Category Archives: Articles

• It’s not the economy! It’s you, dummy.

  Wednesday, August 11th, 2010 by Wes Ball

  Someone asked me the other day why I have written so few articles this year.  The reason is simple:  I’ve been working inside a company to grow it.  Despite this terrified, hide-your-money-in-a-pillowcase economy, by the end of the year we expect to be at or near our very aggressive growth target that we set a year and a half ago.

  Many persons watching us wonder how we can do that.  It looks as though we are selling essentially the same thing as most of our competitors, yet we get between 50% and 100% more for it.  So, here’s the secret…

  We are working our tails off to get there.  We have made sure we understand exactly what people REALLY want to buy in our category (not the “things” they want to buy, but rather the “experience” they want before, during, and after the sale), and we have made sure we are not only providing those things, but also helping them discover how critical it is for their own personal satisfaction and fulfillment that they get nothing less than that.

  Sound familiar?  It should.  It’s the Alpha model.

  Has this been easy?  Absolutely not.  The most difficult thing has been getting everyone on the team to understand and buy into this model.  Actual delivery and communications have been been relatively easy.  Getting everyone to understand that this is not about them, but rather about the customer’s experience, has been the real battle.

  What makes this even better is that this company is in what most people consider to be a “commodity” industry.  Actually, most companies are… not because what they sell is actually a commodity, but rather because they and all of their competitors have allowed purchasers to believe that it is.  They have allowed people to believe that it’s easy to deliver what you deliver and that what everyone in your category sells is essentially the same.

  That is never true.  At the core level, the real defining difference between you and your competitors has to be you.  If they buy from anyone else, they don’t get YOU.  That can (and should) mean not just you individually, but your company, your installers, your service people, your telephone people, your customer service reps, your salespersons, your packaging,… everything and everyone in your company.  Why? Because each has been created or trained to represent the pinnacle of what can be had by buying something in your category.

  When someone buys from your company, the should be buying something they never thought they would be able to get:

  1. freedom from worry about they quality of the product, its installation, training to use it, and/or its performance,
  2. comfort in knowing that if anything goes wrong (or if you don’t achieve expected results), you will be there to make it absolutely right, and
  3. fulfillment in knowing that others will wonder how they were smart enough to find the best possible option out of all the not quite good enough options.

  It’s not the economy that’s holding you back.  It’s you and how you run your company and approach the marketplace.  If you aren’t using the Alpha model to sell in this economy, then you are losing thousands or millions of dollars every day.

  Special Limited-time Offer

  If that’s you and you are tired of blaming the economy or price-sensitive customers on your poor performance, here’s a special offer:  give me a call or email me, and I will personally send you a free article on how you can turn that around in the next 60 days. No charge.  No commitment.  Just real, immediately usable answers that will change the way you run your business (or sell customers) so that you can be selling at higher prices, getting more completely satisfied customers, and reaping greater profits than ever before.

  I’ve hidden this offer deep in this post, because I only want to help people who are willing to work for it.  It’s never easy to become the Alpha, but this special article will allow you to understand how to immediately put your company on the track to becoming an Alpha.  Contact me today, because I have only printed a limited quantity of this special article.  Once they run out, I won’t reprint it again.

  Wes Ball is president of The Ball Group.  He is also author of The Alpha Factor, available here or through on-line bookstores.  Wes speaks around the country to large groups of business owners and managers who want to start growing their sales and profit sustainably without discounting or promotion… no matter what the economy is doing.  You can reach Wes at 717.627.0405 or through his email at w.ball@ballgroup.com.

  Posted in Applying "The Alpha Factor", Articles, Business | Comments (0)

• Motivating employee performance without financial incentives

  Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 by Wes Ball

  In case you don’t already know this, financial incentives are the least effective motivators of desired employee behavior… especially for creating loyalty. That’s really good news at a time when money is tight and companies are desperately trying to keep good employees.  Here are some facts about how to better motivate employees that could really help right now…

  Financial incentives are the best motivator for behavior you want the least, such as self-serving attitudes, destructive greed, and internal competition that demotivates other employees. If you want an employee who has low loyalty, makes other employees distrust each other (and the company), and will try to leverage you continually for more money for doing less work, then financial incentives are great.  The truth is that employees who work for you despite a lack of special financial incentives that are designed to motivate specific behavior are more loyal, more focused upon the good of the company overall, and more supportive of other employees.  In short, they are great team players… something that almost every company says they want to hire.

  So, what motivates the type of employee you want better than money?  Sadly, they are the very things that most companies are loath to give: trust, empowerment, and appreciation.

  Ask almost any corporate employee what they hate the most about their job (and would desperately like to change jobs to get), and they will most often answer with things like, “trust, personal empowerment, and appreciation for work well done.”  Interestingly, despite this overwhelming unmet need, if asked what they want the most, they will most often answer, “more money.”

  Why the disconnect between what they say they want and what they would change jobs to get?  It’s something I have seen in market research thousands of times.  People will say they want something that is far different from what they would give almost anything to get, because they don’t think they can get it or they don’t believe the person asking would give it to them.  So they answer with something they believe the questioner will understand and accept.

  As an employer, I have always been amazed to discover that the employees that have provided the lowest return on investment have typically been those demanding the most money and the most financial incentives for things that will grow the company.  The best employees have typically been ones who want a chance to prove themselves and who are less concerned about short-term financial incentives than long-term growth potential.

  My advice:  Forget the financial incentives except as “appreciation.”  Focus upon making employees feel more trusted by including top performing ones in strategic planning and other long-range planning activities or problem-solving.  Invest in employees who show potential or who demonstrate the “right” attitudes” with training and by giving them special opportunities to prove themselves.

  You will find that everyone on your team is more motivated and more more focused upon the things you really need from employees.

  If you have examples of this at work in your company, I would love to hear about them.  It’s about time that corporate managers realize that negative motivation and weak financial incentives won’t work, but showing more respect, trust, and appreciation to employees will.

  Wes Ball is the author of The Alpha Factor.  Although he spent the last 20+ years growing companies ranging from the Fortune 100 to small local companies, he is focusing almost exclusively upon medium-sized businesses who he believes have the most potential to rejuvenate our economy and to become tomorrow’s market leaders.  You can reach Wes at 717.799.3395 or w.ball@ballgroup.com.
  

  Posted in Applying "The Alpha Factor", Articles, Market research, Uncategorized | Comments (1)

• Grow your business right now; ignore everyone else – part 2

  Saturday, September 12th, 2009 by Wes Ball

  I am working with a company right now that is outperforming most of its competitors, while charging 50% to 100% more for the same products.  How is it accomplishing this?  The secret is that it offers “ego-satisfaction value” that customers really want to buy.  And this is for what most people would consider a completely non-emotional, non-ego-centric product.

  Big surprise, huh?  Yet you would believe this was revolutionary new thinking, if you look at what most of the marketplace is doing.

  Most businesses are creating their own personal recessions right now that will follow them for years. Discounting (because they think they need to in order to survive) is killing their futures more certainly than any government policies can.  The cost to overcome this “devaluing” that they are creating for themselves will far outweigh any possible gain they think they might have generated during the last year.

  Creating “value” has been the subject of conversation around boardroom tables for decades.  Sadly, in most cases, that conversation gets no deeper than adding more “features” or adjusting price for a product or service that really needs to be rethought.  Consumers and corporate buyers are more interested than ever in value, but their definition of that term is being modified to demand more Alpha-style fulfillment than our economy has experienced in a long time.  As consumers feel more pressed and corporate buyers feel more threatened with lack of job security, both are looking for more evidence that they are not just OK, but also  valued.

  Here are two critical things Alphas know about creating value that will drive growth (or limit loss) in any economy:

  • You have to understand who assesses the value of your product, and
  • Discounting is the quickest way to increase your pain rather than decrease it.

  Sound simplistic?  Then why is it that well over 90% of all companies get these two things incredibly wrong.  Even those who start off handling these correctly and build both market share and Alpha influence eventually fall into the trap of incorrectly assessing value and believing that discounting can save them from decline.  We are seeing it all too clearly right now throughout the marketplace.

  • Critical fact #1:  VALUE is in the eye of the beholder (that’s the customer)
    

  “Value” is an estimate by a potential customer of how much he thinks he will gain by purchasing what you offer minus the “pain” he thinks he will experience in purchasing it.  This “gain” vs. “pain” formula is critical to understanding how to strategically make your product or service more attractive.  The potential customer is making critical judgments about what you sell vs. what they want to improve in their lives.

  Psychologists have long held that people typically act either to move away from pain or to move toward gain.  It is the individual’s perception of what creates pain or gain that really comes into play in creating strategic differentiation and market growth.  Without this understanding, you don’t have a prayer of selling “value.”

  • Critical fact #2:  the “beholder” is not you

  More important to remember is that this pain vs. gain “valuation” is done by the prospective customer, not you.

  Businesses of all sizes are notoriously guilty of thinking that they know what customers want.  Sadly, that self-assessment is almost always proven to be false.

  This only gets worse during tough economic times.  As cash flow and profitability are pressed, the pain at the corporate level gets translated into movement away from strategic sanity and toward self-destructive tactics that actually work against the company.  More pressure is placed in panic upon “making the sale” with little regard to how what is being sold can become more attractive in ways that mean something to the customer.

  What means something to the customer is often far different than what means something to the marketer.  As customers move away from pain and toward gain, they make many assessments and judgments.  On the “pain” side is certainly monetary cost, but there are also many other factors, including how hard it is to get it, how hard it will be to work with the people selling it, etc.  Monetary cost only becomes a real factor when the buyer doesn’t have money and can’t get it.

  Luckily, we are still in an economy where that is not a significant factor.  Most companies and consumers are more careful about spending in order to preserve what they have, but most have money to spend on the things they believe they really want, need, and will fulfill core ego needs.

  We all know that if we were to discover that we have a fatal, but curable disease, we would find a way to pay for the cure, even if we did not have medical insurance.  In much the same way, we will find a way to get the things that overcome even less critical needs.  To a lesser extent, we will find a way to fund the purchase of something that increases our self-image and self-perceived value to others.  In the Alpha model, these ego-satisfaction needs are referred to as “Self-Satisfaction” and “Personal Significance.”  After these are satisfied, other monies available might be used to buy other things.

  So, here’s where the conflict comes in:  most marketers make their assessments of what customers will buy based upon THEIR avoidance of pain and desire for gain.

  There is little real understanding among the typical corporate marketer (other than Alphas and emerging Alphas) about what people really want to buy.  The result is that they try to create more value by adding features, adding amounts included, and/or lowering price to “increase” value.  The trouble is that customers just want to satisfy the basic functional need with something that also fulfills their all but insatiable need for self-satisfaction and personal significance.  Features, amounts, and pricing do little to address those emotional, self-perception needs in ways that cannot easily be overcome by a competitor who recognizes real buyer needs.

  If you want to increase value, you have to really understand more than the functional needs being addressed.  You also have to understand the core emotional needs customers want to fulfill with almost anything they buy.

  • Critical fact #3:  DISCOUNTING is almost all pain and little gain

  Why do most marketers fall into the trap of price reduction as a means to “increase value?”

  It’s easy, even if it is self-destructive.  It certainly doesn’t take much creative, strategic thinking to suggest discounting.  It’s also what most salespersons have been brainwashed into believing by buyers who manipulate them.

  Price only becomes a factor when all other things are equal OR when the buyer thinks he can get away with demanding a lower price.  So, the typical marketer gets lots of feedback about how they need to lower their price, simply because they have not differentiated themselves in ways that mean anything to real customers.

  The problem is not just a matter of poor marketing; it is also a matter of bad business management.  Profit is the lifeblood of a company.  Without it, the company fails.  People lose their jobs.  Suppliers feel the pain.  The economy falters.  More companies fail.  And a death spiral begins.

  A drop in price of just 5% across the board can mean a drop in profit for the company of anywhere from 10% to 50% depending upon the benchmark net profit.  In order to compensate for that drop in profitability, drastic cuts must be made on the cost side.  On the contrary, minor changes can create value that could drive prices upward by 10% to 25%.  In many cases, I have seen minor changes in value perception generate value increases of 30% to 100%, which drives even greater sales growth (which only increases net profit further).

  I know.  It’s easy to say, but much harder to do.  That’s only true if you hold to the premise that price is a critical factor in creating value.  Eliminate discounting from your vocabulary, focus upon self-satisfaction and personal significance fulfillment for your customers, and it is amazing what changes will be wrought by your salespeople, your marketing team, and even your administrative team.

  People naturally want to sell and buy real value.  Forget your old perceptions of value, and you will be shocked at what your people and your company can do.

  Wes Ball is president and founder of The Ball Group, a strategic innovation and growth creation company.  He is also author of The Alpha Factor – a revolutionary new look at what really creates market dominance and self-sustaining growth.  Find out how you can use the Alpha model to create dramatic, sustainable growth for your company no matter what the economy is doing by calling Wes directly at 717.627.0405 or email him at w.ball@ballgroup.com.

  Posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Comments (0)