Follow Your Recipe

If you don’t follow the recipe, things don’t turn out like they should. This is especially true if the recipe is your business model. Most of us don’t sell the lowest price. We also don’t sell the best product, either. We sell the best total solution, the combination that is customer intimacy; it’s high-touch, meaningful insights, deep caring, and accountability for results. That’s what makes you worth paying more to obtain.

If you try to operate this strategy without the intimacy, you don’t know enough to deliver the promised value. Without the intimacy, you don’t have the relationships that this recipe is made up of either.

Your interactions with your clients are special; they’re not simply transactions, not simply going through the motions. High touch means that you are proactive. Your interactions have to leave your client with something even more than a positive feeling. If the interactions aren’t special, it isn’t the recipe.

Without the meaningful insights and ideas, you don’t know how to create the best overall solution. You might have the intimacy, but if it isn’t backed up by some serious business acumen and situational knowledge, you can’t deliver the results the recipe demands.

You can’t operate a customer intimacy strategy without caring deeply. If you treat your clients (and your interactions with them) as transactions, you aren’t delivering what the recipe requires. The recipe calls for deep caring. Your clients have to feel it. If they don’t, the recipe doesn’t work.

Most of us have moved passed selling product. We sell outcomes. We sell the fact that we are accountable for those outcomes. Even if you have the intimacy, the high touch approach to interactions, the meaningful insights, and the caring, if you aren’t accountable for the results, you’re not following the recipe.

Imagine you are making your favorite dish. Now leave out one of the primary ingredients. Your chocolate cake may still look like a chocolate cake to the outside world, but anyone who tastes it will immediately know that something isn’t right.

Follow the recipe.