This is a guest post by Sarah Worsham, CEO & Web Strategist at Sazbean Consulting and blogging at Sazbean.com. Sarah is passionate about helping companies reach their business goals by using the web effectively. Sarah provides guidance through Internet Marketing, Strategy & Business consulting.

Sometimes doing business is a lot like being in kindergarten.  When you were 5 and the teacher promised you a story before naptime, you’d get really upset if she later told you she didn’t have time.  It didn’t matter that she let you do a bunch of other fun stuff instead of the story.  You just remember that you were looking forward to the story and you didn’t get it.

The same is very true in business.  If you make promises to your customers, you better make sure you deliver them.  It doesn’t matter what else you did for them, they’ll just remember that you didn’t keep your promise.  And then, similar to kindergarten, they’ll tell all their friends how you don’t keep promises.

Sometimes we forget the we make promises to our customers in the form of advertising slogans, sales, special offers, verbal agreements, etc.  Customers see a special offer as a promise by you to deliver what’s in the offer.  If you make claims that you can’t deliver, you’re breaking your promise.

Moral of the story?  Never promise or market or advertise anything you can’t deliver.  And even if you’re overdelivering – providing extra service – make sure you still deliver on your original agreement (promise).  If you can keep your promises, customers will remember – and tell others – and referrals are the best kind of business generation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Only @ InSights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.