Promise of Value – Page 9 – Discipline makes Daring possible.

February 9, 2022

Packaging to serve

The great thing about your Promise of Value is that defining it can start with you. Your values, abilities and personality act as a kind of mirror, reflecting the kind of people you can best serve.

At some point though, you have to map what you can offer onto what those people actually want and need. You have to make it concrete, and describe it in terms that mean something to them, that make it easy for them to buy, rather than for you to sell.

That’s what I call Packaging your Promise, and I’m having to find new words for how to do it, because most common terms are seller-centric – ‘identifying a market’, ‘positioning your product’, ‘channels’ and ‘routes to market’ etc. That’s a problem, because you’re not selling – in fact you can’t ‘sell’, because as my good friend Barnaby Wynter puts it “Put simply, the buyer has taken control of the buying process”.

What you’re actually trying to do is help the people you serve to buy what’s best for them right now to deliver what’s good for them in the long-term.

And that changes everything.

February 7, 2022

Packaging a Promise

Your Promise of Value is a big thing. And unless you’re promising basics, like ‘enough to eat’ or ‘being able to stay warm in the cold’ or ‘staying alive’, it’s likely to be somewhat abstract – ‘be more confident’, ‘be more beautiful’, ‘be more healthy’, ‘be more happy’.

I may want to ‘be more confident’, but I can’t just buy ‘confidence’. There has to be something concrete I can buy or do that delivers confidence as a result – like a nose job, or a diet, or a new suit, or a private education.

Turning your Promise into something the people you serve can actually buy is Packaging, and the golden rule of Packaging is that it’s about them, not you.

That means you have to know the people you seek to serve really well. What are their motivations? What are the constraints on that motivation? How can you configure what you offer to overcome those constraints and unleash their motivation?

If the constraint is money, the answer might be small packets – that’s how Poundland works – goods are packaged to a price point, so quantities change, but not the price. Or it might be something that makes it cheaper for you to produce or transport, like a bag-in-box for wine or olive oil.

If the constraint is time, the answer might also be small packets, but it could be on-demand delivery, or a draw-down, or a subscription.

If the constraint is attention, the answer might be creating space for focus.

If the constraint is impetus, the answer might be a time limit.

The actual constraints your people are working under will vary, which might mean creating different packages for different groups of people. But be careful not to turn choice into a barrier.

Remember it’s about making it easy for them to buy, not for you to sell. And however you package it, it mustn’t fall short on your Promise.

December 6, 2021

Cultivating culture

Growing a culture is easy. You just leave an agar dish open to the air. The culture you get is a matter of what falls into your dish.

For a business, it’s the same. As soon as you add people to your business, you get a culture. As new people join, they pick up the norms, the narratives, and the identities of the people already there. The result of whatever’s fallen into your dish.

But with a framework that attracts the right things into your dish, that’s easy to grow on and around, it’s possible to grow a culture you’ve designed rather than one that happens by chance. Even if you’ve already got the wrong culture already in place.

What would your business culture look like if you designed it?

November 26, 2021

Stories we tell ourselves

If you knew the stories your family, friends, colleagues, employees and clients are telling themselves you’d be astonished.

The stories we tell ourselves aren’t true. They often don’t help. We keep them to ourselves, but they leak out in our actions, and so how others see us.

What’s the story your business tells itself? Does it help?

If not, share it with your team, and see how you can change it. Your customers and your profits will see the difference.

November 24, 2021

Transactions

Transactions are meant to be purely functional and impersonal. We don’t have to worry about how the person on the other side feels – or even whether they are a person. They don’t have to worry about us either. We both do our business and move on.

All very convenient, but not terribly satisfying.

We humans crave connection and recognition. We love to be seen by others, and we know that the only way to be seen is to see. We’re constantly trying to turn transactions into relationships, however brief (did you speak to the person who gave you your COVID-19 vaccine? I expect so), and especially around the things we value.

I’m happy to pay my car tax through a faceless, characterless portal and my council tax via direct debit, but I prefer to buy my groceries in person, having a chat at the checkout as I do. I buy my books online, from a small independent bookshop. We are both very aware that there are people on the other side of the transaction, and often go out of our way to remind ourselves of that.

Transactions are exchanges that take place between strangers. Or between people who want to treat each other as if they are strangers.

The danger is that by treating each other as strangers, we become strangers. Blind to the needs of others. Blind even to our own need to be valued as a human being. Sublimating that need into a desire for things, or even selling our data in return for a taste of it.

We can’t escape transactions. Our society is increasingly built around them. But as businesses, we can do our best to deliver the relationships our clients really want.

On top of the transaction, as a bonus.

As a gift.

November 15, 2021

Making

You may think a business is simply a matter of creating, manufacturing and selling products or services.

It’s also about creating people. We spend most of our lives at work. So the way we work together to make, sell and deliver those products and services has a significant impact on our capabilities, capacities and beliefs. Work changes us, forms us.

That means that a business is also about making society. Because although ‘society’ often feels like something that’s just ‘there’ outside of us, actually it’s made by us, in the way we work, in the way we live and play outside work, in the way we think about our relationships with others.

Now you know this, you can choose to consciously create, through your business, the kind of society you want to see. Starting with the little society of prospects, customers, suppliers and employees immediately around you.

That’s why for me, a business is not a machine for making money. It’s a system for making and keeping promises.

Because it’s the relationships between people that are really important, not the things we make.

November 10, 2021

Seeing straight

I’m lucky, my eyesight has always been good. Apart from one little thing. I don’t always see straight.

Sometimes, I reach for a book on the bookshelf, and come back with the one that was next to it. I’ve got used to this, so now I purposely reach for the book next to the one I really want. It works every time.

You don’t need dodgy eyes to take advantage of this simple technique. As John Kay writes in ‘Obliquity: why our goals are best achieved indirectly‘ aiming for something next to the thing we want is actually the best way to get the thing we want.

What do you really want for your business? What could you focus on that might actually deliver it?

November 8, 2021

A market of one

I’ve been known to wax lyrical (or just go on about) about how your Promise of Value drives the way you design your business, so that it can’t help but deliver on the Promises you make.

But what does that actually mean in practice? How do you actually do that?

Let’s follow a thread of an example.

Your Promise of Value contains 3 sets of qualities – behaviours (the way you do things, which shades into your values), what you do (what you do to deliver benefit to your clients) and what you are (the relationship that is created between you and a client as a result).

Let’s say that one of your behaviours is ‘honest’. Among other things, that might mean that you always tell the truth. That has implications for your Share Promise process. For example, you may decide to never make claims you can’t substantiate. That might mean that for you ‘Showing Up’ is essentially about presenting the substantiation. Your 60-seconds is a story of a happy client, or your social media feed is full of testimonials, or that your website contains a live feed showing the positive impact you’re having. Or maybe the negative impact, reducing?

Always telling the truth has implications for your Keep Promise process too. It affects how you deal with a complaint, or the advice you give a client. It implies that before either of these situations arises, you must have a process for gathering as much ‘truth’ as you can. That might translate into a separate process each time (receive a complaint, research it, then get back to them), or it may mean building a process for continuously recording data you might need, as a side effect of doing the job.

Your Promise of Value isn’t just for prospects and clients, it also drives how you design your Improve Process – how you organise or re-organise the resources you have to serve your people better. How you design your measurement systems, your appraisal systems and your recruitment systems. For example, how could you test that a potential team member is ‘honest’? How would you build ‘always telling the truth’ into feedback mechanisms?

There will be other options. The form your processes take depends on other aspects of your Promise of Value – not everything all at once, but the behaviours that are most important to you and the people you serve. How does your business combine a behaviour like ‘honest’ with ‘kind’, or ‘professional’ or ‘cutting-edge’?

By embedding your Promise of Value into what you do and how you do it, your prospects, clients, employees, suppliers – all your stakeholders – experience who you are, and what you are here to do in a very concrete way. You’re showing, not telling. What you are, is what they get. And what you are is unique. You’re now in a market of one.

October 29, 2021

Leadership?

At this morning’s Like-Hearted Leaders gathering we had an interesting discussion around what leadership is or could be.

It was an interesting, intricate, circular discussion.

But in the end, I think what leadership could be might be best summed up in the LHL values:

Real conversations, even if they are difficult.
Courage to be vulnerable.
Growth & Learning comes through thoughtful feedback.
Freedom of expression, where everyone is worthy of contributing.
Amplify others.
Trust grows in balanced relationships of give and take.

It’s an interesting question though.

What does leadership mean to you?

What does it mean to whoever you lead?

Discipline makes Daring possible.

Musings from The Disappearing Boss on People, Process and Responsible Autonomy for small-business employers.

Category: Promise of Value