Shocking, I know…
So instead of asking your customers to break their habits in order to do business with you, a much more solid growth strategy for your business would be to find a habit the Ideal Customer already has, and become part of helping them to enjoy their habit.
We don’t want folks to stop buying their snowboards from XYZ and buy from us. We want folks to be able to do the flips they’ve always dreamed of, and only our boards have the revolutionary technology to make those moves accessible even to occasional snowboarders. Flips, not flops.*
Take a look at the Experience you provide, upside-down, and fill in the blanks:
We don’t want folks to stop patronizing [our competitor] and buy from us;
we want them to [do the thing they already do or try to do]. We make their habit [possible/successful/unbelievably-rockin-better].
What would happen if you stopped trying to change your customer’s behavior? How do you enable a habit your Ideal Customer already has?
Grow and be well,
Kelly Erickson
*To all you real snowboarders out there, I apologize for my giddy Vancouver Olympics-inspired example, no doubt full of an outsider’s guffaw-inducing fake-terminology. Thanks for your indulgence.
If you enjoyed this post, please Subscribe (it's free!) 
Comment 
Share
Trackback 
23 February 2010, 9:42 am
You just summed up in a single post why Someday Coaching (or Professional Organizing) is such a hard sell – it’s all about people changing habits, which they won’t do even when they say they want to because changing habits is hard work and who likes to work hard? Not me and not my potential clients.
My best Professional Organizing clients were ones that:
A. were already organized but didn’t have the time or desire for projects and/or maintenance.
B. accepted their disorganization and hired someone else to do it for them.
Unfortunately that never translated well to coaching…
Alex Fayle ¡ Someday Syndrome´s latest blog… Resolving to Be Happier: The Happiness Project
23 February 2010, 10:18 am
Yes, as Alex said, it’s difficult to make people want to change. However it is quite a different thing to be ready when *they* find out on their own that it is a time for a change.
People are creatures of habits, for sure. But we also tend to get bored. Who here has eaten the same cereal day in and day out since the age of 3? Who has gone to the exact same restaurant for lunch every day?
Sometimes we need to mix it up. In fact, you might say that part of our “habit” is to search out for change from time to time. That’s a big part of the reason you have to differentiate yourself from your competitors — they aren’t going to come to you for the “same-old, same-old”. They’ll come to you for the “same-old, but different”.
IMHO,
~Graham
23 February 2010, 9:57 pm
Alex,
That’s the trick of thinking about it upside-down—to find a way to talk about it differently, within the context of habits that are there or are strongly desired. I’m thinking of the massive diet industry, or the smoking-cessation industry—two changes to the routine that are almost guaranteed to fail (sadly!) yet people so strongly want to have “getting healthy” be part of their lives that they spend zillions for help getting the habits to stick!
Graham,
Another great point (which leads right into tomorrow’s post, ironically, so I’ll leave it at that).
Regards,
Kelly