Find Out Why Most People Don't Buy or Use Your Offerings

While you probably think that daunting dangers threatening your business are your biggest problems, chances are that while these challenges loom large in your mind, these dreaded risks actually cast a relatively small shadow compared to other challenges.

What is your biggest obstacle? For most organizations the overwhelming barrier to progress is that most customers and beneficiaries wouldn't use your offerings even if you paid them to!

How do I know that to be true? I've conducted many surveys of potential customers for organizations of all sizes that demonstrate that sad fact.

How do you know it to be true? Think about your own purchases for any given category. You probably buy mostly from one or two suppliers. Would you switch to someone else? When did you last consider switching to someone else? Are there suppliers you wouldn't use no matter how much you were paid to do so?

While this is not a market research article, it's a good time to share a little secret that everyone knows who performs much market research: Relatively few people ever consider using the offerings of any given company or benefit supplier, except for a few behemoth operators like Wal-Mart. Without being considered as a possible choice, you have the same chance of succeeding that a soccer player does who cannot enter the stadium where the match will be played.

For example, let's consider U.S. institutional investors and the stocks of the Standard & Poor's 500 companies. Here you have a public market dominated by large investors and large companies. That sounds like a match made in Heaven for the public companies. Right?

Wrong. Most portfolio managers are expected by investors to follow a promised style. If the style is to buy small capitalization companies, that portfolio manager shouldn't be holding any large company stocks. Oops! Also, the style usually excludes companies that the manager doesn't know well. Since the average portfolio manager only knows about 50 companies well, that excludes 450 large companies right there. And on it goes.

If a big American company has trouble attracting portfolio managers investing lots of money to pay attention to them, what chance does a smaller operation have of appealing to small, diverse, and less well-informed beneficiaries and customers? Very little.

Let me list some of the common sources of the disconnect between offerings and their intended customers and users. My research has shown that ignorance, misperceptions, harmful complacency, disbelief, and mistrust are often the foundations of why people reject helpful offerings.

Which limitations are holding you back your growth? You need to find out.

About The Author-- Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Read about creating breakthroughs through 2,000 percent solutions and receive tips by e-mail by registering for free at http://www.2000percentsolution.com .

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