In my second podcast, discover why I think the easiest, possibly most powerful way to position yourself or your company in the marketplace is to focus obsessively on what ticks people off.

Special thanks to The Autumn Film for jazzing it up with the tunes – you can download four free songs from their most recent album at http://theautumnfilm.com/share, and you can follow them on Twitter.

Transcript of “Don’t tick people off

Today, I want to discuss why I think not ticking people off represents a tremendous secret for being successful in business, marketing, sales, and your career.

There are literally thousands of books about marketing, career development, how to be successful in business. It seems like everyone is searching for a way to get others excited about what they have to offer. While I wouldn’t claim to be marketing guru, I do think that I’ve managed to cobble together a simple rule that has served me very well and that is simply to not tick people off.

It sounds ridiculous, but it is amazing how few people really understand this, and how few companies understand this either. Almost no one focuses on it with intent.

If you ignore what upsets people, all the other work is meaningless

To show you what I mean, I’d like to tell you a story about a restaurant.

Imagine someone wants to start a restaurant, and they go to the effort of learning how to cook, how to manage a restaurant, how to get the licenses they need. They spend weeks trying to find the right location, and once they do they spend thousands installing the ovens and freezers, the wood stoves, the wine cellars. They hire a chef, they make a menu, they find wait staff, hostesses, and busboys. They get the place inspected. They get a yellow page ad, radio ads, and a website.

And they finally open the doors and people start to come in. And what is the experience the customers have?

They have to sit in a chair waiting for a table for a half hour or hour, or more. They finally get seated at a cramped table looking at the bathroom or the kitchen. They wait another 15 minutes for the waiter, who finally arrives with some cold, stale bread and hard, cold butter. As they’re eating, their water isn’t refilled. When they finish their plate, it is immediately taken from them, even though their companions are still working on their meals. They wait a long time to get the check, and when they do get it they discover there was a mandatory gratuity added because they had five people.

At the end of that meal, it doesn’t matter that the restaurant owner did all the work to get them in the door. Their experience is a poor one. And even if that restaurant survives, I would argue that it is just surviving. They’re never going to become what they could have become, because they didn’t focus their attention on not ticking people off.

There are consistent things that tick people off in any industry

This probably just sounds like a bunch of cliches about poor restaurant service thrown together. But that’s exactly my point – it’s a cliche because it is so common. Most restaurant owners don’t make it a passion of theirs to not tick people off – and neither do folks who own companies in most industries. In most businesses, we know similar cliches.

What ticks people off about mechanics? They try to convince you that you need that expensive repair that you don’t need.

What about a doctor’s office? You have an appointment, but you still have to site there for 45 minutes.

What about airplanes? Used car salesman? Attorneys? Dentists?

In any industry, there are likely things, that are consistent, that tick people off. And most business owners pay absolutely no attention to them. The same is often true for people working in a company.

What ticks people off about a tech guy? They act like you’re stupid whenever you ask a question, because they’re the only ones who know how to fix tech issues.

What ticks people off about salespeople? They embellish the truth, or outright lie, in order to close a deal and get their commission, and then hope that the company can live up to the promises they make.

What about managers? They’re disconnected, they don’t understand the real issues of the company, they’re too busy writing reports and sitting in meetings, and ignore the issues you’re dealing with.

And the crazy thing is that all of these people spent their entire lives to get where they’re at. They went to college, maybe got a graduate degree, worked their way up the ladder… and yet most people don’t consider them great at what they do. And the reason is likely because they tick people off.

Why not ticking people off is such a huge opportunity

I hope you understand what I mean, and why I think it’s exciting. I think if you learn to focus on this, it represents a huge secret for getting ahead in business, or in your career.

To illustrate how this can change the way you do things in a dramatic way, let’s play a quick game of “what if?”

What if you went to a restaurant that did focus on what ticks people off? What if you went there and they sat you down immediately, even if you didn’t have a reservation? What if they thought about the placement of every table and what it would be like to sit there, making sure that no seat was too hot or too cold, had a nice view of outside or of other people? What if they greeted you promptly? What if you had warm bread brought to your table immediately, that felt like it was right out of the oven, along with soft butter that was easy to spread? What if they put an old wine bottle full of water on the table so you could fill your water up yourself whenever you wanted? What if they had beautiful, clean bathrooms? What if they didn’t take your plate until you were done, and let you stay as long as you wanted, but then gave you your check promptly when you were ready to settle up?

In other words, what if they went through every single cliche they could think of about what ticks people off about going to a restaurant, and then systematically (meaning they developed a consistent, reliable system) developed processes that alleviated those pain points?

What would happen if there was no wait at a doctor’s office?

What if a mechanic didn’t just try to sell you stuff you didn’t need but gave you real options? What if they told you that yeah, your air filter’s dirty, but honestly you can wait 6 months before you really need to do anything about it? How refreshing would that be?

What if in your company, your salespeople worked hand in hand with your team and only pitched work when they were confident the company could deliver it on time and on budget, in an exceptional way?

What if your IT folks were actually helpful and proactive? What if they weren’t condescending, but actually went around and gave you pointers or have lunch and learns about how to user your machines more effectively?

What if a manager in your company spent one day each month doing the dirty work in the business? Or spent the day in the department talking about your frustrations and really looking for ways to alleviate them?

Lenscrafters knew what ticked people off, and built a business around it

This isn’t just philosophical – there are smart companies that actually did this.

Lenscrafters built their entire company around alleviating what ticks people off. At the time, when you had to get your eyeglasses fixed, you had to wait. You had to make an appointment, get your eyes checked, go back to look at frames and pick out the styles you wanted, back and forth over and over again. And they thought, “what if you didn’t have to spend weeks going around borderline blind, getting into traffic accidents? What if you could get your lenses in about an hour?”

And so they figured out how to do that – and at first they had no idea. But they knew if they could figure that out, they’d solve a problem that ticks thousands of people off all the time. So they moved the lab to the store – the figured out it was silly to have the lab somewhere else. And they put the store inside a shopping mall, so you could do some shopping during lunch and didn’t have to wait inside the store.

It sounds obvious now, but no one thought aggressively about this at the time. Lenscrafters developed a system around solving a simple problem and turned it into a multimillion dollar business.

Unfortunately there are so few companies that get this. If you were able to develop a reputation for being able to solve the consistent, most obvious problems that upset people in your industry, I would argue that you’d never be out of a job, and you’d never be out of customers.

Four easy steps to not tick people off

When people ask me what they should do to position their companies or how they should focus their personal careers, the first thing I ask them is “what ticks people off about doing business with someone like you?” I think there are 4 steps to doing something like this:

1. Figure out what ticks people off in your industry
2. Figure out how to avoid it, through a deliberate process of innovation and quantification of results.
3. Once you know how to solve the problem, develop and document a system that lets anyone in your company do it consistently, every single time.
4. Use this as your point of differentiation, communicating how you solve the problem in a clear, compelling way.

In my mind, the easiest way to develop a position in your company or your career is to focus on this simple question, and to follow the four steps above to make it happen.