Are you ashamed of where you worK?

In my work as a consultant, the focus on how to gain more clients and increase inflow of revenues can be an overarching one. 

As a creative, I’m fixated on effective means to do so while keeping expenditure at the barest minimum.

Gaining clients that invest in a business is one of the chief objectives of every business. 

Without such inflows, a business will inevitably become comatose.

Some days back I began to do some reflection. 

While I worked as an engineer, I found out that I only talked about the company where I worked at times when I was asked to introduce myself at functions or during certain occasions. 

Mostly, it was an egotistic show-off that I worked for an oil servicing company.

Why didn’t I make a passionate case for my company? 

Was it because it was a global oil servicing company that had money and so didn’t need me to talk about them? Was it because I felt there was no need, since it was the top management that made deals?

I could be wrong, but I figured that by talking about my company so passionately even within social circles, my words could spill into the ears of someone whose company was in search of a company that did the type of jobs we did. 

I could trigger a conversation that led to a search, an engagement, and a business deal.

The thing is that I’ve met a lot of folks like me too, who don’t show any enthusiasm about their places of work. 

They are so many of them. Talks about work are as show-offs or for the marketing personnel. Talks about companies are restricted to certain conversations and aren’t considered social.

A prospective client who owned a spa called me to help her grow her profits via increased patronage and content that could attract on social media.

One question I asked was : Do you have a system that converts your employees (instructors, masseurs, and trainers) into ambassadors where they pull in clients for your business?

She told me she never knew that could work as some of her staff couldn’t exactly tell others about the business and couldn’t use social media. 

That was a point that called for training, but she wouldn’t see the need. Also, she assumed that her staff weren’t able to use social media to draw clients to the business.

I began to reel off questions. 

What if you established a reward system where your employees that bring in 5 clients a month are given free massages, a night in a hotel during festive seasons, or shopping coupons?

What if you established “social media hour” where everyone stopped all work and went on Facebook to post well-crafted content (prepared by a consultant or a trained employee) and made it go viral? This could be done every Fridays in the evenings or a part of the break session. It can be adaptable.

What if you allowed your staff to sit in during negotiations with clients so they could learn the lingo and convert those into replicable process so they could go outside and use the same?

It’s not enough to sew branded Tshirts when the employees aren’t excited about the vision. I saw vision and mission statements as words worthy of hanging on the boards placed on office corridors. We were just to read, but we never distilled them to the point of living them passionately. This is imperative.

What if you desensitized marketing as just an act that consisted of gimmicks, purely for the sake of making transactions? That’s what puts a lot of fear in the hearts of employees.

In our time now, selling is now social. If those elements aren’t infused, employees can’t effectively market. They’ll always see marketing as one hard stuff to do.

These can also be employed by organisations with many employees as well as those who have a handful.

Converting your employees into ambassadors where they pull in clients for your business should be your overarching focus. 

I hope the above helped?