I can’t begin to go down the list of times I’ve had to just stare blankly at a company that cries about how little sales they get yet pour little to no money into marketing, brand building or even customer service.

I almost feel like they’re messing with me and I wait around to see if they’re gonna surprise me with an “ahhh I got you good man!”

But alas…. they never say “I got ya good” and I’m left to wonder how I ended up in this room with this self-centered executive standing in front of me….

In a way, it’s almost poetic knowing that a lot of companies die due to being so selfish. Sure this doesn’t exactly apply to the monopoly in financial institutions and government but for the rest of y’all, you’re not gonna make it very long.

For the rest of you who are proactively looking to better the lives of your customers and build a formidable team, here’s how to build your brand without spending another dime and improve customer service at the same time (based on actual case studies).

In the early days of GrowthHaxx, I was all about trying to make every.single.customer happy, even if they weren’t all that respectful, smart, or easy to work with.

After all, I was new to the game and I needed to make money! I quickly found myself burned out because I was helping the wrong people. Worst of all I wasn’t growing! About a year had gone since I had seen any real growth in customers.

So after going back to the whiteboard, and observing like a hawk for 5 months, I discovered that my best customers demanded less of my time, and referred me almost half of my business.

So, I picked one of my favorite customers who was about to get a nice investment and was ready to scale and pitched him my theory/hypothesis which we’ll break down today.

Guess what the first step was in increasing the quality of our customers?

We Raised Prices

I got my start in business via a cell phone business I founded at 15 which then led to Real Estate. In both businesses, I noticed that the cheapest apartments and cheapest plans/phones came with the biggest headaches.

Without getting into semantics, just the observation that this was a constant, so eventually I began dropping those offerings or worked with sharing those assignments with others that were better at it than myself. Which then led us to recognize that a big focal point was to..

Keeping The Bad Customers Away

Something interesting began to happen as we adjusted out pricing: the higher the price, the discrepancies, and conflicts we had to support dropped dramatically.

During some of our feedback discussions with our customers, many reported that they viewed their purchase as an investment in their relationship with us, this directly affected the level of attention and respect they put into our relationship and them wanting to make it a fruitful and happy one.

Communication Is Key

Sometimes, these “bad” customers are frustrated because they’re confused. Sometimes they’re not getting the message in terms they understand, its all about finding out what they think, want and need…. you know, customer relations are a lot like dating. You may mean one thing but say another without realizing it.

It’s your responsibility to make it known who should be doing business with you, exactly what product or pricing they should expect, and exactly what they should expect once they start working with you. Emphasis on the with (you can almost hear the control freaks squirming in their seats reading this).

Remember, your customer and you are in a relationship…. respect, communication, and the occasional loving gesture…

Effective communication not only helps your customer relations but benefits your marketing substantially.

When we went through our emails/ messages we each found that there was a lot of questioning concerning things like “what features do you offer?”

or “do you offer discounts?” “where you located?”,

Questions you can easily answer via your product page, or a carefully curated FAQ page.

The Results Speak For Themselves

In only 1 month for me, and 3 months for my buddy, this theory in practice not only refined our marketing but improved our customer satisfaction via being able to increase our value offers in every product.

After we moved on to the next phase (after testing we moved on to maintenance and then scaling) we began to identify customers’ needs very early on. Something as simple as us emailing them to make sure they understood it all and what their expectations were helped us weed out anyone who might not be a great fit for what we offered. Saving both the customer and us unnecessary grief.

For those that stayed, we were able to organically form a greater relationship, with better communication that lead to better results all around. In case you haven’t noticed yet, this is all key to your brand… your brand is your reputation.

And what better reputation than amazing customer service with results that exceed your expectations.

Here’s to escaping average

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