1. Cultivate spies. Hire your competition’s top salespeople — or at least invite them for lunch, dinner or cocktails. “It’s a great conversational way to find out stuff you may not otherwise be able to,” says Sheetz, author of The Art of War for Small Business.
2. Engage your prospects. When a potential customer declines your business, find out why — and how your offer stacked up. “It’s more important to find out why you lost,” Sheetz says, “than why
you won.”
3. Behold the secret shopper. Intelligence gathering typically involves strolling through competitors’ aisles. No store? No problem. Hire consultants to make phone calls to your competitors, to learn how they operate.
]]>Jon King: For the holidays one year, Jim and I wanted to make homemade jam and sauces. I was working part-time at a greenhouse and brought our leftovers in. A woman suggested that I sell it at the local farmers’ market. I had huge student debt, so a few extra hundred dollars on a Saturday? Totally game.
We never had a product line — we just made what we wanted! If we were making strawberry jam and it didn’t set, we’d call it strawberry syrup.
That’s similar to how you created one of your most popular products, Roasted Garlic Onion Jam, right?
We were making garlic relish for hot dogs and burgers, and it called for a certain amount of sugar, to sweeten it a bit. I added the sugar, but Jim didn’t know, so he added the sugar, too. The batch just set — it was completely solid. But I was like, “We are not throwing this out; we made 120 jars!” So I called it jam and told everyone it was for bagels and cream cheese. And people loved it! So we just kept telling them it was a brand-new product for crackers and cheese.
This woman came up to us — she later became our mentor — and asked if we were selling wholesale. And I said, “I don’t even know what that means!” She bought everything in our van that day and sold it at this old family farm in New Hampshire. I drove over to see the display she had made, and she had doubled the price of everything. And I just thought, Aha! This is the difference between retail and wholesale! So the next week at the market, we upped our prices from $3 to $6. Our customers screamed at us, but they kept buying.
]]>“Working in Silicon Valley, I haven’t had a desk with a phone on it since 2010.”
You don’t say?
“I can imagine a scenario where getting someone on the phone would be the quickest way to resolve a complex issue. But even with that, we have video chat and group video chat in HipChat. The only reason to ever bring up my phone is if wi-fi is spotty. I think most young people probably associate telephone communications at work with interviews or more high-pressure situations. In Silicon Valley, we all work at computers, right? And most of our jobs are based around using the internet in some way. To use a phone takes me physically out of my workflow. Just the manual process of dialing with my fingers, looking up a number…”
Excellent. I’d like to spend the rest of this column unpacking pretty much everything she just said. Thanks, Elena. Elena?
(I think she hung up.)
Elena Gorman has hit on the ironic value of telephonic communication. It is fear-inducing (especially to a generation of texters) because it involves stakes. Getting on the phone with someone means a decision needs to be made. You don’t go to all the trouble to press seven to 10 buttons, then listen to two or three buzzes, then (possibly) speak to someone you can’t see and not be here to get something done.
But this is why it works. This is why it matters. This is why I’m here to endorse the telephone as the most valuable form of communication in business.
First, it’s important to acknowledge the various ways in which the phone is god-awful. To begin with, it’s not a sure thing. (Will the other person even pick up?) It can be really inefficient. (Phone tag.) It’s strangely anxiety-producing. (Ring. [pulse rate creeps up] Ring. [pulse rate creeps up]) There’s the annoyance of cellphone lag. (There’s the annoyance of…Oh, sorry, you go ahead.) And there’s the thing where the other person is eating what has to be a salad with lots of blue cheese dressing and it just sounds gross.
“My students under no circumstances want to make a phone call to set an appointment,” says Keri K. Stephens, associate professor of communication at the University of Texas, who is writing a book on communication in business. “I have an assignment in a class where they have to do that, and they will make up every excuse in the book — ‘Oh, I sent them an email! Oh, I sent them a text!’ I tell them, ‘No, you have to talk in real time to another human being.’ And they don’t want to do it.”
But why? Stephens blames the fear of rejection: “Some people really don’t want to bother other people. But part of the reason is they don’t want to be told ‘No.’”
And yet this is why the telephone is the best. It’s better than texting. It’s better than email. It’s better than videoconferencing (which, OK, is like the phone, except with the added unnecessary worry about what you look like). It’s the best form of communication in business precisely because it kind of blows. The telephone perfectly illustrates a key truth: If you go to a lot of trouble to get yourself in a situation that feels a little uncomfortable and half-baked and no one likes all that much, then you have no choice but to get yourself out of that situation. You’re invested. You’ve made an effort. You’ve prepared. You’ve steeled yourself for the problems that come with talking on the phone. You’re ready to deal with an awkward silence. You’re ready to be on.
The telephone builds grit. And when the going gets tough, grit comes in handy.
The next time you’re about to email or text someone, ask yourself this: Am I avoiding the phone because I don’t want to be told “No”? Am I avoiding the phone because I don’t want to feel rejection? Is this about trepidation?
And while we’re at it, here are some more questions to consider: Am I avoiding the phone because I don’t want to make the other person uncomfortable? Am I unsure of my own level of commitment to what I want to propose to the other party? Is it advantageous to have no written record of what we’re about to discuss? Am I in my 20s and unclear about the nature of this strange piece of equipment on my desk that has numbers and lights on it and what looks to be a “cord” of some sort?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then call. The telephone allows you to efficiently converse, unlike email or text. It allows you to roll your eyes, unlike videoconferencing.
Most important, it forces you to be slightly more committed to your cause. To be slightly more hopeful. Go ahead; pick up the phone. Say, “Hi there! I’m invested in this!”
Right?
Hello?
I think you have the wrong number.
Ugh.
]]>Why? I owe it to you. Magazines like Entrepreneur are designed to help readers navigate their world, and we do that in journalistic ways — talking to experts, interviewing successful entrepreneurs and so on. But we forget that to people in business, we are also a mystery in need of solving. How do editors think? How are decisions made? And so, each month, I’m going to explain our process on this page — the space where, in most magazines, the boss pens an advertisement for the issue you’ve already purchased. (Here’s a trade secret: Many editors hate writing those letters. Some even outsource it to underlings.)
I hope my column can be more useful. So let’s get back to Renoun. What is it doing in this issue?
The explanation begins with the word package. That’s magazine-speak for a series of related stories, which run together across any number of pages. Magazines use packages to explore broad themes — “Let’s do a package on…” is a common sentence in edit meetings — and they create openings for different stories. This can be good for companies seeking coverage: If I hear about something that doesn’t work as a stand-alone profile (like a tiny ski company), it might fit into a package some months later. But this can also cause confusion. A publicist just emailed me, citing a story we did earlier this year about a company similar to her client’s. Might that mean we’re interested in her client’s business, too? Sorry, no: That old story made sense for us only in the context of the package it ran in. The moment had passed.
We usually run one package an issue. Back in July — that’s how far out monthly mags are planned — we decided that our November package would be about how founders rebounded from their first big mistake. Contributing editor Stephanie Schomer oversees these, and she emailed a lot of writers asking for ideas.
One of those writers was Clint Carter. He’d just gone to a Snowsports Industries of America event, scouting stories for Men’s Journal. While there, he saw a guy cover his hand in pink goo, then lay it flat on a table and slam it with a mallet. The goo was a fast-hardening polymer, which protected his hand. Ta-da! And this seemingly crazy person, of course, was Cyrus Schenck. Intrigued, Clint introduced himself. The two later exchanged emails. Nothing came of it for Men’s Journal, but when Clint got Stephanie’s email, he wondered if Cyrus might have a compelling tale about his mistakes. So Clint met Cyrus for a beer, then relayed what he learned to Stephanie, who relayed it to me. I said yes because Cyrus was willing to be so open and vulnerable — and because his tale is worth learning from.
]]>Case study: Chris Baggott, new owner of The Mug, Greenfield, Ind.
Why buy? “We started Tyner Pond Farm [and were] selling out of pasture-raised pork chops, bacon and steak — but were left with a surplus of lesser cuts such as ground beef. The idea with The Mug was to give us an outlet for all that stockpiled hamburger.”
What was your vision? “It shifted from ‘How do we move our surplus hamburger?’ to a place where we captured the heritage of an Indiana drive-in, but with a modern farm-to-curb spin and recipes that are both familiar and special.”
How’d you approach changes? “People had so much nostalgia for the place, we wanted to keep the drive-in vibe. My mother-in-law and others volunteered to be carhops, like in the ’50s! The old restaurant had a Facebook page, so we explained what we were doing and why. The respect from fans translated into engagement.”
Can you please everyone? “Many think ‘local’ or ‘farm to table’ is just for wealthy people. But because we’re vertically integrated with our farm, we’re able to keep prices competitive. Our signature quarter-pound burger is only $4.75, comparable to $9 from a traditional outlet. About 40 percent of our customers don’t even live in Greenfield.”
]]>Many rankings focus only on those who have achieved great financial success. Our CEO Henry Blodget sums up the drawbacks of such a focus:
“The more money you make, the implication is, the better and more successful you are. We believe this cheapens the mission and sense of purpose that many great business leaders bring to their companies and products. And it certainly undersells their inspiring accomplishments.”
Over the course of several months, we scoured the business landscape for inventive leaders making bold moves to create value for four constituencies: shareholders, employees, consumers, and society.
We found companies from around the world, both public and private, across many industries. We considered not only what they have created, but how. We consulted a variety of databases, including Glassdoor to gauge employee sentiment and Wealth-X to chart noteworthy philanthropic missions.
Not every company is a standout in each criteria. Companies with a questionable record with their employees, for example, weren’t necessarily eliminated, but they rank lower than similar companies that make employee welfare a priority. Size wasn’t a deciding factor. Small companies adding great value to the world, like Toms, outranked many multinational conglomerates, such as IKEA. Other entrants, such as Uber and Snapchat, make the list primarily because they have created dramatic economic or cultural impact, attracting millions of customers daily.
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