A business model—at its simplest—has three branches:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Delivery
I’ve already written about the issue I see many entrepreneurs coming up against directly in their marketing, so today I want to focus on delivery—and how it's essential to your marketing.
Creating a killer experience for your clients is one of the best marketing strategies you can implement.
Why?
Not only will a customer who LOVES an experience with you become a walking billboard for your offerings, but various sources and stats suggest that existing customers are incredibly valuable to your bottom line.
Take, for example, research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company that shows a mere 5% improvement in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%.
Let me be clear: customer retention isn’t about keeping any ol’ client with a pulse around. If you’re drawing in your ideal clients, you can expect customer retention that is going to increase your profits. But if you’re drawing in non-ideal clients or bringing clients into a sub-par delivery experience, you’ll face higher customer churn and past-clients who become walking billboards for how awful their experience was with you.
- 62% of consumers admit that they will share a bad experience with other people (Salesforce), and
- 32% of consumers will stop doing business with a brand they love after one bad experience (PwC).
Also, clients are definitely going to tell more people about their bad experiences than the good ones. Statistically speaking, they’ll tell an average of 15 people about a poor service experience, versus the 11 people they’ll tell about a good experience (The 2017 Customer Service Barometer).
This is why you need to be so focused on one ideal client who fits into every function of your business. A non-ideal client who's made it into a paid offer in your funnel will either be in over her head (and feel like she needs way more support), or she’ll be so beyond what you’re offering that she’ll feel she’s wasted her time.
Once a business achieves a certain level of stability, predictability, and systemization when it comes to revenue, there is suddenly a capacity to level everything up. (This is why I’m always preaching getting that first seven-figures outta the way. That’s when magic can happen.)
My team knows: we don’t want our customers to have a good experience. We want them to have a stunning experience that incites a WOW when they least expect it.
This means I’m no longer satisfied with happy clients. I want my clients to feel like they’re experiencing at the very least the equivalent of an Emirates First Class Suite. I’m talking zero-gravity leather recliners, a mini-bar, access to a shower, a 32-inch television with 2,500 channels of on-demand content, and, of course, pillows and sheets for your leather chair that turns into a bed (that they will make up for you)—all while being whisked off to Paris.
If I don’t see posts like these often enough, I know it’s time to turn up the dial:
Here’s how you know if you’re clients are having an epic experience (It’s easy):
They will tell you.
Good or bad, you will know. But if they’re feeling like everything is the status quo and merely okay, you likely won’t hear anything—including rave reviews once they've run their course with you.
So how do you ensure a stellar experience, even if you don’t yet have the resources to create an epic WOW experience yet?
Manage expectations, and then plan to exceed them.
When your clients are upset, it’s not their fault. It’s because either an expectation wasn’t clearly set, so they created something in their head that they aren’t actually experiencing, or an expectation was set and then not delivered on. Plain and simple.
After being in business for nine years, I have plenty of stories I could share with you about instances where I failed to exceed expectations on delivery. Did it put me under? No. Did I hang my head in shame and quit? Hell no! I took the feedback, decided what felt accurate and what felt like it needed to shift, and I improved. Personal responsibility is required for creating and improving your customers’ experiences with you.
This isn’t just about your clients. This is about your business’ continued growth and revenue. If you can manage to create a customer experience that receives rave reviews, your business model suddenly goes from three branches—marketing, sales, and delivery—to a circular loop where marketing feeds sales and delivery feeds marketing.
You have a choice: will customer expectation and delivery become something you prioritize now, or will you wait until you’re on the dark side of the comments section?
xo,
R
