با افراد مختلف متفاوت رفتار کنید

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Treat Different People Differently

In search of the neophiliacs

In any group of one hundred people, pick a measure (height, weight, IQ score, hair length, speed on the 50-yard dash, number of Facebook friends) and you’ll discover a significant number clump around the average.

About sixty-eight of the hundred people will be close to the average. Another twenty-seven will be significantly further away, and four will be extreme outliers.

This happens often enough that we call it a standard deviation.

It turns out that this is especially true for human behavior.

Everett Rogers demonstrated that when it comes to style, technology, or innovations, most people like what they have. They want to do what others are doing, and they aren’t actively seeking novelty.

Some people, though, the fifteen or sixteen people on the left side of the curve in the following graphic, are neophiliacs. They’re early adopters. They want the better, the clever, the innovative. They’ll wait in line to go to opening night of a movie, they’ll upgrade their operating system right away, and they’ll read Vogue magazine for the ads.

Standard deviations: The percentages indicate what percentage of the population being measured is in each segment. For example, 34.1% of the population is within one standard deviation below the mean.

And an equal number of folks, those on the right side of the curve, will defend their status quo to the last day. They still read Reader’s Digest and use a VCR.

Good marketers have the humility to understand that you shouldn’t waste a minute (not of your time or of their time) on anyone who isn’t on the left part of the curve.

If someone is satisfied with what they have, you’re unlikely to have the time or the money to reach out to them directly and cause them to become dissatisfied—that is, interested enough and open enough to changing and becoming a customer.

It’s not for them. Not right now.

With persistence and smarts, you’ll get to them, perhaps. One day. Horizontally. Person to person. Through earned media. But not right now.

It’s the neophiliacs, the folks with a problem that you can solve right now (novelty and tension and the endless search for better), that you can begin with.

Enrollment

There’s no such thing as mandatory education. It’s almost impossible to teach people against their will.

The alternative is voluntary education: gaining enrollment.

We ask people to eagerly lend us their attention. The promise is that it’s worth their effort because, in exchange, they’re going to get the insight or forward motion that they want.

Enrollment is what you need to earn permission to engage.

Enrollment is hands raised, eyes on the board, notes being taken. Enrollment is the first step on a journey where you learn from the customer and she learns from you.

Enrollment is mutual, it is consensual, and it often leads to change.

Lazy marketers try to buy enrollment with flashy ads. The best marketers earn enrollment by seeking people who want the change being offered. And they do it by connecting people to others who want the change as well.

And that change is precisely what marketers seek.

What do people want?

That’s probably the wrong question.

Different people want different things.

Neophiliacs want to go first. They want hope and possibility and magic. They want the thrill of it working and the risk that it might not. They want the pleasure of showing their innovation to the rest of the crew. And they want the satisfaction of doing better work faster, as well as the anticipation of being rewarded for their innovation and productivity.

On the other hand, the typical corporate cog wants to avoid getting in trouble with the boss. And if trouble does happen, he wants an airtight alibi and a great way to avoid responsibility.

The social crusader wants a glimmer of hope and the chance to make things right.

The person who measures dominance instead of affiliation wants to win. And if he can’t win, he might be willing to settle for watching his opponent lose.

The affiliation-seeking tribe member wants to fit in, to be in sync, to feel the pleasure of people like us do things like this without the risk of being picked to be the leader.

Some people want responsibility, while others seek to be recognized. Some of those you seek to serve want a bargain, while a few eagerly want to overpay, to prove that they can.

Almost no one wants to feel stupid.

More and more people have been seduced by the promise of convenience, so that they don’t have to pay attention or exercise judgment. Others feel empty when they’re unable to contribute effort.

The lesson: Always be wondering, always be testing, always be willing to treat different people differently. If you don’t, they’ll find someone who will.

The superuser

Some customers are worth more than others.

You’ve certainly heard the stories of restaurants that keep a picture of the local restaurant critic on the wall of the kitchen. The thinking is that if you can spot the critic early in the meal, you can raise the quality of the experience and get a better review.

If you can pull it off, this might be worth the effort.

The thing is, everyone is a restaurant critic now. Everyone can post on Yelp or share the experience with others. And so, the thinking goes, you need to treat everyone better because everyone has more power.

The math here doesn’t hold up. Treating everyone better is a bit like treating everyone worse—given your resources, you can’t treat everyone better than you already are. Instead, you can look at the new normal and realize that while everyone has a platform, not everyone is using it.

While everyone could be a neophiliac, a sneezer, a power user, a significant contributor, not everyone is taking that opportunity.

You can learn a lot about people by watching what they do. And when you find someone who is adopting your cause, adopt them back. When you find someone who is eager to talk about what you do, give him something to talk about. When you find someone who is itching to become a generous leader, give her the resources to lead.

We have the technological levers to treat different people differently if we choose to. But we’ll need to watch and listen to be able to figure out what to offer and who to offer it to.

The truth about customer contribution

It costs money to market.

It costs money to wear a suit to the meeting, to have a storefront, to develop new software, to keep your items in stock, to run ads, and to pay for publicity, and a hundred other things.

These are all fixed costs, all spread across your entire customer base.

If you do the math, what you’ll see will look like this:

The dotted line is the amount you’ve spent per person on marketing. And the bars are how much gross margin you’ve earned from each customer.

Which means that only eight of the customers on this graph actually contributed a profit to your project.

The theory behind this graph is true for book buyers, restaurant goers, political donors, philanthropists, stamp collectors, and just about any industry where some customers spend more than others.

When you ask, “Who’s it for?” the answer needs to be, “The kind of customers who are going to show up for us in a way that lets us keep going.” You’ll serve many people. You’ll profit from a few.

The whales pay for the minnows.

It can work out. But in order to do your best work, you’ll need to seek out and delight the few. And in return, you’ll be rewarded with a cadre of loyal customers who will buy in for all of it.

What’s the purpose of this interaction?

Consider the valuable customer who reaches out to customer service about a problem.

How do we know if they’re valuable? Well, the customer service folks have a record of who’s writing or calling, so we begin there. A quick search shows that this person has been a customer for years, keeps a lot of money in your bank, tweets about you, never returns items, pays on time, buys your high-margin items, and so on.

In fact, if you do the math, you’ll see that she produces eight times the revenue of the average customer, and unlike the anonymous masses that cost you money, she’s one of the few who generate the income that actually turns a profit.

None of this would be an innovation if we were talking about a freelancer with six clients. When the big client calls, the freelancer instantly knows what’s up.

But we’re talking about your financial institution, the one where the least-respected and lowest-paid person is busy answering the phone when your customers call. Or your retail store, where the same thing is true.

In that moment, then, when the phone lights up, what’s the interaction for?

If the goal is to get it over with, get the person off the phone, deny responsibility, read the script, use words like “as stated” and “our policy,” then, please, sure, yes, keep doing what you’re doing and watch it all fall apart.

On the other hand, the cost of being human in this situation is easily covered by the upside of delighting an extraordinary customer.

Get in your car, drive across town, and show up. Talk about it face to face.

Run down to FedEx and get that shipment in the last pickup of the day. Amazement and delight go a long way.

Have the CEO pick up the phone and call that customer that you accidentally triple-charged. It’ll take a few minutes and it will be worth it.

I know you can’t do it for every customer. But you can learn to see and act accordingly.