How to Get Better Customer Service Results by Focusing Your Small Business Efforts

By Rhonda Campbell
Here’s a dream. You win five Grammy Awards on the same night, win the U.S. Open, take home the prize at a Food Network bakeoff, throw the winning touchdown pass at the Super Bowl and open a school that helps turn under-represented students into national scholars, all in a month. Gosh. You must be feeling awfully good right about now. You’re always winning, but remember . . . this is only a dream.

Specialize and Focus Your Efforts as a Small Business Leader

Dreams are spellbinding, intoxicating. They can keep you going even when you’re exhausted, like gasoline fumes that keep a car moving when it’s on ‘E’. If you’re not careful, dreams can also cause you to spread your attention and energy in too many directions, propelling you to take on too many promotional, business marketing and business product development projects at once. Over time, this could impact customer service and customer sales.

To achieve lasting success as a small business owner, focus your talents and efforts. Don’t try to do everything. For example, if you own a sporting goods store, consider specializing in four to five products (e.g. sweat pants, track and field running shoes, dead weights, hooded sweat jackets) rather than trying to become known for selling every piece of sports equipment and fashion wear on the planet.

When my siblings and I were kids running track, we knew where to get copies of Track and Field News. There was one store in Ohio (where our grandparents lived) and another store in Tennessee (where we lived). That was it. We’d go to those stores, plop down money for the latest issue of Track and Field News and, without meaning to, also purchase a pair of sneakers and sports socks. But what got us in the stores was the fact that those were the only two stores we knew of in Dayton and Knoxville that sold what we really wanted, a copy of Track and Field News. We didn’t even consider going to other stores. We knew we could get what they sold anywhere.

Steps to Focus Your Small Business Efforts

Think about it, as good as they are at marketing, Apple doesn’t sell kitchen sinks. If you’re struggling to focus because you assume by putting more products in front of consumers, you’ll increase customer sales, remember that you’re building for longevity. In fact, develop and manage your company right and it’ll be here after you’re gone, helping to support the next several generations in your family.

Steps you can take to focus your efforts include:

• Review your business marketing plan and assess whether or not you are making the “right” choices that will help you meet your business goals
• Set up a weekly or monthly appointment with a mentor, business consultant or life coach from reliable executive coaching firms, someone who can help keep you accountable and on track
• Ask yourself what you want your company to be known for
• Create a list of your daily, weekly and monthly action items and eliminate items that take you away from your small business goals
• Commend other creative business leaders who are excelling in fields you admire (life is about creating, not competing)

You can also read autobiographies and biographies that tell the stories of other successful small business owners who operate companies in a variety of industries. As you read about challenges they face in their industries, you may come to clearly see that focusing your efforts in one industry at a time is more than enough.

If you enjoyed or benefitted from this article, share it with others by clicking the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Share buttons below. You bet!  We appreciate it!  

Get Your Copy of Spiral at https://www.ebookit.com/books/0000000841/Spiral.html