Guest Blogger, Russell J. White

Being indispensable to your customers is the defining edge between surviving and thriving in this new economy. How would your customers answer these questions about your business? If you are not getting the perfect answer you are looking for, you know where to put your immediate efforts to growing your business revenue.

1. Who is the first business that comes to the customer’s mind in your industry?

99.2% of people surveyed said they will do business with the first company that comes to mind for a product or a service. Customers, both consumer and B2B customers develop buying habits based on what business is foremost in their minds. In the age of overwhelming information getting properly position in the customer’s mind is key to sustaining a profitable business. 

The way to gain that top of mind position is by creating positive buzz. Are you giving them information of value, or are you just trying to sell to them? Do you know your market needs or are you just serving up what you have and hope someone comes along to buy it? Do you have a solid Internet presence where you are easily findable? Are you a “player” in your community and market where your name recognition is a given? If you aren’t the first choice, you are behind in the race. Get properly positioned.

2. How eager are your customers to come in contact with your employees?

Large companies thought they could save money by relocating call centers overseas; customers began dreading help services because the people on the other end were perceived to have poor command of the language and information the customer needed help on. Companies who created good products were getting their reputation hammered because of the service interaction.

Do your customers dread talking with your employees, consider them a neutral experience, or enjoy the interaction with your staff? The more enjoyment your customers get from your staff the more interaction they are going to want. If you have a fun knowledgeable staff customers enjoy talking with, why not give your staff greater opportunity to interact even more with the customers? Make the customer interaction personable. In fact, people make buying decisions more based on their feelings toward the individual they are working with than on the quality of the product. For many of us, product quality differences in the eyes of the customer vary only slightly. It is the relationship they trust and buy from.

3. What makes it worth the effort for your customers to do business with you?

Every buying decision is a choice. Maybe once you were the only competitor in town and now your customers have options closer. Once upon a time you had the most charismatic salesperson working a territory, who no longer works for you. Maybe you are the new player in town and you are trying to make headway in the market.

What are you doing to make sure your customers consider you a worthy choice that is worth the effort to do business with you? Too many businesses rest on their successful history and expect the flow of customers to continue. Others rely on a recognizable national brand they represent to bring in business. Nothing stays the same. When a city creates a new retail area, traffic patterns shift. When a competitor creates new technology, the rules of the industry change. When a competitor grows by acquiring other players in the market, you now have a new force to deal with. Companies go bankrupt ignoring these changes.

What changes have happened in your market to cause you to react and increase the reasons why customers should do business with you? Even better, how can you be proactive to increase your customer base?

As a small business you can’t out-spend the competition, but you can out-maneuver them to grow your business. 

 Russell J. White, President of PinnacleSolutions.org is one of America’s leading business growth strategists. He is an author, consultant, international speaker and business expert on leadership, marketing and growth strategies. Since 1991 Russell has worked with hundreds of clients.  He has been a frequent guest on television and radio. He is considered both a motivational speaker and a business expert.  Russell also writes and publishes the Grow Your Business blog.  Contact him at 803-984-9448 or RJWhite@PinnacleSolutions.org

Mike Masnick had an excellent post on his techdirt blog entitled “If You’re Measuring Productivity In Hours, You’re Doing It Wrong.”

His basic premise is based on another article that was written in a NY Times blog.

Basically, the NY Times blog, focused on how many “hours” of lost productivity took place due to the information stream (e-mails, web surfing, etc.) Masnick takes the right view on this lost productivity. Productivity is not measured in hours. Productivity is measure in the amount of work that gets done.

While I can loosely see the “hours” argument for certain job types where employees are paid by the hour, it is fairly useless in a corporate world where employees are given a job to do and allowed to manage their own time. Any time that the individual “waste” comes out of there own personal time.

I am not argueing that today’s information streams do not reduce productivity, although there are some compelling arguements out there that it does not. The question you have to ask is are employees getting the job done that they were hired to do? If you hire someone to produce financial reports and these reports are completed on time and are accurate, why should you care that they check their Facebook page a few times a day? Think output – not hours.

I read an article this morning on the TaxProf Blog discussing whether or not employers are required to compensate employees while their computers boot up. Apparantly there have been several companies (AT&T, UnitedHealth Group, Inc., Cigna Corp. and others) in the past year that have been sued because they are not paying their employees for the time it takes for their computers to boot up. The attorney who filed the suit claims that over the course of a week, these minutes add up and hourly employees are losing out.

Of course, the defense argues that the time spent while a computer does not constitute work. Employees are usually talking to friends, getting coffee or some other non-work related activity.

I can see both sides of the arguement here, but the real question I have is: How lousy is the work environment that employees would want to file a lawsuit over the time a computer boots up? Their is obviously a deeper issue here related to the overall level of job satisfaction that these employees have. Perhaps the Companies should try to figure out how to make their employees happy so that they can provide better service for their customers. Also note, just paying for the bootup time will not make them happy, it will just resolve this complaint. As I stated their is a deeper issue here.

Do your employees really have jury duty? Did they really come down with Swamp Fever and need to miss a week of work? The normal procedure is to make them provide a doctors not or provide a jury duty notice. This may not be so easy now that an Oklahoma company has begun issuing excused absence notes that appear real.

For a mere $19.95, the Excused Absence Network will issue you up to 5 sick notes from Doctors, Dentists, Emergency Rooms, Jury Duty, Funerals, or Medical Evaluations. While their website states that the notes are for “entertainment purposes only,” how many people are actually using these notes to entertain their supervisors or friends?

MSNBC reported that a New Jersey woman was arrested after supplying one of these notes in order to provide explanation for why she missed traffic court. Unfortunately, court officials called the chiropractor who was listed on the note, and surprisingly, he had never heard of the woman.

A CCH nationwide survey found an absenteeism rate of about 2.3 percent in 2007. That’s down from 2.5 percent in 2006, the highest rate since 2.7 percent in 1999.

In my opinion, this practice is pretty unethical and could be considered fraud if your Company is paying you for your day off. Company founder, John Liddell was quoted as saying, “Millions of Americans work dead-end jobs, and sometimes they just need a day off. People are going to lie anyway. ”

My response to John Liddell and those “millions” of people in dead end jobs, do something to improve your situation and get a better job. The answer is not to lie, cheat and steal. You will never get out of your current situation doing that. The answer is to work on improving yourself and your abilities and move on to a better job with greater opportunities.