Do You Make It Easy (Or Hard) For People To Buy From You?
By leadership author and keynote speaker Ross Shafer
Thanks for finding the Relevant Leaders Club, this is a resource for leaders who want to take away new ideas to boost your business and your career. It’s also a forum to help make everyone a better leader.
This week I want to talk about how about a simple question. Do you make it easy for people to buy from you…or do you make it hard?
Look, I know you have demands coming at you from all sides because, as leaders, we’re expected to drive growth, manage people, and cut costs. If revenue is lagging – or costs are escalating, we call a meeting and strategize, we buy industry research, and we hire third-party companies to compile Big Data. But, it rarely occurs to us to actually witness the process our customers have to go through to buy from us. If the process is clumsy or requires too many steps, your revenue is at high risk.
I’m urging you to get out of the office and physically watch your buyers as they go through the process of buying from you. If you can do it anonymously – like the Undercover Boss TV show – that’s even better. You’ll see first hand if buying from you is easy and fast…or confusing and slow. You’ll see what training has been neglected. You’ll see if your website has glitches that prevent people from finding what they want. In the flurry of running a business, these kinds of problems can go on for a long time….right up until you bump your head on Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
A couple of years ago I did a field report on a young man who wanted to own a Denny’s restaurant franchise. There was a struggling restaurant for sale in Arizona. This man had never owned a restaurant before but when he took a look at the operation in person, he knew exactly how to double the revenue. The location was in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. Many of the customers had to point to the pictures of the food on the menu to place an order. Also, this location didn’t have any Spanish-speaking employees. So this young man hired a bilingual staff and had the menu printed in English and Spanish. He doubled the revenue in less than a year.
When was the last time you physically got out of the office and pretended you were a new customer trying to buy something from your company? Fresh eyes on an old problem can prevent complacency and keep you in business.
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