The first time I think I heard the term pre-eminence I was listeinging to some Jay Abraham tapes. This must be some 30 years ago when Nightingale Conant would send you tapes in the mail. Ah youth!
For those of you that don’t know Jay is something of a cult hero in the marketing world. People who know whisper his name with quiet reverence. Fact of the matter many ideas that are used in the business world were if not invented but brought to the forefront by Jay.
Pretty much no-one had heard of a USP before Jay made if popular. It’s funny now people know the term, but still don’t set about creating one for themselves. Go figure.
Anyway, I heard the term and as much as I knew what eminence meant. The pre part was lost on me.
So if you like me are a little confused as to what it means I will throw some light on the subject. Actually, before we discuss this as an idea I want to make an observation from Webster’s dictionary. (Actually, I am stealing this from Jay also).
It Webster’s it makes a clear distinction between what a customer is and what a client is.
A Customer – A person who buys a commodity or service from you.
A Client – A person who is under your Protection.
I’m paraphrasing (dictionary speak does not lend itself to shall we say entertaining writing).
So…
If we are to be Pre-eminent we need to think like our customers are clients.
We need to not just someone who we have a non-meaningful transaction with. We want to for a better word revere them, or take them under our wing.
If we do that at least consciously we might treat them very differently.
Let’s say you believe a person needs 8 glasses of water a day in order to stay healthy and function. And every day a person comes into your store and buys a bottle of water that gives him one of his 8 required glasses of water.
A customer focus will sell him or her a bottle of water and that’s it job done, see you again tomorrow.
A client focus will sell him that bottle of water and offer him the other 7 or if not from you make sure he or she gets the other 7 from them or someone else.
This is not a sales tactic this is a giving a damn tactic. You don’t mind if they get the water from somewhere else you only care that they are getting it.
The funny thing is though that when you adopt this approach and you do care, your client in time will notice also. And maybe just maybe he might buy that extra water from you, or tell other people yours is the store to buy your water from.
Pre-eminence is holding yourself and what you do for your clients to the highest possible standards. When you do that, people will notice, you will feel better, you will raise your standards and as you do that your standards will raise.
Everyone wins.
If you like this idea you might find THIS equally interesting.