Month: November 2018

Posted on

008 Customer Intimacy

008 Customer Intimacy

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

This week on the podcast, we take a deep dive into one of the three competitive strategies for market leadership, as mentioned in the book The Discipline of Market Leaders: customer intimacy.


Chris, Jol, and Carol talk about the types of conversations you can have with your customers to enable you to learn their pain points, the opportunities that come from having an intimate relationship with your customers, and the importance of having an attitude of service.


We hope you enjoy this episode!

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Getting into the Lives of Your Customers

Working at a Fortune 500 company, I learned how they get into the lives of their customers. For the business to be successful, we had to do that.

Scale is important. How much do you know about your customer? How many touch points do you have? How well do you know the customer’s business? What are its pain points? Businesses thrive on knowing as much as possible about their customers.

Customer Intimacy for Small Organizations

The organizations that I’ve worked with have many, many customers. In retail, you can’t contact all of your customers.

But you should have touch points for the customers who buy your products on a regular basis. You can automate some of that contact. Regardless, touch points can give you an understanding of where your sales are coming from and how you can increase them. Where is your market share coming from? What industry is giving you most of your customers? Do you know that industry extremely well, or do you need to learn more about its pain points?

A Structure for Diagnostic Conversations with Your Customers

As the relationship between you and your customer develops, a broader range of issues are introduced into the conversation. In this way, your opportunities to serve that customer grow. And so do your sales opportunities.

But how can you cultivate such a relationship? Talk about the aspirations of the person and the aspirations of the person’s business so that you can gather information and better understand the situation. Help him or her to articulate goals and then think through strategies and tactics for reaching those goals. Clearly articulate what is going well and what is not going so well. Out of a conversation like that, issues pop. The issues may be strictly business ones or may be related to personal matters. When the issues have been identified, the opportunities will flow.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The Discipline of Market Leaders (book) by Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema

Posted on

007 The Effect of Personal Health on Business Performance

007 The Effect of Personal Health on Business Performance

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

In this week’s podcast, we look at the effect of personal health on business performance and get some tips from Jol, Chris, and Carol on how they maintain healthy, balanced lives.

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Finding Happiness and Decreasing Stress

A lot of people feel the need to spend a lot of money on things that don’t really create happiness. But if we can increase revenue and spend less, we’ll have less stress in our lives and so will live longer.

Spending More to Make More

There’s no real difference between business and personal life in terms of justifying expenditures.

In business, sometimes you need to spend to generate profit, but doing that requires the discipline to consider whether each expense is necessary. In personal life, you may want to buy more because you think that it will bring happiness, but you should think just as critically about those expenditures.

The Importance of Human Connection

Connecting with other people and having that feeling of connection is happiness.

I sometimes do a network audit, which involves looking at your operational network, personal network, and strategic network. Most people fall short in the strategic network, but the fullness of your personal network is often an indicator of how happy you are. So building your personal network is a great way of bringing happiness to your life.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The Profit Formula

Posted on

006 The Profit Formula

006 The Profit Formula

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

This week on the podcast, Chris, Jol and Carol talk about the profit formula, what it means to the client, and the effects of cost-cutting on the business.

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

A Mathematical Perspective on Business

One way of looking at your business is as the mathematical formula for creating profit. If you think about the profit formula from a mathematical point of view and then think about the elements of the formula, you can figure out what you can do to make the result what you want.

Purpose of Increasing the Profit Margins

Every strategy in every business, if you peel it all the way back, is designed to do one of two things: increase payments to the company or decrease payments out of the company.

 One way or another—and it may be a long route— that’s what businesses are designed to do.

Low-Margin Businesses vs. High-Margin Businesses

In low-margin businesses, processes are usually very well developed and look at the cents and the seconds. These businesses set their units of measurement so that everybody in the company is very aware that it takes a lot of volume to make any amount of profit.

The oil & gas industry usually is a very high-margin business. But during the economic downturn we had to look at every single expense line item. The problem is that we had to define the cause of each expense, so it was no longer good enough to look at, for example, the office supplies category. Instead, we had to look at the detail of pens, paper, etc. and figure out what we could eliminate. In other words, looking at the expense category was no longer sufficient. We had to break it down further than that. And that required discipline.

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

The Profit Formula

Posted on

005 The Importance of Business Processes

The Importance of Business Processes
005 The Importance of Business Processes

Welcome to the Bottom Line Top Line Podcast with Carol Bartlett, Jol Hunter, and Chris Spurvey.

In this episode, we talk about the importance of processes and how to identify and implement them in your business.

To download the document, scroll to the bottom of these show notes and fill in the form.

Business Processes in a Fortune 500 Company

When you grow up in a Fortune 500 company,everything is driven by process and discipline. It’s recorded, and there are metrics,and you live and die by the quarter.

The oil & gas industry does this superbly. But process is one of the things that every organization looks at and struggles with. Even Fortune 500 companies struggle to make themselves more efficient or more profitable. But when you translate that and step out—as Carol did—from a publicly traded company to a private company, it changes a little.

I think private companies have the most opportunity to grow in this area. Putting into place strong processes and getting people to buy into those process is, ultimately, where we’re going to see profits grow.

Carol’s Definition of a Process

Process, to me, is where you say whatyou’re going to do and then you do that.

If you can record that and do it systematically, it becomes a really good communication tool. But process isn’t so much about being able to respond on the fly or be responsive to the industry’s needs. It’s more a communication tool that enables everyone to know what one another is doing and makes task progress measurable. And things that are measured get done.

Identifying Your Processes

You already have processes. You may not have thought of the things you do in terms of a process, but you are doing things. You’re doing things this week that are similar to the things you’ll do next week. The question is: Are you doing things in the most organized, efficient way? Can you streamline and focus what you’re doing, eliminating tasks that aren’t adding value or helping your business to perform and adding or expanding tasks that are more important to your business?

To learn more about these topics, please listen to the episode.

Mentions

Connect with Carol, Jol and Chris on LinkedIn.

Grit by Angela Duckworth (book)

High Performance Through Process Excellence by Mathias Kirchmer (book)