Schlagwort-Archive: Blind Spot

The blind spot of sales promotion

The chances of the Internet make everyone a possible vendor of products and services. It leads to confusing offers and a lack of demand in your outcomes. Therefore, you fight with all means for awareness. To stand out from the flood of competitors, legions of advisers offer help regarding Social Media, SEO, Chat Bots, Affiliate, Influencer and Online Marketing, and more. They promise a growing sales funnel and thus make more revenue. However, all these means are void as long as their vie for leads drive the sending offers at any cost as well as the SEO design does not create anything but ongoing work, charges, and the loss of self-confidence in your deliverables.

Too many PR efforts create a blind spot that even the best promotional efforts cannot address – the inadequate design of your deliverables.

  • Focus on the wrong thing – better sharpen the product range
    There is no question that promotion has a significant impact on sales. However, Henry Ford already knew: You cannot build up a reputation on what you are going to do. In our fast-paced times, entrepreneurs seem to put the cart before the horse. They design mesmerizing promotions for an offer that is stuck in the providers’ minds. Coming up with the slogan consumes time and energy – remember, without having a presentable deliverable. At the same time, customers pay for your offer – be aware, they are not willing to pay more for something due to the effort required for sales promotion.
    For this reason: Before you get bogged down in advertising, make your products and services sellable – the baker first makes the rolls before praising them.
  • Distraction through SEO – better conduct personal customer conversations
    The real purpose of advertising is to increase sales – not to attract additional visitors to your website. The presumption that the clever design of the website and especially the keywords will generate further business through the increased number of visitors is more wish than reality. A car repair shop with limited parking spaces and a fixed number of employees cannot process more vehicles at will. Therefore it does not need more traffic on the website, but rather more interaction with its regular customers. In contrast, an advisory office can better adapt to a growing number of orders. Through clever marketing, it taps into and ultimately serves new customer groups and a more extensive scope. However, it is futile to advertise as long as the deliverables are not prepared coherently. SEO is a one-way street that does not provide new insights. Only through the mutual exchange with your customers, you learn where and how you can become better.
    For this reason: Save SEO time and money and instead involve the customers in the further development of your deliverables – you discover your weaknesses and can offer at the same time additional and higher-quality outcomes.
  • Tough in presentation, banal in matter
    According to Microsoft, the attention span of Internet users is eight seconds – then they move on to the next page. However, this duration says nothing about whether a link was clicked by chance or people searched for exactly your content. You should be aware that you only read this bullet point up to here and only understand it 70-80%. Potential buyers skim the content for their keywords. If they do not find what they are looking for or are distracted by something else, they move on and are gone. However, if you catch their attention, they start reading carefully. After all, they want to make an investment – the more it costs, the longer they are ready to read the enticing explanations that clarify your skills. The superficial appearance of most web pages arouses doubts in readers – all show and no substance. By describing your deliverables too shallowly, you have missed the chance to win a customer who is already with you. Stick to the old design rule Form follows Function – sharpen your ax before you chop wood.
    For this reason: No one judges a car only by its body – make sure that all the components of your offering fit together and perform as expected.

Bottom line: Understandably, you struggle to create an attractive external image – especially if you are not working to capacity. However, the problem is rarely a weak web presence. Convincing websites are available off the shelf. A few clicks and the company colors and logo are incorporated. The good news is that these standards make it easy for customers to navigate your offerings. If you are using the same headlines repeatedly (e.g., Better – Faster – Farther – Cheaper), you are not setting yourself apart from your competitors. The difference that makes the difference is a description of your unique capabilities. If this view on the tip of the iceberg of your achievements is then based on appropriately prepared procedures, the moment has come to apply skillfully. In this case, Henry Ford’s insight counts: Half the money I spend on advertising is waste, and the problem is I do not know which half. However, get into the blind spot of your sales promotion first – the products and services. That is what your customers are ready to pay for.

SVC – Capacity killers from the top

Division of labor is determined by horizontal and vertical distribution of tasks. The enemy of this arrangement is the micro manager, who interferes with the tasks of the employees. A typical form is the supervisor call – the capacity killer from the top.

SVC2

Originally the supervisor call had to terminate the function of a running program on a host computer. Programs did not come to an end due to errors in the program code. In order not to restart the entire computer, a SVC could interrupt this program. It always had to be decided, whether the procedure is frozen in an infinite loop or it simply had to process many data. Surprisingly there are executives, who proceed according to a similar pattern in their organizations. They interrupt ongoing tasks regardless of the consequences. How can you recognize them?

  • Like the leopard cannot change its spots, we all have to live with our selective perception. We only consider what attracts our attention in the respective moment the most. Also decision makers cannot escape from this bias. As soon as people draw positive or negative attention with their activities, it can happen that a superordinate instance is motivated to a direct interference despite all delegation.
  • Similarly the blind spot works, which makes the look at specialties impossible. For executives these are mostly the restrictions that are imposed by money or time budgets, which they are not willing to accept. In the US, bosses invented for this purpose “stretched goals”. In the mean time we know the negative effects, if the bow is overdrawn.
  • Good leadership is characterized by an overview of existing and already used resources. As soon as this overall picture is missing, the requirements add up much higher than the possibilities that are available. Fatally the employees are double-charged for this deficit, since they are additionally accused of not being ready to make enough efforts. This produces a continuous discontent, which lowers the usual performance.
  • An important instrument of the leadership is setting goals with a certain prioritization. Long-term planning offers for this the general framework. The damage that is caused by the repetitive change of priorities is immense. Nothing is accomplished. Desired changes do not take place. Personal goals are not achieved.
  • A common approach is the temporary overriding of processes, hierarchies and schedules. And this happens, after the structures were developed, coordinated and decided. But why are you superior, if you do not have power to set this order off whenever you want.
  • It is also popular to assign special tasks spontaneously – past all the installed chain of command. This going around the established rankings with an overriding from top to the bottom is multiplied by the frustration of the ignored levels. Eventually the commitment of the involved people sinks because of their expectation of the direct interference, since they cannot assert themselves in any case.
  • The executives, who want to hold the pressure on the pipe by always coming up with new ideas, are particularly difficult. They undermine thereby the efforts of the employees to convert the ideas that they had just brought on the way. From the outside they seem to be creative and active bosses, who promote new things. That they bring nothing to an end, you usually see after they rose to their level of incompetence.
  • Superior people, who do not trust their employees, are condemned to the fact producing only what they can deliver by themselves. Even though the decisive delegation of tasks would increase dramatically the effectiveness of the own area of responsibility.
  • Those people are also remarkable who make their own ideas the measure of all things, despite missing arguments and out of complete hubris. They live out their Because-I-Want-It syndrome and do not even make an effort to consider the arguments of the others. It is only a matter of time, before the organization will uncover them.

Enterprises can overcome these exemplary symptoms of capacity killers, by taking care of their corporate culture. The most important tool is thereby the regular reflection of the way how executives behave and get to a decision. This is done with an open exchange of opinions within the top team and through employee surveys. Based on this, new ways should be found, in order to avoid awkward behaviors like SVC.

Bottom line: Leadership needs clear goals, roles and a consistent implementation. Superiors have to be thereby role models, who are passed on through all levels. In the positive case this happens for the advantage of the entire staff. Harmful behavior, on the contrary, can have life-threatening effects for the company. A good start is the persistent avoidance of the SVC – the capacity killer from the top.