Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Find Your “Role-Mate”

Business consultants worldwide strongly encourage entrepreneurs to seek out and develop relationships with “accountability partners” to help the entrepreneur/ business owner stay on track.

Quite often, these “accountability partnerships” quickly fade away because some fundamental requirements were never put into place.
A “Role-Mate” takes the accountability relationship to the next level and creates a sustained partnership of trust and success.

Here are three fundamental requirements that you need to look for in recruiting a “Role–Mate.”

1). Vision: your Role-Mate needs to believe in you and trust that your vision is realistic and achievable.

2). Courage: you must be open and willing to receive unconditional advice. Your “Role-Mate” needs to be professional and friendly, but never your best friend.

3). Leadership: Your “Role-Mate” must be a leader. Leaders inspire you to do things you may not necessarily want to do, but need to do.


How about you? What are some of your basic requirements for a “Role-Mate” ?
I would love to hear from you….email me:
bobgambone@bobgambone.com


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Communicating to Our Customers / Clients: Drop the Acronyms and Industry Speak!

Did you ever answer a customer's / client's question and receive a very confused look from them in return?

A few years back a customer asked me why we were out of a particular item.
My answer was, “I know that we “surveyed” that item, but I think it was either “scratched” or on “allocation.”
The customer gave me the same look (deer in headlights) I gave the young doctor when he told me that my “diastolic” number was fine but he was concerned about my “systolic” number.

The point is,  we need to communicate to our customers / clients on their terms. Many of us with retail experience use words like “discontinued”, “selector error”, “focus item” “shipper” "drop-ship" ... just to name a few...and acronyms like "OOS" "CSS" "POS" ...what do these mean to our customers? Nothing!

Knowledge of the your business is good, but the ability to successfully communicate and have your customers / clients understand you is excellence!

This presents an unique opportunity to “raise the bar” in customer /client communications and in conversations with those that may not be related to your specific industry.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------