Because facts are limited inside the walls of your company, do one of the following at least once a month.

1. Visit a Mike’s Carwash and notice how you can feel their culture.

2. Visit a Tire Discounters and notice how they provide their service.

3. Visit a “Best Places to Work” finalist and ask them how they do it.

4. Spend 4 hours with your customer and see how they do their work.

5. Find an local INC fastest growing company and go visit them.

6. Ask your local chamber for names of companies that are exceptional. Visit them.

7. Take a front-line employee out to lunch. Ask them what you should stop or start doing.

8. Take a critical partner or vendor out for drinks. Ask how you can be better.

Do you have a Big Strategy?

Take a 5-minute Big Strategy Assessment to get a better idea how your company is positioned for profitable growth.

~Tony

You’ve read my blog on how to compete better.

On how to create industry-defining value propositions.

On how to innovate with and for your customers.

These are all big ideas. And with most big ideas, it hard to know where to start.

On May 10, I will be leading an Aileron workshop that teaches many of these concepts to you and your team. I’ll show you where to start. And how to finish.

You’ll leave the workshop a little tired but with real ideas to get the growth that you’ve always wanted. To discover the keys to earning higher margins. And to move past price as the predominate way your products and services are selected.

Can’t make the May 10th workshop? Aileron offers the workshop on a private basis where I work directly with your team on your schedule.

For more information, please visit: Aileron’s Value Proposition Workshop.

~Tony

P.S. This workshop is hard work. But I make it fun, and you will walk away with an actionable plan to get your prospects to sit up and pay attention.

Marketing has changed. It used to be standard practice to market AT your prospects. Email blasts that highlight a new product. Cold calls that do nothing but irritate. Glossy brochures that are never read.

Most of your prospects get thousands of pieces of information a week, most of which goes unnoticed. Unread.

Today’s connected world is calling for you to market WITH and FOR your potential customers. To offer them something of value without regard to their timing to buy. To connect them so they can learn from one another and from you. To show them how to do their job better. To lead them in a way so that they will look to you as the expert.

In short, create the kind of marketing that would be missed if you stopped it.

Do you have a Big Strategy?

Take a 5-minute Big Strategy Assessment to get a better idea how your company is positioned for profitable growth.

 ~Tony

How might we make our fried chicken an impulse item?  

Maybe we help convenience store owners sell our chicken and earn more money by turning a $2 chewing gum purchase into a $15 purchase.

Plus we could make it easy: free training, free samples, free marketing and minimal investment in point-of-purchase displays and fryers. Make it a no brainer.

And so we don’t have to set up a shipping business, we could partner with Tyson and Sysco to distribute our chicken and branded paper products throughout the country.  And wouldn’t it be great if we could collect our revenues from Tyson and Sysco instead of each convenience store owner? Tyson sells our chicken and then sends us a percentage of the sales.

And in just 18 years since they expanded outside Louisiana, Krispy Krunchy Chicken is now served in 2,200 convenience stores across the world and was recently voted as the best fast fried chicken in the U.S.

KKC challenged the fast food industry by starting with a really good “How might we. . . ” question. They had the courage to experiment, edit and innovate their business model.  And they were intentional about staying under the radar of Chick-fil-A or KFC.

So now it’s your turn: What is your  “How might we?” question that challenges your industry’s status quo and might just help you grow and compete better?

Do you have a Big Strategy?

Take a 5-minute Big Strategy Assessment to get a better idea how your company is positioned for profitable growth.

~Tony

It’s quite simple really. The time, money, and distraction of things that don’t matter often get in the way of things that do. Both in our businesses and in our lives. Over time, these things just creep in without a lot of fanfare.

So this week, seek out those things that just seem to be getting in your way and reinvest that time and those resources on the things that really matter to you and your business.

Do you have a Big Strategy?
Take a 5-minute Big Strategy Assessment to get a better idea how your company is positioned for profitable growth.

~Tony

Customers will pay you more if you relieve pains that are very painful and are currently going unrelieved. But all too often, we focus our customer acquisition strategies on relieving pains that are minor annoyances; nice-to-haves that are undifferentiated.

Then two things can happen:

• Our marketing messages are never seen or heard because they contain nothing of importance to prospects, or;

• Price becomes the key discussion item early in the sales cycle.

Both of these are self-inflicted wounds. They are a result of not really understanding your customer and what they are trying to achieve.

So go out and ask your customers these two simple questions (and then listen, really listen).

• Q1: How do you define success in your role? (Keep asking “what else?”)

• Q2: What gets in the way of that success? (Again, keep asking “what else?”)

What you’ll hear are the pains that your customer faces every day. You’ll hear how your customer defines success. And most of time, you’ll NOT hear the things that you thought mattered most to your customer.

 Do you have a Big Strategy?

Take a 5-minute Big Strategy Assessment to get a better idea how your company is positioned for profitable growth.

~Tony

If you’re like most businesses, 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers. It’s those 20% that help you through the tough times. It’s who your employees love to work with. And they’ve been customers for a long time.

So, if you could have imagined the consistent profit streams of that ideal customer, how much would you have paid to attract them? With what you know now, what could you have done differently to attract more of the kinds of customers that make up that 20%? What would your company look like if that 20% was 50%?

Knowing the long-term value of your ideal customers gives you the courage to allocate your resources to get more of them. It helps you organize your activities to better support them. And it helps you create more products to make them even happier.

Do you have a Big Strategy?

Take a 5-minute Big Strategy Assessment to get a better idea how your company is positioned for profitable growth.

~Tony

Your customer does not care about the specifics of your culture. They don’t care that you’ve been in business for 59 years. The seven markets you focus on? They don’t care.

But when you look at most websites or sales presentations, they typically focus on what we do and not on the needs of who the website or presentation is for.

A recent participant of one of my workshops got an email from a prospect thanking them for the meeting. They thanked them for a sales call! The only thing they did was to care about what the customer cared about. To ask questions and listen. To find out what pains are going unrelieved or what desired gains are going unrealized. They ditched their sales presentation and led with the customer. Once they understood the customer’s needs, they told them how the company could best satisfy those needs.

Seems simple, doesn’t it? It actually is simple. If you want your customers to care about you, you have to care about them.

So, go to your customer. Pull up a chair. And talk to them.

Do you have a Big Strategy?

Take a 5-minute Big Strategy Assessment to get a better idea how your company is positioned for profitable growth.

~Tony

We often get trapped into chasing many different market opportunities. Or positioning our products in a space where we have not earned the right to win. And if we don’t have a right to win, price becomes the tie breaker.

Getting on the hamster wheel in the first place often comes from copying the strategies of our competitors, matching their moves in hopes that it makes us more competitive. It doesn’t.

The better approach is to truly understand what you can be the best at that the customer really cares about and getting even better at it. Then start focusing your time and money towards your strengths as opposed to “peanut buttering” them across many activities, markets or products.  Align your organizational structure and business model to amplify your “best at” in a way your customer will clearly see and value.

Not sure how to earn the right to win in your market? Send me an email, and I will send you whitepaper that can get you started.

Need help defining your strategy?

If your strategy is not a clear as you think it could be, I encourage you to take a look at our new suite of services. From half-day workshops to multi-month engagements, we have several ways to help you and your team quickly get clarity around how you can win.

~Tony

New innovations, those non-obvious ideas or solutions that can create tremendous value, often come to us when we least expect them. Whatever happened to create that innovation probably started with something that disrupted our normal pattern of thinking: a customer said something, we saw something, we read something– and poof, hello innovation!

But waiting for inspiration to strike is an unreliable way to innovate. If you’re looking for new revenue streams or better and more innovative ways to compete, you must actually try to innovate. You must regularly disrupt your team’s normal pattern of thinking to uncover those non-obvious ideas that just might be transformational. The alternatives are ideas that are just slightly better than the status quo. And “slightly better” usually doesn’t create the value that we seek.

So, when it feels like you or your team are stuck in old patterns of thinking, try asking the following questions to unlock their brains to generate higher-value, non-obvious ideas:

• If new owners bought our company, what would they do about _______________?
• If all current [options, ideas, approaches, solutions] where taken off the table, what would we do instead?
• How would [Amazon, Tesla, IBM, etc.] solve this problem or take advantage of this opportunity?
• How might we __________________ in a way that __________________?

Intentionally shifting your perspective can have a powerful effect on idea generation. Give these questions a try this week and let me know how it goes!

Need help defining your strategy?

If your strategy is not a clear as you think it could be, I encourage you to take a look at our new suite of services. From half-day workshops to multi-month engagements, we have several ways to help you and your team quickly get clarity around how you can win.

~Tony