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"Making Chicken Salad Out of Chicken Feathers":
The Recipe for How to be Resourceful:
Which is more difficult:
a. To find new money and use it to solve an existing problem?
OR
b. To solve an existing problem with current resources?
In my 30+ years of developing and building successful selling opportunities, I have found that when there is a problem to be solved, money thrown at a problem is not its cure.
The cure is found in my Two-Step Recipe:
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Strategic Thinking:
Looking to the core cause of the problem. So, for example, if you are a brick and mortar retailer and you are finding that your store traffic flow is moving too fast for you to make a sale; do you ask yourself:
- "Why is the traffic moving too fast?" OR do you ask:
- "What is it about my store that is not slowing down the shopper?"
The second question begs for specifics and forces you to start to look for specific reasons:
- One of those reasons is the key to the answer
That's strategic thinking...finding the root of a problem, from there a myriad of solutions can be found and formed into a proper plan of action.
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Making the Most of What You Have:
Before you go out and buy new inventory to give your store, "fresh blood" for a new season:
- Conserve your resources, reconfigure what you have.
This is found money!!
As a result:
- You can take an inanimate environment and give it life by creating vignettes in your displays that are "suggestive" and promote cross sales
- You will gain control over your traffic flow
- Your sales people will be more effective and successful
- The room will work for you.
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