When were the scuffed shoes of your business last polished?

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Okay, so you got some marketing material from a company which interests you and give them a call to further proceedings. The conversation goes well but there are still a few things you need to iron out face to face, so you book a meeting.

Meeting day comes and you have armed yourself with insightful questions and background research ready to further your already strengthening commitment to this project. The call comes in to the office that your 10 o’clock has just arrived and you make your way down stairs to the reception area.

Your mind begins to wander about the potential benefits that this new investment could have in your business, recalling the pain currently being felt by the department that has asked for this project to be looked into urgently as it is directly affecting a high profile customer relationship, what if it could solve those problems, great, but you know it’s never going to be as easy as just buying it, but you have a good team and are prepared to trade off the initial challenges to reap the rewards.

With your thoughts concluded gravity takes you to the last step of your march towards reception where the receptionist points your visitor out amongst the loitering individuals.

High hopes for this meeting grip you as you approach your visitors and for the first time your eyes meet. Unconsciously you scan the individual in front of you make multiple judgements which seem to pass all you defence mechanisms until…..

Your eyes finally fall to the feet of this guest and a flash of concerns rips through your body as you realise the un-coordinated error and shameful neglect that this individual has made….scuffed brown shoes.

Now, I’m not saying brown shoes are a problem, but when you ware them with the wrong colour outfit and you are lazy enough not to care for them, what kind of signal does that send to your customer.

This, single step, in the journey of your customer’s lifecycle of dealing with your business, every step is as critical as the next. The further your prospects and customers progress the more critical each stage becomes as they ascend the ladder to ownership of your product or service and when one of those rungs is fractured or broken they are suddenly catapulted down the ladder and all your hard work and money spent helping them along on this journey has been undone in one foul swoop.

Your business is a machine, a system, which must predictably create an outcome that facilitates the growth of your business and helps your customers to achieve their objectives.

Taking a holistic (top level), systemised approach to the way your run your business and its operation is the best way to identify if you do indeed have the wrong colour shoes and if they have been unnecessarily neglected. Sometimes though it may not be obvious, so a control or metric (what should happen) can help you to compare your own objectives or what is actually possible with the reality.

So go on, when was the last time you took a looked for the brown shoes in your business and made sure they fitted with the rest of your business outfit and were nicely polished?

From Business Growth Development, post When were the scuffed shoes of your business last polished?