What are customers missing? What are the industry voids, and how can we detect them?
Scouts play a vital role in the military, and the world of sports. Adopting a scout mindset in business can help us detect marketplace voids, fill them, and monetize them. The business community will introduce these opportunities, as long as we listen, observe, and think. That is what good scouts do…they pay attention to their surroundings, and they are always on the lookout for capitalizing on a dropped ball. I started my sales agency 17 years ago, simply because I was paying attention to what the customers were complaining about, and then I formed a simple game plan that addressed eliminating those complaints. Delivering two, simple solutions is still making me good money, and it is still picking up dropped balls from other vendors. It worked for me, and it can work for you.
Hello everybody and thank you so much for tuning into the Simple Biz 360 podcast. My name's Jeff Mason, I'm gonna be your host for episode 2 27. We are on Rumble YouTube, 28 audio platforms. You can find us at our URL home at simple biz three sixty.com . We are coming to you today from the studios at Half Coast Studios, Crieve Corps , Missouri, St. Louis Suburbs. So if you're looking to record a , a video or a song or a podcast, this is the place to do it. Wonderful people, great professional job. So today we're gonna have some fun talking about , um, scouting for business deliverables. And I'm gonna ask you if you can, you remember the movie with Mel Gibson, I think it was called , uh, what Do women Really Want? Or What Do Women Want? And you know, if you ever saw the movie, it was really, it was really a funny movie. And, and the question is, what about making our own movie about what customers really want? Do you think that would be something that we could kind of embark on ourselves and kind of put a script together for a movie where we could go out scout ahead, right? And become this deliverable scout? So I'm gonna tell you a little , uh, animated story and how I came to start. What you see back here in the graphics is called North 59 Outdoors. So 17 years ago I started this sales agency , uh, in the upper Midwest and have been going strong since. And I did it because I was a deliverable scout. So I was an executive vice president with a company I had , uh, I had sales reporting to me. So I had half the country , uh, was covered by , uh, independent 10 99 sales reps, and the other half was covered , uh, by employees of the company. And what was really evident to me as I became this deliverable scout and I talked with the, the dealers got to visit with a hundred or so of 'em out there in the field. And, you know, it was funny what what really resonated time and time and time again was, gosh, we just really don't care about all the other tertiary things about, you know , vendors and comp . We just need reps that respond to us. They give us what we need, they give us what we need in a relatively short period of time. We don't have to hound them , we don't have to hunt and peck for 'em. We just need somebody who just takes the bull by the horns and does, you know, good follow up and follow through . So I thought, wait a second, I'm sitting here working for a salary and bonus a nice one at that. But you know, I mean, gosh, could I do better on my own? Because I know how I operate and I'm a response guy. I'm a, you know, I'm a guy that loves to follow up and follow through. I'm a guy that loves to give the customer deliverables. So that's what's made my, my heartbeat in business for 30 some odd years. So I said, I'm gonna do this. And sure enough, you know, because I had been a scout, I had gone out ahead and seen, I observed and I observed everywhere and everything. If I'm at a restaurant in a bank line , uh, in the grocery store at a big box store , um, I'm in a movie theater. I'm looking and listening to what's going on because that human behavior will tell me if it's resonating well or bad or ugly. So, you know, this is a great way to just kind of start off things is just to observe all the time and everywhere. Uh, second thing is hear and listen to what your customers are , are , are really saying . And they will spell out, you know, really ways for you to improve. And many times they'll say it in kind of, it's almost hidden in their language. You don't even realize what they're telling you until you drive home later that night. You're , you know , hand on the steering wheel and you're going, oh, that's what they meant, right? And if we really think about it, we can come up with that kind of , um, you know, connecting of the dots. And so the third thing would be just that think, think, think. We are programmed as a society to stop thinking. Let's let the television do the thinking for us. Let's let channel four do it for us. Channel two, channel seven, Fox, CNN, whatever. We are programmed to stop thinking, let people do that work for us. You know what , who was it? We had a president not too long ago that says the people are so stupid that we need, they need us to do their thinking for 'em. Really? I don't know, I don't feel that way, but maybe we are becoming that dumb. So again, in business, listen, if it's your money on the line, your company, your investment, your 401k, your equity in the home, you know what? You owe it to yourself to think, think, think about ways to make your business better for customers and give them those deliverables. So be a scout, go out there and scout the landscape ahead. And today we're gonna leave you with a cool instrumental and it's got a great drum solo, a band called Cream, one of the first super groups , ginger Baker, and this is called Toad. So we , uh, thank you for tuning in and we will see you in 168 hours.