What you did to get your business to where it is today is NOT what you need to do to get your business where it needs to be. Businesses growth requires different actions as the market changes. Barry has identified 6 ways that businesses get stuck, causing their growth to slow. By simply making changes to these unproductive patterns, your business can start to flourish again. Areas discussed are sales, marketing, social media, finance, personal productivity, managing employees and customer service.
- How to skyrocket your business by never selling again.
- How to ensure that the World Wide Web is not a worldwide waste of time.
- How to hire, train, manage and fire employees.
- How to use customer service to make more money.
- How to increase your personal productivity by 100%.
- How to use your financial statements to predict what will happen next in your business.
The business owner’s biggest trap is continually flip-flopping their time between selling things and doing things. While the owner is busy trying to make sales, they aren’t getting the work done…the exact work that makes money. Conversely, when they are doing the work, the sales activity slows to a crawl. The Double Helix Trap keeps businesses struggling for years and years, or worse…a lifetime. In this presentation, Barry shows the 7 strategies to get unstuck which include:
- The Relationship Ratings Methods: Forget about getting sales, have a system to create systematic relationships. We actually can’t sell anything to anyone, we just need to be there when people are ready to buy!
- The Rapid Release Strategy: The exact method to avoid long, fruitless sales cycles, and how to get prospects to a buying decision in one-tenth of the time.
- The Cringe Factor: The simple but highly effective method to identify vendors who are costing you too much time and money.
- The Amplifier Effect: The most powerful technique for growing sales and marketing awareness without taking up any additional effort.
Economic cycles come and go. We have been here before and survived. Cheer the good times with parties, awards and trophies. Mourn the bad times but then let go. Barry demonstrates that developing the resiliency to “bounce” through these cycles of good and bad times determines who will ultimately succeed. Using real life business examples, he shows that with true business confidence, what actions we can take to face our fears, let go of shame and failures, be better risk-takers and define our own brand of success.
The best way to debunk myths about start-up business is to tell the truth: You have to be crazy to start a business. Entrepreneurs live at the complex intersection of business, financial health, physical well-being, spiritual wholeness and family life. Tidbits of insight will vaporize isolation, encourage self-reflection and refresh the spirit of anyone running their own business.
For a long time, a company’s commitment to outstanding customer service began…and ended in its mission statement. The goal of the customer being number one in most companies is not translated into tactics for training the staff or incorporating feedback from their customers. Instead, companies continue to pay sales reps bonuses to bring new customers in the door and only pay minimum wages to the customer service reps to keep them there. This formula results in a revolving door of customers and overall poor service. This is all changing in a 24/7 connected world.
- The world is your competition. With no geographic boundaries, almost every product or service has become a commodity. Your only sustainable competitive advantage is customer loyalty through great service. If I can get what you sell anywhere, why should I put up with bad service?
- With self service kiosks and websites, companies can now personalize the customer experience. Every company can now call you by name, remember what you purchased and recommend what you like. This expectation does not get lower anywhere we surf on the internet, each time we call your company or walk into your brick and mortar locations.
- Your company’s biggest fear was that a disgruntled customer would tell seven people. A dissatisfied customer can now tell 7 million people! Communicating via social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube has turned the business world upside down. Companies can no longer control the conversation about their brands through advertising. But, the good news is that social media can also help build a raving fan base and defuse ranting customers.
You will learn:
- When the world is your competition, customer service is your only sustainable competitive advantage.
- Why you need to personalize the customer experience or get left behind
- With social media, why customer service is the new marketing.
- How to bust the 20 myths of customer service that hold your company back right now.
- How to develop a formula to determine the economic value each customer contributes.
- How to develop a two-way customizable customer service manifesto.
- How to develop action plans for CEOs, line managers, and customer service reps.
- How to get your best customers to stay and fire the harmful ones.
Too often, we get so wrapped up in the business plan that we forget to do the most important thing: Find customers! In the foreword of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Business Plans, Barry suggests that premeditated business should be outlawed. But even though business plans are mostly meaningless, the process of writing the plan is very worthwhile. This session describes the useful parts of the process and what can be learned by developing business metrics rather than damaging your credibility with worthless projections and overstated promises.
Conventional business wisdom tells us that there is always something to learn from failure. Not true — sometimes it just stinks! Failure that offers no real learning value becomes a big jolt to the basic business belief system. Both success and failure are simply outcomes in the life cycle of business where repetition is inevitable and overall process matters far more than any single event or outcome. Barry demonstrates that developing the resiliency to “bounce” through these cycles determines who will ultimately succeed. Using real life business examples, he shows that with true business confidence we can face our fears, let go of shame and failures, use all our choices, be better risk-takers and define our own brand of success.
