What If Your Business Was Truly All About Them?
The truth is there are a lot of people who think they are client-centered, and who don’t behave that way. What’s more, most people agree that their businesses should be all about their clients, but they’ve never formulated or implemented a plan for actualizing this ideal. It’s the same as folks who say, “I have a healthy lifestyle,” but then smoke cigarettes and eat poorly. Maybe they go to a tanning salon and the gym so they can look good, but they really aren’t creating a health-centered life.
You can probably come up with dozens of new ideas for making your business all about them. Then again, maybe you’re stymied. Perhaps you’re thinking, I’d really like to do a lot more than I do for my clients, but another thought also crosses your mind: I don’t have the time, the energy, the staff, the knowledge, or the resources.
How does this translate to your profession? When you commit to having an all-about-them business, you do what’s right for the clients. Period. No hemming or hawing, no allowing them to dictate how you run your business. You figure out what is in their best interests, and then you do it. You don’t simply revere the idea of doing what’s right for them; you actually implement every time. As Guy Kawasaki wrote in The Macintosh Way, you don’t compete on strategy; you compete on execution.
I know you really care about your clients and would really love to run an all-about-them business, but the question is how? How do you go from running your practice as it is now to operating the kind of business that puts the clients first? And if you think you already run a business that’s all about them, then how do you take it to the next level?
So no doubt there’s a learning curve to contend with, new management practices to adopt, staffing issues to resolve, and client contact to be made. And that’s probably not all. It’s not an easy thing, being client-centered. But if you’re going to make it all about them, it’s what you have to do. So, what will you do next?
Ask Clients for Feedback on Their Experiences
Do you ask your clients to give feedback on their experience? This is incredibly effective, but few business owners send surveys to their clients. The truth is – business owners don’t want to take the time to ask for various reasons. It takes time to not only create surveys, it takes time to conduct them and collect the information. Then there is the challenge of implementing business models changes, if you like any of the ideas or suggestions provided. The difference between an everyday business and an extraordinary one is a client survey. I would highly suggest conducting a client survey because it can be a powerful transformation tool.
Listening to your clients and truly comprehending their needs is the most important factor when building a business that’s all-about-them. Your business is completely dependent on your clients and if you don’t make it all-about-them, it won‘t reach its true potential.
Here are a few websites that you can use to quickly and easily conduct surveys:
1. http://www.opinionpower.com – All our quick polls and surveys are free and available to your audience for 30 days.
2. http://www.surveymonkey.com – SurveyMonkey has a single purpose: to enable anyone to create professional online surveys quickly and easily.
How do you transform your business to put clients first? How do you take an existing business that’s all-about-them, to the next level?
Communicate effectively and be productive with groups of clients – Effective and Efficient Behavior
In working with a client today I started thinking about effective and efficient behavior. He was telling me how he was proactive in sending out some communication to his clients that they needed but didn’t think through it enough so got bombarded with phone calls wanting to know more information on the communication they received. We talked about how to do this differently next time. Some ideas were to create a teleconference for people to dial in and listen to so he didn’t have to say the same thing x number of times. He just had to say it once or twice depending on the number of teleconferences he would set up. Then if people had immediate needs (identify immediate timeframe and what that means) they could call in to schedule a phone appointment with him by calling _________ at ___________. We talked about thinking of ways that gets done what he needs done with the least amount of his time involved. If there is a way to group activities and people, it obviously is more productive. You want to make sure it is effective and people appreciate what you are doing. You can also send out a mass voicemail message to your clients which shows you care enough to reach out and tell them what is important for them to know. You can also consider doing a seminar or seminars that people who want the information they need can attend and feel cared about. He could have done one or two group teleconference for those interested and saved a lot of his time. This allows for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. When doing something like this, it still gives you time to do the other things only you can do to keep building your business and pursuing other opportunities. It may be reduced time, but you still have some time. You always want to document the process when you are doing it or after you have done something. This will help if you need to do it again and if you want to modify it to make it even better. These are just a few tips to help you communicate with effective and efficient behavior.
Telling the Truth has its benefits!
Can I succeed telling the truth? Not only can you succeed by telling the truth, you can thrive telling the truth. The reason is that you will attract the ‘right’ clients, who have lots of money, who can handle the truth, and prefer the truth.
Telling the truth can actually give you a competitive advantage in a market glutted by people full of hot air. Most people fear nobody wants to hear the truth, but of course they do! And the ones who want to hear the truth will be your best and most lucrative clients. Most successful people respond to bare-bald-buck-naked facts, because most successful people got that way by remaining grounded in reality.
Jack Welch, arguably the greatest CEO of our time, held the philosophy, “Tell me the truth, and tell me early.” If something happened and you knew and didn’t tell him about it, you were fired. But if you came to him early and told him, “You know what? This whole project is screwed up, and I don’t know what to do about it,” you’d go a long way with Jack Welch.
It's okay to have a thought you DO express!
My husband has an expression, “It’s okay to have a thought you don’t express.” This can be very useful at times. I also believe it is okay to have thoughts you do express. Many times we are thinking something and we don’t say it, and we should so we know the truth about the situation. We might be afraid to say what we are thinking for some unknown reason. You are just guessing on what is really going on in their minds without really knowing the truth. When someone is telling me that a certain situation occurred with a client and they don’t know why or understand, I ask them if they asked them about it instead of just thinking about asking them. Most times we role play how that would work and they then go back and talk to the person. It is really about the client and them wanting to do what’s best for them – so why not ask and tell the truth about how you are feeling?
Can you imagine someone telling you the truth about waiting to take your money until a more appropriate time? How often does that happen? One client did just that. She was busy handling a lot of new business and she told a new client that they should wait to pay her for her services until she was in a better position to service them – two months from now. They were thrilled she told them the truth and agreed to meet in two months where they would then pay her for her services. Upon saying this to them, she felt like the ‘salesperson’ in her really wanted the money and should have taken it right then and there. While the person who she is felt like she was in integrity by telling them the truth. Think about how the clients felt with the truth and how many other people they will tell about her services now.
