by Noah Fleming
Here’s what we’ve learned thus far. What we now know is that our brains work insanely hard at breakneck speeds to try to create a mental picture or a memory from billions of bits of information wedged inside the jelly-like blob inside our skulls. Unfortunately, too many organizations are leaving the creation of those mental pictures up to chance. I’m going to show you a way to ensure you’re consistently creating the right memories. From the function of business, sales, marketing, support, and creating a great customer experience, this changes everything.
Kahneman says that we each experience approximately 20,000 moments each day and more than 500 million moments in a 70-year life. Obviously, we can’t remember all those moments in accurate detail or even a small percentage of them. No matter how many times we’re “wowed” by a company, we simply can’t remember them all. Even though our brains are equipped for “big data” and packed with one of the largest storage devices ever to exist, we simply cannot capture and retain everything that we experience. That’s not to say our brains aren’t capable of retaining massive gigabytes of data. Our brains store gargantuan amounts of information—even memories from many years ago, including our childhood.
We can often be reminded of a memory through something as distinct as a smell, or we can often recreate the sense of smell through our own thoughts. For example, I have a distinct memory of what my grandparents’ house smelled like as a child. I can remember spending many hours at their house in my childhood and the combination of my grandmother’s oil paints sprawled out in the kitchen where she worked on her latest masterpiece and the mixing of that smell with the scent of her latest sweets baking in the oven. I can conjure up the memory of that smell in a moment’s notice (they’re coming back to me as I write this) and you can recreate a similar smell too. It’s almost as if the smell is right there in front of your nose. You might have similar memories of the house you grew up in, or the chlorine from the pool where your dad took you every Saturday morning for swimming lessons, or the musty smell of Grandpa’s old Ford, or the locker room at the local hockey rink. It’s the same for the mental images we retain in our minds. I can remember even the smallest nooks and crannies of the house I grew up in, even though I haven’t lived in that house for over 25 years.
But within those flashes of memory, there are millions of moments we simply haven’t retained. And even though I can recreate a mental image of the inside of my childhood bedroom closet, where many hours were spent building forts and trying to avoid an imminent trip to the dentist, with what I feel is an exact certainty, the memories I have aren’t really “exact.”
My mind recreates the images to the best of its ability, piecing together as many of the stored moments as it can to create a memory; but as Elizabeth Loftus showed us, we create false memories too.
Let’s suppose you’re 35 years old at the time you’re reading this book. If not, it’s easy to do the math (take the number of days you’ve lived and multiply by 20,000). If you’re around 35 years old, then and we can assume you’ve already experienced close to 250 million moments in your lifetime! If that’s the case, then what has happened to most of them?
Unfortunately, most of them simply disappear. They’re gone into the ether of history. Sayonara.
When we think about “experience” in our lives (a wedding day, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one—all of which are massively emotional experiences), we still don’t remember every single detail about the experience. We only remember based on whatever was stored in our minds, and those key moments that our brain deemed important to put into safe storage. We simply can’t remember it all. Even then, the recall of memories is never entirely accurate. As we delve further into the book, you’ll learn how to use these concepts to build an even greater competitive advantage for your organization.
For now, it’s important to remember a few key things about Stage One. In this stage, we have the opportunity to introduce who we are as a company to a buyer and stoke the imagination enough that they’re willing to move to the second stage.
Action Step: Speed Is More Valuable Than Delight
1) As a prospect, visit your own website and take the action a customer would take. Perhaps they fill out a lead generation form for more information, or maybe you only have a contact form, perhaps you only have a phone number.
Whatever you have, test every form of contact as a customer and measure the response time.
If you get a voicemail, leave a voicemail and see how long it takes to get a return call.
If you get your company’s interactive voice response (IVR) system, measure how long it takes to get you on the phone.
If you send a contact form, measure how long it takes to get a response.
2) Track the results and discuss them with your team. See if you can improve prospective customer response times by 75 percent over the next 30 days.
3) Don’t settle for a less than 50 percent improvement over 30 days. Improve by at least 75 percent, and then doing it again. In 60 days you should be twice as fast.
Speed is more valuable than delight.
Rid the Skeletons From Your Closet
There’s a fantastic book in the world of sales that I’ve pillaged the following ideas from and used it to create incredible discussions with the sales and marketing teams of organizations, including some massive, billion-dollar companies. I like to give credit where credit is due: that book is called No Lie: Truth Is the Ultimate Sales Tool, by Barry Maher. It’s a brilliant and intriguing book that I highly recommend. One of the most fascinating takeaways from that book was that it implies that some of the most powerful marketing and sales efforts in the first and second stage of the loop happen by understanding your own shortcomings and deficiencies. Maher starts the book by explaining that every product, every service, has its potential negatives. He shares the following quote from George Bernard Shaw: “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you might as well make it dance.” Great salespeople aren’t afraid of those negatives. They don’t stumble over them, and they certainly don’t try to hide them. Great salespeople use potential negatives as selling points; they even brag about them.
To master the initial stages of the Customer Loyalty Loop, you need to fully understand your company’s own failings and shortcomings and make the skeletons dance. Nobody’s products or services are perfect. Even companies like Apple have products and services that are often plagued with problems. Maher says truth is the most powerful selling tool. The book explains that we must make our skeletons dance. When I’m working with a client on the early stages of the loop, we’re looking to discover the shortcomings and areas where we can be more honest about our products and services. Remember, Stage Two is all about removing and reducing existing friction and resistance. Maher says that truth and honesty create credibility and trust. Workshopping the Skeleton Protocol can be an incredibly powerful exercise for your team. Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Become your own most difficult prospect. Get your sales people together and get as honest as you can in relation to your products’ and services’ shortcomings. Just as FedEx did with the Hierarchy of Horrors, be brutally honest with yourself. Dig deep and spend time to understand the pain and discomfort through the eyes of your customer.
Step 2: Take all the negatives and spend time turning them into a positive. This doesn’t mean listing all the positive aspects of your products and services, but ask yourself what’s positive about the negative? For example, if there’s a negative that you’re the most expensive, then ask yourself why that is. What are all the positives for the customer in being most the expensive?
Maher gives examples like this:
Prospect: To be honest, you guys are more expensive than everyone else.
You: Of course we are! And do you know why that is? (Again, this presents a wonderful opportunity to reduce resistance and build your preemptive positioning with the prospect.)
For example, you might offer unparalleled service sta
ndards in your industry by guaranteeing someone at the client’s site within 24 hours. You might have promised new parts delivered same-day across the country in the case of a breakdown.
Another example might be that you have the slowest delivery times for your products. That’s likely a negative for many potential customers. But why is it a positive? Perhaps you have less breakage and fewer truck problems.
Maybe your software is old. In the eyes of a potential customer, that might be a negative. But why is it a positive? For example, maybe you can explain, “Which is exactly why our software is so stable: a well-tested, perfected, proven performer with thousands of satisfied customers and all the glitches and compatibility issues worked out.”
Maher’s point is that everyone else will try to use the tactical laws of persuasion to bypass that objection. But a better way, which we’ve discussed in great detail in the loyalty loop, is to earn the trust of that specific customer. This is a fantastic way to do it!
Maher’s book provided a full-length treatment on the Skeleton Protocol, which I’m only glossing over here. If you want to read about the thinking behind it in more depth, I recommend Maher’s work but here’s a simple workshop that I’ve done with dozens of clients to address this specific issue.
Action Step: The Skeleton Protocol Workshop
Break up in teams of five to eight and work on the following exercise.
Step 1: Tell the group that they’re now going to work together and role-play as your biggest competitor. Your goal is to displace yourselves.
Describe the actives, for example:
• How would we defeat us?
• How would we take our customers away?
• How would we say we’re better than them?
This has as much to do with understanding the competition as it does with understanding yourselves and the potential shortcomings in your customer’s experience.
Step 2: Discuss and debrief. Have everyone share how they would defeat you and the various shortcomings they notice. Have someone capture the most damaging admissions as to where you see gaps.
Step 3: Come back to reality and work as yourselves again. Work together and discuss all the negatives. Ask how you can turn each negative into a positive.
4. Stage Two: Conversion Not Coercion
Stage Two is all about the continuation of building immense trust with your prospects (which we’ve started in Stage One). In this stage, we take someone who has shown interest in your products or services and attempt to move them from prospect to customer. We don’t do this with manipulation and cult-like persuasion techniques—far from it. If you think about traditional sales, that process is more about ringing the bell every time someone closes a new deal, and less about doing what’s right for the customer to start building a long-term relationship. When you put “closing the sale” on a pedestal, you leave no room for nurturing the client, and that’s a fact. It’s also one of the most damaging beliefs that inhibit a company’s ability to maximize customer value and build actually profitable customer relationships. And the most harmful thing of all, your customers smell it a mile away. Think of it this way: Stage One is all about showing what makes your products, your services, and your experience remarkable, exciting, and different. Stage Two is about converting the prospect into a sale, but continuing to build on the expectations of what’s to come by delivering a remarkable and memorable buying—and interaction—experience each and every step of the way.
As I mentioned when introducing the loop, more often than not, customers can move through stages rapidly. The customer can move through both Stages One and Two so quickly that it seems like they didn’t really happen at all. Sometimes, we have a customer who is simply ready to buy. I’ve had people show up on my website and just purchase. I’ve had people call me and spend substantial amounts of money without even really needing to talk to me. Inadvertently, these early stages of the loop have still happened; they’re just not as overt as the other stages. After all, the customer heard about you somewhere. They got to your website somehow. They picked up the phone and called to place their order for some reason.
Here’s a good way to think about it: Imagine a guy entering a store who needs some flowers before a hot date. In the first stage, the prospect feels like he needs to get the gift, and he sees the store as he’s on his way to pick up his date. In the second stage (where we’re at now), the prospect has now entered the store and is ready to buy the flowers. In this stage, the prospect must be able to find the flowers he thinks are appropriate, both quickly and easily. They must be priced accordingly, and the service representative must be knowledgeable enough to answer any questions he might have about the various kinds of flowers on sale. In essence, we’re bridging the gap between the initial interest in buying from you, to the making of an actual purchase. In this case, Stages One, Two, and Three are happening incredibly fast, and that’s okay.
Sales as an area of business improvement has often been treated as the “song and dance routine” between the buyer and seller. Each partner goes through a series of steps, with each reacting to each other’s move, and their tactics are used to counter the effects of each other’s moves. For example, “Did the prospect raise objections?” Sales training often says things like, “If so, then respond by saying one of these five things.” It’s tactical and focused on the wrong outcome. More important, this approach does not remove the natural resistance the customer feels in the first place, which makes it almost impossible to keep a customer coming back again and again. We’ll talk about that shortly. Meanwhile, the customer is skeptical and dubious and can feel like he or she is being “pitched” or “sold.”
These traditional sales approaches have gotten companies to this point, but the world has changed, and we’re living in a customer-driven economy. It doesn’t need to be treated like a competitive song and dance anymore, and more important, it doesn’t work that well anymore, either. Moreover, as more and more is written about cognitive neuroscience and how the mind really works, consumers will become even more educated about the communication process. It might well reach a point when a sales associate says to a customer something like, “You’d better buy these because we’re selling out of them fast,” and the customer replies, “Please don’t use the fear of loss bias on me.” Or a salesperson says to a potential customer, “You may have read about our new product in the paper,” and the prospect says, “I know all about the availability bias, and it’s not going to work.” More valuable, and increasingly necessary, is to treat the customer’s movement through this stage as one of fluidity by removing friction and resistance, and setting up the customer for the latter stages. And this is an important part of the Customer Loyalty Loop as a whole. Fluidity is the key. Each stage is fluid. And the fluidity is okay, provided you understand what you might still need to do in the latter stages. Here’s what I mean: If a customer picks up the phone and very quickly buys, in some cases you haven’t had the chance to build trust, or to set expectations, or to do your early-stage marketing. But keep thinking fluidity. How fluid is the movement through your company’s process?
When you get a lead, how quickly are they moved through the sales process and asked to buy? Do you quickly rush them through and cut to the chase and try to close the sale, or do you take a more consultative selling approach? Do you slow down the process if needed?
Cementing Trust
Stage Two is all about cementing trust and influencing the action. If you think back to the initial stage, there’s already been a lot of trust building done in our early marketing efforts. We’re continuing to build on that now. That’s the fluidity of the loyalty loop in action. In this stage, you need to remove all aspects of friction and resistance in the sales process and move the prospect to action. This brings up an important point, and that’s the common disconnect between sales and marketing. The disconnect is that there really shouldn’t be one anymore, but there almost always is. Marketing departments are responsible for cre
ating the messaging that happens in Stage One, and in Stage Two you have an entirely different group of people looking to continue the relationship and trust-building process. Another way to think about it is like this: Marketing in Stage One gets people to raise their hands, and sales, in Stage Two, gets people to open their wallets and take some action. That action doesn’t have to be transactional. For example, nonprofits might work to get people to donate in Stage Two. A politician seeks a vote in Stage Two. These are all signs of action. There’s obviously an incredibly important connection between sales and marketing. If that’s the case, how can there ever be a disconnect between these two stages of the loyalty loop? It turns out there almost always is. One of the first things we need to do is remove those barriers and understand the fluidity and connectedness of the two stages. Creating the action in Stage Two is an incredibly important part of the customer’s experience that ties directly to Stage One, and equally to the latter stages.
When I talk about the entire customer experience and the whole customer experience, this is one of the most important and often overlooked areas of focus. If you think about the first time you pick up the phone and call a business, the experience doesn’t start once you pick up the phone or once you eventually get down to the store to make your purchase. The experience starts once you pick up the phone. Think about that for a minute. The experience starts when you pick up the phone, right then and there. Even then, we can argue the experience started earlier than that. At this point, the prospect has made a decision to pick up the phone and call this particular business and now your customer’s experience has started. The prospect has already entered your sales process whether they realize it or not—whether you know it or not. Think about all the elements related to the customer experience that are happening the moment the customer picks up the phone for the first time. Here are a few things that come to mind: