I spent last week at my favorite resort, Rancho La Puerta, and was inspired to write this newsletter, “Show Me You Know Me.” If you’ve ever been to “the Ranch,” you’ll have felt the deep level of personalized service. And your customers want the same experience! Read the newsletter for my thoughts on today’s key competitive advantage: differentiating your customers.
Read the newsletter: Show Me You Know Me
Today’s newsletter, “Don’t Stop the Conversation When You Hang Up the Phone,” focuses on creating ongoing conversations with your customers, giving you ideas for strengthening your customer relationships.
We’re all good at creating ongoing conversations with our friends. Let’s try to be just as good at it in business!
Read the newsletter: Don’t Stop the Conversation When You Hang Up the Phone
Imagine this … one of your customers is speaking with a friend, and suddenly notices that the friend should also be your customer. After witnessing this opportunity, what does he do? Recommend you, or let the opportunity pass by?
Check out today’s newsletter, Will your customers be witnesses for you?
Please share your comments … are your customers witnesses for you? Do you ever serve as a witness for others, noticing business opportunities for them?
Today’s newsletter, Don’t be a “vendor,” focuses on what it takes to be considered a “partner” by your customers, instead of being kept down in the lowly realm of vendor status.
I’ve heard 727,435 senior executives bemoan the vendor/partner challenge in the years I’ve been teaching people about “We” relationships, so I thought this would be a worthwhile topic for us to focus on. My theme: If you don’t want to be considered a vendor, be sure you’re not acting like a vending machine.
Here’s a link to my last newsletter, The Way We Connect.
In a world where products and services are, in the minds of customers, largely interchangeable, the character of your interactions with customers is one of the most important ingredients of effective marketing communication. So, how well do companies interact with you? How does your company compare?
Yes, tear up your elevator pitch. Tear it into little pieces. Want to know what to do with the little pieces? Read today’s newsletter, Tear up your elevator pitch.
Yesterday, I ran into a 24-year old young man who is the son of close family friends. I’ve known “Jake” since he was a little kid, so I’ve seen for years that he has a magnetic, charismatic personality, and has always been able to attract friends.
About a year ago Jake started working for a local firm selling life insurance and investments – a very difficult career for anyone to start at a young age, with its long sales cycles and the need to get people to trust you with their money. He and I work out at the same club, so I see him on a regular basis and have a chance to hear updates on his progress. Some days I’d see him, elated, after a promising meeting with a prospect. Sometimes he was discouraged he wasn’t closing more sales yet.
My comments to him: You have started a career path where long-term relationships create riches. If you have enough great meetings with prospects now, you will start to build relationships with some of them. When you are 40, some of the relationships you start this month may be paying your mortgage. Meetings you have next month will start relationships that will help send your kids to college. If anybody can make it in this business, you can. The only question: Can you wait?
In most businesses, customer relationships are your most valuable asset. Jake has chosen a business where this is especially true, with great rewards for those who can create and nurture long-term relationships. But we’re all like Jake to an extent: Can we be patient and invest now, one relationship-building encounter at a time, in building those relationships that will help us prosper in the future?
Certainly, Jake could use his exceptional relationship-building skills for more short-term financial gains. He could be a waiter in a fine-dining restaurant, creating 45-minute relationships that, I’m sure, would earn him the largest tips of all the servers. But, beyond the few repeat customers who ask for him, these relationships wouldn’t create lasting value for Jake. If his insurance job is like that of a christmas tree farmer, being a waiter would be more like that of a migrant worker, earning wages for today but starting over tomorrow.
I’m rooting for Jake, and for his firm. If he and they can be patient, all will benefit, including Jake’s future clients, since We relationships create strong benefits for both buyers and sellers.
It’s easy to look at Jake’s situation and think, “I’m glad that’s not me. I could never sell insurance.” And yes, specifically, I could never sell insurance. I’d go nuts. But Jake’s job really isn’t selling insurance. It’s building relationships that differentiate him from other providers in the minds of his clients. And when we recognize that we again remind ourselves that Jake’s challenge is our challenge: Do we want to be the migrant worker or the christmas tree farmer? Do we want to build our business around short-term transactions that produce their yields now, or do we want to invest in a rich, bountiful future harvest?
“Attract and retain customers”
I hear this phrase all the time, as if it were an indivisible, and comprehensive, unit. It assumes that once you acquire a customer the only thing left is to retain that customer.
A newsletter I wrote last year, The Apple Farmer, shows why retention is rarely ever enough. When asked what percent of their customers are giving them all of the business they reasonably could, most companies report a very low number to me. They haven’t lost the customers, but they surely haven’t developed all they can from the relationships.
So be cautious of strategies designed to “retain” customers. These strategies may succeed, and, if they do, you may miss the chance to go beyond the success of retention and develop more profitable, mutually-beneficial, continually-developing We relationships.
(My usual caveat: This is not a customer service story. It is a relationship-building-encounter-missed-opportunity story. Much more interesting. Bad customer service stories have become boring.)
I had just arrived in San Antonio the evening before a speech, flying back to the states from overseas. I walked down the beautiful San Antonio Riverwalk and found a restaurant for dinner. The waiter brought the obligatory bowl of salsa and basket of chips.
“Is it possible to get a few corn tortillas instead of the chips?” I asked. “I don’t want to eat anything fried, but I’d love to have something to eat with the salsa.” My body clock was still wound 8 time zones ahead, and I could sense that any food that had been fried in oil would cause an immediate and significant increase in the effects of jet lag.
“Hmmm,” the waiter said, pondering his options. “I have to ask the cooks for the tortillas, and I’ll probably have to charge you for them.”
“Do what you can,” I answered.
A few minutes later he brought me two soft corn tortillas, and asked, “Have you decided what you like to order?”
What a missed opportunity.
I told him something very specific about me – that I didn’t want to eat fried food. This was a gift I handed to him on a silver platter – a tip-laden, relationship-building-encounter-possibility, wrapped-with-a-bow present that he completely missed.
The fact that I didn’t want to eat fried food represented 1% of 1% of 1% of the totality of Steve Yastrow. It was a small detail … but an important detail.
What if the interaction had gone like this:
“Is it possible to get a few corn tortillas instead of the chips? I don’t want to eat anything fried, but I’d love to have something to eat with the salsa.”
“You don’t want to eat fried foods? I’ll check if I can get any tortillas for you. Would you like me look at the menu you with you so we can find choices that aren’t fried for an appetizer and your entrée?”
It’s a world of difference.
As I wrote above, don’t confuse this with a story about customer service. That’s so 2005. This is a story about how easy it is to show a customer you understand some unique detail about them, and then to honor that unique detail, with very little effort. The result if you do this? By focusing on a little detail (a “spice” as we refer to them at Yastrow & Company) your customer thinks, “Wow. They understand me.”
We share 99.5% of our DNA with all of the other 7 billion human beings on earth. What makes us special are the fine details that exist in the last ½%. In cooking, the spices that make up the smallest portion of the volume of a dish add the most to the dish’s flavor and personality. It is the same with people.
So, don’t make the mistake my waiter made. If a customer lets you in on a secret detail of his or her life, look at it as a gift, not an inconvenient challenge to your corporate policies.
Many hours in airplanes, the beautiful Indian Ocean, and a chance to practice “now.” One of the things I really like about traveling to far-away time zones is the chance to practice some life and business fundamentals that contribute directly to business success.
Here’s a short video I shot yesterday:
I’m carrying on with my theme of the last week, focusing on really specific things we can all do to improve our business relationships and relationship-building encounters, moment by moment. Some of the biggest obstacles to being effective with business relationships are the zillions of distractions that keep up from being present as we engage with others. Practice “now.”
"When Steve Yastrow writes, I pay close attention"
- Tom Peters
"I had to buy two copies. The first one is so dog-eared and underlined I couldn't read it any longer."
- Seth Godin
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Encounters: The Building Blocks of We Relationships (Adobe PDF)
In addition to writing, I spend most of my work time helping companies unleash their potential by creating better connections with their customers. This happens through my speaking events and through Yastrow & Company consulting engagements, where my team and I help companies figure out who they intend to be in the future, and then engage the entire company in creating that future through strong "We" customer relationships.
Before starting Yastrow & Company in the mid-90s I was vice-president of resort marketing for Hyatt Hotels. My experiences in the hotel business showed me clearly that most marketing doesn’t happen in the marketing department. Customers are paying attention to all interactions with a company, not just the promises made in traditional "marketing communications."
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