What do your Customers Want? Ask them

February 19, 2009

pdre042052The days of focus groups, hiring expensive business consultants, conducting mass surveys, and spending countless amounts of money designing and redesigning products that go nowhere are all but over.  We are officially connected. Connected with each other, with other businesses, and with the customer.

Whether you are a small business owner struggling to find more business or a CEO who is comfortable with your current market position, you can always learn from your customers.  Don’t ever let yourself be tricked into thinking that because you know the company so well, you know best what to do next.  Because you don’t.

First, think about who talks to your customers the most.  You have a customer service department that solves their problems, a sales team that helps them answer questions and make a purchase, and maybe a group of brand ambassadors that communicates with potential customers and advocates.  They are all in a better position than you to create real change in the customers’ eyes.

Listen to what they have to say. Create a suggestion box and give them credit (maybe cash) if one of their suggestions gets implemented.  Hold weekly meetings for them to voice their opinions.  Allow them a forum for open communication between various departments.  Create teams to develop these new ideas.

Start a blog that you use to communicate directly to a community of your customers or clients.  Tell them what you are working on, how you are solving their problems, and who you are working with.  And constantly ask for their feedback.  They will be quick to tell you where you are going right and even quicker to tell you where you are going wrong.  But as many companies that have already done this have seen, they will show you where you can improve and thank you for actually making the effort.

Use various social networks to solve problems and open the lines of communication.  Twitter accounts can be used for customer service just like JetBlue, Zappos, and Comcast have done.  A Facebook page can be used for idea and strategy discussion.  Make the customers feel like they have a real ownership interest in the company.  They will reward you for it.

Starting today, you won’t have to come up with any new ideas on your own.  All you have to do is implement some or all of the strategies above and let the people do the talking.  Then just sit back and relax, make the decisions as they come, and enjoy a more powerful business; a business supported and backed by a community of evangelists.

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Posted by Zach Heller

Goal Setting Can Lead to an Innovative Year

December 15, 2008

I’ve noticed that many blogs and bloggers have started to list or discuss goals for next year.  Over the next few weeks, many people and companies alike will reflect on how they performed in 2008.  They will most likely look at goals and projections that were made at the beginning of the year to on which to base this evaluation.

Goal setting is an important activity for a number of reasons.  First, it gives you a chance to take an objective look at your company from the outside.  You can evaluate where you are, where you ought to be, and where you would like to get to.  This is one of the few times where you can ignore the minute details and focus on the big picture, which can be very helpful, especially for small business owners.

Second, it gives you guidelines of how you will conduct your business in the coming year.  For instance, if you set a goal to reach out to every single customer once a month because this will allow you to develop relationships and improve customer service, everyone in the company will know how important this is.  It won’t get bogged down after a few months because something else suddenly came up.

Finally, goal setting provides excitement and motivation.  When you have something to work towards, it makes the day to day routine a lot more fun and makes the impossible seem achievable.  It creates a culture of success and gets everyone in the company looking forward to a successful future.

When setting goals, it is important to limit the amount of goals you end up creating.  Make them as broad or as specific as possible, but don’t list every single thing that you want to do.  Use bigger goals to show the most important ideas and create a strong vision.  Also, you should always try to make some goals more easily reached than others.  Setting goals that are too easy does not create a strong drive, but setting goals that seem impossible can be stressful.  Try setting smaller goals that will lead to larger, more ambitious ones.

Finally, make sure everyone knows the goals.  Discuss them in teams, and lay out a framework for working towards them so everyone knows how they can help get the company where it needs to be.  This will stimulant creative thinking, innovative ideas, and corporate drive.  With everyone on the same page, the next year is sure to as good as it gets.

What are your goals for 2009?


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Posted by Zach Heller

Don’t Get Caught in the Recession Trap

December 9, 2008

“Oh no, we’re in a recession,” you think to yourself, “How is my small business ever going to survive?”

“We’ll have to lay off the entire staff.  We’ll have to cut our marketing budget.  We can’t buy any new supplies.  Time to buckle down and wait for them to tell me when it’s over.”

It’s time to take a good long look at the reality of your business.  The recession is real, and it may be impacting us for quite some time, but it will not touch everyone.  Everywhere you look there are businesses that are managing to move along quite well.  And if you own or operate a small business, don’t get sucked into thinking that you have to be stingy right now.  That could be the mistake that costs you your success.

The National Small Business Administration has eased lending to small businesses nationwide.  That means that the tightening credit market may not affect you as much as the big corporations.  And for many small businesses, the amount of credit needed is not significant enough to cause any real trouble.

Small businesses are nimble.  You can come up with new and innovative ways to do business early and often.  This leaves the door open to meet new customer needs, market aggressively without spending a lot of money, and offer a little compassion to your bigger clients who may be feeling the recession more than you are.

It’s true, some small businesses are definitely going to be affected.  But many are not.  Many have the opportunity to thrive and grow during this time.  I am currently working with two small businesses that have seen increased growth in the past few months, and there are no signs of slowing.  Here are a few strategies that your small business could use to grow while everyone around you sinks:

1.    Increase your online marketing. It’s cheap and easy to run a couple of search engine ads.  Develop a word of mouth campaign that your customers can use to spread the word.

2.    Lower your prices. Your customers are cutting their spending.  If you want their business now and in the future, cater to their needs.  They will remember you for it.

3.    Offer a free trial to potential customers. If you can take advantage of those people or businesses that are price shopping now, you can steal some market share from the competition.  Now might be the cheapest time to attract new business.

4.    Focus on customer service. People need to know that you care.  Now, more than ever, a good customer service department can go a long way towards forging strong customer loyalty.

5. Create a detailed spending plan.  Don’t be afraid to spend money, just know where it is all going.  Find the things that are working, and do more of it.  When the market comes back, you’ll find yourself on top.

Just because the economy is in a recession, that does not mean you are.  Take a second to think for yourself.  Could your business be doing more right now?  The way to get to where you want to be is to be moving forward as everyone else is standing still.

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Posted by Zach Heller

Crisis Mode

September 22, 2008

If you read the news, it’s tough to stay optimistic. And because I sit at a computer most of the day, both at work and at home, and because I like to stay on top of what’s going on in my world, it’s hard not to read. There are a few pieces today that caught my eye today.

The first, on CNN, is about the impending oil prices that may have started to kick into gear. Though the prices had dropped over the past month or so, we saw a huge spike today and there is bound to be expensive gas in our future.

The second, from TIME, is a commentary on the state of the union in a post-bailout America. Through a unique comparison between what we are doing and the French system of government, it is apparent that we may be hurting our “capitalistic” ways.

There are problems in this country right now, there is no denying that. And this election can do a lot to define where we are headed as far as fighting those problems. But there is too much work to be done to rely on candidates and government alone. Despite the recent doubt in many large companies, the best solutions to our problems have always come from the private sector.

Innovative minds must prevail. Think long and hard about where we are and how we’ve gotten here. A lot of times there are easy solutions out there if you just approach the problem from a fundamental point of view. We need to solve the energy crisis now, before it becomes as bad as the financial crisis, which is not that far off. And we can do it in a way that helps to rebuild our country.

In the next ten years, what we do as far as energy is concerned will determine the fate of our planet. New companies will form around the clean energy platform. Existing companies will shift focus to address new concerns. Huge amounts of capital will be laid out to develop infrastructure and materials. But in the end we will succeed, and success will come from the ground up. Be innovation, think clean.

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Posted by Zach Heller

Don’t Fire Innovation

September 8, 2008

If you have a chance to watch “The Pixar Story“, a documentary about the incredible production studio that continues to knock out hit after hit, please do.  It is definately worth the time.

The story begins with a few young animators at Disney, and their dream to use computer animation in films.  Disney put together a team to test the new technology, and promptly fired the leader of the team, John Lasseter, right after their initial presentation.

Disney made the decision that they were not going to pursue this new technology that had so many people excited.  Granted, Lasseter and his team may have been far ahead of their time.  But Disney displayed an amazing amount of close-mindedness in their decision to terminate Lasseter.

So, instead of realizing the error of his ways, John continued to pursue computer animation and his dream to make a feature film.  After years of struggle, Pixar put out its first full length computer animated motion picture, Toy Story.  Under the direction of John Lasseter, the film was bigger than anyone could have imagined.

Being a leader in the field is being an innovator.  John Lasseter, and the rest of the founding team at Pixar, are innovators at heart.  They had a dream that most people said would not come true.  But through hard work and determination, made all that much harder because of Disney’s anti-innovative decisions, the team succeeded in grand fashion.

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Posted by Zach Heller

Hiring and Team Leading for Innovation

August 19, 2008

There are a lot of ways to inspire, empower, and encourage innovation and innovators within your company.  The trick is finding the ways that work for you and your employees and sticking with them.  Ride the wave of innovation for as long as it takes you.

For both small and large organizations, hiring can be a great time to create new innovation.  Most times, at any level of the company, a fresh pair of eyes can do wonders.  They can help you see problems that you overlooked, or opportunities that you could never find.  Being in one place too long has a numbing effect, and sometimes all it takes is a fresh outlook on a business to generate new growth.

Innovation within proven organizations and teams can come from a lot of places, but it almost always is a product of great leadership.  There are multiple ways to inspire your “A” players to continue to innovate.  First, create brainstorming meetings across departments and allow people to connect to one another.  Generate many ideas and then focus on narrowing it down to one great new idea.  Then select a team and give them the full responsibility for that new project.

This will give them a passion to get things done.  It will also highlight the work they are doing and provide guidelines for which they will be judged and rewarded.  “Innovation Teams” within the scope of a larger organization should have the freedom to operate on their own while utilizing the many assets available to them within the company.  A little freedom can lead to a lot of creativity.

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Posted by Zach Heller

March Madness

June 17, 2008

Success is not a winner take all game.  It’s not division 1 college basketball. You see, in division 1 college basketball, there are very few, if not only one winner.  It doesn’t matter how good your season was, it will almost certainly end in a loss.  The only teams that end the year with a win are the national champs, the winner of the NIT Tournament, and a few terrible teams that don’t even qualify for their conference tournaments.  It is the sport with the fewest winners at the end of the year, the ultimate test.

The point is, the business world is not like that.  In fact, when the economy is working like it should, and businesses are acting responsibly, it should work exactly the opposite.  There is room for success for all companies.  Sure competition is important, and there is only so much market share to go around in certain industries.  But you can always carve out your niche and achieve the type of success that you want without destroying everyone around you.

I am not trying to kill the competitive drive inside each one of us.  All I am saying is that there is a point when people can become hyper-competitive and lose the point of starting a business in the first place.  We should not try to achieve total domination of a market, we should try to achieve something that helps your customers.

Find the part of the market that fits your company’s strategies and go after it.  Once you have it, you can extend your offerings or marketing strategy to chip away at other segments of the market.  That is how to grow a business and that is the mindset that will lead to success.  Ridding yourself of that winner take all mentality will open you up to collaboration, outside help, and joint ventures that will lead to greater successes in business and in life.

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Posted by Zach Heller

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