Businesses can plateau, stall, or stagnate, often without the owners or key executives even realizing it. The GFC (global financial crisis) has revealed many such organisations. The purpose of The Sticking Point Solution is to help entrepreneurs and executives recognize the ways in which their businesses may be stuck - before they collapse. The author, marketing expert, Jay Abraham identifies the nine "sticking points" that keep entrepreneurs and executives alike grinding just to survive, instead of growing and thriving.
Before you read this book consider this popular quiz. Who on your sales team opens the most accounts? Who is best at retaining accounts? Who converts the highest percentage of initial meetings to second meetings or presentations? If you don't know the answers to these kinds of questions, you should. You need to take a hard look at the way your sales force sells and whether you might get better results with a radically different approach.
That's one of many ideas raised in this new book. "When business shifts either up or down, individuals and companies typically take one of two actions: They either do more of the same thing or less of the same thing. But their activities are all tied to doing the same thing, as opposed to doing something different or better, something more profitable, impactful, productive, expedient and preemptive."
Abraham is an evangelist for data collection and stresses time and again the importance of measuring everything your sales team does. You can't know what's working and what's not working without solid data.
"Once you've identified who, identify why," says Abraham. "Why do those individuals dramatically outperform their peers in that category? If you can recognize those elements of success, you then ask yourself, Can I teach that skill to everybody? If not, am I better off having this individual own that sub-process and perform this function exclusively (or at least primarily)?"
Be careful you don't fall into the "but we've always done it this way and it's working fine" trap, Abraham cautions. Just because something seems, on the surface, to be working doesn’t mean it can't be done much better.
Another of the 9 solutions centres on client relationships. Abraham shows that it pays to deeply care about your clients. In this book he greatly expands on his understanding of the "lifetime value of a customer" and provides a generous number of means that you can safely leverage to give the most value to customers, and at the same time, get the most value for long term business success.
He introduces the reader to leading thinkers and accomplished doers. You will discover proven methods to better connect with your marketplace. These are not the tired churn and burn techniques. Instead, you will learn many different ways of interacting with, and treating clients, so that they can't help but feel highly valued and want to do business with you. His updated lessons of being in love with your client and not your product or service used in combination with his powerful overall strategies will set your business far apart from the mediocre competition that your business might presently be mistaken for.
The 9 “mantras” of this book provide a timely blueprint for the new economic environment. If there's ever been a time to innovate and question the status quo, it's now. No business will make radical improvements by doing more of what has already been done. Radical growth comes only from radical change – and radical change comes from asking radical questions.
