Today the head of the IMF and the Conference Board both declared the next decade the lost decade for economic growth. And the decade only just started!
Remember, economists deal in global statistics which are the AVERAGE of every country’s economic potential. You, the business owner, do not have to be an AVERAGE statistic in the next decade. Want more in your future than doom and gloom? Then change the game you’re playing in your business. Take back your future. Get your team together and brainstorm how you can deliver more value to your customers to earn their business and their loyalty.
Here are our top three tips for delivering top line value:
1. Reinvent your customers’ experience buying from you. Get their feedback. Search out their pet peeves. What works and what doesn’t. Choose to listen by being curious, rather than defensive. Every pet peeve has a golden opportunity in it for your business, but only if you choose to see it that way. Then analyze based on the complaints where the problems are in your customer experience system. Put together a team made up of someone from each part of the business, including those departments not part of the ‘problem’. Mandate? Reinvent how the process works to deliver what the customer really wants. Set a deadline and give this team carte blanche to come up with a game plan, budget and implementation plan you will approve.
2. Deliver value in surprising ways. How can you and your team go the extra mile for your customers? Can you teach them something that will help their business? Make introductions that will help generate more traffic? Show them how to get more mileage from your product or service. It’s like those Apple iPhone commercials that show you how to use their product. Or the webinars that Nevada State Bank put on featuring Darren Hardy from Success Magazine for how to build a successful mindset to deal with the economy. Or the supply salesperson who designed a supply cart for a hospital and filled it with her products so that the nurses didn’t have to take valuable time away from nursing to stock the shelves with new product deliveries.
3. What are you talking about? Are you adding to the doom and gloom mentality when you talk to your staff, suppliers and customers? Are you dwelling on the headlines or spending your creative energy with your team dreaming up how you are going to outshine the economy. Your mindset powers your business. What fuel are using?
As business owners, we can be part of the problem or part of the solution. We don’t have to succumb to the headlines. What will you choose to do?
