Customers and other strangers

If you operated Momma Mia's Meatballs, which feature do you think would give you the best advantage in the competition for customers?

• The best location?
• The best meatball recipe?
• The best prices?

Would any of the above matter if you didn't have any customers?  Or if you ill-served the ones who patronized you? Probably not. At least not for long. 

I was thinking about this following a hike this weekend in a local state park.  We were hungry after finishing our jaunt and were looking forward to a burger and beer at a historic tavern near the entrance to the park.

It was closed.

On a beautiful Saturday afternoon. 

In June. 

It wasn't closed because of an illness or malfunction.  Its posted hours noted that it didn't open until 4 pm on Saturdays. We took our appetites and our business elsewhere, as did others.

The little deli up the road, which didn't offer anything other than pre-packaged fare, was busy with others like us. Hungry customers. With money. 

As Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management once wrote:  "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."  You cannot do this successfully if you are not focused on satisfying their needs.

Ownership and attitude

In one of our earliest posts, Ownership Attitude, we noted that while the definition of "ownership attitude" may be open to debate, it's attributes are manifest:

"Owners are independent, strong-willed, risk-taking, opinionated, combative, willful, perfectionist, far-sighted, deaf, myopic, sleep-deprived, the first out-of-pocket but last to be paid, and most often not 'millionaires-or-billionaires.'

While not exhaustive by any stretch, what these attributes illustrate is that owners are NOT employees.  In fact, they make HORRIBLE employees, by and large."

Here's another take, authored by the Bill Bonnstetter of Target Training International, and published in the Harvard Business Review.  Bonnstetter looks at the attributes and skills that are most and least prevalent among serial entrepreneurs.  In sum:  Great vision and drive; poor management and interpersonal skills.

If entrepreneurialism is driven by these qualities, is there any hope that the business owner can understand his/her employees' needs and motivations, given the noted deficit in empathy?

Yes, there is hope.  More than hope, actually, there is science.

According to behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who also visited with us last week, there are several keys to motivating humans, be they employees, co-workers, spouses or siblings.  (It is also very relevant to sales and marketing.  Ping me and I'll describe how.)



Ariely's TED presentation on meaning, motivation and ownership is thought-provoking. His conclusions:

• Meaning drives satisfaction and performance
• Recognition and praise is essential to meaning
• Investment (time and effort) creates meaning and drives ownership

As a business owner, these tenets can be both comforting and troubling.  Ask yourself:

• Am I able to bring out in others the qualities that made me successful?  
• Can I not only install the practices but instill the culture needed to manage it?  
• Do I need to delegate that critical assignment because I am not wired to do so?

The future success of your enterprise depends on your ability to answer those questions honestly and to execute the solutions correctly.

Deja vu all over again

Two great American pastimes intersected this past weekend:  weather prognostication and football, in the forms of Groundhog Day and Super Bowl Sunday. 

Both are now spectacles that have evolved far beyond their humble beginnings.  Regarding the Super Bowl, I am always awed by the sheer magnitude of this often-not-so-special event.  Some big facts about the 2013 Super Bowl:

• 7.5 million TVs will be bought for the game.
• Nearly $4 million will be spent per 30-second ad during the game.
• 1.2 billion chicken wings will be consumed and 50 million cases of beer will be quaffed.
• 2 billion gallons of water will be used to flush those wings and beer away.
• 7 million people will call in sick on Monday

Groundhog Day is a less over-the-top affair, even in Punxsutawney, and whatever the predicted outcome.  Whether early spring or more weeks of winter, February 2nd heralds repeated opportunities to catch one of my favorite movies, Groundhog Day.  It's a classic American business morality tale.

Hear, say.

At a gathering of business folks recently, we discussed the book Power Questions.  Those gathered found it to be a good, thought-provoking read, and some had already put some of the concepts and questions into practice in their organizations.

The author, Andrew Sobel, has penned several books on selling and fostering lasting client relationships.  Good questions, in his words, "light fires under people, help them see problems in new ways, and inspire them to bare their souls. The result is deep personal engagement." Power Questions offers many great examples of great questions to ask and how to ask them, and provides the reader with more than 300 questions, grouped topically.  It's a great resource for any business leader.

Is questioning enough, though?  Most modern sales "systems" are now built around the concept of questioning, of "finding the pain" of the prospective buyer.   Asking pre-programmed questions that are designed to manipulate the emotions of someone you just met doesn't seem like the recipe for success to me.  As one of the members of our book group said, "if a salesperson asks me 'what keeps you up at night?', I know they are a hack and haven't done their homework."