From The Editor's Desk
Customers are essential to the survival and growth of any business. As the success of businesses depends on their ability to service, increase and keep their customers, through good times and bad, customers should always be priority number one.
I thought you would find the following twelve tips (by Dana Dratch, extracted from www.bankrate.com) to be of interest:
1. Get to know your customers
Talk to your customers regularly about what they want and need from your business. You need to develop a relationship where they know you value their opinion.
2. Give customers something new
Find products and services that are exciting enough to bring in new customers and that keep old customers happy.
3. Respond immediately to problems
It doesn't matter who's right, make the appropriate restitution. Your goal is to satisfy the customer and keep that person coming back. Be sure to link restitution with loyalty!
4. Stay in touch
Don't let customers go too long without thinking of your business. You can use a variety of methods to get your message across: direct mailers, e-mails, phone calls, etc. Every four to six weeks is a good rule of thumb.
5. Set yourself apart
Differentiate yourself from the competition. Avoid being a 'me too' business.
6. Follow up with customers
Contact your customers after the sale or event and find out what they think of the service/quality they received. That way, if they are happy, you can ask for referrals. If they're not, you're the first to know and have a chance to set things right.
7. Entertain your customers
You need to become almost a destination for your customers. Make the encounter with your business fun and interesting.
8. Give your customers superior service
If they get great service from you they'll be less likely to switch when a new business enters your market.
9. Emphasize value
You may not have the cheapest prices in town but you must be able to offer the best value. In the long run, that's a much smarter strategy
10. Find out what the customer wants and provide it
Make it very, very simple for the customer to get what they want
11. Give customers more than they expect
Under promise and over deliver - that way you can't go wrong.
12. Reward your customers
There are lots of ways you can reward customers - promotional calendars, pens, wines, etc. - all with your logo of course. There are many inexpensive, inventive ways to say "thanks."
Although Spectrum Solutions has been selling, delivering and implementing The Dealmaker™ suite of programmes for less than two years, we have managed to secure more than one hundred customers. We attribute our success to fantastic products, people and service, but also to the loyalty of our customers, without whom we would have no reason to exist.
We would like to thank each and every person and organisation that has contributed to our success, particularly our repeat customers such as Ask Afrika, Kelloggs (USA), Kimberly-Clark (Latin America), Nedbank, Neotel, RSM Betty & Dickson, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Symantec and Virbac. Thank you most sincerely for your support.
In this month's fabulous Edition of the newsletter:
- Our "Did You Know?" section provides food for thought on the subject of thinking before we speak
- We are delighted to introduce you to our fabulous new monthly feature "The Real You" Interview where we pose a set of unusual questions to one of our The Dealmaker™ Graduates. Our first interview is with the gorgeous Nicola Jackson, Director with Bell, Dewar & Hall Attorneys
- For June our "This Edition's Story" features a wonderful, inspiring speech given by Steve Jobs to graduate student at Stanford in July 2005. You may have seen it before, but it's well worth another read
- Rodney Frowein is the Coach profiled in this month's "Meet The Team" segment
- We have been asked by many readers to include in the newsletter the articles written by Kim Meredith, Managing Director of Spectrum Solutions, on the subject of Dealmaking. From next month we will begin a six part series, with the first article being "Lessons In Dealmaking From Children"
Enjoy the solstice month of June! - Portia Ngcobo
Did You Know?
What do Socrates and Oprah Winfrey have in common? They both wrote on the subject of the harm words can do when words are not "filtered"; ie: when we don't think before we speak. The following story is attributed to Socrates.
In ancient Greece, Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem. One day an acquaintance met the great philosopher and said, "Do you know what I just heard about your friend?"
"Hold on a minute," Socrates replied. "Before telling me anything, I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Three Filter Test."
"Three filter?"
"That's right," Socrates continued. "Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you're going to say. That's why I call it the three filter test. The first filter is TRUTH. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?"
"No," the man said, "actually I just heard about it and..."
"All right," said Socrates. "So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of GOODNESS. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?"
"No, on the contrary..."
"So," Socrates continued, "you want to tell me something bad about him, but you're not certain it's true. You may still pass the test though, because there's one filter left: the filter of USEFULNESS. Is what you want to tell me about my friend going to be useful to me?"
"No, not really."
"Well," concluded Socrates, "if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?"
Think before you speak, before you gossip. Take a page out of Socrates' book and the world will be a far better place for us all.
Extracted from www.anvari.org
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"The Real You" InterviewInterview with Nicola Jackson
Director, Bell, Dewar & Hall (Johannesburg, South Africa)
The Dealmaker™ Graduate |
1. What was the name and breed of your first pet?
A Golden Labrador named Rastus. He was a present from my grandfather, for my second birthday.
2. What is the best advice a business mentor gave you?
"But surely..." leads to the mother of all %*&^ ups! Get your facts right and be prepared.
3. What was your first job and how much did you earn?
Waitress - and a very bad one at that! My finest moment was leaving a shift after making a loss of R10.00 - due to the lack of tips and me having to pay for my parking.
4. If you could assassinate one person, who would it be? Why?
Bob. Why not? (Ed's Note: for our overseas readers, that's Robert Mugabe)
5. If you were a superhero what or who would you be, and why?
Vernon Koekemoer. Who else can take on Chuck Norris?
6. If you were given the opportunity to have dinner with one person, who would it be, and why?
Fidel Castro. I am curious to know whether, had his American League baseball career actually taken off, would he have given it all up for his "Dictator of the Month December 2004" status?
7. Motto to live by?
"Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle and a victory." - Mahatma Gandhi
8. Can you share one idea that would help to improve networking skills?
If you're someone who doesn't like to network because it involves talking to strangers, consider that somewhere in that crowd is a new client, colleague, or friend waiting to meet you.
Thanks for the insight Nicola!
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This Edition's StorySteve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc. gave the following speech while addressing graduate students at Stanford in July 2005. Inspiration everyone could all take to heart. |
Thank you. I'm honoured to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories. The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy. Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life. And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naïvely chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms. I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever - because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty. We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees. We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me. I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I'd been rejected but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life. During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumour on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumour. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-Seventies and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry, stay foolish.
Thank you all, very much.
Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of Apple Inc.
Meet The Dealmaker™ Team: Rodney Frowein
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While in his second year studying Mechanical Engineering at University of the Witwatersrand, a personal tragedy resulted in Rodney having to leave university and assume responsibility for running the family business. After a period of four years Rodney sold the business and returned to his studies, spending the next ten years as an Engineer with Mather & Platt, then the largest privately owned company in the world. |
Rodney's career shifted into gear with his promotion to Information Technology (IT) Manager at Mather & Platt, a move which eventually led to his working for IT vendors such as Wang, Groupe Bull and finally IBM. Rodney spent five years with IBM, progressing to the strategy-orientated position of Sales Manager for the Software Group.
During this time, Rodney became a Director of Business Process Management (BPM), a company specialising in Workflow and Image technology. Rodney was a key member of the team that grew this company from a start-up business to one of the larger and more successful Workflow organisations in South Africa. Rodney was responsible for the negotiations with Wang in the UK, which saw BPM becoming the Wang Distributor for South Africa, and for the negotiations which ultimately led to the purchase of BPM by Q-Data.
With his recent move into the education profession, Rodney has delivered Project Management courses for the likes of Transnet, Nedbank, Avis, IBM, Bytes Technologies and South Africa's Department of Health, amongst others. Rodney joined The Dealmaker™ team in 2006 as a Coach.
Rodney is a member of Psychological Association of South Africa and of Mensa.
A Brand New Programme!
The Dealmaker Programmes Company has developed a new programme, The Dealcloser™, the competitive edge for closing deals.
The Dealcloser™ is a two day programme for people with sales and negotiation experience who want to enhance their proficiency in:
• closing large, strategically important or complex sales, and
• maximising the profitability of their deals
The programme's emphasis is on selling strategies, negotiating skills and the related processes that ensure this success.
By the end of The Dealcloser™ programme you will:
- understand how to use a sales process to maximise strategic planning for important deals
- be able to position value propositions at the highest level
- interface more confidently with executive decision makers
- be able to close down sales-driven deals in a shorter time and protect profitability
There are two programmes scheduled for South Africa for the second half of 2008. Both programmes already have bookings so reserve your place now to avoid missing out on this fabulous new course.
The Dealmaker™ Programmes - Dates for 2008
The course dates for the balance of 2008 are as follows:
The Dealcloser™ |
Venue |
05 & 06 August 2008 |
Johannesburg |
01 & 02 October 2008 |
Johannesburg |
The Dealbuilder™ |
Venue |
16 & 17 September 2008 |
Johannesburg |
The Dealdiva™ - Women Only |
Venue |
20 & 21 August 2008 |
Johannesburg |
11 & 12 November 2008 |
Johannesburg |
The Dealmaker™ |
Venue |
22 - 24 July 2008 |
Johannesburg |
07 - 09 October 2008 |
Johannesburg |
The Dealmaker™ Follow-up |
Venue |
21 & 22 October 2008 |
Johannesburg |
The Dealguru™ - Executives Only |
Venue |
14 & 15 October 2008 |
Johannesburg |
The art of dealmaking is an essential life skill. Investing in a personal development course is absolutely imperative for everyone wanting to improve their life, career and financial well being. Please give us a call on +27 11 440 0193, or, send an email to enquiries@thedealmaker.com to reserve your place on one of our fabulous programmes.
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