Did you send a Thanksgiving greeting to your customers? When was the last time before that, that you said “Thank you”?
When prompted, we remember to let customers know that we’re grateful for their business. When they actually make a transaction, we thank them. But oftentimes, they don’t hear from us otherwise. Especially if they are infrequent purchasers (even if those are large purchases), gratitude can be a bit of a case of “out of sight, out of mind”. This Thanksgiving, you’ve probably got some spare time on your hands. Why not use it to say thank you to everyone who has supported your business this year? And then, make a plan to do so with regularity. It will engage your customers, and keep them thinking about you.
Did we mention we’re grateful for you? Thanks so much for reading this post. Want to hear from us regularly? Subscribe with the orange button, below.
Decisions are hard. Especially in times of great uncertainty. That’s why thinking about how we make decisions, and creating frameworks for better decisions, can lighten the load when the going gets tough.
We have four rules we like our clients to think about, when they’re trying to make challenging decisions in their business:
Know that, no matter what, not everyone will agree with your decision.
Understand that, once taken, it’s important to stick with the decision long enough to see that it’s working, or isn’t.
In conjunction with the previous, before taking the decision, define carefully how you will judge whether it worked, or didn’t.
Ignore red herrings and other extraneous information (or decision points) that are not pertinent to this specific decision.
Getting a handle on these four things will help you make decisions with more confidence in the process, even when you’re worried about the potential outcome.
I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to know to make better decisions for their businesses and careers. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or click the handy orange button below to subscribe to news you can use.
You’ve started to get some traction with your social media posts or your blog, and then…the trolls show up. What can you do?
The natural urge is to feel defensive. To want to fight back. But is that in your best interest? Most of the time, it’s not. Here are some steps you can take when confronted with negative information:
Remind yourself and your team that happy customers often say nothing – you may have many “likes” or “shares”, but much of the time, of comments
Exercise compassion – pay attention to the remarks and see if there is a grain of truth that represents an opportunity for improvement.
Consider the source – are they a “troll for hire” or bot, simply programmed by an algorithm to respond to certain phrases or topics?
Don’t argue – looking defensive won’t get you anywhere and will add validity to their remarks
Apologize and explain what you’ve done – if they’ve called you out on a legitimate complaint, say you’re sorry and tell them how you’re working to solve it
Take the conversation offline – and show that you’re offering them another way to voice their concerns
Push them out of the way – enlist your allies (customers, clients, or stakeholders) to help you build up the positive comments
Bear in mind that often the people who are bothered the most by trolls are team members who work their hardest to be good, kind, compassionate, and helpful. They’ll want to defend themselves. The best thing you can do for them is to have a clear policy and a place where they, too, can voice their concerns. Do that, and encourage them to support your efforts to manage what is sometimes a very unruly and discomfiting beast.
I’m Megann Willson, one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to see everything they need to know to make better decisions as they find, understand, and engage their customers. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or subscribe for weekly updates using the handy button, below.
Have you heard Jessica Salfia’s poem, “The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining”? It talks about the “new normal”, and more. Truthfully, we’ve heard so many people say they are waiting to get back to normal. Or that they’re trying to normalize their business processes, “under the circumstances”. Or that they don’t have time to think about strategy right now, because they’re just treading water, or trying not to crack the thin veneer that’s separating them from the chaos. Does that sound familiar?
It makes us think. What if, or how might we? How might we use the crisis to knock on the door of an opportunity? How might we use our time differently, to make our businesses over into the kind of businesses we’ve wanted or deserved all along? Let’s face it, everyone is doing things they’ve never done. Learning, implementing, trying, failing, and trying again. So we’re asking you to consider this: create what we’ll call a One Team®. (If you’re a team of one, you might need to reach out and form a Mastermind group to be your One Team). That team’s job is to select one thing that everyone agreed before all this began, would make a massive difference to either your customers or your colleagues, if it could just be sorted out and implemented. Then give the team license to take one day a week to think about this, and only this. Really work on it. Come up with ideas. Test. Prototype stuff. Make drawings. Research. Ask questions. They get a buy on all video conferences for most of that day. Then at the end of that one day, they have only one online meeting to explain their one most important lesson learned, to offer one thing up that the rest of the company can use, and to make one ask that will carry them forward to their next step. Then you let them repeat this process until you can see the change they’ve made. Because they will. We’re sure of it.
I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them to see everything they need to work on to make better decisions for their businesses. Find us on Twitter and Facebook, too. On Fridays, we send News You Can Use to our subscribers. You can become one by signing up with the orange button, below.
Based on a completely unreliable, unscientific set of observational data gleaned from #socialmedia, we’ve noticed (and heard during phone calls) that many people who are suddenly forced to work from home (or who are used to working from home, and have had partners or offspring thrust into the mix) are having trouble with focus.
Steve and I have been working with clients for nearly twenty years, helping them focus on what’s important when they are surrounded by irrelevant data and daily distractions. Here are a few tips that will help you get some real work done:
Get dressed. OK, maybe you don’t need a suit and tie. But schedule at least one early and one later-in-the-day video call, to incentivize yourself to “dress up and show up”.
Make a list of things you want to get done, then prioritize. Get it down to ONE. If you can do this one thing, you’ll feel like you’ve accomplished something. Then start it. When you’re done, reprioritize based on current information, and start again.
Work in short spurts of about 25 minutes (read up on the pomodoro technique). In between, get some oxygen – go out on your balcony or stride around the room, just get air for a minute or two. In between, give yourself two minutes, no more, for one of the following.
Schedule two minutes for news and social media consumption – endless scrolling, scrolling, scrolling might have been amusing last week, but if this is our new modus operandi for a month or more, that will get old, PDQ.
Read something that is business-y, but unrelated to your vertical or domain, and then figure out the connection.
Drink a big glass of water.
And every time, before you sit down to work again, please, wash your hands.
Stay safe out there, people. Keep your distance. Don’t touch me, and I won’t touch you. If you need help with your business, or planning a new one, let me know. You can also find us on Twitter: Steve or Megann. We’re also on LinkedIn or Facebook. Under the Store tab, you can join a MasterMind group or explore coaching with us. Or you can just wait for news to arrive in your inbox, on Friday afternoons. (Just in case you’ve lost track of what day it is).
One of the most challenging things you may face with your customers or buyers, is when they push back and say they want to pay a different price, or have different delivery terms, or change what you were hoping to receive. In a business-to-business or account-based-selling environment, this can be a frequent occurrence, so it’s useful to learn how to deal with it.
The difficulty, or risk, is that if you counter with another option, they may walk away. You might damage the relationship. So the first thing to consider, is the lifetime value of that customer. Are they likely to purchase again and again over time? If so, you need figure out how to be more accommodating, without “giving away the store”. How can you do that?
If you’re familiar with “how-might-we” thinking, you’ll know that it is most often used in idea generation. But at its heart, the ideas you are trying to generate are solutions to problems. That means when you encounter other types of problems, you can use the same approach to excellent effect. Instead of thinking, “that customer is so demanding!”, consider thinking, what can I offer them so they get some of what they want, and I get some of what I want?
Over time, if you exercise the how-might-we muscle to deal with challenging customer requests, you’ll find it becomes easier, and you get better at preserving customer relationships while still feeling like there was plenty of pie for everyone (and there is). What can this help you tackle today?
I’m Megann Willson and I’m Partners with Steve Willson here at PANOPTIKA. We help our clients see everything they need to know (and realize what they don’t need to know) to make #betterdecisions. You can find us here on our blog, and also on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Or you can sign up for weekly updates delivered direct to your inbox, by clicking the orange button below.
Every day, we hear companies saying they love their customers. And how do they show it? They push them tons and tons of irrelevant content. They flood their inboxes. They try to sell them things they don’t want or need. And here’s what many of them don’t do:
Try to find out what will really make them happy.
If you’ve been fortunate enough to be in a long-lasting relationship (like we have), you’ll know that you’re always looking for ways to delight the other person. To show them that you want to help them get what they want and need to feel like they are their best. Saying sorry when you’re wrong. Asking their closest friends if there’s something they’ve been dreaming of that they haven’t told you. Not taking, taking, taking.
So today, on Valentine’s Day, and every day, if you really love your customer:
If you’ve messed up in any way, apologize. Sincerely.
Find out what they’ve really been dreaming about without asking them to spell it out for you (watch, observe, pay attention, or ask others who know them as well or better as you do) and then help them get it.
Do an unasked kindness for them that doesn’t have an immediate payoff for you (A referral? An endorsement? A sincere note of thanks that isn’t a sales pitch?
To you: thanks for reading. We appreciate it. And thank you to all of you who refer others, endorse us on social media, and engage in conversations about how to find, understand, and engage customers. I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. (The other is Steve Willson – Happy Valentine’s Day!) You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, or through our weekly email news.
Do you ever have one of those days where it seems like you’re being sent the same message again and again? I’ve had one of those already today.
If you’re like many business people, you may have started the year off with not only some personal resolutions, but some business ones, as well. We all have great plans when we’re sitting on a comfy couch and the phone isn’t ringing, our email isn’t pinging, and we’re not being bombarded by social media messages. Slowly, surely, though, we can slip. Even if we’ve been doing a great job, we can lose our vigilance and let distractions and habits creep in, that will move us away from where we intended to go. Unexpected events can break our concentration and mess up our plans.
You may find that you’ve been able to stick with your plan really closely (congratulations, well done!), or you might have something happen that has happened with a few of our connections this week. I took a fall this morning, shortly after crowing about how well my exercise plan has been going. (No worries, pride aside, I’m all good). The first thing I thought was, I need to remind people to get back up! You may have a personal event knock you for a loop, like one of our friends and colleagues, who had an unhappy loss completely break her usually unflappable stride. Or you might be like our friend Debbie Adams of PeopleCan consulting, who spent longer than planned in Halifax, with recent weather events in Newfoundland throwing a wrench in her travel arrangements, and her travel schedule skew her personal success practice just a little.
All of these things have something in common. Not one of us decided that because we’d had a slip or a slide, we should sit down and stop. Nope. We’ve all got enough experience that we knew what to do. Get up. Get up right away, and get going. (In fact Debbie had a great video teaching session this morning about falling off the wagon – and how the right response is to chase the wagon!)
Whether it’s “great minds think alike”, or as my father-in-law would say, “fools seldom differ”, all of us have learned this lesson that I’m sharing with you today. As a quote I read on social media yesterday said, you’re not starting over, you’re starting from experience. Go get ’em.
I’m Megann Willson and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. We work with our clients to help them see everything they need to know, to make better decisions for their career or their business. You can also find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter, and if you sign up, we’ll send news you can use (but not too much), direct to your inbox every Friday afternoon. We love to watch you grow.
How well do you know your customers? Have you undertaken a big research project recently, to gain some in-depth insights? Or have you fallen prey to the not-really-correct school of thought that “Steve Jobs didn’t believe in market research, and that’s good enough for me?” The truth is, neither of these approaches is right. There, I’ve said it. Could it be that famous marketer Steve Jobs was wrong? Yes, sort of. (And about a few things, I might add).
The truth is, getting to know your customers is an ongoing process. As you launch your business, you need to build an understanding of your targets or prospects. It’s a green field. All you will have to rely on is research. From that point forward, though, you need to constantly be piecing together different layers of intelligence to understand who they are, how they work, what they want, and why they do what they do. Asking them to connect the dots won’t work. It’s not their job to do your work for you. (That’s the kind of research Jobs was right to reject). Instead, give them an opportunity to have free-flowing conversations with you. Let them talk about their aspirations, whether they are directly related to what you want to sell them, or not. Then have some conversations with constraints. Give them things to compare, and try to understand how they select, sort, and prioritize. Look at what you can learn from “unresearch” – sales data, notes from interactions they may have had with your service workers, or your product team. See what they do with other people who sell them things. Find out what delights them when they’re not at work.
Customer understanding or user experience research is more than simply testing a product or website and seeing how it goes, as a one-off. It’s about building a rich mosaic from many tiny fragments of information. If you throw it all into a database, or a central file, or don’t try to sort it at all, you’re wasting an opportunity to create something beautiful. But if you categorize it, move it around, and look for connections, you may start to see forms and patterns that make something out of what seemed to be nothing. Find ways to sort all your customer data, and you’ll usually find you have a rich mosaic of understanding, sitting right on your shelf, in your hard drive, or floating around in the cloud. And like a mosaic, look at it up close, then stand back, and observe it from a distance. I’m sure you’ll discover things you never expected, that will help you create whole new customer focus, and grow your business, whatever it is that you make or do.
I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the Partners here at PANOPTIKA. A customer insight audit can help you and your team to use what you already know to build a solid foundation for this year’s business strategy. If you’d like more insights, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, or sign up for weekly ideas, tips, and offers using the orange button below.
A week or so ago, we had the most refreshing experience. It made us feel amazing. Serene, even.
One of our clients asked us for less. Now, we always try to go the extra mile with our clients, and if they are new to us, and we’re working on a project, we try to show them all the possible lines of inquiry we might explore, to learn more about their customers or prospects. We prefer a very open journey, but if someone doesn’t know us, they might have trouble seeing how that will work out. So imagine our relief when the client called and said, “I like where we’re going, but don’t you think we will get a richer result if we ask very broad questions and then probe as the respondent takes it in their direction, not ours?
Yes, yes we do. Thanks for asking us that. Constraints can be useful. But questions that will take the discussion in the direction you want, rather than where the respondent wants to go, are likely to end up with you feeling like you didn’t learn anything new, and simply confirm what you already belief. The lesson? Open yourself up to simplicity, if you want a richer, more meaningful result.
I’m Megann Willson, and I’m one of the partners here at PANOPTIKA. If you’d like us to help you see everything that’s really important to your prospects or customers, let’s talk. You can find all our contact information here on the website. And if you’d like regular insights that will spark ideas you might not have been thinking about already, you can also find us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or on Facebook.
