The principal focus of today’s discourse is the pivotal concept of "Three Feelings to Cultivate," which serves as an essential element for fostering emotional resonance within your organization and ultimately propelling its growth.

As we navigate the intricacies of customer interactions, we must confront a fundamental inquiry: how do our customers feel post-engagement?

This episode elucidates the transformative power of emotions, positing that the cultivation of specific feelings is not merely an ancillary consideration but a cornerstone of customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Through a series of illustrative examples, we demonstrate how the strategic embedding of these emotions into every touchpoint can invigorate brand experiences and forge lasting connections. Join us as we embark on this enlightening journey to redefine the emotional landscape of your business, ensuring that every interaction resonates deeply and meaningfully.

Takeaways:

• Incorporating emotional resonance into business practices can significantly enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction.
• Businesses must prioritize understanding and measuring customer emotions to drive meaningful connections and growth.
• Identifying and cultivating three distinct feelings can transform customer experiences and foster brand loyalty.
• Effective customer engagement requires businesses to transition from transactional interactions to emotional transformations.

Chapters:

00:03 Introduction to Emotional Resonance in Business

01:45 Three Key Feelings to Cultivate

09:51 Understanding Customer Emotions

20:16 Understanding Customer Emotions and Journey

25:43 Transforming Customer Feelings Throughout the Journey

28:40 Transforming Feelings in Customer Experience

36:07 Exploring the Force for Good Toolkit

Burning Questions Answered:

1. What’s the #1 reason customers remember a brand?
2. Why does customer loyalty feel so unpredictable?
3. What causes the emotional “drift” as companies grow?

This episode part of the Force for Good Tool of the Week Series! Each week we feature one of the 100+ Force for Good Tools.

**These tools are free this week at https://aforceforgood.biz/weekly-tool/ **

*** The Full FFG Toolkit is available with A Force for Good, the Book: https://aforceforgood.biz/book/***

****Have questions on how to pioneer your 100 Year impact plan? Schedule time with Coco: https://calendly.com/coco-sellman/zoom-office-hours-clone ****

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Coco Sellman, the host of the Force for Good Business Show, believes business is a force for good, especially with visionary women at the helm. With over 25 years of entrepreneurial experience, she has launched five companies and guided over 500 startups. As Founder & CEO of A Force for Good, Coco supports purpose-driven women founders in unlocking exponential growth and prosperity. Her recent venture, Allumé Home Care, reached eight-figure revenues and seven-figure profits in just four years before a successful exit in 2024. A venture investor and board director, Coco’s upcoming book, *A Force for Good*, reveals a roadmap for women to lead high-impact, high-growth companies.

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Welcome to Three Feelings to Cultivate create emotional resonance that scales your company and sets you free.

I'm your host Coco Salman, five time founder, impact Investor and creator of the Force for Good system.

I'm so excited to be with you today.

In most companies, we measure performance with metrics, which I highly recommend and very much love.

We reward action, something you need to do, but we rarely ask the question that matters deeply to our resonance with customers, and that is how do our customers feel after they interact with us?

Are they relieved, seen, uplifted, or are they overwhelmed, dismissed, or simply uninspired?

Disconnected feelings drive memory, memory drives return, and return drives revenue.

So if your business isn't cultivating three specific emotionally resonant feelings consistently across the customer journey, you're missing a high leverage growth opportunity hiding in plain sight.

And that is exactly what this Masterclass today is all about.

Three key feelings to Cultivate are the topic of today's Masterclass and they are the specific, intentionally chosen emotional shifts you would like your customers to experience as they move through your brand's ecosystem from the very first touch to lasting loyalty.

At the heart of every customer journey is a transformation not just of outcomes, but of emotions.

How do they feel before they engage with you and how would you like them to feel after?

Remember, every interaction your customer has with your business is either building emotional trust or eroding it.

The brands we stay loyal to are the ones that feel right, so we need to have that emotional resonance.

Without emotional resonance, we never get your customers to a place where they're ready to evaluate you rationally and thoughtfully.

Three Feelings to Cultivate is a force for good core growth element designed to help you name three distinct emotional shifts you would like your customers to experience.

Embed those feelings into every message, service, interaction and touch point and then create an emotional arc that customers want to return to again and again.

Once you've defined your three feelings, it becomes part of your brand's emotional signature.

Think about what would you like the emotional signature of your company to be?

The three feelings to Cultivate act as a tool within your company to create emotional resonance at every step of your customer's journey.

Once you identify these three core feelings, they become your emotional compass for every person on your team.

These three emotions can then be woven into every message and moment, experience and touchpoint in your emails, on your webpage, in your product interactions.

Every phone call that happens with technical service or support or billing or receiving.

Every social media post can carry the same feelings and that will create that long term resonance at Every step.

So where does this fit on your larger journey with course for good?

We're focused on three feelings to cultivate today, which is one of the many core growth elements of the Force for Good system.

And we're going to use the tool of the week.

This tool is the Feelings to Cultivate Finder.

It will help you today in our masterclass to use this finder develop your three feelings and then identify how to implement those three feelings through a high leverage habit and a high potency action.

So where does this fit in the larger scheme of things?

It fits on the four page growth plan.

On the first page at the very bottom left corner you'll see on the top of the page you have know your purpose.

The bottom of the page is knowing who you serve.

And in the corner is three feelings to cultivate.

And this is the area we're going to focus today.

I invite you to think as we go along how these three feelings will then permeate into every other area of the four page growth plan, especially anything related to knowing who you serve and your growth model.

That's on the second page, your enrollment funnel.

Also check for resonance with your core purpose and your vision.

What three feelings are going to be most impactful to your customer to experience?

And as you focus on those transformational experiences, those transformational emotions, you will be able to better serve and elevate your customer, your team and your brand all at one time.

The aim is to provide transformational experience so you want to think about starting points and endpoints as you're considering those feelings.

From problem to solution, from pain to relief, from overwhelm to call.

What are your customers feeling?

They want to transform.

So think about the problems they have when they come to you and how that makes them feel.

When they have this problem solved, what does that feel like?

Also think about what are the pains they're having?

Look to see what does pain, pain look like for them and what does relief look like to them?

And what are those feelings that come along with that?

And there's usually some feeling of overwhelm that they have and then they transform the overwhelm into clarity or calm.

They come in at a certain state and then elevate their state.

Could be from happy to fulfilled.

It could be from sad to healed.

It could be from acceptance, excited to elated.

What are those transformational experiences they're having as they interact with your company and your solutions?

What are your customers feeling that they want to transform?

What are the feelings they want to elevate?

Because it's where your customer would like to elevate and end up why Do Feelings Matter?

In another masterclass, we track the 17 steps of the customer journey from the moment they learn about you to the moment they become a loyal customer.

One of these lenses we used in that journey was to look at how your customer is feeling.

What are the emotional states as they go through interacting with your company at the various stages?

Perhaps you notice some highs and lows your customer experienced along the way.

At certain moments your customer might feel more excited and hopeful, while at others they may feel more frustrated or even angry.

It's important to understand the overall tone of their experience.

Some businesses, like a clothing retailer or an amusement park, might experience customers in a generally light, happy state, while other businesses like hospitals or funeral homes have customers who generally are in a more somber mood.

So ideally, the many messages, images and experiences your company provides will meet your customer where they are and then aim to elevate them.

Taking someone from devastated to ecstatic is probably a good stretch, but devastated to composed might be just what that person needs.

Sense what your customers might be feeling and try to understand what would sense, heal, elevate, or transform them.

Why do emotions matter?

Why do emotions drive growth?

Loyalty isn't logical, it's emotional.

Customers return because of how your company makes them feel.

Teams align and act with clarity when they know the emotional destination, culture and consistency create a brand that people can trust, refer others to, and remember.

So when your whole company has these three distinct, unique feelings that it is fostering, then you become more aligned with everyone on your team to help you drive that emotional experience and ultimately drive growth.

So why do founders and teams not bother to define three core feelings?

Three Feelings to Foster we're so busy optimizing our funnels which which is good, but we haven't necessarily focused on optimizing feelings, which is a very important part of your customer's journey and a very important part of their ability to choose to work with you and stay with you.

Another reason is founders assume team members just know what the brand should feel like.

That's not a good assumption to make.

The founder's original emotional signature gets diluted as the team grows.

This is also a big reason why we don't focus on it.

We don't think it's that important, but as the team grows becomes more and more important because the touch points with the founder aren't as frequent with all members of the team.

And the last reason we dolge bother to define three feelings is we've never been taught to name or operationalize emotions in business, just consider what a huge opportunity that is, and it's big for your customers.

Customer interaction is a chance to elevate the moment.

So the invitation here is to make every moment matter to me.

This is the simplest and most powerful way to unite your team.

Give them three emotions to create and they now have the ability to build those three emotions authentically in their own way and at the same time aligning your brand.

Nothing is more authentic than personal connection with immersion.

So when you give your team and yourself the strategic power to home in on emotion, you align in a way that is specific and wholehearted all at once.

Another reason to do it is because it builds a distinct, emotionally resonant brand experience which will differentiate you from your your competitors.

It also transforms team alignment from passive to passionate.

You give them an emotional tool to bring along.

It deepens customer memory, advocacy and referrals.

When your team conveys to your customer an experience that's emotional, or your website or your product conveys emotion, it deepens the memory of your customer.

It also aligns your personal leadership experience with your company's purpose and helps you scale a business that feels as good as it performs.

The heart of your customer journey isn't your funnel, it's your empathy.

In another masterclass, I explained how a roommate selected our area of chosen greatness, the one area to be most attentive and great and innovative.

And that area we chose was to be great at recruiting, engaging, and retaining reliable nurses who would not call out.

When we considered our nurses and what they most long to feel, we surveyed them on their desires and expectations of an employer and assessed their core motivations.

We discovered that what they long to feel is valued, appreciated and deeply cared for.

As we dug deeper into the needs of our patients and families, we found their longings to be very similar.

These feelings, value appreciation and deep care became the intended feelings we wanted to cultivate within our company.

We aimed to ensure these feelings were embedded into every system, process and communication we made.

We want to meet them where they are and then uncover what they want to feel.

In order to support your customer on their journey to transformation, you must know and feel where they are when they arrive at your door or on your website or your ad in a magazine.

It is important to be laser specific.

If they are feeling hopefully what components are playing into that?

If they're feeling discouraged, which word precisely characterizes their annoyance?

It also is helpful to remember that how your customer is feeling while searching for the solution you offer varies dramatically depending on what you offer, if your customers come to you shopping for bridal shoes, they will feel very different from someone planning a funeral and needing a casket for a loved one.

So meet them where they are and then uncover what they want to feel.

Ultimately, what we're looking for with the three feelings to cultivate are three feelings that are truly unique from one another and express a three dimensional experience.

Think of your three feelings to cultivate as the three legs of a trusted, sturdy stool.

Three distinct, complementary and strong emotions support the entire customer experience.

Safe, smart and hopeful creates a full arc of transformation.

In contrast, happy, content and joyful may feel repetitive to the customer like three flavors of the same note, and won't offer the emotional range needed to truly guide your customer's journey.

Behind every powerful brand is a set of intentional emotions.

Behind every successful movement is a feeling people want more of.

Behind every enduring business is an experience people want to return to because of how it made them feel.

Let's look at some examples of what it means to look at where they are and where they want to go.

So we're going to meet them where they are A bride to be looking for bridal shoes might feel hopeful, elated and nervous when she arrives at Beautific Bridal Shoes.

She longs to leave with a pair of perfect bridal shoes, one that makes her feel like royalty.

She wants to feel beautiful, celebrated and 100% certain she is leaving with the perfect pair of shoes.

So hopeful, elated and nervous transforms into beautiful, celebrated and 100 certain.

Another example, a mother looking to enroll her third grade daughter who has just been diagnosed with dyslexia into an online reading program is feeling overwhelmed, worried and fragile.

A mother longs for a program that will help her daughter experience success in reading.

This will help transform this mother's experience into empowered, relieved and grateful.

So she goes from overwhelmed, worried and fragile to empowered, relieved and grateful.

The last example is a CFO struggling each week to provide the data her CEO and board directors will want to receive because the information lies in several disparate systems.

Visits ABC Data Integration website feeling inadequate, embarrassed, stressed.

And the CFO will feel capable, confident and certain when she rolls out the new integrated data dashboard.

So you can see how this works, right?

You're moving between three emotions of where they are and three emotions of what they want to feel along the customer journey.

So move your business from transactional to transformational.

We're going to start the three feelings to cultivate Finder.

You're going to meet them where they are uncover what they want to feel and then commit to three feelings.

And we're going to use an example ABC Integration Company which I just talked about a minute ago.

It's integration analytics and reporting software.

It's a fictitious company and it has an avatar, Francine, a CFO of a large financial institution who provides complex reports to her CEO and a demanding public board.

Here is the three feelings to cultivate Finder we go right into Part one Meet them where they are.

So reflect on your customers.

The first question is who they are and what they need when they come to you.

Write down their attributes, problems, needs and desires.

So who are they and what do they need when they come to you?

Now this might be something you've already done and drafted and is on your four page plan.

If not, just write down who they are when they come to you and what they need.

ABC Integration Company wrote down CFO of a mid sized to large company responsible for monthly, quarterly and annual financials reports to CEO, board and investors.

Someone who's smart, capable, detail oriented and under immense pressure and deeply values accuracy, speed and professionalism.

What they need is seamless, reliable access to unified data from multiple systems, tools to eliminate time consuming spreadsheet wrangling, greater confidence in financial reports and to feel respected and trusted by leadership.

So those are the things that they need.

So what are your customers, who are they and what do they need?

Write that down.

Next, move on to question two.

Given who they are and what they need, what are they feeling?

Write down the feelings associated with who they are and what they need.

In our case of this cfo, she's feeling defeated, frustrated, embarrassed, inadequate, stressed.

Write down how is your customer feeling when they come to you and they're in the midst of their challenge and thinking about their problem.

Problem question 3 reflect on your customer journey.

From finding out you exist to learning about your company, to maybe trying a few things out, to finally saying yes, to paying you, to having a complaint, to having it resolved, to buying again and again, becoming loyal and sharing referring your business to lots of customers.

So see that whole range.

Think about the customer journey.

Recall how your customer felt at various stages along this journey, especially when they were deeply entwined with the problem or desire that they really want to experience.

Which feelings do your customer experience most intensely along the journey?

So think about those moments and think about the feelings.

So our example with ABC Data Integration is at month end that panic, pressure, frustration in board meetings Embarrassment, stress, fear of letting others down when hunting for a better way, exhausted, skeptical, overwhelmed when doing the Implementation.

How are they feeling when they're doing the implementation?

Not having enough time?

Feeling exhausted?

Feeling overwhelmed?

Questioning.

So all those moments for your customer, what are those big poignant moments?

Describe how they feel.

All right.

Think of your authentic customer before they learn about your company and solutions.

Imagine how they feel as they search online for solutions.

Call friends or colleagues, ask for recommendations, and search for a solution to their problem.

Really move into those negative feelings they are feeling.

The pining, wanting, needing, wishing feelings.

And on question four, write them down.

What are those feelings?

And so you might go back to the other questions.

What are they feeling?

Panic, defeat, pressure, inadequate.

These are the ones that our CFO is feeling.

Frustrated, embarrassed, stress, fear, exhaustion, skepticism, overwhelm.

Write your list down and then circle your customers top three pining feelings before their problem is solved and their desires are met.

What are those feelings we chose for ABC data integration?

Defeated, frustrated, and stressed.

You're looking for three distinct feelings here.

All right, now we go on to part two.

Now we're going to uncover what they want to feel.

They're going from this one state, and now we're going to move them to another state.

Your company has the opportunity to support your customers in transforming how they feel.

In part one, you identified the three unique feelings.

And now here in step two, we're looking at when your company solves a customer's problem and delivers the solution, how will his or her feelings transform?

What will be the new feelings your customers will feel?

So in this exercise, we're going to write a list of potential feelings your customer might feel.

So in the first column, we write down the three feelings you collected from the last question.

On part one for the cfo, she's feeling inadequate, embarrassed, and stressed.

And then we brainstorm all the feelings associated with the solutions solution.

So you're looking at the second page of the three feelings to cultivate Finder.

You'll see in the second column, you're adding all the feelings that they want to feel.

So what are those feelings your customer wants to feel?

And so maybe they want to feel hopeful.

In this case, what CFO wants to feel is hopeful, calm, capable, worthy, successful, self, assured, poised, trusted, confident in control, powerful, empowered, resilient, equipped, proficient, assured, composed, grounded.

Then the next step, after you've identified a whole host of feelings they want to feel that are kind of the opposite of what they don't want to feel or what's associated with the problem, the next step is to review the feelings.

You wrote down the feelings associated with the solution, and we've Got the three feelings in column one associated with the problem.

For our cfo, it's inadequate, embarrassed and stressed.

We're going to go deeper into inadequate, what's the opposite feelings, and they receive the solution and are lifted from the problem, what are they going to feel?

No longer inadequate, but now equipped, proficient, capable and assured.

So what are they going to feel in your customer journey?

They're going to go from that negative feeling to some positive feelings.

Write down all those feelings that are opposite that first problem feeling and then you're going to go on to the next one.

In this case, it's embarrassed for our cfo.

She's feeling embarrassed that she doesn't have the data the way that the cfo, the CEO and the board wants it.

She feels embarrassed.

They're asking for her misinformation back in the middle of a meeting and she knows she can't get it.

She feels embarrassed.

But once she's installed the ABC Data Integration Company solution and she has all that data and it's neat, organized places so she can query and look up, find answers quickly.

Now she feels confident, self assured, poised and trusted.

The third feeling she feels is stressed.

She feels stressed because every month she's got to do all this work to make all the data reports come out.

And now she's able to do it, it comes out more quickly, more easily.

So now she feels instead of stress, she now has transformed that feeling into composed, grounded, calm, relieved, respected, activated, certain, secure.

So what are the feelings that your customers are having when they discover the solutions along your customer journey?

Write those down.

Next we go to the last and final page where you choose three specific feelings you would like to incorporate into every aspect of company?

Brand communications, images and experiences.

Which three feelings would be most clearly desired by your customer?

Next Wish.

Three feelings work well together, but are distinct like three legs on a stool.

Which three feeling words are most accurate and specific?

I encourage you to spend some time with your thesaurus or your favorite AI tool to find the right word.

Words like happy, good and fun are often trite and not specific.

Find the specific words that will create absolute clarity for you and your team about the emotional experience you aim to create.

Which three words can already help you see new and different ways to serve your customers?

Which words will inspire you and your team to bring a unique experience to the customers?

So go ahead on this last page and write down those three feelings to cultivate.

ABC Data Integration Company.

They chose capable, competent and certain, right?

Congratulations.

You just crafted your three feelings to cultivate.

So go ahead and write them on your four page plan.

Let's take a moment to acknowledge the wisdom you just cultivated.

Loyalty lives in emotional resonance, not just satisfaction.

Your brand's emotional signature can unify both customers and teams.

You now have a tool that clarifies what to say, build and reinforce.

You've aligned customer growth, team culture and founder fulfillment.

Now you've taken out of your mind what you want the experience to be with three simple words, emotions, feelings.

Now your team is empowered to create that same experience again and again.

You've begun scaling with soul and designing from the heart.

Customer loyalty is rooted not in satisfaction, but in emotional relationship.

Residents.

Come back to the four page growth plan and fill in the three feelings to cultivate on the first page.

Notice if there's any reverberations in other parts of the four page growth plan that can now shift a little bit because you now know three feelings you're cultivating and the experience you're bringing to your customers.

And now it's time to define a high leverage habit.

A repetitive ritual you do weekly or monthly that almost guarantees growth when you consistently do it.

Which habit could help you focus and deliver the three feelings to cultivate weekly or monthly?

Here's some examples.

Add how do your customers want to feel to all weekly team meetings?

You could review all campaigns and deliverables through an emotional lens.

Maybe there's a checkpoint where you go through all your campaigns.

With this new step, you might spotlight emotional wins in customer stories and team shout outs.

That could be something you add to your weekly team agenda.

You could include a monthly audit of customer experience lined with your three ceilings.

And you could add your three feelings to onboarding and job descriptions.

These are things you can do to make sure that these three feelings become regular partners with you and your customer journey and your team journey.

Elevate your messaging by rooting it in emotional transformation.

Next, create a high potency action.

A high potency action is a bold, intentional action that delivers quick, meaningful impact beyond daily habits.

Something that's not already in your calendar.

Something you're not already doing.

One thing you can really say, all right, I just figured out these three feelings to cultivate.

How can I activate them big time?

You could rewrite your about page to reflect these feelings.

You could host a team conversation with on what your brand feels like.

You could send a customer survey asking how they feel at each stage.

You could identify one touch point that dulls your brand and redesign it with feeling.

You could post your three feelings in every meeting room, digital dashboard and welcome.

These are all different ways you can create higher frequency energy and transformation using your three feelings Feelings to Cultivate Design your customer journey to take them somewhere they can feel proud to arrive.

Today we did a lot you crafted your three feelings to cultivate.

You used the Cree Feelings to cultivate Finder.

You can now use it again and again in whatever way you like.

Be a great exercise to do with your marketing team.

A great exercise to think about for each product and service that you have.

It's really important to have those three core feelings for all of your brand messaging and experiences.

You also integrated those three feelings into the four page growth plan.

You identified a high leverage habit committed to a high potency action and now you have the power to elevate your company in a new way using this core growth element.

So make your customer feel seen and they will stay.

Make them feel elevated and they will share.

You can learn more about the three feelings to cultivate and its context in the larger Force for Good system by referring to chapter seven of the Force for Good book.

When you purchase the book, you'll get the whole Force for Good toolkit.

This toolkit includes today's tool and all the other tools in the system.

You can get it at a forceforgood Biz Book.

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Thank you for being here with us today and exploring this important concept of of free feelings to cultivate and remember the world is made better by women led business.

Let's all go make the world a better place.