Your time is valuable.
Your prospect’s time is even more valuable.
So if you’re not right for them you need to let them know as soon as possible.
Put together 3 questions that will tell you whether or not your business is right for them.
Then ask them as early as possible.
Download our free e-book on qualifying out to find out how.
Let me know how you get on.
I vividly remember the butterflies in my stomach as I handed over the cash. It was a lot of money to pay for a book – £40, when a paperback cost less than £1.
Would it be worth it? Would I regret it? What were the other people in the shop thinking of me as the assistant handed it to me, here in this ‘insider’ shop, catering to the trade?
They were oblivious of course, but for me, buying this book was my initiation into the world of fashion designers and insiders, the people who go deeper than the weekly magazines or even Vogue. Handing over what my friends and colleagues saw as an obscene amount of money for a book was an essential part of that experience.
If, like many small businesses, you see payment as an add-on, a bit of admin you’d rather put off, you’re depriving your client of the chance to relive the reasons they agreed to buy from you, diminishing their experience and in the process, subtly de-valuing what you’ve given them.
If paying is part of the experience, then taking payment is part of the service and that means it should be an integral part of your process.
In my early days as a software engineer, back in 1988, this book (“Principles of Software Engineering Management” by Tom Gilb) was my bible.
We’d just acquired a new client, who’d been told that the networked point of sale software they’d just ordered would be ready in 3 months.
The trouble was, what they’d seen was a mock-up. We hadn’t even begun to think about designing or building it.
So, having found this new book a few weeks earlier, I decided to follow its principles.
Having mapped out a high-level architecture for the system, we put ourselves in the shoes of the customer – a large department store – to work out which elements we should deliver first.
Next we worked out which parts of the standard software development approach we could ditch, without compromising maintainability (I learned to code with the MOD, so maintainability was key).
Having stripped our development process back to just what would support the things we really cared about – software that did what the customer wanted reliably, delivered in business-useful chunks and in code that could and would be easily maintained in future – we were rigourous in sticking to it.
Everything else was low-tech and informal. We were a small team in one room with a whiteboard, and could communicate well enough to keep things on track and under control.
We were helped by a fantastic boss, who believed in us, and defended us from the traditionalists outside our team.
It worked. We didn’t deliver the whole system in 3 months, but the client was more than happy.
They got what they needed when they needed it. As they populated products, we built the departments piece, and so on, each delivery fully tested and working properly, building on the previous one until the system was complete.
And we were the first to market with this kind of product.
The point of this little nostalgia trip?
The right level of discipline makes daring possible.
Today I had to pay £14.95 to get out of a car park (on top my parking).
Because the user interface had been (deliberately?) designed to let me forget to take my token back.
The payment console had very visibly prompted me to insert my parking token with an eye-catching animated graphic, but there was no eye-catching graphic to prompt me to take it back again. I didn’t realise my mistake until I reached the exit barrier.
Up to that point I’d had a good morning, spending my money in a local museum coffee shop, a couple of clothes stores and a bookshop.
“There is a sign on the machine.”, aaid the man on the other end of the intercom.
“But I was looking at the screen.”, I replied. “And I’ve never parked here before.”
“That’s just how it is I’m afraid. I’ll send a transaction to the machine for you to pay the fine. It will issue you with a replacement token”
Yes, it was that easy for them to let me have another token to exit the car park.
Oh well. I won’t do it again.
Because I’m never shopping in Maidstone again.
What traps are you laying for unwary customers?
Intentional or not, they’ll lose you business.
image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons