Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Conscious Marketing Principle 1: Falling in Love: Serve Clients, Don’t Sell Customers



Principle 1:

Falling in Love: Serve Clients, Don’t Sell Customers

DISTINCTIONS:

These businesses have learned to cultivate and feel an enormous empathy, respect and love for their clients. They felt it was of supreme importance to honestly be able to say to them “I feel what you feel. I understand your problems.” They were able to articulate their pain better than their clients could.

  • Customer: someone who buys a product or serve
  • Client: someone under the care, protection or guidance of a fiduciary

Consider carefully the difference between those two words because this distinction forms the philosophical core of the Principles of Preminence. The question before the house is this:

“Do you want to sell customers or do you want to

serve clients?”

If you are willing to step up into a new level of impeccability in your business conduct then read on.

Let’s start at with the bottom line . . .

You need to understand what they truly need at the deepest level – to help them gain clarity on what they truly want and then develop a clear strategy to get them that. You need to love them so much that you want to get the biggest and best possible outcomes for them.

Most people make the tragic mistake of falling in love with their business – rather than their client. You must do the opposite. An easy way to do this is to choose to serve those you already love. Before you even get into business – decide who it is you most love and would most want to serve and then it’s easy. It’s much easier to serve those you already love then to fall in love. But if the people you’re serving are not people with whom you are already in love – then start paying more attention to everything that is great and wonderful about them. Most businesses see their customers as numbers.

They hate being seen as a “number”.

They understood that most people inherently don’t like and don’t trust “the system”.

Most people feel static and out of connection. They really want to believe that there’s a much better way than the mainstream approach. Just look at the success of the movie phenomenon “The Matrix”. It deeply struck a chord in the psyche of our culture. It spoke to that nagging suspicion that something is fundamentally wrong with society – that the basis and very structure of society might be a lie. Most people feel this way.

Your role is to be the embodiment of a vision of something better. Most people, in the back of their minds, have the sneaking suspicion that there must be a more fulfilling, natural and easy way to do things.

They saw it as their job to affirm to them that their suspicions were indeed correct that, “You are not being told the entire truth. There is a better way.”


If you notice you aren’t really truly in love with your clients it’s because one of four things is going on:

A) Profession: You’re in the wrong business; you’re off your life’s path. Ouch. You probably need to change careers.

B) People: You aren’t clear enough on what your ideal client is and so you’re settling for poor quality clients who are draining your energy. Get clear on your perfect client and, whether slowly or quickly, weed out the energy drainers. Stop settling. Change your clients.

C) Perception: You aren’t taking the time to truly appreciate them – to notice what’s wonderful and loveable about them. You may have habitual and inappropriate questions, beliefs, language or metaphors about “clients” that block you from seeing their beauty. Start noticing how you think of clients, and what you say to yourself when you think of them. Are they “a pain in your ass?” “An interruption” or “an obstacle to you achieving your goals”? If so: Warning. Change the way your are looking at or describing your clients.

D) Procedure: You may be a night person but you’ve set up your job to see clients in the morning because you think you HAVE to; you’re a coach who hates his clients because his life is scheduled with unavoidable sporadic calls vs. setting it up so they “Call on demand”. You’ve made the client king and given them your cell # and said “Call me 24/7” …and they do. Change how you interact with your clients.

You need to set up your lifestyle so it works for you so that you have more to give to your clients. This “falling in love with your clients” likely sounds a little “woo-woo”. But it’s the most bottom line, highest ROI thing you can do. It’s a hard nose, business approach.

Do you get it?

Do you get that this is the key to obscene amounts of wealth and happiness in business?

“Great customer service” is respectable, even laudable… but trite. Focusing and creating “raving fans” is wonderful… but may be incomplete. Before your clients become raving fans of you or your company YOU need to be a raving fan of your clients.

Make sense?

Customer service is important but falling in love with your clients is a much more vast, expansive, deeper and connected foundation to build from. If you fall in love with your clients – if you come from that place – you will perform legendary service naturally. Legendary service is a byproduct of a great love for those you serve. Service is the flower but love of the client is the soil.

Is that a license to not develop systems? Is that a license to not develop policies and procedures around serving your clients? No. It’s an affirmation that, unless you really love your clients you likely won’t spend the time it takes – to develop such systems in the first place. You won’t invest the needed focus to make those systems not just excellent – but outstanding.

How do you know if you’ve fallen in love with them? Well, ask yourself “When I fall in love romantically what do I do?” Then translate these answers to business.

When you really love a particular client isn’t it true that:

  • You perform legendary service
  • You’re in constant contact – always courting
  • You’re giving much more than you expect in return
  • You are passionately and constantly trying to improve the quality of your products and services.
  • You keep trying to think of ways to make doing business with you more fun
  • You find yourself constantly thinking of ways to delight and surprise your clients.

These businesses realized that it was not their job to “dazzle them with their brilliance”. When they offered perspectives – they wanted their clients to say “ me too” not “so what”

The key is not that you think you understand them. Everyone thinks they understand each other. The key is that they feel understood. Read that sentence again. It’s not that you love them but that they feel loved.

Your clients need to feel cared for by you – to trust you’re not just looking at their wallet. People want to feel worried about. Like they matter.

Your job is to voice their innermost feelings and affirm them.

Most people are thinking:

  • I don’t trust the system
  • I don’t want to be average, a number
  • I don’t want to be controlled anymore (by people circumstances, lack of resources, the competition)
  • I want to feel powerful and in control of my life. (People hate feeling that someone else ultimately controls how their life will end up. But they don’t know what to do to change that)

When you are in conversation with your clients they need to think “What I feel, she feels too

The most chronic blunder of most entrepreneurs is thinking that people want their product or service. They don’t. They want a result. They want a solution to a problem. They are looking for relief from an affliction. They are hoping that your product or service will help them achieve some desired goal. It isn’t about you.

In fact, they really don’t care about you or your business problems, how hard it is for you. They don’t care that you had a bad day. The sooner you realize that it was never about you or your business – the better.

Your product or service I just a means to an end for your client. What is that ‘end’?

Is there even a problem? Or do you just think that people should want it?

Most businesses fail because they fail to identify and address their clients' and prospects' deepest needs.

There are five levels of this. You know you’re making progress in this area when:

1) You realize that they have deeper needs than your product or service. You realize they want those for something.

2) You feel totally clear about what these needs are

3) You can articulate their needs better than they can.

4) You can articulate the needs and inklings that they barely even knew they had themselves – you can put words to those vague discomforts, niggling doubts and unclear concerns

5) You inspire people to see more, you bring awareness of such higher possibilities that they raise their standards for their life, they stop settling, they get out of “no man’s land” and they grow – this creates a new level of need; a new gap between where they are and where they want to be.

Remember: you must fall in love with your client more than your business or product. You’re there to serve THEM, not you.

This comes from a commitment to not only having a transactional relationship, but a transformational one. It calls on you to go beyond the superficial and mundane levels upon which most business relationships exist. It calls upon you to be a little vulnerable and candid. At its simplest level, it asks you to focus on being truly interested not interesting; engaged – not engaging.

Most people in business are so busy focusing on how they can be the most interesting, dynamic and engaging person so that people will buy their product or service. But those people will never get as far as someone who truly and deeply cares about their clients and focuses on their problems, their secret desires and frustrations, their hopes and dreams and their well-being.

Your answer to the following questions forms the core concept or proposition that you are making. In marketing, nothing is more important than your offer. A good concept will always transcend bad writing but a bad concept will never transcend good writing. The core premise must be strong and valuable to the end user. And it must be communicated powerfully.

Ask yourself, “How can I elegantly and powerfully educate people that:

1) They have a problem?”

2) It can be solved?”

3) It must be solved?” (they need to feel this at the emotional level not just understand it intellectually)

4) It must be solved now?”

5) I can solve it?” How can you help them feel certain about this?

6) I can solve it better?” (e.g. faster/with more skill/with more advantage and less risk to them than anyone else).

7) I just solved their problem?” Sometimes people “don’t get what they got” and that’s your fault.

Notice that each of the seven levels above focus not on YOUR products or services but on your CLIENT’S problems and pain. The Preeminent business owner focuses entirely on the client.

Since most people don’t trust the system you must position yourself as a viable and refreshing alternative - one that helps them regain power and control their lives. But that will never happen unless you truly care. It will feel like too much effort. It's probably an incredibly burned out phrase, but it's still true that people don't care how much you know, unless they know how much you care. You want to understand the fabric of their life well beyond the “transaction”.

The leaders in pre-eminent businesses know that their role isn’t to simply ‘hock their wares’ but rather to nurturously guide their clients on a journey from where they are to a better place.

Some people say, “But my job doesn’t lend itself to falling in love with clients.” If you believe that then, “yes” that will be true for you.

But, when you get that your real goal in business is to help solve people's problems and you get that solving people's problems is probably the most loving act that you can do for them - things start to shift for you immediately, dramatically and powerfully. And, I would go so far as to say that until and unless you embrace some higher purpose and sense of identity in business you will never be truly fulfilled or happy. Some people might look at this as a life of sacrifice, but really, the life of sacrifice is the life that you live before you find this sense of higher purpose.

"Someday you'll find out that there is far more happiness in another's happiness than in your own. It is something I cannot explain, something within that sends a glow of warmth all through you."

- Honore de Balzac

If you ask for people’s business from any place other than service and inspiration - you will feel diminished. You will feel reduced to mere sales.

"Ultimately, it is not our credentials, but our commitment to a higher purpose that creates our effectiveness in the world."

-- Marianne Williamson

I remember best-selling author Marianne Williamson speaking once about her experience working in a bookstore. The bookstore owner was constantly fussing about how to sell this or sell that. She told Marianne to look at every single client, who came in the store and think to her self, "There's a potential sale." But Marianne had a very different relationship to the bookstore. She saw it as her ministry. She saw it as a chance to really love people. She saw it as a church. She refused to see her position in the same mundane and mediocre way that everyone else held it.

And, as she did that, the sales did just fine.

If you walk into a bookstore and you feel you're being looked at only as a source of money - you aren't going to stick around very long. But imagine going into another bookstore, where you feel better every single time, you walk in it. Imagine going to bookstore, where you feel loved and cherished just from walking in the door. At one point, Marianne Williamson woke up and said to her self, "Oh, I get it. They think this is a bookstore!"

I remember seeing on TV one day, a special 15 minute report about the traffic cop. Now, I don't know about you but I can't think of many jobs more mundane than being a traffic cop. You're basically just directing traffic. There's no time for idle chitchat, and you don't have a lot of time to really connect with people and send them love.

Or do you?

This was an old African-American Man from Jamaica. And he didn't just direct traffic, he would dance and give people high fives as they went by, and made sure that every single person who passed his way got a smile and wave hello. In the special they showed interviews of people who drove 10 blocks out of their way just to make sure they got to pass this man as he directed traffic. He made everyone with whom he came in contact feel wonderful and loved. He made people happy. As the good Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "If you're going to be a street sweeper, be a great street sweeper."

Tactics of Pre-Eminence:

  • Be interdependent not dependent – dependence creates desperation and desperation is incredibly unattractive in business. Handle your business. Take care of yourself. Get your emotional needs met. Manage your money. Create a life that works for you – create a solid foundation for yourself emotionally. To the extent you can do that you will be incredibly attractive to people.
  • Keep Reviewing “The Only Four Questions That Matter” (below) until your answer is a solid and powerful YES! to four every time.

The Only Four Questions That Matter:

1) Do you, in your heart of hearts, know it to be true that your community and the world is better off for the existence of your company/product or service?

2) Do you, in your heart of hearts, know it to be true that your clients are better off for availing themselves of your product or service?

3) Do you, in your heart of hearts, know it to be true for your clients are better off under your care than with your competition?

4) Do you believe that you offer at least as much or more value than you charge for? IS it worth the price you ask them to pay?

Monday, July 03, 2006

Authentic Marketing - Robert Middleton

Authentic Marketing
- Robert Middleton

http://www.actionplan.com

This month I got philosophical and decided to interview myself about
"Authentic Marketing." I've noticed over the years that many
professional service business owners have real issues with marketing.
(They hate it, avoid it, are scared by it, etc.) This "interview"
addresses some of those issues.


Q. What is authentic marketing?

R.M. You might think of this as marketing or promotion of one's
business that doesn't come from self-centeredness but from a higher
place, a place of service and contribution. When you are marketing
your business authentically, those who come in contact with your
business are inspired to work with you, they don't feel coerced or
manipulated.

Q. That somehow sounds antithetical to American business. After all,
we associate marketing with being less than truthful. I think we've
even come to take most marketing messages, not just with a grain of
salt, but with downright suspicion. How is it really possible to
market authentically?

R.M. Sadly, American business and the advertising industry realizes
most people want fairly superficial things. They realize that people
act from their own self-interest and therefore prey on motivators such
as beauty, greed, status, and instant fulfillment. But of course, most
products and services don't deliver on those promises. A shampoo
really isn't going to make you more popular. A new car isn't going to
make you any happier.

Q. So you seem to be proving my point. Where does authenticity fit
into all of this?

R.M. First it comes with the realization that all marketing isn't
about promotion or advertising. That's really just the tip of the
iceberg of marketing. Marketing is really about the complete
experience one has with a company's product or service. So marketing
isn't just a slogan or a brochure or an advertisement. It's about how
the company answers its telephones and how they respond to complaints
and how they deal with their customers. And, of course, it's about the
actual quality of their product or service.
The bottom line of authentic marketing is about truly caring about
your customers and clients.

Q. So what does this look like in the marketing of professional
services? You use your 5 P model of Positioning, Packaging, Promotion,
Persuasion and Performance. Is that what it means to market
authentically?

R.M. Not really, that's just a model for different stages in the
service business marketing process. The 5 Ps are a very useful tool
but you can still use those principles without much caring at all,
where the sole purpose is just to make more money. That can be done,
but authentic marketing, at its core, is about caring. From that point
you can start to market from a whole different place.

Q. So what happens after you start caring?

R.M. You'll start to realize that caring doesn't happen in a vacuum.
That is, you can't just sit in your office and really care about your
clients and do nothing! Caring requires action and marketing is a very
powerful vehicle for action. You can only make a difference with the
services you provide if people understand what those services are and
how they work. And people will never be able to take advantage of
those services if they've never heard of you.

Q. So once you've made the commitment to care about your customers or
clients, and I assume that would include things like providing high
quality services, communicating honestly and responding quickly, you
still have to get the word out.

R.M. Yes, exactly, and this is where people have such a problem. They
can understand good service, good communication, reliability and all
of that -- they see that as being authentic -- but they have a hard
time "getting out there," as you say, getting known, communicating
about their services to a wider audience, even explaining the value of
their services. This part of marketing often doesn't feel authentic.

Q. Why is that?

R.M. It's what I call "car sales syndrome." What I've observed in
speaking to thousands of people in workshops and seminars is that when
it comes to marketing and selling, most of us immediately have the
image of someone selling cars - usually used cars! That's what selling
is to us. You know what I mean -- deception, not caring, talking
without listening, and outright manipulation. Since that whole realm
is so distasteful to us, we don't want to have any part of it. After
all, we ARE professionals, aren't we? We don't want to stoop that low,
and of course, that's very understandable.

Q. That sounds like quite a hurdle to get over. People are happy to
provide great service and in fact do care about their clients but they
don't want to be tarred with the same brush as "car sales." So they do
very little in the area of self-promotion. And if they do, they always
feel a little tainted by it. Is that correct?

R.M. Absolutely. If that's the mindset we're stuck in we'll never
reach the number of clients we could or really make the contribution

we're capable of. In many cases it means we often end up with less-
than-ideal projects, doing things we'd prefer not to do instead of the
work we really have a passion for. So in trying not to sell out to the
"false gods" of marketing and selling, we often end up selling out
anyway. I've seen this with hundreds of clients. Their issue isn't
always: "how can I get new clients," but "how can I get the right kind
of clients and do the work I was meant to do?"

Q. So how do you help them market themselves authentically?

R.M. It's quite simple really but we make it too complicated. First
you commit to caring about your work and your clients above all else
and then you commit to holding true to that attitude of caring in
every aspect of your marketing. You realize that marketing and selling
your services have nothing to do with selling used cars. You start to
realize that authentic marketing is about communication, education and
helping solve problems.

For instance, when you're working on the material for your web site,
you need to explain how you help your clients and build a solid case
for your services. There's nothing wrong with building that case from
every legitimate angle possible -- case studies, testimonials, details
about how your service works, etc. You don't have to resort to
hyperbole and hucksterism to do that successfully. You have to be
completely honest and demonstrate your caring without saying things
like "we're a caring company," which no one believes anyway.

Q. This doesn't sound easy to me.

R.M. It's simple, but not necessarily easy. It takes a very high level
of commitment and self-honesty. It takes being vulnerable and open. It takes working at
continuous improvement. It takes really digging into the actual value
you provide and finding the best way to present that information. But
that's what builds trust and relationships.

The companies who get it, and I'm including both small and large
businesses, turn themselves inside out to communicate to their
customers with complete integrity. Those kinds of companies build
loyalty that a competitor could never erode with a million dollar ad
budget. For instance, I get many referrals from people who have never
even worked with me. That's because they feel they know me and trust
me through my marketing.

Q. Does it take much of a budget to market authentically?

R.M. For a professional service business it can be done with virtually
no budget at all. Communicating one-to-one with your clients and
prospects (what I call keep-in-touch marketing) can be done by e-mail
for virtually free just as I've been doing for over 3 years. It's
really an authentic one-to-one conversation with those you do business
with. And that can be done in many, many ways, from giving talks to a
thousand people to writing an article for a web site to speaking to
someone at a networking event.

Q. Authentic marketing certainly feels right, but is it really
profitable? After all, if you don't make money in your business,
you're out of business. All of this sounds somewhat idealistic.

R.M. That's what I used to think as well, but it's really just the
opposite. Authentic marketing is about the long-term. It's about
building loyal clients, not about making a one-time sale.

For example, I have a client that provides supplies to the
construction industry. I talked to several of her clients to get some
testimonial quotes. It was a wonderful experience speaking to them
because they were all so thrilled by my client's service and
responsiveness that they wouldn't go anywhere else. Being authentic
doesn't mean being a doormat. Authentic marketers can be very
hard-headed business people. But they tend to attract the right kind
of clients so it becomes very profitable for everyone.

Q. So what are the first steps in beginning to market a professional
service business authentically?

R.M. Just decide to start. You'll see opportunities opening up
everywhere for authentic marketing. Commitment to this is
all-important. Without it, you'll be stuck with your outmoded notions
of selling used cars and you'll never take a step.

For more by Robert Middleton go to:

http://www.actionplan.com

Tentative Fall Tour Schedule

Aug 28 - Sept 10: Vancouver
Sept 11 - 13: Calgary Intros
Sept 14 - 16: Edmonton Intros
Sept 18 - 24: Regina Tour
Sept 25 - Oct 11: Halifax Tour
Nov 17 - 19: Edmonton Weekend
Nov 24 - 26: Calgary Weekend
Nov 28 - Dec 3: Fairfield, Iowa Tour