Three Places to Remove Dumb Stuff
No one in business intentionally gets up in the morning and says, “let’s find some dumb stuff to do that costs me money, reverses my growth and makes my staff and customers mad”, but most of us do it.
We do it because we don’t know it is dumb or it is better than all the other dumb choices we have. So, what does it take to remove dumb stuff?
First, recognize dumb stuff. The hard part about recognizing dumb stuff is that it may have been smart stuff at one time. Things that may have made sense at one time are:
- Having salespeople cold call.
- Letting salespeople make up your customer offers sitting in the customer office.
- Going to trade shows to “show the flag”
- Spending time focused on your competition
- Learning and giving a GREAT product pitch
- Focusing on Sales to grow
These and hundreds of other “myths” exist because of two basic reasons. First, at one point in time, these seemed to or actually did get the job done. Your business or some business got better by doing these things and then they were passed on as “TRUE” and a myth was born.
The other reason these started was declaring these as “TRUE” removed the requirement to find out what really was “TRUE” and what really grew a business based on science.
To remove dumb stuff, you can recognize it by measuring your Revenue RoadMap. Specifically, measure the resources applied to the six critical areas of the RoadMap and the outcomes being created along the road to a contracted partner.
And/or bring Revenue Science™ into your business through outside professionals who can point at dumb stuff or you get certified in Revenue Science™ so you know where to look and what to do.
Second, don’t be that company that “focuses on sales”. At this point in time technology has put buyers in charge of almost every buying environment other than functional monopolies.
NO buyer wants to be sold and research tells us that buyers trying to make a buy have ten basic tools they use to arrive at the best possible buy and while salespeople are not the least helpful they are next to last, and buyers only want to talk to them after all decisions are made and it is time to talk price. Being that next to last place salesperson who only fights off a competitor by giving away profit, is near the head of the DUMB STUFF list.
Another research study presented in the book “The Human Brand” finds buyers seeing sales either as “making money from their customer” (how to get in the next to last position) or “making money with their customer” resulting in long-term partnerships based on a common value transfer (think Smart Stuff).
To get to the Smart Stuff side and make money with your customer apply the Five Question “Revenue Strategy” and deploy your customer focused partnership based on the resulting strategies’ True North.
Third, get out! Dumb Stuff normally starts at headquarters (HQ) and in the brains of those who don’t partner with customers to make the customer better. Everyone at HQ is sure the product will sell itself if the market will just listen and understand how cool the product really is. HQ staff is sure they know the price the customers will be glad to pay once they “get it”.
HQ has a plan to out engineer, market, sell and service every competitor in the market.
HQ has included industry-leading technology and product specs to meet all needs it is waiting for sales to go out and share this in the market.
All of this is Dumb Stuff. Customers only care about getting their problems solved today including problems they don’t fully understand. Customers want their world to get better – they don’t want a better product.
Customers want you to completely understand them, bring them ideas, options, choices and recommendations that help them today and lead them to an even better place in the future.
The fact you are better or different than a competitor holds NO interest to the customer who is still not clear how you are fixing the short-term problem. They want a long-term RoadMap that makes their world better than ANY OTHER OPTION.
Revenue Science™ tells you to get out of HQ. Don’t think about you, your products, your profits, or your process.
Get out of HQ and attached to customers for the purpose of making them greater with you than without you.
When you get out there and look back at HQ with your customers’ eyes you will see the Dumb Stuff and the “Cost of Chaos” is created by HQ thinking and with your customer relationship.
Just removing these three types of Dumb Stuff positively impacts your Cash and Growth since you are now making money with your Customers and they are helping.
Revenue Science™™ is an organized systematic and repeatable way to determine revenue cycles, and decrease the cost of chaos with such precision that you can see rapid decreases in your cost of sales and increases in profit within weeks and months.