This is not a new idea, but it bears reminding. If you listen well to your customers, they will tell you what to do to grow your business. They’ll tell you what’s strong and weak in your product and service. They’ll tell you what products they would buy if you offered them. They’ll ask questions that tell you what’s confusing about your product information. It’s not safe to assume that your customers think the same way you do, that they care about what you care about, or that they know what you know.

Negative feedback (via complaints, refund requests, etc) is more valuable than feedback that says “don’t change a thing”. Yet I’ve noticed, without systems in place, glowing reviews end up on the office bulletin board, and complaints end up nowhere in sight.

Decision makers need to be connected to the stream of feedback coming from their customers. At my companies our software systems are setup to email customer feedback to me and key managers when it’s entered by a customer service rep. We make changes and fix glitches all the time based on what we hear.

Also, pay attention to what your customers are doing on your web site, that’s a form of listening too. I’ve started reviewing what customers search for on our web sites. (The search information is anonymized to protect privacy.) Are they looking for a product that we don’t carry? Are they having a hard time finding something that we do carry? Is our search feature showing relevant results?

You can’t guess what your customers want, the only way to know is to listen well, and knowing better what customers want is a substantial competitive advantage.

You are not designed for a long steady grind, or an extended mad dash. Of course you are not designed for constant rest either. You aren’t designed for constant anything, you’re made for periods of exertion with periods of rest in between.

This applies to both physical and mental activity. Our brains and our bodies seem to thrive on this variation between stress and rest.

An advisor told me recently that this applies to growing a business too. You need times when you go after it hard, (new products, expansion, big changes) and times when you rest and catch your breath. 

If it’s time to go for it hard, pour your energy into it knowing a time of rest is around the corner.

If you’ve been pedal-to-the-metal too long, build some times of rest into your day, week, and year so you don’t burn out.

If you’ve been idling on medium forever, expand your range into some intense times and some slow times. It will improve your quality of life, and your productivity.

This applies to both managing employees, and marketing to customers. People are not all the same, they break down into groups that are very different in important ways.

One employee is motivated by money, another by recognition. One needs close supervision, one is most effective when given a lot of freedom. One wants consistency, another wants a new challenge every day.

One customer is all about price, another doesn’t even check the price. One customer uses your product in a business setting, another just for fun. One customer is a technical expert, another a newbie.

It’s a lot easier to lump everyone together and rationalize to ourselves that one size fits all, but it almost never does.

1. Learn to see and serve the differences between people.
2. Decide who you’re trying to please (“everyone” is not a valid option), and expect indifference or displeasure from the rest.

A mediocre strategy, fully and energetically executed, beats a brilliant strategy incompletely or haltingly executed. Plans are important, but only execution makes change. You probably already know what to do, go do it!

Yesterday one of my executive coaches said to me “CEO’s are in the business of behavior selection more than behavior modification.” This rings true to me. As managers of employees our job is to select people who already behave the way we need them to, much more than it is to try to motivate people to behave differently than they normally do. I think this applies most strongly to things we learn early in life (our personality, how we interact with other people, our learning style, etc) and not as much to things we learn as adults on the job (processes, technical skills, etc). Select employees, don’t try to modify employees.