For a moment, I would like you all to think back to your days in high school or college and the pressure you felt to bring home the grade. The great thing about school is that you have tests all semester long and are given constant feedback and therefore have much greater control over your report card at the end of the semester.
This works great in school, but then you graduate and take a job with a company and everything changes. As many of you have experienced, once you go to work for an employer you find that you work ten times harder and get very little, if any, real tangible feedback on your performance and growth needs.

As a business owner it would be wise to step back into that mindset when running your business and find out if you are making the grade in all your classes. For all you business owners out there, I want to you take a moment and ask yourself how these three ‘teachers’ would grade you in their respective classes; Ms. Myway – Customer Satisfaction, Mr. Ourteam – Employee Satisfaction and Mrs. Nemesis – Global Competition.

It is imperative that you, as a business owner, realize that if you aren’t consistently scoring an A (or better) in each of these classes, you may not be around for the long haul.

All too often business owners get caught up in the day-to-day operations of running their business that they don’t take the time to touch base with their clients and find out how they are doing?

The reason this is so important is because the global marketplace in which we now operate ensures that the pace at which customer’s needs and expectations change is mind-boggling. What last year was considered an added-value, has now become an expected feature. So the only way that you can stay ahead of the curve, and beat your competition to the punch, is if you have a constant and robust dialogue with your customers that continually evaluates their wants and needs and gauges their level of expectation.

You need to continually examine potential new products or services that your customers may want, how much they would be willing to pay for them, how and when they want them delivered and why these products or services will benefit them. Understanding your customer’s why is absolutely critical – the better you understand the ‘why’ behind their needs, the better equipped you will be to develop new solutions to their complex needs.

At the same time that you are assessing your customer’s current and future needs you must also examine and understand your competitor’s value proposition. Then you must determine how you can further differentiate yourself from them and provide further value to your customer’s while exploiting your competition’s weakness in product quality, development time, pricing structure, etc.

If you have a question for the Maniacal Marketer, please send it to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Christine Regan is the president of Redlake, Inc, www.redlake.tv, a marketing and sales agency in New York.

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