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The most important benchmark for your small business is the happiness of everyone associated with it. When you get this right, everything else that matters falls into place.
What’s Inside Matters Most
Happiness is contagious. It attracts top quality employees, and their happiness attracts and retains customers that enjoy working with your team. This is why building a culture of happiness is guaranteed to enhance your bottom line.
I recently had conversations with several green industry companies here in the Chicago area, and they all report they are not just getting by, but actually growing in some segments of their businesses. What is most interesting is that they are accomplishing this by quietly going about their business, with the intention of avoiding outside distractions.
In challenging business environments like this one, benchmarking your company against uncontrollable outside influences may lead you down a dead-end path. Instead, focus your attention on the happiness and well-being of your inner circle – your team, your advisers and your customers.
Core Values Shape Your Culture
To achieve goals and objectives, the tendency is to develop rules that hold everyone accountable. This may generate results, but it seldom encourages a culture that will sustain those results.
A better approach is to clearly define the core values of your company and make sure everyone commits to them. Once you achieve that, you can empower your people with guidelines, as opposed to lessening their motivation with restrictive rules.
A valuable tool that you may not have considered for shaping your culture is social media. That’s right, instead of policing the use of social media, I’m suggesting you encourage your staff to use it. Why? As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “When everyone sees what you are doing, it changes your behavior for the better.”
Enhance Customer Relationships
In addition to happy employees, you obviously want happy customers. Not surprisingly, they generally want many of the same things as your staff – fewer restrictive disclaimers, new ideas and more opportunities to connect and collaborate with you and your company.
One way to stay on top of their needs and desires is to migrate your database to a social customer relationship manager – a social CRM. Batchbook (batchblue.com) is the social CRM that has proved ideal for my small business. It manages my contacts, tracks sales opportunities, and automatically brings valuable information to me that my clients are posting on their social networks.
Imagine picking up the phone to chat with a customer. You have not spoken in a while, so you refer to historical notes, which may no longer be relevant. Now imagine having a conversation based on timely news that is of interest to your customer now.
Batchbook and other services seamlessly merge my customer’s updates from their blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn – and it’s all done in real time. Since your prospects and customers create this information, it stands to reason that it is important to them. This information is gold.
Measuring your success against benchmarks is essential for keeping your team focused on what matters.
The key is understanding how intangible qualities such as happiness and culture work to get the numbers, and most everything else, to naturally fall into place.
Jeff Korhan is a speaker, consultant and top-ranked blogger on new media and small business marketing at www.jeffkorhan.com. Mail korhan@gie.net.
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