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Have a Great Day,

Tim

If you constantly create expectations with your customers that are so high that you can’t deliver, you will have unhappy customers… until they stop being customers altogether! We always see advertisements that seem too good to be true and they usually are. There’s no better way to lose customers than to offer them a diamond and give them a lump of coal.

You want to meet and exceed their expectations whenever you can. Everyone likes getting something for free. You can give them something they didn’t expect.

If you promise in an advertisement that they can get one free doodad, surprise them and give them a coupon for another or a percentage off.

You want to build it into your marketing mission and promotional ads, and choose an item with some big value but a minimal cost to you. You can promise them a certain amount, but you can deliver more.

Here’s to Your Success,

Tim

P.S. If you’re looking for success, check out my Favorite Success Mentor.

There’s an old saying that you should find a need, fill it, and you’ll get rich. It’s not really true. You need to find a want and fill it. People don’t always want what they need. They need to eat right, but they don’t. They need to stop smoking, but they don’t. They want to be more healthy.

You want to sell them what they want, but give them what they need.

Your prospects and customers are people just like you and me and they’re going to respond to messages similar to ones we might respond to. They’ll get turned off by the same things and exaggerations that we do. Filling their needs and wants typically involve things that we’ve talked about - convenience, long-lasting, time-saving, better-looking, more functional stronger guarantees, better service, etc.

We never know which hot button is their buying button. We need to test one feature or benefit against another until we discover what their hot buttons are.

Your objective is simply one of matching your marketing mission to the functions of the products or services that your business offers. If your business offers products and services that by design are problem solvers, then you need to use this function in your marketing approach.

You want to exaggerate and accentuate the types of problems they may have because your product or service will solve them. Point out a problem in detail and tell just how your product or service is designed to solve that problem.

Here’s an example. A diet program. You don’t want to sell the powder or the vitamin, but you want to sell better confidence, better health, greater attraction, and long life.

How do you uncover their real wants and desires? If you listen, you’ll discover the customer talking back to you in many ways. They might speak directly with you, your employees, the media, other customers. You have to pay attention.

You’ll hear more of what they don’t want instead of what they do want. They might say prices are too high or there’s not a big enough selection or the quality isn’t high enough. That’s telling you the opposite of what they really want.

However and whatever they say - listen to them! You’ll learn something every time you do.

Here’s to Your Success,

Tim

Customers can actually be frustrating and they often don’t make it easy for you and your employees to treat them nicely.

You need to remember where all your revenue and sales come from for your business. Every dollar in sales that your business gets comes from these customers that can sometimes be frustrating. You want to treat them well and hope that maybe they’ll return another day happy and satisfied and bring family and friends.

The old saying, “The customer is always right”, is really not true. One unhappy customer, through word of mouth, can translate into a lot of lost customers. Just because customers aren’t telling you how good you are, oftentimes you think, “Everything must be okay.” They may not come to you and say, “Gosh, that was a horrible experience, but they might tell their family and friends that.” Silence is not golden.

Each person really has different theories on this, but they have the potential to tell just one or many other people positive or negative things about your business. Look at a happy customer as free advertising (and you know how much it costs for advertising).

It’s been said that an unhappy customer will tell a minimum of 10-20 people their negative experience. Think about that! 10-20 people automatically not doing business with you. That might change the way you respond to someone. Just maybe a receptionist having a bad day and being rude on the phone - that person telling 10-20 people about that and they will never do business with you.

The first step to a better relationship is to realize customers aren’t different from anyone else. They are people with feelings and reactions, wants and desires. They’ve been studied for the last 50 years and, during that time, more than any other time in history. It’s your job to understand human drive, passions, emotions, fears and target those emotions.

You want to always be looking for a response from them - good and bad. Every bad response you get from a customer is an opportunity to improve.

The second step is to reverse your “Green Plan” that is always thinking of them as money machines. You want to think, “How can you get them more, better, faster, easier, less-expensive, higher-quality, longer-service, better benefits, more options, and more desirable things that they want?”

If that’s the only thing you think of, the profit will come as long as you are running the business properly. You can’t think like this for long without ending up with more value in your business or product or service. A greater number of customers that are doing more business with you, doing it more frequently, and they’re doing it more often for a longer term and they’re giving you referrals.

Here’s to Your Success,

Tim