Business World Info

Most salespeople are encouraged to add more customers. They often receive commissions based on the volume they deliver. Change those commissions to reflect customer profitability, and you’ll see quite a change in which customers your salespeople go after.

Unless you support those sales efforts with the right offerings and marketing, however, you won’t make as much progress as you might. What should you do?

You want to grow. So you direct the salespeople to make calls twice as frequently on their accounts. Not much happens.

Continue reading ‘Which New Customers Should You Try to Attract?’ »

Have you ever needed to pick up your laundry but had no time to do so? It can get pretty frustrating wearing dirty clothes while you wait for a chance to pick up the clean ones.

One dry cleaner in our area provided a great solution by putting in a self-service kiosk where you could drop off or pick up your laundry 24 hours a day. It’s quite impressive and saves lots of embarrassment.

Such a business model innovation can make a business much more profitable by extending the hours you can assist your customers without adding much cost.

Continue reading ‘Be More Available to Your Customers’ »

My first trip on a German autobahn was an experience I’ll never forget. There’s no speed limit on these well-engineered and flawlessly maintained roads. Many people drive high-powered Porsches, BMWs, and Mercedes that are designed to almost fly over these routes.

The CEO of a prominent German company loaned me his personal car and driver for a quick jaunt to the airport. Thank God for that favor: Otherwise, I would have been driving and I had never driven faster than 120 m.p.h. before.

On the autobahn driving at 120 is like poking along at 55 m.p.h. on an American freeway. We passed that speed within a few seconds. Before long, the speedometer topped 250 kilometers an hour (roughly 160 m.p.h.). It was exciting, but that initial reaction began to turn into fear.

Continue reading ‘Get Ready to Expand Your Number of Customers by 21 Times’ »

I acted and my action made me wise. –Thom Gunn

If beneficiaries, customers, and users can help themselves, costs can fall while satisfaction rises. For instance, some stores now offer the experience of being a potter. Everything you need to make and decorate a pot is there, and your artistic creation can be carried away to use after it has been fired and cooled by the store’s staff.

Selling you a decorated pot simply wouldn’t be the same. This experiential approach is also a lot cheaper and less time-consuming than taking a pottery course. With plenty of written directions at the work stations and people you can ask for help, customers find it easy and pleasant to create pots.

But many organizations start with the idea of people helping themselves to reduce costs and fail to execute well. Why? Setting up workable do-it-yourself conditions is hard to do.

Continue reading ‘Add Desirable Do-It-Yourself Features to Lower Costs and Add Customers’ »

The motto of many organizations is “Customers come first.” Read or hear that motto, and you might assume that an organization is bending over backwards to make life simple and easy for customers. But that’s rarely the case. Such mottos are usually lip service rather than commitments that are enacted in reality.

Consider how so-called customer service usually works online. A Web site decides to become more secure by requiring you to select a more complex log-in name and password.

If you try to make this new selection on a Web site and make a mistake, you are usually advised to try again. Make too many unsuccessful attempts, and the site shuts you out.

Continue reading ‘Increased Security May Make Customers Flee’ »

The General Motors approach to automation has been inflexible. It did optimize costs if you made tremendous numbers of exactly the same vehicle. If you needed to change over to offer vehicle variations, the robots needed a lot of tending.

Toyota countered that challenge by automating relatively stable processes such as the link between a customer’s order in a dealer showroom and the parts order process, while not automating that which would be desirable to change quickly such as providing any extra features a customer wanted.

Flexibility is an important point for two reasons. First, customer satisfaction soars when customers can have just the features they want without waiting. The traditional assembly line produces lots of standard cars that the manufacturer and dealers then try to sell at the best price. Only a small number of customers want exactly the features a particular vehicle has.

Continue reading ‘For Low Costs and Happy Customers Create Flexible Automation’ »

Here’s a better idea: Encourage beneficiaries, customers, and users to decide how much automation they want to use . . . and when they want to use that automation. Customize your automation to uniquely fit each beneficiary, customer, and user in the same way that Dell customizes its computers for each customer.

Let’s consider how this principle might work for credit card customers. Some customers would like to be able to look up details of their account on the Internet. Others would like to receive a standard oral report customized to their interests by making a toll-free telephone call. Some would like to be able to call someone who can answer their questions. A few might want to receive e-mails that provide updated account information every time there was a transaction, while others might simply want a daily e-mail update.

Whatever those individual preferences are, the customer’s desires are bound to change. The process to go from one set to another set of solutions needs to be very fast and simple.

Continue reading ‘Let Customers Adjust Automation to Fit Their Needs’ »

Every investor dreams of making his/her business the best it can possibly be. A business man would like to create a business that will survive all harsh conditions raging from economical hardships, cut-throat competition to spontaneous changes in customer tastes and trends.

The process of enlarging ones business is two-fold. The first part involves increasing the output of the firm while the other part is to seek to increase the demands of the company’s products or services. This will work to enlarge the business as each extra unit of product produced is sold off easily. Both the physical size and market share size of the business will thus have increased. Continue reading ‘Business Development Policies That Ensure Success of a Business Enterprise’ »