Sabotaging Success

There is a lot of excellent material around how people self-sabotage - particularly when they are doing well. Often this comes down to having a poor self-image that acts like an anchor and we keep self-correcting to hold onto the diminished self-image that we have.

Businesses can also suffer from the same malaise. One of the key areas affected is when a business is not clear on its purpose, vision, values,  brand standards and who it is best set up to serve is productivity.

It is worth defining productivity again: “The effectiveness of productive effort, especially in industry, as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input.”

This is so important that Paul Krugman wrote in his 1994 book The Age of Diminishing Expectations, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.”

An example many businesses can probably relate to is losses incurred serving “D” customers. Not all customers are created equal. This can be a very hard truth for some businesses to accept. The reality is that you are best set up to serve a certain core group of clients - your people, systems and processes will be geared and targeted towards delivering excellent service to this identified target group. If you are a small to medium business, you are likely very flexible and able to adapt to fluctuating customer needs. As businesses get bigger, they often become more process driven and lose some of the individual flexibility. This is not a bad thing. It means that somebody's D client could be another company's A client.  

Are you trying to treat everybody the same - at the cost of your productivity and profitability? This often happens when a business is more concerned about being nice and helpful to everybody rather than focused on who they are best set up to serve and delivering excellence to a smaller group of people. Here are two examples:

When companies have regular repeat customers, I strongly advise doing a customer grading exercise that breaks client data base into ABCD clients. Once done, we then work on how we will treat the A, the B, and the C customers. Teams have limited resources so it is important to ensure that we are looking after the clients and proportionately investing in those clients who are the most valuable to us. In doing this exercise many companies are amazed at how they are treating the C&D clients with the same, if not better, standard of service as their A clients in terms of client visits, time spent, calls and offers made.

Another area people often struggle to let go of the D grade customers is around cash sales/across counter sales for businesses that are B2B. They can take huge amounts of time for little to no return - putting minimum order values can be a great way to protect your staff’s time.

If you suspect you are negatively impacting your productivity we encourage you to address this now and as always if we can help, do reach out.

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