Fuelling discontent

Mike Hawthorne, Managing Director

I imagine there are some people who actually enjoy buying petrol.  You may even be  one of them.   Most  people are probably indifferent, but for me it’s a banal and joyless experience.  Not as bad as completing  a tax return and way better than root canal, but joyless none the less. 

Perhaps the origin of this lies in some past, forecourt -related trauma.  Perhaps I have a particular dislike of getting diesel on my soles.  But  whatever the cause, the problem definitely got worse for me once petrol stations decided to  “maximise their site’s retail potential”.  Now fan belts, oil  and other motoring essentials fight for space with barbeques,  pies and latte.  The net effect is to make the whole process  even longer.  In many garages the increased transaction time ensures vehicles are stuck at the pump.  And at a well-known garage on the A3 this frequently leads to tail-backs on to the main road.  In my own case I’ve been known  to drive with the gauge in the red in the hope  I’ll  come across an old -school filling station, that just sells fuel.  By the time I find one, the car’s usually on vapour, which makes for quite a lucrative petrol-only sale.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with trying to sell related products and services.  Done well it provides the customer with additional benefits and it helps boost profits.  But this illustration demonstrates some of the risks.   It shouldn’t be detrimental to the original service and it definitely shouldn’t jeopardise the relationship.

At AchieveGlobal we’re often asked to help by giving service providers the skills to sell,  either in business to business or business to consumer environments.  One of the biggest challenges can be that the individual service people are concerned at the prospect of  selling  - often because they’ve experienced it being done badly.  When they see how the skills can actually improve customer attitudes, they become much more positive.

Speaking of positive experiences, recently I was getting my passport application pre-checked at the Post Office (not an AchieveGlobal customer).   The clerk asked when I was travelling and offered travel insurance and  currency.  Perhaps others wouldn’t have liked this approach, but my response was positive.  They met all the golden rules, being friendly, relevant and targeted to me. 

There are many organisations who could learn from this.  And for some of them,  here’s today’s free consulting tip:   Can we please have a fuel only queue,  or as a compromise,  a line for three items or fewer?

Have I Got (Bad) News For You?

Mike Hawthorne, Managing Director

I’ve a bit of a confession.

From September 08 until somewhere around April 09, I barely watched or listened to a news bulletin. I allowed myself a little bit of web surfing just to get the basics and I gave the headlines an occasional listen. But then I’d hastily turn the radio off, or if it was TV, I’d hit the channel change.

I’m sure this didn’t cause sleepless nights at the BBC but it was a big step for me. I’d always prided myself on keeping up to date.

I ran to ground when the world’s news media started predicting financial Armageddon. Actually, it seemed they were falling over themselves to see who could describe the grimmest vision of the future. Various channels even decided to brand their bad news coverage with suitably alarming logos. One chose a graph going into the red with the word “Crisis” emblazoned across the top. Balanced reporting?

And all this came hot on the heels of the summer’s Big Story on rising energy prices. Some reporting stopped just short of predicting Mad Max style dystopia.

Meanwhile I’d come home after a normal day at work; apparently productive, working with good people. If you recall, the weather in early autumn was uncharacteristically benign. Chelsea FC was riding high too, in the honeymoon days of Felipe Scolari. Yet despite all this, I only had to glance at TV news and my spirits fell faster than the FTSE, or anything else whose fortunes depended on Lehman Brothers.

Do you make better decisions in white noise? I thought not. So I decided I needed to take back a little control, stop listening to how bad things might be and focus on those things I could influence. More importantly, I felt I would be more useful to those who knew me if I could keep my spirits on an even keel. And if that meant avoiding the hype and the hyperbole of a news media using increasingly extreme language to sell its content, so be it. I could make my own judgments, free to take the view that, while things might be very difficult, maybe just maybe, we weren’t completely doomed. And even if we were, we still had a few options left.

Turns out I was in good company. I met quite a few “business leaders” as the BBC likes to call them who thought the same way. Apparently, ‘Suralan’ was one of them too, though I’m not absolutely sure how I found this out. Perhaps it was osmosis. It’s possible he’s changed his view now given his new role, but then again……

I broke cover the other day and watched the news. “Green shoots?” There was some talk too about things “bottoming out”. Is the worst over? Who knows? The answer of course is absolutely nobody. But while the media speculates we can get on with our lives, see customers and run businesses. In NLP this is called “managing your state” but that’s another way of saying whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist, the end result will always be the same; it’s just that the optimist has a better time in between.

What are you doing to keep your spirits up? And if you’re a manager how are you supporting your team’s morale? Please let us know.

It’s been emotional

Mike Hawthorne, Managing Director

A man much wiser than me (self-help Guru Tony Robbins to be precise) once said, “People buy things because of the way they think it will make them feel.”

This particular sentiment has always struck me as a brilliant insight into the complex business of decision-making.  It perfectly captures the balance between the rational aspect of a decision, such as evaluating the requirement, assessing options and making a choice on the basis of the benefits delivered, and the ultimate output – the feelings generated by the benefits.

We can clearly see this at work in decisions such as which house we choose to buy.  Even though it’s one of the biggest transactions of our lives, many people own up to the fact that they chose their house on the basis that “it just felt right”, picturing themselves on the terrace with a glass of Pimms on a sunny summer’s afternoon. Gut feel is a powerful thing; a miserable grey autumnal day and a mug of cocoa are not in the same league when it comes to justifying romanticism.

Advertisers know the power of emotion too and pitch their products accordingly. Think cars.  Okay the way they tug our heart-strings may have changed in recent years – social responsibility, a better option for the planet, passenger safety etc; but it’s still an appeal to feelings – showing how a benefit will deliver a positive emotion – a feel-good factor if you like.

Is it any different for business-to-business transactions?  Not in our view.   Most decisions on making a business purchase are taken in order to achieve an improvement in performance or costs, or maybe to boost an organization’s image.  But at the core of all this is also how the decision-maker or decision-makers will feel.   Will they feel a greater sense of control, do they feel more secure and will they gain kudos?

Paradoxically, many decision-makers know the importance of feelings and set up buying processes to try and reduce their impact.  Formal tenders, for example, seek to stipulate objective criteria and allow a number of individuals to contribute.  But I don’t think it’s stretching the point to say that these processes appeal to another set of feelings – confidence for example, or the belief (or relief) that responsibility is shared.

At AchieveGlobal we train Salespeople to (among others things) ensure that solutions properly take into account feelings.  And we also work on the other side of the desk as it were, helping managers and others identify the impact of feelings and how they can accommodate theirs and those of others.

Is emotion in decision-making a positive or negative? Fans of Life on Mars / Ashes to Ashes will observe how the legendary DCI Gene Hunt is, more often than not, spot on with his initial ‘Gut feeling’ and yet the need to also incorporate his non-emotional sidekick’s logical behaviour solution to solve the crime is invariably necessary.

What do you do to ensure your decisions, or those of others, respond to and incorporate emotions?