Value Needs to be Promoted
Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:51AM I don't like shameless self promotion, but there is a time and a place for it. If you have found a way to provide greater value for your customers you need to promote it. Value is one of those things that most business owners understand. They know that they need to innovate. They know they need to find better, faster, cheaper ways of delivering goods and services to their customers. And they work very hard at it. But they expect that "If I build it they will come." In other words, these innovators expect the world to beat a path to their door, but the world doesn't know why they should.
This is where business owners need to learn to talk about themselves. This is something I don't do very well. It is also something a lot of our clients don't do very well. But if you want all of that hard work to pay off you must let people know about it. And it's not just customers that need to know. There are three groups of people you should target when it comes to promoting the value you deliver.
- Recipients of that value. The idea for this post originated while I was completing a client's tax return. There were a couple of items in our questionnaire that made me think there might be more money on the table. I dug a little deeper, then a little deeper. I went back to the client and asked for some more documents. Finally I found two unexplored areas for tax savings that netted the client an additional $1,000 on his refund. This was a tiny return that we were only charging about $500 to prepare and as I wrapped everything up I realized that I had not communicated any of this to the client. Here I was giving someone a 100% return on his investment in our firm and I wasn't even going to tell him about it. Shameful.
- Your people. Value is a culture thing. You can't do it alone. Imagine you own a hardware store and you believe that it is your mission in life to be able to answer any hardware related question a customer might ask. Can you do that alone? Can you personally patrol the isles interacting with each and every customer? Of course not. Your people need to hear the stories of how you helped a customer stop a leaky faucet with a new 80 cent o-ring rather than $100 sink fixture. They need to watch you do it. They need to experience it. When you do something extraordinary for a customer the team needs to know. Culture isn't built through education. It's built through shared experience.
- Future customers. This is the group that gets most of the attention. We build great stories into our sales pitch of how we have helped others and delivered great value in the past. That's good. Keep it up. But don't let your presentation go stale. Demand that only examples less than 30 days old make it into your pitch. It is more powerful to give an example of something that happened yesterday than it is to recount a success you had last year.
If you are delivering value to customers don't be afraid to self promote. You deserve it.
Reader Comments (2)
Great post, Joey. I'll add a couple points...
Regardless of industry, professionals so often take for granted that others already "get" what they - the professionals - have to offer because they - the professionals - know all about and are good at what they do. In other words, what comes easy to some is anything but easy to others. So, really, professionals need to not only communicate the value they offer but also communicate specifically HOW they can be of help (i.e. make their process more efficient, take a responsibility off their plate, etc.). This is key... thinking/communicating like - AND ABOUT - your customers and prospects, not yourself. What are the benefits (not just features) of your product or service? Do you have any credible statistics to back them up? But....
The flip side of that is business owners often are so "close" to their businesses that it's very hard for them to look that things from a different perspective. That's why it can be beneficial to outsource with someone who can look at things a little more objectively. As in your example, new opportunities can be found and acted upon.
Finally, just an extra thought. It's interesting that businesses have no problem advertising, but self-promotion is an idea met with much trepidation. The concepts are the same - get the message of your product/service out there - but advertising is more "accepted" while PR is really so much more effective, especially now with the many opportunities the Internet offers. Hmmmm... may have to explore that one for a blog post of my own. :)
Really good stuff, Andrea. Thanks for taking the time to to comment and to do so with such insight.