Exceeding Customer Expectations

Jul 30, 2013 | Sales, Marketing & Customer Service

The “buzz” in customer management arenas continues to be “Customer Expectation Management”. Customer Expectation Management or CEM is a way of doing business that focuses heavily on delivering not only a quality product, but delivering that product with service that exceeds the expectations of the customer. Studies have shown, many companies and individuals will pay a higher price for a product, if they can do business with organizations that put quality customer service at the top of their...

Develop from Within / Lead the Business at Hand

Jul 23, 2013 | Leadership Development

There's a great statement Bill George, the former CEO of Medtronic made about CEO's and successors. He said: 'As CEOs, we don't design anything, make anything or sell anything. Our job is to create the strategies for building the business and to create the kind of positive environment that enables our employees to do these vital jobs. The only way to build lasting value in our companies is to focus on our missions, our customers and our employees.' He continued by stating, 'We need to...

Creating Procedures – Keep It Simple

Jul 16, 2013 | Leadership Development

I was recently asked to provide some insights into how an organization can easily, yet effectively, create documented procedures (i.e., systems). If you've followed any of my writings over the years, you know I'm a huge proponent of checklists, procedures, and simple documentation to ease a leader's and the team's working lives. I don't like to create complicated bureaucracies of paperwork, just easy-to-follow guides. Simple, clear checklists or standard operating procedures, when created...

Dealing with Difficult People

Jul 9, 2013 | Leadership Development

We've all come across difficult people in our workplace and typically, we've found that the “safest” way to deal with them is to ignore them. However, by ignoring the difficult behaviors of our team members, we are by default condoning their poor behaviors. We are passively accepting their bad behaviors. As professionals, as leaders, we need to stop condoning their behaviors if we want our team members to stop behaving badly. So what do we do? Interact with them assertively. Most...

Critical Numbers

Jul 2, 2013 | Sales, Marketing & Customer Service

Critical Numbers are those key financial, production, or sales numbers that tell us how well we're doing -- or not doing. These numbers help us determine what we MUST accomplish day in and day out to be successful. For instance, for a movie theater, one critical number to track may be the number of seats sold; for a food processor, cost of raw product and additives; for a grocery store, spoilage rate. Whatever the number -- everyone in the organization must know what the number is --...