How can a business leader make good strategies during chaos? This is a question that many of us are facing as we stand and run an unstable world economy. As Mark Kuban pointed out, some of the most influential startups today started during the recent recession. Moving forward, leaders need to respect the moment and work for the future of the business.
In an interview last year, marketing veteran Seth Godin said the next best move comes from asking an important question:
Do more people trust you and pay attention to you today than six months ago, and What will you do from now on in the next six months in order to radically change the number of people who strongly believe in you?
This reflective exercise is key, and I think there are two great lessons from this statement:
Build trust first and then attention
Trust is a rarer product than attention. In fact, faith leads to attention. You can get a lot of attention, but that does not mean that people will go out of their way to work with your service or buy your product. However, by building trust, you can create a dialogue with your potential customers and be at the forefront of attention when your offer meets their needs.
Building trust requires three actions:
1-Appearing for the client
2- Be consistent with your availability and message
3- Focus on service more than on the transaction itself
Do you have more confidence now than before? Six months is very good to see how your strategy has worked.
If it's summer, what are the actions you will now take to build up winter, trust, service and attention? Discussion automatically changes the scope of your decision-making process.
Currently most of the world is isolated. However, in six months, we will surely be in a different landscape: perhaps out of isolation, obviously more intelligent about the pandemic and more adapted to a new economy.
In other words, our world is now in transition. Making short-term decisions may not help you stay alive until the end of the year.
For example, professional public speakers like me may not practice public speaking. We will master virtual speech and direct all our possibilities to speak at a distance. But what will happen today one year, when those conferences that have been delayed suddenly return? Until then, stage speakers would be out of practice. In my case, I am having active conversations about all of my late engagements. I speak and practice my conversations on stage and am ready to speak in front of an offline audience when the world is ready in the near future.
Things are changing rapidly. The quickest measure may not be directing your business where the customers are, but defining your strategy of where they will be.
