I ran a FAST Intensive Workshop for entrepreneurs at the weekend which was exceptionally well received and based on the feedback I got I wanted to share an insight we discussed heavily, and that was Simplicity.
When I talked about Simplicity, many of the attendees initially thought I was referring to how I could make their jobs easier, which they were very interested to hear.
But actually what we discussed was how do make our businesses simple for our customers to use.
Too often people are so focused on making things easier for themselves that their customers actually suffer, I mean does anyone really like voice recognitions calls, or would you rather speak to someone in person..
But when we make it difficult for our customers to do business with us, we are basically just pushing them towards the competition.
Don’t believe me? Well, how many of you have given up and moved onto to another website because the company you were hoping to buy the product or service from, made it too long, too laborious, or too difficult to complete the process that you just quit!
I know I have, multiple times, and I know many others who have too.
When we make it difficult for our customers to do business with us at the point of sale, what does that communicate to them about the rest of our services. If we can’t get that right, the sale, what chance do they have of being able to do any business with us simply.
I believe this is why Amazon is so popular, you can almost complete the process with just 1 or 2 clicks, they have made it so easy we almost cannot fail.
They are the benchmark against which I measure others by. If a companies website is more effort than Amazons then I just move on, as I suspect they will be difficult to work with in other areas too.
When I asked the question about what type of payments people accept, 100% of the people said they accepted paypal, however not many other payment methods were accepted.
When I challenged the entrepreneurs on this, they said, but people can pay by paypal.
But what if the potential customer doesn’t have paypal or doesn’t want to pay by paypal, why should payment method be the problem of the customer?
We should accept all payment types, if we don’t, then we risk losing the sale and pushing the customer to the competition.
In order to be successful we need to examine every aspect of our business and see what we can do to simplify it, and make it easy for people to do business with us.
When we do that we will attract and retain more customers. When we don’t we will lose customers, it is as simple as that.
If you want to know more about FAST for Entrepreneurs contact me at gordon@leadership-principles.com
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