The golden rule of marketing consulting is to blame someone other than the business owner for their loss of sales, opportunity and generally loss of anything. Because that’s exactly what business owners are doing. They’re blaming the economy, the market trends, the changing technology and my all time favourite–the customer for their sales woes.
Well, chances are that things in the market certainly have changed but here’s why you, the business owner can’t adapt to these changes:
No Insights
If you have no consumer insights about why people need your services and what they would pay more for and what they hate about what you’re doing, you’re flying blind. Take a few of your prospects out to coffee, ask them what problem is costing them money that you could fix for them. Read a few articles about trends in your industry and what the successful ones are doing differently? Take a supplier who works with the same customers as you out to lunch, pick their brains about what the customer needs are and how they’ve changed. I promise you’ll no longer be complaining about the market changing. Instead you’ll be thinking about what you should be changing in your own business.
Stuck in 3rd Gear
If most of your time is spent stuck going a 1000 miles a minute spending every waking moment on existing client work, how on earth do you ever expect to lift your head up long enough to see the changes around you, let alone change your business in time to react to the changes? Actively start tracking how much time you’re spending in the business with existing clients versus on the business of rubbing shoulders with prospects. I guarantee you’ll be shocked by the numbers like most of my clients who do this exercise are.
The I Don’t Care Syndrome
The new technology and market trends are sometimes so baffling to business owners that they convince themselves that they don’t need to know about them or that they simply can afford not to care. As one social media guru put it, “if you’re a business and you’re not on social media, you won’t have a business much longer”. It’s that simple. So get yourself out of the I Don’t Care Syndrome and start to learn about the ways you can communicate with or even serve your clients better through new technology.
After all, remember that it’s never about them, it’s always about you.
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