by Shep Hyken
The fifth and final P is for promotion. This factor has to do with advertising, public relations, special rewards programs for repeat Ace customers, and couponing initiatives. Whether it takes place at the national level or in the local neighborhood, promotion makes a big difference in the marketplace. Ace uses promotion to meet the brand promise of helpful.
Now, if you’re an Ace store owner, manager, or associate, you can look at that list and instantly know what the most important areas are for you to focus on if you want your store to survive and thrive.
Your business needs to define what your “Five Ps” are. Of course, they don’t have to start with the letter P. They don’t all need to start with the same letter. You don’t have to have five. It could be just one, or it could be ten. The key is that they are well-thought-out enough to show you where your strengths are. This can’t be what you aspire to be. This list has to be about what and who you are.
Notice that Ace’s very first P is people. People is how Ace delivers on the helpful brand promise. No matter how great their product, pricing, place, and promotion are, if the people are there to support these four other Ps and they don’t deliver on their brand promise, none of the other Ps matter. Is that one of your strengths? It should be.
Know what you’re good at. Be clear about it. And, make sure everyone in your organization, from the most senior executive to the most recent hire, knows and understands your strengths.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Everyone in your organization should know, and be able to discuss, the key factors for success in your marketplace.
Your list of business success factors should be comprehensive, concise, and easy for people at all levels to understand.
No matter how good your list of success factors is, if your people don’t deliver on your brand promise, none of it matters.
THE DRILL
What would you say are the five most important reasons a customer would want to do business with you? Which of these factors is the most important?
YOU CAN’T BE GOOD AT EVERYTHING
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Your company can’t possibly be excellent at everything it does. And it shouldn’t try.
THAT’S THE REFRESHING, realistic message of Dr. Frances Frei, author (with Anne Morriss) of Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). She argues that to be best in class at something you have to be willing to be worst in class at something else.
This idea is refreshing because, for years, too many of us have gotten caught up in the seductive idea of “achieving excellence” throughout the enterprise, as though excellence were something that we could somehow deliver in every single aspect of our business, for every single customer, internal and external, every single time. Whatever it takes, we tell ourselves, we are committed to achieving excellence in literally everything we do. Is that really the right commitment? Can we really be best at everything? Probably not. But we can be the best at what we choose to be known for.
This also means that not all potential customers should be your customers. But the ones that are your customers should be amazed, every single time. That is the customer group to focus on. For those customers, we can be best at what they want and expect. But we can’t be best at everything, for everyone, all the time.
Ace is the perfect example of a company that has put this vitally important strategy into action. There are certain areas where Ace has made the strategic decision to be broadly competitive with its big-box store competitors, but they don’t to try to beat them at their own game. For example, Ace recognizes that they can be competitive on things like price and inventory, but downright excellent at helpful. What’s more, Ace may be recognized as a leader in the general area of “home improvement,” but where they really excel is in the areas of maintenance and repair. They own that part of the industry. Ace makes the smaller maintenance and repair projects especially easy for you. How do they do that? By focusing like a laser beam on things like convenience, store design, maintaining an inventory of hard-to-find items, and amazing helpful service and expertise.
If you’re looking for someone whose expertise will get you across the finish line with your home maintenance or repair project, someone who will help you cross that item off your to-do list, someone who will find a local or hard-to-find item, someone who will give you amazingly helpful service and make you feel absolutely certain that you got more than your money’s worth in the process, Ace is the place.
It happened over and over again while I was interviewing Ace people for this book: They told me that the customer who cares about price and nothing else is not at the center of their business plan. That’s not their game. While they are competitively or fairly priced, Ace chooses to win on helpful. That’s a strategic decision.
So, what are you trying to win on? It’s fine to have an aggressive goal, but the reality is that some unrealistic goals that are all about “excellence in everything” can hurt your organization.
As Ace’s CEO John Venhuizen told me, “We remind ourselves every day that it is better to differentiate ourselves on something we are already good at—which is helping people figure out how best to complete a home improvement or maintenance project—than it is to try to be better at something that the competition is already good at.”
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Dr. Frances Frei says that to be best in class at one thing, you have to be willing to be worst in class at something else.
You can’t be best at everything. Don’t even try. But do be best at something specific that your customer wants.
Identify areas that you can excel at and exploit them. Identify areas that you are not going to excel at and embrace them.
Figure out how to be better at something that the competition is not already good at.
THE DRILL
What does your company do best? What gives—or could give—your company a competitive advantage?
Is there something your company might not be great at but you make up for with excellence in another area?
PLAY TO YOUR STRENGTHS
The best get better by working on their strengths, not on their weaknesses.
WHILE I WAS TALKING TO DAVID ZIEGLER, the current Chairman of the Board of Ace Hardware and owner of several Ace hardware stores, about what traits made for effective leadership at Ace (and elsewhere), he mentioned the importance of developing a personal growth strategy. Just as a company must focus on its strengths, at the same time choosing what not to focus on, an individual executive needs to decide what he or she will take on as a personal priority and what will be delegated to someone else.
Ace owners have to wear many hats: merchant, accountant, human resource manager, salesperson, etc. The best owners play to their strengths and fill the gaps by hiring people with the right attributes to create a successful business. This ties into the previous tool, You Can’t Be Good at Everything. The things you decide to hold on to should relate directly to something that you know you do very well. The things you should, as Mr. Ziegler puts it, “fire yourself from” are those areas in which you are unlikely to develop core strengths.
This is a great reminder that each of us, as an individual, faces an important question. As time passes, are we going to spend more and more of our careers focusing on what we’re really good at? Or are we going to spend less time deploying our core strengths, in a misguided attempt to become good at everything? Ace urges its people to choose the first option, and I do too.
If you think that this approach applies only to members of the executive team, you’d be wrong. It shows up throughout the organization. It’s true that when you start in at the entry level with Ace (or any other employer, for that matter), you have to be ready to do whatever you’re asked to do. But after just a little time on the job, what you’re going to find is that you have a strong aptitude and interest for certain parts of the business, and less aptitude and interest in other parts.
/> Like a lot of customer-and employee-centric companies, Ace believes that an associate has the responsibility to share with his or her manager where the passion is, where the energy is, and where the motivation is. It’s nice if the manager is able to figure this out independently, but it’s even better if the associate makes a point of sitting down at some point with his or her manager and saying something like this: “Hey, I have an associate degree in horticulture, and I love landscaping. I’ve been thinking that it might make more sense for me to spend some time over in the Lawn and Garden department, where I can really help out, rather than to stay where I am in Hardware. What do you think?”
Marcus Buckingham makes a very strong case for playing to your strengths in his mega-bestselling book Go Put Your Strengths to Work (Free Press, 2007). Conventional wisdom says to work hard and train to overcome your personal weaknesses. However, a study of 80,000 managers in more than 400 companies found that the best managers believe that the opposite is true. You might be able to help a person get better in a deficient area, but if you try to help them get better at what they are already good at, you move them from being good toward being really good—and maybe even toward greatness.
The bottom line: Get better at what you already do well. Know and play to your strengths!
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Develop a personal growth strategy that plays to your strengths.
If you are a manager, decide what items on your to-do list do not play to your strengths and can be delegated to others.
Conventional wisdom says to work on your weaknesses. The best people know it’s better to work on improving your strengths.
If you’re a frontline employee, talk to your manager about supporting your company in ways that connect to your strengths.
THE DRILL
What is your greatest personal and professional strength?
What are you doing now (or plan to do) to develop that strength even more?
CHAPTER SEVEN
CULTURE
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“The culture is made—or destroyed—by its articulate voices.”
—AYN RAND
THE CULTURE DEFINES THE BUSINESS. And culture starts with you. Your job is to be an articulate voice.
Why focus time and attention on your company’s culture? Because most, if not all, companies that fail to amaze the customer have failed to amaze the employee. The two challenges are always linked together. In this chapter, you learn how to address that challenge, and why it is everyone’s job to do so.
The next thirteen Amazement Tools (#s 10–22) will help you create and sustain a culture that is customer-and employee-focused. It is up to you to do your part in setting the example and maintaining that culture. You have the power to create it and sustain that positive culture—or, if you choose not to manage it well, to erode it. Culture always starts on the inside, with you. And whatever the culture is on the inside of your organization, it is going to be felt on the outside by the customer.
Culture Tools
10. To Be the Best Place to Buy, Be the Best Place to Work
11. Don’t Take the Easy Way Out
12. The Awesome Responsibility
13. Defend the Culture
14. Shift Your Vocabulary
15. Adopt a Customer-First Mindset
16. Celebrate Uniqueness
17. Great Ideas Come from Everyone
18. Consistency
19. Tell the Story
20. Be a Committed Learner
21. Mentoring
22. Starting Over
TO BE THE BEST PLACE TO BUY, BE THE BEST PLACE TO WORK
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Treat your employees the way you want your customers to be treated—maybe even better!
I’VE BEEN SHARING THE SENTENCE you just read with audiences since at least the mid-1980s, and every time I say those words out loud, I always see lots of people in the audience nodding their heads in agreement. In fact, audience members often tell me that this one sentence is one of the most memorable and important parts of my program. It’s my customer service slant to the familiar Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” I call it the Employee Golden Rule. I have yet to meet a business leader who disagrees with this concept.
Yet the reality is that many companies whose leaders tell me that they agree wholeheartedly with what you just read do not treat their employees the way they want the customers treated. The end result is that their customers are potentially not treated as well as they could be.
So, why don’t they follow through on the Employee Golden Rule? The answer starts with the company’s culture.
First and foremost, the company must get into alignment (which I discussed in chapter four, “Operationalizing Helpful”). Leadership must determine the direction in which they want to lead the culture. If the goal is a truly customer-focused culture, then it must start at the top, with a mission and vision that are not only created but also implemented throughout the entire company. And, the vision and the mission must be crystal clear. They are what I referred to earlier in this book as the mantra, a simplistic one-sentence—or shorter—version of the mission and vision of the company. By now you know Ace’s mantra is one word: Helpful.
Until the company and every employee has a mantra to live by, and leadership sets the example of how to live and defend that mantra, the internal culture may be out of alignment.
Without a mantra, without a cultural touch point, without a point on the compass that everyone can use as a guide, without at least one role model who walks the walk for the rest of the enterprise, there can be no customer-first culture. If there is no shared, perpetually reinforced understanding of “how we do things here,” no real-world standard that actually rewards treating both internal and external customers well, it’s all just talk.
In fact, just talking about it in this culture hurts your organization. You have to connect the words to the actions. Once you have a mantra—such as “helpful”—someone must model it until it becomes part of the company’s DNA, as experienced by the employees.
That’s the only way you can possibly amaze your customers every time—by amazing your employees first, so that they treat each other the way they want the customer treated. When it comes to amazing customer service, it starts on the inside and works its way out, and everyone in the company has to step up and become a leader in that effort.
Amazing from the inside out means not saying one thing and doing something else. It means being genuine, and making sure that what people see and hear from you is what they actually get from you. So at Ace, associates experience helpful before they are expected to generate helpful.
What does that mean in practice? It means you build your community from the inside out, which means you start with the employees.
Matt Dowdell, an Ace owner from Montana, told me that his personal mission is to be the best employer within a 10-mile radius of his store. He wants people to line up to not just work in his store, but to have a career in his store. That mission affects his hiring judgments, his compensation plan, his training routine, and of course, his interactions with his associates on a day-to-day basis. (By the way, he also wanted to be the best charitable contributor to the community within a 10-mile radius, and of course, the most recommended hardware store within a 10-mile radius.) That’s building helpful from the inside out!
This approach is what I have referred to as employee centricity. If the concept of customer centricity is a focus of all activities supporting and benefiting the customer, then employee centricity is where it starts.
Until we have a mantra that everyone agrees on internally, we don’t really have an employee-centric enterprise. And until we achieve that, we really can’t have a customer-centric enterprise. That’s because the internal customer experience determines the external customer experience. Telling people how to treat customers is one thing. Showing how you want them treated, by modeling the behavior with them that you want e
mployees to display toward the customer, is completely different.
As Mark Schulein, one of the Ace retailers told me, “We focus on engaging with our own people first, knowing what they’re going through at home, finding out what’s going on in their lives, learning what we can do to support them, because that’s exactly what we want them to do for the customer once the customer walks through the door. We believe that in order to be the best place to shop you have to be the best place to work first.”
Remember: Whatever gets rewarded and reinforced becomes part of the company’s culture—and whatever doesn’t get rewarded and reinforced affects the culture too.
YOUR AMAZEMENT TOOLBOX
Treat employees the way you want the customer treated, maybe even better.
The only way you can possibly amaze your customers every time is by amazing your employees first.
Talking about the Employee Golden Rule is not enough. You, as a leader, must model it daily.
A mantra is a simplistic one-sentence, or shorter, version of the mission and vision of the company.
Every employee must buy into and live by the mantra, and it starts with leadership setting the example of how to do so.
The internal customer experience determines the external customer experience.