Visual Summary / DVFZ Books
Influencing a customer is only half the sale
What separates a browser from a buyer, and a buyer from someone who keeps coming back.
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01 The problem
Influencing a customer and winning one are two different jobs
Marketing gets a person interested. That is influence, and plenty of businesses are good at it. Something else has to happen before that person hands over money, and this is exactly where the book says most companies stop working.
The handover point is the purchase. Up to that moment you are persuading. After it you are proving. Any business that wants to see the size of the gap can look at its own analytics and count how many full shopping carts get abandoned.
The fundamentals have not changed. What changed is that buyers now compare suppliers at the touch of a button and will switch without warning, so a company has to be the same company on both sides of the checkout.
It is at the point of purchase that a company stops influencing its customer, moving them to a ‘winning over’ phase, and it is at this phase that most organizations fall short.Chapter 1, Winning and Influencing Customers
02 Buying behaviour
Six things move a buying decision, and none of them is your product
Before you can persuade anyone, you need to know what actually shifts them. Pinelli names six universal principles behind buying behaviour, and each answers a different question in the buyer's head.
Reciprocity is value beyond the item itself. Commitment is the pull of what a person already uses, which is why brand loyalty is real but only takes one slip to break. Consensus is belonging, the reason community and equality work by brands like PepsiCo move so much stock. Authority is an expert weighing in, which matters most when the brand is unfamiliar. Liking is affinity with what the brand stands for. Scarcity is the pull of the thing you might not get.
All six come with a boundary. Persuasion is either ethical or unethical, and the book is clear that manipulation will destroy a company and its reputation later.
Name the value you can add beyond the product itself: free shipping, a sample, after-sales service, a discount. Very few products carry enough value on their own, which is why even Apple builds service around the thing it sells.
03 Customer empathy
Sell the need, not the thing the customer asked for
Customer empathy is not recognising what a client thinks they want. It is working out what they actually need, and in the book's telling those are frequently two different purchases.
The example is running shoes. The customer wants shoes. What they need only appears once you ask the open questions: when do you run, what is your gait, do you have foot or health issues? Answer the ask and you make one sale. Find the need and you fit the right product, which is the sale that comes back.
Pain points fall into three kinds. Productivity is the catch-all, because almost everything a customer buys is meant to make life more convenient. Comfort is wants-based and has not yet become a need. Convenience runs through both, and customers will pay more for it than they will save by going cheaper.
Take your three most common customer requests and write down what each person is really trying to get done. If you cannot answer, you have not asked enough open questions yet.
04 Expectations
You can meet a customer's expectation or you can frame it
Nothing produces an unhappy customer faster than an expectation you cannot meet. There are only two ways to close that gap: raise what you deliver, or shape what the customer expects before they buy.
Accommodating works sometimes, and Starbucks turned its name-spelling habit into a strength that way. But most inflated expectations were inflated by the company itself, and meeting them costs more than they return. So Pinelli takes the other route: frame the need first, using practicality, precision and scope.
Precision is the one businesses get wrong most often. Two statements can mean roughly the same thing and point at completely different products.
Needs are specific, wants are vague and since customers almost always buy on need, not want, sometimes needs statements are completely off the mark.Chapter 4, Framing and Managing Customer Expectations
Test your wording both ways. "Maximize our customers' temperature comfort" speaks to a want. "Minimize our customers' temperature discomfort" speaks to a need. Pick the one you can actually deliver, then say it in public.
05 Relationships over procedures
Customer relations is the same fix, started by you
Customer service is inbound and reactive. It waits for the customer to make contact. Customer relations is outbound and starts with the company. That single difference is what makes a customer feel needed rather than processed.
Pinelli's example is a company that promises delivery in 24 hours and then misses it. Reactive means waiting for the complaint and resolving it well. Proactive means seeing the delay in your own data, apologising first, and offering a resolution before the customer has even noticed. Both paths end at the same fix. Only one of them tells the customer you were watching.
The demand behind this is real. In a Microsoft study, 55% of customers said they expected more from customer service departments than from the product itself.
Customer relationships are not tangible; it is the emotions a client has when thinking or talking about your brand.Chapter 8, Relationships Over Procedures
06 Learning to let go
A paying customer is not automatically a good customer
Some people cannot be pleased. The book is unusually blunt about it, and says so directly: the customer is not always right, and chasing the unpleasable one costs you the customers you could have served well.
Check your own side first. Are your objectives clear? Were they clarified with the client? Were milestones and timelines set? Was communication kept open? If all four are yes and the customer is still impossible, you are not looking at a difficult customer. You are looking at an unpleasable one.
There is a window for the decision. Around three to five interactions is where it belongs, because past five the customer's frustration stops being about the missed delivery and becomes about your brand itself.
Quiet is not the same as gone. Lapsed clients buy once or twice a year and many still recommend you while dormant, so they get useful content, not a stream of offers.
Ask them before you bend any further: what will I gain from keeping this customer, and what will I lose from keeping them? Answer honestly, then act on the answer.
07 The recurring client
Not every customer is worth the same, and you can move them up
A one-time customer buys and is never seen again. A repeat customer comes back when they happen to need something. A recurring customer buys on a set schedule. The third kind is what the book tells you to build for.
The difference is predictability. Recurring revenue costs far less to market to, and Pinelli calls it the holy grail of customers. Not every business can build a large recurring base, but every business can add something that creates one: a subscription, a points scheme, a reward that lands on a fixed date.
Beyond recurring sits the referral customer, who arrives already trusting you because someone they know did the persuading. Three things move people up: education, consistency and patience. An educated client is a confident buyer, and a confident buyer does not send the product back.
The book runs the numbers. A brand with 10,000 followers that gets 1% to share a purchase reaches 100 customers. If each has 100 followers, 10,000 new people see the brand. If 0.5% of them buy, that is 50 customers you did not pay to reach.
08 The whole book
Influence gets attention, relationships get paid
Every chapter runs the same line. You win a customer by being the same company before, during and after they pay you, and the proof of it is which of these three they become.
One-time
Bought once and left. Winning them again means paying for advertising again, which is why a business built on them struggles to hold a margin.
Repeat
Comes back voluntarily but is not committed. Location, convenience and price all still decide it, so the offer has to stay attractive.
Recurring
Buys on a schedule through a subscription or points scheme. Cheapest to market to, highest loyalty, and the source of most referrals.
Ask one question of every process you run: would this customer describe you the same way after the sale as they did before it? If the answer is no, that is the thing to fix.
Adapted from How to Win and Influence Your Customers in the Social Media Age
Sheryl Pinelli · © 2022 Mind-Kern Inc. · 16 cited sources in the source edition