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Business Management

Your worst customers are your best teachers

When I look back at my experience as an entrepreneur I tend to dwell on the mistakes more than on the accomplishments. Yes, I can remember the moment when I learned we closed a...

Posted on 3rd March 2016 by Dave Manzer

Tech Startup

Startup communication best practices

If there is one thing that is a lynchpin for success in an early stage company it is human capital. In the early days of the life cycle of a startup tech company, a multitude of...

Posted on 29th February 2016 by Dave Manzer

Marketing Strategy

15 marketing activities companies forget to do for product launches

Product launches are never an easy process to coordinate. Depending upon the size of the company, it may require a project manager coordinating a range of activities from product...

Posted on 19th February 2016 by Dave Manzer

Content Marketing

Blogging Tools We Can’t Live Without

Blogging is a laborious, tedious, and sometimes delirious activity for marketing professionals to pursue. That may explain why there are very few companies that do it well....

Posted on 4th February 2016 by Dave Manzer

Uncategorized

Six Signs your Inbound Marketing Needs Help

A lot has been made about inbound marketing over the past five years, and for good reason since it can have many beneficial impacts to a business. From higher search engine...

Posted on 21st January 2016 by Dave Manzer

Media Training

The Dos and Don’ts of a TV Interview

Congratulations! You’ve managed to land a TV interview for your brand. Oh wait, now you have to go on camera, and you’ve never had a TV interview before, and you are starting to...

Posted on 4th January 2016 by Dave Manzer

PR Tips

New Year’s Resolutions for your PR Strategy

With the holidays, awkward family moments and turkey and stuffing nearly behind us (or in us), we head into 2016 with hope and a new set of challenges and goals, some of which may...

Posted on 29th December 2015 by Dave Manzer

Media Training

How to Conduct Media Training – Part 2

In the previous blog post we brought you a series of tips and tricks on how to go about planning and executing a media training event. In this post, we pick up where we left off...

Posted on 23rd December 2015 by Dave Manzer

Media Training

How to Conduct Media Training – Part 1

Whoever wants to address the press in an efficient and effective manner needs media training to do so. This certainly applies to company representatives that conduct day-to-day...

Posted on 15th December 2015 by Dave Manzer

Content Marketing

Get your brand into fighting shape with Content Marketing – Part 2

This is a continuation from last week’s post where I gave the reasoning behind  getting your brand into fighting shape with content marketing. This installment gives you...

Posted on 9th December 2015 by Dave Manzer

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Business Management

Your worst customers are your best teachers


Dave Manzer
Your worst customers are your best teachers
Posted on 3rd March 2016 by Dave Manzer

When I look back at my experience as an entrepreneur I tend to dwell on the mistakes more than on the accomplishments.

Yes, I can remember the moment when I learned we closed a particularly large account and felt elated, content and maybe even a tad bit optimistic about the future.

But the moments I remember most are the big fails, the times I dropped the ball or just did a terrible job servicing a customer’s needs. Those moments play out in my mind in slow-motion forcing me to relive the experience over and over like some train wreck on the big-screen.

I’ve come to believe that dwelling on failure is a particularly human quality. Feeling the pangs of defeat more acutely than our victories has always been integral to our survival. Back when we ran screaming from saber-toothed tigers or stalked wooly mammoths across glaciers, failure was what helped us learn to improve our hunting prowess and bring fresh food back to the clan rather than becoming some predator’s midmorning snack.

In entrepreneurial terms, defeat and failure hones our business skills and sharpens our instincts. It gives us more weapons to use for the next big opportunity. What we take away from an angry customer helps us anticipate how to better serve future customers.

We learn how to align our sales pitch to our operational strengths. We figure out how to communicate with customers and set up feedback loops. We set the proper expectations and make sure to deliver on promised results. We gain a sixth sense about which customers to take on, which to pass up.

The bottom-line is that behind every successful business is a hot mess of mistakes, mishaps and miscalculations. The key is to embrace failure, learn from it, implement improvements, and then repeat the cycle over and over. It never ends.

Successful entrepreneurs are not defeated by their screw-ups, they listen to their angry customers and analyze the moment when the crap hit the fan. They may lose face and have to show up hat-in-hand to make an apology; they also lose the occasional customer, perhaps even deservedly so.

But they won’t make the same mistake twice, at least not very often. Their survival depends upon it. Our ancestors made sure of that by embracing failure to eventually dominate their environment.

What about your business? Have you had any major flubs that taught you a valuable business lesson? If so, please share below or feel free to drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook.

About the author: Dave Manzer founded Manzer Communications, an Austin tech PR agency specializing in communications & strategic inbound marketing for startups and fast-growth businesses in 2009. If you have any PR or content marketing questions about your business, feel free to tweet him at @davemanzer or email him at dave(at)manzercommunications(dot)com.

Dave Manzer
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