Author: Andrew Cooke

The Importance of Trust & How To Address a Lack of It

Andrew Cooke trust , , , ,

The Must of Trust

How trust underpins business, how to gain it, and the costs of losing it

by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

Hard to earn, and easy to lose – trust underpins business and all our relationships, professional or personal.  It is a must. So how can leaders accelerate the trust that they can engender from others.  What can we do to improve the speed of trust?

Building TrustThe most effective way for a person to build trust is, through their behaviour; to demonstrate their ability and capacity to keep their commitments.  In doing this the individual needs to keep to the process of Make, Keep and Repeat – continually keeping commitments builds trust makes things happen faster, with less stress and makes things more enjoyable. This can be risky for managers to do but it helps them to build trust quickly and efficiently – especially in difficult situations.

Make, Keep and Repeat

So let’s look at the power of each step:

1. Make – making public a clear, defined commitment that is specific, measurable and has a clear date set to it.  This removes ambiguity and holds you to a commitment to which you can be held accountable.  Yes, you as the manager or leader are making yourself accountable to your reports or peers. Making a commitment builds hope.

2. Keep – demonstrating the fact that you have met your clearly articulated commitment as previously defined.  You need to actively publicize this.  People need to know that you have done this; you cannot assume that they will know because you have done it.  Furthermore, proving that you are keeping your commitments gives you right to expect them to reciprocate i.e. they will make, keep and repeat in terms of their own commitments.

3. Repeat – this develops consistency, belief in you, and proof that your actions mirror your words.  When people see a discrepancy between what you say and what you do, they will always follow what you do.  By repeating this process you are establishing and creating an avatar for others to model their behaviours on.

Extending Trust

A good way to increase trust is to trust others.  Trust is usually reciprocated –the more you give, the more you get.  So if management doesn’t trust, then it cannot expect to be trusted.  In doing this you give trust smartly, not blindly.

“Trust Taxes”

Trust taxes are costs that you incur when there is little or no trust. When trust goes down, speed also goes down and cost goes up.  This is a “tax” – and these taxes can double the cost of doing business.

There are 7 types of “trust taxes”:

1. Redundancy & duplication with smaller spans of control – if there is less trust, then you will find that tighter control develops over smaller areas, and that there is unnecessary duplication of resources to offset the increase in perceived risk.

2. Bureaucracy – with less trust so procedures and systems become more cumbersome in order to bridge the perceived gap between what is needed and what is available in providing security and consistency in the work done.  In the US there is the retailer Nordstrom, where its high levels of trust are reflected in its “one card operating manual”: on one side of the card it says – “We have one rule… – on the other side it says “use your best judgement in all situations”.

3. Politics – more silos develop and turf wars become more prevalent.  Less trust results in individuals putting their agenda ahead of others and the business overall, it also creates a “fixed mindset” where people see the pie as fixed, so that they only way they can get a larger slice of the pie is at the expense of somebody else e.g. different departments negotiating for budget allocation will compete against each other for it.

4. Disengagement – a lack of trust reduces staff engagement as they do not believe that their leaders have their interest at heart.  This is reflected in research which shows that 96% of engaged employees trust their leaders, whereas only 46% of employees who are disengaged.

5. Turnover of Employees – as disengagement increases, so staff perceive roles and jobs elsewhere as more attractive which, previously, they might not have considered.

6. Churn – low trust also extends to customers and other stakeholders who now see other businesses as more attractive and less risky.

7. Fraud – with lowering levels of trust there is a lower level of integrity increasing the likelihood of fraud being committed within the company.

How Does Management Address a Lack of Trust?

1. Frame it in economic terms

The issues of trust, or rather the lack of it, needs to be framed in economic terms, otherwise it will become a ‘nice to have’ initiative, not an economic issue.  What is the impact of speed and cost on every dimension of the company; ask yourself if you could improve it then what would the impact be e.g. in innovation, execution, or strategy.

2. Make trust a specific objective

Make so it is not seen as a nice by-product, but rather as a way of improving which inspires trust and confidence.

3. Focus on instilling practicing and applying the behaviours that engender trust in the company.

It is not just the softer behaviours, but also the harder results, that help to drive results.  People need to be seen to be performing and being credible, this gives trust, and helps to drive it.

Trust is key for driving good business, and for avoiding the costly implications of the seven “trust taxes”.  Build trust for yourself, for your managers, reports and peers within your company and for those with whom you have relationships (or want a trusting relationship). To do this Make Commitments, Keep Commitments and Repeat.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Why What Got You Here Won’t Get You There!

Andrew Cooke Behaviour, Change, Leadership, Leadership Development ,

Why what got you here won’t get you there!

Are any of these scenarios familiar to you?

  • You’ve been recently promoted.
  • You’re in the same job you were in a year ago, but the scope is a lot bigger today than it was then.
  • You’re working in an organization where the performance bar has been raised dramatically.
  • You’re operating in a constantly changing competitive environment.

I expect you are in a position where you could easily pick two, three or four of these options.  The question is, what do they have in common?  The answer is that you are in a different situation in which you need to get different results. You can no longer do what you always did to get what you always got. In short, you need to change.

The problem with change is that we don’t always like to or want to change. Also, if we have been successful in the past then it can be difficult to change our behavior as we believe it is our past behavior that has made us successful. However, these same behaviors can now be an impediment to us with our being successful in spite of our behavior rather than because of our behavior.

In dealing with this are two things to identify:

  • What behaviors do you need to stop?
  • What behaviors do you need to change to be a more effective leader?

In doing this you cannot depend on your own intuition.  An interesting piece of research found that leaders, when comparing themselves to their peers, consistently over-rated their contribution with 80% of all leaders surveyed seeing themselves in the top 20% of performers, and 70% seeing themselves in the top 10% of all performers.  To get a realistic understanding of what you need to improve on as a leader you need to objective input from your stakeholders. These are the people who are involved with you and impacted by your behavior – your boss, your peers and your reports.

To find out more how you can do this email Andrew Cooke and find out more about the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centred Coaching process for executive coaches and successful leaders.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

The Only 2 Ways of Making Money

Andrew Cooke Marketing, Pricing, Sales ,

Is the whole greater than the sum of the parts anymore?

by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

When we look at some of the changes brought about by changes in technology we find that it has effectively, and literally, taken products, institutions and industries apart. In essence it has unbundled them. Unbundling is the process of taking something and breaking it down to its constituent parts so they can be sold and acquired separately rather than just as part of the whole.

Music is a good example. It used to be that if you liked a band’s new song you could buy it on a 45 record. The song you wanted was on the ‘A’ side and on the ‘B’ side would be another song – usually not worth listening to. If you wanted the one song, you had to buy the other. When the band released its next album you would have to buy the LP record or CD, this effectively bundled all the tracks together whether you wanted them or not. More recently we had the development of companies such as Napster which enabled you to download individual songs – unbundling what was previously bundled together. This has gone further with streaming through Spotify and similar companies, where you can choose what you want and play it immediately.

This process of bundling and unbundling has affected every industry, and it is an on-going dynamic.

Low-cost airlines allow you to book your seat, and have unbundled all the other offerings allowing you to select what you want. So, if you want, you pay for seats with extra leg-room, for headsets, for in-flight entertainment, for food, for drinks, for luggage, for pillows, for blankets. Michael Leary, CEO of Ryanair based in Dublin, once joked (?) about charging people to use the toilet on flights.

Other companies have gone the other way, from having a series of different offerings that were purchasable independently of each other, to being bundled together. For example, Microsoft sells its desktop products as a bundle in Microsoft Office at a significant discount to the price if you bought the same set of products separately.

We tend to cycle through a time of bundling and unbundling our offerings depending on our product portfolio, the level of competition, and changes in customer needs, technology, the industry and the general business environment.

Look at your products and services and ask yourself are there other ways you can make them available to your customers?  Can you unbundle all these things and sell them separately successfully? Or can you bring all the things you sell separately and bundle them together and sell that successfully?

Aristotle said that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but he may not be right for much longer.

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The More Choice You Have, The Less There Is

Andrew Cooke Decision Making ,

Giving greater choice does not mean more will be chosen! 

Most people believe that having a choice is good. The belief here is that choice gives us freedom, so if we have more choices we have more freedom, the better it is for our lives.

But some research has found that this is not necessarily the case. Researchers set up in a shop and presented an array of tasty jams and enticed shoppers to buy a jar. In one version, there were six varieties shown to shoppers. In another, there were 24 jams. The second, larger array attracted more traffic. But the smaller array led to ten times more purchases.  The researchers concluded that sometimes we feel overwhelmed by the number of options available to us.

Having too much choice has two negative effects on people. Firstly, paradoxically, is that too much choice produces paralysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. Think of comparing retirement plans or different car insurance policies.

Second, there are significant opportunity costs you incur, that is when you choose one option you try to assess the costs of what you have foregone i.e. the benefits you will not realize for the options you have not chosen.  Because people are naturally afraid of making a wrong decision so you perceive more of the costs of your choice than the benefits, and you are less satisfied with the alternative that you have chosen.

The implications for the paradox of choice hold equally true for your customers, your suppliers, your employees and others as they do for you.  So if you want to avoid your customers suffering from “analysis paralysis”, and for them to value the benefits of what they choose to buy from you, there are two things to do:

  • Give them limited choices – rather than asking them to compare offerings with many features and attributes keep them focused on the key ones that are important to them.
  • Use three options – for some reason, people find it easier to choose when they have three options to select from.  Provide them with three distinct offerings, and make the similarities, overlap, and difference clear and relevant. Make it easy for them to decide.

The paradox of choice is part of who and what we are. Learn to work with it rather than to circumvent it.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

3 Ways to Help Change the Perceptions of Others

Andrew Cooke Business Growth, Leadership, Management, Perception, Performance, trust ,

Perceptions of Business Growth – What is REALLY happening?

by  Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

Is your business growing or not? Do you share the same view as your staff, your manager or your leaders?  How do you know if you do?  This article highlights the differences that exist, examines why they exist, and suggests ways to create a common understanding of the business’ growth potential and opportunity.

ImageA recent Australian study by Leadership Management Australia (June 2012) of over 2000 participants including Leaders, Managers and Non-Managerial Employees highlighted a major problem and disconnect facing business.  The perception as to whether their businesses were growing or not.

The Non-Managerial Employees firmly believed that their businesses were growing (71%) whereas Leaders and Managers have a considerably different outlook – with the belief that growth is declining. Only 47% of Leaders perceived their businesses as growing and 45% of Managers.  So what does this mean for business in dealing with the future?

An individual’s perception of a situation is their reality, no matter what you think.  It is how they ascribe meaning to a situation and is based on their beliefs, feelings, ideas and experience.  As such we are looking at how to overcome a clear difference of opinion and belief. Failure to do so can cause major problems between these groups.

So what can we do?

Firstly, the differences may be due to the time-scale that the respective groups look at the work of the business – employees focusing more on the immediate and short-term, managers for the mid- and short-term, and leaders for the mid- and long-term.  The longer the time-scale that you are working to the greater the level of uncertainty that you need to incorporate into your forecasts and plans.  We need to understand this.

Uncertainty comes from a variety of sources.  Externally to Australia there is growing uncertainty in relation to economic, environmental and even political conditions in a number of countries, whose ripples are being felt on Australia’s shores.  Within Australia there are internal uncertainties including the carbon tax and the mining tax which is exacerbated by a government suffering in the polls.

Secondly, employees need to understand the perspective of managers and leaders.  To do this the leaders and managers need to clearly and consistently communicate what the issues, opportunities and risks are and in doing so create trust.

Trust creates high-performing organisations (HPOs) and helps the business to achieve high revenues, profits and market share than low-performing organisations where trust is low.  These HPOs are also more effective at accomplishing their goals in critical areas including customer loyalty and retention; achieving predictable results; business agility and practicing innovation and creativity.

Thirdly, the business needs to actively engage employees in coping and dealing with these changes and engendering trust.  Key to this is establishing clear priorities and being able to cascade them to people so that they are meaningful, relevant and measurable; and building these priorities into their work creates alignment, traction and results.

To enable the business to grow requires more than leadership and good management.  It requires good communication, developing trust across and throughout the business, and the establishment of a commonly shared and understood perception of the business and its future growth. Creating this enables the business, holistically and at all levels, to engage proactively and develop opportunities and options for business growth.

Do you know how perceptions vary across your business and why?  What perception do you want to create for your business and how will you do it?  Share your ideas, experiences and examples of what has worked and what has not – ask your questions and let’s see what answers we can come up with.

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How to Find & Challenge Assumptions

Andrew Cooke Change, Fail, Leadership, Perception, Problem-Solving, Psychology , , ,

How to benefit from making mistakes and challenging your assumptions.

by  Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

Make Mistakes

A common view is that failure is a bad thing.  It implies a lack of success, personal weakness and it makes you vulnerable.  None of these things are comfortable, enjoyable or desired and, as such, failure is to be avoided.

The problem with this is that the only way you can learn and grow is to fail.  It is a natural part of our way of life.  How many parents proudly remember their baby standing up for the first time, and walking without falling down?  Exactly, it doesn’t happen.  Yet we insist that as we get older so we must always know better, and so we must not fail or be seen to fail.

So let’s plan to fail.  Plan to fail by making deliberate mistakes.

If we are looking to make deliberate mistakes we are better prepared for the eventuality than if we make a mistake unexpectedly.  By looking to make a deliberate mistake you are immediately putting yourself in a mindset of testing, learning and developing.  If you make an unexpected mistake you are more focused on avoiding making the same mistake than learning from it.  One way helps you grow, develop and to focus on the upside; the other can make you more insular, reactive and focused on the downside.

“Consider the Opposite”

Psychologists use this technique, “consider the opposite”, to stop ourselves from drawing premature conclusions and, instead, ponder whether we might be misinterpreting the evidence. For example, “I think my partner is selfish–but, wait, maybe I’m just ignoring all the times he’s looking out for me.” Or, at work: “I think my colleague is being rude and abrupt–but what if he’s not being abrupt and is just trying to respect my time?

If there is such a potential upside to making decisions, then why not take control of the process and try to deliberately make mistakes which can learn or benefit from?  In their recent book, Decisive, Chip and Dan Heath tell the story of a company called DSI–Decision Strategies International, a management consulting firm.

The CEO at DSI, Paul Schoemaker wanted his colleagues to help him plan and execute a deliberate mistake, as a way of testing their assumptions about DSI’s business.

They approached this in 5 steps:

  1. Challenge the Conventional Wisdom – they listed the 10 key assumptions underlying their business.  Conventional wisdom is rarely articulated and even more rarely questioned.
  2. Identify Low Confidence & High Payoff Alternatives – they identified and focused on the three assumptions that they were least confident about and that, if proven wrong
  3. Select the option with the having the highest potential of benefiting from a strategy of deliberate mistakes.
  4. Plan to make the mistake
  5. Review results and identify results asking:

What was the difference between what we expected and what we got?

What changed or happened for this result to occur?

How can we replicate this or avoid this outcome?

What are the key leanings from this?

How should our underlying assumption be changed, modified or removed?

The three assumptions that DSI came up with were:

  1. Young MBAs don’t work well for us. We need experienced consultants on the team.
  2. The firm can be successfully run by a president who is not a major billing senior consultant.
  3. It is not worthwhile to respond to RFPs. Clients who use RFPs are usually price shopping or are going through the motions to justify a choice they have already made. (RFPs are requests for proposals. Customers send out RFPs to attract vendors to bid on their business.)

A further round of assessment led them to select number 3 as the one in which they had the least confidence, and which could have the greatest payoff. Now they were ready to make their mistake.

The firm’s policy had been never to respond to an RFP, but they resolved to respond to the next one that came over the transom, which, as it happened, came from a regional electric utility. The DSI team submitted a proposal with a budget of about $200,000, a price that reflected their normal fees but that they suspected would be well out of the client’s league. Schoemaker said, “To our surprise, the electric utility invited our firm to visit with the CEO and the senior management team to explore not only the project in question but others as well.”

Eventually, DIS earned over $1 million in fees from the client. Not bad for making a mistake.

But let’s be clear here, most of your “deliberate mistakes” will fail, and in the fact that failure should be encouraging because it means you’ve been making the right assumptions all along. Beyond the mistake itself, the willingness to test your assumptions has its own value. It signals to your colleagues that your work will be conducted based on evidence, not folklore or politics.

So where are you looking to make a mistake?

Excerpted from Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Copyright 2013 by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Published by arrangement with Crown Business, a division of Randomhouse, Inc.

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When Saying Nothing Gets You More!

Andrew Cooke Negotiation, Problem-Solving, Psychology, Sales, Uncategorized ,

Using silence to find out more

Silence is a powerful way by which you can elicit more information from people you are talking with – especially when talking with customers or interviewees.

silence-is-golden-2

A Golden Silence is when you pause, deliberately, so that you can listen without thinking of what you are going to say next. There are two forms of Golden Silence:

Golden Silence I – you simply pause for approximately three to four seconds after you ask a question,

and

Golden Silence II – you simply pause for approximately three to four seconds after the person responds.

Golden Silence I – this gives the other person, your customer or interviewee, a moment to think about what has been asked and how to respond.  This is likely to provide more solid information.

Golden Silence II – this gives you a better chance to understand what has been said, furthermore during the second pause the customer or interviewee will often reflect further and provide additional information.

Be careful how you use Golden Silence so it does not seem manipulative or intrusive.  The Golden Silence technique is mean to expand, not limit, the possibilities of Superb Communication.  As such, by paying close attention to how the customer reacts, it vastly improves your chances of reaching a better result.

Benefits of Golden Silence

  • The number of  interactions increase
  • The length of responses increases
  • The reliability of the information you get increases
  • Your level of comprehension increases
  • The opportunity for misinterpretation is reduced
  • The number of relevant unsolicited responses increases
  • The number of customers’ questions increase
  • Dialogue shifts to the customer’s real wants and needs, and away from those of the seller
  • It gives you more time to think

Techniques to Avoid

  • Using the phrase – ‘think about it’ – it is vague and can come across as a subtle put-down
  • Mimicry
  • Using ‘Yes…but…’ – this occurs when the dialogue is stalled
  • Rhetorical questions – they add nothing to the dialogue and can be manipulative.
  • Asking ‘Why?’ immediately after they reply – this can put people on the defensive.

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

How to Improve Productivity Quickly

Andrew Cooke Leadership, Management, Productivity ,

Raise Productivity – Build on Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

by  Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

Raising ProductivityToo often in business we focus on our business’ and staff’s weaknesses.  The reasoning is that by addressing our weaknesses we can improve.  This is a fallacy.  The only way that you can improve and raise performance on a sustainable basis is by building on your strengths.

Let’s look at it diagrammatically.

 

Building on Weaknesses

In this first chart we are looking to address a weakness.  This weakness means that we are currently performing below the level of performance that is expected.  We spend time, effort, resources and money on this and we raise the level of performance – but only to the expected level of performance.  The risk here is that, despite your best efforts, this may not be sustainable as once the pressure is off the individuals they may revert to their old habits

Building on Strengths

In this second chart we are looking to build on and leverage a strength.  Currently we are operating the level of performance that is expected.  We spend time, effort, resources and money on building  this and we raise the level of performance – to a level of performance significantly above that which is expected.  As this is a strength, and a good habit that is in place, it is likely that this improvement will be sustainable – even when the pressure is off the individuals.  Here people are working smarter, not harder, in a way that is aligned with what they do well making it on-going.

The Implications

So what does this mean for us as leaders and managers?

Firstly, invest more effort, time and resources in developing your best people – not your mediocre people.

Secondly, and this many seems counter-intuitive,  but it pays to assign the best workers to the best bosses because that strategy results in the largest productivity gains.

For example, if 75% of your business’ value/productivity comes from 25% of the workforce then getting a 10% improvement from your top 25% means you’ve increased organizational value creation by 7.5%. Not bad. Your remaining 75% would have to boost their collective productivity by 30% — triple the top performer’s rate — to match that 7.5% net increase.

What’s the better and more rational bet? That top management can get a 10% spike from their top people? Or that they can get the demonstrably less talented, less capable, less productive three-quarters of their enterprise to dramatically increase their value outputs by almost a third? Which group would you invest in? I know where I’d put my money.

So What Do You Do?

Firstly, leverage your business and key performers’ strengths and make it into a virtuous cycle.  Secondly, don’t ignore the weaknesses – but remember it shouldn’t be the squeaky wheel that gets the oil and the attention.  You have limited resources; use them to the best effect.  Thirdly, look at how you can remove the weaknesses – either by changing people to roles where they are better suited, training (if it can produce sustainable improvement and after investments in your areas of strength), or removing them (take out the dead wood and non-performers).

A recent piece of research entitled The Value of Bosses from the National Bureau of Economic Research empirically argued (unsurprisingly) that bosses matter. Better bosses generate better results. Underlying this were two findings:

  1. That the most significant impact bosses had didn’t come from their motivational skills, but from teaching workers how to be more productive, i.e. capability building. That’s important.  Research showed that replacing a supervisor from the bottom 10% of the pool with one from the top 10%  increases output about as much as adding a 10th worker to a nine-worker team. Not only that, but about two-thirds of the productivity boost from working under a good supervisor persists even after the worker switches bosses.
  2. The second finding is that the most efficient structure is to assign the best workers to the best bosses rather than have the best bosses bring the weakest workers up to speed.

So to raise productivity on a sustainable basis build on your staff’s strengths, in doing this the business’ leaders and managers need to be able to teach their teams how to become more productive, and to cascade this skill and associated capabilities throughout the business.

What are you doing to enable your leaders and managers to practically develop these skills, so that they can develop them in others?  For ideas, insights and any questions please email me or comment here.

Share your knowledge, share the wealth!

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Risks of Conforming, The

Andrew Cooke Performance, Productivity, Tool , , ,

Doing things with rigor takes effort, but not everything you put effort into is done with rigor. 

We often look at how hard we work as a measure of the quality of our work. But this is wrong. When you are looking at the quality of the outcomes you or your team produce you need to consider two elements:

  • Effort – how hard you work at getting the work done.
  • Rigor – how well you adhere to the process of getting the work done.

To be efficient and effective in your work you need to be high in terms of both the effort and the rigor which you apply.

An effort is focused on doing the best with the inputs (the tasks), it is about being efficient. Rigour is about focusing on the process of getting the work done, doing it consistently in the manner which has already been determined – this is about being effective.  You need to do both to produce long-term quality work outputs. As you can see in the matrix below the level of rigor and effort you make will largely affect your work outcomes.

The Rigor/Effort Matrix

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • Low Effort/Low Rigor – this is the worst situation where people, make little effort in getting the work done and when they do, they tend to do it in an ad hoc manner.  Processes and/or guidelines tend to be ignored, or not followed properly, and the work produced is poor quality, substandard, and costly (especially as work will need to be either redone or people in this quadrant will need a higher level of management oversight).
  • Low Effort/High Rigor – here people, make little effort in getting the work done, however, they do tend to follow the processes/guidelines that are in place.  So, although the work produced is of a suitable quality or standard, the work completed or produced does not meet expectations in terms of what need to be done or which has been planned.  Again this can result in further costs to the business as either more people are required to produce the necessary volumes, or those who are high producers are put under greater pressure as they pick up the slack.  This can lead to them being overworked, stressed and potentially more likely to want to leave for a less stressful job.  This can result in a business losing its best people and retaining the worst.
  • High Effort/Low Rigor – people make a lot of effort but do it in an ad hoc manner.  This can result in a lot of substandard or poor quality work being produced as they do not follow processes or guidelines. This can lead to a lot of waste, rework and may necessitate a lot of investment in quality control to try and manage the symptoms of low rigor.
  • High Effort/High Rigor – here people make a considerable effort, are engaged, and do good work on a consistent basis.  This produces great work for customers, improving customer retention, reducing costs, and improving revenue and profits.

Use this tool to assess where the individuals in your team are.  Assess their level of effort (1=very low, 10-very high), and the level of rigor they demonstrate (1=very low, 10-very high). From this plot them on the chart.

For each individual then determine where you want them to be and identify three actions that they can take that will help them bridge the gap.

So make the effort and be rigorous in doing it! Remember, doing things with rigor takes effort, but not everything you put effort into is done with rigor.

To view or download a PDF version of this blog click here

Share your thoughts and ideas here, or email me at andrew.cooke@business-gps.com.au

If you found this article of use or interest please don’t hesitate to share it with others.

Click here to find out more about Andrew Cooke and Growth & Profit Solutions.

Customers – Market Reach or Market Gravity?

Andrew Cooke Customers, Marketing, Uncategorized , ,

The Only 2 Ways to Reach Your Customers

by Andrew Cooke, Growth & Profit Solutions

There are two ways to market to and gain customers, and two ways only.

Either you reach out to them, or they are attracted to you. One way you try to “push” them to come to you, the other way you attract them to you and your offerings and they “pull” themselves in. These two ways are at opposite ends of the spectrum

So what does this mean for you?

Market Reach Out

Many businesses try to acquire new business and new clients by going out and trying to find them – especially newer businesses and those who are in commodity markets. Typically this includes advertising, promotional activities and a lot of “telling” – proudly telling your prospective customers what you do.

This method involves a lot of effort and a relatively low return. You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince, and often the princes that you do find are only there for the short-term before they hop off to your competitors. This is a costly and risky exercise where your resources, time and investment are used inefficiently and effectively,

As time goes on, you build up history and credibility, and you get smarter and more focused on what you do for your clients rather than what you do for yourself. You also begin to market yourselves using more targeted, interactive approaches that are relevant, of interest and of value to your customers – here you are listening to your customers. Ways to create gravity include, but are not limited to, testimonials, press coverage, articles in trade journals and magazines, speaking, referrals etcetera.

Market Gravity

As the awareness of your work, your reputation and your relevance to your prospective client increases so the dynamic begins to change. Rather than you having to seek out clients they begin to come to you. Your cost of acquisition of clients is lower, they are less price-sensitive as they see the value you can help them realise, and you get a better quality of client with whom you can develop long-term opportunities.

As such, your revenue and profit opportunities improve and you can become more selective both in terms of with whom you work and what kind of work you do. You are more strongly differentiated from your competitors, and prospects want you. Your business growth begins to accelerate with less effort.

How are you attracting your clients? Are you reaching out and trying to pull them in, or are you creating the ‘gravity’ so that they come to you? If you don’t build your own ‘market gravity’ no-one else will – so start work on it today!

What has worked or not worked for you? Share your knowledge, share the wealth!

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