Management Fundamentals

The “Customer? What Customer Syndrome?” Part I

January 11, 2022 by Jim Blasingame

Here’s a classic business maxim that was an article of faith for generations: “It’s essential to know at all times what your competition is doing, or you might lose old accounts and new prospects.”

Do you still worry about the competition? In the Age of the Customer, an obsession with the competition can result in an unfortunate and dangerous condition I call the “Customer? What Customer?” Syndrome, or CWCS for short.

A company has CWCS when it’s more likely to ask, “What’s my competition doing?” than the much more appropriate questions, “What do my customers want?” and “What are my customers’ expectations?”

There are two levels of CWCS. In this column, we’ll focus on Level I. [Continue Reading]

Spring Cleaning For Small Business, In December, During A Pandemic

December 7, 2021 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: The perennial push to close out the sales year as strongly as possible, while 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 of a business’s December cleaning, but here are five important ones to get you started. [Continue Reading]

Age of the Customer Prospecting Rules for the Age of the Pandemic

November 15, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

Since 1993, control of the three major elements of your customer relationships – product, information, and buying decision – has shifted from your business to your customer. This marketplace transition is, by definition, a Biblical proportion paradigm shift from the original, 10,000-year-old Age of the Seller, to the new Age of the Customer.

This shift has created many disruptions across the marketplace, but none more than to the discipline of professional selling. More specifically, the element that has been disrupted most is business-to-business prospecting.

If your sales effort isn’t getting the job done, it’s probably not because your sales team isn’t working hard enough or has forgotten how to close – a process that has not been disrupted. It’s because the rules of prospecting have been turned upside-down. Here are four facets to this prospecting shift: [Continue Reading]

Small Business Survival Lessons From Jeff Foxworthy

November 1, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

You’ve no doubt seen the classic Jeff Foxworthy act, the one where he says, for example, “If you have more than one car jacked up in your front yard, you might be a redneck.”

Just as Jeff got rich delivering this comedic routine, you can benefit from his cause-and-effect logic by applying it to your small business. Except unlike Foxworthy, it won’t be funny if you resemble too many of these one-liners. In fact, your business might not make it. Or as comedians say, you’ll bomb. [Continue Reading]

Managing The Three Clocks Of Small Business

May 8, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

“Time Is On My Side,” is the title of one of the classic rock ’n’ roll songs performed by Mick Jagger and the legendary English band, The Rolling Stones.

This bold statement works in a song, but for small businesses – not so much. The reason is because of the complicated dynamic between our most limited resource, time, and three of our most important business factors, expenses, sales, and cash.

In the marketplace, there are actually three different clocks at work that every business uses: one for operating expenses, one for sales, and one for cash. Let’s take a look at how these three clocks impact your small business.

[Continue Reading]

Did you make a sale, or did you make a loan you can’t afford?

May 2, 2021 by Jim Blasingame

Congratulations on making that nice sale. You’ve worked hard to get customers to come and buy your stuff. Success feels good, doesn’t it?

Well, sorry about the cold water treatment, but what if I said you can succeed yourself right out of business? Retailers selling to consumers get paid at the point-of-sale. But if you have business customers, they expect an open account relationship where they pay you in 30 days – sometimes. And there’s the rub.

Let’s do some easy, but critical math: When you extend credit to customers, you have to fund virtually the entire amount of the sale until the day you get paid. Everything but net profit, which if you’re lucky is small single digits.

Here’s another way to think of it: The moment you deliver to a customer on credit, you haven’t so much made a sale, as a loan. And any banker will tell you that two out of three things that can happen with a loan are bad: Besides being paid later than agreed, sometimes it isn’t paid at all. For an under-capitalized small business – which is redundant – such possibilities are perilous.