Warm Relationships with Readers
The People Business
As an Entrepreneurial author, you must appreciate the underlying truth about what business you are in. You also are in the people business, and the move energetically you nod your head while reading this, the better you are at running your business. Entrepreneurial authors know that warm relationships:
*Come from consistent follow-up
*Come from knowing the reader’s name
*Come from giving more than is expected
*Come from eye contact and smiles
*Come individually and not in groups
*Involve knowing personal data about people, not merely business data
*Are created through caring service
*Come when everyone wants them
*Form the foundation for future prosperity
Five basic truths
The world-class rendered of service lives by five basic truths about customer relationships and how to keep them warm and comfortable:
1. Make the reader feel unique. If you do this, you will have established a serious competitive edge over all who would hope to woo your customer from you. If you can make a reader realize that you know what makes him or her unique, you have the potential for a lifetime relationship.
2. Make the reader feel singled out. When a reader knows that you have made not a mass-market offer, but a one-of-a-kind offer tailored specifically for the customer, you have struck it rich in your quest for a warm relationship.
3. Make the reader feel that you want to be of service. Many companies serve their customers well enough, but seem to be going through the motions. Entrepreneurial authors see to it that their employees want to help, honestly care, and render such good service that the reader can actually see they are happy to do so.
4. Make sure you stay in constant touch with the reader. The fancy word for this is follow-up, and entrepreneurial authors worship at its altar. They stay in touch with readers by phone and mail, with newsletters and direct mail letters. They use their follow-up to make sales. Announce discounts, introduce new items, ask questions via all-important questionnaires, and ask for the names of potential new readers. This follow-up pays itself while providing the added bonus of warming up the relationship through contact.
5. Make sure you exceed the reader’s expectations. Entrepreneurial authors are generous, as you have undoubtedly learned, because they see the business rewards of giving. Their generosity also pays off in profits because by giving readers more than they bargained for, the entrepreneurial author wins that reader’s heart. Exceeding expectations is not the norm. If you exceed them, you will stand out. It is not easy to give that little extra, but try telling that to an entrepreneurial author. You’ll hear that what’s really not easy is staying in business if you can’t outperform all competitors.
In order to live by these five basic truths, turn your readers into lifelong customers, you must have the soul of an entrepreneurial author. You’ve got to have the patience, passion, and persistence of the person who is committed to success. Without these characteristics, it will be difficult to render the kind of service that twenty-first readers will demand and expect. Such service is remarkably rare right now, but as the competition heats up and customers gain sophistication, you will be forced, as the price of admission, to provide service that leads readers to want to make your business part of their identity. That’s the payoff of a warm relationship.
