Your role as a business owner is to solve your customers’ problems. Your ability to determine what your clients want and provide them with solutions is a large part of your success. Part of getting you into your best business shape is increasing your effectiveness in coming up with good ideas on how to solve your client’s problems in a unique way.
To deliver, you should know your market and what your company can do. As the business owner and CEO, you are the solution. Your client’s problems are just lying around waiting to be seen so you need to be receptive to those problems and creative about the solutions that you will offer.
For both you and your customer, things are changing faster than ever before. Technology has become more sophisticated, competition more keen, and consumers––the people who buy your products and services––have become more educated and aware. You are in the unique situation to stay current on the latest technologies for your industry and use them in ways that show your customers that you can apply the latest technologies to solve their problems.
In addition, because your client’s choices are ever expanding, regardless of the industry you are in, it is very difficult to be either unique or less expensive. What is important is the service your client receives from everyone in your business. From the receptionist at the front desk to the accounting clerk in the office, everyone who talks to a client must provide them exceptional service and professionalism. You can be the very best at attracting clients and even selling to them, but what will ultimately make the difference between success and failure is your service.
If you’re really going to be effective and successful in the marketplace today, it is necessary, even vital, that you continually change, improve, adjust and update your selling, service, and problem-solving skills, as well as your methods of marketing and general business operation. Keep in mind that:
“People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
One of the best and most effective ways you can show your prospects and customers you care is by helping them solve their problems in a satisfactory, cost-effective, and professional manner.
Getting New Ideas
Since having ideas and recognizing opportunities are so crucial to your business, you need to do everything possible to heighten your awareness in these areas. You also need to be able to use your knowledge of your customers and their needs, your industry and the new advances in your industry to come up with ideas for products and services for your business.
However, being exposed to a new idea is one thing, but what you do with it once you have it is just as important as getting it in the first place.
Studies on retention show that you remember:
- 10% of what you read,
- 22% of what you hear,
- 37% of what you see,
- 56% of what you see and hear, and up to
- 86% of what you see, hear and do.
So an idea that is heard but not acted on is only half as likely to be retained as an idea that is actually put into practice and that means it’s going to take some effort on your part.
In their book, The Knowing-Doing Gap, authors, Jeffrey Pheffer and Robert L. Sutton mention that every year there are 1,700 new business books published, $60 billion spent on training, $43 billion spent on consultants, and our universities turn out 80,000 graduates with MBA’s. Yet, most businesses continue to operate day in and day out in much the same ways as they have always done.
Again, and this theme will keep coming up because it is so important, knowledge without action is no better than no knowledge at all. Just knowing isn’t enough. You’ve got to do something with what you to know.
The ideas presented here work. They’re not theories. They’re not speculations on what “should” work. And they’re not philosophical musings. These ideas, concepts and techniques are currently in use by business owners across the country in one form or another. They’re being proven in actual field use day in and day out.
They work for others, and they can work for you. You are going to have to take the time to study them, understand them, and make the necessary modifications to tailor them to your own personal and business style and operation. And then finally, you’re going to have to apply them in your business.
“Murray Priestley has 25 years of commercial and asset management experience having served in board, CEO and senior executive positions with a number of global public and private companies.”