Gina Branch

The personal quality necessary to achieve outstanding success in business is that you must be willing to go the extra mile.

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It’s the “Under Promise, Over Deliver” concept and “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.”