Being remarkable....

I’ve started reading a Seth Godin book called the Purple Cow – it’s about 7 years old now, and everything doesn’t just ring bells, it’s a blaring noise in my ear – it’s about noise, and the noise we create being in business.

My favourite business saying is that every business is first and foremost a sales business, we’re in the business of selling.

If you’re an accountant, you’re selling your accountancy services – the provision of the services is part of the deal, but it’s not the deal. If you’re a GP, you’re selling your medical skills, again providing those skills comes later after it’s done, and so on.

Seths book (I hope he doesn’t mind me referring to Seth by his first name) is all about being remarkable – Seth himself wasn’t remarkable to me until recently when one of the directors forwarded a clip online to me from one of his talks, so he must be right!

There are a host of concepts in there that he’s introduced from others, and recommended books by other that I will at some stage try and get myself across them, but I won’t comment on all of it, because then I’d be writing my own book.

Instead I’d like this think about what is remarkable, and how do we show we’re remarkable to our customers?

Well, as Seth says, being remarkable is about being worth someone remarking about you about, i.e. we have a good pizza place not to far from us that Lisa and I get takeaway from occasionally, it’s good but it’s not remarkable because it’s not GREAT and I wouldn’t tell friends about this place, but it is the best around me. I’ve got a GSXR1000 which also I think is good, good fun, but it’s not remarkable, my old R1 that was remarkable.

What really is remarkable, and here’s a nice plug, is my TIVO and my XBOX – both of these two items are remarkable.

After having Foxtel, it was costly junk, they couldn’t sort out whom I was a customer of be it Telstra’s or Foxtels? And I found 90% of the content unwatchable filler – so I guess it too is remarkable.

But for the TIVO, it’s remarkable, because it learns behaviour, what I like to watch, whom I like to watch and goes off and records things accordingly – along with the things I wanted to record aswell. It’s not pay TV so some of the new edgy US stuff isn’t there, but I have a PC and an XBOX and I’ll come to that.

The XBOX is also remarkable, because I don’t have pay TV, I do have a PC with internet that I can download content from, and my XBOX picks it up and lets me watch it on TV.

It’s great, it fills the cap between what I have currently, and what I want that I can have and at a fraction of the cost, that’s remarkable – my daily viewing experience have improved tremendously because of it and I’m always to watch something that I’m in the mood to watch.

Sure, reading the start of the book my mind was racing about how is Esendex remarkable – we do stuff others don’t, we include things others don’t, but it’s boring. But then I started thinking about our value prop, case studies on how we’ve effected customers, and that’s how we’re remarkable, to me at least and that’s important because I’m selling the stuff.

We’re remarkable, because we’ve save so many customers time – enough time to show significant labour costs. We’ve reduced complaints, evened out and raised the bar on customer service levels, reduced operating costs, increased profits and most of all... we’re made our customers remarkable by using us.

And that’s remarkable.


Enjoy,
C