By Penny Power – Business Author & Human-Centred Speaker
This week, encouraged by the service I received in New York in the shops, restaurants, and cafes, I spent time pondering how wonderful it is when people show such delight and desire that you want to give them money!
It made me feel so wanted and, in a way, loved. I felt like I was making a difference to their lives. I felt significant to them in that fleeting moment.
Working as a small business with small businesses for over 30 years, I know how fantastic it is to gain clients and also how wonderful I feel when I give a supplier an order. To me, this is the reason I work. To know that I can make a difference to people and their lives through my acquired wisdom and connections; these are pretty important drivers for me.
I value my clients so much, and I make a deliberate effort to ensure they know it. For someone to trust us with their hard-earned money, well, what an honour, and why wouldn’t I thank them?
Thomas chases down the people that we want in our community. He is not looking for just another member. He is looking for that particular person. Their expertise and acquired wisdom matter, but so, critically, do the values they display: who they are, not purely what they are.
We are the stewards of a community, and that is much like being the stewards of a company. Peter Drucker’s words, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast,’ are a guiding principle for us. Our kind, loving culture, full of reciprocity and positivity, does not happen without clarity about whom we want to join us. So when we find someone who fits, we really want them, and from their very first interaction with us, we hope they know they are desired and they feel wanted.
So why am I sharing this?
Because I find few suppliers that actively show the emotion of wanting our business. Most make me feel it is purely a transaction for them, and I can count on one finger the suppliers we spend our hard-earned income on that, once they have won our business, show any desire to make a difference to our business.
Too often, with SaaS providers, social media platforms, utilities, and banks, we can feel like little more than data. Would anyone actually notice if we left?
Recently I downgraded our health insurance to a lower level, purely on the grounds that they never cared, not once, that Thomas had cancer back in 2018. They provided the product, but I never felt the relationship. And eventually that lack of significance affected my loyalty.
Perhaps this is something businesses have forgotten. Customers don’t only want to feel satisfied. They want to feel wanted. Employees don’t only want to feel employed. They want to feel wanted. Suppliers don’t only want their invoices paid. They want to know their contribution matters. And prospects don’t want to feel hunted by a sales process. They want to understand why you genuinely want to work with them.
Being valued is knowing someone appreciates what you already do. Feeling wanted is knowing they actively choose you. And when people feel wanted, they are far less likely to quietly walk away.
With the advent of AI, there will be even more ways that, as customers, we can feel insignificant, pushed away, and unvalued. As AI enables businesses to automate more communication, I believe feeling wanted will become more valuable, not less. Efficiency can make a transaction easier, but human attention makes the person on the other side of that transaction feel significant.
The companies that win will be those that build ‘Significance’ into their agent and customer contact centres, into their leadership so their teams feel significant, and into their sales teams, so they show genuine, emotional desire to win the prospects they are focused on and, once won, never take those clients for granted.
And if you are a small business, it doesn’t make you look small to really want a client. Think of the barista in your favourite cafe who knows your name and looks so happy to see you. Keep doing it. Keep churn low, never take a client for granted, and when seeking to win a client, emotionally consider all the reasons you want to make a difference to them.
AI can’t do that, but you can.
Ponder that this week and appreciate everyone who is enabling you to learn, win, and serve your clients, and most of all, love them deeply, as that is the best way for anyone to feel significant.
With love,
Penny x
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