Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Bring Your Customer’s Customer Into Focus

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When you take a photograph, the resulting product is two-dimensional: tall, wide, and flat. But in most cases, you want the photo to actually show depth, where images in the foreground and background are all in focus.

In photographic terms, the range of focus front to back is called depth of field. The best way to expand depth of field so more of the subjects in the photo are in focus is to add light. Light contributes to depth of field.

If you were given a photo of people who were the most critical to your success, you’d easily recognize your customers in the foreground in perfect focus. But as you look deeper into the photo you’d notice the images behind that first row increasingly drop out of focus with each receding row. The reason is that for most of the history of the marketplace, businesses have gotten away with having a very narrow customer depth of field.

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“Follow Me Home” Is a Solid Gold Gift

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First, let’s establish two maxims: one classic, one new.

Classic: The cardinal rule of customer acquisition – it’s not your customer’s job to keep your business top-of-mind, it’s yours.

New: Every year your website becomes less of a destination and more of a distribution center – develop a strategy that doesn’t depend upon prospects and customers returning to your homepage every time they need/want something from you.

It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one – everybody knows that. The bad news is, with all of the mega-corp algorithms, online competitors, and cyber-clutter, keeping the attention of even our most loyal patrons is getting harder every day. But here’s the good news: For every example of how technology makes business more complicated, there is a corresponding tool or application that increases efficiency and productivity. Even for small businesses.

One prime example of how to stay on the radar screen of people who already know you – users, prospects, customers – is to practice what I call the “Follow me home” strategy.

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You can buy your American Dream from someone else

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The American Dream has many components, but to me, the big three are: liberty, business ownership, and home ownership. The order is intentional.

1. Liberty is prime because it makes the other two possible. Freedom is from God, but liberty is a contract we give to each other. 

2. Business ownership in America has produced more self-determination than any other force in history, including from all of the associated jobs. 

3. Homeownership is available to all Americans who’ve claimed one of those jobs. 

 As much as the latter two are part of our liberty, business ownership is the most challenging.  Blasingame’s 1st Law of Small Business states: “It’s easy to start a small business, but it’s not easy to operate and grow one.” 

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Mobile Computing Will Dominate Your Future

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What if I told you that seven-of-ten of the prospects and customers in your market can’t find your business? You’d be very disturbed by that, wouldn’t you?

Now, what if I told you that three-fourths of the calls your prospects and customers want to make to your business are not getting through? Would I be able to see the veins in your neck as you raise your voice to declare that such a thing would be impossible?

Well, in the past year or so, addressing small business audiences around the country, I’ve asked this simple question: “How many of you have a website that conforms to the small screen – a mobile website?” I’m sorry to report that the number of attendees who raised their hands – across multiple industries – was in the vast minority.

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Storytelling – older than the marketplace

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Storytelling: older than the marketplace

 Cogito ergo sum. French philosopher Rene Descartes proposed this idea in 1637, which translates to “I think, therefore I am.” Certainly, the power of abstract thought is what separates humans from other animals. 

Anthropologists now believe Homo sapiens succeeded, unlike other members of the genus Homo, Neanderthals, and Cro-Magnon for example, because their (our) brains had a greater capacity for speech and language. Today Descartes might modify his philosophy to “I think and speak, therefore I am.”  In Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith proposed the written word as one of the three great human inventions; the other two are money and mathematics. But long before humans were writing we were telling stories. And these stories – told, memorized and retold over millennia – became the headwaters of human development. We, humans, love to tell stories almost as much as we love to listen to them. 

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How much is call reluctance costing you?

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How much is call reluctance costing you?

Professional sales people are the most important players in the marketplace. 

The justification for my position springs from a classic business maxim: Nothing happens until somebody makes a sale. 

But professional selling is as hard as it is important – especially at the B2B level. Plus, customer expectations in the Age of the Customer have increased the degree of difficulty in an unprecedented way. So, the last thing salespeople need is to be fighting their own demons – to not be able to get out of their own way.

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