Revenue Journal®

Every company has a tempo. What do I mean by tempo? It's the amount of time you think you have - to get something done or resolved. It's the heartbeat of your business. It's the tick-tick-tick of your corporate clock.

Your tempo is tied directly to two aspects of your business: How quickly your technology is changing, and how competitive your market is.

Tempo and revenue are joined at the hip. Here are the situations where the tempo/revenue connection becomes critical:

1) Customer expectations. If your customers expect one kind of tempo from you, and you deliver something else (obviously, we're talking about you being less responsive than they're hoping), your revenue is going to suffer.

Let's say you sell a service. A customer calls with a question. After grudgingly navigating through your "press one for this" voicemail system, the customer ends up leaving a message for a person he thinks can answer his question.

But the customer doesn't just wait passively for your salesperson to call back. He also calls a competitor. The competitor doesn't have a voicemail navigation system. An actual human being answers the incoming call. This competitor's receptionist listens to the question and puts the customer on hold and calls the expert's cell phone, gets the answer to the question, and tells the customer.

Or, let's say the customer calls a different "fast response" competitor, who has no receptionist. But, this competitor has an easier-to-navigate voicemail system, and the moment the message is left, the expert is paged. The expert picks up the voicemail, and calls the customer back - before the customer has a chance to call someone else.

How fast you respond to customer expectations has a direct effect on revenue lost or gained.

2) Changes in your market. If you have been used to a slowish tempo, and new changes in your market cause your customers to expect a faster tempo, your revenue is going to suffer. Usually this situation arises when a new competitor comes into your market, and sets a higher standard for project completion, ease of purchase, speed of customer service response, and problem resolution. The companies left behind by the new competitor are always too slow to react. First they deny it, then they get depressed about it, then they finally decide they have to do something about it. By then, the faster competitor has eaten at least half of their lunch.

Changes in the speed of your market can also come about because of new technology. Shopping by Web is an obvious example. Overnight delivery was another. Email is a perfect example of a very disruptive technology, tempo-wise. Before email, customers were happy to get an answer to a question in days or hours; now they expect an answer in seconds or minutes.

When the changes happen, the successful companies face reality and change their tempo. The companies destined to fail do not.

3) Acquisition of a "faster" company or product line. Big Company acquires Little Company, and starts to sell the Little Company's product. Big Company has a certain tempo (we can safely assume it is "slow"). Little Company has another tempo (we all know it is faster, right?). Big Company starts imposing its habitual, slow tempo to selling and servicing the Little Company's product. Customers feel slapped in the face by the difference and start to warn their friends to stay away from the Little Company product. Sales for the Little Company products start to slide.

Now, not all big companies are slow, and not all small companies are fast. The tempo of a company is dependent on three things:

1) Management's sense of urgency. One of the most common sources of frustration among those "doing the work" (workers) for those "making the decisions" (managers) is the fact that managers are insulated from the customer's urgency. The worker is dealing directly with the anxious, give-it-to-me-now customer, and the manager only hears about it, second-hand. For too many managers, the customer's urgency is some far-off, vague concept that isn't invited into the conference room.

In a very few companies, the CEO spends enough time with customers to have picked up on their sense of urgency, and every decision he makes is driven by that urgency. Workers in those companies feel like the CEO "gets it."

2) The company's ability to resolve issues. I just did a project for Johnson and Johnson. This is a company whose Credo is three paragraphs long, and talks at length about how the company will serve its customers, employees, community, and shareholders. The people who work at J&J believe that Credo, and put it to work every day. It is one of the least political companies I have ever worked for, and also one of the most productive.

For a large company, they have a refreshing ability to get things done. In the usual larger companies, the biggest impediment to progress is the tendency to get embroiled in subjective bickering. At its worst, it involves territorial spats that can reach an impasse and stop progress altogether. Most companies endure some level of self-indulgence, but the less you have, the better off you are. A no-nonsense yet considerate approach always wins over an emotional, ego-driven approach.

3) The emphasis on risk-aversion versus meeting customer needs. Speaking of emotions and egos...the CEO who yells at employees will create a risk-aversion environment, where no one wants to be associated with a decision that might turn out to be a mistake. Risk-aversion is also created by legal teams that are so paranoid that very little meets with their approval. Both of these situations create companies that won't make a sound decision, won't stand up for anything, and certainly won't move fast enough to meet urgent customer needs.

Time to change your tempo?

What is your customer's tempo? Are they making a typical, low-scrutiny consumer purchase, where they just want it yesterday, with the minimum of fuss? Or, are you selling a high-scrutiny product or service, where they take forever to make a decision, then want everything NOW?

What about service? How urgent is it? Do they need help immediately, or can they wait a few hours or days?

What is the tempo set by your competition? Is a new competitor speeding things up? Are they doing the jitterbug, while you're still waltzing? Are you facing up to reality, or choosing to trivialize it?

Has your market changed recently? New technologies, new systems, new ways of doing things?

As you do some soul-searching, make a list of all the areas where your company is a little "slow." Figure out what you can do to improve in that area - usually it's a combination of process, systems, and people, with an emphasis on the processes. The systems and the people can only work effectively when the processes are right.

Focusing on this subject can keep you from being blindsided. You wouldn't want to lose what you have worked so hard to build, just because your tempo was behind the beat.