Super Bowl is over, the commercials are history and so as you start the first week in February, we thought this message from Seth Godin offered us a few moments to check in with ourselves and ask “Do you love your customers?”
“There are two ways people think about this:
- We love our customers because they pay us money. (Inherent here is customers = money = love.)
- We love our customers, and sometimes there’s a transaction.
The second is very different indeed from the first.
In the first case, customers are the means to an end, profit. In the second, the organization exists to serve customers, and profit is both an enabler and a possible side effect.
It’s easy to argue that without compensation, there can be no service. Taking that to an extreme, though, working to maximize the short-term value of each transaction rarely scales. If you hoard information, for example, today your prospects will simply click and find it somewhere else. If you seek to charge above average prices for below average products, your customers will discover this, and let the world know. In a free market with plenty of information, it’s very hard to succeed merely by loving the money your customers pay you.
I think it’s fascinating to note that some of the most successful organizations of our time got there by focusing obsessively on service, viewing compensation as an afterthought or a side effect. As marketing gets more and more expensive, it turns out that caring for people is a useful shortcut to trust, which leads to all the other things that a growing organization seeks.
Your customers can tell.”
Which of these scenarios describes you? From our perspective, it’s not either/or but “and” yet with a little different twist. We love our clients and because we care about them as people first and want only the best for them, we are able to share our gifts, talents and knowledge with them and help and support them to achieve their goals, dreams and desires. Our clients invest in themselves and as a results of that, exchange money as a symbol of the value they see in what we have to offer. Likewise, we recognize the value of what we bring to the table and price our services to reflect that value.
At the end of the day, value and trust are in the eyes of the beholder. The good news is that we can control what we offer to our customers, how we value what we offer and how much we care and build trust with those we serve. That’s what creates success because from that, the money and rewards flow!
