Setting the Rule on Your Guar*antee: How to Turn this Tricky Strategy into a Point of Distinction by Kim Castle, BrandU®
[NOTE: Some words in this article may have been disguised to avoid triggering sp*m filters.]
Once you reach that place in business when you are sure of the products and services you sell, you are confident they are clearly being communicated to your customers, and sales are starting to flow in, you will come to a fork in the road, a deciding point, that sends the faint at heart fleeing: that place is a "guar*antee".
Should you or shouldn't you — that is the question. The answer comes from you — and setting the rule on your guarantee.
What's fascinating about this heralded strategy is that from:
• a customers perspective — it makes you feel all warm inside
• a business owners perspective — often you're damned if you do dammed if you don't.
A guar*antee puts your prospective customer at ease, giving them an eas*ier decision to buy from you. After all, if you don't stand behind your product or service 100%, why should they buy from you?
On the other hand, with service-based businesses such as consulting, programs or products where your customer has to apply themselves to get results, it's much harder to guar*antee results.
Let's look at what a guar*antee really is?
• something that assures a particular outcome
• a formal promise that a product will be repaired fr*ee of charge if it breaks or fails within a stated period, or that substandard work will be redone
• a formal promise by one person to take responsibility for the obligations of another person if that person fails to meet them.
• to promise something or make something certain.
Large brands and stores that sell products usually offer mon*ey backed guar*antees like:
Mon*ey Back or Satis*faction
Price Match
Within a Certain Time
Internet marketers typically adopt this practice as well by betting on the fact that people often forget what they buy online — even to a point of putting it on a shelf without using it. They bet on numbers and the hassle it takes to return something.
Mon*ey back based guarantees can work well if you sell products, especially if you subscribe to the “numbers theory”, or you deeply believe in the quality of your physical product. Plus, you can always get the product back to sell again. Bottomline: in the words of actor and director Clint Eastwood, “If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster.”
But what if you don’t sell a product?
What if your results are completely linked to the effort your customer puts in? This is where a mon*ey back guarantee gets tricky.
If you put in the time and you deliver the services you promised, if your customer changes their mind, how can you get them back? It’s like eating an entire meal at a restaurant... then deciding it wasn’t what you wanted.
In this case, you can either decide to forego a guar*antee and concentrate on selling with the aid of referrals and testimonials, OR, you can decide to offer another kind of guarantee — which is what I do in my guided programs and events.
Since branding is an extremely clarifying process that a client has to go through, in entirety, to experience its powerful results, I offer something more valuable than mon*ey — I offer myself — and my sixteen years experience with brands large and small.
I offer a “Personal Satisfaction Guar*antee” which is inline with my brand’s value and core promise:
...the only path to multi-million success is held in taking full responsibility for ALL the results in your business. That means you.
The type of work that is done in this process in such short-periods of time requires a person’s entire focus to complete it. They run the risk of not committing themselves fully to the process, if they hold the thought in the back of their mind that they can withdraw for any reason, and get their mon*ey back.
Building a business doesn’t work that way, either a person is committed or... they’re not! Actor Morgan Freeman said it perfectly when he said, “The best way to guar*antee a loss is to quit.”
Instead, my commitment is to hold my customers accountable for turning their business vision (the idea) into a reality, at least for the time they have chosen to work with me.
What I offer instead is extra attention and my time, to make sure they walk away with what the product or program delivers.
To save you from jumping in on the guar*antee bandwagon just because everyone is, answer the following:
1. Do you sell a product that is solid on its own?
2. Do you off a service that works without your customer?
3. Do you offer a service that relies on your customer’s involvement for results?
4. Can you really “assure a particular outcome” ?
5. Are you willing to “take responsibility for another person if that person fails to meet them” themselves?
6. Are you prepared, as a business, to shoulder whatever happens even if you’ve answered no to quest*ions four and five above?
If you still decide to offer a guar*antee, turn to your internal brand value and core promise to decide what kind. Your power as a business, no matter what the strategy, always resides there.
Fortunately in over 15 years, I have only come across a handful of unsatisfied customers who didn’t like my guar*antee philosophy. Usually it’s because of self-responsibility and/or mon*ey challenges. And I have to admit it makes me said that I couldn’t help them — every single time.
And while I couldn’t make them happy in the short run, I believe I have helped them raise the bar on themselves as a business leader in the long run. That is a price I’d gladly pay, over and over and over.
© Castle Montone, Limited
Are you making one of the 15 MISTAKES THAT KILL BUSINESS SUCCESS? Find out at www.15mistakes.com.
WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR E-ZINE OR WEB SITE? You can. Simply include this blurb with it: Brand Visioneer and BrandU co-founder, Kim Castle teaches entrepreneurs and small business owners how to turn their business ideas into a moneymaking marketable brand. If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank™, get your FR*EE branding tips now at www.whybrandu.com.
Setting the Rule on Your Guarantee: how to Turn this Tricky Strategy into a Point of Distinction by Kim Castle - To learn more about this author, visit Kim Castle's Website.
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Kim Castle
(Visit Kim's Website)
With nearly two decades in the advertising
and design business, with clients like
Domino’s Pizza, General Motors, Direct TV,
Pedigree, Wolfgang Puck, Higher Octave
Music, Hollywood Celebrity Products,
Disney, and Paramount, as well as
thousands of entrepreneurs around the
world define, structure, communicate, and
position their business for greater
profits, BrandU® co-creators Kim Castle
and W. Vito Montone discovered that
entrepreneurs could experience the same
power that big brands command for a
fraction of the cost with the world’s only
process-based results-drive Integral
approach to business creation.
BrandU® is helping entrepreneurs grow with
the power of extreme clarity from idea…to
brand…to market™ and helping one million
entrepreneurs become successful and whole
so that they can make a difference in the
world. Are you one of them?
If you want to experience clarity all the
way to the bank™, get started now at www.brandu.com/rd.cfm?id=743.
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