For the Love of SMBs
Why do I love SMBs?
The majority of companies I work with say customers are at the heart of everything they do. They say customer focus is on their DNA; it is just who they are.*
They mean it! I can feel it!
Why am I passionate about helping SMBs?
When we take a closer look, we often notice that while that may have been true when they started out, actions, systems, and processes are no longer aligned with that customer focused value. These companies have unintentionally outgrown their customer focus without noticing.
As their company grows, a negative side effect of growth is often that internal growing pains are felt externally by customers. Their company becomes more and more difficult to work with, and they don’t notice the extent of the problem or what is causing it, until the problem is painfully eroding profit margins and increasing customer churn.
While customer focus remains a company value, it is not operationally or sustainably integrated into their culture, systems, processes, or how decisions are made.*
There is great news!
Company values-in-action gradually erode and ultimately the experiences being provided erodes too. There is a growing gap between:
what the customer expects (employees too)
the reality of the experience being delivered and what you believe (assume)
the customers’ experience is today as compared to what it once may have been.*
This is fixable! It can be a tough realization because these leaders are so passionate about people - employees and customers!
How does this happen when customer focus is a core company value?
As SMBs grow, the company becomes more complex. Gradually.
More technology, more processes, more people, which often means more silos, policies and procedures, disconnected systems, multiple sources of master data, and ultimately less experience consistency for customers. Decisions are made, which are unintentionally misaligned with those values. Values and experiences are not operationalized, meaning they're not woven into the fabric of culture, decision-making, corporate priorities, and compensation.*
That does not sound sexy.
I know, but it is fixable and profitable to do so!
Does this sound like your company?
The experience you deliver to your customers ends up as a hodgepodge, cobbled-together experience that has evolved over time, varies by channel (in person, online, over-the-phone, via social media). Hand-offs between teams are ad hoc; processes have become too varied or too rigid; manual errors are multiplied.
When your team gets a customer complaint or escalation, your team does its best to fix it, to make it right for your customer. The desire to have a customer focus is still on your DNA, but you do not fix the root of the problems—the real cause.
What would your customers say?
Do your customers think their experience has eroded over time? Ask a sampling of your customers (current and former), those that you believe love their experience and those you know have not loved it.
What about your employees? Has their experience eroded? Have they seen the customer experience erode over time?
How can we help?
Magnetic Experiences is focused on serving SMB leaders.
Scale Up - recapture the culture and strong, sustainable profit margins that launched your tremendous growth by plugging money leaks and elevating both employee and customer experiences. Our business advisors have deep industry expertise in professional services, SaaS, contact centers, retail, food services, and distribution.
Career Coaching - proactively chart your course for what’s next to find and land your next best-fit role with results-driven coaching.
100-day Action Planning - build and execute a plan with our MX Coaching-Consulting Model™ to get up to speed and get results quickly by engaging the culture, managing your message, setting team direction, aligning your team, and ultimately delivering results.
Hope abounds for SMBs. Prioritization and focus are required!
It is possible to:
scale up and grow capacity intelligently and sustainably,
proactively serve your people (employees, customers, partners) with great experiences,
minimize growing (scaling) pains,
achieve strong, sustainable profit margins, and
build deeper and more profitable connections without outspending your profits.
What in the world is SMB?
For the most part, the clients I work with are familiar with this vernacular, though sometimes people think the term refers to solopreneurs, very small businesses,and side hustles. For our purposes, we’ll refer to the Gartner SMB definition:
A small and midsize business (SMB) is a business that, due to its size, has different IT requirements — and often faces different IT challenges — than do large enterprises, and whose IT resources (usually budget and staff) are often highly constrained.
For the purposes of its research, Gartner defines SMBs by the number of employees and annual revenue they have. The attribute used most often is number of employees; small businesses are usually defined as organizations with fewer than 100 employees; midsize enterprises are those organizations with 100 to 999 employees.
The second most popular attribute used to define the SMB market is annual revenue: small business is usually defined as organizations with less than $50 million in annual revenue; midsize enterprise is defined as organizations that make more than $50 million, but less than $1 billion in annual revenue.
* Denotes excerpts from my book The Five Customer Experience Mistakes you don’t know you are making That Are Causing Profit Erosion
Have you purchased your copy of my new book? It’s a short, practical guidebook, and in it I share five key customer experience mistakes organizations make that lead to profit erosion. I wrote the book because these mistakes often go unnoticed; they start as small inefficiencies and multiply throughout the organization as the company's growth accelerates. When you know what mistakes you're making, you can start working to patch the holes and creating more valuable experiences. Available on Amazon.
