Entrepreneurs Take Risks

Boy, that\’s true about entrepreneurship. If you don\’t take risks, you never accomplish anything. The way you are positioned in the minds and hearts of your prospects, and customers largely determine how easily you sell, how much you sell, how often customers buy from you, and whether or not they recommend you to others. This positioning message can be developed inadvertently or accidentally in the course of your business. Or you can specifically and deliberately decide exactly how you want your customers to think about you when your name comes up in conversation. The most successful companies, large and small, give a lot of thought to their positioning. They do not let the way their customers think about them be determined by chance or by accident, that they decide in advance what their positioning will be. Then they make sure that everything they do in their interactions with customers repeats and reinforces this key message.

Imagine that one of your good customers calls you up one day to ask for your advice, he says. A friend of mine called me and invited me for lunch tomorrow. He says that he is thinking about buying from you and your company, and he wants to ask me for my opinion based on my experience with you. What do you want me to say? If one of your customers were meeting with one of your prospects and you could write out a cue card that your customer would recite to your prospect, what words would you use if you could be a fly on the wall while one of your customers was describing you, your business and your products or services to a prospect? What would you want to hear? Would you want one of your customers to describe you by saying the following?

This is an excellent company. Their products and services are of superb quality. Their customer service is excellent. Their people are warm, friendly, fast, and efficient. They are people of the highest integrity. I would wholeheartedly recommend that you buy from them. You\’ll be happy that you did. Is this what you would like your customers to say about you? If it is, what would you have to do in every customer interaction to ensure that your customers talk about you like this every time your name is mentioned?