Order Take Out Now.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about keeping your promises and building meaningful trust with your customers.

Sales is never easy, especially when you consider that perhaps only 2% of your audience is ever really ready to buy from you right now. As far as "easy" goes in sales, it is always easier to expand your relationships with customers who know, like, and trust you, than to start from zero with strangers. This is true unless your standing relationships have become estranged. Sadly, if your customers no longer like and trust you, then you probably don't have a sales problem at all, do you? What you more likely have is a service, delivery, or overall quality problem. Lucky for you, the remedy for disenfranchised, dissatisfied, and even disgruntled customers is typically not more complicated than keeping your promises. Simply do what you said you would do, by when you said you'd do it. As my mother used to say, "You are only as good as the promises you keep," and the same is true for brands.

Now that you're keeping your promises and you've restored happiness among your most important client relationships, you may have built enough trust equity to increase sales, revenue, and profits. Before you go too crazy trying to develop new up-sell and cross-sell offers, be sure to focus on understanding your customer's needs. There's nothing worse than offering what you need to sell, rather than selling what they need to buy. If you understand their needs, meet them perfectly, and keep your promises, they will spread the word on your behalf, and you won't have to hunt around for new customers anymore.

Now, let's talk about timing. Don't ask for the golden ring on the first date. Let them get to know, like, and trust you first. The best time to offer your clients any sort of premium upgrades, platinum packages, or gold memberships is when they are at the peak of their happiness. You've understood their needs, you've exceeded their expectations, and you've kept all your promises. This is the moment when you've converted a happy customer into a long-term loyalist. They will go out of their way to come back for more, and when they do, they will bring their friends along with them.

What may be true in marketing can be clearly demonstrated in a Chinese food restaurant. Hey, give me some slack! This is, after all, a marketing blog based on what it says in other people's fortune cookies. In the case of today's fortune, the person has just finished eating their meal. The customer is as satisfied in that moment as they will ever be during their visit, and upon opening their fortune cookie, they are presented with a simple up-sell opportunity, "You may be hungry soon: order takeout now."