Why does my company always make the most money and add the most customers in the summer months? When others tell us about “everyone being gone” for summer vacation and sales being off, why have ours been consistently high for most of the 26 years that this company has been attracting and wowing customers? After years of crunching numbers and trying to understand this so we could replicate it in the winter months, we came to no conclusions. Then, this summer, the answer came during a trip to Alaska, where the sun rises around 4 a.m. and sets around 10 p.m. That’s a lot of light, day after day. You’re already ahead of me with this story, aren’t you?
What have we been doing with all of this light and how did that boost business? More importantly, are you doing some or all of the following things and seeing results?
- There’s more daylight. We are up earlier, go longer, exercise more and that gives us even more energy. We love this time of year so we smile more and folks find that attractive. We have more time to have longer conversations with customers, so we do. We hear more, listen more and remember more about their needs. We remember it all with the help of our digital tools--handhelds or laptops.
- We are more social. The wonderful summer evenings mean outdoor concerts and many opportunities—on land and at the beach, to invite customers to kick back and relax with us. Dinners at our retreat in the mountains with nature in full force and bloom renew us all. That is when we have our best conversations and deeper listening happens. Customers and friends who provide great referrals tell us their dreams, their plans and how we might help them reach their objectives. We don’t talk about processes, features or “solutions.” We remember all that we hear and observe and put this into our plans and daily actions.
- We read books that we bought during the winter and never got past the first chapter. Generally, we read business books and biographies, rather than fiction. We turn off the "busy-ness" and turn up our attention to the reality and abundance around us. These books help us reflect and use silence to connect big ideas with what we are hearing from customers about their needs. We use the information immediately and sharpen up our listen, even more. Terrific books that generated immediate results already this summer include Blog Lightening by John Jantsch, Info Guru Manual by Robert Middleton, and Return on Customer by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D.
What does all of this tell us? We sell more when we think we are not selling. We increase customer attraction and value when we are listening and not rushing. The best presentation we give all year does not use PowerPoint slides, handouts or our website. By lightening up, smiling more and looking into the eyes of others, we listen more and connect much better with customers. Email is not complete communication—no way, not ever. And we find that everyone is not on vacation. Nearly all of our customers go to work every day and just take one or two weeks off in that long stretch of daylight called summer time. So we are all using and benefitting from our conversations and creative problem solving, all summer long.
So, if the more time we invest in customers increases our trust and value with customers, and that always boosts revenue, how do we apply this all year long? We’ve come up with a really great, long list. Here’s one gem on it that you can use now and all year long: Stop recreating wheels. That means get away from the computer and put more face time in with the customers. Here’s a great discovery that frees us to do that. It’s called MyWorkTools.com and there you will find a well organized, totally practical, immediately useful collection of every type of proposal, letter, plan, presentation, and resource document that you might depend on now. There are many more tools that you might have spent valuable time creating. But why recreate wheels when you can just put your hands on what you need—right now?
Most of it is free. Some of it is for sale at prices that don’t even cause a blink. For example, if you’ve ever spent all day writing a marketing plan, customer research survey, service level agreement, or board meeting package, what is that time worth? If you could get essentially the same thing for six or ten dollars, doesn’t that make more business sense? Of course it does.
If you use most of your time to build relationships with customers, smile, listen, and help them lighten their load, how much value do you think that will create for your customers, best prospects and your business?
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