With The Great Resignation continuing into the new year, business owners need to evolve in order to compete in the market and keep their team members. This requires a new business mindset.
We’ve shifted from a focus on sales to finding solutions to your customer’s problems. It’s more important than ever to create lasting relationships. Your team members are the ones who bring that to life. Working with your team on business mindset skills helps them feel successful while you run a successful business.
My best advice for improving company culture, team member satisfaction, and customer experience is to embrace a new business mindset. Here are three ways to do that.
Emphasize Value for Your Customer
One of the first key mindset shifts is understanding that your business isn’t what you sell nearly as much as the value you provide to your customers.
In a world where a review is just a click away, customer experience is crucial to any product or service you provide.
Encourage your team to put themselves in your customer’s shoes. Consider the following:
- Who are your customers?
- Where are they?
- What do they want from you?
- How do they want to consume your products?
- How do you engage in conversations with them?
Every interaction you have with a customer enhances or diminishes the value you add to their lives. And more often than not, your team members are right there making those kinds of first impressions.
Business Mindset Training Helps Team Members Understand Their Role
With so many team members leaving their jobs, your team members need to know that you value their efforts. A successful entrepreneur isn’t afraid to let their team members shine.
Help your team understand their role in your business explicitly. The last thing your team members need is to feel like they have to guess what you want from them day after day. Be consistent with feedback. Let them know areas where they’re an absolute rockstar and those areas that are opportunities for growth.
Give them the tools to feel successful in their position and be open to answering questions as they arise. If they’ve been with you for three months, they’re an expert, compared to your customers. And as such, they need to feel empowered to share their expertise with customers.
If they’re uncomfortable, you could have some role-playing sessions to help them understand how much they know about the company and the products and services you provide. As they gain confidence, it only strengthens their ability to create great relationships with your customers.
Make Sure Everyone Understands the Task-vs-Result Business Mindset
Your team members need to understand that it’s okay to stop what they’re doing and use their expertise to gain the trust of your customers while adding value to their experience.
Every team member has a job description. Of course, those tasks are essential, or they wouldn’t get assigned to them in the first place. But if the everyday tasks they complete are in the same space as potential customers, they should always prioritize customer experience over task completion.
Completing the tasks for the day is one goal, but if a customer could use some help, the result from that interaction outweighs the importance of completing the task at that moment. Let me give you an example.
My friend went to a store to purchase a shelf for his office. A team member in his proximity could have kept working on the task he was hired to do. Instead, he engaged with my friend. Rather than turning his back and quietly continuing his task, he approached my friend and asked questions about the type of wall he planned to put the shelf on and what he would display on it.
That led to purchasing a more expensive shelf that met my friend’s needs rather than the less expensive one that would have crashed to the floor and torn up the drywall after he loaded it up with more weight than it could handle.
As a customer, I’d want to return to that store the next time I needed a shelf, simply because the team member showed up as a helpful expert.
Suppose you can share a company vision that focuses on solutions and relationships and creates experiences that align with that vision in obvious and subtle ways. In that case, you’re building the relationships that amplify the profitability and success you want. That is the kind of business mindset you and your team need to aspire to in today’s market.
