Act small, Think BIG
For many years, I have believed the CRM, BPA, CEM (choose your favorite acronym) movement was a way to allow big business to act and feel small to their customers. I spent years working in this space, selling CRM to companies as the magic pink pill. In the end most CRM initiatives ended up being about simply improving customer service. After all, CRM is not about the product we offer, how we position the product, the expectations we set, how we sell our product, or how we manage our customers, its all about those folks who service customers who don’t make them happy- right?! Wrong
Seth’s blog Too Small to fail, makes me think that if ALL companies approached everything they do by acting small, while thinking BIG, most companies would save quite a bit of $$ and reap the benefits of increased retention, increased wallet share and ultimately increase their profits. Thanks Seth for the thought provoking post.
One secret of being a large financial institution is that you can take huge risks because you’re too big to fail. If you hit craps and lose it all, don’t worry, because you’ll get bailed out.
One secret of ’small is the new big‘ thinking is that you won’t fail and you can’t fail and you don’t need to worry about a bailout. Not because you’re small in headcount or assets, but because you act small.
A small acting bank would never have invested in tens of thousands of loans that they hadn’t looked at. And a small acting startup wouldn’t hire dozens of people before they had a business model… and then have to lay off a third of them just because their VC firm showed them a scary PowerPoint.
I’ve always been frightened by big-firm accounting. The sort of financial legerdemain in which skilled accountants work hard to make the numbers look the way the CEO wants, instead of making them clear. Cash accounting run on a simple bookkeeping system is the small way to do it… even if your company is huge. That’s because sooner or later, management has to know what’s actually happening as opposed to what they can pretend is happening.
Big-thinking companies lose customers all the time because big-thinking companies isolate the decision makers from the outside world. Angry customers who are leaving don’t get heard… that news is heard by the poor shlub reading a script at the call center. 90% of the angry customer mail that people forward to me (I have enough for a lifetime, thanks) is angry because the (former) customer is tired of being ignored.
If you act small and think big, you are too small to fail. You won’t need a bailout because your business makes sense each and every day. You won’t need a bailout because your flat organization (no matter how large it is) knows about problems long before they’re too big to deal with.
The media and the tech blogs glamorize businesses that act big. They write about the big checks VCs hand out and they lionize the organizations that make a splash. The untold story is in the organizations that are close to the customer, close to the product and close to each other. Acting small always pays off.
(Thanks to Howard for the phrase that inspired this post)
[From Too small to fail]
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