What one item about your chosen career or business would you have changed if someone could wave a magic wand and make a quick change? Would you like them to give you a more straightforward way to contact qualified prospects? Do you want those potential customers and your present clients to see you as even more of a professional—possibly even an “expert”—in your industry?
Even if you may be competent at creating presentations now, wouldn’t it be nice to be even better? Maybe you want to be better at addressing objections or closing deals. Or do you value repeat business more?
What if your existing clients believed you were the only person or company who could efficiently meet their specialized, particular, and personalized needs? Or how about recommendations? Choose the top client you currently have. How about having more contacts who resemble them than you can reasonably handle? Which one thing, if anything, would you change to become a better, happier, and more successful businessperson?
How to Be More Effective
There is no denying that times are changing more quickly than ever. The people using your products and services have become more educated and aware while technology has advanced and competition has become fiercer.
Furthermore, given the wide range of options your customers or clients have for similar goods and services from various businesses as well as the people they choose to work with, it makes sense that the better you are at meeting their needs, the more significant advantage you can command and the greater your potential for success.
To be genuinely effective and thrive in the market today, you must constantly alter, improve, adjust, and modernize your problem-solving, selling, and customer service skills in addition to your marketing strategies and overall business operations.
You’ve probably heard this before, but it has been said that:
“People care more about how much you care than how much you know,” the saying goes.
Helping prospects and customers find suitable, economical, and clever solutions to their difficulties is one of the most powerful and effective methods to demonstrate your concern for them.
Exposure to fresh concepts
Exposing yourself to fresh, tried-and-true, in-the-field ideas, concepts, and strategies that have succeeded for businesspeople like you is one way to achieve this. After becoming familiar with new knowledge and images, it will be up to you to choose which concepts may be most effectively applied to your business situation and how you will use them to serve your clients and prospects better.
Your objective should be to learn at least some of the methods that professionals and businesspeople who have already achieved success in their fields use rather than to try and become an expert in marketing. You should seek strategies that are quick to put into practice and can start utilizing immediately. It could take a little longer to prepare for other concepts. There will also be some that might not be appropriate for you or your business. That’s alright. It’s impossible for everything you encounter to be completely applicable to every circumstance in your organization.
Your time, effort, and money will be well spent if you frequently receive just one or two good, actionable suggestions you can implement into your business operation that make a difference.
How We Retain Information
Having a novel concept is one thing, but what you do with it once you have one is equally crucial to its success. According to studies on memory, you recall:
10% of the information you read, 22% of the information you hear, 37% of the information you see, and up to 86% of the information you see, hear and do.
So, the likelihood that an idea will be remembered is half as great when it is heard but not put into practice. With that idea in mind, it is crucial to realize that for any information you come across to benefit you honestly, it must be put to use in addition to being read. In other words, it has to be felt or done. It will therefore require some effort on your part.
The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pheffer and Robert L. Sutton notes that 1,700 new business books are written each year, $60 billion is spent on training, $43 billion on consultants, and 80,000 MBA grads leave our colleges. Nonetheless, the majority of firms continue to function mainly in the same manner on a daily basis.
This demonstrates that knowledge without application is equivalent to knowledge itself. Knowing something is not enough. With the information you possess, action must be taken. Hence, rather than dismissing new ideas as irrelevant when proven to succeed in business, even if that business is completely unrelated to yours, thoroughly consider them and decide…
Will the way this concept is presented work for me?
Will ANY portion of it work for me if not?
How can I modify or adapt it to make it work differently?
How quickly can I implement this or a portion of this concept in my company?
What kind of resources will I require to put this concept into practice?
What would it cost me to put it into practice?
What will it cost if I don’t put it into practice?
What is likely to be my reward if I put it into practice?
How can I apply this concept to different parts of my business?
The secret is to act. Not the ideas themselves, but their application is the source of all success.
TopLine Business Solutions, an international consulting organization with more than 1,000 consultants in more than 30 countries, was founded and led by Martin Howey. Martin is renowned as “The Consultant’s Consultant”—the guy that top business consultants worldwide look to for training and advice. Martin is among the finest authorities on marketing, business development, and profitability solutions. To learn more about starting a business or working in marketing and industry.
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