If your service is at all complex, stories make it much easier to explain your value.
So, collect as many mini-stories as you can about how you’ve worked to help your clients, and make sure everyone knows how and where to tell them.
Download our free e-book on collecting client stories to find out how.
I’d love to share some of your stories – let me know how you get on.
Your time is valuable.
Your prospect’s time is even more valuable.
So if you’re not right for them you need to let them know as soon as possible.
Put together 3 questions that will tell you whether or not your business is right for them.
Then ask them as early as possible.
Download our free e-book on qualifying out to find out how.
Let me know how you get on.
In my early days as a software engineer, back in 1988, this book (“Principles of Software Engineering Management” by Tom Gilb) was my bible.
We’d just acquired a new client, who’d been told that the networked point of sale software they’d just ordered would be ready in 3 months.
The trouble was, what they’d seen was a mock-up. We hadn’t even begun to think about designing or building it.
So, having found this new book a few weeks earlier, I decided to follow its principles.
Having mapped out a high-level architecture for the system, we put ourselves in the shoes of the customer – a large department store – to work out which elements we should deliver first.
Next we worked out which parts of the standard software development approach we could ditch, without compromising maintainability (I learned to code with the MOD, so maintainability was key).
Having stripped our development process back to just what would support the things we really cared about – software that did what the customer wanted reliably, delivered in business-useful chunks and in code that could and would be easily maintained in future – we were rigourous in sticking to it.
Everything else was low-tech and informal. We were a small team in one room with a whiteboard, and could communicate well enough to keep things on track and under control.
We were helped by a fantastic boss, who believed in us, and defended us from the traditionalists outside our team.
It worked. We didn’t deliver the whole system in 3 months, but the client was more than happy.
They got what they needed when they needed it. As they populated products, we built the departments piece, and so on, each delivery fully tested and working properly, building on the previous one until the system was complete.
And we were the first to market with this kind of product.
The point of this little nostalgia trip?
The right level of discipline makes daring possible.
Here’s what I think works well:
Every great business is founded on a promise.
Not to shareholders.
Not to staff.
To prospects and customers.
The promise of a change that’s yearned for, that’s worth more than the money in my pocket.
A promise you do your utmost to keep.
All businesses have such a promise, it shows, but it isn’t always articulated explicitly.
Making it explicit, and sharing it with your team is the first step in building a framework that enables them to deliver it on your behalf.
The first (and last) rule of your enabling framework:
If in doubt, remember the promise, then do what it takes to deliver that.
A 2013 research paper from the now defunct Department for Business Innovation and Skills identified reasons why small businesses – those employing between 0 and 9 staff – didn’t want to grow much bigger, if at all.
Here are two that struck me:
These can be solved quite simply, but not easily:
That way you get the best of both worlds.
How do you know when someone is doing a good job?
Is it by seeing them do it? Is it by reading a report of the results or hearing about them from someone? Is it by doing the job with them?
We know from NLP that individuals have a preferred ‘channel’ for taking in information, and not surprisingly, information about how well a person is working is no exception.
More interesting perhaps is that time comes into it too.
How do you get convinced enough that you don’t need to watch that person anymore?
For some people, once is fine. Others need a few occurrences. A few people are never quite convinced and have to keep checking.
This means that for some business owners, the temptation is to delegate a job, then watch over that person to make sure they are doing it right, which clearly defeats the purpose.
The other temptation – just as dangerous – is to assume after one occurrence (or a few), that everything is fine, only to uncover a disaster when the person is off sick or on holiday or leaves.
However you get personally convinced about how well a person is doing their job, it pays to have a means of confirming that this is still the case over longer periods of time.
First, make sure the person taking on the job knows the business outcome they are trying to achieve and the activities that are needed to get there.
Then create a process for spot checking that helps them and you to stay reassured that all is well, and that can catch any problems early.
Then let them get on with it.
(this blog was originally published in LinkedIn).
What makes us feel free?
Agency – making our ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe
Mastery – learning new skills
Autonomy – being free to choose how we make our dent
Purpose – doing this for something bigger than ourselves.
Community – doing all this with ‘people like us’.
A business can be a great place to make this possible. Even better when “those that create value in the company benefit directly from the value they create”.
There’s a reason we originally called them ‘Companies”.
You can probably complete that sentence.
For me, it means that it isn’t the badge you wear that tells people what you stand for, it’s what you do and how you behave. The badge is just our shortcut for knowing what to expect.
Of course, over time, the badge becomes a proxy for the behaviour, and if you’re cynical you can exploit this fact.
So yesterday, our towns were festooned with poppies, and our TV schedules rammed with Remembrance, while actual ex-servicemen are homeless, in prison or committing suicide, and many who lost their lives, parents, or childhoods in the last war are seeing the social contract they fought to bring about being dismantled before their very eyes.
Yes, you can get away with just wearing the badge, but eventually, the doing will out.
That’s true for businesses too.
When we first moved into our house 30 years ago, there was a Safeways supermarket in the high street. Every night there were bargains to be had, as fresh food was marked down for quick sale. Every Christmas, the fresh turkeys sat on the shelves until Christmas Eve, when, seemingly out of the blue, a gang of eager shoppers would hover around the shop assistant as they marked those same turkeys down for a quick sale.
Within a couple of years, Safeways had gone. I wasn’t surprised.
Today, with the barrage of Christmas advertising already well under way, I spotted ‘Christmas Eve Boxes’ in the window of a pop-up Christmas shop.
How long will it be before we’re giving ‘1st of December boxes’?
And how long before we’re complaining that “Young people today can’t do deferred gratification”?