THE ANSWER
IS IN FRONT OF YOU
The other
day, a businesswoman approached me at a conference. “If you could give
only one piece of advice to help people be successful,” she said eyes
twinkling, “what
would it be? What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?”
It was an easy question. “Your customers will tell you everything you need
to be successful,” I told her. “`All you have to do is listen to them.”
The woman looked disappointed. I think she was hoping for something more
sophisticated, more complex. But that’s not where the keys to success lie.
Business may be tough but it ain’t complicated. The answers to what we need
to do to succeed are usually standing there right in front of us just waiting
for us to discover them. Most of us see right through them. That’s the tragedy.
Of course, I didn’t want her walking away thinking I was a complete twit,
so I told her about a company I had worked with that provided medical and surgical
supplies to hospitals in Australia. During the morning the sales staff told
me that it was a very tough business to be in because all hospitals faced funding
crises. As a result, administrators were reluctant to buy, they told me, and
if they did, price was the major issue. Then we brought in the CEO of a large
private hospital. “Right,” she said, getting straight down to business. “I
suppose you would like to increase your sales with my hospital? This is how
you do that,” she said without waiting for an answer to her question. She then
listed four things the sales staff should do. People were dumb-founded. She
made it so easy for them to increase their business with her. All they had
to do was follow her instructions. Then she added, “By the way, price is important
but it’s certainly not the major issue.”
This is not a unique example. I worked with a consulting engineering firm
that had lost the business of a major local authority because of performance
problems on recent projects. We invited the senior manager responsible for
letting contracts to come and talk to the 120 staff. “If you’d like to win
our business back, do these seven things,” he told them showing a PowerPoint
slide. Recently, I organised four retail customers to come and talk to a cosmetics
company. In ten minutes, each clearly and simply set out what they wanted the
company to keep doing and where they need to improve. Similarly, at a seminar
I ran for the staff of a rural newspaper, a reader gave specific examples of
things he personally read in the paper and things he didn’t like. He even told
them which ads worked for him and which ads turned him off. His message was
so powerful that everyone agreed the advertising agencies should have been
there to hear it.
In each of these examples, customers were invited to come and talk to staff
but while I think that’s a great idea, you don’t need to go that far. Just
think of how much feedback your customers give your company every day in conversations
they have with your staff. What are you doing to capture that information and
then learn from it? At Christchurch City Library, a very customer driven organisation,
they have just launched a programme to encourage staff to recognize useful
feedback and to give them the skills to probe to really understand what the
customers are saying. Staff have also been told they then have two responsibilities.
One is to act on what they hear and the other is to capture the information
so that management can learn from it. I stand by my answer: Your customers
will tell you everything you need to know to succeed. You just have to ask
and listen. Try it. You’ll find it makes succeeding so easy it’s almost like
cheating.
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