Your Customer is not Your Friend

You own a business.

You believe in your company.

You believe you deliver a better experience than your competitors.

Is this confidence based on your intentions, your goals, your beliefs, your values and your personal commitment to your customer’s happiness?

It is? Uh-oh.

Judging yourself by your intentions isn’t a danger among friends, because a friend knows your heart even when your actions are inappropriate.

But it is a real and present danger in business.

We judge ourselves by our intentions but others judge us by our actions.

What happens when a prospective customer makes contact with your company? Do they meet your best employee on that employee’s best day? Of course not. They meet your average employee on an average day. Or worse, they meet a below-average employee on a below-average day.

And then you are confused by those negative reviews.

Sad, isn’t it? Your intentions and motivations and personal commitments never quite made it to the party.

Wouldn’t it be great if your employees were consistently delivering the experience you’ve always believed in?

I want to help you make that happen.

The process is called “message integration.”

The key is to take what’s in your heart – your highest and brightest and best intentions – and bury those intentions deep in the hearts of your employees.

Frances Frei, that most beloved of Harvard Business School professors, says,

You can’t change a person’s performance until you first change their beliefs.”

Simon Sinek, in the most popular of all TED talks, says,

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do things that they believe.”

Simon Sinek agrees with Frances Frei and I agree with both of them. I’ll bet you do, too. Yet most of the people I’ve met who adored that Simon Sinek TED talk did exactly the wrong thing at the end of those magical 18 minutes. They drew concentric circles, pointed to the middle one and said, “We’ve got to start with Why.”

And each of these fine people walked away from that exercise with something that felt like a fuzzy and ambiguous “unique selling proposition” or worse, a high-tone mission statement filled with words like “honesty,” “integrity,” and “value.”

Right now I’m in the middle of making a video detailing HOW to implement the advice of Frances Frei and Simon Sinek. It’s a delightfully simple and effective technique and I’ve decided I want you to have it.

I’ve also decided I don’t want to be perceived as hanging onto the coattails of Francis Frei and Simon Sinek, so I’m not going to make my video public. Instead, I’ll be sending a private link to all my Wizard of Ads partners and then to all my clients and then to all the alumni of Wizard Academy. Then I’m sending it to everyone who has ever made a cash donation – no matter how small – to our school.

I’m going to request the Wizard Academy donor list from Vice Chancellor Whittington on Friday afternoon, October 15. And then I’ll be sending that private link. (You still have time to get your name on the list.)

It really is a marvelous technique. Chances are, you’ll replace all the content on your About Us page with the results of this exercise.

And that will be the smallest and least important of its uses.

Roy H. Williams