Four Agreements for Improving Client Relationships Enterprise AL

In his book The Four Agreements, shamanic teacher and healer Don Miguel Ruiz captures the essence of the human spirit and presents a wonderfully simple, yet effective, code of personal conduct learned from his ancestors. The four agreements one should make with one's self are the following:

1) Be impeccable with your word
2) Don't take anything personally
3) Don't make assumptions
4) Always do your best

While Don Miquel Ruiz's book is one of a spiritual journey (if you are up for a challenge read it; be forewarned it will probably bring you more than one reading to understand the book), his principles and his advice can be used more literally in our business as a guide to interacting with one's customers.

As I (and others before me) have so profoundly stated before, running a profitable business in this industry requires that you spend less than you take in. A lot of what you end up spending has to do with properly managing the relationship with all of your clients, at all times. Every company/client relationship goes through various phases from start to finish of a project. Sometimes the client is in control, sometimes the actual process of what needs to happen is in control, sometimes other consultants and/or the builder is in control and once in a while the custom installation company is in control. The more times the ball swings into your court, where you and your company are choreographing and scripting what happens, the greater the chance that you will end up with a happy client and more money in your pocket. Here are, in my opinion, the Four Agreements of Client Relationships:

1) Deliver more than what you promise
2) Make everything personal
3) Assume your clients don't know what they want and act accordingly, and
4) Have everyone do better than what they think their "best" really is

"Deliver more than you promise" is one of those beautiful phrases that just rolls off one's tongue and sounds incredibly simplistic. I can already hear many readers sarcastically saying to themselves, "No kidding, just do more than what we promise, huh?" Deep down, we've heard it a thousand times before, the famous, "Under promise and over deliver" spiel from a countless number of CEDIA EXPO business classes. Of the four agreements above, it is by far the most important one by a large factor. Yet, in reality, while we all know deep down that if we actually did do more for our clients than what we said we were going to do, they would be happier, and happier clients generally make better referrers than unhappy clients. But here's the other reality: few companies manage to actually do this in practice, at least on a repeatable level.

My belief is that the core reason as to why delivering more than what one promises is so difficult to do has less to do with the "delivery" side of the equation and more to do with the "promise" part.

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