100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

There is only one boss: the customer.
—Sam Walton
Our customers are the origin, the originating source,
of all the money we have and all the things we own. It’s not

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the company that pays us, it’s the customer. The company
just passes the customer’s money along to us.
When we take a vacation, it’s important to realize that
the customer has paid for it.
When we send a child to col-
lege, it’s with our customer’s money!
Sam Walton built his Wal-Mart empire knowing that
there was always only one boss: the customer. He believes
that the customer has the power to fire everyone in the
company simply by spending his money somewhere else.
Why not begin motivating our people accordingly? Why
not show our people the joy of treating that customer re-
lationship as a real and genuine friendship? It could be, in
the end, our ultimate competitive advantage.
Without our encouragement as leaders, the customer
tends to fall off the radar screen. Without our asking the
provocative and respectfully encouraging questions of our
people, the customer can even become a “hassle,” or a
“necessary evil” in our lives.
In our zeal to bond with the people who report to us,
we all too often commiserate and sympathize with their
horror stories about how hard it is to please customers,
how customers take advantage of us, why the phone ring-
ing all day is such a problem for time management...and
we agree, and by agreeing, we unknowingly plant the seeds
that allow customers to be treated coldly, stupidly, and in
a very unfriendly way.
And this defeats the whole purpose of business! We’re
even willing to go farther: poor customer relations becomes
the root cause of every business problem we have.
Notice, if you will, how you are treated by the airlines
that are having the biggest financial difficulties and how
you are (almost always—no one’s perfect, yet) treated by
Keep Your People Thinking Friendly...Thoughts

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
the people at Southwest Airlines, the only highly profit-
able airline. It is no accident that Southwest is the only
airline that devotes all its thinking to the problems of the
customer while the other airlines devote all of their think-
ing to the problems of the airline.
The whole purpose of your business is to take such
good care of the customer that the customer makes it a
habit of returning to your business and buying more and
more every time.
But this will only happen when your people consciously
build relationships with your customers. When they ac-
tively, consciously, creatively, cleverly, strategically, art-
fully, and gently build the relationship with the customer.
Building the relationship does not come easy. It goes against
our deepest habits.
And it will never happen if your people see the cus-
tomer as “a hassle...someone on the phone checking out
prices...just an annoyance...someone interrupting me when
I was just about to go to lunch...just a problem in my
day...someone trying to return something...someone try-
ing to challenge my years of expertise...some jerk...some
idiot....”
The reason this kind of disrespect and even contempt
for the customer sinks into the psyche of our people is a
lack of ongoing encouragement to think any other way. In
other words, a lack of leadership. In other words, you and
me. A bad attitude toward the customer always comes, in
some subtle way, from the top.
A fish rots from the head down.
We as leaders set the tone. We either ask the right
questions that start the ball rolling in our employees’ minds,
or we do not. If I am a leader, I want to ask questions that

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respect my people’s intelligence. I want to treat them as if
they are master psychologists, as if they are experts in cus-
tomer behavior and customer thinking patterns—because
they are. I want to ask how we can build more trust with
the customer. I want to ask how we can convert a seem-
ingly simple phone call into a warm relationship that leads
to the customer liking us and wanting to buy from us no
matter what the price is. I want to ask how we can get the
sales force to win the customer’s trust and repeat busi-
ness. I want to ask for advice and help with the psychology
of the customer. I want to ask the questions that will mo-
tivate my own managers to start thinking in terms of life-
time customers instead of single transactions.
I might start a meeting with my team by saying, “Let’s
say you’re a potential customer and you’re calling my store.
Let’s say you’re new in town and have no buying habits yet
in this category of product. I’m the third store you have
called. If I’m stressed and grumpy, and I simply give you
the price you wanted for a product you’re curious about
and hang up, I may have lost you forever. What does that
matter? A loss of a $69 won’t kill us!
“But consider the lifetime impact—or even just the
next 10 years. What if that customer spends even just $400
a year in this category but has, because of this bad original
call with us, formed a buying habit with a competitor?
(Most people go to certain stores because it feels com-
fortable to go there.) In 10 years, that customer would
have spent $4,000. That’s $4,000 lost in less than a minute
on a bad phone call. If someone lost $4,000 in one minute
from the cash register, would they still be working for us?”
Finally, in the end, I don’t want to be too macho or
too “professional” or too afraid of what people would think