3. Stage One: Imagination Before Persuasion

“MEN WANTED for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.” —Ernest Shackleton, 4 Burlington Street

As the story goes, this ad was placed in London newspapers in the early 1900s. The story claimed that the ad generated at least 5,000 responses from men and women of all ages ready to embark on the adventure of a lifetime. The ad’s response was a catalyst for claiming its spot in a book titled The 100 Greatest Advertisements of All Time.¹ The ad was supposedly written by an Arctic explorer named Ernest Shackleton. Unfortunately, the ad might be a myth. It may have never even been published. One website has devoted the past 15 years to trying to find a copy of the advertisement and put up a $100 cash bounty for anyone who can find it.² Dozens of Internet sleuths have searched the microfiche archives of hundreds of newspapers and nobody has yet to locate it. I’d suggest increasing the bounty, but we’ll come back to this ad shortly.

Sales, marketing, and loyalty experts are continuously talking about the traditional customer journey. We’ve already spoken about this in the previous section. All too often, those experts view the first two or three parts of the traditional customer lifecycle as the most important, but then fail to focus enough (and sometimes any) attention on the additional steps (and perhaps the most important steps in helping us maximize profits and revenue for our organizations).

Talented marketers, expert copywriters, salespeople, user-experience wizards, growth hackers, and so on almost all exclusively focus the majority of their efforts on taking from the customer from a point of interest, to getting the customer to hand over a bundle of cash. If they’ve reached that point, then the job is complete. And as I continue harping at you, the job is never complete!

We’ve all heard the dusty, old chestnut that it cost as much as 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. One of the problems with presenting new and existing customers this way is that it undervalues the process of trying to keep an existing customer. Making it a binary brain issue—new customers vs. existing ones—and showing how much it takes to get the new customer is likely to result in actually minimizing the customer retention effort. However, an existing customer is a new customer; these two categories are a false division because they are not alternatives—they are the same person, just at a different stage of the process! It’s a bit like a medical practice putting all of its efforts into diagnosing people and hardly any into treating them. Another problem with the false division between new and existing customers, and in particular the statement that it costs 5 times as much to acquire a customer as it does to keep them, is that nobody ever tells us how to make the existing customer 5 times more profitable. But I did. And not to toot my own horn, but this was covered in great detail in my previous book, Evergreen. There I espoused not just a strategic framework that would allow companies to understand better who they are, who they’re doing it for, and how to nurture and cultivate deeper, more meaningful, and more profitable customer relationships, but the main point was really about creating a mind-set shift. This mind-set shift focused on the fact that companies are spending enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources on hunting for new business as opposed to caring for and nurturing the customer from the point of the first contact to a long and fruitful life doing business with your company.

To take things to the next level, it begins with the Customer Loyalty Loop and understanding the psychology of the new customer experience.

Customer Archetypes

Throughout the book, we talk about why tactical persuasion tactics will only get us so far. If you want to succeed in Stage One of the loyalty loop, there is nothing more important than truly understanding who your buyers are so that you can create marketing and messaging that speaks to them directly. In Stage Two, you need to know their wants, fears, and desires so you can properly remove resistance from the sale. In Stage Three, it’s incredibly important to make the actual customer experience as personal and meaningful as you can. It’s a bit of a fun exercise, but it’s incredibly telling. I’ve done this exercise with executive teams, CEOs, and sales and marketing people. Almost always, we find that people know more about the people they watch on television after work than the people they are charged with serving on a daily basis. If you want to master the loyalty loop, it’s incredibly important to know your ideal customer inside and out.

At my recent Evergreen Summit, I asked a group of executives to explain, in detail, a favorite TV character. At first, they looked at me in bewilderment, but then they took part. For two minutes, heads were down as people crafted incredibly detailed descriptions of Walter White from Breaking Bad, Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm, Charlie from Two and a Half Men, and others. I asked someone to share what they had written, and a highly successful CEO went on to explain Walter White in incredible detail. He told where he worked, what kind of car he drove, what color hair he had, what his struggles were, what his family was like, and so on. The list went on and on. Others in the room also wrote incredibly detailed narratives describing their favorite characters. When they were done, I asked the group to flip over their paper and write a detailed narrative of their ideal customer. The participants got down to work, but I could see instantly this was a lot harder than it looked. Finally, one attendee blurted out, “Okay, Noah! Point taken!” Everyone laughed, but nearly everyone agreed that it was much easier to write a description of our favorite TV character than writing a description of our ideal customers. But why is that? It should be the other way around. This is a fabulous exercise to do with both your sales, marketing, and customer-facing employees.

If it were evident that your people need a lot of help in this area, then I would urge you to spend time learning more about your customer archetypes. If you found that your people genuinely have a good idea of who your customers are and what’s important to them, then go ahead and skip to the next exercise. There is nothing more valuable than a comprehensive, thorough, deeply psychological and emotional understanding of your entire customer base. You need to understand how to reach each type of customer, what resonates with them, and how to speak to them. You can only find the ones you want if you know what you’re looking for. The Walter White exercise is a great way to see if your people truly understand the customers they are serving. It’s important to the entire experience as it guides people on how to effectively communicate with your customers.

Meaningful, Memorable, and Personal

One of the underlying assumptions of all great customer service delivery and exceeding customer’s expectations is to understand the power of personalization in a world gone mad with automation and cost-cutting, and how to balance that personalization with the automation of the right elements of your business to maximize the impact of that personal touch. The customer experience must be meaningful, memorable, and personal. Too many companies drop the ball when it comes to providing experiences that are personalized, positive, and consistent. Today more than ever, larger organizations are tapping into large amounts of data to provide these more “individualized” experiences. All companies of all sizes need to recognize the power of ensuring that experiences are personalized, positive, and consistent. Even something as simple as sending a letter to a longtime customer that reads, “Dear Valued Customer,” can create feelings of resentment with that longstanding customer. Is the customer truly valued? Was your call really important to them? Organizations need to be mindful of how the experience starts and how the experience ends as two key opportunities to influence the mind of a new customer and one that becomes a loyal customer.

Are there easy ways to increase customer satisfaction? According to research, there are. In a study done with waiters at a restaurant, they were able to significantly increase their tips, showing that customers felt better about the service, through a very simple strategy. The waiters would bring table mints and, some time later, they would come by the table again and offer more mints, in case the people at the table wanted more. This alone increased tipping by 23 percent.

What does this study show us? It suggests that offering a more personalized and careful attention to the customers, even when this is expressed through small things like offering more mints, can significantly increase customer satisfaction.

There are a couple of ways in which the study is relevant for the Customer Loyalty Loop. First, it shows that small details, such as free bonuses, personalized attention, and follow-ups, among other things, can significantly increase customer satisfaction, increasing their loyalty as well. Second, it shows the importance of showing concern for the customer’s needs in a noninvasive manner. In this case, the waiter came to offer more mints because he wondered if the table needed more. For the customer, that shows that the waiter took them into consideration and showed some concern for their needs, making the service that they received far more personal, even if it was only done at the end of the meal.

In general, this study suggests that by showing concern for and attention to the customer even through small details, customer service can be significantly improved, raising customer loyalty and satisfaction. For example, after someone buys, consider calling them to thank them. Simple. Don’t forget the power of handwritten notes. Hardly anyone is using it, and it always generates a wonderful response.

If someone books a stay at your hotel, instead of e-mailing them a confirmation letter, call them to follow up. If someone has purchased something from you, or you’ve installed something at their place of business, stop by every once and a while and check it out.

Finally, depending on what type of business you’re in, categorize your clients even further. Make note of their interests personally and professionally. Here’s what I mean. For me, it’s simple; I usually take on about six to eight large projects a year, keeping my client base relatively small at any one time. I have a number of coaching, mentoring, and speaking clients, but the larger projects I’m engaged in are manageable to the point I know a lot about each one of their businesses. I’ll routinely capture and maintain articles, stories, and things I find that might be of interest to that client. I’ll maintain a file and send them once a month. I’m not suggesting everyone gets something monthly, but if I have a client in the funeral industry and see an interesting piece of content in the New York Times on that specific industry, I’ll clip the article and/or forward it with a brief, personal note. “Shawn, this is interesting as it related to the work we’re doing with your sales team. What are your thoughts?” It’s meaningful, memorable, and personal. There’s nothing malicious about this; it’s pure added value. It might be impossible to scale this to hundreds or thousands or millions of customers, but it doesn’t need to be. I have another client who has a keen interest in fishing—so do I. I’m constantly sending him interesting things I see, and he appreciates it.

Think about what you’d like your customers to be saying about your business.

The New Customer Experience

In the first stage, we start with the beginnings—before the sale. This is the first time the customer is exposed to your brand or the moment the idea of your company is first planted in their head. This is counterintuitive for many, but the Customer Loyalty Loop starts long before the sale has ever been made. It starts from the very first time a prospect is exposed to your sales, marketing, and advertising efforts. It’s that first time they read an ad in a London newspaper that stops them completely in their tracks and makes them say, “Sign me up for that adventure!” It’s the first time they open their mailbox to find a brochure from your firm. It’s the first time they find you via a Google search. It’s the first time they’re told by a trusted colleague that they need to implement your enterprise software solution or your sales approach. The impressions and the memories of these initial encounters with your product are the platforms on which all subsequent actions are based. This stage becomes all about the behavior of the customer, understanding how our actions align with how they’re feeling, and more important, how they’re making decisions. We begin by asking ourselves questions like, “How can I better understand what is happening at this point, and how can I use that information to improve my sales and marketing efforts?”

In Stage One, the real secret is about learning how to tell your story in a way that implants a positive movie into the potential customer’s head and makes them want to maintain their interest in you and ultimately do business with your company.

There are some ways we can accomplish this proactively, and we’ll discuss a few of them. Also, I’ll discuss the science behind why this works and provide action steps so you can look at your efforts at this stage and make immediate improvements.

One of the ways we can accomplish this is through a concept called preemptive marketing.

Preemptive Marketing

One of the greatest marketing breakthroughs of our time came from a strategist by the name of Claude Hopkins.³ Here are two crazy things you might not know about this: One, this sales and marketing breakthrough occurred back in 1919, and two, it’s hardly ever used today, even though it’s more relevant than ever with the rise of social media and new tools for digital storytelling. It’s one of the most powerful marketing techniques you could ever employ. Further to that, it’s crucial in the first stage of the loyalty loop. Here’s the story.

The Schlitz beer company needed help. In the late 1800s, Schlitz became known as the beer that put Milwaukee on the map, but after the turn of the century, the sales for Schlitz began to drop. They were getting crushed and losing market share in an increasingly competitive marketplace. They felt that they had a fantastic product, but it was becoming harder and harder to compete because everyone was selling the same product. The product became commoditized, or so they assumed, but they knew they needed help, so they took the plunge and hired a fantastic consultant by the name of Claude Hopkins. A quick note of shameless self-promotion here: it’s important to hire great consultants. (Like me!)

Hopkins was the Don Draper of his time. He traveled to the Schlitz factory to meet the executives and toured the facilities. As the executives took him on what was probably a pretty standard tour of the brewing facility, Hopkins was amazed at everything he saw. For example, he noted that the factory sat on the edge of one of the Great Lakes, where water flowed into four large basins, feeding the plant with an endless supply of clean water. As the tour continued, he was shocked at the love and care that went into producing what had seemingly become an undifferentiated commodity. Schlitz, for example, showed Hopkins its research center where the company was performing thousands of experiments on yeasts to perfect the quality and purity of the final product. He saw the bottle-cleaning area, where bottles were washed a minimum of 12 times to remove all the impurities from the bottle, resulting in the best-quality beer they could produce. He noted that many of the scientific testing areas were encased in glass with air purification filters and workers adorned with lab coats. All of this was done to protect the product from impurities getting into the beer. When Hopkins finished the tour, he was stunned and asked the executives, “Why aren’t you telling your customers about this?” And they responded, “Because all beer is made this way.” Hopkins thought for a moment and said, “You’re right, but nobody is telling the public about this.”

Almost every product and service is a commodity to an extent. There’s very little differentiation between most products and services. In fact, most companies sell products that are very close in quality, at similar prices, to a similar audience, using similar advertising. In a nutshell, companies do struggle to differentiate themselves.

Hopkins recognized the power of telling your story before anyone else could in a way that stoked a fire inside your prospect’s mind. Jay Abraham, one of the greatest marketing experts of our time, has called this the concept of preemptive marketing.⁴ Preemptive marketing is about everything that happens before the sale—the ability to implant a story in the customer’s mind, before persuading them to buy. While most companies are waiting for prospects who are ready to buy, preemptive marketing is about building the trust, the relationship, and story long before your competitors have even had a chance to influence the potential customer. This creates an unfair competitive advantage, and it’s available for you to use right now. Hopkins went on to create messaging for Schlitz around the concept of purity. Every beer manufacturer was calling their beer pure. But what Hopkins did was different. What he did was explain why and how the beer was pure. For example, one ad explained that the Schlitz’s brown bottle provided an extra level of security against sunlight, which would spoil beer in lighter bottles. Were others using brown bottles? Sure, but nobody else was explaining why. Another ad urged consumers to ask their doctor about the purity of Schlitz beer—because “He knows the importance of purity.”⁵

What does science tell us about preemptive marketing, and why does it work? Is there any research to back up why preemptive marketing has an impact? For this, we look to the work of one of my favorite social psychologists and his work on happiness. A Harvard social psychologist and author of the book Stumbling on Happiness,⁶ Dan Gilbert provides us with an interesting insight as to why this works, the way it does, and how we can further take advantage of preemptive marketing. Gilbert says that “people believe everything they read or hear—whether truth, fiction, or outright lie—when they first read it or hear it. It is only afterward they may come to disbelieve it.” In a nutshell, people believe everything at least for a second. Preemptive marketing allows you to be first to plant a story in the customer’s mind, and it’s a powerful concept we can all use. That’s not to say we’re planting truth, fiction, or outright lies, but we can be in charge of telling our story and ensuring it’s the one that differentiates us from our competitors. More so, the repeated use of those stories makes everything even more believable.

Think of the concept of preemptive marketing as your opportunity to plant the seed of imagination and a memory inside your prospective customer’s head before your competitors even have a chance at getting their attention. Too many branding, advertising, and marketing companies are obsessed with trying to get some moment of awareness through all that noise. They talk about eyeballs! We need more eyeballs—more eyeballs! A far more effective route is to carefully consider the memory you want to implant and work toward doing that. To do this, you need a story and that story needs to be compelling enough for the prospect to pay attention.

Consider the following thought experiment. Put yourself back in London in the early 1900s and you’re reading the newspaper. You’re flipping through while sipping your morning tea. The sound of your favorite British police sirens (eee arr, eee arr, eee arr!) can be heard in the distance. There’s a cool breeze coming through the window. As you quickly flip through the classifieds only glancing at the page, something catches your eye. You spot the Shackleton ad we discussed at the start of this chapter. An ad that’s only 26 words long, just slightly too long for Twitter, with no fancy graphics, just plain text, but one that stops you in your tracks. This advertisement accomplished what many of the ads in that newspaper were likely unable to achieve. It got your attention by planting a story in your head—a story of adventure, the unknown, the ability to become a hero and a legend. We can get our prospect’s attention in a lot of ways, and that’s why attention is an inadequate label that comes from the traditional lifecycle—because attention is in short supply. You can whack a hammer on a desk to get someone’s attention. You can say something provocative and edgy, and that might do it. But there is a far more effective way, and that’s to get the attention that matters.

We have a window of opportunity to plant the seed of memory and to tell a story. Stories are emotional, and they create a reaction. That’s what Shackleton did with this ad, and that’s what Hopkins did with Schlitz beer.

Why does this work?

Think about how you would have reacted if you had seen the ad. You would have created images in your mind about what an expedition like this would be like. It would have likely encouraged you to have images of adventure, danger, challenge, heroism, and achievement. Note that the ad threw out a few ideas like danger and honor and let you, the reader, do the rest. In other words, the ad made you make up your story by giving you a few keywords. Moreover, not only did it spell out what the job was—a dangerous expedition—it spelled out the “why” of the job—honor and accomplishment, with a little heroism thrown in for good measure.

The ad also plays on several cognitive biases. One of these is the fear of loss. The ad specified “men wanted” but it didn’t mention how many. Clearly this wasn’t intended for everyone, and there would surely be competition for places, despite, or perhaps because of, the difficult conditions and low pay. In fact, the ad implies that only a special sort of man could make the cut—those who didn’t mind the danger, difficult conditions, and were more interested in adventure and honor rather than money. In a subtle way, it defined an in-group, and which self-respecting man wouldn’t want to be part of it?

Moreover, the fact that the pay is low can be seen as an advantage. This job is about adventure and honor, and no amount of money can buy that. If it were a standard position, the low pay would be a disadvantage, but here it just highlights the special qualities and real appeal of the opportunity.

Also, this is likely to be the first time you have seen a job like this advertised and as such “anchors” all your future exposure to similar ads. So, let’s suppose the next day you saw an ad for an expedition to another part of the world; you would automatically recall this original ad, which would influence your thinking and your decision about the new one.

As you can see, there are some important factors that impact the power of preemptive marketing. But what if there was another powerful tool that we could use, one that could dramatically impact the customer experience before it even happens? Well, it turns out there is, and that’s the concept of anticipated memories.

A Simple Thought Experiment

Do the following thought experiment with me: I want you to think about your last vacation. I don’t mean your last business trip, but a real, relaxing vacation.

Perhaps you traveled to the Caribbean, where you spent your days lounging on the white sandy beaches of Aruba. Maybe you set sail on an Alaskan cruise, where your time was spent enjoying the sights of the Alaskan snow-capped mountains, or enjoying hot coffee on the ship’s balcony while watching moose and grizzly bear wandering the riverbed or the occasional bald eagle sighting. Perhaps the days passed by as you toured the vineyards of the Bordeaux region of France, sipping some of the finest wines your lips have ever tasted. I want you to close your eyes for a moment and take it all in.

Take as long as you need.

Try to remember the sights, the smells, and the feeling of the breeze on your skin. Remember the tastes of foods you tried for the first time, or the sand between your toes. Come back when you’re done. Don’t worry; I’ll still be here.

In the few short moments it took you to complete that exercise, something fascinating happened inside your mind. It was something so profound, so powerful, and yet highly applicable to your business. What just happened, within seconds, inside that blob of jelly in your head, can drastically change how business is conducted and how organizations operate. What just happened has significant ramifications on your ability to market your business effectively, maximize customer value, and build intense customer loyalty.

Now here’s something even more interesting! If you didn’t close your eyes and do the exercise that I told you to do, you still, technically, completed the task.

Here’s what I mean.

What happened with an almost incalculable speed is that your brain just processed through billions of tiny bits of information in an attempt to piece together a memory of your last vacation. Scientists or neurologists call this the process of recall or retrieval. Your brain used bits, pieces, and fragments of your entire vacation—whatever pieces it could pull together quickly—to create a few mental images of your last trip, snapshots if you will.

If you did complete the exercise, then you undoubtedly remembered a few very distinct and memorable things about your trip, and you could probably see certain moments replayed in your head. Your journey might have been last week—and the memories are still really fresh, or it might have been three years ago (if so, you need to take more time off!). It really doesn’t matter; the same thing happened.

Now you might be wondering, “How can my recent trip to the beach exponentially change the way my organization operates?” Or perhaps you’re curious how your memory can help you create a more profitable company. Then again, maybe you’re just thinking, “Noah, what on earth does my last vacation have to do with customer experience, customer service, and customer loyalty?” I want to show you how with a simple understanding of anticipated memories, you can create an almost unfair advantage when it comes to maximizing your company’s potential. But before we do that, we need to look at one of the most fascinating medical studies ever conducted and its implications to our discussion.

Dr. Martin Seligman, in his classic book Authentic Happiness, writes about an experiment involving colonoscopies:

682 patients were randomly assigned to either the usual colonoscopy or to a procedure in which one extra minute was added on at the end, but with the colonoscope not moving. A stationary colonoscope provides a less uncomfortable final minute than what went before, but it does add one extra minute of discomfort. The added minute means, of course, that this group gets more total pain than the routine group. Because their experience ends relatively well, however, their memory of the episode is much rosier and, astonishingly, they are more willing to undergo the procedure again than the routine group. In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to re-enter it.

Before I tell you why this study is important, listen to this: Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, the author of the New York Times bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow, who we’ve already talked about, coincidentally shared the same study in his own book and when he took the stage at the renowned TED Conference. I have no doubt Seligman’s work influenced Kahneman and vice versa, but it’s more fun to call it a coincidence.

Here we have two psychologists who were attempting to teach us about the inner workings of the human mind. One was studying the brain and happiness, and the other was studying how humans think and make decisions.

Now I already told you this, but I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t play one on the Internet (or in the books I write), but here’s why this matters: both of these psychologists had inadvertently stumbled upon one of the most profound business lessons ever.

Let me explain: These studies show us why customers choose to do business with one company over another. The study also shows us why they continue to do business with a business over time and why they may choose to end the relationship early, or even come back to a business after a length of time.

In a nutshell, they had discovered the secret to not only getting a new customer but how to keep them—two major issues and challenges for any business on the planet.

I’ve shared this fascinating medical study before. But on those occasions, I discussed how we could ensure customer and client relationships ended as positively as possible with our greatest percentage chance of being able to bring a lost customer back through customer reactivation efforts. It wasn’t until I made the connection between Kahneman’s and Seligman’s different takes on the study that I recognized the greater implications of this research.

What this study teaches us is that contrary to the belief of marketing experts, authors, college professors, and consultants everywhere, it is not the customer’s experiences that create a customer for life, or even a repeat customer, but rather it’s the customer’s memory of the experience. Think back to the cognitive biases we discussed earlier where we showed research that suggests that the memory is the experience. It’s not what happened that is critical; it’s the points that we remember that are essential. And those points will be heavily influenced by the strongest emotions we recall. So if the last part of a colonoscopy allows you to experience relief, you will have an overly positive memory of the event because it has been colored by the sense of the relief and the reduction in discomfort. And further to that, it’s not your sales or marketing that gets you a customer in the first place; it’s the imagination of the expected experience your customer has in relation to doing business with you. This relates back to the preemptive marketing we just discussed in the previous section.

Now you might be thinking to yourself, “wait a minute, Noah—what’s the difference between the customer’s experience, and the memory of the experience?” There’s a huge difference. Customer loyalty becomes a function of memory, and as you’ll see, even a great experience can be jaded by the reminder of the wrong memory. We don’t recall a perfect memory; in fact, as one author wrote, “not only are memories capable of being retrieved, they are also capable of being reconstructed.”⁷

So here’s what I’m suggesting: Contrary to industry norms, the most important thing your organization is selling is not a product or service, it’s not the benefit derived, and it’s not even a great customer experience. But rather, it’s the memories created that resonate and stick in your customer’s mind—the ones that remain to be recalled and retrieved at a moment’s whim—before, during, and after the sale! There’s a fascinating distinction between the experience and the memory of the experience.

Here’s what we’ve learned thus far. What we now know is that our brains work insanely hard at breakneck speeds to try to create a mental picture or a memory from billions of bits of information wedged inside the jelly-like blob inside our skulls. Unfortunately, too many organizations are leaving the creation of those mental pictures up to chance. I’m going to show you a way to ensure you’re consistently creating the right memories. From the function of business, sales, marketing, support, and creating a great customer experience, this changes everything.

Kahneman says that we each experience approximately 20,000 moments each day and more than 500 million moments in a 70-year life. Obviously, we can’t remember all those moments in accurate detail or even a small percentage of them. No matter how many times we’re “wowed” by a company, we simply can’t remember them all. Even though our brains are equipped for “big data” and packed with one of the largest storage devices ever to exist, we simply cannot capture and retain everything that we experience. That’s not to say our brains aren’t capable of retaining massive gigabytes of data. Our brains store gargantuan amounts of information—even memories from many years ago, including our childhood.

We can often be reminded of a memory through something as distinct as a smell, or we can often recreate the sense of smell through our own thoughts. For example, I have a distinct memory of what my grandparents’ house smelled like as a child. I can remember spending many hours at their house in my childhood and the combination of my grandmother’s oil paints sprawled out in the kitchen where she worked on her latest masterpiece and the mixing of that smell with the scent of her latest sweets baking in the oven. I can conjure up the memory of that smell in a moment’s notice (they’re coming back to me as I write this) and you can recreate a similar smell too. It’s almost as if the smell is right there in front of your nose. You might have similar memories of the house you grew up in, or the chlorine from the pool where your dad took you every Saturday morning for swimming lessons, or the musty smell of Grandpa’s old Ford, or the locker room at the local hockey rink. It’s the same for the mental images we retain in our minds. I can remember even the smallest nooks and crannies of the house I grew up in, even though I haven’t lived in that house for over 25 years.

But within those flashes of memory, there are millions of moments we simply haven’t retained. And even though I can recreate a mental image of the inside of my childhood bedroom closet, where many hours were spent building forts and trying to avoid an imminent trip to the dentist, with what I feel is an exact certainty, the memories I have aren’t really “exact.”

My mind recreates the images to the best of its ability, piecing together as many of the stored moments as it can to create a memory; but as Elizabeth Loftus showed us, we create false memories too.

Let’s suppose you’re 35 years old at the time you’re reading this book. If not, it’s easy to do the math (take the number of days you’ve lived and multiply by 20,000). If you’re around 35 years old, then and we can assume you’ve already experienced close to 250 million moments in your lifetime! If that’s the case, then what has happened to most of them?

Unfortunately, most of them simply disappear. They’re gone into the ether of history. Sayonara.

When we think about “experience” in our lives (a wedding day, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one—all of which are massively emotional experiences), we still don’t remember every single detail about the experience. We only remember based on whatever was stored in our minds, and those key moments that our brain deemed important to put into safe storage. We simply can’t remember it all. Even then, the recall of memories is never entirely accurate. As we delve further into the book, you’ll learn how to use these concepts to build an even greater competitive advantage for your organization.

For now, it’s important to remember a few key things about Stage One. In this stage, we have the opportunity to introduce who we are as a company to a buyer and stoke the imagination enough that they’re willing to move to the second stage.

Rid the Skeletons From Your Closet

There’s a fantastic book in the world of sales that I’ve pillaged the following ideas from and used it to create incredible discussions with the sales and marketing teams of organizations, including some massive, billion-dollar companies. I like to give credit where credit is due: that book is called No Lie: Truth Is the Ultimate Sales Tool, by Barry Maher. It’s a brilliant and intriguing book that I highly recommend. One of the most fascinating takeaways from that book was that it implies that some of the most powerful marketing and sales efforts in the first and second stage of the loop happen by understanding your own shortcomings and deficiencies. Maher starts the book by explaining that every product, every service, has its potential negatives. He shares the following quote from George Bernard Shaw: “If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you might as well make it dance.” Great salespeople aren’t afraid of those negatives. They don’t stumble over them, and they certainly don’t try to hide them. Great salespeople use potential negatives as selling points; they even brag about them.

To master the initial stages of the Customer Loyalty Loop, you need to fully understand your company’s own failings and shortcomings and make the skeletons dance. Nobody’s products or services are perfect. Even companies like Apple have products and services that are often plagued with problems. Maher says truth is the most powerful selling tool. The book explains that we must make our skeletons dance. When I’m working with a client on the early stages of the loop, we’re looking to discover the shortcomings and areas where we can be more honest about our products and services. Remember, Stage Two is all about removing and reducing existing friction and resistance. Maher says that truth and honesty create credibility and trust. Workshopping the Skeleton Protocol can be an incredibly powerful exercise for your team. Here’s how it works.

Step 1: Become your own most difficult prospect. Get your sales people together and get as honest as you can in relation to your products’ and services’ shortcomings. Just as FedEx did with the Hierarchy of Horrors, be brutally honest with yourself. Dig deep and spend time to understand the pain and discomfort through the eyes of your customer.

Step 2: Take all the negatives and spend time turning them into a positive. This doesn’t mean listing all the positive aspects of your products and services, but ask yourself what’s positive about the negative? For example, if there’s a negative that you’re the most expensive, then ask yourself why that is. What are all the positives for the customer in being most the expensive?

Maher gives examples like this:

Prospect: To be honest, you guys are more expensive than everyone else.

You: Of course we are! And do you know why that is? (Again, this presents a wonderful opportunity to reduce resistance and build your preemptive positioning with the prospect.)

For example, you might offer unparalleled service standards in your industry by guaranteeing someone at the client’s site within 24 hours. You might have promised new parts delivered same-day across the country in the case of a breakdown.

Another example might be that you have the slowest delivery times for your products. That’s likely a negative for many potential customers. But why is it a positive? Perhaps you have less breakage and fewer truck problems.

Maybe your software is old. In the eyes of a potential customer, that might be a negative. But why is it a positive? For example, maybe you can explain, “Which is exactly why our software is so stable: a well-tested, perfected, proven performer with thousands of satisfied customers and all the glitches and compatibility issues worked out.”

Maher’s point is that everyone else will try to use the tactical laws of persuasion to bypass that objection. But a better way, which we’ve discussed in great detail in the loyalty loop, is to earn the trust of that specific customer. This is a fantastic way to do it!

Maher’s book provided a full-length treatment on the Skeleton Protocol, which I’m only glossing over here. If you want to read about the thinking behind it in more depth, I recommend Maher’s work but here’s a simple workshop that I’ve done with dozens of clients to address this specific issue.