In this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show we’re going to talk about how you can create a compelling customer promise so that you not only end up with customers for life but with evangelists who are ready to do anything for your business.

If you don’t get this right, you will have no distinction in the marketplace, the perception of your value is low and you end up with customers who are runaways. They will buy from you but there is no loyalty and connection. But if you get it right, competition will fade away, your price will not matter and you will build an army of evangelists.

To make it happen, here are the principles that you need to know:

• Expectations are transactional,
• Be focused on their identity, and
• Create a buzz from the delivery.

The Customer Promise Amplifier

This tool allows you to figure out how you deliver your promise to customers in terms of execution, perception, buy criteria, type and impact. There are 3 levels to this:

Expectation level
At the bare minimum, your execution is based on their expectation and you meet it. The perception in the marketplace is that you’ve got a commodity that you are offering and it’s without any distinction. The buying criterion is the cost and you have satisfied customers who end up being leavers or runaways.

Desire Level
This is the minimum level that you want to serve. Serve their desires and you have elevated above their expectations. They will look at you and your offer as a premium and the buying criteria is not much the cost but the utility or the impact that it’s going to have in their life. You will have happy customers and they will become repeaters who keep coming back.

Unexpected Needs Level
You do completely unexpected things so that your customers will look at it and perceive it as extraordinary. Their buying criteria will be based on their identity and you will have customers who are your fans. It will cost you money but in the long term it’s going to pay back as the impact you have will create evangelists who are willing to vocalize for you and are out there talking you up.

— Begin Transcript —

Hey there, Mel Abraham here, the author of the #1 bestselling book, The Entrepreneur’s Solution and the founder of Thoughtpreneur Academy where we teach you how to brand yourself as an influencer for more impact, income and freedom. And welcome back to this episode of The Entrepreneur’s Solution show and in this episode, we’re going to talk a bit about promises. We’re going to talk about your customer promise.

How do we elevate and amplify your customer promise so not only do you end up with customers for life but evangelists, they will fight for your business and I’m going to introduce you to my Customer Promise Amplifier, a tool and template that I use with many of my high level clients. And if you want to download that tool, just go to MelAbraham.com/session080 and you will get a chance to download the action guide for the Customer Promise Amplifier in that process.

And if you’re not by your computer, maybe, you’re out for a run and you’re just listening to this on the podcast or you happen to be driving and I want you to be safe then just text me at some point in time. Text MYLEGACY one-word to 38470, I will send you the download link to make sure that you get all the tools, all the value out of each and every episode.

So, let’s look at this whole idea of the customer promise because here is what I believe—a satisfied customer is your path to disaster. It’s not what I want. I don’t want satisfied customers. I actually want ecstatic customers. I want customers that are jumping for joy that are absolutely beyond themselves. Think about what it’s like.

I remember, my wife and I, we frequent a hotel down here for brunch. They have a great brunch and it’s right on the water. We love going there and we happen to go there for our wedding anniversary this past year. And they kind of know us there but they treat us so well. We walk in, we sit down for the brunch, we’ve got the view of the water and all of that and here they come. They bring us this beautiful pastry with happy anniversary on it.

And the treatment and everything throughout the whole process was phenomenal but then we come out and now, normally they keep my car up front and I come walking out and I don’t see the car and I look at Dan the valet and I said, “Hey Dan, where’s the car?”

And he says, “Oh shoot, I’m sorry Mr. Abraham. It will be up in just a moment.”

And I said, “Where is it?”

And he says, “Well, it was your anniversary. So, we decided to wash the car for you.”

And you think about that. As completely not it was not something that we expected, it was not something we asked for, we had no idea that they would even consider but they took it upon themselves to create an extraordinary experience for Stefanie and I and this is what I’m talking about.

What is your customer promise?

And I think that the things that we got to think about is this: If we don’t get this right, there’s some things that happen. Effectively if we don’t get this right, you’re going to find that you have no distinction in the marketplace.

You become commoditized. You become reduced to being put in a pile of
sameness and people won’t go there. I mean, we typically go there many
times a year because of the way they treat us, because of the
experiences, because of the whole process. Aside from the fact that the
food is absolutely amazing. So, if we don’t get this right, there is no
distinction between us and the rest of the stuff that is out there.

And if we don’t get this right, what you find is that since there is no distinction, the perception in the marketplace is that you’re low value.

You’re a commodity. You may be a pile of beans at that point of time
and I don’t mean it in a negative way. Well, I guess, actually I do.
Fact of the matter is, is that as a business, as an entrepreneur, I
never ever want to compete at a commodity level because then there is no
differentiation and the primary focus when you’re at a commodity level
then is price and I don’t ever want to be the differentiator on price. I
want to be the differentiator on         quality, experience,
connection, the whole process but price is never in there because I want
price to become no object. In fact, if I do this correctly, not only
does price objections go away but competitive objections go away.

The last thing that happens; well, one of the last things that happens if we don’t get this right is effectively, you end up with customers that I call runaways.

In other words, they’re transactional. They’re going to come to you,
they’re going to buy and then, there is no loyalty, there is no
connection. It’s a transactional relationship and they’re going to run
away. They’re going to be gone out of your sphere, out of your circle;
you’re never going to hear from them again.

And that means that
the challenge is that in order to continue your business, you always got
to keep getting more and more customers. You’ve heard the cliché that it’s
easier to sell a current customer, to create value in a current
customer’s hands that’s already got a relationship with you versus
trying to do something from the very beginning, start to find a new
customer.

So, what I want to do is, yes I’m going to have a
process or a system that allows me to bring in new customers but I need
to have something that nurtures the customers that are already there,
the people that I care for, that I’ve cared to come to me and transact
with me at least once to really build that relationship and build that
connection.

Many of you have heard that I believe that our society
in general is starved for connection and we’ve confused contacts,
likes, and shares and thumbs up and all that stuff as connection and
it’s not. It’s contacts. So, how are you connecting with the audience?

Here
is the cool thing. When you get this right, when you get this right,
some things happen. Some really cool things happen. First things first, competition fades away
because what ends up happening is you’ve created a relationship with
that customer in such a way that you’re not going to go anywhere else.
There’s a tremendous level of loyalty.

I have just had a recent
buying experience for something that was a very high priced, high ticket
item and the salesperson that I worked with was absolutely phenomenal.
Bent over backwards, he’d worked through some challenges that we had
during the transaction, some difficulties with timing, with structuring,
with all the types of things and he did everything possible.

In fact, when there was ever an issue, I would simply call him up and he says, “I got this. Don’t worry about it.”

When
you can do that for your customer, man, I took the time to write his
direct report, his boss and their boss a letter about him because and
I’m going to refer to him because of the experience that he created. So,
competition effectively fades away if we do this correctly.

The other thing that happens is that as I said earlier, price doesn’t matter.

The conversation is not about price at that point because you are the
provider. If you’ve positioned yourself correctly and you’ve created the
experience in your customer’s eyes, in your client’s hearts, in their
minds, through the experiences that you created; not some promise that
is never fulfilled but something that is over fulfilled if you will see
in the framework when I break it down; that is over fulfilled in such a
way that they say, “I get it. I’m paying a little more or I’m paying a
lot more but I’m willing to do it because of the experience, because of
how it makes me feel, because of how they treat me in that process.”

And so, really when we start to look at this, that starts to really, really shift and change the relationship that you have:

• With your market,
• With your audience,
• With your customers, and
• Your clients.

And ultimately, what ends up happening is that you’ve build an army of evangelists.

People that are willing to go to bat for you, people that are willing
to stand toe to toe for you in a way that they’re going to tell people
about you. In fact, this transaction I just talked about, I’ve already
referred them 2 people to talk to them about doing a deal for them and
the fact is, is that, that relationship is what created the referral.
So, they’ve got someone in me that is an evangelist for their brand and
when you can create evangelists for your brand through experience so
they can sit back and say, “I’ve had first hand experience with you or
with your brand and here is what it was like”.

It’s like having a
bunch of really high ratings on yelp. But when you’re going out there
vocally and telling people about it that’s a different ball game. And
so, what we want to do is use the customer buying experience to build an
army of evangelists. In fact, this if you will, unpaid sales team
that’s out there touting your .., that’s out there singing your praises,
that’s out there willing to raise the flag and say, “This is who you
got to go to. This is who you should be working with”.

I mean
think about that in your business. Think about how that would affect
your business, the business coming in, the revenues, the profitability,
the work that you’re doing, the meaning, all the way down the line, the
ripple effect of creating that experience.

So, what do you need to know to make that happen?

I
think there is a couple of principles for you to understand as we move
forward and then we will build out the framework, the customer promise
amplifier framework. So, here is the thing. The first thing to
understand is Expectations are transactional.

What do I mean by this?

If
all we do is build our business, our customer experience to meet their
expectations then you’re creating a transactional relationship. We’ve
got to surpass our expectations. We’ve got to absolutely wow them with
the things that we do and we will give you some ways to do that. We’ve
got to give them some surprises. We’ve got to do some things differently
because meeting expectations is the bare minimum of operations and
that’s not enough and that is where I think we start to create that
transactional relationship that’s fleeting and I want you to have not
transactional relationships. I want you to have long term relationships
that are mutually valuable.

In other words, they get value out of
the relationships and you do too. Granted, there is commerce involved
and it’s a commercial relationship but that doesn’t mean that there
can’t be a relationship just the same, just because there is money
involved.

The second principle that I think we need to really
think about is if we’re not focused on expectations, what should we be
focused on? We should be focused on is their identity. Their aspirations. What are they really trying to identify with?

If
you think about some of the incredible commercials, even going way
back, it was when they first came out and women started to smoke, there
was an advertisement that came out for the cigarettes that they called
them torches of freedom. I mean, think about that. What they did is they
created an identity for women to pick up cigarettes. Now, I am not a
smoker nor have I ever been nor do I support it. I think it’s an
unfortunately unhealthy habit so I’m using this as an example because
when we’re talking decades and decades ago, when this started to happen
what they used as an advertisement is to create an experience that
created a connection to an identity and that was torches of freedom.

You
could see the same thing with Apple when they first came out with the
iPod and you had those silhouette, those white silhouettes of the people
with the headphones on and this cool kind of feel for it and they
created an identity for people to work from and to say, “I want to be
part of that crowd.”

So, one of the things that we need to think about in our products or services is how
do we appeal to their individual identities, to their aspirational
identities in order to make it come to fruition, to raise bar of what it
is that they want in the process?

And then, the third principle is to realize that we need to create a buzz from the delivery.

In other words, when you deliver your service, your product or
something, how do you create a buzz? How do you over deliver and create
an experience beyond any other?

I know that last year during the
holidays, my wife and I took some time out. We went and spent Christmas
Eve out at a hotel and here we came back in from an evening out and they
had on our bed a monogram pillow with ‘A’ for my last name of Abraham.
They had rose petals through the room. They had a bubble bath. They had
chocolates and champagne and all that was nothing we ordered, it was
nothing we asked for. It was something they did to create a buzz, to
allow me to sit back and want to talk about the delivery, to want to
talk about the experience and I ask you this, is that if you look at
your experience, if you look at your customers journey, if you look at
that relationship, what are you doing to get them to talk about it, to
verbalize it, to post it on social media, to have conversations with
their friends saying, “You have to go there. That’s the only place to
go.”

Because if you’re not doing that then we’re failing on this
principle. We need to get people to have a buzz, to be willing to talk
about it and even if there is problems, I get it there is problems,
there is challenges that we deal with those at a level that also creates
a positive buzz, that you take care of things in a way that allows
people to feel good about the relationship they have with you..

So, how does this happen?

I think that we need to understand what I call The Customer Promise Amplifier
and in order to do that I’m going to actually jump to the iPad here and
get ourselves into building out this framework and again, if you’ve not
downloaded the action guide, the customer promise amplifier action
guide, just go to MelAbraham.com/session080 to download it or text me MYLEGACY one-word no-spaces to 38470. I will make sure that I get that to you.

So,
let’s just jump in to the iPad and let’s work this thing out and see
how this works. So, one of the first things to consider in this process
is this, is that we’re going to talk about things on a variety of
different levels and the first, the first things that we’re going to
talk about is really about your execution. So, at what level are
you executing at first. We’re going to talk about your execution. We’re
going to talk a bit about, we’re going to talk a bit about your
customer’s perception.

And then, from there, because based
on their perception, I just going to expand this a little bit, based on
their perception they will then come up with their buying criteria.
So, we’re going to talk a bit about the buying criteria based on your
execution and what they’re looking at. We will then touch on the type of customer that you’re creating.
You’re creating a relationship, the kind of relationship that you’re
creating with a customer becomes important and you have the ability to
impact that. And then, the last thing that I want to touch on is what impact that has with your relationship in the marketplace and that customer as we move forward.

So,
at the bare minimum, at the bare minimum, when you first start out,
we’re really dealing and this is the thing that we talked about in one
of the principles is that you can deliver your execution based on their expectations.
Effectively, you meet their expectations. Here is the challenge with
that is when you meet their expectations, as I said, you’re actually
creating a relationship of a commodity. The perception in the
marketplace is that you’ve got a commodity that you’re offering and there is no differentiation, there is no distinction, there is no value beyond what they’re using it for.

Their buying criteria then becomes one of “What does it cost me?”

They’re
totally focused on one thing and one thing only and that’s the price
and we need to get that customer focus off of price and on to value that
client focus in order to really nail this thing and in the end what
ends up happening is you have satisfied customers and that my friends, will be the beginning of the end for you because satisfied customers end up becoming what I call leavers or runaways. They’re not going to stay with you for long.

So
what we need to do is we got to look at this whole piece and say,
alright that’s where a lot of people may play but it’s not a place where
you want to play. You want to move yourself up? I don’t want to serve
at the expectation level. The minimum that I want to serve at is what I call the desires level
because if I’m serving their desires, I’ve elevated myself above their
expectations because they come into the game with a level of
expectations but there is always a little bit where they would desire,
just a little more, just a little more.

And so, if you can serve at that desires level what ends up happening is they start to look at you not as a commodity but as a premium,
as a premium and when you start to be seen as a premium, what they
start to look at from a buying criteria is not as much the cost. They’re
still going to focus a bit on the cost but they’re actually going to look at what we call utility.

• The impact it’s going to have in their life.
• How it works.
• The functionality.
• The utility of what it does for them in the process.

And now, instead of satisfied customers, you actually have happy customers.

So,
this becomes the minimum level. This is the minimum level we need to
operate at the desire level, not at the expectation level, at the desire
level because with happy customers you have what I call repeaters.
Now people are going to come back to you and use you over and over
again because they felt that you actually exceeded the expectations that
they had.

But there is still another level above that and this is where
I actually think we ought to strive for. This is where I think if you
take the time to create the relationships, to do the things to really
bring this to life, things will change for you dynamically and I’m going
to give you a worksheet that’s going to help you build out and amplify
this customer promise experience for your customers in doing that.

But now you start to operate at a different place and this is at their unexpected needs level.
Completely unexpected just like this whole thing with them washing the
car for me and doing some of those things. It was totally unexpected.
The car certainly needed a wash, so I’m guessing that’s what they saw.
But the fact of the matter is it was totally unexpected and in that
process, it made me look at it and say that is extraordinary.

So
their perception, if you operated at that unexpected needs level is
that you are extraordinary in your delivery, that you’re extraordinary
in your service, in your product, you’re extraordinary in that process
of creating the connection with your clients, your customers and your
marketplace and with that extraordinary type of relationship, with that
kind of perception in the marketplace, their buying criteria is based on their identity. They identify with it.

Now
you’ve created a deep-seated relationship and connection with them in
their heart, in their soul not only in their logical mind that gets them
to go this is about me and this is who I am and this is what I want and
I want to be part of and they feel like they’re part of a movement,
they feel they’re part of a mission. This is what drives; some of these
companies that have some tremendous, tremendous success and growth is
because they work at the identity level.

Clifbar is one of them.
Patagonia is another one. Tom’s shoes, Zappos; all of them what they’re
doing is they’re actually; Apply in some cases, they’re a little
challenged right now but what’s built Apple is that people identified
with them, they worked at the identity level and when you work at the
identity level, what you do is you create not only happy customers but you create fans
and the impact and this is the cool thing about it is if you do this
well and when you do this well and if you take the time and I know none
of this is easy and in fact sometimes, it’s going to cost you money to
do it but in the long term, it’s going to pay you back in spades because
in the long term the impact you’re going to have is now I have evangelists.

• People that are willing to go to bat for you.
• People that are willing to speak about it.
• People that are willing to be vocal about it.

Not someone that says, “Yeah I’m satisfied” and they don’t say
anything good bad or indifferent. I want people that are speaking to the
hills that are saying, “My gosh, you got to go to Mel.” I’ve had a
couple of folks in recent, just recent times that I’ve had the
opportunity and the blessing to work with them one-on-one and the
response because of the impact they had was tremendous and so, what you
need is people that are willing to vocalize this in that way.

We
live in a different marketplace today. It’s not about just direct
advertising or TV advertising or newspaper ads. It is about word of
mouth. It is about that viral kind of nature of contacts and
communication and we need to create that viral nature by blowing away
our customers, by exceeding their expectations, by far exceeding their
expectations and exceeding their desires by working at their unexpected
needs level and doing it in such a way that creates them a perception of
you being extraordinary and makes them your evangelists. Your invisible
(if you will) unpaid sales team that’s out there talking you up and
putting it out there for you.

That’s the key to doing this. That’s
the key to amplifying your customer promise and your customers’
experience and when you do that successfully, man, the doors are going
to open up. As I said, price and cost become a non-issue, competition
becomes a non-issue because you set yourself apart, you’ve created the
distinctions in a way that people cannot compare you to what’s out
there.

Great book if you haven’t read it that talks a bit about
this distinction is Blue Ocean Strategy. I love, love, love that book.
If you haven’t checked it out, check out Blue Ocean Strategy in the
process. So, here’s the deal. The customer promise amplifier action
guide that you can download MelAbraham.com/session080
you can download has a worksheet that takes you through a number of
processes that allows you to start to understand what it takes to really
build out and work through the process of amplifying your customer
promise and delivering on it.

So it’s not, hear me clearly on
this, it’s not about just making the promise. It’s about delivering on
it. It’s about fulfilling that promise in a way that your customers,
your clients, our marketplace are talking about it all the time. So,
you’re going to go through, we’re going to talk about three different
categories of things that you can do in the action guide. We’re going to
talk about your baseline.

• What’s the baseline things that you can do?
• What’s the aspirational things that you can do?
• What’s the experience you can create for your customers and clients?

So, do me a favor. Download that action guide, work it through,
get it implemented in your business, get it out there in such a way that
you start to see things. I get it, you’re going to have to invest your
time because it takes a little while to create these experiences and
build that trust that the experience is going to be consistent
experience over and over again. But when you do, man what happens is you
start to create momentum in the business.

So take that guide,
work through it with your people, work through it with the people that
are the face to the customer people, your internal people. Create it
part of your business identity to go out there and create extraordinary
experiences to wow them in a way that makes them go, “Oh my gosh, I got
to tell the world about them.”

So, I hope that this serves you. I
hope that you found this of value. Fulfilling and exceeding your
customer promise will be the key to transcending price objections,
competitive impacts and that will do it. So, do me a favor. If you
haven’t done so already, make sure that you subscribe because I got a
lot of these tools, these templates and these success tips for you in
business, in wealth and success, in thought leadership, in
thoughtpreneurship that I’m going to keep doing on a weekly basis. So,
subscribe. Be part of the community.

Love to hear from you also. So, if you’ve got any questions just leave them for me at AskMelNow.com.
You can go there. You can leave me your questions. We will make sure we
get it on an upcoming episode. And one last favor. If you would do me a
favor is that there is probably people that you know that these kinds
of tips, these things could serve them, could help them, share it with a
friend. Go ahead and share this, post it, put it out there. Let’s get
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This is the way
I can get access to as many people as possible and give them access to
me at this level. So, do me a favor. Share it, subscribe and until we
see each other on the next episode,

May your vision be grand, your journey epic and your legacy significant!

See you soon. Cheers. Bye!!

— End Transcript —

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Like
this? Please share it and help a few more people bring their dreams out
of the darkness and give life to them again.  Cheers, Mel

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