Discipline makes Daring possible.

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

Category: Share Promise

Crossing the threshold
March 29, 2022

Crossing the threshold

Do you know how your clients feel after they have worked with you?

Maybe not, but it’s probably fairly straightforward to find out – you can simply ask.

Do you know, or can you imagine how they felt before they discovered that you were their solution?

You can probably remember what prospects told you, or what you observed when you met.

Do you think there are other people feeling like this right now?

Probably.

What else do these other people need to feel in order to know that you are the solution for them?

This is the feeling that will help them to cross the threshold and commit to a journey with you.

How can you give them that feeling?

 

HT to Bev Costoya for that brilliant question.

Enrolment and onboarding
February 23, 2022

Enrolment and onboarding

It’s easy to conflate ‘enrolment’ and ‘onboarding’ and think they are the same thing.  They’re not.

Enrolment means to ‘sign up’, to ‘commit’, to ‘buy into’.  It’s what you want your prospect to do at the end of Share Promise.  You want them to say ‘Hell yes, I’m in!‘, and start their journey with you.

Onboarding means to ‘acclimatise’, to ‘socialise’, to get to know ‘how things work around here’.  It happens at the start of Keep Promise – if it happens at all, that is.   Because if you’ve built your business around the client, it should already feel like home to them.

Lost
February 11, 2022

Lost

I’ve been having some technical issues lately.  There’s an error somewhere in the network between my machine and the server that hosts my websites.  It’s probably something trivial – like a misspelled street name on an envelope, but its been tricky to track down.

Having ruled out the obvious culprits, the search began.  And that was the hardest part.   How do I know what to search for when I don’t know what the problem is? I literally hadn’t a clue.  The only option was to try something and look at what came back to guide my next search. After a few searches, a path became clear.

Learning how to market your services feels the same.    How can they find you when they don’t know you exist?   How can you show them you exist when you don’t know what they’re looking for?  Where on earth do you start?

The solution is similar, and takes, not magic, or money, but patience.   Put something out there and see what comes back.  Adjust and repeat until the path becomes clear.

Word for the year 2022
January 13, 2022

Word for the year 2022

I’m pretty rubbish at selling.  Perhaps because it feels too much like putting a part of myself out there, setting myself up for judgement.  Because many people won’t need what I do, and probably most people won’t like it.

But then I’m letting down the people who would.

An offer can only be accepted if it’s made.

So my word for 2022 is ‘Offer’.

As in: ‘Here, you might like this.  I made it for you.’

It’s called The Disappearing Boss, and it has it’s own website.

A market of one
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.

Our greatest tool
October 25, 2021

Our greatest tool

Following nicely on from the last post, I recommend this series of posts from my friend Mary Jane Copps – The Phone Lady.

You’re probably familiar with the idea that as humans we are wired to look for stories, which means that telling them is a great form of marketing.

What Mary Jane makes us realise is that before you can tell your own story effectively, you have to first find the story of the person you are talking to.  Not the story of the avatar you’ve created to ‘represent’ them, but the actual story of the actual person you are speaking to right now.

Why?

Because “It’s within their story that your value takes root.“

That means that whatever your process for communicating one-to-one with prospects or clients is,  it must have room for curiosity, and enough flex to accommodate the learning you gain by exercising that curiosity.

Intersections
October 11, 2021

Intersections

“Who am I the ideal solution for right now?”

A way to think about the answer is to think about 3 sets of people:

  • Who needs what you can do for them?  Why?
  • Who is motivated to actually do it?  Why?
  • Who has the ability to do it (including the ability to pay you for it)? Why?

The intersection of these three, tells you the answer, because all three are needed to prompt action.

And if there is no intersection, maybe you can create one, by increasing their ability?

Ideals
October 8, 2021

Ideals

The answer to the question “Who is your ideal client?” is often “The one who pays well, on time.”

It’s flippant, and usually followed by a sheepish laugh, but also revealing.  No matter how much depth you go into on the psychographics and demographics of your ‘ideal client’, the chances are you’re thinking more about your needs and abilities than you are of theirs.

A bigger and better question to ask is “Who am I the ideal solution for right now?”

Start from where they are
September 17, 2021

Start from where they are

Decades ago, I rescued my mother from a tiny rock, in a shallow sea.   No big deal you might think, but she had poor eyesight, vertigo, and couldn’t swim.  She was used to staying on the sand.  She was panicking, hiding it because she’s our mum, and supposed to be in charge.

I might have been tempted to shout from my place halfway up the beach: “Just step in, it’s not deep, you’ll be fine!”

But I didn’t.   I paddled out to her, took her by the hand, and helped her to put one foot down and the water and see just how shallow it was.  I got her to put her next foot down, letting her lean on me until she felt steady on her feet.

Then I let her walk by herself the rest of the way.

When what you offer is new, it is also scary.   It doesn’t matter that you know the rock is tiny and the sea is shallow.   Your prospect doesn’t know that, not emotionally, where it matters.

Don’t just shout from a distance, move to where they are, accompany them on the first steps of their journey.   Then let them move forward with dignity.

They’ll remember that for the rest of their life.

Niche, then niche again
July 19, 2021

Niche, then niche again

For an individual business, competing with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of other businesses, the key to achieving an above average rate of profit is to differentiate yourself. To de-commoditise your offer. And one way to do that is by specialising how you do things, rather than what you do.

Most coffee shops do the same thing as their competitors, what differs is the mode of delivery, the ambience, sometimes the coffee.   In any given high street, where a customer can choose from half a dozen coffee shops, the one they buy from regularly will the one that feels like their kind of coffee shop. For me, its Cuore, an independent Italian, possibly Caffe Nero, never Starbucks or Costa.

The implication here is that any coffee shop is catering to more than a physical need or desire for coffee. My choice of coffee shop says something about my taste in coffee, but more about my values; who I identify with; the lifestyle I aspire to, and who I want to be seen to identify with.

My choices are a function of my mindset, my worldview, not my age, postcode area or gender. My psychographic profile, not my demographic.

When you articulate the Promise of Value for your business, you are identifying your business psychographic, and by extension that of your ideal clients. These are ‘your kind of people’, the people you can serve, who’ll be willing to pay you more than the alternatives available to them.  They’ll thank you for being there for them.

Sometimes, this is enough. But if you are a new business, or an existing business looking to expand, it helps to narrow your focus even further to a subset of the people you serve.

This is where demographics becomes useful. If your psychographic tells you what kind of people you’re looking for, demographics tells you where you’re most likely to find them.    It can also help you to identify where they are currently being under-served.

That makes psychographics part of your Promise, demographics part of how you share that Promise.  Which leads to the following rule of thumb:

Niche your Promise to find the people you can serve best. They’ll thank you for it.

Niche your Share Promise to find the people you can serve best now. They’ll thank you for it now.