We’re 20 Years Old: Thank-You!

By Phil Krone

I took the entrepreneurial plunge 20 years ago in July and launched my own marketing and management consulting firm, Productive Strategies, Inc. We knew where we wanted to go but not how to get there. We were fortunate that our clients taught us a great lesson about business growth that put us on the right path and has kept us there ever since.

At the time, I wanted to offer sales process and marketing-related services but was unsure what the specific offerings would be. We started out with the idea of serving US companies competing in the international marketplace. Fairly quickly, we learned a basic lesson of business growth, and we’ve remembered it ever since: Listen to your market and take what you hear to heart.

Initially, we did develop some clients the way I thought we would. We helped Master Lock find distribution partners in South America, for example. But within a couple of years two things happened more or less over the same period of time:

First, we realized that this market was difficult to sell to, largely because the decision makers were mostly out of the country and unavailable to meet with us.

Second, prospects seeking assistance with their domestic marketing issues kept approaching us for help. Instead of trying to swim upstream we took what the market was saying to heart and changed our focus from international to domestic.

In the international market the biggest issue we saw was lack of good distribution partners. In the domestic market the biggest issues we identified were a lack of consultative selling skills and the absence of strong sales processes. As a consequence, by 1996, I had created our popular FOCIS® consultative selling course and since then our consultants have helped thousands of salespeople, managers, business owners, and professionals build their consultative selling skills and processes.

We couldn’t have sustained our business for two decades without the help of our many clients, those kind enough to make referrals to us, and other friends of the firm. Your support has enabled all of us at Productive Strategies to do the work we love doing: helping clients grow their top lines in any market characterized by a complex sales process. For this we thank you. In fact, referrals account for 80% of our new business each year.

The major lesson I’ve drawn from thinking about our evolution is twofold: First, we have grown by listening to the market and trying to offer services that are being asked for; and second that there is no better source of new business than referrals from satisfied clients. Thank you again to all of you who have helped us along the way.

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