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What Do Clients Want Most?

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Woman rugged-up looking very comfortable.

What do your clients want? What is it they really want – above all else?

Another way to ask the question is, “why do customers remain loyal?”

There are lots of potential answers to that question. Could it be price, quality, skill or excellence?

In his book “What Clients Love“, author Harry Beckwith claims that what clients want most is “comfort”.

He goes on to say that “In an age of so many choices and messages with trust declining … and so many of our choices involving things we cannot see or inspect; today’s client feels uniquely uncomfortable.”

Beckwith offers these suggestions as ways to provide the comfort that clients crave:

  1. Perceived “Expertness” – reliance on an expert is a clever time-saving device. It relieves you of the burden of having to know and evaluate everything.
  2. Clarity – clarity helps people understand and gives them confidence in you. Are your words designed to impress or do they convey that simplicity and understanding matters most to you?
  3. Integrity – are people able to predict what you will do based what you say? That level of reliability is rare (and thus quite valuable). 
  4. Genuine Interest in People – your genuine interest in people assures them that you will protect their interest as well as your own
  5. Passion – clients know that if you love what you do, you will perform well.

Do you agree that comfort is what clients want most? What’s working for you? In your experience, what are the factors that lead to loyalty among your clients?

Source: Beckwith, Harry. What Clients Love: a field guide to growing your business. Warner Books, 2003.

Follow Me

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Follow Me - friends walking in the hills

No doubt you have worked under people with a varying degrees of leadership skill. Some of them are very skilled and take their role very seriously. Others are thrust into the role and haven’t had adequate training or preparation.

So, what is it that makes you want to follow someone? Of course, the answer is not the same for you as it is for me. However, there are quite a few people suggesting the answers are consistent no matter who you ask.

Communicate Effectively and Often

In my research on the topic, one thing that surfaces most often in writings about inspirational leadership: they communicate effectively and often. This is an important mindset among effective leaders – they are motivated to influence the way people think. Through their preoccupation with effective communication, they are saying, “follow me”.

Your Brand is the Foundation

How is this done? One idea for becoming a more effective communicator is to develop your personal brand. I found these definitions (thanks Wikipedia!) that I thought were inspiring:

“A personal brand is a widely recognized and largely uniform perception or impression of an individual based [your] experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.

“Personal branding is the conscious and intentional effort to create and influence public perception of an individual by positioning them as an authority in their industry, elevating their credibility, and differentiating themselves from the competition, to ultimately advance their career, increase their circle of influence, and have a larger impact.” That’s an impressive list of outcomes, is it not? Your brand:

  • Creates influences public perception of you
  • Positions you as an authority in your industry
  • Elevates your credibility
  • Differentiates you from the competition
  • Advances your career Increases your circle of influence

The most challenging part in all this (for me and many others) is the “conscious and intentional effort” required. On this point, I ran across a quote recently that resonated with me:

Consistency leads to familiarity, and familiarity leads to trust. Trust leads to action; action turns prospects into clients.

I’m interested in your thoughts – is Personal Branding something you’ve tried? Has it worked for you? What challenges have you faced?

Sources

Google attributes the quote (in a different form) to Jay Conrad Levinson.

Personal Branding is licensed under CC BY-SA

What to Do About Mediocrity on Your Team

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My key takeaways from this article:

  • High performance should be seen as the norm not the exception
  • Mediocre teams are characterized by accountability from the boss (peer accountability is better)
  • Asking folks to step-up to high performance is inviting them in to a place of stress. Some will look for hypocrisy as an excuse to retreat to safety.

Robert

by Joseph Grenny

I’ve been struck over the years watching executives opine in public about the need for “accountability” and “high performance,” then complain helplessly in private about one or two middling members of their own team. You have no moral authority to ask other managers to hold people accountable if you’re not doing so yourself. Are you sure you’re doing enough to push for high performance? What do you do when someone’s work is good but not great? How many employees do you have whose performance isn’t bad enough for termination, but whom you’d pass on if you could get a do-over on hiring them?

Unfortunately, if you’re hoping for a silver bullet to address a mediocre performer, I have little to offer. Chronic mediocrity is a symptom of ineffective leadership, not anemic personnel. But mediocrity is not destiny. In fact, I’ve even seen examples of government bureaucracies in tragically broken countries that dramatically turned around their performance in a matter of months. They do it through four leadership practices that lead to performance excellence.

Download or access the full article here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/rob.gramly/What-to-Do-About-Mediocrity-on-Your-Team.pdf

Conversation Marketing

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Conversation marketing is a relatively new marketing strategy that features automated interactions with customers & prospects. Conversations are conducted using a form of Artificial Intelligence (AI) referred to as Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Source: https://www.clearvoice.com

As the graphic explains, NLP is nothing more than a system that can understand language. We call these Conversation “Marketing” systems because we’re a marketing agency and our clients look to us for help in developing a form of interaction that turns prospects into customers. In reality, they provide a simple way for customers to interact with your business regardless of what’s on their mind.

In their simplest form, their ability to understand language is based on their ability to ask meaningful questions and respond in a meaningful way. We typically deploy this form of Artificial Intelligence for our clients in the form of a “chatbot” – a robot that provides an easy way for customers to interact with the business.