Act with focus, not with frenzy
NAHAD-sponsored webinar offers advice on motivating customers to act in ways that will drive positive results for your business.
In a NAHAD-sponsored webinar titled “Be Focused, Not Frenzied: Navigating Business Through Uncertainty,” Steve Yastrow, president of Yastrow & Company, offered advice on motivating customers to act in ways that will drive positive results for their business.
The webinar focused on issues surrounding the current COVID-19 crisis and addressed how businesses are facing and adapting to the new reality.
“There are many factors out of your control and you need to assess, evaluate and understand them because they are really important. But you don’t need to let them control you. Your success in dealing with this situation depends largely on how well you address the things that you can control,” Yastrow said.
Yastrow uses the analogy of the difference between being in the driver’s seat or the passenger’s seat of car. This, he says, can be achieved by focusing on understanding your environment and adapting to that environment with thoughtful and strategic actions.
“Act with focus, not with frenzy,” he said.
As examples of current adaptive actions, Yastrow points to virtual meetings and a shift to carry-out service by restaurants.
Yastrow says there are some things we can expect to come out of our current economic upheaval. First, once the crisis passes, people will want to return to doing business, but how people buy and sell will be different.
Adapting to this changed environment will involve focusing not just on macroeconomic (big picture) factors but more on how those factors will affect your business, including your external customers, your employees, the logistics of your industry and your competitors.
Adapting with thoughtful, deliberate and strategic action includes determining what success looks like to you, how to motivate customers in ways that will help you achieve that success and how to inspire your team to help motivate your customers.
How to achieve best possible outcomes includes realizing and acting on the concept that you don’t create your business results, your customers do. Therefore, your job and the job of everyone in your company is to do things that motivate your customers to take actions that help you succeed.
Yastrow also defines a customer as anyone whose actions affect your results. These can be paying customers, suppliers, referral sources, etc.
A key to this is — in light of how macroeconomic forces influence your market and your customers — looking at microeconomic factors that you can control. While you cannot control things like the stock market, you can influence how customers see and support your business on a local level.
Key questions to ask yourself are:
Who are the customers that can best help my company achieve its goals? What actions do we need to motivate them to take?
Yastrow also looks into the psychology of what people believe and how those beliefs influence what they do. He also discusses the misconceptions surround the concept of a “brand.”
“Your brand is not what you say you are,” he says. “Your brand is what your customers think you are.”
Seen that way, the key question becomes, “What do we need our customers to believe so they will act in ways that drive our desired results?”
The simple answer is that they must believe they are better off because they do business with you.
He also deals with the concepts of brand harmony, unified customer experiences, “being the brand,” and other ideas to motivate customers to believe that they are better off by doing business with you and want to support you.
This 55-minute webinar is available for free at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrnYCoVMALQ&feature=youtu.be.
Steve Yastow’s in-depth, real-world experience advising hundreds of companies and organizations inform his practical, proven approach to driving business results. He has been a keynote speaker for more than 20 years, speaking for hundreds of organizations, including large conference keynotes as well as interactive workshops for individual organizations. He is a former senior marketing executive with Hyatt Hotels and is now president of his own consulting firm, Yastrow & Company.
Learn more at www.yastrow.com and www.nahad.org.
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