Coloring Outside the Lines. Jeff Tobe

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СКАЧАТЬ Small family. Good wages. 727 North Irving Avenue.”

      We placed that advertisement in the Times on a Thursday when most maids have the afternoon off. The first edition went on the stands at 1:00. By 3, the line of applicants had begun to form on our front porch. By 4, buses were erupting maids in groups at our corner. By 5, Mrs. Sumner had made a selection and the appointed one was happily at work in the kitchen a few minutes later getting dinner.

       When I came home I got the full story and I proceeded to analyze it. “You see,” I explained, “this afternoon dozens of maids, dissatisfied with their jobs read that column of classifieds. And what did they find? They discovered the perfect place to work. The kind of place they’d been thinking and dreaming about.”

       The trouble was that I didn’t let it go at that. Next morning, I went down to the office and told one of the men there what had happened. He looked at me hungrily, “Man! We’ve been without a maid for two weeks. I wish you’d write an ad for us”. I told him that if he would just give me the specifications of his home as a maid’s paradise, I’d be happy to. He gave them to me and, of course, by this time I was getting better at this sort of thing. I wrote an advertisement and he put it in the Times the next day.

       What do you suppose happened?

       Our maid went down and applied for the job!

      This story does a great job of illustrating the power of looking at the world through our client’s eyes. As basic as this sounds, most of us do not do it! Most of us have no idea of how our customers perceive us, our product or our service. Every morning, take one minute by yourself and imagine you are one of your clients about to do business with you that day. What do they think of when they think of doing business with you?

      Do they associate doing business with you as a pain or a pleasure? Are you just another vendor or employee? Are you a valuable, problem-solving resource on whom they can rely? Are you professional? And the key is to do this for each individual client and put yourself in their shoes.

       #2 Understand and Embrace Your New Roles in a New World

      Almost five hundred years ago, William Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage. All the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and each in his time plays many parts.” Many of us have been playing our ‘roles’ far too long and in order to create the future, we must re-write our script. I’ve identified five roles in my one-act play we call the future: one is the lead role and the other four are supporting roles. You must take on these roles in your profession if you are to be more successful. The four supporting roles are as follows:

      1. Challenge solver. You no longer sell product or services. You solve your clients’ challenges. You sell an experience. You look for challenges then find different ways to solve them

      2. Solution broker. In other words, you provide solutions. These may be solutions outside your normal realm. Your clients turn to you in this role because of trust and loyalty and they turn to you first.

      3. Educator or information provider. With the speed of change, our clients—both internal and external---need to be educated. You can be an invaluable resource for your clients by positioning yourself as an educator and an information provider. The discount clothing retailer Syms, has a great motto by which we should conduct business: An educated consumer is our best customer!

      4. Communication enhancer. This is also referred to as communication facilitator or communication reenforcer Perhaps your clients simply need you to listen, or perhaps your product or service will help them with their communication challenges.

      Now for the lead and the most important role. It’s that of Questioner.

      We must constantly ask ourselves, “What business am I really in? I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but most of you are under the influence of some type of business-induced trance! Most of you are having hallucinations! I don’t believe that the majority of your answers would be the REAL purpose of your business. None describe what you really do for a living.

      I think the purpose of all of our businesses is simply to attain and retain customers. If you don’t create and keep customers, tomorrow you won’t have a business. Agreed?

      What would happen if you stopped looking at your primary role in your business, as the provider of ideas? If you don’t have customers for whom to provide those ideas and if the ideas don’t work for the customers, it won’t do you any good. What would happen if you looked at your emerging lead role as becoming a Customer Attaining and Retaining Agent? When you think about it this way, several things happen. First of all, you aren’t tied to a specific product or service because all you are doing is creating customers and continually filling their needs.

      Thus, you have five roles. The main role is customer creating and retaining agent. The supporting roles are

       1. Challenge solver

       2. Solution broker

       3. Information provider

       4. Communication Enhancer

      Over the next few days, I would like to ask you to really delve into how you can take on each of these new roles in your businesses or your professional life.

       #3 Learn to Listen to the Environment for Whispers of Possibility

      Listen to ideas that your environment offers you. When you think about environmental factors that influence your business, you may think of technology, change, diversity, economy, natural disaster, aging of America, pollution, government control, crime, downsizing and so on. But look at these factors from a different perspective. Within each environmental challenge is an opportunity somewhere. You know, if the dinosaurs were able to do an accurate environmental survey, they may be around today! Dinosaur companies who are unable to analyze their environment and look for opportunities within it, face the same fate as the dinosaurs. We have to ask ourselves, what environmental factors have I been complaining about or ignoring that could present a real opportunity to create and retain new clients?

       STEP #4 Learn to Think in New

      Why is it important for an Olympic athlete to practice every day? To get better at it! We seem to take the basics for granted. How many people practice thinking in new ways as a real discipline? Very few. One of the reasons much of our world is in a quandary as to how to solve our many challenges, is because of this inability to think in a new way. Einstein said “Everything has changed except our ways of thinking.” We have to apply the same disciplines in getting ourselves to think in new ways as we do to getting our bodies into shape or in learning to play a musical instrument. So this fourth step in learning to see the invisible, is to make opportunity-finding a habit every day.

      Henry Ford said “Thinking is the most difficult work in the world and that’s why so few people ever do it.” Most of us are thinking the same thoughts in the same way every day and that’s why we may beat ourselves up for never having an original thought when we really need one. That’s because we don’t PRACTICE THINKING.

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