Work with your customers in the knowledge of the end result. If your end result is a quick sale and no repeat orders, where is the motivation to do a good job, or make sure that they are happy? If the profit in acquiring new customers is in the long term relationship, you’re much more likely to be considerate, helpful, supportive and understanding. You’ll consistently work hard to do a good job.

Seth compares the follow-through to the action required in Tennis or Golf – the ball is long gone, so why keep swinging? The same is true for football, boxing and my personal favourite, snooker – if your cue continues in a straight line after the shot, you know the stroke itself will also be true.

Seth’s Blog: Follow through
If you know that the last two inches of your follow through don’t matter, then you’ll start slowing down at three inches, or even four, and suddenly it does matter. If you draw the line on money back guarantees you’ll keep sliding backwards, bit by bit, until it does matter. If you’re quick to fire the employee who needs a lot of help, you’ll be quicker with those that need just a little, and then, pretty soon, it’s a very different place to work, isn’t it?

CRM was supposed to help businesses better understand their customers and increase efficiency. Yet most companies are not getting the return they expected. Why the purchase of software or hardware (which can sometimes cost millions to the company) that enable a company to capture informations and details about individual customers that can be used for target marketing, called by some people “an expensive way to learn what otherwise might be learned by chatting with customers for five minutes”?

from Why CRM doesn’t work « David vs. Goliath

Excellent. Someone else that gets the point!

Coincidentally, I’m currently working with a business that is about to implement a ‘CRM’ system. It turns out, like too many businesses and people, and in all fairness the whole industry, they don’t really understand what CRM is.

In many cases, CRM is implemented on a promise, on the promise and expectation of what it did for another business. In truth, the thing that actually made the difference was the businesses approach to it’s customer, as is pointed out in the post.

All too often, unfortunately this point is missed completely. Who’s going to point out that it’s the strategy that makes this work? The software company pitching for the contract? Conflict of interest. The Sales Manager? Too close to the problem.

CRM can work extremely well and deliver fantastic results. But unless it fits your strategy, rather than your your strategy fitting around it, it’s just going to add more work with little return.

I can help

I found Richard inspirational and his vision compelling of what he calls, the individual revolution.

He suggests that technology has created an environment in which the mass market culture is dying. For example: no longer are there a few TV or Radio channels to listen to, there are hundreds. Every individual has their own taste in music, and is able to fulfil that desire through podcasts or radio or a number of television channels.

The Internet has created a culture where every individual can express their own unique personality through the music they listen to, the fashion they create for themselves, the web sites they browse, the hobbies in which they indulge, the businesses they create.

Increasingly, people perceive themselves as individuals, not as consumers.

Seth Godin‘s work also supports this change in culture, proposing that the Internet is not a mass-marketing medium. It’s not a replacement for television. It’s just the opposite – it creates a fragmented, splintered culture where every individual, every business can satisfy their own unique needs and requirements. Small communities with common interests communicate through blogs, chat rooms and web sites and perhaps buy from stores specialising in the things in which they are interested.

The age of the individual has arrived.

I recently made that same leap of faith, in to the void that is going it alone. My approach to business development reflects this unique culture, recognising and valuing my clients’ individuality and recognising that their differences are often their competitive advantage, and that frequently this means that there is no one-size-fits-all solution.