What do a tailor, a mason and a sales person have in common? The most successful ones are specialists in alignment. Alignment means achieving just the fit your target audience wants. Whether your expertise involves buttons, bricks or any other business, alignment is what you need to do, to succeed in your professional relationships. Here are some categories where alignment counts.

Good feelings and solutions to problems. According to author and management professor Michael LeBoeuf, good feelings and solutions to problems are the only two things that people ever buy. How do you align what others want and what you provide? You STALL: stop talking and learn to listen. Ask others two "W" questions: What do you want? When do you want it? Interestingly, a third "W" (What does it cost?) is a factor influencing only 10% of customers who decide to switch their business to a different provider, according to research by the Juran Institute. Think about it. Whether customers are looking for toothpaste, financial services, a new home or anything else you can imagine, they base their purchases and repurchases on their perceptions of good feelings and solutions to problems.

Empathy and understanding. To succeed, you have to know what’s going on in your customers’ hearts and minds. You have to know them as well as -- and preferably better than -- they know themselves. You need to be a passionate student of what your customer wants today and where his or her preferences might gravitate to tomorrow. The most successful people gather this intelligence in the field, getting close to their customers, using observations, questions and various forms of research. Thomas J. Watson, Sr., IBM’s founder, said, "You cannot sell by sitting in the office. The only time that pays off is time spent before a prospect." For empathy and understanding to remain in alignment, they have to be an ongoing process that doesn’t end once a contract is signed or a transaction is made. Follow-up is a form of empathy and understanding that is highly appreciated, perhaps because it’s so haphazardly practiced. Jay Levinson, father of the "guerrilla marketing" approach, says, "Sixty eight percent of business lost in America is lost because of the apathy after the sale. Not poor service. Not poor quality, but the love-‘em-and-leave-‘em attitude. This means there’s lots of room to move in."

Head and heart. People do things for logical reasons. They scrutinize product and service features. These are head calculations. But, ultimately, people -- even analytical people -- act for emotional reasons. Those emotions, or matters of the heart, are stirred by what people value. To succeed, you need to become expert at interviewing others to determine what they value. Value propositions are such things as safety, convenience, security, ease of use, freedom, choice, reliability, protection, independence, choice, control, empowerment and peace of mind. Ask others what they value and listen carefully to what they tell you. People shop for features, but they buy -- and will pay handsomely for -- what they value. Unfortunately, too many sales people have a compulsion to talk, talk, talk, rather than ask, ask, ask, and listen, listen, listen. By asking and listening, you allow the customer or prospect to tell you what they value. The customer or the prospect does the aligning for you, which makes the sale -- if only you’ll listen.

Trust and loyalty. The biggest success comes when you surpass expectations. Trust and loyalty -- the glue that holds relationships together -- increase when you go further than expected to show that you place others’ interests ahead of your own. The "I care about you" message actually carries more weight in most cases than does raw performance. There will always be others offering customers some benefit that outstrips yours -- or seems to. While you can’t be cavalier about innovations by your competition, be aware that people do business with people they trust and like. However, trust, likability and loyalty are only as solid as the latest perceptions others have about you. A key alignment question to keep asking your target audiences is: "What more can I do?" Dave Thomas, founder and CEO of the Wendy’s restaurant chain, says, "You can’t take a customer for granted. There really is no such thing as customer loyalty. If you want to succeed in business, you have to be loyal to your customers, in order to get them to keep coming back."

Incidentally, the categories of alignment are also adaptable to your personal and non-customer relationships. Use alignment principles with your relatives, friends and co-workers and watch your success with them skyrocket.