Why Underpromising and Overdelivering is Underwhelming

Why Underpromising and Overdelivering is Underwhelming.

And later on in the podcast, I'm going to give you the four B's to create business boom. All right, let's go. So, under promise, over deliver. We, I mean, we were taught as kids, certainly I was, you don't toot your own horn.

 Children were to be seen and not heard. You're not supposed to boast or brag. And then once we got into our business life, that kind of percolated our thinking, and we've become mortally afraid of saying something too bold or too controversial, as it will set expectations that you can't deliver on.

And in larger organizations, I've even seen, as the culture develops and the legal department then grows, the legal department will then water down anything that you want to say that's slightly edgy or risky. And so, the net net is you arrive at a narrative that is staid and boring. And you can't be successful in sales by being staid and boring.

If you've got a lot of repeat business you're existing on kind of word of mouth, people have worked with you before, you don't really need to sell those. You don't really need to give them that jolt that first impression to tell them why you're different because they've experienced what you did, they've been happy what you did, and they're going to come back.

 I see a lot of businesses who think they're very successful in sales, and they tend to service their existing customer base, which is all very well when the economy is doing very well.

When the economy starts to take a little bit of. a turn, their existing customer base starts to buy less. And if you don't have the ability to go outside your existing customer base, you're going to shrink and you're going to go extinct.

So what I want to help you with today is winning new business, not having a bland or watery promise that will fail completely.

I don't know what the exact statistics are, but if you Google it, it, it's estimated that any particular individual is bombarded by thousands of ad messages, daily billboards, TV and radio ads, online ads, social media ads, promotions, emails, text marketing.

You can't even pick up your phone now without it, giving you 47 different messages that you can help you with every aspect of your life and business.

And so in reality, we're competing for attention. We're in an attention deficit economy. It's ADHD is rife. And so if you've got a long rambling monologue, boring monologue, You know, describes your business, you're just not, you're not going to penetrate that barrage of noise.

What you have to do is you have to create a bold promise, something that, that stretches yourself. So don't under promise, you're selling yourself short. Over promising does two things.

Number one, it lifts you out of your comfort zone, right? You you would have put together some claims and some promises that you've felt were well within, your ability to deliver. And that's generally probably mundane and uninspiring. You've settled for something that's comfortable.

 Comfortable to me is a word I would choose to describe an old sofa. Sadly, many people in business consider it a destination.

You can't be successful being comfortable.

I like the expression,

if you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much room.

So you've got to over promise, right? And that over promise will then make you a little edgier.

It will make you stretch a little bit more. It'll make you strive to be more because you've promised more. It's called growth. It's called development. It's called aspiration, and that's what's going to really impact your customer when you over promise. So the first thing is, it's going to cause you to stretch your execution muscle, your ability to deliver value to your client.

Secondly, which is the point of this podcast, a bold promise captures attention. We've got to create a pattern interrupt when you're hunting for new business. No more is this evidenced when you try and cold call somebody and you get them on the phone. You might have to dial a hundred times to get through to a few people.

And when you do get through to somebody, you mutter and you mumble, you stumble and you fumble. And you just sound like it's just noise. So you've got to have something. You've got to be bold and you've got to go for gold.

 I Googled this, um, and said, you know, give me some examples of bold advertising messages.

, one that came up was Red Bull. You've seen those ads. Red Bull gives you wings. All right. So they're not promising that you're going to fly around, but, but it is a bold promise. That's going to make you feel, , vibrant, you're going to soar, you're going to be successful. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty assertive out there.

One that's a little less bold, but still has some good meat to it is Geico. 15 minutes could save you 15 percent or more on your car insurance.

What about Geico? Five minutes. Could save you 40 percent or more on your life insurance. Now you might be able to do that some, some of your clients. So, you know, think about, think about, you know, a bold message.

I worked with a company called SBTI. They were a company that, did Six Sigma, programs, and they were one of the first. entities to really embrace and train Six Sigma. In fact, the founder of that company, co created the DMAIC roadmap.

For those of you in the operational excellence continuous improvement, you'd recognize the DMAIC roadmap.

 I was doing business development for them and I was at some kind of trade show and I went up to an executive of, fortune 500 companies. And various people were trying to talk to him. He was a speaker at the event.

 I said, Hey, you should talk to me at SBTI. We've been involved in seven out of 10 of the largest company transformations in the last decade

that's a bold, that's a bold claim. And it was true but it was bold, got his attention and that went on to be a series of successful meetings.

So I want you to think about creating a bold attention grabbing claim because it's fundamental if you're going to be a sales hunter and you're going to be looking at out for new business.

So I'm going to give you the four B's to go boom with your client, to be explosive, to create a moment, a pattern interrupt where the client goes, wow.

So these four belief four B's:

number one, the B of belief.

Belief precedes sales. You've actually got to believe implicitly that your product or service will deliver immense value for your client.

If you're not sold on that proposition, you will not be able to sell your client on that proposition.

You have to go and dig deep and look at all of the successes you've had in your business, all of the client successes and take all of that energy and distill it, put it inside you and really fuel that belief and conviction that the combination of you, your company and your service is absolutely fundamental to the success of your client.

And when you believe that implicitly, you will proceed with absolute conviction and commitment. So number one, belief.

Number two, boldness.

It's got to be a bold claim, right? Make it big, make it impressive, really communicate the value. You know, you might be able to. Want to commit longer term value, but in the short term, you know, what's going to happen in the next few weeks, you know, this project is going to be successful over the next year.

This is what we're going to do, but what you'll see in the next few interactions is X. So you give them something that's tangible that they can, that they can hang on to.

The third B is brevity.

You want to be able to distill that bold belief and conviction messaging into 20 seconds or less, because that's the only, that's the amount of time before you lose somebody's attention.

If you're on the phone, you've got to get out. So you, I want you to spend time working on a bold claim, and then I want you to, Make it shorter. Pithy. You could even drop it into chat GPT and say, make this message as short and powerful as possible. That will help you in being able to refine it to something of its essence.

 Once you've got that bold offer, you believe in it and you've made it so that you can deliver it in a few short sentences in 20 seconds.

The last B is what I call. Bulking

Bulking as in muscle development, right? In order for you to deliver something consistently, professionally, at the top of your game, you've got to work out, right?

If you want muscles in the gym, you've got to do reps. You've got to do reps every day. You don't go to the gym and go, Well, yeah, I did my reps last month. No, you've got to do your reps every time you've got to get on that bench and you've got to go and get those, dumbbells and you've got to exercise those biceps. Otherwise they're going to go fat and flabby.

 Similarly in sales, you need sales muscle. Sales muscle is built through repetition and through discipline. So how do we bulk up our bold messaging? Well, the first thing to do is to stand in front of a mirror. You've, you've done your messaging, you've made it brief, you believe.

Now look in the mirror and say what you would say on a cold call. You've got an executive on the line. Hey, this is Mick Holly. Then you're going to make your bold claim. Look at yourself in the mirror. Do you really, do you look as though you believe it? Can you say it without stuttering, without stumbling?

Do you look confident? Are you animated? Are you vibrant? Keep on doing that in the mirror.

Then what I want you to do is... get a family member or a friend and go through the exercise with them and ask them for their feedback on that messaging.

And then the third iteration would be to practice it with other people.

Ask other people in your business or even past clients and practice that messaging on the phone. So you've gone through being able to deliver that message. You want to role play. And when you role play, you can ask, your role playing partner to throw up some standard objections, and then you can be able to segue from your bold statement and your claim when they ask questions, you have a very seamless segue into objection handling or reinforcing the points you've gone through many, many, many times you've built that muscle, you've built bulk, right?

So those four B's: belief, boldness, brevity, bulking, do those things. And you will go boom. You will separate yourself out from the noise. You will create your prospect to stop and to listen to you. And then the door is open for you to continue that sale and for you to be successful and help that client.

In summary, do not under promise and over deliver cause that is underwhelming.

Overpromise stretch yourself and over deliver by being bold by being brief by having belief and having the muscle, the bulk to do that consistently without thinking it becomes autonomous. It's part of your very fiber.

You will be a hundred times more successful.

Tune in next week for more tips to close sales.