Got Alignment? Broken Promises Won’t Pay the Rent

People build relationships and decide who to buy from based upon trust.  Patricia Aburdene, author of Megatrends 2010 said: “Transcendent values like trust and integrity literally translate into revenue, profits and prosperity.”

If you are searching for a surefire way to anger and alienate your prospects and customers, simply violate their trust and you have just found it!  Think about one of your own recent experiences as a customer where what was delivered to you didn’t live up to what was promised.  How likely you are to do business with that company again? Even worse (for the business), how many people have you spoken to about your negative experience? 

I had a fun and illuminating breakfast meeting about a week ago with Larry Bailin.  Larry is an internet marketing guru, a published author, a sought-after speaker, and (as I concluded during our breakfast) an all-around nice guy.

The initial part of our conversation focused on Larry’s primary business, Single Throw Internet Marketing.  As a speaker and a consultant myself, I have a natural curiosity to learn about businesses, their customers, the people who run them, and the obstacles and opportunities they face.  So in a conversational manner, I was running Larry through a series of questions to help me get a grip on both “the man” and his enterprise.

One of the things Larry shared with me that periodically frustrates him is that some of his clients struggle to implement the internal processes, systems, and behaviors to support their online presence.  As we dug into this issue, it became clear to me that these clients struggled to deliver on the promise of their marketing.  In my own terminology: their internal reality (what they did) wasn’t aligned with their external reality (what they promised) and they weren’t creating trust.

How does your business’ internal reality align with its external reality?  If you’re not sure, I suggest that you take steps to find out, and pronto.  Your prospects and customers will be able to tell you, as will your own staff (believe me, they know).  An organizational assessment tool I use with my clients is a handy way to get at this critical information quickly, economically, and in a manner that preserves the anonymity of individual responses (in other words, you get the truth).

Data in hand – good, bad, and even ugly – you can then more objectively evaluate your internal reality in terms of your organization’s:

• Structure – including roles, responsibilities, and lines of communication
• Processes – both formally defined processes and informal ones
• Rewards & Recognition – both formally and informally, what behaviors are you reinforcing?
• People – do you, your mangement team, and your staff each have the right knowledge, skills, and attitudes to be successful in your role?

In my experience, if you’re not actively working to align the internal and external realities of your business, they are probably moving on their own inertia in a divergent path.  This is exactly the pattern that gives my new friend Larry Bailin heartburn as he helps his clients market more effectively online; it’s also the pattern that can stagnate growth, or even worse, put a business out of business altogether.