Redshots Executive Coaching and Mentoring

executive and business mentoring

This Summit e-zine provides you with news and views from Redshots, November/December 2007

Hit the ground running in 2008 with our complimentary review

I’m reminded of one of the movie moguls who was told that his latest script had too many old clichés in it to be successful. “Well, get me some new clichés then!” he roared. Well, one I hear a lot is “If you keep doing what you are doing, how do you think you will get a different result?” To make the best of 2008, then something different has to happen before it even starts. To that end I am offering 5 readers a special 30 minutes Power Review in return for a donation to charity. I will work with you to:

a) Determine if your approach can be fine tuned to really get working for you
b) Size up just how effective your sales proposition is
c) Make input on your 2008 calendar to jump start performance.

The donation can be to a charity of your choice.

If interested, please email me at anthony@redshots.co.uk for more details and conditions.

Tip of the month – Think “Experience” not “Service”

(even if you are a hard-nosed lawyer or a no-nonsense entrepreneur)

We are still amazed when people think that “good service” is enough to get our business. We – and you I expect - expect good service as a given. What makes the difference is whether we think we will get a great customer experience. Technical competence does not bring in repeat business. Results alone do not guarantee repeat business. Customers and clients return when they have an emotional connection to your business – even if it’s law. Winning business people understand this and make sure that everything lines up to do that. It is no accident that my children get their first work experience at companies that do (think well-known names in the entertainment business). What will happen if you continue to give good service when your competitors “get” that it’s about giving great client experience?

From working with successful companies and practices we know producing great customer/client experience requires a step or two up. It will not happen if you are running your business like a loosely connected collection of technically competent people occasionally subjected to “team-building”. How will you fare when your competition has their people acting as a community of leaders? The CEO of a professional services firm commented to me that there are many practices run as a collection of sole practitioners rather than a true “partnership”. Privately many professional firms’ CEOs tell us their key worry is that employees will not reinforce the brand messages from pre-sales in the actual service delivery.

People are smart, so recruiting and retaining talent* will not be easy if employees and clients are dealt with in a way that does not recognise these key trends.

*The 2006 CIPD Annual Report on Talent suggests 8 out of 10 employers have trouble with key staff retention.

Feature – Should I be worried about social online networking?

Report claims online networking will peak in 5 years

In the last two years there has been explosive growth in online social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, and hundreds more. Companies and firms are banning staff from using these during work hours, and introducing restrictions on what is portrayed on these sites by employees to protect the good name of the firm. Rumours abound of people denied jobs or promotion because of what they naively posted in their online social site profiles.

A report by Datamonitor suggests that everything will peak and fall off in the next five years. So is it worth getting too worked up about these sites? Can you work out the next five years and hope you don’t have to find out about this stuff? Well, actually our opinion is no. Ignoring online social networking may damage your wealth. Like many technologies and trends, the hype and inflated claims create scepticism in many professionals’ minds, and they reject it all out of hand. There is a saying about babies and bath water. The internet is not going to disappear. New technologies such as Web 2.0 are actually creating more of a change than the initial web. The other thing that is different is that new people coming onto the work force and marketplace use these sites as a matter of normal extension of their personal experience. Older professionals even now are starting to use Google to get background on the people they deal with. Younger people go straight to a networking site to see how they are connected with and get a flavour before deciding to meet. To them your lack of presence or the right presence is like showing up without your business card!

Older professionals make the mistake of going straight into selling mode, the give up – or are instructed to give up - after a few weeks because nothing appears to happen. That is because they are using the technology the wrong way. There are always 4 or 5 stages in getting to a sale, such as building awareness, building credibility, establishing need and so on. The temptation is to go straight from Stage 1 to Stage 4 with this new technology. This is something you should never do in any kind of selling activity whether online or face to face – even when the prospect actually invites you to! When it comes down to it, for many that will still mean a face to face meeting at some stage but that may be with someone you would otherwise never have gotten to know. Many practice and business owners would love a business based on referrals, on collaboration, useful feedback, alliances and so on, but ignore the web capability to do this on a large scale. I’m not advocating unlimited use of Facebook for employees, just a more focused overall approach. Younger employees and clients have few qualms about going online, sharing information and asking for collaboration and interaction. Increasingly they will not want to do business with nor be employed by companies/firms they regard as web illiterate. Use the technology the right way and you will prosper.

Investors are nervous about another dotcom bubble but equally nervous about missing out on the next Google. Microsoft recently bought into Facebook at a price that some say values it at $15bn. Perhaps they don’t see the future tailing off like Datamonitor predicts.

For me I found the following to be a sign of the future belonging to collaboration and interaction rather than old time professional expertise. Today I found a blog where the writer announced he was creating a social networking site, and because he “knew nothing about marketing” could readers help him figure out how to market it – and they were!

2008 Diary Dates

We expect to publish public course dates for 2008 soon. Please email anthony@redshots.co.uk with area of interest to be kept up to date.

Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year