Paradigm Shift – Soft Sell Includes Marketer AND Customer

Focusing on the Soft Sell paradigm shift, we’ve been writing a lot about Soft Sell marketers — conscious, heart-based, aware of their emerging sense of responsibility to their customers, as well as their responsibility to themselves in every transaction.

And we have been thinking about and articulating the principles and tactics of Soft Sell, relationship-based marketing.

But what about the Soft Sell end user— the customer? What responsibility do customers have in the Soft Sell paradigm?  That’s what this post is all about.

Imagine mixing red and yellow. The result is orange – a complete fusion of the two primary colors. Orange is the relationship. A successful (or even not so successful) business transaction is like that.

The seller and the buyer are like the colors, and the result of the transaction is the fusion of their two intentions. In that fusion neither intention remains exactly what it was at the outset. Entering into the transaction both seller and buyer must give way to the emerging relationship and co-create to achieve the result each wants. So both have to be willing to evolve and be changed through the process to arrive at the end.

It’s an improvisation, with both sides adjusting and moving with the flow within the transaction.

There’s an exchange of intention, objectives, energy, desire, need (on both sides), and that exchange is real. Neither the buyer nor the seller leaves the transaction as they entered into it. Both are different whether the difference is significant or trivial.

Caveat Emptor

Historically, the buyer’s position in the marketplace was best described by the phrase caveat emptor — buyer beware. The relationship between the seller and buyer has been thought of as one containing two separate entities whose connection is at-an-arm’s-length joined primarily through supply and demand, price and willingness to pay.

That defined the marketplace and how it was supposed to function.

Was there co-creative exchange? Certainly. That was unavoidable, although largely unconscious. The difference they experienced in the transaction was a difference in the amount of money each had at the end of the, and it remains, for the most part, that way today.

The caveat emptor relationship left only the buyers with the responsibility to be responsible. They had to protect themselves by knowing enough not to be abused. It was their task to perform due diligence in order to assure themselves they were not making a mistake.

And when they did falter, misjudge, fall into a gaffe, they were left holding the bag of responsibility. The seller was, by convention, exempt (unless, of course, the buyer sued).

Although the phrase “hard sell” represents what has happened, evolving consciousness demands that this story change — that the shape and experience of the buyer/seller relationship mature and grow up for the sake of both sides and the well-being of the planet.

What Does That Grown Up Relationship Look Like?

This kind of evolutionary change has everything to do with the shift from the arm’s-length relationship of contenders to an emotionally intimate, consciously co-creative relationship of partners.

Back to the color analogy. The buyer and seller blend in the transaction so that, at the end, it is  very difficult if not impossible to tell who made what contribution to the final result. It’s a partnership.

Ballroom dancing provides another analogy. The dance is the result not of what the male or female dancer contributes. It’s a collaboration.

When we wrote our first book, those who knew us said they could tell who wrote what. By the third book that difference had disappeared. We were one voice.

As a customer, when you acknowledge the partnership quality of any sale, then buying becomes a process of care and connection in which mutuality and reciprocity are the moral codes you follow — for the mutual benefit of both you and the seller.

A Both-And Balance

On page 160 of our most recent book — The Heart of Marketing: Love Your Customers and They Will Love You Back — we listed the following points for the Soft Sell marketer to stay in both-and balance. Here we apply them to the customer.

● You want to be sure that the benefits accruing from the purchase support the intentions of both you and your seller as equally as you can make that happen;

● When your transaction is based in both-and, you experience a sense of poise and emotional elegance—not just graceful but grace-filled;

● You manifest emotional stability and comfort because your purchase is grounded in the truth of the whole rather than in the separateness of me-first competition;

● Interdependence, cooperation, and partnership are evident in feeling and consciousness, defusing your ego demands and relegating them to a non-dominant status;

● You trust your choices because your conscience leads you to right-action;

● All of the elements of your transaction, from your initial shopping to the opening of the relationship with your seller, are functioning in harmony, and that harmony breeds success; and

● When you are in harmony you have integrated the well-being of both you and your seller. Then you will create and produce a result that is both beautiful and beneficial— both a pleasure and a profit for both you and the person you do business with.

We say that marketing is best done with consciousness and conscience.

Those two conditions apply to the customer side as well. Not with one-sided warnings, but through a heightened awareness that every interaction is a relationship and a relationship is a co-creation.

Relationship marketing is also relationship purchasing and always has been. The difference now is that the awareness of this inescapable fact must move to the forefront of every transaction.

Because It’s All in the Connection,

Jim