Selling the Invisible: a field Guide to Modern Marketing \(Biz Books to Go\) pdfdrive com

Watch your relationship balance sheet; assume it is worse than it appears,
and fix it.
The Day After—Why Getting the Business Can Be the First Step
in Losing It
You can generate significant sales for a service simply by promising miracles.
After doing that, you have a new client who can’t wait for the magic you
promised. In short, you have the Client from Hell.
Even if you do a very good job, you have a disappointed client. Your client
wasn’t expecting a very good job; she was expecting a great job. You promised.
This phenomenon is the bane of the collections agency industry, and explains
why that industry is all churn, a constant business of getting new clients to
replace those who are fleeing. The salespeople deliver passionate sales pitches,
the clients sign up, the salespeople pocket their commissions, and the client
thinks those blankety-blank deadbeats will finally pay.
But those blankety-blanks still don’t pay. Only about 21 percent do pay.
Do collections agency prospects ever hear that even a good agency will
collect less than 30 percent of the debts outstanding? No. So 79 percent of their
prospects end up disappointed, and leave for another agency.
If you make a client think you will do better than you can do, the client will
end up disappointed. Even worse, she will decide that you misled her, or lied.
It isn’t worth getting that business. A disappointed person who thinks you are
a liar will usually tell three other people. Suddenly, one great sale has become
four big problems.

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Don’t raise expectations you cannot meet.
Expectations, Satisfaction, and the Perils of Hype
What dissatisfies a client?
It is not bad service in some absolute sense of “bad.” You send a letter to
New York that takes three days. Is that bad delivery? Well, it is terrible delivery
for an overnight service and hideous delivery for a fax, but it is acceptable
delivery for a letter. It is the level of service you have learned to expect. So you
are satisfied.
A customer’s satisfaction is the gap between what the customer expects and
what she gets. Service below her expectations makes her dissatisfied—and the
greater the gap, the greater her dissatisfaction.
This means that one of a marketer’s most suicidal marketing weapons is
hype. Few marketers can resist using hyperbole to boost sales. But does it work
for the long term?
Ask IBM. In 1983 IBM introduced its PC Jr. with an uncharacteristic flood of
hype. Americans got “Charlie Chaplined” into believing that this new PC would
be the IBM of personal computers.
That raised people’s expectations enough. The added hot air from what was
typically such a modest company inflated expectations even more.
The PC Jr. could never meet those expectations. People who tried the PC Jr.
were dissatisfied, because it fell below the enormous expectations that IBM’s
hype had created.
Because of that debacle, IBM lost a chunk of its customer franchise. If IBM
had tried to follow the PC Jr. with a product that really was revolutionary, few
would have believed it; IBM had lost the credibility needed to make that claim.
It was seven years before IBM earned its way back in, and then only with an
exceptional product: the PS 1.
It could just as easily happen to you.