I love the Seth Godin blog post titled "Cultural Wisdom." For me, it captures one of the reasons good creative work is so important. It sums up why you shouldn't settle for misspellings in your company's Facebook posts, why your frontline staff should not be any less than customer service experts and, yes, why the windows in your store or restaurant should always be clean.

When these things aren't right, your prospects may not know why, but they'll at least sense that something is off, and that, maybe, you're not the right company for them. Read Seth's take on it:

It's very easy to underrate the value of cultural wisdom, otherwise known as sophistication.

Walk into a doctor's office and the paneling is wrong, the carpeting is wrong, and it feels dated. Instant lack of trust.

Meet a salesperson in your office. She doesn't shake hands, she's fumbling with an old Filofax, she mispronounces Steve Jobs' name, and doesn't make eye contact.

Visit a website for a vendor and it looks like one of those long-letter opportunity seeker type sites.

In each case, the reason you wrote someone off had nothing to do with their product and everything to do with their lack of cultural wisdom.

We place a high value on sophistication, because we've been trained to seek it out as a cue for what lies ahead. We figure that if someone is too clueless to understand our norms, they probably don't understand how to make us a product or service that we'll like.