Latest News on Category: managment

As the CEO of a corporate business, you are paid to think.  The success or failure of your company lies in your wisdom, experience, and ability to think deeply and strategically about your business now and in the future.

Back in the 80s and 90s, CEOs enjoyed a more consistent and predictable business environment.  The way to profitability was simply to do more of what was working well (and profitable) and do less of what was not.  Prior year results were a reliable indicator of future year performance.  Strategy could be developed using simple scenarios and calculations.  Cost savings or price increases were simple and easy ways to manage profits. 

Today’s business environment is radically different.  New businesses and entrepreneurs enjoy the ease of entry into even the most complex markets thanks to fast-moving technological advances.  Not only that, the lack of capital overhead allows these newer businesses to move more quickly to meet customer needs than ever before. 

Customers too have lost loyalty.  With more access to information and friend referrals than ever before, customers will easily move toward the business providing the best solution for their needs in the moment...and customer service can make or break a company as referrals and positive and negative press spread more quickly through social media.

In today’s turbulent times, you can only succeed if you are a CEO who can see the unseen, identify opportunities hiding from view, and focus on strategy rather than becoming sidetracked in the minutia of daily meetings and procedural distractions. 

In today’s video, I share ways you can take the time and learn to be a CEO who sees around corners, see the unseen, and take advantage of your creative strategic thinking to create sustained profitable growth for your corporation.

How to measure the impact of customer retention and satisfaction on your business so you can maximize profitable and sustainable wealth.

The vast majority of senior executives and corporate leaders are making a dire error when measuring the happiness of their customers.  They focus on worthless customer surveys and on new client acquisition to measure their ability to serve customer needs, rather than focusing on the most important measure of customer satisfaction: Customer Retention.

Improving your customer retention rate is quite simply the fastest and easiest way to create a massive positive impact on your profitability.  Customer retention gives you two critical pieces of data for analyzing your business:

1. It tells you precisely how good you are at understanding what customers need and delivering customer value. 
2. It provides you the input necessary to calculate the average customer lifetime of your customer, which in turn, allows you to calculate net new customer growth, lost revenue from customer attrition, and how much new revenue you can create by focusing on customer retention improvement.

In this video, I demonstrate and explain these concepts more fully...and provide you with step by step instruction for using my Customer Retention Rate What-if Strategic Growth Calculator™.    When you use the calculator, you will discover the three-step system for analyzing your ability to create and deliver the value your customer base is looking for.

Understanding your customer retention rate, average lifetime customer value, and the levers you can pull to create more revenue from existing customers can secure your business growth and profitability during these fast moving, non-linear times.

Consider the difference between Blackberry and Apple. 

Blackberry was a powerhouse of the early 2000’s when they came out with a handheld device with a QWERTY keyboard and easy access to email.  However, as smarter and smarter phones became the norm, Blackberry focused on maintaining its leadership with corporate clients, rather than risky innovation.

By focusing on the wrong questions about customer satisfaction (that of the corporations and not the users), Blackberry did not notice the lifetime of a customer was declining.  The company simply did not realize how many customers were falling off...and how much more quickly they were moving toward smartphones.  Even the corporate clients, which were Blackberry’s bread and butter, began to buy iPhone as employees demanded the latest technology.   As iPhones introduced apps that allowed employees to access any email service, fast search, and even windows programs, corporations began to change their buying habits as well.

Because of the focus of Blackberry on maintaining the status quo, they did not realize they were leaking customers at a very high rate...as Apple focused on customer wants for sleek design, lightweight phones, color and touch screens and apps. 

As Blackberry shows us, managers and CEOs must first focus on client retention.  You must know how well you are serving your current clients before you focus on new customer acquisition.  Most corporations have this wrong…

The corporations focusing on client service and satisfaction, on pivoting quickly to meet client demand, and on providing clients the greatest experience dominate markets in fast-moving, non-linear times. 

In an era of social sharing, ease of consumer reviews, and fast-paced technological advances, customer happiness is even more profitable than ever before.  According to a 2016 Nielsen survey, 82% of Americans cite referrals as the #1 criteria when choosing a product or service to purchase. 

Customer Retention Rate is now more urgently important than ever. 

I invite you to access the Customer Retention Rate calculator here, watch the video as a guide on how to use the calculator and then use your own data to assess your company’s results.  

Once you complete the exercise with your team, I invite you to schedule a call with me to discuss your results and gain further insight as to how my advisory services can help you drastically improve your customer retention and profitability in these turbulent times.

(http://www.business2community.com/marketing/numbers-dont-lie-2016-nielsen-study-revealed-referrals-01477256#RrGBc8tzwfVrgW00.97) - link to study

Video Blog #1

Grow Your Leadership Mindset

The Key to Sustainable Profitable Growth in a Fast-Moving World

1-hour duration

Global business leaders call on Carlos when they get stuck. Their back story runs to a fairly universal pattern. Cut away the details and it goes something like this. They are frustrated because their business is failing short of its commercial potential. Oh, sure, it’s surviving, maybe even growing, marginally, but high-sustained exponential growth is not happening. These leaders keep bumping their heads against an invisible growth ceiling. They’ve gotten themselves locked into a low-growth pattern and they don’t know why. No matter what they try, they can’t reach escape velocity in their business. Can you relate? Are you seeing a similar pattern in your business?

Now here is the amazing thing. These leaders who need to get unstuck, they’re located all over the world. They’re in every niche of every industry you can think of, every size business, old industries and new, it doesn’t matter, because nine times out of 10 the root cause of their slow growth can be found on this chart. What the chart is saying is that there is a way to change your results if you change the way you think. Conversely, if you don’t change the way you think, then no matter what you do, you’re not likely to change your results much at all.

So, listen up. In this video blog, you’ll get to eavesdrop as Carlos shows to his mentee John, a Chief Executive Officer, how to use this chart to locate the key growth limiting barriers in his business and how to knock over those barriers once and for all.

That is one of, if not the most, important mentoring session Carlos had. Why? Because, Carlos is giving you the secret of leading companies - in other words, why they succeed in a fast-moving world.

Click here to get the transcription

Click here to get the Grow Mindset Chart