Do you like to see impressive, amazing things? Do you like to witness jaw dropping, astonishing situations and events? Of course you do. Everybody does. And it only costs eight bucks. That's right, for eight bucks you can go to a movie theatre and watch Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger deliver two solid hours of stunning imagery, special effects, lighting, action and thrills, splashed across the big screen in blazing color and Dolby Surround Sound. These days, with a few thousand dollars of equipment, you can even get the same thing, maybe better, at home.

Yes, people like to be impressed, and Hollywood thinks nothing of spending $100 million on a picture so they can give the people just what they want. And they do a great job of it.

You Can't Compete With Hollywood

But one of the worst things you can do is deliberately try to impress your customers. Why? Because you're not Hollywood and you don't have $100 million dollars. And impressing people is not your job. Your job is to help them solve problems and capitalize on new opportunities.

Here's what happens, almost on a subconscious level: When you try to impress, instead of building trust, educating and persuading, you immediately cause your customer's guard to go up. He immediately stops believing you.

This is a big, big mistake. Most companies are trying so hard to impress people, nobody can figure out what they do. More importantly, nobody cares how impressive you are. Nobody cares how many billions of dollars of assets some insurance company has. They'd much rather know that you will go to the mat for them when there's a problem. They'd much rather know that you really care about their problems and that you want to help them.