Small Business Growing

Archive for August, 2010

What your small business can learn from singing legend Tony Bennett

Last night, singing legend Tony Bennett performed at Wolf Trap, and provided a superb concert to a packed house.

Tony has always had a reputation for his timeless style and elegance.  He is a national musical treasure.  Even though Tony has been singing for 60 years, he sounds as vibrant and fresh as ever.

There are a thousand lessons that we as small business owners and associates can take from the way this amazing performer works, but there is one immediate lesson that I’d like to share.

It may be the single most important thing a small business can do for its customers, second only to providing good value and a good experience in the prime product or service.

It is respect and appreciation.  Both go hand in hand, and one leads to the other.  Respect includes a number of intangibles that we communicate (or not) to our  customers.  It reassures them that we have understanding and care about their needs and problems.  It says to them, in lots of little ways, “You are very important to me, and I will do my best to give you my best.”

Appreciation is the tangible expression of respect in which we verbalize our thanks with words, and sometimes more.  Genuine customer appreciation happens when we first actually feel appreciative, and second we clearly communicate it to our customers.  Just feeling it is good, but appreciation must be perceived by our customers for it to have value in the customer experience.  If we feel it but don’t communicate it, our customers never know.  In their mind, we are unappreciative.  This is a big deal.  Fail to communicate authentic appreciation long enough, and it can take your business down and out.

Back to this magical concert.  At several moments throughout the evening Tony communicated his appreciation.  The communication was sincere, and you could feel the reciprocity and chemistry between performer and audience.  The man is a beloved performer not just because he has mastered his art.  He genuinely appreciates the privilege of performing to an audience.  It is a lesson every small business would be well advised to remember.

Our customers need to hear our appreciation.  They choose to give their business to us and when they get little or no expression of our appreciation, some will think twice before returning.

Many small business owners express their appreciation by doing their very best work.  This is wonderful, but if it stops there we will lose customers to someone else who demonstrates and verbalizes their appreciation.

Take a close look at how you show customer appreciation, and how often you show it.  And if it needs work, start simple by just verbally expressing your appreciation, to all customers, but especially those who are responsible for most of your business.

And, take a moment to read about one of the ways we show appreciation: by making an emotional connection.

Remember…it is not about how much appreciation you personally feel.  It is about how much expressed appreciation your customer feels.

It they are unappreciated, sooner or later they will go elsewhere.  No need to let that happen.

Customer Experience Management for Small Business: Asking a few questions can work wonders

Small business owners have an untapped goldmine.

It is the insights that their customers can give them, if only they would ask.

At SmallBusinessGrowing.com we talk about growing and retaining customers. The emerging field of Customer Experience Management (CEM) provides a set of ideas and methods to advance that cause. You don’t have to hire a CEM consultant to begin  – or continue – the process of becoming a more customer centric business.  

There are many places to begin, and one of the best is directly with your customers.

If you do not already have an established way to tap into your customers perceptions, here is a simple way to begin.

You will have to modify the sketch I provide to make it work for the distinctives of your business and history.  But the idea is simple. Start by selecting three to five customers.  The “assignment” is to interview each and ask a set of simple but hopefully revealing questions.   I say “hopefully” because in actual reality doing this kind of customer research does not always give you a set of immediate insights.   You sometimes have to digest the results of your data and then you realize what you want to ask of the next set of customers you interview.  It is a building process in which we often don’t know the best questions until we start listening to the voices of our customers.

What questions should you begin with?  You know your business, but you can start with something simple such as these three questions:   

• What do you like most about doing business with us?

• What do you like least?  Please be honest….you won’t offend me!

• What should we do or not do that would add to the value of your experience with us?

In making this request you want to express appreciation before and after the conversation.  You also want to request and encourage complete candor.  You will have customers who will hold back in their critique of your business.

You may get some gems out of this, and you may get some things that you are well aware of.  The bigger point is taking a first set of steps in moving toward a more customer focused business.  Here is a point I’d like to leave you with this time around.  Many small businesses think they already have a good customer philosophy and indeed they may have.  But the reality of most small business is that the demands of getting all the normal “stuff” done does not leave much time or inclination to go deeper on customer experience.

The businesses that do begin down this road can have a powerful competitive advantage. In fact, getting deeply in touch with your customers perceptions – especially at the level of their genuine emotions – can change your business from top to bottom.

Give this a shot, and please let me know how you are doing. In the meantime, take a quick minute to read this post on making emotional connections and check out the very simple tool that can take care of at least one aspect of your customer strategy.

Small Business Strategy: How to Focus on the right goals (13)

We are working our way through a step by step process for defining an effective strategy for your small business.

If you you want to get the context of this post please go back to the first in the series and work you way through.  The posts are brief, so you can quickly get the sense of the process I have been discussing.

After doing the big picture work of building a strategy for your small business, we have been focused in the last few posts on ways to define your yearly goals.  This post is focused on “Execution”..actually doing what you have defined.

In the past few years a lot has been written on this matter of execution.  Let me offer just a few thoughts amidst a whole lot more that could be said about this critical part of strategy..actually putting into play what you have planned on and committed to do.

First, each business and each leader has their own “execution” challenges.  The first thing is to give some consideration to what your particular challenges are when it comes to getting it done.  Is it lack of skill among team memberrs?  Is it problems in the work processes?  Is it an absence of team spirit and cooperation?  Is it the absence of appreciation for work well done?  What are the distinctives within your business that are hampering effective execution?

Second, make the goals and the desired outcomes crystal clear.  Clarity of outcome will cover a multitude of glitches.  People are able to “self-organize” to a very great extent when they at least know what is is we are trying to achieve.  Your goals should paint a clear and unambiguous picture of what success looks like.  If people are uncertain about the outcomes they will often fill in the empty spaces with their best estimate of what is expected.

Third, don’t think of execution as something distinct from strategy.  Here is the point:  your strategy can get better as you execute, IF you and your team are always learning as you work on your goals.   The reality of business life is that we work in an environment where, as small business owners, we must improvise and “make stuff happen.”   We do this by day to day, and sometimes moment to moment, adjustments to get things done.  The world does not always behave the way we would like.  Things happen and we adjust.  To have a great strategy, see your execution as a work in progress.  One big implication of this is to listen and respect the insights of the team members who are participating in the execution of strategy.

Fourth, let me get extremely practical with this point.  Don’t procrastinate.  If you are a “one man/woman band” and you are the business, you are always having more to do than time to do it.  Once you have determined that your short list of critical goals are what you must act on, schedule the time to start on that first goal.  YOU start will give you momentum, and before you know it you will be well on your way to achieving those goals.

The third point above, strategy and execution as unified, really takes us to the next phase of how focusing on the right goals.  We’ll talk about the “Learn and Adjust” phase next time.

If your business depends on good relationships with customers and clients take a moment to check out a tool that can have a very positive impact on your repeat and referral business.

“Customer Experience” for Small Business: When does it start?

The emerging discipline of Customer Experience Management is all about shaping and delivering exceptionally good customer experiences.

If you are a small business owner, the knowledge from this still developing field has great potential to extend or even transform how you think about the experiences of your customers and clients.

In this post I’d like to talk a little about when the customer experience begins.  You may be thinking it starts when you have some contact with your customer, in  the store, by phone or email, during a one-to-one consultation, or some other form of engagement with them directly.

These are all prime customer experiences, but let’s start at the beginning.  The customer experience actually begins when any potential customer has contact with any aspect of your business persona.  This includes your marketing and all of the representations of your total brand, as well as what others say about the experience of working with your business.

If you want to start to tap into the incredible power of going deep into your customer’s experience, start first with how the business is being presented to the rest of the world.

We’ll come back and talk about the actual up close and personal aspects of customer experience, but let’s start with your total brand.

Here is the core insight as I see it:  a full customer experience strategy starts with how we are presenting our business to the world, even before we get to shaping the actual customer service delivery experience.  Your prospective customers are having an experience each time they see any physical, digital, human, or other representation of your business and its brand.

When they hear about you from someone else, when they hold a booklet that describes your services, when they see an ad or view your website..these are experiences with your company.

There are lots of practical implications to this, but let me mention at least three:

• Get clear on your business Vision, Purpose, and Values

• Communicate that as part of your brand image, even if only in a section of your website

• Work toward a complete unification of all the marketing and other representations of your brand

The physical cues that prospective and actual customers see when they first start to experience your business communicate at many levels.  They can suggest clarity, unity, organization, and attractiveness…or something far less.

Here’s the summary:  Don’t think your customer’s experience starts when they first talk to you or one of your team members.  Get perfectly clear on what you are about as a business, and communicate it in a unified way in both the colors and graphics as well as the spoken or written content of your communication to the world.

If you would like to take a quick look at one very simple tool that will help to significantly upgrade one aspect of your customer experience strategy, check this out.

Customer Experience Strategy for Small Business

As a small business, our customers/clients are everything.  Without them our business does not exist.

If you are a small to medium-sized business, and see your customers as the lifeblood of your enterprise, there is a “movement”  you should know about.

It is known by some as Customer Experience Management (CEM).  This is a different body of knowledge and practice than Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Since our focus at Small Business growing is practical and not theoretical, I’d like to introduce the concept and occasionally offer ideas and short thoughts on how it can be applied for small business.

Customer Experience Management is an emerging discipline focused on helping organizations understand and create positive, memorable and satisfying customer experiences that result in repeat and referral business.

It is especially concerned about the emotions of the experience.  The practical application of this developing field is to understand and gradually reshape the customer experience so that it is highly satisfying for the customer, and results in the customer returning to the business and telling others about their good experience.

I see this field, and the practical knowledge that is emerging from it, as an extremely positive development in the business landscape, especially for businesses that are passionate about serving their customers well.

We’ll be offering ideas and generally “thinking out loud” about how CEM can help you as a small business owner or associate.  Please feel free to share your thoughts about your own customer experiences, and especially any thoughts on the application of CEM in your business, as we write about this still developing field.

Here is a simple tool that we think can quickly add to one aspect of the customer experience.  It is not the complete answer, but it solves one part of shaping the customer experience.

Team Work for Small Business (2)

Last time around we started this series on small business and team work.

In that larger context, we are now focused on the role team meetings play in the overall performance of your business, especially with regard to how your people work as a team.

In small business..and in life…the most basic things are often the most illusive.  This applies to team meetings as well.  The core methods for effective meeting management are pretty simple.  But simple does not always equate to easy.  Let’s take one of the simplest rules for getting a great team meeting process established:

• START AND END ON TIME

I understand this is basic, but it so often is not practiced.  And yet it is critical to establishing  a culture in which team meetings are not viewed as a monumental waste of time.

Developing your meeting routines so that they work seamlessly is something that really does require work and discipline.  It rarely happens because personalities magically jell.

It happens when certain practices are put into play consistently.  And one of those disciplines is starting and ending at the advertised time.

Lots of things can conspire to prevent this from happening.  Let me just provide one example:

• the leader/owner who talks too much.

This is a common problem and it can become invisible to the leader.  Who is going to tell you , the owner, to talk less and let your team talk more?

I have seen this pattern countless times and it hurts the business.  We’ll come back and revisit this exact issue, but for now the point is simple:  start and end the meeting at the advertised time.

Parkinson’s Law applies here.  The more time allotted for meetings, the more there will be to talk about.  So make a judgment about what is a reasonable amount of time for your meetings, and stay with it.  If you are chairing/facilitating the meeting, of course you have to control the pace just enough to enable all of the agenda items to be covered.

So start right here, with this practice:  set the start and end time and stay with it..  This is only the start of very high performing team meetings, but it is a good start. the next obvious question has to do with frequency of team meetings.  Let’s take that one up next time.

By the way, if you are finding this helpful, you can receive our posts automatically by going to the subscribe link.  And if you are putting what we are talking about into practice, let us know how you are doing.  We’d love to hear from you!

Team Work for Small Business (1)

If you are a small business with more than one person, you have a huge potential for team work, and all of the competitive advantages that it can bring.

However, for many small businesses the potential for team work remains just that…a potential, not a fully realized benefit.

There is a huge range of team effectiveness among small businesses, from totally dysfunctional to extraordinarily productive and well integrated.

The primary difference, the source of great team work on the one hand, to barely cooperative on the other, is in the leadership.  And for small business that usually comes back to the ownership.

In this series we are going to lay a foundation for effective team work by starting with team meetings. It is not the only place to start building great teams, but it is a good place.

Meetings are one of the key building blocks through which teamwork can be crafted and refined.   We’ll start by talking about foundational principles that I hope will add a little something to how you think about and manage meetings.

If you don’t have particularly productive team meetings, let me remind you of two things you probably already know.   The first is that the human talent within your organization, your own included, is the greatest single resource you have to improve your business.  The second thing is that team meetings are one of the primary culture building and performance enhancing vehicles to take your business to its next level.  The point:  if you get better at managing team meetings you can help build talent and shape a more productive culture.

But I can tell you for sure that it won’t happen automatically.   You will have to invest some time experimenting, learning, and enhancing your ability to lead more effective team meetings.

Let’s start with thinking time.

Before we get into some very simple strategies to run better meetings, I’d like to encourage you to think about the overall level of team cooperation within your small business.  Most small business owners are necessarily involved  in keeping the business going by dealing with the urgencies and priorities of working IN the business.  Working ON the business by thinking about things like team work and productive meetings can seem like a luxury.  But it is a necessary luxury if the business is to grow

Think about how much real teamwork you have now.

• How well coordinated are the players in your organization?
• How does the communication flow between people?
• To what degree do people in your business feel part of the business rather than “hired hands.”

Next time we’ll start to outline a set of very straight-forward steps you can put into play to build a culture of effective team meetings.  If you see this as something your business needs to work on, spend a little time on those questions, and do some serious reflecting on just how much your business functions as a team.  This will help you clarify your own concept of the difference between a small business that functions with a very high level of team work, vs. those that do not.

And I am not talking about a “text book” state of team heaven.  I am talking about learning to gradually move up the performance ladder to a better place.

I also invite you to read about a tool we use to build customer relationships.   If your business needs strong customer/client relationships to grow, you should read this section of our blog.

Small Business Strategy: How to focus on the right goals (Part 12)

We are working through foundational concepts to build a strategic plan for your small business.

I invite you to start with the first in the series and work your way through to put this post in context.

Last time we offered the practice of “Observation” as the first step in formulating the right goals for your small business.  

The next step in the process is to move from observation to a defined set of goals that we will focus on…and learn from.  Let’s simply call this step “Definition.”

To make this step from Observation to Definition you will do what we all do some of every day, but arguably not enough of:  Sense Making.

Sense making is the process of interpreting what we have learned from observation, pulling it together into some form of coherent whole, and on the basis of our understanding, making the move to a defined set of goals that will be our focus in the year ahead.

Did  I say “coherent?”  In fact, the reality of business life is that we are often dealing with the edge of chaos, where “stuff”  happens and we have to extinguish fires, solve problems, and improvise on what to do next.  Yes, I know that reality, so I am not suggesting some text book idea that is detached from what we go through as small business owners.

But in spite of the messiness, we can bring a higher level of order and direction to our business by sharpening our skill at making sense of the occasional – or frequent – mess, and ordering our goals so that they are based on more than reactions and quick fixes.

The good news is that we don’t need not be brilliant strategists to craft significant goals.  But we do need to get deliberate and intentional about seeing the many cues around us, and then actively making sense of what they are telling us.

If this kind of planning has been missing in your business, let me encourage you to break out of the familiar and jump into a new world of seeing your strategy as a highly creative process where you learn to break the rules and move into new thought patterns.

There are many models of exactly how you determine specific goals.  But let me keep it simple.  Start with just a few..maybe three or four…key goals that you see as critical to the business.  I would suggest that your written documentation of these few goals be simple and elegant.  For example you could:

• Define the result or outcome of the goal.  This may have a quantitative aspect.  For example:  an increase of 10% in referral business over the next year.

• Define in simple terms the steps or processes that you will initiate or improve to achieve the goal.

• Define the resources and persons (maybe you) that will be responsible.

• Set a time frame and milestones for review and assessment.

Next time around we’ll briefly discuss the third step in this part of the planning process which is “execution”..doing it.

And while you are on the site, take a quick look at something that could bring a world of improvement to your customer strategy.