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Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Customer Care

Networking For Referrals: It Makes Business Easier And Life Simpler

April 20, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

The act and practice of networking – for business or any other endeavor – is one of the great intangibles in life. Networking can help you get into a college, a new job, a business prospect – you get the picture. But none of this happens until you actually meet people.

In the marketplace, the business reason for networking is to get referrals. Ivan Misner is the Founder of Business Network International (BNI), the world’s guru of networking, and the author of a wheelbarrow-full of books on the subject. He thinks people who don’t get enough referrals just don’t know how to ask for them. I agree. Ivan has an excellent suggestion to help with this, and it revolves around the person called the “center-of-influence,” or COI for short. The COI is the connection between you and the person you want/need to meet, and whom you likely met while networking.

Ivan says, “Don’t make your COI do all your work for you. Help them out by asking this question, ‘Who do you know who…?’ and then finish the sentence with a description that fits what you need: your business, industry, product, service, etc.” Here’s an example: John, let me ask you a question, who do you know who buys advertising? …truck tires? …owns apartments?

Here’s a concept I call, “Blasingame’s Entrée Spectrum.”[Continue Reading]

Filed Under: Customer Care, e-business, Entrepreneurship, Management Fundamentals, Marketing / Branding / Advertising, Networking, Sales / Sales Management, Start Ups, The Age of the Customer Tagged With: selling, small business, small business owner, success

Closeness: The 21st Century Coin Of The Realm

March 23, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near?
Just like me, they long to be, close to you.

If you’re old enough to have had at least a couple of anniversaries of your 39th birthday, you recognize these lyrics from the Roger Nichols/Paul Williams song by the brother/sister act, The Carpenters, which topped the charts in 1970.

When I write the theme song for small business, the title will be, “Close To You.” My reasoning is because, like the birds and the stars and the objects of their affection, there are many stakeholders in our small businesses that we hope will long to be close to us. Let’s take a look at three of the most important ones.[Continue Reading]

Filed Under: Customer Care, Entrepreneurship, Management Fundamentals, Start Ups, The Age of the Customer Tagged With: age of the customer, entrepreneurship, management fundamentals, small business

Bring Your Customer’s Customer Into Focus

March 10, 2023 by Jim Blasingame

When you take a photograph, the resulting product is two-dimensional: tall, wide, and flat. But in most cases, you want the photo to 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.

When the coin of the realm was to be competitive, that meant you spent all your time thinking about how to serve the person in the foreground, the first row of your business world: your customers. But as I’ve revealed in the past, being competitive has been trumped by being relevant. And in The Age of the Customer, perhaps the most important component of being relevant to business customers is helping them serve the most important person in their photo:  [Continue Reading]

Filed Under: Customer Care, Futuring, Management Fundamentals, Sales / Sales Management, Start Ups, The Age of the Customer Tagged With: age of the customer, customer care, management fundamentals, small business, success

Spring Cleaning For Small Business? Yes! In December!

December 1, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

Whether it’s a year where something we once knew as “normal” was part of our reality, or during an unprecedented and unimaginable year of a global pandemic, the abiding management question for all small business owners is always valid: “What’s the best use of my time right now?” And at no other time of the year are we more time-management challenged than in December.

The twelfth calendar month is the only one where two powerful imperatives converge against a hard stop, each demanding a full measure of your time, attention, and resources:

  1. The perennial push to close out the sales year as strongly as possible, while
  2. Simultaneously taking steps to set the business up for a fast and clean start when the New Year dawns on January 1.

Pardon the football metaphor, but in the marketplace game your business plays all year, December is the two-minute drill of your fourth quarter. And in this tight transition period, that fierce competition for precious time and resources requires discipline and devotion to fundamentals.

Our grandmothers practiced the fundamental of spring cleaning when the weather broke warm. In the marketplace, in order to kick off the New Year right, your spring cleaning should happen before then. There are many targets for a business’s December cleaning, but here are five important ones to get you started. [Continue Reading]

Filed Under: Customer Care, Human Resources, Leadership, Management Fundamentals, Sales / Sales Management Tagged With: leadership, management fundamentals, small business, small business owner, success

“Customers from Hell” and the #1 Business Fundamental

October 6, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

“This is for one of those customers from hell.”

That’s what a small business owner said to me during one of my road trips across the country to check on how things are going out on Main Street.

“Ann” was responding to my query about her business. Her full answer was closer to, “Business has been good. But now I’ve got to spend most of the day dealing with this customer from hell.”

Turns out, what caused this customer’s alleged domicile to be mentioned is because they required a lot of extra attention – they wanted things the way they wanted them. Like Ann, you might be surprised at my response, which is our next “Business Fundamental.”

“You should never have a customer from hell.” [Continue Reading]

Filed Under: Customer Care, Management Fundamentals, Profitability, Sales / Sales Management, Start Ups, The Age of the Customer Tagged With: age of the customer, customer care, management fundamentals, selling, small business, small business owner

“No Problem,” The Vuvuzela Of Customer Service

September 29, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

“No problem.”

That’s exactly what the young man on the phone at the bank said after thanking him for not being able to answer my question.

He didn’t say, “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to be of more assistance,” or “I’ll be happy to take a message.” Instead, he slouched into the verbal scourge of the 21st-century marketplace: when an employee serving a customer says, “No problem.”

In addition to the sound being harmonically dissonant to a customer’s ear, “No problem” is also cognitively dissonant to the Universe because of its misuse in the following two service scenarios, both inappropriate and unprofessional: [Continue Reading]

Filed Under: Communication, Customer Care, Sales / Sales Management, The Age of the Customer Tagged With: age of the customer, customer care, selling, small business

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