I figured it might just hit the spot for some of you.

A new Copyblogger post is a great example of why.

It’s about crafting offers that people can’t refuse. Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Every business owner should certainly know what their unique qualities are and how their service or product is different, better than the next guy’s.

But have you ever directly asked your clients? They may have a slightly different view of this. Or they may have a very different idea of what makes you special to them.

It’s as simple as asking.

When you’re talking with a handful of your clients over the next few weeks, find a good spot to ask them “why they’re doing business with you.” Consider even asking them what they find special about you or your company.

Take some notes and after you’ve talked to enough of your clients to get some decent feedback, step back and review the feedback. You may discover some new ways of presenting yourself and your company from that point forward.

One should also consider finding out how their service can be improved.

Your waiting area (or next to the cashier) could have a clipboard with the following on it:

We are interested in improving our service to you. Please fill out the following questions and please give us the “straight scoop”:

• Should we be available to service you at other times of the day or night?

• What part of our service can be improved?

• Amongst the staff here, who services you particularly well?

• Is there someone here who does not service you well? (If this is the case, please just answer ‘yes’ and we can discuss this privately with you)

• Is there some aspect of your service that you have not fully understood? If so, please be as detailed as you can

• Is there something here that you do not agree with? Once again, if this is the case, please be as detailed as you can.

• If there was one thing that we could change about ourselves that would make things easier or more satisfying to you, what would that be?

• What do you like the most about our service?

• If we gave you a million dollars right now, would you be willing to tell all of your friends and family about us?

• …scratch that last question and ask:

• Would you feel comfortable telling your friends about us? What would you tell them?

In this day and age of email and web surfing, you might also consider sending a letter (yes, a letter that the Post Office delivers) to a number of your customers asking them to fill out a survey similar to the above.

People like being asked their opinion. They like being given the opportunity to give their opinion.

Have you ever left a place of business, a doctor’s office, a store in the mall, and something happened that just didn’t sit right with you? And then you thought about bringing it up to one of the staff or perhaps even the owner, but didn’t?

This kind of thing can happen to our customers. Whatever it is, the customer didn’t quite like and then chose not to tell us about it.

Perhaps they called in one day and the receptionist was very rude to them.

Maybe their billing statement was off by a few dollars.

Or an item they purchased wasn’t what the store’s advertisement said it would be.

It doesn’t matter. It’s something that caused the customer to have less affinity for you. Less affinity means less likelihood of doing further business with you.

However, and this is a big however, if you give them the opportunity to tell you what’s going on, nine times out of ten they will.

The information you get from surveying your customers can help you on many levels. Three that come right to mind are:

1. You can roll up your sleeves and handle a customer’s concerns. Result: saved customers.
2. You might find out a particular staff member of yours is not performing. Or worse, actually chasing customers away. Knowing this can be invaluable. Unfortunately, there are a small number of people who work at cross-purposes in the workplace.
3. You could discover simple changes that, once made, can improve service and your bottom line.

I know some business owners that have been operating for years not really knowing what’s going on with their customers. Of course they know their buying habits and perhaps some of their likes and dislikes.

But surveying can and often does run much deeper.

It can produce a rich source of useable info that can magically improve your scene.

What can you look forward to here?

Simple, useable advice to make your business life easier, more productive and more enjoyable.

You’ll find the tone here very conversational. My first business book, The Small Business Success Manual, was written in this way: light-hearted, practical, easy to understand. 9,500 copies later, I’m told I’ve helped many companies improve their scene.

So you’ll see a variety of things here, but they’ll all have one theme: helping you achieve business success…one idea at a time.

Last but not least, we’re getting great feedback on our free business analysis. Check that out here.

They put together a free course that draws from their best content over the last 6-7 years. This is seriously intelligent stuff. I highly recommend you head over to Copyblogger, scroll down the page a little and you’ll see the section on their free Internet Marketing Course. Over 70,000 people have signed up for it, including yours truly. I also listen to their podcast, which I find extremely insightful.

There you go. Nothing to sell here. Step away from this blog and head to Copyblogger.

If you’re familiar with the “positioning” principle that Laura’s father Al and Jack Trout put on the map some 20 plus years ago, you’ll also want to read her article that found the “flaw” in the positioning concept. She goes over in further detail what a “visual hammer” is and its importance.

Related articles

• NEW BOOK: Visual Hammer (ries.typepad.com)

Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application

Images via @daylife

I’ve come to believe in Tim Tebow, but not for what he does on a football field, which is still three parts Dr. Jekyll and two parts Mr. Hyde.

No, I’ve come to believe in Tim Tebow for what he does off a football field, which is represent the best parts of us, the parts I want to be and so rarely am.

Who among us is this selfless?

Every week, Tebow picks out someone who is suffering, or who is dying, or who is injured. He flies these people and their families to the Broncos game, rents them a car, puts them up in a nice hotel, buys them dinner (usually at a Dave & Buster’s), gets them and their families pregame passes, visits with them just before kickoff (!), gets them 30-yard-line tickets down low, visits with them after the game (sometimes for an hour), has them walk him to his car, and sends them off with a basket of gifts.

Home or road, win or lose, hero or goat.

Remember last week, when the world was pulling its hair out in the hour after Tebow had stunned the Pittsburgh Steelers with an 80-yard OT touchdown pass to Demaryius Thomas in the playoffs? And Twitter was exploding with 9,420 tweets about Tebow per second? When an ESPN poll was naming him the most popular athlete in America?

Tebow was spending that hour talking to 16-year-old Bailey Knaub about her 73 surgeries so far and what TV shows she likes.

MORE FROM TIM TEBOW

“Here he’d just played the game of his life,” recalls Bailey’s mother, Kathy, of Loveland, Colo., “and the first thing he does after his press conference is come find Bailey and ask, ‘Did you get anything to eat?’ He acted like what he’d just done wasn’t anything, like it was all about Bailey.”

More than that, Tebow kept corralling people into the room for Bailey to meet. Hey, Demaryius, come in here a minute. Hey, Mr. Elway. Hey, Coach Fox.

Even though sometimes-fatal Wegener’s granulomatosis has left Bailey with only one lung, the attention took her breath away.

“It was the best day of my life,” she emailed. “It was a bright star among very gloomy and difficult days. Tim Tebow gave me the greatest gift I could ever imagine. He gave me the strength for the future. I know now that I can face any obstacle placed in front of me. Tim taught me to never give up because at the end of the day, today might seem bleak but it can’t rain forever and tomorrow is a new day, with new promises.”

I read that email to Tebow, and he was honestly floored.

“Why me? Why should I inspire her?” he said. “I just don’t feel, I don’t know, adequate. Really, hearing her story inspires me.”

It’s not just NFL defenses that get Tebowed. It’s high school girls who don’t know whether they’ll ever go to a prom. It’s adults who can hardly stand. It’s kids who will die soon.

For the game at Buffalo, it was Charlottesville, Va., blue-chip high school QB Jacob Rainey, who lost his leg after a freak tackle in a scrimmage. Tebow threw three interceptions in that Buffalo game and the Broncos were crushed 40-14.

“He walked in and took a big sigh and said, ‘Well, that didn’t go as planned,’” Rainey remembers. “Where I’m from, people wonder how sincere and genuine he is. But I think he’s the most genuine person I’ve ever met.”

There’s not an ounce of artifice or phoniness or Hollywood in this kid Tebow, and I’ve looked everywhere for it.

Zac Taylor is one that had his spirits lifted by Tebow (Source: Stephanie Taylor)

Take 9-year-old Zac Taylor, a child who lives in constant pain. Immediately after Tebow shocked the Chicago Bears with a 13-10 comeback win, Tebow spent an hour with Zac and his family. At one point, Zac, who has 10 doctors, asked Tebow whether he has a secret prayer for hospital visits. Tebow whispered it in his ear. And because Tebow still needed to be checked out by the Broncos’ team doctor, he took Zac in with him, but only after they had whispered it together.

And it’s not always kids. Tom Driscoll, a 55-year-old who is dying of brain cancer at a hospice in Denver, was Tebow’s guest for the Cincinnati game. “The doctors took some of my brain,” Driscoll says, “so my short-term memory is kind of shot. But that day I’ll never forget. Tim is such a good man.”

This whole thing makes no football sense, of course. Most NFL players hardly talk to teammates before a game, much less visit with the sick and dying.

Isn’t that a huge distraction?

“Just the opposite,” Tebow says. “It’s by far the best thing I do to get myself ready. Here you are, about to play a game that the world says is the most important thing in the world. Win and they praise you. Lose and they crush you. And here I have a chance to talk to the coolest, most courageous people. It puts it all into perspective. The game doesn’t really matter. I mean, I’ll give 100 percent of my heart to win it, but in the end, the thing I most want to do is not win championships or make a lot of money, it’s to invest in people’s lives, to make a difference.

So that’s it. I’ve given up giving up on him. I’m a 100 percent believer. Not in his arm. Not in his skills. I believe in his heart, his there-will-definitely-be-a-pony-under-the-tree optimism, the way his love pours into people, right up to their eyeballs, until they believe they can master the hopeless comeback, too.

Remember the QB who lost his leg, Jacob Rainey? He got his prosthetic leg a few weeks ago, and he wants to play high school football next season. Yes, tackle football. He’d be the first to do that on an above-the-knee amputation.

Hmmm. Wonder where he got that crazy idea?

“Tim told me to keep fighting, no matter what,” Rainey says. “I am.”

Link to the Sports Illustrated article.

Link to Tim Tebow’s web site/foundation.

1) Being genuine counts.

2) Helping others counts even more.

How about you? Add your comments below.

Yes, of course, there are times when staff come to you with information that you can quickly acknowledge and send them on their way. You don’t need to be doing a “mind meld” every minute of the day. But there are times when I’m speaking with someone—a customer, staff member, supplier—and I know I’m just not fully there. My justifications for this are ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind’ or ‘I should be able to juggle a number of things at once’ or the one that is always available: ‘nobody’s perfect.’

And of course each and every one of those is just that, a justification. Do I have the ability to simply pay full attention to people? Of course. We all do. We just make decisions to allow ourselves to be distracted. And I believe the more we do that, the more it affects our bottom line. And it may also adversely affect our well-being!

Make a conscious decision for the next few days to simply PAY FULL ATTENTION when speaking with…well, everyone! Just focus on really listening to what’s being said. I think you’ll find you’re more in command of your business and I think you’ll feel better emotionally.