THE secret of our success

I don't usually write this kind of thing (so please forgive any bad grammar, I'm no blogger!) - but it's our 20th year this year so a good time for reflection. 

One question I'm often asked is "what is the secret to our success?" - and my response never changes. I tell new recruits (and anyone who asks) that I could say it was brilliant strategy, amazing leadership, perfect timing, hiring the best people... but I don't. 

What I actually tell them is simply "we do a good job" and in the event that we don't, we care, we fix it and we get better. And here's why... through maintaining standards and striving to create the best possible solutions for our clients, karma gifts us with recognition when our clients succeed. When we outperform a market, when our work enables a business to leapfrog a competitor or gain an enviable market position, when a client wins an award - all of these things result in positive PR and exposure for OUR business. 

Anyone who's ever worked with me will understand that the old ABC's of selling isn't effective in the new world. With information so easily available and in the palm of your hand, gone are the days of hoodwinking the now educated buyer. Up-selling has been replaced by up-serving, and in order to build meaningful relationships with your customers you need to really go the extra mile, see things from their perspective and treat their business as you would your own. And in doing so, we're empowered and driven to treat each project as if our own success depends on it's success. In short, if WE do a remarkable job - it will get talked about (remarkable by definition).  

The secret to creating a great business is to invest in remarkable delivery...

Positively remarkable service delivery is the most important step in the entire sales process. A sales manager once told me "we sell the sizzle, not the sausage" but we live in a world whereby if the sausage is no good, the business is destined to fail.

Before the internet and social media, research shows that an unhappy customer would tell 11 people about their experience. In the new world, an unhappy customer might have 500+ friends on Facebook, 100's of Twitter followers or 10k Linkedin connections. And it's not just a flash in the pan status update you need to worry about, a negative review of your business could be indexed on Google and come back to haunt you for years. If you have a truly bad product or service, no amount of marketing budget will carry the load for poor performance. 

But it's not all doom and gloom. Conversely, if people see your business as remarkable for POSITIVE reasons, all of the above factors start to work in your favour. If people truly love what you do, and you can genuinely help elevate their business, improve their life and help them achieve their goals they can tell 1000's of people; the pay-off for being positively remarkable is immense. 

In order to build your business, you need almost all of your clients to talk about you in a positive way. By no means is any business perfect, you can't please all of the people all of the time. But by focussing on cooking amazing sausages, wowed customers create the sizzle for you. Your marketing team is comprised of our clients, your long-term lead-gen strategy is gaining happier clients through striving to be remarkable at every touchpoint.

In order to achieve this and become remarkable you need to ask yourself the following; 

• Will people speak positively about you after the sale?
• Will they share your story?
• Would they recommend your business to their friends?
• Is your brochure worth passing on to a colleague?
• Is your service worth tweeting about?
• Would I upload a photo of your product to instagram?
• Would someone make a youtube video review about their experience?
• Would your staff tell their friends they should work for your company?
• Would your competitor say they wanted to be like you?
• Would newspapers write positive stories about you?
• Would this piece of work you've just completed win an award?

if you're answering YES to all of these questions, then you can probably stop reading now - you're on the right track and just need to keep on doing what you're doing. Well done! If you're answering no to any of the questions, read on...

To flip that around - think about every touchpoint in your business and ask yourself the question; is this positively remarkable? (i.e is it so good that people would talk about it?)...

• Your website
• Brochures
• Marketing Materials
• People
• Product
• Premises
• Adverts

List every touchpoint that a prospect, customer, supplier, partner and employee has with your business and scrutinise it point by point. Be brutally honest with yourself, and strive for excellence by revisiting the process periodically. Your business will get stronger day by day, week by week, month by month and year on year. If you surround your product with remarkable touch points you'll be unstoppable.

The worlds fastest growing companies are spending 5-15% of their revenue on R&D, innovation and training, they're not spending it on marketing campaigns like they used to. They're investing it in making their customer experience or product positively remarkable; the best product wins* - if you commit to build the best product and keep investing in it, you're playing a winning strategy. 

Embrace the challenge, face that discomfort of how much there is still to be done because that discomfort is your friend; it's what's keeping the wannabes and posers out of your league. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. If were simple, there wouldn't be any pay-off. If creating value were straight forward, it wouldn't be valuable.

In short, strive for excellence. If you've got high standards invest in maintaining them, and if you haven't, invest in building them.

If you're a member of the VS team and reading this, take credit in knowing it's your hard work that continues to enable us to be remarkable. Well done, and keep it up!

Hope you found this useful - if you're not achieving massive results, and would like to discuss this subject further (or find out what's stopping you) just drop me a message I'd be happy to provide experience based guidance.

What do you think?

I’d love to know your thoughts. Do you agree or disagree? Let me know why in the comments box below...

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