1. Brand promise guarantee
[date]

2. Where are you with BRAND PROMISE guarantee?
This deck is designed to help you create your Brand Promise Guarantee or test and refine it.
Here’s what’s included:
Slides 3-8 are Education
Slides 9-10 are Examples
Slides are Exercises
Slides 13 is Next Steps
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: These slides are designed for our DIY clients to use at any step in their process of determining and using your Brand Promise Guarantee in your business. You can either pull slides from this deck to customize our Annual Planning deck for your team if you will be working on this topic in your session, or you can use these slides to guide discussion in an ongoing Think Rhythm to work on Brand Promise Guarantee.
If you get stuck at any point in the process, please reach out to our coaching team for help.

3. THE PROMISE YOU MAKE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS
Brand Promise
It must really matter to your customers
It must differentiate you from your competition
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an educational slide.
Your Brand Promise is the promise you're making to your customers that both really matters to them and makes you different from your competitors.
THE PROMISE YOU MAKE TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

4. It’s HOW you sell your WHAT to your WHO
Brand Promise
WHO? Your Core Customer & their Needs
WHAT? What makes you unique – or at least uncommon
HOW? The persuasive strategy that will convince your WHO to buy your WHAT
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an educational slide.
Your Brand Promise will help you win more of the Right Customers by helping you focus on HOW you sell your WHAT to your WHO.
How to Determine Your Brand Promise:
Identify your WHO: Your Core Customer and their Needs (not wants)
Identify your WHAT: Determine what is your unique or uncommon offering to your Core Customer
Identify your HOW: How becomes the persuasive strategy that will convince the core customer to buy the firm's uncommon offering vs. all competitive offerings. This sells WHAT to WHO.
It’s HOW you sell your WHAT to your WHO

5. Power of A Great Brand Promise
Easily attract your core customer
Makes you memorable, remarkable, and standout in the market
Gain clarity on what’s important to your core customer
Focus sales and delivery teams
Close deals faster and easier
Play to your strengths
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an educational slide.
This is what a great Brand Promise can do for your company.

6. Steps to Determine Your Brand Promise
Decide on your Sandbox
Identify your WHO
Discuss their needs (vs. wants)
Understand what you are uniquely qualified to deliver
Determine your Brand Promise
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an educational slide.
These are the steps this slide deck will walk through to help you determine your Brand Promise.

7. Your brand promise is your message to your who
The real value lies in the system you create to ensure you deliver it:
Activities
Strategies
Brand Promise KPIs
Brand Promise Guarantee
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an education slide.
Now that you have tested your Brand Promise, the next step is to create a system and process for delivering on that promise.
The brand promise is not only about marketing, it is also about being able to deliver what you are promising:
What are the right key activities?
How are you measuring whether or not you are delivering? (KPI – “Kept Promise Indicator”)
Use Rhythm to set up KPIs and Priorities that Focus and Align your team to consistently deliver your Brand Promise in a way that attracts new customers and delights the ones you love. Discuss those priorities and KPIs at your weekly meetings. When you struggle to deliver on your promise, discuss what adjustments you need to make in your execution in order to get back on track to success.
You can document the key activities, KPIs, and Guarantee in Rhythm (Rhythm: or use the tool available in Rhythm University:

8. Brand Promise Guarantee
How can we be sure you will keep your promise?
What will you do if you fall short?
Reduces or removes risk for your customer
Causes you to build the internal systems and processes necessary to ensure you always deliver
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an educational slide.
The Brand Promise Guarantee helps a new customer try you if they don’t know you yet. The Guarantee reduces the risk the customer experiences when they buy from you for the first time.
The right Brand Promise Guarantee will shift the risk from the customer to you in order to help you win their trust. These are NOT safe ideas. In fact, you may feel your stomach turning at first when you discuss and determine your Guarantee.

9. Graniterock example
Brand Promise: Total Customer Satisfaction equal to or greater than Nordstrom’s Brand Promise Guarantee: “Short Pay” “If you are not satisfied… don’t pay us. We will contact you immediately to resolve the problem.”
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an example slide.
A great example is Graniterock’s Short-Pay policy. Graniterock provides crushed gravel, concrete, sand and asphalt to the construction industry. Their Brand Promise is to provide total customer satisfaction, equal to or greater than Nordstrom’s. To ensure this, they have implemented the Short-Pay policy. At the bottom of every invoice, there is a statement which says: “If you are not completely satisfied for any reason with any part of this invoice, do not pay us for it. Simply scratch out the line item, write a brief note about the problem, and return a copy of this invoice along with your check for the balance.” Knowing that the customer has complete discretion on payment based on satisfaction has driven the employees to foolproof internal systems to ensure satisfaction.

10. Intuit example
Brand Promise: So easy to use, you won’t need tech support Brand Promise Guarantee: “Free tech support”
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an example slide.
Another example comes from the accounting software company Intuit. In developing their Quicken product, they decided to go to market with a promise of “Free Customer Support”. Knowing that providing support without charge would place a huge financial burden on the company, the development team was inspired to build bullet proof software that was so user friendly, they were sure there would be no need for customer support.

11. What’s Our Brand Promise Guarantee?
Step 1: What is our Brand Promise?
Step 2: How do we know if we’ve kept our Brand Promise? (KPI)
Step 3: What will we do to ensure we don’t fail, or what happens if we do fail? How can we reduce the customer’s risk to buy?
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is a activity slide.
Before you can do this exercise, you must complete the Brand Promise exercise and know what that is.
If you haven’t already, now is the time to discuss how you will measure whether or not you are keeping that promise. What is your KPI?
Once you have these first 2 steps complete, brainstorm ways that you can ensure you are living up to your promise and what meaningful guarantee you can make to your customers. Keep in mind that the Guarantee should motivate your team to create the systems and processes to make sure you always deliver because it will be painful to fail, and it should reduce the customer’s risk to buy.
You might find that your Brand Promise Guarantee is something you are already doing but just haven’t made it public yet so it isn’t helping you close sales.
Your team may be able to brainstorm and get to a clear answer in one session, but you may need to get in a Think Rhythm to work on this until you feel like you’ve gained some clarity.

12. Brand Promise Guarantee Test
Does the Guarantee make us Different from our competitors?
• How does it Hurt us?
• How does it Improve us? (The pain of the guarantee should help us get better.)
• Does it Help Close Sales?
NOTE TO FACILITATOR: This is an activity/discussion slide.
Use the questions on the slide to lead a discussion to test your brand promise guarantee
The right Brand Promise Guarantee will shift the risk from the customer to you in order to help you win their trust. These are NOT safe ideas. In fact, you may feel your stomach turning at first when you discuss and determine your Guarantee.
•Does the Guarantee make us Different from our competitors?
•How does it Hurt us?
•How does it Improve us? (The pain of the guarantee should help us get better.)
•Does it Help Close Sales?

13. Bring Your brand promise to Life
Communicate your guarantee to everyone in your company so they can help to ensure you always deliver.
Ensure your Sales and Marketing teams are using the Brand Promise Guarantee to help close deals.
If you have to default to your Guarantee, take time to reflect on the lessons learned and make adjustments to your processes and systems.
NOTE TO FACILITATOR:
If you are concerned that your Guarantee may put you at too much risk, you can test it quietly before going public with it. You can get a baseline for how often you might fail to deliver, what the cost of the failure would be, and what systems and processes to create so you can minimize the risk.