Appreciation Marketing – Make It Personal, Part 2

Weeks ago, we discussed how you might make your communications with your clients, prospects, friends, and family more personal.  Personal communications are so much better, and meaningful, in your business, and personal, life.  Your clients, prospects, and everyone that you contact must believe that you are the person with whom they should do business or the person with whom they should partner.

We have discussed how you must be professional in your business, promoting a valid product or service for a valid price, and dealing with your clients in an honest, ethical manner.  In addition, you must be passionate about what you do in your business, being a product of your product, using your service, and living the life that you promote to your clients.  In addition, you must be personal in your dealings with clients, prospects, and others, treating others as people, not numbers.  You are the personal face of your business, in all ways.

Appreciation Marketing teaches us to treat people as people, not client or account numbers.  Each and everyone whom we meet is a person, with hopes, dreams, and worries.  We must recognize those people as people, not just possibilities to sell them something, but people with whom we should bond and engage as people.  Find out what their hopes and dreams are; discover their worries and concerns and assist them in their future success.  Personalize your relationship.

People do business, and associate, with people not companies.  We build associations with people, deciding to continue to buy based on the person representing a business and how that person treated us.  We do not build associations with companies alone.  While we might make an initial purchase from a company, we will not maintain a long-term association with a company if the people there with whom we interface treat us badly.  You must treat everyone the same, well.

There must be a personal relationship in order to have a long association.  We should not look to build just associations; we must build relationships with others.  Then, and only then, can we have a vested interest in their success, and they will have the same type of vested interest in our success.  If you do not do this, you will have a passing association, not a relationship, and you will not be their partner in their success.  The level that you must gain is a partnership in the future.

Have you ever heard the term “fair weather friend”?  These people say that they will be there when you need them, that they are supportive of you in your time of problems, and that they believe in your success and gaining that level of prosperity.  Fair weather friends are the people who really do not mean what they say.  They will leave you at the first sign of problems, they will tell you something and mean the opposite, and they will never tell you what you should hear, instead saying what they believe that you want to hear.  They will never tell you that you are wrong if you are.

We are products of our past, and we all have stories from that past that we tell to others that let them know who we are.  Leave me a story and then share it with someone else, or email me at Jim@SOC4Now.com, or call me at 360-314-8691.  When we share our stories with others, we share our lessons and help someone else to avoid the problems that we may have experienced.  We prevent someone else from “learning the hard way”, and we allow someone else to avoid failure in their business or in their life.  That is what we do for our partners.