The Heart of Business – Part 1

Every business can be broken down into 2 fundamentals: 1) production, 2) sales.

If we look at sales, the goal should not be more sales … it should be more repeat and referred sales.

Repeat and referred sales (their growth or lack of growth) is an indicator of the health of a company.

Why focus on referred and repeat sales? Because they are a market’s best sales. Why are they best? Because they take less time to close (they come with a level of trust built in), they reduce or eliminate your competition from consideration, they lower your dependence on traditional marketing (high price, high volume) and they give you the biggest price range to close in. 

Where are these best sales found? They are found at the heart-level of the marketplace because they are given to those who are remembered well. This is the realm of experience because experience makes the strongest memories because it’s personal. We see proof of this in what makes public speaking such a common fear and what makes some songs favourites while others remain just songs.

Because experience creates the strongest memories, to grow more repeat and referred business and build relationships that your competitors cannot break, companies must intentionally operate at the heart level of business … where business becomes personal. 

So how can your business win at the personal level? By creating strong connections. This until now has been a tricky area to manage because what people connect with seems to be as unlimited as there are different people. I say until now, because I believe there is a universal way to connect with any type of person and that is to make them feel valuable for who they are … a person and not what they are … a customer or employee.

Knowing this truth gives you the ability to create a plan to guide/assess actions in this critical area of business today.

More on that in Part 2 of this blog.