It’s not that I’m against free webinars. Just cool it with the shouting, all-caps, annoying FREE!. It’s not a differentiator. It’s not unusual. Lead with something else.

You’re not Oprah giving every member of your audience a new car. You’re not giving away free meals, or even free coffee. You’re doing a webinar. They’re almost all free. My email collects 5-10 webinar invitations every day, all of them free. Get over yourself.

I’ve got nothing against free webinars, I present free webinars too. I really like the technology. It’s a great medium. I just really don’t like marketing as if FREE! is something that matters in a webinar.

And, come to think of it, have we not come to an age in which free is so frequently assumed with so many content and expertise offerings that it’s become odd, a bit jarring, to make such a point of it? Free webinars, free blogs, free movies, free radio … all I get when you shout out FREE! is that you’re a bit out of touch.

And, wait a minute … maybe your webinar, or whatever, would be more successful if you gave it a value. Is it worth it?

(Photo credit: Viviamo/Shutterstock)

Sometimes I think the common wisdom on customer service is too common and not all that wise. We oversimplify and we leave the dark side out of the story. Extreme customer service isn’t always good for a business. There’s a dark side to it.

You’ve probably heard this story; I certainly have. It comes up a lot in customer service lore. Some swanky department store’s customer service is so good that they even take back clothes that weren’t purchased there. No receipt required. Even if the store never carried that line.

It may or may not be true. That’s not the point. It might as well be true because it’s customer service bible now, chapter and verse. I read some great stories along these lines in the Heath Brothers’ Made to Stick book (which I reviewed and recommended here, by the way). And I noticed another well-written post by Seth Godin as Win the fight, lose the customer last week too. That’s what brings this to mind. Seth wrote:

Given the choice between acknowledging that your customer is upset or proving to her that she is wrong, which will you choose? You can be right or you can have empathy. You can’t do both.

However, I say it’s not nearly that simple. Extreme customer service has its dark side. Let’s go back to the fable of the swanky department store and look at two problems:

1. It Burns Out Good Employees

Nobody tells the real story of the guy with the jacket in the swanky department store. Just for sake of illustration, assume he’s rude and mean and insulting. He’s berating the poor salesperson and annoying the other customers. He’s talking about the stupid store and the stupid jacket maker and so on (probably using a word stronger than stupid).

The salesperson, meanwhile, notes that the brand is one the store has never carried. She’s dying to say, loud enough for the sympathetic customers around to hear her, “I’m sorry sir, but I know you didn’t buy this jacket here because this store has never carried that brand.” And, after saying that, to send him on his way. “Now please let me attend to customers waiting for my help.” The other customers want that too.

However, because of the lore of extreme customer service, she has to swallow hard, apologize, and process a return. This is bad for her morale, bad for her health, bad for her spirit, and didn’t do much for the store either.

We forget that good employees in good companies come to care about the company and its policies and they don’t like rude people complaining unfairly. When the policy is to swallow hard and comply with any outrageous request, those employees resent it.

And don’t they matter too?

2. Not Everybody is a Customer

Here’s the other thing that bugs me about that story: that mean guy with the jacket isn’t a customer. He didn’t buy it at that store. And after he gets his ego rush with the screaming customer game, is he going to become a customer? No, probably not.

Somewhere in the oversimplified lore of extreme customer service we forget that there is a market segment focus in the extreme customer service. It depends on good customers. It doesn’t work when you take bad customers, who won’t ever be good customers (is the jacket guy going to be shopping at Swanky Department Store in the future? No, lets just say he isn’t. So the extreme customer service annoys customers, stresses employees, and does no long-term good.

Don’t you think that as humans we have a built-in instinct that wants fairness? That resents unfair demands and having to give into them? I do.

Do you think this kind of extreme customer service trains people to be mean, by giving mean people what they ask for, unfair or not? Should we worry that reasonable people pay more and get less than mean people do, because of our business lore of extreme customer service? I’m just asking.

I just bought Predictably Irrational. I haven’t read it yet, but I had to buy it because I just read Jeff Atwood’s 9 Ways Marketing Weasels Will Try to Manipulate You on Coding Horror. Jeff relates his post and the nine ways to that book. Jeff says:

In fact, it’s already happening. Witness 10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

What the book talks about, according to these posts, is our craziness as consumers with pricing, supply and demand, and behaviors that don’t really make sense, but happen all the time.

• There is a cost to free, for example. When a truffle costs 15 cents and a chocolate kiss only 1 cent, 73 percent of us choose the truffle, and only 27 percent the kiss. When the kiss is free and the truffle 14 cents, 69 percent of us choose the kiss.
• Most of us will go out of our way to save $7.00 on a $25 pen, by driving to another store for instance. But almost nobody will drive to a different store to save $7.00 on a $455 suit. Why not? It’s the same $7? (And this one bugs me, because I absolutely know I follow that pattern, and it makes sense to me.).
• We’re much more likely to do something altruistically, for the public good, than if somebody pays us.
• We can be manipulated by expectations. Tell us the meal is gourmet, make it expensive, and we’re more likely to think it’s good than if we say it’s cheap but convenient.

And the conclusion, which makes Jeff Atwood uncomfortable, is the sense of “marketing weasels” manipulating us. Or, the less aggressive sense of it, how marketers can capitalize on consumers’ irrational behavior. I have trouble with all this, because it seems like really good stuff for running a business, but I don’t want to see a weasel when I look in the mirror.

What if the question was: what’s the best book about marketing to read and recommend? And the answer was: read this compilation: Top 250 Blog Posts – Advertising, Marketing, Media and PR Spotlight Ideas. How things have changed. 

Not Kotler’s Principles of Marketing, not Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing, not even Jay Conrad Levinson’s Guerilla Marketing. But read the 250 posts included in this top 250 posts list at SpotlightIdeas, and you’d have a marketing education.

The posts are divided into meaningful categories, and include a highlights list of best bloggers in any of these marketing-related topics. Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Leo Babuta, Robert Scoble, and many other generally-recognized blogging leaders.

Is this funny, or just annoying? It’s an alleged comment to one of my posts on this blog. And get this: the same comment also appeared, word for word, on another post on my Up and Running blog on entrepreneur.com. Two different posts, but the identical comment, as follows:

Great post, I agree. I think a great addition that might help others would be learning how to outsource. It’s really helped my business. I found a free outsourcing mini coarse and I learned a lot from it. It’s amazing what you can do when you can hire someone for $4 per hour to help you run your business.

And it has a URL, that I haven’t included, because I don’t want to promote it. A link that people are supposed to click to take part in the “amazing” gains of hiring someone for $4 per hour to be you. And I didn’t approve the comment, so don’t look for it, you won’t find it.

• Re: “Great post, I agree.” Oh come on, how dumb do you think I and normal readers are? How obvious is that?
• Re: “free outsourcing mini coarse.” I guess it doesn’t include spelling.
• Re: hiring someone for $4 per hour to run your business. Yeah, you just put this comment on a post about how social media requires authenticity, which is hard to leverage. And on another post about overused words in advertising. I can see how that’s working for you.

Still, that’s a poorly executed waste of time commenting on blog strategy, which, I sincerely hope, will never work for you.

This is a simple two-minute video that makes a very powerful point about how fundamentals can change, evolve, and yet, still remain as fundamentals. It was produced by the Business Marketing Association for its 2009 national conference.

I’m told that part of it is a remake of a classic McGraw-Hill “Man in the Chair” commercial from a couple generations ago. I’ll take their word for it. I think the whole thing works.

And if you don’t see it, you can click here for the YouTube original.

For more information on BMA’s “UNlearn” conference and to see the original “Man in the Chair” ad, go to http://www.marketing.org/conference and http://www.marketing.org/images/Mcgra…

Very good reminder here about the way words get diluted, and then useless. In my early days in the PC industry all software was supposedly “user friendly.” And that phrase ended up mocking, humorous, a caricature of hype.

In this same vein, Steve McKee writes Five Words to Never Use in an Ad in BusinessWeek. And they aren’t what I would have thought, but, as soon as I think about it, he makes a great point.

The words? Well, for example, he finds the same underlying problem with “quality,” “value,” “service,” and “caring.”

The above four words all fail for essentially the same reasons. Not only are they overused, they’re based on variables that will be different for everyone. There’s a quality/value/service/caring continuum in each person’s mind for every purchase occasion, and it is a continually moving target.

And the fifth word, “integrity,” is one that you have or you don’t; and you don’t get by proclaiming it.

A company either has integrity or it doesn’t. It’s either honest or it isn’t. And most people give companies the benefit of the doubt in believing that they operate with integrity. When a company talks about integrity in its advertising it’s for one of two reasons, neither one of them good: They’re either trying to cover up some lack of integrity (which never works) or they’re implying they live by a higher standard than their competition. That’s impolite, to say the least. Every company needs to have integrity. No company needs to advertise it.

I agree.

You know who you are. You hate selling, but here you are, making your way as entrepreneur, having to sell or sink.

Me? I’m a terrible salesperson. I’m also bad at networking, cocktail parties, and small talk with people I don’t know. Do I seem stuck up, aloof? Not really, just awkward.

I’m probably still scarred from my miserable failure at selling encyclopedias when I was in high school. I spent all summer, never made a sale, never managed to convince even a single person that I was really conducting an educational survey, and not selling encyclopedias. That miserable summer might have been what led me to hippiedom, way back when … but that’s a separate story.

And yet, hating to sell or not, I sold myself to business clients well enough to support a big family on my business plan consulting for 15 or so years, while simultaneously starting to build Palo Alto Software as a product business.

And I’ve had the privilege of working with and watching some greats in this category. I watched, and I learned. It comes down to 5 points:

1. Really listen

Really. Shut up for a bit and listen to the other person. No, don’t half listen while your mind races ahead to the next point. Really listen, and absorb what they’re saying. I like this quote in a Time magazine interview with Larry King:

I never learned anything while talking.

2. Empathize

There’s no way to avoid it: you have to actually feel what this other person is feeling. Jump into their skin, or into their head, and look out from inside their head at the rest of the world. My mother used to call it putting yourself into the other person’s shoes. My sister-in-law used to say “borrow my eyes and see through them for a while.” See if you can imagine how he or she feels and he or she sees it. What experiences have they had which led to that point of view?

There’s no substitute for empathy. It’s the most important quality in business.

3. Always tell the truth

Lies come out, in the short term or long. Even plausible lies are time bombs.

When asked questions you shouldn’t answer — it happens; in the software business, for example, some questions about platforms and programming code and such — just tell the truth, and say you don’t feel comfortable answering that question. Explain why not.

When asked questions about weak points or flaws, answer them. You’ll gain some credibility and avoid the long-term loss you risk if you lie and your customer finds out later.

Your credibility, which is inseparable from your integrity, is the key to long-term relationships.

4. Solve the other person’s problem

One of my favorite things when I used to take sales calls, from back when my company was just starting up to just a few years ago (even as president, I used to grab the sales phone on random calls a few times a month), was to recommend a competitor’s product instead of our own. It went something like this:

“If you want a business plan just because you need a stack of papers on a banker’s desk in two days, and nobody’s really going to read it, then you don’t want our product. Ours likes you to think. You want __________.” Ours doesn’t write any text for you, it’s not fill in the blanks …

And I would end up giving them the toll-free number of a competitor. There was great satisfaction in that. And, in the long term, it’s good for the business. People see that you realize what your product is good at, and that other products might be better at different things.

I’ve seen our best salespeople do it over and over: they listen, empathize, and solve the other person’s problem either with our own product or by suggesting something else, that isn’t ours, that will solve the problem. We’re dealing with humans here; not everybody is a potential sale. Some of those people whose problems we can’t solve now will come back to us later, when they have a problem we can solve.

5. Grow thick skin

The first person who ever worked for Palo Alto Software as a full-time salesperson was amazingly persistent. He would leave voice messages for key gatekeeper people once a day for months, without ever getting a returned phone call. And, at least in several key accounts, those months of unanswered phone calls eventually got him — and our product — in the door.

Yes, I know, it’s somewhat contradictory to include empathy and thick skin in the same post. If you really empathized with the people who ignore messages, you might not persist in calling back. But business and life is full of paradox. I can’t resolve this one.

What’s wrong with having some fun with labels and packaging? Nothing that I’m aware of. Although BusinessWeek doesn’t seem to like it.

My wife and one of my daughters came home one Sunday afternoon with a bottle of Shiraz from Virgin Vines. This is what it said on the label:

Dare to enjoy this wine without dashes of pretentiousness or hints of snootiness. Virgin Vines believes that wine should be all about having fun and loving the taste … not waxing poetically about meaningless wine-speak and food pairings. Simply drink this big, bold red with something or someone you find delicious.

p.s. If you feel the need to describe this wine as “full bodied with great legs,” we suggest you lie down until the feeling passes.”

I like the approach, but not everybody does. I did a quick search, and discovered Virgin Vines Says It’s Hip to be Dumb in BusinessWeek. What, wine sacrilege? They say:

But as increasingly clever marketers find success with simple, compelling labels — think Yellow Tail and Marilyn Merlot — they’re discovering another way appeal to the $10-wine buyer: Make fun of the $30-and-up buyers. Think about how Rush Limbaugh talks about liberals, and you get the idea.

Not fair. Rush Limbaugh should approach liberals the way this label approaches wine snobs.

I picked this up while browsing Seth Godin’s recent post over the weekend. He had it here, as part of a riff on the new world of commercial advertising on YouTube. Good post too, but I ended up thinking this Dove commercial on YouTube deserves special attention.

(If you don’t see the video, click here for the YouTube source.)

I assume you’re aware of how much we distort the supposedly ideal beauty in women. I am. But we forget. This is a bad thing. It hurts people, both women and men, and we should remind ourselves frequently.