If you don't know what your promise is, how can you know you've kept it?

Hey there,

If, as I've mentioned a few times now, a business is a system for making and keeping promises:

you may well have questions about that promise part.

What exactly do I mean by 'Promise' and how to you define it?

That's what I'm going to talk about today.

Why you need to define your Promise
What a Promise is
What having a clear, comprehensive Promise of Value does for your business
Why it works

Here goes.

Why you need to define your Promise:

You're in a crowded market, and the buyer is in control

There are hundreds, if not thousands of other businesses out there, doing what you do.

You can't outspend them all.

There are hundreds if not thousands of potential buyers out there, looking for a solution to their problem.

You can't serve them all.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of other solutions to the buyer's problem out there.

You can't deliver them all.

The answer is to focus. To identify the part of the market you are best placed to serve.

Then to concentrate your efforts on:

Creating solutions that meet their actual needs right now.
Helping that part of the market to find you when they need you
Helping the right potential buyers to buy from you once they've found you
Making sure the experience of buying from you is so good they can't help but buy again, and recommend you.

Step 1 is what I call Package Promise. Steps 2 and 3 make up what I call Share Promise. Step 4 is Keep Promise.

Before you can do any of that really well you need to Define what that Promise is.

What a Promise of Value definition is

What I call a Promise of Value is a comprehensive, yet succinct statement that captures:

Who you are for
What you do for them
The ways you do it
The relationship you build with them as result

The good news is, you and your team already know all this. You already live it, otherwise you wouldn't have clients who love you, keep buying from you and recommend you.

You just need to do this much more on purpose. Much more systematically. And to do that, you need to articulate it all more clearly.

I learned how to do this from Barnaby Wynter at The Brand Bucket Company, so if you want the latest thinking from the horse's mouth and in full practical detail, do get hold of his latest book 'Become the GO-TO Brand'. In it he tells you exactly how to create and use what he calls a 'Values Proposition'.

What having a clear and comprehensive Promise of Value does for your business

Once you have it written down, your Promise of Value Statement becomes a vital resource for your marketing:

It enables you to focus on people who share your values and behaviours (psychographics), rather than where you might find them, or what they currently look like (demographics). That means it narrows the market sufficiently to make marketing more efficient and effective, without prematurely restricting you to an industry, life-stage, innovation preference or income level.
It is a literal resource that you (or someone else) can raid for key words and phrases to describe the benefits of what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for. It enables you to express your uniqueness in different ways to attract those who share at least some of your values, giving you flexibility in your marketing without sacrificing the focus that matters.
You can use it to attract the right prospects and charge the right prices for what you do.

The benefits of having a Promise of Value go way beyond the marketing part of your business. You can (and should) also use it to:

Design how you package up your products and services to make them easier to sell and more profitable to deliver.
Design processes and systems that will enable you to deliver on your Promise of Value consistently every time.
Ensure that any changes you want to make to your business won't alienate the people you wish to serve.
Attract and motivate the right suppliers and staff.

Why it works

Who you are for

One of the characteristics of a self-organising system, such as a human being, is that:

"as it changes, it does so by referring to itself [autopoietically]; whatever future form it takes will be consistent with its already established identity"

Whenever we buy, we buy the possibility of change. Often that's exactly what we want. Sometimes it isn't.

That means that if you know something about that 'already established identity' you can speak to the people you wish to serve more clearly, more directly and more truthfully. You can reassure them that what you do will change them in the way they wish. Or that it won't.

How can you possibly be sure of doing that?

By serving people who's 'already established identities' are at least a partial match with your own.

What you do for them

What do people really want? It's a surprisingly short list:

Agency - to be able to make their own ‘me-shaped’ dent in the universe.
Mastery - to learn and master (even teach) new skills.
Autonomy - to be free to choose exactly how they make their dent.
Purpose - to do this for something bigger than themselves, that has meaning beyond the transaction.
Community - to do all this with ‘people like us’ - to make a 'we-shaped' dent.
- Status - to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

If you can design products and services that give people more of these, you're offering something much bigger than a USP - you're offering a transformation. And if you can do that in a way that's consistent with the 'already established identity' of the person you're much more likely to succeed.

The ways you do it

There's a reason you love working with some clients and not others. The ones that are a joy to work with share some of the same values, the same behaviours, the same world view. The ones that are a pain to work with don't. And to be honest, you probably knew that in your gut before you took them on.

Happily, at the same time as fully articulating your own 'already established identity', you also articulate the 'already established identity' of those most likely to enjoy working with you - because they share values, behaviours and world view. You can stop chasing customers and start attracting them instead.

Big business knows how this works. That's why Unilever owns (through the Magnum Ice Cream Company) at least 47 ice-cream brands. They know that the people who wouldn't be seen dead with a Calippo, might well be happy to walk around with a Ben & Jerry's in their hand. They know that those people who look down on a Viennetta as vulgar, may well happily treat their dinner guests to Magnum Bon-bons.

While you probably aren't aiming to be Unilever, you do want to make sure your business attracts clients who will be a joy to work with and get the most from what you offer, and avoid attracting those who won't.

The relationship you build with them as result

By thoroughly understanding your own and your clients' 'already established identities', you're able to create a psychological space for all those 'people like us' - you've created a tribe for your clients to belong to, fulfilling at least two of their desires:

Community - to do all this with ‘people like us’ - to make a 'we-shaped' dent; and Status - to know (and for others to know) where we stand in our communities.

If, along the way you've also enabled Agency, Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose, you've made that sense of belonging even stronger.

Now imagine what could happen if you made that space physical too?

That's it.

Here's what I hope you learned today:

Your Promise of Value is far bigger than a 'unique selling point'. It's also far longer lasting. Done well, it's nothing less than a promise of transformation, to help those you serve:
- "Get significantly closer to becoming the person you really want to be, with more agency, mastery, autonomy and purpose, in a way that is completely congruent with your values, beliefs and style. So you can join the tribe that feels like home for you, with the status you seek."
Once you've defined your Promise of Value, you'll find you can package up what you do in all sorts of ways to serve the people you wish to serve, to give them exactly the help they need, when they need it. That means your business can evolve along with your clientele.
Your Promise of Value is much more than a marketing tool. It's also key to your operations. Once you have it you'll be able to take on new staff, use new technology and reorganise and scale your business without losing any of the things that make you unique. You'll always stay consistent with your own 'already established identity'.

So, go on, get Barnaby's book. Run yourself a Promise of Value workshop. Or investigate getting me to run one for you.

Whichever way you do it, I think you'll be very pleasantly surprised by what comes out of it.

Thanks for reading!

The Disappearing Boss

Continuous Improvement** for customer‑focused small‑business owners - turn your successful company into a self‑managing system for making and keeping promises to customers—no silos, no supervisors—where your people run end‑to‑end processes with real‑time feedback, and you can take breaks without breaking the business.

**The way Ohno‑san really meant it.