Part 6 in a series of articles from Sales Through Service: How to make customers want to buy again and again and again (because you’re so ‘great’!) by Guy Arnold
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Issue Number 4 – Dealing with challenges well
Because everyone is so busy rushing around putting out fires, there often seems to be little if any time, to look for potential new challenges coming over the horizon: so the first many people and businesses know about key and critical challenges is when they have already arrived.
This is of course very normal, but incredibly wasteful and very damaging and dangerous.
Intuitively we are frightened of challenges and tend to shy away from them; therefore, the answer to this problem is to counter intuitively seek out problems while they are small and far away … before they become big and urgent problems.
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Therefore, the key is your customer focused mission, your customers’ real needs driving your processes, your ‘go the extra inch’ sessions, and your clear measures, it makes it much easier to identify challenges and issues before they have arrived and plan to deal with them effectively using everyone’s excellence and teamwork capabilities.
Without this sort of structure and these sorts of processes in your business, it becomes more and more difficult to do this, and challenges become great hairy monsters that everyone avoids … and that eventually tear you all apart.
Just look at what happened to Kodak, General Motors, Woolworth, HMV, M&S etc.
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Next time: Issue Number 5 – Increased Customer Churn
