This is Part Four of a series covering the Eight Personal Qualities for Success.
In Part Three I covered, Self Responsibility and Be Committed. In Part Four, I’ll discuss, The Extra Mile, Control Your Time, and Persistence and Determination
The Extra Mile
The sixth personal quality necessary to achieve outstanding success in business is that you must be willing to go the extra mile. It’s the “Under Promise, Over Deliver” concept, and can be summed up in the following statement:
“If you are always willing to do more than what you get paid for, the day will come when you will be paid for more than what you actually do.”
Robert Cialdini, in his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, discusses what he calls the Law of Reciprocity. Basically it says that when you do something for someone else, there’s an unstated obligation for them to want to do something for you in return.
So when you go the extra mile for your customers or clients, you’ve just set the stage for that law to take effect. But it’s only on that “extra mile” that it works. When you give what might be considered “normal” service, or “adequate” service or even “good” service, you haven’t earned the right to expect that law to work for you.
In fact, even performing “knock-out” service often isn’t enough to gain you an advantage. We’ve all come to expect that from any number of businesses.
You’ve really got to do something special in order to gain an advantage in today’s highly competitive marketplace. Then, and only then, can you expect to create that nearly compelling desire in your customer to want to reciprocate. This simple truth says it all:
“There’s no traffic jam on the extra mile.”
Control Your Time
The seventh quality is that you must master and take control of your time. Time is an expendable commodity. Each one of us has the same 24 hours in each day. When those hours are gone, they cannot be replaced. They are gone forever, never to be recaptured.
You must treat your time as precious, and guard it wisely and selfishly. Don’t let anyone disrupt you or take you away from the focus you have on your goals.
People who don’t have goals are used by people who do. If you let others draw you away from your goals, you are simply saying that their goals are more important than your own.
If you are serious about business success – really serious, then this is one of the most important and critical areas to defend.
Persistence and Determination
Number eight, is to develop persistence and determination. From time to time you will encounter set backs or reach plateaus where it seems like nothing is going right.
Your competitors lower their prices, run massive ad campaigns and unheard of promotions, and the next thing you know your customers and clients begin doing business with them.
Business is walking out the back door faster than it’s coming in the front door. Your volume is beginning to drop, and you become concerned. You seem to be spending more time in a defensive posture than you do in servicing your existing customers, and you’re losing. Now is not the time to give up. Now is the time to dig in and begin to play offensively.
Now is the time to be determined not to lose your good customers – the ones you worked so hard to get. Your strategy should be to keep in touch with them and continue providing exceptional service.
Nearly every business is cyclical. Eventually things will change. While you can’t be competitive on price all the time, you can be competitive on the service you give, and the empathy you have for your customers and their problems.
We’ll talk more about how to do that in a later blog, but for now, just resolve in advance that no matter what, you’ll never give up.
