“Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.” – Matthew 7:12

Following this rule is the secret behind all successful companies. Today’s buyers have no patience for anything else. In this article we’ll look at how to put the Golden Rule to work for your company, as you look for ways to get more customers.

The ever-present gap between buyers and sellers: Not doing as you would have others do onto you

Do you love getting cold calls from a robot in the middle of dinner? Do you love it when you pick up the phone and the voice says, lying, “I’m not calling to sell you anything”? Do you love getting spam? Do you love over-aggressive salespeople who pester you in the store, not giving you the time and space you need to think and make a decision?

Of course not. All of these irritations are due to one thing: sellers get up in the morning determined to sell, and buyers get up in the morning determined to solve problems and get on with their lives. This drastic “intention gap” is what creates the friction between buyers and sellers, and causes buyers to turn away, in disgust, even to the point of thinking, “I’ll never buy from those people!”

Sellers, when they are being buyers, hate these techniques as much as other buyers do, but they do them when they are selling because they don’t think they have any choice. It’s the old teenager’s excuse: “But Mom, everybody is doing it!”

No, not everyone is doing it. In fact, the leaders in any given industry are not doing it, which is why they are the leaders in their industry.

What are market leaders doing to get more customers, and what does it have to do with the golden rule?

Market leaders avoid the One Big Selling Mistake (thinking like a seller) by ignoring their own needs and focusing on their customers’ needs.

Yep, it’s that simple. It’s not easy, though. It takes a consistent, passionate dedication to that focus, from everyone in the company, all the time.

It requires that kind of dedication because doing the opposite – thinking like a seller – is as powerful as the force of gravity. Left to their own devices, without rules, tools, principles, and procedures, people will automatically revert to the seller’s mindset and the seller’s irritating actions.

Let’s look at the rules, tools, principles, and procedures that can be used to break out of the seller’s mindset and apply the Golden Rule.

Rules of Engagement: Meeting Google and Customer Expectations

You have two customers now: your buyer, and Google. Google is the gatekeeper, serving up answers to 3.5 billion searches every day. Google is a very smart robot, but Google is still a robot. Google needs you to help it understand what you sell, what makes you special, and when you should be served up.

Google, because it is a robot, operates on a set of rules. And in fact, Google operates on the golden rule. Google continues to dominate because it gives customers what they’re looking for. Google is the world’s largest “do onto others” machine. In order to do that reliably, it uses about 200 criteria to determine how valuable your content is to customers, and how much others think of it.

It’s not just about keywords; it’s about establishing your identity with Google by making sure all your content is pointing in the same direction. All of your site content should be saying to Google: “If they want to know this , we have something good for them.” That’s your first job: content that your customers want to read and that Google will thus want to serve up.

Your second job is providing proof to Google that your content really is valuable. Are others linking back to you, reinforcing the idea that you “have something good for them”? Are people coming in, but then bouncing out immediately, because you didn’t have something good for them? Are you listed in all the 50+ online directories, so that if someone is looking for you, they can find you? Are your meta descriptions, alt tags, page titles, and content structured so that when Google crawls your site, everything makes sense and reinforces your identity?

In order to meet Google’s expectations, you need to play by Google’s rules.

Customers have rules, too. Don’t call me during dinner. Don’t lie to me. Don’t say one thing and do another. Keep your promises. Respond quickly, and be helpful. Take the time to understand what I want. Don’t push me.

If you break any of these rules, customers now can warn others away from you, even to the point of taking a video with their phone while you (United Airlines) beat up a passenger on your plane and forcefully drag him out of the airplane. That’s another customer rule: If you mess up, I’ll make it public.

Powerful Tools for Sellers

Your customers now have a supercomputer in the palm of their hands. They can know anything, do anything, go anywhere, and buy anything, in seconds. That means they now have complete control over the buying process, which means you have lost all control over the selling process.

That leaves you one option: Stop rowing your own boat and get into the boat with the customer and help them row their boat. Another way of saying this: Get the heck out of the way and make it easy for them to find you, understand what you’re selling, and buy from you.

The good news? While customers were gaining all this power, Google and other software companies were building tools that gave you, the seller, new powers. You can now see:

We could fill an e-book with the tools available to you, but the truth is, you don’t have to market in the dark anymore. There are tools that make customer and market data available to you, tools that show you what you need to know about customers, and tools that show you what your competitors are doing.

Principles That Create More Customers

Your principles determine your thoughts and your actions. Your customers respond to those principles.

We have developed proven principles that work for today’s customers. One of the most important principles is, “Everything starts with the customer.” This is more than a cliche. It’s a whole way of thinking, and it starts at the top.

Building the Golden Rule into the company requires that the business leader owns that concept and religiously brings people back to that concept, in every discussion, to avoid the pull of the revenue-sucking “seller’s gravity.”

So what questions should you be asking yourself, to make sure that “everything starts with the customer?” How about:

These seemingly “little” roadblocks to revenue are costing you, big time, every single day.

Procedures: The Key to Giving Customers What They Want

Doing onto customers the way they want you to can only be accomplished if your procedures are built on pleasing customers, and are those procedures are well-documented and followed.

Employees left to their own devices may or may not please customers, depending on who they are and how they feel that day. Maybe those cops at United Airlines who beat and then dragged the passenger off the plane were particularly stressed out that day, or stressed by the situation, or didn’t feel they had any other option.

There were certainly better, more customer-pleasing procedures that could have been deployed, such as, “If no customers take you up on the offer, increase the incentive.”

The Golden Rule has been “golden” for so long because it works.

It works for the person who does something good for someone else and feels good doing it.

It works for the recipient, who appreciates the effort and feels that there is hope for the world after all.

And it definitely works in business, because business is really all about people helping people. That’s what your customers want: help.