So here’s a really important concept. It’s called asymmetric value. We’re talking about the difference between what it costs you to give something and the value to the person who’s receiving it.

So if you can imagine, there is stuff that your business does that is seen as low value to the customer. If these activities are costing you a lot of time, energy, or money, then you’re wasting your time. If it’s costing you very little, then you’re in the grind. You’re just doing commodity work. This is where most salespeople live.

The column on the right is where the recipient is getting a lot of value. If this value costs your agency, you’re being a hero. Maybe you donated a kidney or you shoveled mud out of somebody’s basement after the hurricane and that’s wonderful, but it doesn’t scale. There aren’t enough crises or enough hours in the day to live at this pace.

Now, by contrast, where the cost to you is low, but the value to the other person is very high, this area is scalable. This might be things like sharing your expertise and knowledge, connections and relationships that you can share with others, the empathy that you have that allows you to pay attention to other people and understand their needs. Maybe give them a compliment, maybe just lend a listening ear when they need it.

This puts you in a very good position because eventually those people will start to return asymmetric value back to you and that customer will move their high-value business from another company over to you, or somebody will introduce you to their network or their high-value referrals. If you learn to live in this quadrant, if you can actually run your business out of this quadrant, guess what you win.