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There are several factors to succeed in business, but one of the absolute most important ones is to keep your customers. It’s expensive to find new customers. It’s significantly more expensive to attract and build up trust with new customers as compared to selling additional products or services to existing customers.
Jeffrey Gitomer wrote an article on the reasons why customers fire you. It’s an excellent article that’s a must-read if you wish to keep your existing customers. Jeffrey Gitomer is a New York Times best-selling author and famous speaker in the area of sales. Here’s the article copied in it’s entirety:
You’re Fired! By the Real Boss—Your Customer
by Jeffrey Gitomer
Presto! Every customer returns for a second dose of whatever you sell or serve. Is that the reality? Or have you sold them once, and then got fired (and now they’re being served by your competition)?
You see, people don’t stop doing business; they just stop doing business with you. Each of us has lost a customer or ten in our business career. Why? Lots of reasons. We all know what to do; the problem is we just don’t do it.
Being fired is not just maddening and frustrating, it’s also an opportunity—an opportunity to figure out why and fix the problem. Here’s a list of 14.5 reasons why customers fire you:
1. Showing no genuine or personal interest. Impersonal service. Insincere people. Commission (only) hungry salespeople.
2. Poor response. Take too long to get back to a customer or service a customer and they will find someone else. People will even sacrifice quality for speed.
3. Unavailability. People or product. Formula: “Can’t get the stuff I need or can’t reach the person I want, equals go someplace else.
4. Hard to do business or order. Long waits on hold. People who are not product-knowledgeable. Computer voice attendant rather than a real human being to answer the phone, and going through three minutes of crap only to get lost or put on eternal hold. Bye-bye.
5. Unfriendly person on the front line. It never ceases to amaze me how many angry people serve on the front line of multimillion-dollar businesses. The first rule of every corporate policy in America should be one word: “smile.”
6. Poor or rude collection practices. This is a big one. Taking away someone’s dignity when collecting a bill is common practice in business. Most have never taken the time to point out to collection people that keeping the customer is as important as collecting the money.
7. Overpromising. Customers are like elephants—they never forget. You overpromise and under-deliver, you lose.
8. Inadequate capability to handle the customer’s problem. Poor product knowledge, or too many service problems and not enough service people. Double jeopardy if you make a lame excuse about it.
9. Too eager to do more business (too pushy, too much pressure). No one wants to buy more from a high-pressure person. Help, don’t sell. Create an atmosphere of buying (asking about them), not telling about you. Don’t be a pest—have a solid reason for following up.
10. Poor professional package or image. Customer’s want to feel that the quality of their business will be reflected by the quality of those they deal with. How’s your image? How’s your package?
11. Dumb excuses about why you “can’t.” Customers are calling because they want help. They want help with their situation, not to hear a bunch of bull-oney about yours.
12. Nickel and diming. Charging for every incidental, like copies, phone calls and interest on late payments, puts a bad taste in the customer’s mouth.
13. Poor product quality. No matter how much people pay, they expect a quality product. If you’re selling price and sacrificing quality, eventually you will lose the business to someone with opposite thinking.
14. Poor service delivery. Everyone expects fast service that’s right the first time. How’s yours? How’s the attitude of those who deliver it?
14.5 Poor training. Don’t fire the problem employee. Shoot the person who trained them. Poor or ineffective training is the root of customer dissatisfaction. Success tactic: Make “reasons for customer dissatisfaction” the basis for a new training program.
What happens to angry customers? From a variety of reliable research, here is a compilation of interesting statistics.
• 91% who leave will never return.
• 96% who leave won’t tell you the real reason they left.
• 80% will do business with you again if their problem is handled quickly, and to their complete satisfaction.
• When the incident is real bad and they leave, stories about what happened will be retold for years.
Interestingly, most of the time when we lose (get fired by) a customer, it always seems to be their fault. I’d love to have a dollar for every customer who was wrongly blamed. Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s easy to assess who’s to blame—just look in the mirror. Your mirror.
I’ll leave you with two questions: What are you doing to build loyalty and ensure repeat purchases? Are your customers resigning or re-signing?
If you put forth the effort and expense to attract a customer initially, make the effort to keep them. It’ll save you significant amounts of money and time, and may just be the difference between your business succeeding or not. Until next time…
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We as people spend a considerable amount of time in the pursuit of happiness. But, is that really a valid expenditure of such a valuable commodity such as time? Darren Hardy, publisher of SUCCESS Magazine doesn’t seem to think so. He recently wrote an excellent article discussing the pursuit of happiness. In the article he gives several reasons why our focus should be on pursuing something else, something much more fulfilling in the long-run.
Click here to read Darren Hardy’s article on the pursuit of happiness.
For those of you who don’t know who Darren Hardy is, besides being the publisher of SUCCESS Magazine, he’s also a world-renowned motivational and personal development speaker, coach, and mentor. He’s also the author of the book The Compound Effect, which is one of the best personal development books I’ve ever read.
Click here to read more about The Compound Effect.
Before you click out of here, leave a comment below and let me know what you thought of Darren’s article. Also, take a minute and share this post below via the social media buttons. Thanks! Until next time…
Adversity is something that we all face, but how do you react to it? Adversity comes in many different forms and has different faces. Sometimes it can be a crushing blow while other times it is something on the surface. Ultimately it’s how you react to adversity that defines your future. A while back I wrote that we all have to overcome adversity. Today I want to discuss
How You React To Adversity
It’s no secret that we all face adversity at some point in our journey, usually multiple times. Jim Rohn says, “The same winds blow on us all, the winds of disaster, the winds of opportunity, the winds of change.” Even if you try to hide and not take any chances in life, which I personally don’t think is living a good life, you’re still going to have adversity dropped in your lap. And you’re going to have to respond to it, even if your response is to do nothing and let it dominate your life. But, it’s often not easy to move past these tough situations.
Adversity can be extremely difficult to deal with. It is sometimes depressing or extremely frustrating. Other times, the adversity can be absolutely crushing. Regardless, the key is to pick up the pieces, no matter how difficult, and push forward. The adversity doesn’t define us, our reaction to it does.
If we all face adversity in our lives, then it’s our response to adversity that separates us all from each other. Some choose to wallow in the pain and frustration of adversity, believing that life is unfair. Others choose to learn whatever lesson they can, pick up the pieces, and move on. Success lies in moving forward, even when everybody else says it’s time to give up. That’s why so few people attain true success. Most people aren’t willing to fight through the really tough times.
Don’t be most people. You’re going to face tough times. Adversity will find you no matter how hard you try to avoid it. Your response to adversity will be the defining factor in your life. Choose to push past adversity and achieve. Choose success. Until next time…
Before you go, take a minute, slide to the right, and leave your information. I’ll send you my course on the 7 principles of leadership for free. I’m sure there’s something in there you can use to help you along on your journey to greatness. Also, take a second and share this post with others via the social media buttons below. Thanks!
As humans, we have the ability to do remarkable things. We have the ability to make sense out of chaos, to triumph from certain defeat, and to turn our lives around even when it appears that all is lost. It’s amazing what humans can accomplish.
I found an article by Jim Rohn in my archives discussing how humans are capable of such remarkable things. It was printed in it’s entirety in the newsletter which means I can’t link to the full article, so I’ve copied it below. It’s an excellent article that truly shows what humans are capable of.
Doing the Remarkable by Jim Rohn
When it comes to meeting and conquering the negativity in your life, here is a key question: What can you do, starting today, that will make a difference? What can you do during economic chaos? What can you do when everything has gone wrong? What can you do when you’ve run out of money, when you don’t feel well and it’s all gone sour? What can you do?
Let me give you the broad answer first. You can do the most remarkable things, no matter what happens. People can do incredible things, unbelievable things, despite the most impossible or disastrous circumstances.
Here is why humans can do remarkable things: because they are remarkable. Humans are different than any other creation. When a dog starts with weeds, he winds up with weeds. And the reason is because he’s a dog. But that’s not true with human beings. Humans can turn weeds into gardens.
Humans can turn nothing into something, pennies into fortune, and disaster into success. And the reason they can do such remarkable things is because they are remarkable. Try reaching down inside of yourself; you’ll come up with some more of those remarkable human gifts. They’re there, waiting to be discovered and employed.
With those gifts, you can change anything for yourself that you wish to change. And I challenge you to do that because you can change. If you don’t like how something is going for you, change it. If something isn’t enough, change it. If something doesn’t suit you; change it. If something doesn’t please you, change it. You don’t ever have to be the same after today. If you don’t like your present address, change it—you’re not a tree!
If there is one thing to get excited about, it’s your ability to make yourself do the necessary things, to get a desired result, to turn the negative into success. That’s true excitement.
You have the ability to do remarkable things, if you’re willing. Make the effort and you can accomplish anything you desire. Until next time…
Before you go, take a minute, slide to the right, and leave your information. I’ll send you my course on the 7 principles of leadership for free. I’m sure there’s something in there you can use to help you along on your journey to greatness. Also, take a second and share this post with others via the social media buttons below. Thanks!
Motivation is an important piece of success. Motivation is a driving force that causes you to take action moving you towards success. But, motivation must come from within. Yesterday I covered the importance of empowerment. Today I want to discuss how
Motivation Relates To Success
Motivation is a driving force that pushes you to take action. It causes you to keep pushing forward, even when things aren’t going as planned. It drives you when you’d rather be doing something else. Motivation is the fuel for your business. But, motivation doesn’t come from external sources.
Motivation comes from inside you. It comes from the energy and passion you have for whatever you’ve undertaken. No matter how hard I or anyone else tries, we can’t motivate you. The only thing we can do, if you have the internal drive, is find the hot buttons that energize that drive. The key to motivation, though, is to love what you do.
By truly loving what you do, you will bring a sincere passion to the endeavor. If you don’t love your undertaking, you’ll eventually wear down. Darren Hardy says that to be successful in life, you must prefer to be working on your endeavor instead of sitting on the beach or playing golf, or any other of a number of non-productive activities. If you’d rather be doing those other activities, you need to find a new field to pursue.
Motivation comes from within. You have to motivate yourself in order to be successful. Choose to pursue something you’re passionate about, and motivating yourself will be easy. Until next time…
Before you go, take a minute, slide to the right, and leave your information. I’ll send you my course on the 7 principles of leadership for free. I’m sure there’s something in there you can use to help you along on your journey to greatness. Also, take a second and share this post with others via the social media buttons below. Thanks!
Empowerment is such an important aspect of building a successful team. For the team to thrive and grow, and eventually reach it’s maximum potential, the leader must empower the members of the team to be creative and innovative, to be problem solvers. Through empowerment, the leader provides the members of the team with a positive environment that gives them the best chance of success.
While reviewing my newsletter archives, I found this article by Denis Waitley. The article really digs in to the importance of empowerment. The full article was included in the newsletter, so I’ve copied it in full below. Enjoy the article.
Power From Empowerment by Denis Waitley
A good way to think of leadership is the process of freeing your team members to do the best work they possibly can. Like NBA basketball coach Phil Jackson.
Jackson, who moved from the record-setting Chicago Bulls to the Los Angeles Lakers, says his principal task is creating an environment in which his players can flourish. When communicating with his championship teams, Jackson convinced them that they had the talent to win championships, and that the main goal of the coach was to free them to use that talent.
Today’s business team members say they want, more than anything else, the autonomy to do their jobs without the boss’s interference. In the new century, it’s already clear that the CEOs of our best-run companies believe that the more power leaders have, the less they should use.
The job of the team leader is to set a mission, decide upon a strategic direction, achieve the necessary cooperation, delegate authority–and then let people innovate. To do that we all could take a hint from the late football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. Before his retirement as one of the leading coaches in college football history at Alabama, Bryant observed:
“I’m just a plowhand from Arkansas, but I’ve learned how to put and hold a team together. I’ve learned how to lift some individuals up and how to calm others down, until finally they’ve got one heartbeat together, as a team. To do that, there are just three things I’d ever have to say: If anything went wrong, I did it. If it went semi-good, then we did it. If anything went real good, then you did it! That’s really all it takes to get other people to win for you.”
The key to authentic leadership is to listen to your followers, and then open the door for them to lead themselves. The secret is empowerment. The main incentive is genuine caring and recognition.
The five most important words a leader can speak are: “I am proud of you.”
The four most important are: “What is your opinion?”
The three most important are: “If you please.”
The two most important are: “Thank You.”
And the most important single word of all is: “You!”
Empower your team members. By doing so, you’ll give them the freedom to excel and reach their maximum potential both individually and as a team. Your success stems from their success. Learn to empower those around you and you’re sure to reach the greatness you’re destined for! Until next time…
Before you go, take a minute, slide to the right, and leave your information. I’ll send you my course on the 7 principles of leadership for free. I’m sure there’s something in there you can use to help you along on your journey to greatness. Also, take a second and share this post with others via the social media buttons below. Thanks!
Contact info for Denis Waitley:
Email: customersupport@deniswaitley.
Phone: 877-929-0439 (toll free).
Web-Form: http://www.yoursuccessstore.
Personal development is absolutely critical to success. I’ve discussed it many times. In my last post, Use Different Resources For Personal Development To Gain Perspective, I recommended using different resources for your personal development to become well-rounded and gain perspectives from various successful people. Today I want to use an article by the great Jim Rohn to reiterate just how important personal development is.
This article discusses the true value in personal development, and emphasizes a very important point. You have to become more to get more. That’s a powerful statement when you really sit back and think about it. But, there’s several other important nuggets of wisdom in the article, also.
Click here to read Jim Rohn’s article, The Miracle of Personal Development.
Jim Rohn provides such a unique perspective, and is such a master of language, that he has an uncanny ability to teach vitally important principles in an easy to understand way. Enjoy the article. Until next time…,
Before you go, take a minute, slide to the right, and leave your information. I’ll send you my course on the 7 principles of leadership for free. I’m sure there’s something in there you can use to help you along on your journey to greatness. Also, take a second and share this post with others via the social media buttons below. Thanks!
Personal development is extremely important in all aspects of life. It’s a critical element if you wish to attain a high level of success. But, it’s also important to utilize different resources for personal development to gain valuable perspective. Yesterday I linked to the second part of an article on the 5 characteristics of personal mastery. Today I want to discuss the
Importance Of Utilizing Different Sources For Personal Development
It’s no secret that personal development is extremely important. There’s a whole industry that’s thriving because people understand that they must grow personally in order to achieve their maximum potential. And it is absolutely critical to the journey towards success. We all have to learn new skills when we start out on a new endeavor. But, don’t just focus on one source.
It’s all too easy to find one source of quality information and latch onto it. It may be that you like a certain source’s presentation style or the quality of information. But, there’s a ton of different sources out there that can provide invaluable information that can help you grow. And nobody knows everything. By finding different sources, you’ll expose yourself to new information and presentation styles. You never know when you’re going to find that one nugget of information that will be the one missing key that unlocks your true potential. Personally, I’ve read books, newsletter articles, blog posts, listened to cds, and watched videos from Jim Rohn, Darren Hardy, Brian Tracy, Chris Widener, Dr. John Maxwell, and so on. And if you’ll notice, I’ve mentioned several different mediums in order to hear the messages in different ways and improve my retention of the material.
I have recently found a new source of training materials. The Prosperity Factory is a new online resource developed by blogging giant Ty Tribble. Ty has designed The Prosperity Factory to provide fresh, new training videos every two weeks. All of the videos are exclusive interviews conducted by Ty with industry giants in the business, online marketing, network marketing, affiliate marketing, and direct sales industries. Here are a couple of examples:
Click here to see Ty’s interview with a 6 figure MONTHLY income earner, Ben Sturtevant.
The Prosperity Factory is even set up for you to utilize the training videos to attract leads to your business. It’s another advantage of this resource. I’ve spoken personally to Ty, and his future vision for The Prosperity Factory is big, really big. It’s on a path to be a top-flight resource for personal development. But don’t take my word for it.
Click here to watch a 5-minute video by Ty Tribble himself on The Prosperity Factory.
Personal development is critical to your continued success. And it’s important to find different sources to learn from. But the reward is worth it. Keep learning and keep growing and you’ll achieve the greatness you’re destined for. Until next time…
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All of the most successful people in the world have 5 specific characteristics in common. They all have mastered these 5 characteristics, which has led to their success.
This a follow-up to yesterday’s post, The 5 Characteristics Of Personal Mastery Part 1. In that post I linked to an article by Darren Hardy, the publisher of SUCCESS Magazine. Today I want to take you to the second half of Darren Hardy’s article discussing the 5 traits of personal mastery.
Click here to read the second half of Darren Hardy’s article.
This article series is an absolute homerun in describing what it takes, the amount of work involved, to be successful. I especially like the Michelangelo quote at the end of the article, but I won’t spoil it. You have to read the article to see it.
You have it in you to be successful, but it involves a ton of work, and you have to master the 5 specific characteristics to do so. But, in the end, the effort is well worth it. Until next time…
Before you go, take a minute, slide to the right, and leave your information. I’ll send you my course on the 7 principles of leadership for free. I’m sure there’s something in there you can use to help you along on your journey to greatness. Also, take a second and share this post with others via the social media buttons below. Thanks!
There are 5 specific characteristics that all of the ultra-successful people have in common. These traits are common across the board from CEOs of major corporations to Olympic athletes. Focusing on your personal development in these 5 key areas will propel you to great success.
Here’s the first part of a two-part series written by Darren Hardy, editor of SUCCESS Magazine and author of the book The Compound Effect. In the series he discusses these 5 distinct traits of the successful.
Click here to read Darren Hardy’s article.
This is an excellent article that not only discusses the traits of the ultra-successful, but also shows you how you can work to improve yourself in each of these areas. Tomorrow we’ll take a look at the second part. Until next time…
Before you go, take a minute, slide to the right, and leave your information. I’ll send you my course on the 7 principles of leadership for free. I’m sure there’s something in there you can use to help you along on your journey to greatness. Also, take a second and share this post with others via the social media buttons below. Thanks!
