Congress is working overtime right now, or so it seems.

I sure hope they’re not getting overtime pay, either time and a half or double OT.

There are a few jobs bills that have been recently introduced in Congress. They’re designed to encourage jobs hiring by offering companies limited tax credits and temporary payroll tax relief.

Personally, I don’t think these incentives will do much to add new jobs.

I’m a strong proponent of lower taxes, capitals gains tax rates and some tax credits.

But companies don’t hire new employees because of a tax credit. They hire new employees when they need them.

If your company is growing you’re likely in a hiring mode. And it’s probably time to hire new employees, if you’re ramping up for an expected increase in orders and new business.

Lower taxes? Bring them on!

Lower capital gains tax rates? Let’s keep them low like they are right now.

But these tax proposals to create new jobs? I don’t think they’d have much impact on real jobs growth.

So what do we need to jumpstart this economy?

For starters, we need a climate of confidence.

What Makes Your Company Unique?

General Marketing

Welcome to the Level2 blog. You’ll find our blog full of business-building ideas that are worth many hundreds of dollars to you and your business.

To compete in today’s competitive marketplace, your company must offer something customers want and since most company have competition, you must find a way to stand out from the crowd. In marketing, we call this your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

What is your USP. If you don’t really know, try this exercise.

Sit down with your Team with a whiteboard. On the whiteboard, write this question:

What are the 10 reasons customers should buy from your company?

Experience proves that more than likely that your Team will come up with fairly typical answers—answers like better service, better qualified temps, personnel, and so on.

As they come up with answers, you write all the answers down on the whiteboard. Once they have ten, you do something really interesting. You now ask your Team to review the ten items and identify any reason you’ve written down that one of your competitors would say to a customer about themselves, whether or not it’s true. As they identify the items that a competitor would say, you erase them.

Not surprisingly, all the warm “touchy-feely” things will disappear. After all, everyone says they give great service, everyone says they have better qualified people, everyone says they have top-quality products, and so on.

You may have absolutely nothing left on the board. That means you have a problem. Either you don’t have uniqueness, or just as importantly, you haven’t been able to find a way to articulate it.

The point is, of course, that if you don’t have anything tangible, anything real that differentiates you, you have to find it

Comments (1)

Posted by Brett Flickinger on March 1, 2010, 10:33 am | Trackback

The Cost of Losing Customers

Customer Service

How much are your existing customers worth to your company? If you don’t know the lifetime value of your customers, you need to find out.

What is the Lifetime Value? Simply put, it is the total amount of money a single customer will spend with a company over their lifetime. In the case of business to business sales, the Lifetime Value is total amount of money a single customer will spend over the normal period of purchases.

Where all else fails, use 50 years. For example, the lifetime value of a supermarket customer is $250,000. Put another way, the average customer, you and me, will spend $250,000 buying food and other products in our lifetimes at the supermarket.

Why is this information important? Because it puts a real cost to losing a customer.

Laura Liswood is a researcher specializing in lost customers—what makes them go away, what can we do to keep them, and so on. Her research quotes some amazing statistics. They are frightening.

She calculates that if a business loses just one customer per day and the average customer spends $50 per week, then the net loss to annual revenue is a frightening $989,000!

Couple that with the Lifetime Value and you begin to see why customer retention is so critical.

How well does your company handle customer complaints? What is your customer defection rate? If your company is continually replacing lost customers, you are stagnating your growth and wasting precious resources.

It’s critically important we remember Laura Liswood’s research. And, it’s even more important we take action on it, don’t you think?

Comments (0)

Posted by admin on December 15, 2009, 1:12 pm | Trackback

Dugan & Lopatka Blog

Jobs Tax Credit Proposals

What Makes Your Company Unique?

The Cost of Losing Customers