Serving vs Selling 

This is probably a pretty fair statement – people tend to remember a great service experience more than they remember a great sales experience.  

It likely doesn’t matter how clever the salesperson’s jokes were, they simply don’t compare to the customer service person who came in and saved the day when there was a real problem. 

In fact, most great sales experiences feel like service experiences – when the salesperson seemed like they were simply there to help and were motivated by our needs not their targets. 

Great service experiences resonate with all of us because we (as customers) feel valued and that we are at the center of the story. 

So, if we remember service experiences more and if the best sales experiences feel like service experiences why then does so much marketing feel like a non-stop sales assault? 

Why does the marketing industry bombard customers with unmemorable and often unwanted sales messages? Wouldn’t we better connect, better engage customers if more marketing felt like service experiences? 

Serving customers vs selling them can be invaluable way to cultivate longer-term value add relationships. But it does require reframing the way that campaigns and experiences are planned and designed.  
 
Selling is about us – our campaign, our objectives, our sales, and our KPIs. 
Serving is about them – their information, their needs, the value that they receive, the benefit to them. 
 

To serve we need to ask ourselves different questions when developing communications. Forget about: 

• Who is our target? 
• What are their unmet needs? 
• How will we find them? 
• What is their reason to believe? 
• What is the communication idea? 
•  What KPIs should be achieved? 

Instead, ask: 
Who are we serving and why? 
 Beyond money and KPIs, why serve this audience at this time? Why does it matter? If you can’t answer why it matters, then it probably doesn’t and neither will the campaign. 
 
How can we serve them? 
 Where are they now, and what is the best way for us to be there, to be helpful and useful to them? When should we be there?  

 
How can we demonstrate that our commitment and capability to serve is real? 
How do we say it? How do we live it? How do we make the audience we serve feel it? 
 
Can we measure the value we adding? 
What’s our return on value added?  
 
Great brands do this well. 
  
This is not about corporate social responsibility. 
 
It doesn’t matter if you sell hamburgers, cars or cosmetics. 
  
The brand that wins is usually the one that serves their audience best.