A Strategic Getaway

The home stretch for this calendar year is in view. It’s a great time to review YTD performance against the current strategy and it is also a good time for some sober second thought about whether the current plan is sufficiently robust for your next fiscal year.

Convention Business Travel (CBT) is worth your serious consideration.

You can take the team to a retreat destination of your choice this fall and I can help you make the experience unforgettable for you and your team and also a Smart Investment. As your facilitator and business coach, I can help you map your meeting discussions in an agenda to meet your business objectives AND with the help of our Strategic Partner at Convention Business Travel you gain access to their Agenda Builder Tool with which you will record the meeting discussions, duration and participation.  The report provided by the Agenda Builder Tool is the document you will need to attach to your expenses for Canada Revenue Agency purposes. It supports your travel expense claim and is immediately available, upon request.  Furthermore, my facilitation exercises and work assignments are all built-in and ready for us to discover together…

http://www.conventionbusinesstravel.com/FocalPoint.aspx

What could be better!  You and your team get some good planning time together. I add additional value, truly making this a Smart Investment.  Furthermore, depending upon your particular industry regulations, the FocalPoint content qualifies for Continuing Education Credits. (for more detail visit:  http://www.conventionbusinesstravel.com/Education/FocalPoint.aspx).  Talk about two birds with a single stone. But it gets even better!  You also have the opportunity for some free time that you can use to further improve team morale.

It’s easy and it’s strategic!

“It’s Too Expensive!”

How often do we get confronted with the response “it’s too expensive” when engaged in a sales conversation with a prospect? Possibly more often than we might like?

Next question. How often do we respond with either some type of justification or explanation of our stated price? Or, perhaps we simply jump to offering a price reduction. Do either of these responses sound familiar?

If we believe that the value provided by our service or product offering is fairly priced, why do we experience so much trepidation around the prospect’s response to our price? It might be because this is what generally happens to us and we haven’t determined how best to respond.

Brian Tracy (public speaker/author/educator) offers an interesting response to the price objection. He suggests that we ask “how do you mean?”. Personally, I feel that this response is a good one. In my experience, many prospects (and customers for that matter) have normalized similar products to the point that most of them have been ‘commoditized’. If this is true, then it becomes easy to understand how a prospect would decide to offer a price objection so readily and so often. After all, he/she believes the same product can be purchased elsewhere and presumably at a lower price.

The “how do you mean?” question invites a response. It puts the person who made the price objection in the position of revealing more information. That person might still complain about the price. At this point, our next question might be “compared to what?”.

Pricing can be a tricky proposition. However, some preparation on our part will help us respond to price objections.

Now, if we are able to differentiate ourselves and our offering in some clear and tangible manner, then maybe some of the pricing issues will go away.

When we dig deeper, perhaps what is ultimately too expensive is the ‘hit’ to our business due to a lack of differentiation on the part of our business in the marketplace.

To Be Different or Not (at Your Peril)

It’s easy to talk about being different.

We can all sagely nod our heads and claim that we fully understand the importance of differentiation. We all get the notion that we need to be different in our offering, in some meaningful way, if we are going to successfully attract and retain customers.

The next question is the one that seems to cause us some issue.

Do we actually implement some type of differentiation in our business?

My informal, non-scientific observations suggest that our understanding of differentiation frequently gets parked at the door. We seem to be so immersed in the day-to-day minutiae of running our businesses, that we overlook what it takes to stand out from our competitors. Prospects can buy from us; buy from our competitors or not buy at all. If we don’t focus on maintaining some type of compelling differentiation within our business, why should anyone care?

In Harvey Thompson’s book Who Stole My Customer, he claims that the top two major reasons for losing prospects or customers is lack of courtesy followed by lack of competence. These are both staff related issues. Both speak to skills that can be learned. Both suggest areas where a differentiation strategy could pay significant dividends to the business.  [learn more about Who Stole My Customer in episode 10 of BIZBUZZ]

Phil Kotler (of marketing fame) states that the company that stops getting better gets worse.

Getting better is a conscious decision taken by the business owner. It involves a focus on differentiation.  Better must, by definition, indicate a better experience for our customers.

Are you engaging in a periodic review of your differentiation strategy, in this very crowded space that we occupy?  If you’re not, beware!

 

Invest for Success

Have you ever been told that the largest single investment that you will make is in your home? I know that I’ve repeatedly heard this bit of folk lore in the past.

Why are we so quick to overlook the income that we can generate over a lifetime of productive activity versus the price of a house? I won’t dismiss the fact that houses typically cost upwards of ten years worth of income. However, ten years does not a working career make.

 For me, the much more critical investment question is “how much investment am I going to make in myself?” This is a question  about both what to invest in and how much to invest. A friend of mine once suggested that we are all our own human resource  director.  He was right then and is still right today.  Our success (or lack of it) is largely of our own choosing and making.

One of the wonderful things about walking upright on the planet is that we get to make choices. Lots of them. To me, one of the  most critical and important investment choices anyone can make is to decide to invest in oneself.

Try it.  Aim higher. You might just find that it opens new possibilities.

 

 

FocalPoint International Named Preferred Continuing Education Partner

The following is a news release that was published by Convention Business Travel on Feb 5, 2014.

Convention Business Travel and its new division, Continuing Education, now deliver FocalPoint session material and approved continuing education courses using their Agenda Builder Tool.  Members receive front of the line access to FocalPoint business coaches to facilitate session material on and off-site via an online self-directed format, online instructed format, or in-person facilitated format for continuing education credits. “Embedding the session material for Continuing Education credits adds value to our members as they grow their business and support their teams on-site.   

Lisa Patrick and John Cutler

The Continuing Education division complements our offering of providing agenda discussion packages for customized corporate retreats and supports the opportunity for our members to engage in high-impact discussion packages off-site as well.” says Lisa Patrick, Co-Founder and CEO.  John Cutler, Managing Director of Convention Business Travel and franchisee owner of FocalPoint Business Coaching Alberta continues, “Having the FocalPoint material available for professionals to earn required CE credits in an ever increasing number of industries is a game changer for FocalPoint franchisees and the brand.  Over the years I’ve had dozens of clients and prospects ask specifically if our stellar curriculum was available for continuing education credits.  Now we can say YES! It’s a big win for business owners and professionals, FocalPoint, CBT, and ultimately, the North American economy.”

“Licensing our world-class coaching session material to optimize the Convention Business Travel platform allows us to enter the Continuing Education market, a market that will generate massive exposure for our brand.   More importantly, it will enable us to support and foster growth for considerably more professionals and businesses across the continent.”says Dominic Rubino, Vice-President of FocalPoint Coaching International powered by Brian Tracy International.

Read more at

http://blog.conventionbusinesstravel.com/

 

 

A Slippery Slope

I recently had the pleasure of listening to Brian Tracy conduct a teleconference call on the subject of leadership. During his presentation, he suggested that there are two types of entrepreneurs: those that are constantly upgrading their knowledge and skills and striving to move forward and those that are coasting.  As he finished this statement, he reminded listeners that there is only one direction in which you coast.  It occurred to me that not only do you coast downhill but you would also be going backwards!

The above reminds me of the following quote from John Kenneth Galbraith:

“People are the common denominator for progress.  No progress is possible with unimproved people”

In my past corporate life, the funds needed to upgrade our knowledge and skills frequently seemed to be a discretionary line item in our budget.  I don’t recall that much energy went into discussing the skills and knowledge that our organization would need to possess in the future.  Perhaps there was a product bias that caused us to believe that our product portfolio was strong and that it was the primary source of our differentiation.  I don’t know.

With the benefit of hindsight, I would argue that a strong link must be made between training and the business objective of achieving sustainable differentiation between you and your competition.  The source of differentiation is people based and if you subscribe to Galbraith’s statement about progress, then you need to think carefully about the training required in your organization.

After all, if coasting downhill isn’t frightening enough, try doing it backwards!