Be careful, be very careful. If you have been scaling down your operation to squeeze out more profitability or to reduce costs thats fine. Its good business sense. However, it needs to be coupled with a little risk taking in developing other areas. Not recklessness, just considering opportunities that erases fierce competition.

A huge leap in your marketing effort. Creation of an attractive product offering, or development of the customer experience that knocks the socks off your customers.

Not doing both is tantamount to shooting oneself in the foot twice. All you’ve done is actually not move forward, you’ve just battened down the hatches!

Seth Godin mentions that 90% of our business will come via word of mouth or digital marketing by 2011. Couldn’t agree more. Wrote something similar myself on 3rd April. To see his full blog click on the link below:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/sixty-to-zero.html

Phew, we are almost ready to publish my next four e-books:

‘Leading whilst on your own,’ ‘Improving the customer experience,’ ‘Converting leads into customers’ and ‘Starting a business.’ It’s been an interesting journey, expertly designed by Andy Farmer.

Just need to get the technology sorted and we are there! We’ll be charging a small fee (it is small!) Keep a look out over the next couple of weeks.

The laws of supply and demand are changing. Rapidly, they are ceasing to exist and disrupting the way we have set up our company’s to do business. Corporate and small business alike. Business in the past was built on scarcity and we haven’t changed our businesses radically enough to cope.

It isn’t so long ago that to do any kind of banking, even to set up a bank account, you had to go into the bank. Now you can do it from the comfort of your own armchair. If you wanted to read a newspaper, or get the latest news, you either watched TV or wandered to the local newsagents for a paper. Now you can get news alerts to your mobile phone or read The Times online.

If you wanted to book a holiday, you used to have to go to your local travel agents and book something there. Not anymore. If you fancied a new car, you would normally test drive a model you liked, organise a loan and then drive it away a week later. Not now, a car is sold every 2 minutes on eBay!

Not surprisingly, if I wanted an Abercrombie hoodie, I would have had to go to one of the stores in the UK or make the trip to the US. Now I can buy online anytime I want 24/7. And, it’s the same for most small businesses whether you are selling marketing advice, gifts, clotted cream, kettles, wine, graphic design, IT support or garden equipment.

The only thing scarce nowadays is trust, great leadership and fabulous customer service. The very thing that makes us different, competitive and sustainable over the long term.

The challenge for all business is to shift from product orientation to developing business models based on trust, leadership and customers.

If you aren’t selling a product thats changing the world, today is tough and tomorrow is going to be even tougher. You may be one of hundreds of companies selling stuff thats found in abundance. That anyone can get from anywhere and, as a result, it’s difficult to differentiate yourself. In fact, from a product point of view it’s impossible. Sorry but it is!

How do you market yourself? How do you seem different? How do you show demonstrably how good you are? There will be something, no matter how small, but its unlikely to centre on your product and it certainly shouldn’t be your price. It’s probably your customer service or, should I say, experience.

Building relationships with your customers is your future, its your ticket to sustainability and if your product is common, it’s really all you’ve got.

People may not talk about your product anymore but they could very well talk about your customer service!

A fabulous and special piece of work showing how the new way of doing business is impacting. It gets you thinking about how you can change your business to meet the current demands of the digital age. Well worth the time and money!

That’s a frightening, even a little unsettling thought. Everywhere, it seems, people are providing the average, mediocre rubbish and its becoming steadfastly boring. All too typical, all too ‘old age.’ Surely a little imagination and commitment wouldn’t go amiss. The customer experience age is not an evolution, it’s a revolution.

There is nothing like a bank holiday to understand this. You can go into any restaurant, cafe and store and experience the utterly inert and uninterested service one can possibly get. Frankly its astonishing! Or perhaps, expectations are just too high? It’s a slap in the face, not just for consumers but for all of those people advocating a new stage in customer interaction.

Where are the jaw dropping, wow, amazing experiences when spending a small fortune in a restaurant? Complacency really has kicked in even in these strange times. Is it too scary to provide a service that exemplifies the changing expectations of our consumer? We are going through the single most significant change in consumer behaviour right now, but for most small businesses, that fact hasn’t even registered.

It’s been said many times before that being good enough ain’t good enough anymore. Where does that leave you? How does that make you different? How does that enable you to attract attention?

Anyway what is it that we fear about our customers that we can’t just make it to the next stage?

It’s a point of difference from the customers point of view. It asks the following questions:

1. How different is this product/service from the other suppliers I could buy from?

2. Why is it different and do I believe what I am being told?

3. Does it reinforce my values and the feeling I want to get from buying this product and service?

4. Is it going to remove the anxiety I feel when buying?

This point of difference clearly demonstrates why you clearly stand out from the crowd. Why you have attained the reputation you market and provides a compelling reason why your customer should buy from you again and again.

This point is communicated by all the people working in your company and experienced by your customer at every stage of your interaction with them. Those companies not effectively doing this are the ones struggling to rise above the competition.

Found a great site that posts short videos on business development techniques. Some of the tips are down to earth, practical and definately add value. Take a look at:

http://www.yourbusinesschannel.com

There are a few free ones which are short but useful. To see over 600 you have to sign up and pay.

My latest article on how we focus on customer satisfaction rather than employee satisfaction first.

http://EzineArticles.com/?id=2012809