By now it's clear that the economic turn around won't be quick. All the pundits predicting recovery have lost credibility as unemployment stays high and the stock market creeps up. Although weather forecasters do not have a significantly better reputation for accuracy than economic forecasters, they may capture the best wisdom in their rule of thumb: A long spell of good weather is often followed by an equally long spell of bad weather.

You might wisely assume that we are now in the New Normal Economy. New, we've left the economic holiday of the 1990's far behind. Normal, in that today's struggles will continue in the foreseeable future.

Consider the strategies below to help your nonprofit succeed in the New Normal. You will be unable to institute all five strategies at once. Choose one. Learn how to move forward with one. Assign a champion to continuously drive it. Then add the next strategy. Having the majority in place in the next twelve months will create new power in your organization. For each strategy spend eight hours a month, minimum, on the chosen focus. Continuous improvement in these areas is much more important than a burst of energy without follow through.

Customer Retention

This system and philosophy recognizes the customer (donor, visitor, client) as the source of revenue. The customers pay your bills at work and at home. Customer retention research shows that keeping a customer costs a fraction of getting a customer. Understand this, then act.

Action begins by making it easy for a customer to do business with you. Seeing the world through the customer's eyes is critical to meeting the customers' needs. Create mechanisms like ghost clients and mystery shoppers, focus groups, visitor interviews, and member surveys. It means in depth understanding of families, communities, neighborhood associations, advocacy groups, and funding sources. Coupled with empathetic respect, this knowledge underpins customer retention efforts. Armed with this flow of information, you can fine-tune your products and services. Manage quality into all parts of the customers' experience, and you build a deep relationship. Be sure to review how your culture, systems, policies and rewards support customer retention.

Create a process for responding to complaints that includes a customer recovery process for those who may want to end their relationship with you. Of course, if you are listening to your customers, you will never be surprised by customer loyalty loss. When surprises occur, and a customer resigns or fails to return, you have less opportunity to recover the customer.

Last, measure customer loyalty, the ultimate measure of customer satisfaction. For a museum, what is the member retention rate? How often do visitors return? What is the per visit rate of purchase in the gift shop?

Resources:

• Customers For Life by Carl Sewell
• Responsible Managers Get Results by Will Phillips et.al.
• Fifty Powerful Ideas You Can Use To Keep Your Customers by Paul Timm
• The Loyalty Effect by Frederick F. Reichheld, Thomas Teal

Reduce Costs

This does not mean layoffs. Reducing costs leaves funds for investing in strategies. The simplest approach to reducing costs is to:

• Announce the need and explain why.
• Create incentives. For example, forty percent of savings on office supplies for the next three months goes to the office administration staff.
• Celebrate progress.

• Organize work around value added results, not tasks. Departments disappear; processing teams appear.
• Reduce contact points for internal and external customers. Aim for a single point of contact.
• Design processes that can be accomplished by as few employees as possible—ideally one. Eliminate assembly lines and hand-offs.
• Expanding, enrich, combine jobs.
• Consider triage and parallel processing.
• End standardization if every situation is not standard. Create several versions of the same process to fit different needs.
• Eliminate the need for integration and coordination across boundaries by eliminating boundaries and collapsing processes.
• Eliminate redundancy which, adds no value.
• Remove errors by designing the process to do it right the first time. Eliminate checking, reconciliation and inspection.
• Eliminate support work that adds no or low value for the customer.
• Design a customer-focused structure to eliminate the unresponsiveness and lack of accountability of a functionally structured organization.
• Managers become strategic leaders and coaches, not scorekeepers and gate minders.
• Employees become professionals responsible for results.
• Charge those who will use the output of a process with performing it.
• Increase personal mastery in breadth of knowledge and skills. Train and cross train extensively in technical issues, business literacy, and coaching.
• Design decision making into the process, where the work is done.
• Increase employee flexibility in responding to situations.
• Capture information only once, when created.
• Make information available to anyone who needs it, instantly.
• Enable the "field" to send and receive data wherever they are and whenever they wish.
• Build controls into the information system, e.g., an order can't be submitted without date.
• Build knowledge into the information system so generalists can do the work of specialists.
• Simultaneous centralization and decentralization.
• Improve customer contact without personal contact (e.g. the ATM machine).
• Eliminate paper. Find everything quickly and easily.

• Increasing Workflow Productivity by Will Phillips
• Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer
• The Discipline of Getting Thing Done by Larry Bossidy
• PaperTiger.com

Getting Sales Now

Many businesses narrowly focus selling. Perhaps adequate for old economy, it may not be sufficient in the new normal. There are fundamental ways to improve sales.

Sales Force Size:

• The more people selling the more sales.
• Recruit continuously, aim at several interviews a month.
• Improve the sales force selection process: involve more people, assess, trial selling, prior performance.

• Time sales people are face-to-face or voice-to-voice with customers.
• Many full time sales people spend only a few hours a week actually selling.
• Measure this weekly and review. Coach as needed.
• Reduce travel time, waiting time, proposal writing time, etc.

• Strategize on how to increase the dollars per sale.
• Notice when sales are above average. Build on that success.
• Coaching
• Win Rate
• Measure every sales person's ratio.
• Track
• Explore how to improve the ratios.
• Use the ratios to calculate the number of suspects needed now to produce prospects later and eventually sales.
• Coach
• Cycle Time
• Measure how long it takes to make a sale.
• Think how to speed this up.
• Notice when it's lower than average. Build on that.
• Coach

1. Notice More. What's working well now?
2. Where do today's sales come from? Why?
3. Competitors
4. Who is hurting us?
5. Which competitors are not as sharp now?
6. Where are we vulnerable?
7. Sales
8. Where is each sales person strong? Weak?
9. Sales SWAT Team
10. Daily sales briefings; AM and PM.
11. Plan and review each day's sales activities.
12. Sales Meeting Sales Training

• Networking
• In person drop-ins
• Phone calls
• Email campaign
• Creating the best proposals
• Handling objections
• Follow through
• Sales Meetings
• Building on strengths dialogues.
• New sales ideas
• Positive attitudes sustained
• Discouraging, helpless and hopeless talk is aggressively avoided.
• Take Responsibility
• Initiate calls.
• Ask for referrals-Harvest your crop.
• Choose your attitude.
• Public Numbers
• What gets measured gets done!
• Wall charts & spreadsheets
• Who contacts whom and when.
• Appointments made.
• Identify proposals to write.
• Number of proposals written.
• Maximize Focus and Leverage
• Block out prime selling hours for sales calls; no email, no meetings, no writing.
• Solicit every department to 'think sales'.
• Leads, freeing sales person's time to sell.
• What else? Be inventive!
• Reward the help.
• Have Fun; Build Energy
• Fun sales/lead contest for current customers.
• Mini territory contests

Most small and mid size nonprofits do sales and fail to manage the sales process. A sales management system is an engine that drives sales. This engine can be broken down into 13 components. Here is an outline of the elements.

1. A sales manager
2. Hiring right
3. Sales training system
4. Daily sales coaching
5. Sales meetings
6. The numbers
7. Compensation
8. Lead generation system
9. Tracking system
10. Promotional activities
11. Re-explore needs
12. Product knowledge
13. Sales Territories

• Sales Professional Idea a Day Guide 1 800-621-5463.
• SummitSales.com provides low cost sales training in a box.

Check List For Getting Sales Now: This list, while not inclusive, will get you off to a solid start.

Action	Done On	Desired Results	Actual Results
Decide to launch this effort
Launch the effort
Assign a champion
Resources/reading/learning
Spell out the strategy
Describe the attitude
Compose the sales team
Begin daily Sales SWAT Meetings
Measure sales daily
Problem solving meetings regularly

Competition

Your competitive strategy is your single most critical strategy. Why? It is the one which distinguishes you from everyone else in your customer's eyes. Without this you may end up competing on price alone.

Your competitive strategy is the set of decisions you make which creates unique value in your customer's eyes-not yours! Most nonprofits focus on doing quality work, providing good customer service at below market rates. This is not a competitive strategy. It would work fine if there were no competitors. Designing a competitive strategy requires real understanding of the market and the competitors. Most nonprofits (and many businesses) do not have a competitive strategy regardless of their size.

• Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout.
• Differentiation in Six Steps by Will Phillips

Check List Competitive Strategy: This list, while not inclusive, will get you off to a solid start.

Action	Done On	Desired Results	Actual Results
Decide to launch this effort
Launch the effort
Assign a champion: The CEO!
Resources/reading/learning
Thinking time identified
Spell out the strategy
Align culture
Align job descriptions
Align policies and procedures
Align rewards
Decide what does not fit the strategy
Review schedule set

Finding and Keeping the Best Staff

The foundation of superb customer loyalty is superbly finding and retaining of the best staff.

This is a major investment of time, effort and dollars, although less than many think. Bill Gates was noted for recruiting the very best senior leaders to Microsoft, invariably for less than they were earning. Money may attract people, but what keeps them and what keeps them performing at the very highest levels is pride. Pride can only exist where there are close emotional ties: having a best friend at work; having a boss who really cares. Cares enough to break all the normal HR rules and get involved in the employee's problems, in their personal lives. Like the CEO who cosigns when an employee wants to purchase his first house. Or the one who sets up English language classes for immigrant employees, or arranges day care, or classes in personal financial management.

Five Strategies for Retaining Employees by Roger Herman, from TEC Express News is one of the best short articles on this topic. It begins with a review of why employees leave: Understanding Why Employees Leave "It doesn't feel good around here." This can include any number of issues having to do with the corporate culture and the physical working environment. "They wouldn't miss me if I were gone." Many people don't feel personally valued. When people don't feel engaged or appreciated, all the money in the world can't hold them. "I don't get the support I need to get my job done." People want to do a good job; they want to excel. At the same time, most feel like their boss won't let them do a good job. When frustrations exceed the employee's threshold, they leave.

Lack of opportunity for advancement. "Advancement doesn't necessarily mean promotion," advises Herman. "More often it means personal and professional growth.

Inadequate compensation. People want fair compensation but-contrary to most managers' beliefs-money rarely comes first when deciding whether to stay or go. A certain percentage of people will always chase more income, but the majority of workers look at non-monetary reasons first.

Read the full article by Roger Herman.

Resources:

• Bringing Out the Best in People, How to Apply the Astonishing Power of Positive Reinforcement by Aubrey C. Daniels

• 1001 Ways to Reward Employees by Bob Nelson

• The Customers Come Second—Put Your People First and Watch Them Kick Butt by Diane McFerrin Peters

• Why Pride Matters More Than Money by Jon Katzenback

• First Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman