by Noah Fleming
Watch Your Language
“Do you want fries with that?” The classic line that many of us heard many (too many times to admit!) before. This is part of the McDonald’s script that dramatically increased the fast-food chain’s business. My mentor and business coach, Dr. Alan Weiss, often says, “Language is everything. Language controls the discussion. The discussion controls the relationship. Relations controls the sale.” He explains that language is one of the most important yet often overlooked aspects of running a business.
At the time of writing this section, I was at the Detroit Airport preparing to visit a client. Arriving a couple hours early, I had time to have lunch so I decided to visit a new P.F. Chang restaurant. P.F. Chang is a chain, and I’ve eaten at many of them before, but on this particular visit, at this particular location, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before and that was the incredible use of language and scripting. Every customer that sat down at the bar, the server said the same thing, “Hey, how’s it going? I’m Janice; what’s your name?” I responded and told her my name and then every time she came back, she addressed me by name. This might seem like a small thing, but I watched as nearly half a dozen customers immediately introduced themselves. Maybe it was just Janice doing this herself, but then I watched another server introduce herself in a similar fashion. It’s part of their script, and it matters as part of the customer experience. It’s not identical corporate language that must be followed meticulously like robots, but the intent is there. Disney Vacation Club members are greeted with the language, “Welcome home!” And when we return to the Jasmine Porch at the Sanctuary Hotel on Kiawah Island for our yearly visit, they always say, “And welcome back, Mr. Fleming.” It’s part of the script, part of the language, and part of the customer experience. Language and intent in the customer experience is everything. If you have three people explaining the same thing in three different ways, eventually you’ll have nobody to explain it to.
Never mind the specifics, there’s immense importance in talking in the language and lingo of your customer base. Starbucks created a vocabulary that their clients embraced, and Tim Horton’s in Canada embraced the vocabulary their customers created for them. How well-versed are your employees to speak the language of your target market or in a language that resonates with your core customers?
I covered this in great detail in Evergreen, but language is incredibly important to the overall customer experience as it allows you speak to your customers in a way that resonates with them.
How about the personality of your organization? Are your front-facing people representative of the image you portray? Does the actual language used when speaking to your customers match the language used on your website, advertisements, or business communications?
One of the greatest compliments I received when writing my first book was from a well-known business book publication that said reading my book was a lot like sitting down and having a beer with me. I hope this book is the same, but you must write like you talk. And you must communicate with customers like you write.
Building Trust Through Language
In Stage Two, our goal is to cultivate trust and reduce both friction and resistance to allow the conversion process to happen without coercion. In that stage, language is everything. Just as it’s important to carefully shut up and listen at this stage, it’s also important to ask the right questions. Websites frequently have a section for FAQs (frequently asked questions), where the answers for the most frequently asked questions are laid out. Unfortunately, too many organizations don’t properly train their people with the right language to answer those questions in personal conversations. The key focus of those initial discussions is almost always focused on what the company can do for the prospect, when it should be the complete opposite. Those initial sales encounters in Stage Two should be all about the prospect. Keep your focus on the prospect and you’ll do fine. You don’t have to treat this as a battle to be had amongst your potential customers.
I’m reminded of a story I heard once about a disarming sales tactic used in the jewelry and automotive sales industry. The salesperson would always start the conversion with the language, “Before we get started, do you mind if I share....” The reason to share something “before we get started” is because this presumes there’s a stage before the typical persuasion song and dance, and the typical tactical persuasion efforts. The sales experts taught us that we were about to go into battle and therefore saying something “before we get started” allowed us to frame the discussion in a certain way. It’s just another tactic used to circumvent resistance, instead of removing it entirely. Alas, it’s still a neat little language technique that the old-school sales guys have up their sleeves.
Language is important throughout the entire customer experience, but especially important in Stage Two. Remember, prospective customers don’t need to be slid down the greased chute through various persuasion tactics and techniques. Instead, we need to remove resistance and language is one of the most important tools in our arsenal to do that. What is the real purpose of an FAQ? Done right, it’s to remove resistance and handle objections before they arise.
Your salespeople should be talking to customers regularly, hopefully more often than your service people, and your service people more often than your marketing people. However, I’m making an assumption that everyone is talking to customers on a regular basis. You should be starting to see how these exercises all build upon one another to create a memorable customer experience.
“Surprise, Surprise!” is a small training exercise that was developed when working with a billion-dollar manufacturing client. The goal was simple: to better understand the language prospects were using and the responses people were giving. This is not about having the perfect response to every objective, but to ensure consistency and congruency across the experience.
Here’s how it worked. This team would do a weekly call where each person would share the most surprising and interesting thing they heard from a customer or prospective client over the past week. Each person would share how they responded or if they responded at all. Sometimes there wasn’t that much interesting to share. Other times there were minor arguments over the right response. But more often than not, there were major “ah-ha” moments discovered and skeletons that not one sales rep had considered. There was also a glaring incongruence of typical responses to a question or concern. On more than one occasion, this has caused a problem by one person saying something to one prospect, another to a different prospect, and those prospects both eventually talking to each other.
Action Step: Surprise, Surprise!
1. Spend a few moments discussing each but of sharing, the prospect’s or client’s reaction to the response, and engage in a brief discussion on better ways the person might have responded.
2. Have someone collect and collate the notes.
3. If you continue to hear the same things popping up over and over again, incorporate these into the various stages of the loyalty loop. For example, a corporately shared script book could be updated and distributed regularly from sales to marketing. If there’s resistance in the sales process that can be addressed in your marketing or preemptive materials, then it makes sense to work that language into the corporate language. Your customer service staff might share things that are valuable and interesting to your sales team. If things are being promised that aren’t delivered in the third stage, then loyalty won’t ever exist. It’s impossible.
Test, Test, and Test Again!
One of the cardinal sins of all sales and marketing efforts is people don’t test new ways of doing things. Some of the greatest breakthroughs with clients have come from testing. I was working once with a manufacturing client with two co-owners. I had suggested we try something and the one owner thought the idea was fabulous. The other thought it was a ridiculous waste of our time. He didn’t even want to discuss it. He said they tried everything and what I was suggesting was sure to be a colossal fail
ure. I convinced them we should test the idea. Guess what happened? We doubled (yes, doubled) the profits of the company in one year. That’s pretty remarkable. The only thing I suggested was we test an idea. The cardinal rule of all sales and marketing is to continually test everything. When it comes to the four stages of the loyalty loop, there are plenty of things to be testing and constantly improving. Test your marketing efforts in Stage One. For example, run variations on your preemptive marketing. In Stage Two, test your sales efforts. For example, if you typically just respond to an RFQ as fast as possible, consider slowing down the process. If you usually send a sales rep to see the customer, test having them come to you. If you usually wait to talk to a new lead before sending them any materials, consider immediately FedEx-ing them a package of testimonials and case studies. Consider including any additional valuable information that creates your preeminent position in the customer’s mind as the one and only source for their needs.
If you usually e-mail your proposals to your clients, test the process by couriering hard copies to them. Try new things always. Test everything, and test often.
Want to try and introduce a Remarkable Moment in Stage Three? Don’t just spend a boatload of cash without understanding what sort of impact it has on the customer. Instead, test something new, radical, and off the wall to see what your customers are saying.
Want to implement a new follow-up process to take advantage of recency and frequency in Stage Four? Test following up at different intervals and gauge the reaction. Test the appropriate reason and appropriate time. Discover when is the single best time to ask for a review, referral, or another sale.
The point is this: Just as we can test the response to an advertisement, we should be testing our business procedures throughout the loop and constantly be looking for ways to improve the customer’s experience to make it more meaningful, memorable, and valuable.
Case Study
One of my clients, Eastwood Guitars, sells to an industry that for a long time has relied on one specific model. The manufacturer makes a guitar, and the music stores sell the guitars. Eastwood, however, is also unique because it sells direct to consumer. For a long time, the small independent music stores fought against the idea of selling directly to consumers, but the tides have changed. Now some of the biggest guitar brands in the world are selling directly to their consumers.
Eastwood had spent years working to nurture and develop its customer base through remarkable customer service after the guitar had been sold from a retailer. The majority of its efforts was focused on providing useful and valuable information to its fans after the sale and continuing to build the relationship with its audience. It wanted to try something new that defied industry norms. We looked at the business model and its customer’s buying behavior. Many people would buy multiple guitars from Eastwood. But sometimes a guitar would be made and it would flop. So we decided to change the model by employing a crowdfunding model within the industry. Borrowing from the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, we created EastwoodCustoms.com. This way, we could gauge demand for a product before making it. The site has been a smashing success. Popular bands like Devo have partnered with Eastwood to release custom models of whacky, unique instruments. One of the first major successes for the custom shop was the La Baye 2x4 DEVO, which looks exactly like it sounds, a big 2x4 block of wood turned into a guitar. Before the Eastwood Custom Shop, CEO Mike Robinson said he might have manufactured a few dozen of the guitars and then worked hard to sell them. The Eastwood Custom presold over 250 of them before they even went into production. Not only is Eastwood selling more guitars, but they’re being paid for before they’re made. This is exactly the type of thing I’m talking about. Always be improving the customer experience, and always be looking for ways to flip the experience on its head. You never know what you’ll learn.
Action Step: A/B Test Your Customer Experience
1) Make a list of all of your standard business operating procedures and brainstorm new ways of doing things. Test and try again.
2) Do the same with industry norms. Make a list of everything and anything that’s considered “the way things are done in our industry.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. Well, if you’re reading this you’ve likely heard the term disruption before. It’s a buzzword and I can’t stand it, but if you look at every disruptive business that has gone from unknown to become a ubiquitous and dominant force in their industry, the recipe for success is almost always the same. They’ve taken everything that’s an industry norm and flipped it on its head. Make a list of the top 10– things that are industry specific and brainstorm how you can do it differently.
Building Trust and Removing Resistance
There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about the changing consumer landscape. With these new changes, there have been numerous new approaches to selling introduced from consultative selling methods to challenging the prospect as a method to show your expertise. Many of these approaches are novel and on the right track, but the key to remember is that selling is no longer a method of tactics and persuasion. Instead, it’s a two-way conversation and part of the whole customer experience. If you think about Stages One and Two of the loyalty loop, at this time, our sole job from a conversion point of view is to continue to build on the anticipated experience to come, continue to build on the expectations, and priming the customer to experience your products and services the right way. My mentor and business coach, Dr. Alan Weiss, often says that the consulting business is a relationship business. He’s right, and in today’s changing consumer landscape so many different types of businesses across various industries have had to embrace the sale as an exercise in relationship building. But when you think about it, every business is a relationship business.
When it comes to influence and persuasion, most people think of the esteemed Dr. Robert Cialdini, and for good reason. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve had the pleasure of having dinner and spending a couple of days with Dr. Cialdini, and he is indeed brilliant. There’s no question his work has shaped the field. But there is a name that should be as recognized and as important, but is often overlooked by the same people who love Cialdini, and that’s Erik Knowles. Dr. Knowles is a professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas and the one of the world’s renowned experts on resistance and persuasion. Knowles, in my opinion, is best known for looking at persuasion in a new light. Knowles argues there are Alpha Persuasion strategies.4
These are traditional persuasion techniques that attempt to create action by doing a better job at explaining the features and benefits of something. But perhaps more compelling is what Knowles calls the Omega strategies. Omega strategies seek to identify the resistance people have to a particular offer and remove that resistance. Omega strategies are the key to unlocking the doors to an incredible second stage of the loyalty loop.
As with Cialdini, it’s important to remember that tactics cannot subsume strategy in this area. But an understanding of the work of both Cialdini and Knowles make it easy to identify jagged edges in a sales process, and make it easy to find ways to make the selling experience more natural, more comfortable, and more conducive for generating future business. To understand better, let’s understand the feeling and emotions going through the customer’s mind at this stage by looking closer at the work of Eric Knowles.
Removing Customer Resistance
Knowles’ basic premise is simple. There are two types of persuasion. The first seeks to increase your desire for something by using the tactics of persuasion. Consider, for example, the laws of influence from Cialdini. One of those is the principle of scarcity—scarcity, meaning something is in limited supply, and you better hurry, or you might miss out. We discussed a few examples of these in the earlier discussion on the various cognitive biases companies use to get us to buy. “You’d better hurry! Only six spaces left!” “We’re almost sold out.” These are the Alpha strategies. The second type of persuasion, the Omega strategies,
seeks to reduce resistance to purchasing by allowing the customer to move seamlessly through the process.
What is resistance? It could take different forms, but at the root, it is about the opposition to an idea or a suggestion. This is a common problem when you are trying to get people to act in a particular way, whether that is to buy your goods or even change behavior for their good. Resistance is common when you are trying to change or influence behavior.
Milton Erickson was a famous psychotherapist who practiced in the latter half of the 20th century. He was known for his techniques to overcome or, better yet, circumvent the resistance his clients had to change. As psychotherapy was developing, he was a leading proponent of the idea that you don’t try to change people by giving them logical arguments and expecting them to follow your instructions just because you’re the therapist. Erickson realized that if you tackle people head-on, their defenses go up, and your chance to influence them goes down. He realized that you had to work with what the client gives you and find ways to get them to own the message rather than resist it. This requires subtle communication techniques, and Erickson was the master of them. He realized that any new narrative would have a much greater chance of success if it was consistent with the person’s already-existing views and stories.