Episode 2
with Simone Douglas
Does your 6 word story measure up or are you faking it until you break it?
This week, Simone will be looking at things through a marketing, sales and service experience perspective.
Are we delivering on the expectations we are creating?
Do we live our values every step of the way or are they just a poster on the wall?
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Chris Irving 0:10
Welcome to the confident networker podcast with your host Simone Douglas. In each insightful episode, Simone does a deep dive into the strategies, tactics and tools that will help you be a confident networker.
Simone Douglas 0:32
Does your six word story measure up? Or are you faking it until you break it? Building a brand is one of the most important things you can do for your business. Whether you’re a fully fledged company with multiple departments or freelancer, often mistaken for a logo and a set of color and font guidelines. A brand is the set of perceptions and expectations the public has about your product or service perceptions that we would hope you have carefully cultivated. So if this brand and its story has been carefully cultivated, and tirelessly articulated, then summing it up in six words should in theory be a breeze. A six word story is just that six words that sum up and convey the felt sense of what it is to engage with your business too fluffy. The most famous six word story is often attributed to Hemingway and reads like this for sale, baby shoes never worn. Now I’m reasonably confident that it doesn’t matter what your life experience is, that story will invoke an emotional reaction. And that’s what you’re looking for the six words that evoke the emotional reaction for your business, the six words that can become your rudder for absolutely every other piece of content or engagement that you have. With one of my businesses, the Duke of Brunswick hotel, our six word story is very simple. The outside world doesn’t matter here, that becomes the rudder for everything that we do. Everything that we touch, every customer engagement, every piece of marketing collateral that we put together, needs to contribute to that story. It’s easy to get distracted by all the noise in the business world at large. But jump days your chance to settle in and work on your business in ways that allow you to make the most of your opportunities today, tomorrow and forever. Today’s show is looking at your business through a marketing sales and service experience perspective. Are we delivering on the expectations that we are creating? Do we live our values every step of the way? Or are they just a poster on the wall? So back to why we’re talking about six word stories today in the largest sense, what this tale reminds us of is that story is a potent tool no matter what it is that we do at once. It is a vehicle that carries a message mystery, promise and entertainment. It tells us something of the storyteller to and in all of this it affords the opportunity to connect the teller to others in lasting ways. But the six word story offers more as both an exercise and as a handy reminder, we’d be wise to take into whatever we do. We tell stories not for our own benefit, but to engage others. So when we craft our story even from a business perspective, it’s important to think about our audience or in this case, our customers and prospects. First and foremost, people like a mystery more than a lecture, they want to be part of the story in some way to relate directly to it. Understanding your business story helps you keep its values top of mind. Knowing and sharing your strategic narrative unites your employees reminds them that you support and appreciate them. And above all, crafting a compelling story can steer your business away from hiding or merely surviving toward thriving. Countless businesses are entering uncharted territory and a strategic narrative can serve as a much needed compass. As we talked about on last week’s show, when it comes to our customers, the most successful businesses have a carefully crafted balance of storytelling and story selling that engages both the heart and the mind and then ultimately the wallet of their ideal customers. So what are our key issues from an owner perspective when we look at this kind of narrative, so the first thing that we need to cover off on his water our customers moments of truth for marketing and sales, you need to focus on the interactions that are important to the customer, and on the way your frontline employees handle those interactions. Although businesses are investing record amounts of money in traditional loyalty programs, and in customer relationship management technology, or CRMs. In general, and in general service quality improvements, most of these initiatives end in disappointment. According to Forrester Research, only 10% of businesses and IT executives surveyed strongly agreed that business results anticipated from implementing a CRM were met or exceeded. What’s regularly missing is the spark between the customer and the frontline. Add staff members, the spark that helps transform weary or skeptical people into strong and committed followers. That spark and the emotionally driven behavior that creates it explain how a great customer service company earns its trust, and loyalty during moments of truth, those few interactions, for instance, a lost credit card or canceled flight or a bad meal when the customers invest a high amount of emotional energy in the outcome. Superb handling of these moments requires an instinctive frontline response that puts the customer’s emotional needs ahead of the companies and the employees agendas. Next, we need to look at how do we identify where we’ve been telling tales instead of engaging stories and what is the risk of our customers forming an adverse opinion Okay, so your teams will deliver exceptional customer service and perform well at moments of truth only if they know clearly what they’re supposed to do and why the what part addresses their brain the why their heart or subconscious feelings that motivate them to work. Like any other good story, the answers to these questions need to be clear, compelling and to resonate with the human being. Efforts to help your team understand the what can be complex, but they are more successful when the material is presented as simply as possible. And again, your six word story will allow you to do that because it will give your teams a rudder that they can look at to make the most of things. So that becomes really important. As business owners and managers we need to use general statements of values and principles, repeat them regularly and avoid the extensive protocols that undermine empowerment. Your team is likely to react spontaneously or in an emotionally intelligent way. If they don’t feel the weight of a lengthy rulebook, then we need to have a look at whether we’ve mapped out our marketing and sales processes with our six word story in mind, do our standard operating procedures in our marketing and sales maps marry up with our story and our values? Or are we faking it until we break it? We need to have a deeper sense of meaning and a stronger set of emotional skills together to make that strong foundation for handling those moments of truth. But your team will respond positively only if the structures and systems consistently reinforce the message. So it’s necessary to create rewards, both for having behaving in certain ways, and for demonstrating an ability to behave in new ways. As business owners and managers we need to modify these performance management systems to strike a balance between financial results and the things that really matter at moments of truth. Simplifying frontline processes is another key priority. Because it not only gives the team time to perform more effectively at moments of truth, but also reinforces the critical success element, their sense of empowerment, your team will often resist change because new initiatives come on top of their existing responsibilities and overwhelm them. So it doesn’t matter where you are in your business right now is definitely the time to be taking a solid look at exactly where you are, and making some realistic decisions about where you want to go in 2021. All whilst keeping a finger on the pulse of the last quarter of the year. So we’ve settled on a narrative or a story and we have it lined up with our values. The question is how can we control the narrative surrounding our business, it’s time to get our heads around some straightforward steps to build a memorable and cohesive brand. If this is your first time listening, welcome to the world of seriously social sales and marketing where relationships when you’re the sales. And if you’re a returning listener, thanks for being part of my seriously social Global Business family. We’re now going to take a short minute two minute break. And when we return, we’ll get into the detail on what we will really need to be looking at in order to successfully identify you humans. Establish your why be you and avoid split personalities in your messaging and develop or refine your brand’s message, be the life of the party on your social networks and align your customer service efforts with your brand. And then finally, we want to make sure that you’re dressed for success.
So we’ve settled on a narrative or a story, we have it lined up with our values. And the question is how can we control the narrative surrounding our business, it’s time to get our heads around some straightforward steps to build a memorable and a cohesive brand. The first thing that we need to do is identify your humans. I think it’s really important in business to remember that you’re dealing with human beings, not dollars and cents, not numbers, customers put some one step away, we’re still dealing with humans. So the first thing to do in branding, and the step that makes or breaks your success is to pinpoint the population or the humans, that your business is geared towards the whole point of branding, as you’ll hear me say time and time again is to create an emotional connection between your audience and your business. In order to do that you need to know how to engage with them as human beings. You A brand is those hard to pin down feelings that separate powerhouses from mediocre businesses. Your brand is the holistic reputation of your business. Marketing is the vehicle that delivers customer facing messages via different channels as guided by your branding strategy. Your product or service is the tangible item your customers by your website is part of your marketing strategy. And your logo is how your customers connect with you visually, your name is simply that it’s just your name. brand strategy is the goal a business sets itself for how they want people to feel about them. It should also include the plan of attack, or the roadmap that will be followed to achieve those objectives of connecting with your target audiences on an emotional level. A well defined and executed brand strategy affects all aspects of a business and is directly connected to a business’s simple truth, consumer needs emotions and competitive environments. So if we go back to the Duke of Brunswick as our example for today, our brand is really simple. We want people to feel like they’re part of our family. We want them to feel like they’re embraced and therefore that the outside world doesn’t matter here and they’re stepping into their home. And so all of the interactions that we have fall back on that in some way.
We then need to look at how we establish our why. So if your audience is the who of your brand, your mission statement is the why. Why did you start your business which values drive you and your teams and how does your product or service add value to the lives of your tribe or your humans. By understanding exactly what your brand stands for, you can convey that message to your audience in ways that truly connect across the platforms that the audience or your humans want to connect with you on. In a world where people are constantly looking for connections with their favorite brands. It’s crucial for businesses to give their customers something they can relate to, that goes beyond a beautiful logo or an impressive website. While the external elements of your brand like your voice and even your name can help you to establish awareness and affinity among your customers. It’s your brand values that deliver real engagement and direct you towards more powerful bonds with your human beings your target audience. For most businesses brand values act as the true north on their compass towards market success. Regardless of how you might get sidetracked on your journey to true brand affinity your core brand values will remain fixed and steady, they need to be communicated over and over again. Unfortunately, finding your own brand value definition can be a challenging experience. You’re not describing what you hope to achieve, or how and why you intend to reach your goals. Instead, your brand value proposition looks at the way your brand promises to act. For as long as you serve your chosen marketplace. That’s a promise you can’t afford to get wrong. Though your ideals will differ according to the goals, hopes and expectations of your company. Any brand value definition should be memorable. brand values don’t mean much if they’re not constantly represented by the things you do and say. It also needs to be unique. Your brand values definition should be a unique reflection of your culture and identity within your business. You can’t simply copy and paste something that works for another business or organization. It also needs to be actionable. Your brand value proposition is something that needs to guide how your business works. When defining what matters to your company, choose actionable language. For instance, don’t just say that you value integrity. Tell your customers that you work to do the right thing and describe how you do that. We also need to make sure that it’s meaningful. If you want your core brand values to resonate with your customers, they need to include things you’re willing to fight for and not willing to compromise on. We need to make sure it’s clear and defined. When choosing the principles on which to build your brand. Make sure that things you stand for are easy to understand, and we need to make sure that it will stand the test of time. While businesses and customers can change with time your brand values should remain consistent and strong. The only reason you should change your values is if you’re seeing some serious backlash from your existing code of ethics. From there, we need to have a think about whether or not we’re actually being ourselves. Okay, split personalities need not apply. When it comes to branding. It’s only going to confuse the humans that you’ve gone out of your way to connect with your brand mission and logo speak to an overall brand personality or the consistent human element of your brand. This is the part of your brand that creates those emotional connections with customers. So it’s important to understand who you are as a business as though you were a person this will resonate with your audience, because it creates a cohesive tone of voice as your audience will come to rely on your brand to deliver a specific type of behavior, whether it’s quippy one liners or motivating posts, you want to make sure your personality is consistent. So creating an avatar of sorts is the best way to get it right. Where your brand identity includes the complete perception. Others have view of your brand. Your brand personality is an important aspect that helps you to cultivate that perception. The easiest way to conceive of your brand personality is by picturing a real life person representing your brand or business. What does he or she look like sound like? How does the spokesperson communicate with others? Are they clever and witty, serious and professional. You may have touched on these questions before but now is the time to really flesh it out. Once the image of your brand’s personality is clear, write it down to be effective, your brand personality needs to be consistent, giving off the same tone and message across all forms of marketing and communication. So to keep it simple, in the Duke of Brunswick, our brand personality or our famous person, and we always choose a famous person, because it’s easy then for everyone to understand where it’s going, is Hugh Jackman. He’s funny, he’s warm, he’s colorful, and he’s down to earth. And he’s by all accounts very welcoming and open. And that is congruent with our six words story about the outside world not mattering hear things falling away. So once you’ve selected your personality, and you’ve got clarity around that, then you can develop your brand message. For this step you need to consider the brand mission you outlined. How did it translate into the message you want your customers to take away from me? Like your brand’s overall personality. This message should repeatedly show up in all of your efforts and constantly be emphasized to your audience. Have in mind that anyone who comes in contact with your business should love it even those who aren’t buying, your brand needs a cohesive message and that message should come from your business’s core values and strategies. If you try to be too many things at once the message becomes scattered and the brand identity is diluted. It’s hard to be known for something when you fail to present a consistent message about what your business should be known for. Or worse. If your brand messaging contradicts itself, you’re gonna lose consumer trust and their business people don’t like to be lied to and consumers are naturally suspicious of businesses as a general rule. After all businesses want their money contradicting messages serves as proof that your business is not to be trusted, inconsistent message is also a sign of an unhealthy brand and a weak brand identity. So you need to take a really hard look at this within your business. We also want to make sure that we’re not being a wallflower on social networks, so we need to inject strong personality into all of our channels. Having that strong presence on social media is one of the most cost effective ways that you have at your disposal to help spread awareness about your product, and reinforce your brand personality. Allocating budget to sink into advertising will mean you can also use your social channels to run paid campaigns to get more exposure for your business. And then lastly, but definitely one of the most important elements you need to align your customer service efforts with your brand customer service is an element of branding that’s often ignored but shouldn’t be your brand values should be alive and easily spotted in your communications with your customers, whether through your voice tone, images, etc. to paint a cohesive picture of what your business stands for. Keep in mind that with customer service, your reputation is at stake, the way you talk to your customers will almost certainly influence their perception surrounding your business, especially when they have a bad experience. It’s incredibly important when building a brand to make sure that whatever persona you’re crafting aligns with what customers are actually going to experience when they interact with your business. And then finally, we want to make sure that we’re wearing a tailored suit and not slipping into a hand me down one. So even though it might seem that after you’ve done all these things you’ve finished building your brand and your branding is consistent. It’s a constant process that can change with time as you become more in sync with your customers desires and needs. That said, you’ll want to be confident that the foundation that you’ve laid for your business and personal brand is strong and cohesive and you can always make changes later. To make the most out of things. There are other important branding terms you should understand like brand assets, brand associations awareness, positioning and promise values and voice which we’re going to go through shortly. We’re now going to take a short 10 minute break. When we return we’ll cover off on what you need to do to take action in relation to the key elements that we’ve covered off in these topics to help you make the most of your new year that’s coming up.
So what do you need to do today we start off first up you need to review your process maps when it comes to sales and marketing and your customer touch points. As a brand you have influence over each interaction a customer has with your business. Consider every possible situation that could bring your customer into contact with your Brand and design a scenario to deliver a positive experience. This is the time to use touch point mapping touchpoint mapping is important because it allows your brand to visualize and improve every experience a customer has with your business. Because no customer buyers journey is exactly the same, each brand is going to have multiple map variations. To create your maps, what you need to do is consider all of the possible ways people experience your brand, and what their journey is to discover it. So again, one of the things that makes the Duke of Brunswick stand out is that we have 100% gluten free kitchen. So one of our key target markets, or our most important humans, are people diagnosed with celiac disease. And they go through a really interesting journey from point of diagnosis because all of a sudden, they can’t eat any of their favorite foods, and it can become massively overwhelming. So in doing our touchpoint mapping, we got to recognize that one of the most important relationships that we could start building was with dieticians, nutritionists and doctors who are part of this diagnosis process. Because if they know that we exist and what our purpose for being is, which is to provide a safe environment, then that starts the journey with our customers right from the beginning where the outside world doesn’t matter, and that they can just be normal human beings. So once you’ve mapped out all of your touch points, okay and reviewed your process maps when it comes to sales and marketing, then you need to evaluate and document how the customer uses your product or service in terms of the actual behavior. So customer experience encompasses every aspect of our company or businesses offering the quality of customer care of course, but also advertising, packaging, product and service features, ease of use and reliability. Yet few of the people responsible for those things have given any kind of sustained thought to how they set how their separate decisions shape the customer experience. To the extent that they do think about it, they all have different ideas of what customer experience means. Because a great many customer experiences aren’t the direct consequence of the brand’s messages or the company’s actual offerings, a company’s reexamination of its initiatives and choices will not suffice the customers themselves that is the full range and unvarnished reality of their prior experiences. And then the expectations warm or harsh, those have conjured up, need to be monitored and probed. So you need to start having conversations with your customers. This is a great time to pay really good attention to your CSAT or customer satisfaction surveys and also to your Net Promoter Score surveys. So as a stage three business, you really want to be making sure that you are routinely surveying your customer satisfaction levels, but also posing the Net Promoter Score question. So one of the things that you want to get into the habit of doing is just sending that out as a quarterly survey and seeing what your net promoter score looks like. So there are some companies and businesses in the world that sit on a negative net promoter score and others that sit on a really healthy one. Our net promoter score at the Duke of Brunswick is 92, which is actually massively high. So that means that we have way more promoters than we do detractors and neutral people. So people have heavily invested in our brand and our story because we have delivered a customer experience that works. So start documenting and looking at how your customers use your product or your service. From there, we need to take a look at from the customer’s receipt of your product or service, who is the last person in your organization to touch it? And what do they do? Are we creating new friends? Or are we creating brand detractors with the experience of going on a journey within our organization. So this is where follow up becomes really important. Follow up entails everything that takes place after the sale is closed from getting signatures on all the contracts and paperwork to scheduling delivery. It also includes your ongoing relationship with your customer relationship is the key word here. If you were involved in transactional selling only focused on making a short term sale, you would not be worried about follow up because someone else in your company would take care of you and move on to the next customer. In many retail selling environments. This may be the case, you would not expect to receive a thank you note from the checker at the grocery store or the cashier at a fast food restaurant. However, you would expect to hear from a real estate agent who sold you a new home or from a financial services consultant who’s managing your money. It’s the attention to detail to be sure that your transaction goes smoothly that you rely on your sales teams to do well. The specific follow up activities are going to vary from business to business and even from customer to customer. Successful companies have a checklist or best practices that are used as guidelines adds to ensure that all details are covered. In the case of complex sales follow up may include a transition team with members from both the business and the customer. The transition team may work closely together, including weekly or in some cases daily status calls to ensure that the transition to a new product or service goes smoothly. So for example, if it’s the implementation of a new logistics system or software programs, it may require the old system runs parallel with the new system until all aspects are completely set up and appropriate training is conducted. This is especially true for products and services like these that have a direct impact on the operation of the customer’s business. The relationship really begins with the close of the sale follow up is what makes a relationship grow and prosper. Follow up is how most customers evaluate the performance of the product or service they just bought. So not the sales process themselves. But the follow up at the other end, you need to continue this process until you have reached the salesperson who puts in the order how well do all of these people who have engaged with your potential customer during this process, understand your six word story, how well have they integrated it into how they do what they do? Not what they do, then you need to keep climbing the mountain document the steps from the sale to the first touchpoint with this customer. So we’re working backwards now understand what information was shared and health checking it against your six word story and your brand values. So again, this is where you’re going to pick up on where you’re falling down. You’ll also start to pay attention to and get clarity around who it is that doesn’t believe in your story at all. Or maybe they don’t even know what it is. And this can be one of the big challenges. Now starting with the first piece of marketing collateral map each touchpoint the customer had with your business what’s missing? Where did we miss a step or an opportunity or create false expectations around messaging? What did we under promise and was it a deliberate sales tactic because it’s going to cause you problems later on. From here we need to integrate all of the touchpoint maps and marketing collateral into a single road map. Build your credibility by creating a systematic follow up system so that your customer knows they can count on hearing from you regularly. You might touch base in person or by phone, email, text on social media, or a combination of all of these contact methods. The key is to communicate regularly in the manner or manners in which your customer prefers. It’s a good idea to get into the routine to get and give status updates from your customers. Then for each of your internal steps create a standard operating procedure and a position description. Training requires consistency. So we should not be training new employees based on our own idiosyncrasies. Many people don’t understand the value of SOPs. I think a lot of people see an SOP as simply a box that you check off to say that you’ve documented a process. They don’t understand that they can be used to audit the process to look at standards as training tools that ensure recruits are working in the correct way or even just to guarantee uniformity in the way that you conduct business. Although you may be asked to write SOPs, he likely won’t have detailed knowledge and experience with every process. So instead, consult the people who perform the processes every day. documentation that you can use as foundation material may already exist, but frontline teams are usually your best sources of content. When you include your staff, you also empower them by helping them contribute to the processes and documentation used by the entire organization. In addition, as a manager or an owner, you need to think twice about tasking external consultants to write this stuff up. Because internal SOPs written by colleagues garner more respect than instructions written by outsiders. So for each external touch point, ensure it’s incorporated in corresponding SOPs and included in position descriptions. Then plan to spend time putting the lessons learned and the aha moments into practice. Remember to act nothing changes if you don’t set aside time to make it happen. So once you’ve worked out what you need to do, start putting timelines and deliverables on your action plan. Get clear on what you want your customers to feel, what actions you want them to take, what pain points you’re here to solve, and what is the story that you’re writing with them. So start taking a collaborative approach to your brand story with your customers get them really involved. We’re now going to take a short two minute break and when we return, we’re going to bring it all together and look at why any of the things we’ve covered so far matter and what the direct impact can be to your bottom line.
Okay, so we have covered as usual, an epic amount of content and need to tie it all together. So let’s take a look at your key actions for this week. If we go back remember the questions we need to be able to answer what are our customers moments of truth for marketing and sales. So Let us use an example. If we again go back to the Jacob Brunswick Kritische, we’ve been looking at it today. So focusing on the interactions that are important to our customers and on the way frontline employees handle those interactions. Let’s take a look at one customer segment type people diagnosed with celiac disease. So what is their challenge? When we have a look at it, people diagnosed with celiac disease can’t go anywhere or eat anything without being concerned that they’re going to get glutened. That’s the challenge or the problem that we solve for them. Their usual service experience in other venues not at the Duke of Brunswick is one of irritation. So they will go they will ask if something is gluten free people roll their eyes at them, or they will make them promises that it’s gluten free only to find that it’s at risk of cross contamination. They’re deemed to be an inconvenience, there are a small amount of choices for them available on the menu, as opposed to the moments of truth when they walk into the Duke of Brunswick Hotel. So if we go back to our six word story, that the outside world doesn’t matter here, the second paragraph to that story or an addendum to it is that who you are is absolutely okay, that we’re happy to have you come into our world where every human being matters. So their service experience is diversely different. In fact, often we will make the point of asking as we seek people at the table, does anyone have any allergies or dietary requirements out side of being diagnosed as a celiac, if you’re a celiac, you can eat absolutely anything off the menu. But if you have other allergies, we’re more than happy to accommodate. So again, it’s a change and a shift in perception. We embrace the difficult customer or the perceived difficult customer outside of our organization to us, they’re just family. And you’ll do anything for family regardless of what’s required. So making sure that you can give those customers that experience is great. But we also need to make sure that every member of the team has bought into that story because it only takes one person to break that service experience one person to give them a negative experiences all that it’s going to do to undo all of that fantastic storytelling. So when we over communicate that vision again and again and again, how do we identify where we’ve been telling tales instead of engaging stories? And what is that risk of our customers forming an adverse opinion? Again, if we use the pub as an example, we were missing a few key aspects. Okay, so annual staff training and team building day, we sat down and we reframed it all for the team based on Patrick Lencioni is Five Dysfunctions of a Team fantastic author. And by all means, if you haven’t read five dysfunctions of a team and you’re in a stage three business, you really need to get a hold of the book. But basically, it talks about, you know, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, you know, you start very much with an absence of trust. So we don’t have trust in the process, we don’t have trust in the leadership. And we don’t trust that we can be vulnerable and honest. And then when you have fear of conflict, which is really just code for incapacity to have robust discussions, honest discussions, okay, and a lack of commitment to the goals. And then we move into avoidance of accountability. So the golden rule, and one of the things that we really foster at the Duke of Brunswick is that we are all empowered to hold each other accountable, not accountable to a sales goal, not accountable to, you know, X, Y, and Zed, but accountable to this six word story. So if this is our rudder, if this is the one thing that we use to make sure that all of our narratives are correct, then absolutely, we need to be able to hold each other accountable when we slip up, because we’re all human beings. And we do something or we say something that detracts from that story. So this is the language that I use with the team all the time. Are you adding to the story? Are you writing another sentence, another paragraph or another chapter to our story with our customers? Or are you removing things that have already been written? So that becomes really important, and from there, we have that shared common goal. That’s how one goal is that every customer that encounters is every time that that’s their experience? So have we mapped out our marketing and sales processes with that six word story in mind? You need to look at this every step of the way. Every engagement with our customers is either contributing to or detracting from his story, and the story is our compass and I’m belaboring that, but you know, if you look at any of the Duke of Brunswick marketing collateral, whether it’s our website, whether it’s our social media channels, whether it’s the text messages we send, or the email marketing that we send, or when the team answers the phone, it’s always with that in mind, and we’ve mapped all those touch points, we’ve identified exactly where those things go wrong. And what we need to be aware something as simple as whenever any of the team answer the phone, they always say, Hi, welcome to the Duke of Brunswick This is and then they say their name. So this is Lars speaking this is Aiden, speaking how can I help? Okay, so it doesn’t seem like a big thing. But even something as simple as the way that you answer the phone or that your team’s answer the phone is going to have a direct impact on that story that you’re telling and a brand perception. So all of the little things contribute to the big things. And we really need to break that down and have a look at it. And then make sure that it’s integrated into our standard operating procedures. So do our standard operating procedures and our marketing and sales maps marry up with our story and our values? Or are we doing just what I said, which is faking it until we break it, you’ve all walked into a business where you had a fantastic brand perception of them based on their social media or their website, or you’ve done a little bit of googling or one of your friends or family had said that they were fantastic, or they really loved the product or service, and you walk in the door, and somebody breaks it for you. We’ve all had that experience, it might be that we walked into a retail store or a restaurant that came highly recommended or whatever it is, but you know how you feel when you experience that. So have a think about what the direct impact is to your customers, because it’s the same. So mapping out our standard operating procedures means that the team doesn’t have to think about the basics. Okay, if all of the one percenters are covered, and people are well trained in them, and it’s well role modeled for them, then what you’re going to end up with is a team that is empowered to contribute to the story. Okay, that means that you can give them license to make decisions within the business and within every customer interaction, to ensure that you they are helping you to build your brand story instead of taking away from it. Again, if you don’t have those SOPs around this, and more importantly, if your brand isn’t integrated into every layer of the SOP, you’re in trouble. Okay, so how do you measure up go away and test against the basics we covered off on today. And lastly, a final word on leading from the front. In the same way that as parents, we can’t teach children to control their emotions just by telling them to do so. Training programs can’t teach adults to behave more appropriately. kids watch their parents, your team’s watch their leaders and adopt what seems to work and what they perceive to be acceptable to the business or to the organization. So it stands that role modeling succeeds only if the role models authentically exhibit the sort of emotions such as empathy and self confidence that they should be passing on to others. Unfortunately, many frontline efforts fail because leaders left to their own devices tend to do what they feel most comfortable doing. For example, it’s not uncommon to see leaders in the finance industry, many who were previously high performing salespeople continuing to sell instead of showing their direct reports how to sell. Yet I know other businesses that perform 20% more effectively than their counterparts with similar sized teams and infrastructure. Largely because the leaders of the high performing ones motivate and coach their people. Raising the skill and the will of your leaders involves the same degree of self discovery that the frontline staff should experience. The difference is that leaders focus less on the emotions needed to serve customers than on the emotions required to help frontline staff perform well. The critical skills include identifying opportunities to improve the customer experience and the business’s performance, coaching and having tough conversations with team members and facilitating frontline in situ training. Remember, emotional intelligence may be largely innate, yet businesses can take concrete steps to improve the EQ of their frontline teams. Doing so can pay off in improved interactions and more profitable relationships with customers. And integrating these efforts along with communicating your six word story within every level of your business ensures a customer centric organization that is connected to its tribe, your customers, it’s also a fluid state culture is easy to break and paying lip service to it will have the expected result, a customer disconnect between expectations and what’s delivered. Surely, you might have completely nailed all this when you were a startup business. But now you have grown and you rely on other people, the story needs to make sense to them and to your customers making the purchasing decisions. At stage three, we are learning how to cement our customer and referral relationships through messaging, sales, collateral, and most importantly, our people. We’re in the process of leveling up and that means fixing our gaps refining what’s there and playing the long game in terms of our marketing. Next week’s show, the feedback loop for consistent improvement user friendly and results driven How is our product or service offering working for our customers now that they are part of the family and how do we assess that and maintain our relationships and brand positioning
Chris Irving 40:03
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