Can you believe we are in the final quarter of this financial year already? With 3 down and 1 to go, I'd love to share a few pointers to help you maximise the final quarter of 2018:
2017 has been a wonderful year! Thank you to all of my clients, friends, family, colleagues and network for being part of it. 2017 has dealt us some challenges and some wonderful opportunities and delivered some wonderful adventures!
I love a great planning session! I have developed a tool to help you map out your plans for 2018. It's simple, it's old school, it's ... a wall planner! And here's yours to download for free. You can print this on paper if you have a jumbo printer, or better still, send the file to your local signwriter and have it made into a whiteboard. Here is what you will need to tell your signwriter: As I write this entry, there are only 7 Fridays until Christmas. How did that happen? Well I know how it happened, it happens this way every year. Yet every November, my heart seems to race a little faster.
Capability Statements are a fantastic way to showcase the credibility, capability and experience of your business without getting into pushy selling. In addition to being useful to include with tenders and expressions of interest, capability statements can be a useful resource for your staff, sub-contractors and colleagues to promote your business in a professional manner.
When promoting our business, it can be easy to get caught up in trying to impress the wrong crowd. Most often, I find that crowd is our competition. It's natural to want to impress our peers, we invest a lot to ensure we are leaders within our industry. But when creating communication for our business, this is definitely not who we should be thinking about.
Today I would like to issue a challenge.
I would like you to enter your place of business in the same manner a customer would. I would like you to do this once a month! When we arrive at our shop, office, warehouse or where ever it is that our business is located, we often park in the same carpark, arrive via the same roads and enter through the back door. Our experience is often nothing like our customer's experience. Which can be dangerous, it can mean no-one is taking responsibility for ensuring our customer journey is a positive one. Most business owners I speak with all mention that word of mouth is one of their most impressive sources of business however, most don’t resource customers with anything to make their job easier.
When happy customers want to tell their family, friends and colleagues about you and your business, giving them a helping hand can increase the effectiveness of the recommendation. Hard selling can be difficult and yucky. Persuading someone to buy something they don’t need is just icky – whichever way I look at it. When Dr Flint McGlaughlin, an American academic and business leader used the phrase ‘clarity trumps persuasion’ it certainly resonated with me.
As contemporary business owners, I believe we need to understand that our audience is quite educated. They have a plethora of choice and the internet searching device they are holding in their hands is giving them all the tools they need to carry out extensive searches in a matter of seconds. In response to this, I believe we need to consider moving out of persuading mode and into clarity mode – if we’re not already there. You may call it June 30, end of quarter, end of financial year, half way through 2017, whatever you call it - you are right and we only have 37 more sleeps until we wake up and the calendar ticks over to 30th June 2017. What will you be prioritising between now and then?
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AuthorRoxanne Grey |