable resource. But when you demonstrate you can help me improve my life (or my business) you get my attention and I am more than willing to give you my TIME. This is also a strategic aspect every company should be adopting and incorporating into their overall CUSTOMER OBSESSION strategy.

Fourth, stop playing in the commodity space and start differentiating your company. I would encourage you to read my post on COMMODITIZATION to learn more about how this can either destroy a company or set them apart from their competition. It is the inevitable result of the Internet Revolution we live in today. The companies that have specific strategies to avoid falling prey to the process of commoditization will be able to eclipse their competitors in ways that put them well ahead for longer periods of time.

Fifth, make this who you are as a company…your DNA…your culture…your mantra. When you create a Vision around Customer Obsession and build all the strategies above to support this Vision, everything works together to support it. But everything you do as a company has to work together or it will slowly erode back to where it was before. Imagine if you were the CEO of a company (you may be already) and whenever some new ideas came up for you to consider in the area of products, services, or the customer experience, you simply asked two questions…

• “Tell me how this is going to improve our customers’ life or their business.”
• “Tell me how this is going to save our customers TIME.”

Asking these two simple questions could completely change the way you served your customers AND it would change the way your customers viewed you as a company among the thousands of competitors. That would not only allow you to be completely prepared for the “tipping point” but it would put you on a path to THRIVE and not just survive.

These 5 things will completely transform your organization into something that capitalizes on EXACTLY WHAT YOUR CUSTOMER WANTS…guaranteed!! If you need more insights or are curious how you develop and put a strategies like these in place, give me a shout and we’ll grab coffee and I can share with you how this could completely change your business. Are your ready?

The post We’re reaching a “Tipping Point” as Leaders…5 Ways to Prepare and Thrive first appeared on WOM10.

When we wrote our book, “Creating and Delivering Totally Awesome Customer Experiences,” we found a very interesting fact from our research…customers hate the unpredictable and inconsistent. We coined the phrase, “Random Acts of Excellence and Chaos” to describe this phenomenon. What it essentially means is that customers like consistency more than they like “occasional exceptional.” They don’t want to wonder what experience they will be getting every time they interact with you or your employees.

We found that customers, like you and I, prefer to have consistency in our interactions and experiences rather than surprises or the unknown. In other words, we don’t want to always wonder if today we are getting “happy Harry” or “sad Sally” when we interact with a business. We want “consistent Carol” because we know what we will get and we will have less anxiety. We would rather have our excitement delivered in different ways than with every experience we have as a customer.

You might be saying to yourself that you enjoy these exciting experiences…and you would be correct that most people do as well. Unfortunately, there is the other side to this that says they don’t enjoy the bad experiences and so they would rather not take the chance of getting a bad one instead of the really great one. There is enough anxiety in customers’ lives already…they don’t want to add one more thing throughout the day that creates more of it. And this is equally (if not more) true for B2B businesses as it is for B2C…it’s just that the interactions are different but the same rules apply.

Think of McDonalds’s for example. Most customers wouldn’t say they go out of their way to eat the delectable food at McDonald’s…but they know that no matter where they are they are pretty much going to get the same experience. Ray Kroc, founder of McDonald’s, figured this out and it is still a mantra for them today…consistency in what they do no matter where they are located. It works…and customers prefer this over the unknown.

Start by switching hats and thinking like a customer…because you actually are for many other businesses. If you shop somewhere regularly, do you want to wonder what the experience will be like or how you are going to be treated every time you interact with a particular company? Usually not…you want consistency. We all want to know what we are getting before we get there if it is somewhere we have bought from before and if it is different it causes us anxiety. It’s the same reason we all drive the same way to work for the most part or order many of the same foods, or choose some of the same products to buy again. We like consistency in much of what we do and we don’t want more anxiety.

So what does this have to do with delivering “happy Holiday Cheer” and then paying for it in the New Year?

Simple…most of the time there is merriment in the air and employees feel it and enjoy passing it on to customers during the holidays. There are company parties and treats being brought in on a regular basis and people simply being much happier for the most part. This translates to your customers whether you like it or not. The customers feel this and in turn are generally happier this time of year (other than the stress of trying to find a gift for uncle Bob who hates everything). So your employees are happier and the customers are happier and so their experience is better than it may be the rest of the year. Then the holidays are over…now what?

When the merriment ends so does the “happy holiday experience” for most employees.

This means they go back to their normal routine of providing a good or even great customer experiences…but not an over-the-top WOW, awesome experience they were delivering during the holidays. We have just created our own version of “Random Acts of Excellence and Chaos” in our own company. We have treated the customers differently during the holidays than we are in January. Add onto this a host of returns (if you are in retail) and you not only aren’t in “holiday merriment” any longer you are in “post-holiday sadness” where people just aren’t that happy at this point in time.

THIS IS A HUGE OPPORTUNITY if you see it differently that 90% of businesses.

This is your opportunity to continue the “holiday merriment” and continue to offer this “holiday experience” each and every day into the New Year. When customers see this is the way they are treated every day, not just during the holidays, it makes a statement about you and your business. It says you actually do care about their experience and you are there to deliver it whether they are shopping, returning, or simply asking questions.

This becomes who you are…not the time of the year!

Now for the bad news…most companies I talk to don’t have a clue about how to continue this on a regular basis…day in and day out going forward. They can tell their employees to be happier and friendlier but unfortunately you still end up with the “Random Acts of Excellence and Chaos” situation you probably started with before the holiday merriment started in December.

Now for the good news…it doesn’t have to stay this way!!

This year you can decide to change your strategy…investing time and resources into making this WHO YOU ARE…the DNA of your company. Maybe this is the year you decide to turn delivering an awesome experience into a process and make CUSTOMER OBSESSION your starting point. If you decide to do this and change your company focus and strategy about your customers, you will be able to create this “holiday merriment” experience 365 days a year instead of 30. While all your competitors are “gearing up for the holidays” your customers see this as the norm when they interact with you and your employees. What would that look like in 2017?

Granted, this doesn’t happen overnight so you might have to spend the first half of the year making the change…but it will last a very long time and only get better. Now your employees won’t be thinking this is just what they do during the holidays…they will see how they can deliver this incredible and amazing WOW experience every single day.

YOUR CUSTOMERS WILL LOVE IT!

When this comes together, now your “Holiday Merriment” will be your “way of life” as a company…now a one-off that happens during the time of year when everyone is doing the same thing. Now you can break away from your pack of competitors in the race to the top…you will be the one everyone loves to interact with the entire year, not just during the holidays.

This is what can take you from being viewed as a “commodity” to “completely differentiated” from your competitors. It’s a STRATEGY with a prescribed set of processes and actions…that’s the only way to make it about who you are and your DNA. Now you can know that what your customers love during the holidays will simply be “the way you do business every single day!”

The post Will your Employees “Christmas Cheer” continue throughout the New Year? first appeared on WOM10.

When I first started my “deep dive” into “Customers” and how to optimize their experience (almost 20 years ago) we didn’t have Social Media. The ability to “spray your audience” with useless tweets, images, or emoticons, and commenting didn’t exist. If you didn’t do a really high quality job with a high quality customer you didn’t get any high quality referrals or recommendations. You weren’t talked about and the customer simply left.

Today, we live in the Internet/Digital Revolution where in a matter of seconds you can reach thousands upon thousands of people with a simple short tweet, image, hashtag, or comment. And if you want to take a little longer, you can blast out an e-mail to the same list of thousands. But just like the old saying goes, “Just because you CAN do it doesn’t mean you SHOULD do it.” This may be more relevant today than any other time in history!

While the “Art and Science” of creating Word-of-Mouth has certainly changed, the power of it and the impact it can have on a business has increased more than anything we have seen. The question is whether or not your business is using it as LEVERAGE or a DETERRENT.

Today we have the ability to reach anyone we want in an instant. This is powerful. The question is whether you are reaching the right people or whether you are simply reaching lots of people. Going after “masses” of people is “so yesterday” as a strategy. It doesn’t work any longer…at least not with any follow-on rewards.

QUANTITY is not the answer today. The answer is not to go after massive “likes” and “followers” and “connections” if they you haven’t identified their Personas as specifically your potential customers. And not only do they need to be your potential customers, they have to be your “ideal potential customer.” No longer do you have time to waste on marketing and connecting to audiences that aren’t ideal.

If a customer is not an “ideal customer” for you, they probably are for someone else and you should let them market to them instead of you. Let them spend the time and resources on trying to attract them. Today, find the “shiny marbles” you really want the most in your customer base and design a strategy to go after them with everything you have…tailored to what would really help them improve their lives or their business.

This is QUALITY over QUANTITY. Choose the few that you would love to have as customers because they fit the way you do business and how you want to grow. When you know who these few, quality customers are then you are focusing in the right way to create LEVERAGE in your marketing.

Here’s why you want to focus on a few, high quality customers and prospective customers…THEY TELL OTHERS JUST LIKE THEM. Everyone knows people like themselves and they hang out with others who have similar interests and needs. A simple example…the person who invests a lot of their time in charities and non-profits knows a whole bunch of other people who do the same. This works in virtually every aspect of your business and with your customers…your “ideal customer” knows other potential ideal customers.

The one question I highly recommend every business owner or leader focuses on is this…“Do you offer a customer experience to your ideal customer that is so incredibly remarkable that they can’t wait to tell other potential ideal customers about you?”

If the answer is YES, then you are well on your way to capturing the ideal customer in your market ahead of your competitors and you will be able to “own that customer persona” going forward…becoming a differentiated and unique brand to this ideal audience…CONGRATULATIONS!!

If you answer NO, there’s room for improvement…both on identifying your ideal customer and on improving the experience you give them so they are motivated to tell others.

This is where developing a strategy that helps you move to an answer of YES would give you tremendous LEVERAGE. It would allow you to truly differentiate yourself with the AUDIENCE YOU WANT instead of just an overall general audience…of which there are many in that audience that either doesn’t care that much about you or you won’t ever be able to make happy. They are DETERRENTS to your strategy!

Here’s the MAGIC to this strategy and focus…QUALITY matters much more than QUANTITY!

When you focus on the QUALITY aspect of identifying your “ideal customer audience” it doesn’t matter how many there are…the numbers work for you today where they didn’t so much before. As little as 10 years ago, if you had 20 in your quality audience, they probably had a leverage power of 2 – 10…meaning they would tell between 2 and 10 people about you. That means your ideal audience 10 years ago of 20 would be able to reach between 40 – 200 new prospective “ideal customers” for you via Word-of-Mouth. Not bad…but certainly not good enough to rapidly grow your business today.

Take those same numbers in today’s new Digital/Internet Revolution. If you have the same 20 people in your “ideal customer audience” they all have (on average) 1000 friends, connections, and followers. This means those 20 ideal customers now have the potential to reach 20,000 potential new “ideal customers” because of their reach. And remember, people know people like themselves so the likelihood that many of these 20,000 potential customers are just like them is extremely high!! Let’s be conservative and cut this number in half…or even more conservative and cut it down by 75% if you are really uncertain…it still gives you a reach of 5,000 potential ideal customers!

When you compare the leverage you have today vs. just 10 years ago, the difference is 4800 potential new customers…and that’s being extremely conservative by just assuming a 25% likelihood they know people like themselves…which I would say is incredibly low.

This is why QUANTITY is not the answer today in the WORD-of-MOUTH Customer Economy we now live in…QUALITY is your answer to getting you to the IDEAL QUANTITY.

Allowing your customers to help you reach the desired, ideal audience is easier than it’s ever been in history…but only if you approach it strategically and with a completely (and I emphasize completely) different frame of reference. Using a traditional approach of “spray and pray” or “campaigns” or “broadcast messages” is not going to work. Investing the time to truly find out what will “help your ideal audience” is what gives you the foundation to create LEVERAGED WORD-OF-MOUTH.

Forget the big numbers people are offering you today…they won’t help you achieve the success you are looking for. Forget trying to blast your messages out to as big of a list or population as you can find…it won’t work any longer and your audience will “turn you off.”

Instead, try a strategy that works in our new world…focus on the “small numbers” of the “ideal audience” and you can take advantage of the leverage available today in our Digital Marketing Revolution and Customer Economy.

This is what will make the difference. In virtually every speech I give I share a simple way to think about and remember this concept…“You have to really SMALL to get really BIG.” Keep this in mind when you are trying to figure out your strategy for moving forward, it might just be the “mantra” you need to develop and eclipse your competition.

And as usual, if you want to learn more about this just shoot me a message. I’m happy to talk with you more about it without a fee…it’s ALWAYS my gift to you to help you be better at what you do. As I always say, my passion is to help you “skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is today,” as the famous ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky used to say. If that’s where you want to go as an organization, I’m happy to give you some insights to get you thinking different and headed in the right direction to take advantage of the new world we live in today.

The post Quality STILL wins over Quantity first appeared on WOM10.

Once we got over this idea, everyone then thought they were trying to take over all products and offer them as cheaply as possible…being the ultimate commodity provider. They weren’t…this wasn’t their plan either.

Now that they are a solid part of our lives, we realize what they are all about…giving you and me, the customer, the very best online shopping experience possible…we finally get it. This is what they were designing and building from day one…to make our shopping experience easier, more customer friendly, and offer incredible selection and value. They were all about the CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE from day one!

The secret sauce for Amazon is CUSTOMER OBSESSION.

Back to Jeff Bezos and Amazon…and. You can see how passionate Bezos is about their OBSESSION with the customer by looking at a couple of quotes Jeff has given us that are worth noting, two of these really resonate with me…

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

 “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”

Amazon doesn’t just say they want to treat their customers well or that they really appreciate their customers (common rhetoric from most companies), they demonstrate it in everything they do…including their LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES. In fact, their NUMBER ONE PRINCIPLE is very simple…

CUSTOMER OBSESSION – Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.

Another great leader had the same vision…Steve Jobs from Apple. He wasn’t about trying to make the most technologically advanced computer…his desire was to improve our lives using a variety of forms of technology. One of his most famous quotes tells the same story as Amazon…

“Our DNA is as a consumer company – for that individual customer who’s voting thumbs up or thumbs down. That’s who we think about. And we think that our job is to take responsibility for the complete user experience. And if it’s not up to par, it’s our fault, plain and simple.” –Steve Jobs

If you have ever bought anything from Amazon and had to return it for some reason, they carry this feeling of Customer Obsession through their entire experience…all the way to the very end when they ask you a simple 3 question survey. Here are their 3 questions…

1. Rate our Customer Service? (from Terrible to Great)
2. How helpful was the Amazon Representative? (Very Unhelpful to Very Helpful)
3. What would you like us to improve? (lots of choices)

But even before they ask you to take the survey, they make a very powerful statement to reinforce their commitment to you and to the experience they want you to have. They have a simple statement that is at the top of their survey that says what they live, eat, and breathe…

“Your feedback is helping us build Earth’s most Customer-Centric Company.”

This says it all…what they are about and what they focus on in everything they do. Do they always get it right? Nope…but they get more right than any other company of their size or in their industry and they have this as their “guiding principle” in everything they do…they can only continue to improve…ahead of their competitors. This is what Bezos knew from the very beginning and continues to build upon this foundation. And purchasing Zappos was just another step in this direction (more on that one in another post).

CUSTOMER OBSESSION is when you build your entire company around the customer and their experience is at the center of your universe. All processes, operation, support, sales, marketing, and leadership have this as their guiding light and the foundation upon which their ENTIRE ORGANIZATION is built. This is how Customer Obsession happens inside a company and why those businesses who truly obsess over their customers are the LEADERS IN THEIR INDUSTRY!

But you’re not Amazon…in fact you are most likely an SMB business…small to mid-sized, nimble, and highly competitive. You don’t have the resources of an Amazon…but you have the most valuable resources of all…SPEED AND FLEXIBILITY. You can move faster and make changes happen much quicker than Amazon or any other large company. You can make a decision to be Customer Obsessed tomorrow and put your plans in place quicker than any large company in the market.

You, the Owner or CEO of an SMB company can dominate in your industry faster than almost anyone else you compete with…if you MAKE THE COMMITMENT TO BE CUSTOMER OBSESSED. This isn’t about “saying the words” and then doing what you are doing today or making little changes. It isn’t about telling every employee to be friendlier to the customer. It isn’t about telling your customer how much you care about them. It’s about changing your company at the core…putting the customer first in EVERY DECISION and building ALL YOUR PROCESSES to create and incredible, consistent, and awesome CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE your customers can SEE EVERYDAY.

CUSTOMER OBSESSION IS AN “ALL-IN” STRATEGY!

When you become Customer Obsessed, no longer do you pay “lip service” to your customers and tell them how much they mean to you or how important they are or a bunch of other fancy phrases…YOU SHOW THEM! You demonstrate how important they are in everything you do…every day…with every interaction. You do it to the point where they say…

“WOW, you really care about your customers…everything you do for me is over-the-top incredible. There is no one in your industry that treats me the way you do…I can’t wait to tell others about you.”

When you get this reaction…consistently…you are CUSTOMER OBSESSED! And your employees will love working for you because they are the ones hearing it from your customers. You will have a CUSTOMER CENTRIC CULTURE that your competitors can only envy. You will be the one your customers talk about and tell others about. You will be the recipient of “Word-of-Mouth on Steroids.”

This is HOW YOU CAN BE LIKE AMAZON and dominate your market and industry. Are you up to the challenge that Bezos took on many years ago when he created Amazon? If so, we should talk…I would be happy to share with you what this new world looks like and share with you how others are doing it today. It’s a once in a “business life time” adventure and journey…one that you will never regret and one that will change your company forever!

The post Why Amazon DOMINATES…How YOU can Dominate in your business first appeared on WOM10.

Organizations often rely on “policy manuals” or “procedure manuals” or “customer scripts” or “customer flow charts” to solve issues. What ends up happening more times than not is that they PUNT!

NO manual, no matter how much time or energy is put into it, can handle all the situations that come up with customers. Customers are unpredictable…they often times don’t know exactly what they want so they turn to your employees for answers. Answers that aren’t in the company “manuals” or “guides.” Unfortunately, this is usually more of the “norm” than it is the “exception.”

What do your employees do when these “exceptions” occur? How do they proceed to solve the customer issues and leave the customer feeling awesome? What is the “process” for handling these situations in real time when the customer is anxious, in a hurry, confused, and needing answers? Is there a process?

The process in many organizations is to “pass it off to another person” and hope they can take the issue and resolve it to the customers delight. They PUNT!

The sad part is that we…the CUSTOMER…now expect this to be the “norm” inside most organizations. Have you ever called a support line with an issue and immediately asked to speak to a supervisor because you know you will probably end up there anyway so you might as well start there? We all have…it’s what we, as customers, have been trained to do because employees PUNT.

Have you ever had a situation when talking to a company where you explained your situation and the person couldn’t solve your issue…so they PUNTED to the next level…then you had to explain your situation all over again…and they PUNTED…and you had to explain it once again to another person at another level in a different department? We all have…and with each “hand off” we get more anxious, more upset, more frustrated, and more inclined to tell our friends how terrible this company is at handling their customers.

Employees have their scripts, their policies and procedures that tell them if anything happens outside of this I have to PUNT to the next level and let the next level deal with the issue. While this might be a great INTERNAL SOLUTION it isn’t a great CUSTOMER SOLUTION. It doesn’t win you any points with the customer or the experience they are having with your company.

One thing that does happen when this cycle occurs…the customer remembers this and so the next time they try to bypass this system and go directly to the supervisor. They also tell all their friends how to get past your system and go directly to the supervisor to get anything resolved. The customer learns quickly and they build their own process to avoid your process of PUNTING.

Let me share with you a different approach to this issue…one that will DIFFERENTIATE your company and give you a clear COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE in your industry.

PURPOSE…give your employees a sense of PURPOSE rather than more detailed policies and procedures. Give them THE REASON and THE AUTHORITY to handle the customer the way the customer would want them to handle their situation.

When employees know they can solve a problem and become resourceful, both you and the customer win…and the employee is much happier because they solved a problem and got positive feedback while doing it.

Take any world-class company that is known for delivering an awesome customer experience and their employees have PURPOSE…they understand their true role and they have AUTHORITY to deliver an awesome experience to their customers.

DISNEY is one of these companies…their employees are focused on delivering “happiness” to their guests in everything they do…regardless of their role. You can see it every day in every employee…they act knowing their PURPOSE is to deliver an awesome experience. There are thousands of situations that come up every day throughout all of the Disney properties that aren’t in any manual or policy…yet they get solved and the customer leaves saying WOW. These solutions and processes can’t be captured or documented…the employee has to feel they have the authority and empowerment from leadership to do what they feel is the best outcome for the customer.

ZAPPOS does the same thing…there are no supervisors to PUNT to in their system. Their employees have full AUTHORITY to solve an issue or determine the best way to help a customer. They have the authority to deliver WOW in every interaction with every customer…no supervisors to go to, just the employees. They also don’t measure the statistics others measure…they measure WOW…how can I make our customers happier than when they first called. This is their PURPOSE and every employee knows it when they work there or they don’t work there.

NORDSTROM, especially in the earlier days, hired employees and gave them the same PURPOSE…deliver the most incredible and memorable experience to the customer. It didn’t matter if the customer was going to spend $100 or $10,000, they were going to make them feel special and like the most important person. And every customer going into their stores knew they were going to get this treatment and knew they were paying more for their products…but it didn’t matter. The employees had a PURPOSE to deliver this experience to every customer and with every interaction…and customers told everyone else where it soon became their brand.

There is one common thread that runs through all these companies…THEY HIRE THE RIGHT EMPLOYEES WITH THE RIGHT ATTITUDE. This is their common thread…their employees. TOTALLY AWESOME CUSTOMER EXPERIENCES CAN’T BE DELIVERED WITHOUT THE RIGHT EMPLOYEES. These successful companies don’t want employees that are always asking what to do or afraid of doing the wrong thing or looking to PUNT…they hire employees that are creative and have a passion for serving their customers. Having the right employees is critical to having a PURPOSE DRIVEN organization work.

I’ve just given you a very POWERFUL FORMULA to create incredible success and a COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE for your company. Three things you can take away from this and incorporate into your own organization to help you become even more successful than you are today…

1. DEFINE YOUR PURPOSE…make sure your purpose is crystal clear so every employee and customer understand and get it…focused on delivering an awesome customer experience…every day.
2. HIRE EMPLOYEES WITH ATTITUDE…get people on board who have the right attitude rather than aptitude…can’t train attitude but you can train aptitude…to get to this level you absolutely, positively need the right attitude.
3. LET THEM RUN AND BE THEMSELVES…if you followed step one and two above, now let them be them…their attitude, with your purpose, will give them the authority to deliver some absolutely amazing things to your customers.

When these three things are working, you get massive WORD-OF-MOUTH and your BEST MARKETING is now being done by your MOST POWERFUL SPOKESPERSON…your CUSTOMER. Companies that follow this today will find themselves being differentiated and the envy of their competitors. Are you ready to make this happen in your organization? If so, and you want to understand how this all comes together, let’s chat and I can give you some additional insights to help you move forward in this direction. It’s a wonderful place to be…just ask Disney, Zappos, Nordstrom, and a host of other incredibly successful companies that follow this recipe.

The post STOP PUNTING…your EMPLOYEES can help you create a COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE first appeared on WOM10.

It’s actually simpler than you might think when you strip away all the noise and emotion from the situation in crisis. When something goes wrong and we get this question from our customers (either openly saying it or knowing they are thinking it) we scramble to try and fix the issue…only for it to most likely pop up again sometime down the road. We spend a lot of time “fixing” immediate issues instead of “fixing” them permanently.

There are 3 main areas I would encourage every business owner or executive to explore inside their organization. I have found that when these 3 areas are addressed, the number of “Why can’t you just get it right” comments all but vanish…because you are now getting it right…before an issue happens. Here are the 3 areas I would encourage you to “honestly and openly” review inside your organization.

1. YOUR CUSTOMER JOURNEY…This is one the best place to start in any organization, regardless of your size or industry. If you don’t have a documented Customer Journey, I highly recommend you step back, invest some time, and put this together. In a nutshell, the Customer Journey is the entire process a customer goes through their first interaction with your company to the end of the purchase (and even beyond when you add in regular follow up and building ongoing word-of-mouth with your customers).

I find the majority of organizations don’t have a Customer Journey mapped out. A key (and critical) component of a Customer Journey is a well-designed and mapped out Customer Experience (Customer Experience Mapping)…most organizations don’t have these either. The key to both the Customer Journey and Awesome Customer Experiences is that they are “documented and trained.” It is definitely not enough in our “commodity driven” economy to simply “care about your customers.” The research tells us less than 25% of organizations have these in place. So is it any wonder why the customers’ journey is full of unexpected twists and turns that lead to a less than desirable experience…over and over again?

Building Customer Experience Maps is at the heart of any Customer Journey. Companies that have documented Customer Experience Maps usually lead their industry…and they have an experience that thrills their customers and creates a totally awesome interaction and experience. Starting with the Customer experience goes a long way to eliminating the repeated issues that crop up and helps avoid the ones that would have normally occurred in the future.

2. INTERNAL PROCESSES…Often times the processes companies have created are designed for ultimate efficiency and are “inwardly focused” as opposed to being designed for the customer, which are “outwardly focused.” When this occurs, it means the organization has designed their processes to make the most efficient use of their resources, products, and services as the prime objective. This generally works in the opposite direction to delivering what would make the customer happiest and their life easier when dealing with your company.

This “product/service centric” strategy is a “throwback” to the Industrial Revolution of the ‘90s where everything was about “products and services” as opposed to the Internet Revolution where “everything is about the customer.” We now live in what is often referred to as The Customer Economy because today, the customer is firmly in control. Customers dictate to companies what they want and how they want it…and if you can’t deliver this they move on to the other hundred competitors that can deliver it to them. This “commoditization” of the current economy is forcing companies to become “outwardly focused” with their processes if they want to win over their customers and create a competitive advantage.

3. ACCOUNTABILITY/EMPOWERING EMPLOYEES…It is much easier for employees to take responsibility and accountability for issues when the above two areas are addressed. When problems arise, they have a better understanding of what might have occurred to cause the issue and now they are empowered to fix it for the customer without the usual “garbage phrase,” “I will have to check with my supervisor/manager to see what we can do.” This phrase should be banned from every company…the best ones already have.

Setting up Customer Obsessed Processes and Customer Experiences completely designed around your customers demonstrates to your employees what they can do throughout the Customer Journey to ensure they help the customer get what they need and want. This doesn’t mean giving things away, it means giving them the experience they most desire when interacting with your company. When employees know what the experience should be and how they can WOW their customers, they become empowered to make it happen. They take accountability and responsibility for their portion of the Customer Journey and make it happen.

When these 3 things are in place, you literally eliminate the phrase, “Why can’t you just get it RIGHT?” Now you are getting it right almost every time and when you don’t, you make changes and incorporate these into your processes and customer experience. This is true CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT with the Customer in mind, not just the efficiency of your product/service centric business processes.

This is an incredible OPPORTUNITY for almost 75% of the businesses in the market. Research shows us that the vast majority of companies aren’t doing these 3 things and as a result are ending up with “spot fixes” rather than continually improving the CUSTOMER JOURNEY. If you decide to take on these three areas, you most likely will position your company in the enviable position as the undisputed leader in your industry…because your competition isn’t doing it and your customers love it!

If you want to know more about how this actually works inside a company, shoot me a message and we can talk further to help you see how these all fit together…and how they work in some of the best companies in the world. It might just be the guidance and answer you have been looking for to take your business to an entirely new level.

To get you further excited about his opportunity, there is the WORD-OF-MOUTH and ADVOCACY aspect that can occur when all of this is in place and dazzling your customer. One of the best results from this type of strategy and approach we haven’t talked about is how much money this can actually save a company when they don’t have to continually invest time, people, and funds to continually fix the same problems over and over again. A topic for another day. I hope you will cease the opportunity…it’s sitting in front of virtually every company RIGHT NOW!!

The post Customer to Business Leader…“Why can’t you just get it RIGHT?” first appeared on WOM10.

I’ve talked about this issue in probably 700 of the 1000+ speeches I have given over the past 8 years…traditional media, predominantly newspapers, are in a free fall and it will only get worse. To prove this point, a recent article in WSJ (Wall Street Journal) shared some research by GroupM where they stated that “global spending on newspaper print is expected to decline 8.7% in 2016…the biggest drop since the recession of 2009 when it dropped 13.7%.” These are big numbers when converted to dollars. And while this is significant, it isn’t my point…their CUSTOMERS are the real issue.

We can talk all day about the implications this has for many people, including the employees and suppliers to these organizations, but that is a topic for another day and another discussion. Let me just leave this one on the table by summarizing it in just 3 words…THEY MISSED IT. If you want to read more about how this impacting thousands of employees and changes in their industry I would encourage you to read the article, “Plummeting Newspaper Ad Revenue Sparks new Wave of Changes.”

These traditional media organizations, newspapers being a major component, missed it…they missed the Internet Revolution and the Digital Economy. They were so powerful and consumed with their own success and domination that they missed the Tsunami headed to shore that was going to change their world forever. And if you need a quick refresher…think of Craigslist…the first “shot across the bow” that literally wiped out their stalwart of classified advertising. They never recovered from this and never attempted to change their model to compete with Craigslist…they missed it.

I could go on and on about how they missed many other aspects relating to their industry but that is not the point I want to make…or the opportunity that is present today for EVERY BUSINESS LEADER. I want to talk about HOW THEY COULD HAVE PREVENTED THIS FROM HAPPENING so we can all learn from each other’s mistakes and apply them to your industry.

I want to answer the question, “WHY DIDN’T THEY SEE THIS COMING…THEIR CUSTOMERS WERE TELLING THEM WITH THEIR ACTIONS.”

These changes didn’t happen overnight. Granted, they happened faster than any other time in our history but they weren’t instant. There were plenty of warning signs from their customers…their subscribers, advertisers, and readers…that could have guided them out of the cave. Customers were telling them how they wanted something more effective, less expensive, and easier to use.

Back to Craigslist for an example…it was a great model they could have overcome and become a leader in if they had been more “outwardly focused” rather than “inwardly focused.” They missed it. When Craigslist entered the market it was new and innovative…a Blue Ocean strategy for a fat and overpriced service called classified ads. I know, I placed many of them in my day and couldn’t believe how much I had to pay for minimal results. It was a bloated system designed to make newspapers very rich.

And just like all the other models that come along and blew up a bloated industry (think of Uber, AirBnB, Amazon, Zappos, etc.) they became successful because the incumbent’s didn’t want to change their model…it was their “cash cow” at the time and they made billions. They had all the power because they had the audience…the CUSTOMERS. They could have adopted more of a Craigslist model and stopped Craigslist in its tracks…but they didn’t. They thought because of their power in the market they could dictate what the customer should get…remember Henry Ford when he only wanted to offer black cars?

If they had actually LISTENED TO THEIR CUSTOMERS and realized their true wants and needs…to sell their stuff in less time and less money…they could have owned this market and created an entirely new revenue stream. They missed it because they didn’t listen to their customers and come up with a plan to give them something of great value. The only wanted to offer it in black.

They also missed that the CUSTOMER WAS IN TOTAL CONTROL of the purchasing decisions. With the switch from the Industrial Revolution to the Internet Revolution, customers had many more choices and could now vote (with their wallets) which one(s) they wanted to support. They chose Craigslist because there was no competitive alternative from the newspapers. The newspapers customers left. They went to a better model…one that gave them what they were screaming for…efficiency, time, and cost.

The newspapers must still be in denial today because they still don’t have an offering to compete effectively with Craigslist. But as the saying goes, “the cows have left the barn” so their opportunity is gone. They missed it.

THIS WAS A CUSTOMER ISSUE…IF THEY WERE LISTENING TO AND IN TUNE WITH WHAT WOULD HELP THEIR CUSTOMERS LIVES THEY COULD HAVE CHANGED.

Now I would ask you to think about this with regard to your own business…your own industry…your own customers. What is it in your industry that is “fat and bloated with margin” and not giving your customers what they truly want at a reasonable price? I believe there are opportunities to identify this in virtually every industry. What exists in what you do or provide to your customers they would love to see changed? What could be changed in your business which would actually help your customers lives (or businesses) improve? What could you offer that would be more efficient and/or less costly?

And what could you change in your CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE which would blow your customers mind in how much you cared about them and demonstrated how much you cared about improving their lives (or business)? What are these? If you don’t know, it’s time to find out…because they are there. If you don’t believe the opportunity is there and there is nothing you can do, go back up to the top of this post and reread the case study on Craigslist…there is always an opportunity.

THIS IS THE OPPORTUNITY FOR EVERY BUSINESS LEADER TODAY…identify the areas by finding out from your customers what would improve their life significantly if you could change it. Be bold…be open minded…be creative…and encourage this feedback from your customers. If you do this…constantly…they will actually see you truly care and maybe, just maybe, start telling you something they aren’t telling anyone else (including your competitors).

When this happens, you all but eliminate the danger of becoming the “newspaper in your industry” and it opens the door to become the “Craigslist in your industry.” This is where future minded business leaders want to go…now you have the insight to get there. Are you up for the challenge?

The post The “Plunge” of Newspaper Advertising…it’s a CUSTOMER Issue first appeared on WOM10.