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Putting WOW Into Corporate Culture
March 10, 2009
In his book, The WOW Factor (Skyhorse Publishing, 2008), entrepreneur Barney Adams offers insight and advice on his two great passions: business and golf. The founder of Adams Golf and inventor of Tight Lines, "the most popular fairway wood of all time," Adams knows a few things about both topics. Here he discusses what a senior-level executive can do to bring “the WOW factor" to his or her company.
By Barney Adams
It's easy to talk about WOW regarding products, their design, and quality manufacturing, but how do you extend that message throughout the manufacturing force? I can give one example in which everyone, regardless of job, education, and experience, can participate: housekeeping. Install a culture of a clean facility and good work habits and you're installing WOW. I've had visitors come to our place and comment on how clean it was, and we hadn't shut down and prepared. That wasn't the WOW, though. The WOW came when one of our manufacturing group leaders told me he heard about the visitors' reaction and how it made the employees proud.
One easy approach to incorporating WOW into your business from a sales perspective is to go to your customers. You know your customer base far better than I do, so I'll focus this discussion on selling to retail where I have the experience. What is a WOW for your customer is easy to identify: a great product with consumer demand and good margins (okay, great margins). Pretty obvious, right? The honest answer is, maybe. Let's say you have all of the ingredients, especially a terrific product line and tremendous demand, but along the way your on-time shipments start missing dates. Your product is still good, as is the quality of your service. You just have a problem coordinating your shipments on time.
When that happens, billing is automatically messed up. You send the bill because your terms are thirty days, as agreed. The only problem is, that’s supposed to be thirty days from delivery of the correct product. Finance thinks that-s what happened because the billing information is confirming, but the customer's finance department doesn't agree because they got the product wrong or late. After a few such mistakes, you end up with a contentious relationship. Your sales force and their customer relations people provide some assistance, but business issues prevail.
Because the WOW of the product line hasn't extended through the full cycle of doing business, as always the weakest link becomes the issue. Maybe sales and management got a little busy congratulating themselves about their WOW products. Maybe a hundred things went wrong.
All I'm saying here, in a simplistic example that I lifted from a real-world experience, is that to really be a WOW operation every facet of your business must be coordinated. The company in my example lost market share while the products were still good. I can think of many examples, as, I'm sure, can you.
Let me use this forum to issue a WOW challenge. I have a personal dislike for automated phone-answering systems. One could say they are the anti-WOW. I'm not going into the cost/benefit analysis, but I'll concede that in some cases they are necessary. What I will do is issue a WOW challenge. Instead of just buying a system off the shelf or having it designed by Barney Nerdlink, whose contact with the outside world is through his collection of video games, try a different approach. Design a system that, when using it, people say to themselves, "WOW, that is the best automated system I've ever used. I wish everyone would do that." For those hiding in the corner office who think that’s a silly idea, what I think is nuts is your ad budget factored by your automated answering system. You spend a ton to market your product, and if the effort is successful, I call, ready to be your customer. When I do, you then expose me to a system that turns me away, just for some cost savings. How does that offer your prospective customers a WOW experience?
I don't offer any formulas or formal ways to introduce WOW into your thinking or your company here. You know your business, and you have, or are developing, people as assets. WOW is a group effort. It is a culture, and for the life of me I can’t imagine anyone saying, "No, I don't want my business to have a WOW factor."
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