Are you STB?

Are you STB? 

What do I mean by STB? 

Simply The Best. 

It’s a fantastic song, but you have to be asking yourself this question all the time when it comes to your marketing. 

So what do I mean by are you simply the best, are you STB? 

Well let’s start talking from the perspective of ego and reputation. 

Your ego is what you think of yourself, and your reputation is what other people think about you and talk about you when you’ve left the room. Your ego and your reputation can be the difference between success and failure. 

If you listen to your ego, you will only fail. There is no way you can ego your way through to success, because you won’t be taking anybody else’s view seriously. 

If on the other hand however you focus on your reputation, on thinking what other people think, on learning what other people believe about you, and on listening to what other people say about you when you’re not listening. If you can focus on that then getting to simply the best is easy. If you focus on ego it’s not. 

After all people don’t care how good you are or how much you know, until they know how much you care about them. 

We’ve talked in the past on other videos about Gary Vaynerchuk’s four-letter word that summarises the best marketing strategy, and of course that four-letter word is C A R E, care. People genuinely don’t care how much you know, how good you are, until they know how much you care about them, until they know that you’re in it for them. 

So that being said, how do we prove to people therefore that we’re the best decision of their lives? 

How do we help people establish that we are absolutely what they need? 

A long time ago, in the 70s and 80s and even into the 90s, there was a joke in the technology world, that nobody got fired for hiring IBM. It was such a strong point that it even became its own catchphrase – nobody got fired for hiring IBM. People even use that today in the context of other companies, talking about well “yeah, but you know it’s a bit like nobody getting fired for hiring IBM, these guys are the IBM of the space, of course we’d use them” 

Most of us however aren’t IBM, we don’t get to that state where we are the godlike default practitioner of choice. We have to work hard to show people that we’re the best decision of their life. And there’s a few ways that we can demonstrate to people that we are simply the best, that we are the best decision of their lives. 

The first is we can create a business case showing the numbers theoretically. 

We can effectively educate our marketplace and show them the value gap, the qualitative difference, that our product or service will make. It’s not rocket science to build that case out, because when you’re speaking to people, to pitch to them or to try and win their business or their trust at least at the start of that process, if you can’t convince them you’re worth listening to they’re not going to listen. This applies to everything. 

At the end of the day, if your pizzas arrive at my house quicker than any other pizzas, I’m buying in. And that’s exactly why lots of pizza companies promise your money back if it doesn’t get there in 30 minutes. So that’s an example of the business case showing the numbers theoretically. That’s what our audience cares about is that the pizzas arrive really fast and really hot, so therefore we’re going to focus on from that business case, leveraging our time from oven to customer, or from order to customer to make that exceptional. And we’ll use technology, we’ll show people on an app, we’ll update them or show them where the pizza is. 

But whether it’s a pizza or if it’s a massive IT transformation project, at the end of the day the only way I’m going to know I’m making the best decision, is by understanding that business case – that’s the first thing I need to understand. 

The second thing I want to see is case studies of people who’ve actually done it. 

People who’ve actually used the service, either from myself or a competitor. So now we’re actually standing the business case up. We’re supporting it and saying this isn’t just theory, this is what should happen and this is a case study of what did happen with X Y Z co. That case study doesn’t have to be massive, it just needs to demonstrate that what you put together in the business case, actually plays out roughly that way. That people can actually expect similar results, maybe not the same results because there may be lots of other variables of play. But the reality is we want to demonstrate to them that the business case works and that the case study follows up with that and shows them a real-life example of how that that business case turned out in reality. 

The next one is testimonials. 

And this is often a part of a case study but the reality is these testimonials should be standalone, they should be used a lot more in marketing than I see people using them. 

Testimonials are everything. 

This is totally the difference between ego and reputation. 

If you have lots of testimonials from people that are credible, the more credible the better, then they’re not going to risk their reputations writing a review on a company that doesn’t deserve it. And that’s the assumption that people make. 

If you’ve got loads of testimonials, if you’ve got a testimonial or something from Bill Clinton, that may be a phenomenal testimonial, than if it were just John Smith down the road. So that’s a huge confidence builder. 

The fourth way we think we can prove to people that were the best decision of their lives, is by using client ambassadors at events. 

So when we have events, it’s really important that clients are there with us. Whether they’re mingling in a crowd, or on the top table, or whether they’re a speaker, maybe they’re a moderator, panel moderator or whatever. But getting client ambassadors at events is vital because they can talk about how you change things in a way that you never could, because your ego will get in the way. They’re just going to talk about reputation. 

So if you can stack the deck and have lots of good client ambassadors at events around the world wherever you conduct your events, then you’ve got an advocate in the room from the start. And by the way they’re not on commission either, they’re there because they love working with you. They’re your biggest fan, they want you to do well. 

And the fifth and final way we can prove to people that we’re the best decision of their lives, is we can demonstrate it by bringing the customer into the processes within the business. 

So one of the easiest ways to do this is to create a user Council, where you have a counsel that meets X percent of the time, once a month, or once a quarter, could be for an hour, could be for half a day. But they take stock, they put customers into the primary decision making basis. 

As a result, if you do any one of those five things, the business case, the case studies, the testimonials, the client ambassadors at events, and the user Council – if you do any one of those you’ll see a lift. 

If you do all five, you’ll see everything will change, and more and more people will realise that you are the best decision of their lives, and they’ll be happy to take that decision.