I have been reading a book my brother Neal gave me in the 1980’s by Paul Hawkin titled; Growing a Business. I had remebered it as inspirational but as I have reread it I have become intriuged by how well he captured some very insightful aspects of, well, “growing a business.”
It is a good read in its entirity but one concept I picked up in the first 100 pages again was what he calls the “What if” factor.
What if, in your business, you really do listen to your customers. What if you can develop a service or product that builds into making your customers clients rather than consumers. What if you can break the mold in a dozen small ways to add value and duribility to what you do or sell.
I am doing a poor job of explaing what he wrote so well but it is a concept which resonates with me. I sat down this morning a without breaking a sweat quickly listed 20 simple things we can tell our customer we do that I believe are “what if” kinds of things. Over the next couple of days I will try these on those of you that come here and I would love to have you either confirm them or challenge me that they don’t fit with the reality of how we do business and care for our client base.
1. What if we didn’t make our prospects wrestle in the mud for two hours to get to the bottom line price on the cars we sell? My industry does this on a regular basis and I think it is despicable. We have a realistic book based price posted on every car on our lot and if we get an offer for something less or different we can usually give a definitive answer or make a counter offer in 60 seconds or less.
