How To Use Simple Ideas To Grow Your Business

If someone could wave a magic wand and suddenly change something about your chosen profession or business, what one thing would you have them change? Would you have them provide you with an easier way to contact more, betterqualified prospects? And would you want those prospects as well as your current customers to view you as even more of a professional, or maybe even an “expert” in your field?

You may be good now, but how would you like to be even better at making more effective, more persuasive presentations? Perhaps you would like to be more effective at closing sales or handling objections. Or, is repeat business more important to you?

What if your current customers felt that you were the only person or the only business who understood and could effectively serve their specialized, unique and individual needs? Or, how about referrals? Take the best customer you have right now. How would you like to have more contacts just like them than you could possibly handle? What one thing would you change to make you a better, happier, and more productive businessperson?

Increasing Your Effectiveness

It’s no secret that things are changing today, faster than ever before. Technology has become more sophisticated, competition more keen, and consumers – the people who buy your products and services have become more educated and aware.

And with the wide variety of choices your customers or clients have, not only in similar products and services from different companies, but also in the individual people they deal with, it stands to reason that the more skillful and professional you are at meeting your customer’s needs, the bigger advantage you can command, and the more effective and successful you can become.

If you’re really going to be effective and successful in the marketplace today, it is necessary, even vital, that you continually change, improve, adjust and update your selling, service, and problemsolving skills, as well as your methods of marketing and general business operation.
It has been said, (and you’ve no doubt heard) that:

“People don’t care how much you know,
until they know how much you care.”

One of the best and most effective ways you can show your prospects and customers you care, is by helping them solve their problems in a satisfactory, costeffective, and professional manner.

Exposure To New Ideas

One way to do that is to expose yourself to new, tried, tested, and fieldproven ideas, concepts, and techniques that have worked for other business people much like you. Once acquainted with new information and ideas, it will then be up to you to decide which ideas can best be tailored to your own individual business situation, and how you will begin to use them to better serve your customers and prospects.

Your goal is not to try and become a marketing expert, but rather, to learn at least some of the tools that the experts and those who are already successful in business are currently using. You should be looking for ideas that are easy to implement, and that you can begin using right away. Other ideas may take a little longer to gear up for. And there will be others that may not be right for you or your operation at all. That’s okay. It’s not possible for everything you come across to be 100% usable for you in every situation that occurs in your business.

But if you regularly get just one or two good, usable ideas that you can put into your business operation that makes a difference, then your time, effort and money will be well invested.

How We Retain Information

Getting a new idea is one thing, but what you do with it once you have it is just as important as getting it in the first place. Studies on retention show that you remember:

-10% of what you read,
-22% of what you hear,
-37% of what you see,
-56% of what you see and hear, and up to
-86% of what you see, hear and do.

So an idea that is heard but not acted on is only half as likely to be retained as an idea that is actually put into practice. With that concept in mind then, it is important to understand that if any kind of information you come across is to be of any real value to you, it must not only be read, it must be applied. That is to say, it must be experienced, or acted on. And that means it’s going to take some effort on your part.

In their book, The Knowing-Doing Gap, authors, Jeffrey Pheffer and Robert L. Sutton mention that every year there are 1,700 new business books published, $60 billion spent on training, $43 billion spent on consultants and our universities turn out 80,000 graduates with MBA’s. Yet, most businesses continue to operate day in and day out in much the same ways as they’ve always done.

What this proves is that knowledge without action is no better than no knowledge at all. Just knowing isn’t enough. You’ve got to do something with what you to know. So when you come across new ideas… ideas that have been proven to work in business… even if that business is totally unrelated to yours, rather than discard them as not applicable, study them carefully and determine…

• Will this idea work for me as it is presented? If not, will ANY part of it work for me?
• How can I change, modify or adapt it to work in one form or another?
• How soon can I put this idea or some part of it into effect in my business?
• What kinds of resources will I need to implement this idea?
• What will it cost for me to implement it?
• What will be the cost if I fail to implement it?
• What is likely to be the payoff for me if I implement it?
• How can I leverage this idea into other areas of my business?

The key is to take action. All success comes from the implementation of ideas, and not the ideas themselves.