Back in 1987, President Ronald Reagan gave his famous “tear down this wall..” speech in West Berlin.
By November of 1989, the wall was down.
The people spoke and took action.
Now at that time, I was far more concerned with my next pack of Topps baseball cards than anything going on in Berlin.
But I’ve grown up since then (Yes, I still have my baseball cards.) and realized that the online business world has walls too. Walls that are going to come down… whether the folks doing business online care or not. And whether they’re prepared or not.
The people will speak. And it will happen.
One of the biggest walls out there right now is the communication wall.
I’m sure you’ve seen it.
You get an email from a marketer and at the bottom, you might read something like:
Please do not respond to this email. For support, please open a support ticket by visiting the site below.
This type of email is from someone who hasn’t gotten the message.
Let me pull out my marketing speak customer translator and see what this email really says. It’s basically saying:
We’re sending you this email to sell you something… or to teach you something that will hopefully THEN let us sell you something… or because you’ve already bought something… So PLEASE, whatever you do, don’t respond to this because, frankly, well, we just don’t have the time to hear it.
Then they lead you to some “help” desk that does everything BUT help.
If you actually have the patience to create an account or submit a ticket, you are assigned a ticket number and assured that “someone” will get back to you.
How sweet. Makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn’t it?
From a business perspective, I think treating your prospects and clients like that is kind of nuts.
Even if you did read in a book somewhere that your time is valuable. And that it’s smart selling to make sure that you remind everyone of that every chance you get.
Maybe that was a smart strategy in the past. But now that people have choices for where to put their money, I think that strategy is self-centered and doomed.
10 years ago, very few tools existed for the average Joe or Jane to produce their own content or create their own products.
There was a barrier to entry to getting your business started.
These days, almost anyone with a pulse can have a web “business” up and running in about 12 hours.
Sure most of them won’t survive… but many of them WILL make noise. And they’ll vie for the attention of the market.
So how does the playing field change when something like this happens?
How does the game change when ANYONE can play?
The bar gets higher. And things that didn’t used to matter start to matter.
Quality starts to matter… design starts to matter, response time starts to matter, communication matters, caring matters, treating people like PEOPLE instead of entries in your prospect database matters…
As always, the cream rises to the top. And believe me, there’s plenty of room at the top.
Because excellence is rare. And caring is rare.
Take Gary Vaynerchuck…
His story is pretty amazing… but what does he have really? What is his biggest asset besides his content knowledge?
He just cares. I don’t know what’s going on in his head, so I can’t comment on that. What I DO know are the actions he takes.
He invests time. That’s the new currency. Time, which is a representative of caring.
Gary is exhibiting the actions of someone who cares.
Here’s the takeaway:
If you’re too busy to care for your customers and TALK to them, they will leave.
The people that care will get the money over the long time.
Caring isn’t communicated with words. It’s communicated with action.
Right now, it’s easy to stick out if you actually care. Over the next few years, the bar will keep getting higher.
Who knows how many folks will “get it” in time to stay alive.
I guess it just depends on how much marketing kool-aid they’ve ingested.
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