Whatever you sell them on is what you will keep them with.
If you have convinced your customers to do business with you because you are more clever than everyone else, then the moment you seem to be less clever is the moment they leave you.
Same for your fees, your quality control, your service model, or your performance.
Same for dating!
The only way to get past this is to take your prize qualities—your beloved cleverness or passion or above-average service model—behind the shed and shoot them, and then come back and honestly, humbly, get to work.
They will know what they want; you don’t have to hold up a billboard.
What happens is, subconsciously, something happens when you highlight “standout” attributes. Whatever you hold up as the standard of your identity and business model changes the entire conversation, so that instead of evaluating you by your holistic product or service, your customers will value you based on that prize quality.
If you drop your fees to earn the business, that entire relationship will be about fees and you will likely end up losing them to a competitor who has lower fees—regardless of how great you did.
If you position yourself as more intelligent and competent than the next guy, you will lose them to the new guy who has more letters behind his name, trendier glasses, and sizzle.
If you get people to like you by buying things for them, you can never quit.
Whatever you sell them on is what you will eventually loose them on.
This gets to the core of what it means to be human. If we try to be more than we are, it will inevitably come back to bite us; if we try to earn business that wasn’t meant to be ours in the first place, we will lose it.
They either buy into who we are, or they don’t.
Which is why the only way to do great business is to be whole, centered, balanced, and honest. You present an array of values to potential customers, open yourself up to them, and if they choose you, they should be choosing you based on qualities that cannot be manipulated or undercut.
Transparency, honesty, integrity, and trust.
Sure you need to be competent, likable, and fairly priced, but none of that matters on its own; each is one part of the big picture of the business of your life.
The business culture in America is obsessed with making yourself “standout”, as if we were all fighting for the same three clients.
As a matter of fact, there are classes you can take, teaching you how to be memorable. Most focus on how to tell your story, how to present yourself to make maximum impression.
Sales conferences are dominated by this stuff.
But at the end of the day, what it takes to be truly successful is simply what it takes to be human: a courageous acceptance of who you are and a tenacious commitment to pursuing excellence, for the benefit of others.
And if you place others first in the line of priorities, and do it long enough, there won’t be a need for sales conferences.
Unless you want a laugh every now and then. They’re great for that.
It’s taped across my desk, visible whenever I go to speak, write, work, or think: Whatever you sell them on is what you will keep them with.