Exceptional returns come when modest efforts bring immodest outcomes. Relationships are a terrific avenue for exceptional returns: people don’t notice your effort; they notice the value it creates for them.
Yet, most of us suffer professional relationships in a miasma of miscommunication. We miss profoundly, and exchanges that could be valuable for both parties end up being bitter—or worse, apathetic.
When we misunderstand service, our greatest efforts cause the greatest harm. When we understand service, what feels like play to us creates exceptional value for someone else.
The key to being exceptional with people is to Underperform and Overdeliver.
Performance = Me, Delivery = You
The performance is everything on the surface. This is what is asked for. It is expected. Performance is professional, customary, and how it has always been. Performance is on the contract.
The delivery is everything that matters. It is the deep solution. What is to be delivered is never on the contract. It is personal not professional; unique not traditional. Initially, neither party knows what is to be delivered—and unfortunately most they don’t even figure it out by the end.
The delivery is (almost) never named.
| The Performance Expected | The Delivery Needed |
| Medicate my back pain. | Introduce activities into my life that will allow long-term postural health and mobility. |
| Increase my brand’s social media engagement by 50%. | Help me understand my value and attract a community that needs it. |
| Double my net worth | Disarm half my insecurities. |
The delivery required is unique to every relationship—the same performance advertised might require different delivery depending on the people involved.
Here’s My Point
Focus your efforts on finding what people really require—their deep needs.
Then, choose those solutions to their deep needs that you are best poised to deliver through your unique gifts.
Finally, forget about the performance—do only as much of it as you must.
This sounds like fun, but you should be skeptical. Why focus all your efforts on providing something that isn’t even being asked for?
Because there are three inequalities.
Why Overdelivering is Exceptional: The Three Inequalities
Let me explain.
Surface Wants >>> Deeper Needs
If what the client asked for was what the client needed, this guide wouldn’t exist.
But what someone asks for is rarely what they need.
How do we know? Because the performance is not the delivery (look above!).
Now here’s what the performance and delivery means in terms of the client. The performance asked for is the surface want. The delivery required is the deeper need.
It’s important we focus on the right thing. Of course, it’s useful to give people what they ask for. But it is far more meaningful to give people what they need.
The real problem with performance is that it gets us busy solving surface wants which come with two issues:
1. Surface wants are hard to satisfy: The surface want tends to involve metrics outside your control. Clients want 300% more engagement, a 99th percentile test score, and custom-fix at a retail-price.
You can (sometimes should) try your best. But you cannot guarantee these results. Especially when this ask is a symptom of deeper issues.
2. It’s Draw-Lose: If you’re able to satisfy the surface want, you gave the client what they paid you for. Don’t get me wrong, this is usually good enough. But it’s just good enough.
Sometimes, it’s not even good enough. If there are deeper problems that needed fixing, then your surface solution may do precious little—even if it works. Some clients will find a way of resenting you for it.
That is why it makes sense to look for deeper wants.
When you spend time figuring out the deeper want, you are more likely to do something your client will love.
This brings us to the second inequality:
Love >>> Like
The rewards of being loved aren’t linear, they’re exponential. 2 clients who love you are worth 15 clients who like you.
Clients that love your work are going to come back. They’re going to recommend you to people who don’t even ask. They’re going to look over the glaring mistakes you’ll inevitably make.
Clients who like you might come back eventually. But they’ll not recommend you unless expressly asked, and even then, they’ll be non-committal. They will not overlook your mistakes.
When you satisfy the deeper need, you get love. When you have love, you have exponential returns. People stick around. They’re happy to share their financial successes with you. They offer you projects even you’re not sure you can take on yet. They become your friends.
It’s fantastic.
But I’m being a little disingenuous, aren’t I?
If I told you that solving the surface problem was hard, imagine what it would take to solve a deeper need. Why should you undertake this herculean task?
Because you can solve the deeper need without great exertion. Here’s why:
Your Unique Gifts >>> Your Average Gifts
There are some gifts you’re especially poised to give. These things come naturally to you, you like them, and you are good at them. These are your unique gifts.
Unfortunately, most of us spend very little time providing our unique gifts.
When we solve surface wants, our clients dictate our service. And clients have no desire or knowledge to find our unique gifts.
So, we end up providing value that is painful for us to produce and average as a service for the client.
But the beauty of serving a deep need is that we can do so using our unique gifts.
Because beyond the performance and the surface want, we find not one but a series of deeper needs. And each need can be served in a variety of ways. You pick the service that suits you. You don’t have to do it all.
Since you’re serving at a greater level of depth than what was asked for—and are acting from your strengths—you’ll be overdelivering.
Now don’t overthink unique gifts. I don’t mean they’re special or rare or permanent. Your gifts are dynamic and change with context and time. And you’ll continue to discover new gifts or enrich old ones.
Right now, your unique gifts are just those things that you do better than most, and with more pleasure.
Serving deeper needs through your unique gifts is exceptional in two ways:
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- They create more value: Your unique gifts are things you are good at doing. By using them you accomplish far more than when you do things you’re not as good at.
- They cost less: Your unique gifts come naturally to you. They feel more like play than work. It is easier to get into flow.
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So that’s why overdelivering works. You solve a deeper problem, using your best gifts.
When you do so, the right clients fall in love. And the wrong clients leave.
Congratulations, you’re basically in service heaven.
How to Overdeliver
The pieces are becoming obvious, so let’s put it all together. There are 3 principles for overdelivering:
1. Identify Deeper needs
Look beyond what is asked. Seek what is needed.
2. Use Your Unique Gifts
Pick those solutions that you are uniquely poised to deliver.
3. Ignore the Rest
If it is not one of your unique gifts solving a deeper need—don’t do it. Or do as little as you must to stay in the game.
I wish I could be more specific, but overdelivering is personal.
You overdeliver by recognising two beings in their true forms.
You recognise the other in their deepest need, and you recognise yourself in your finest capacity to serve them.
But even though there’s no recipe to overdelivering, an example can illustrate the point.
So, in the next section, I do a case study of an endearing entrepreneur called Derek Sivers who really exemplifies the attitude of overdelivering.
If the analysis isn’t for you, skip to the finale at the end.
Overdelivering Case Study: Derek Sivers
Identifying the Deeper Need
If you’re on the internet in the early 2000s buying indie music, on what metrics do you decide which online store to buy from?
We’re about to find out.
Derek Sivers is a musician who stumbled into founding an indie music distribution company called CD Baby. As such things go, CD Baby became a “runaway success”. In Sivers’ words:
“CD Baby had lots of powerful well-funded competitors, but after a few years they were all but gone, and we dominated our niche of selling independent music. 150,000 musicians, 2 million music-buying customers, $139 million in revenue, $83 million paid directly to musicians.”
But what led to CD Baby’s phenomenal success in a crowded niche? Initially, even Sivers himself didn’t understand it:
“I never did any marketing. Everyone came by word-of-mouth. But why? I honestly didn’t know.”
CD Baby’s success couldn’t be chalked up to the usual suspects: it wasn’t the “features, pricing, design, partnerships and more”. His competitors did that too, and often with greater focus.
Since he couldn’t figure it out himself, Sivers decided to ask 100s of his customers why they kept coming back to CD Baby. And here’s what they said most often:
“You pick up the phone! I can reach a real person.”
Siver’s elaborates:
“They called and got a real person on the 2nd ring, instead of an automated call-routing system. Or they emailed and got a surprisingly helpful personal reply, instead of an impersonal scripted FAQ response.” – Sivers’ post (1).
And so, Sivers concludes: “clients would choose one company over another mainly because they liked their customer service.”
And that answers our original question.
Sivers’ clients–people buying indie music in the early days of the internet–most valued genuine connection.
Unlike the Amazon consumers of today, they were early adopters and fans—people who appreciated independent musicians and were willing to go the extra mile to support them.
They were acting from a deep connection to music and the individuality of the artists they were supporting.
And in realizing that his customers valued genuine human connection through customer service Sivers had gone beyond the performance demanded—“sell music CDs”—and identified a need he could serve.
He fulfilled step one of Overdelivering: identify the deeper need.
Use your Unique Gifts
To truly Overdeliver, Sivers would need to go further than the deeper need. He would need to learn to serve the deeper need in a way that suited his—and his companies—particular talents.
And he did. I’ll point to 2 moments specifically. The first has to do with a shipping email.
- Welcome to the CD Baby Jet
When you order online, retailers will send you a confirmation email of your purchase. Instead of the chalk-dry “your order has been shipped” email that most retailers use, Sivers wanted to go with something personal.
So here’s the confirmation email he wrote to be sent out for every purchase:
Sivers’ email is an example of overdelivering because he uses one of his unique gifts of being a charming, funny writer who likes to “make people smile”.
This a unique gift because he’s a talented writer who can create this endearing email without great effort. In fact, he mentions in his excellent conversation on Tim Ferris’ podcast that the email took him something like 20 minutes to write.
Of course, what makes this unique gift effective is that it is in the service of the deeper need of his clients—he’s exchanging a soul-less confirmation email for a genuine personal experience.
So that’s how Sivers overdelivered with his email. And did it work? I’ll let him tell you himself:
“That one silly email, sent out with every order, has been so loved that if you search the web for “private CD Baby jet,” you’ll get thousands of results. Each one is somebody who got the email and loved it enough to post it on his website and tell all his friends.
That one goofy email created thousands of new customers.”
– Excerpt from Sivers’ blog post (2).
2. Everybody Gets A Refund
The second example of Sivers’ overdelivering is his policy of refunding virtually every client that asked.
We can see this in the excerpt below, where Sivers is telling to his employees how to handle a demanding client who wants a refund after the team has put in their work for him. Sivers takes the opportunity to explain the philosophy of his business to the team:
“Yes refund his money in full. We’ll take a little loss. It’s important to always do whatever would make the customer happiest, as long as it’s not outrageous. A little gesture like this goes a long way to him telling his friends we’re a great company. Everyone always remember that helping musicians is our first goal, and profit is second.”
Excerpt from Sivers’ blog post (3).
I love when a company refunds you on sight. But how is this serving the deep need of Sivers’ clients?
Because it is an act of exceptional customer service that treats the client with humanity. Not only is every request received by a real person, the client also gets 100% trust: If you have a complaint, you get a refund. No questions asked.
Finally, Sivers is exploiting a unique gift by refunding his clients. Here, the unique gift is Sivers’ sufficiency—his ability to happily leave some profit on the table to create a better experience.
This might not sound like a unique gift—but there’s good reason to think it is one.
Unique gifts just are those things that you do better than others and for less effort. If you take a certain loss better than others, and suffer less from it, it’s a unique gift. And it gives you the flexibility to create exceptional value.
Of course you don’t have to leave money on the table. Just notice that some of your unique gifts might be costs you are willing to bear that others aren’t.
If you’re happy to give more time, more money, or more care than expected, you’re on your way to overdelivering.
Ignore the performance
The final stage of Sivers’ case is the underperforming.
Sivers didn’t do any marketing. After he realized his customers valued customer service, he “structured the business to match this priority. Out of 85 employees, 28 people were full-time customer service.”
Of course, it is not necessary or effective to underperform all the time. Underperforming is about noticing that the performance doesn’t move the needle of exceptional service. And about choosing to focus on exceptional service whenever possible.
And that’s the sum of it.
Sivers identified a deeper need of his clients–a kind, personal and enjoyable customer service experience. Then he delivered on it using his unique gifts. And finally, he ignored much of the performance—things that appeared to be important to selling CDs online but weren’t of actual value to his clients.
Finale: Overdelivering is Love at work
In sum, I’m not saying anything your great aunt Agatha hasn’t preached already: Serve well, with great love.
But we already knew this is virtuous. What I am saying is that it is also a wonderful strategy for being exceptionally successful at what you do. And that’s another reason to serve well.
And I’m also saying that this exceptionality is available to all of us:
Overdelivering takes commitment, but not strenuous effort. It demands attention, but not exceptional intelligence. It requires patience, but not great timing.
And last of all, now that I’m done selling this to you and me, I want to acknowledge this:
Overdelivering is love at work. And as such, it is a gamble which demands you extend yourself.
But it is always worth extending yourself to overdeliver.
Take me for example.
I’ve been writing this piece for dozens of hours now. And it is what I like to do. But I write this because I hope it might do something for you.
You, who may never read this, and you, who I will probably never meet.
And I write this with great delight.
For these are the things we do out of love.
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