Help them move forward

If you approach a customer support ticket, a negative review, a cancellation request with a defensive mindset, you will always fail.

When people approach you with a problem, they are not interested in hearing that it’s not your fault. They might be seeking a solution, a clean cut, a way to rant. Never will they want to hear a closing statement from your defence attorney.

What do you want to achieve and what do they want to achieve are two important things to consider in these cases.

You have a system to monitor your customers opinions because you want to know when things go wrong and try to remedy that, possibly changing people’s attitude towards your brand. Then why is it rarely your fault, why is confrontation often the go-to tactic, why is empathy the last thing that’s being taught to your people?

And on the other hand, customers do very often reach out because they care and they want to share. They are unsure about what happened, they are hurt because things did not work out as they expected, they want to know they have not done a terrible choice.

So, when you see a customer support ticket, a negative review, a cancellation request, keep in mind you are not there to prove a point.

You are just there to help the other move forward.

Patience and perseverance

It did not work.

Ok, but how long did you try? Was it ten minutes, two weeks, three months, one year?

People are not always immediately ready to respond to whatever it is you have on offer that will change their lives (for the better). Patience and perseverance are as important as ideation and execution.

Giving away value

Should you use social media to give away value or to drive traffic to one of your properties?

Marketers are so resistant to the idea of using social media to establish brand and reputation (i.e., give away value, with no direct measurement), and therefore companies often end up with marginal distribution (social media don’t like that you drive traffic away from the platform) and engagement (people don’t like to be driven away from whatever platform they are using).

This is a fantastic thread on the matter.. by somebody who has established their brand and reputation consistently giving away value.

Scripts

Scripts are out there, they are easy to replicate and scale.

Script #1 – Send LinkedIn contact request faking interest in profile, then send follow up pitch upon acceptance of request.

Script #2 – Collate information you find on Google in an eBook, gate the eBook to collect email addresses, then sequence them.

Script #3 – Map what competitors have on their blog, then have a piece of content to match all topics, possibly changing the content only marginally.

There are more. The problem is that they work for about 10 minutes, then they are old, start annoying people, and you are left wondering why.

If you want to stand out, you have to do something that is not scripted.

It’s not easy.

It’s not supposed to.

Incremental

It’s difficult for any content creator to accept that people – some people, most people – don’t want to hear from them. Just as it is difficult for a founder to accept that customers – some customers, most customers – don’t want to do business with them.

It really is nothing personal. We are all overwhelmed by constant busyness, plus not everything is for everybody.

Of course, the only way to overcome this is to make what you do indispensable for 1, 10, 50, 1000, 10000 people. It’s incremental, and it starts from just a few. If you think at 1000000 from day 1, you have lost already.