GarthBox

Customer stories don’t start at the door.

They start before they’ve even thought of you. The person who purchased a scone from you? Her story started this morning when she didn’t have breakfast because she was rushing to work on the weekend.

Her story continues as she walked down the main city strip and decided a scone (not yet yours) would be the perfect thing since she’s in a hurry. She’d love the warmth of a shop because it’s cold outside, too.

She picked your shop out because of the steaming coffee sign outside. She decided then a coffee would go good with the scone, too.

This is where many a store owner and marketer think the story starts: She walks inside.

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Customer stories don’t end when they leave, either.

In fact, if you’ve created something remarkable, then the story never ends.

The lady who purchased from you gets to work–scone and coffee in hand–and sees her coworker. “Ugh, you got breakfast? I didn’t have time to make anything this morning,” her coworker said. “Here have half,” your customer responded.

They split the scone.

The story element of warmth you gave her, grew stronger with a sense of friendship.

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These are the stories that matter. That help you make decisions on a daily basis.

Do you raise the temperature a couple of degrees in the shop or keep it cooler because you’re hot behind the counter? Do you have light jazz music on or techno? Do you stop at a “thank you and you’re welcome” exchange? Or do you wish them a productive and fulfilling day?

Have you rehearsed your customer’s story? Are checking the decisions you make with the story?

 

Stay Positive & Figure Out The Story First, Then Make Decisions

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One of the fastest ways for you to get a promotion is to laser in on how to make the life of the person above you easier. It’s thinking as they think. It’s striving to fill their shoes.

At the same time, you’re making their lives easier and allowing them to put more time in work of those above them. There’s a positive domino effect to this.

From larger tasks like writing out paperwork and creating presentation decks to research to writing an email that’s easy for them to copy and paste and send to who they need to.

This way of working isn’t just benefiting you from thinking and working like the title above you, it’s benefiting the entire organization, and when the organization wins, you win.

 

Stay Positive & It Starts With You

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If you’re frustrated with a task, it’s not likely you’ll turn out strong work.

If you feel challenged, you work smarter and the result speaks to that.

But, the feeling of frustration rarely helps us create something remarkable.

I’ve found that the best counter to frustration is conversation. It’s likely you have misinterpreted part of the task. The deliverable you are working on, might have meant to be tweaked a bit. You may be missing the obvious that you’ll only realize when you put words to your method.

The task might not become easier to do through conversation, but it will be a lot less frustrating.

 

Stay Positive & Share The Frustration(s)

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In any message strategy, you have the opportunity to define an anchor.

Many businesses establish a pricing anchor.

Here’s this bottle of beer for $30, so it makes the $15 bottle of beer look much more appealing.

And consider that a sale price is meaningless without also showing the “original” price.

Other businesses have a story as an anchor.

One business in particular works to sell unique products, but that can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. So they use an anchor. “We even sell a giant peacock throne. It’s a chair you can sit on that’s shaped and colored like a peacock. It’s remarkable and it’ll be the statement-piece in your room when your family comes to visit.” Now you have an anchor for what “unique” means.

The real problem for businesses arrives when there’s no use of an anchor.

Truthfully, we’re all wired to seek out an anchor through our process of decision-making. We can’t determine the value of something until we have another similar thing to compare it to. So we’ll search until we find one, and most of the time it’s a competitor who has a lower price, a better story, a greater guarantee.

 

Stay Positive & Better To Create Your Own Anchors Than Let Another Biz Define Them

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In the day-to-day, routine may have you sending work to others who will then ship it.

The expectation is that they’ll review it before sending it into the world. They’ll catch your spelling error or missing page or they’ll spot and fix the formatting.

While there are some remarkables in the world who make time to review, most don’t.

The onus is on you to respect their trust and to deliver the greatest work you can create.

It means you invest the time in reading it over again. It means you place yourself in the shoes of the future recipient and critically evaluate the work on their behalf. It means you would be proud of your work if it got shipped as is…because much of the time, it does.

 

Stay Positive & Ready To Ship?

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The cop-out assumption about professional development is that you need time.

Better, though, to use the constraint of time to work smarter, differently, expertly on a specific problem.

The issue usually isn’t time; it’s the number of problems your working to solve because you wanted to fill all of your time.

Focus. Minimize. Focus again.

 

Stay Positive & Let The Small (Focused) Things Add Up

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Certainly there are times when good enough is just that–good enough.

But other times, specifically when you have time, it could always be better.

The amateur ships anyway. The artist spends the extra tad of time to make it better.

 

Stay Positive & Which Are You Again?

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