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

Do you thank people enough? Are you sure?
Poised for a Fall
Brace yourself.
A typical service client cannot tell when the service is performed well. He
cannot tell if the motivational speaker really motivated his salespeople, if the
tailor made the perfect alterations to make the suit most flattering, or if the
lawyer won a motion that another lawyer would have lost.
But a typical client is very good at seeing that the speech fell flat, that the
pant legs are 1/4" too long, and that the court denied his attorney’s motion.
In short, few clients know how good they have it—but all of them know how
bad.
And so, the central fact of service marketing is this frustrating one: It is much
easier to fail in a service than to succeed.

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To make matters worse, most service relationships are not deeply cultivated:
a few meetings here, a couple of lunches there. Add up those hours, and they
rarely equal two dates. Unfortunately, trust takes time—more than two dates’
worth. And so service failures, which are much more obvious than successes,
erode the client’s already weak trust at the heart of the relationship.
Given that failures are obvious but most successes are invisible, what must
you do?
Advertise your successes. Show your client what you have done.
If you beat the deadline by two days (a good idea), make sure the client
knows.
If you came under the estimate by 7 percent (an even better idea), make sure
the client knows.
If you are especially proud of something you did, make sure the client knows.
Don’t expect the client to see how hard you have worked, how much you
have cared, and how well you have performed. So often, the client is the last to
know.
Make sure the client knows.
Satisfaction and Services
How do you satisfy a service customer? With surprising difficulty—as you will
realize when you compare it to your own experiences with buying products.
You decide to buy a car, for example. Our world being arranged as it is—
around the automobile— you need a car. If you are typical, you also desire a car
and may even covet a particular one: the leather seats, the special trim packages,
the six coats of paint, and the messages that car conveys.
When you buy that car, you are satisfied the second you pull out of the
dealership. The car is just what you wanted.
After you buy a product, it constantly reinforces your satisfaction. You golf,
for example. You covet and buy a Titleist Tour 100 balata golf ball. Each time
you wash and wipe off the ball, the white-on-white finish that attracted and
satisfied you from the beginning reminds you what a smart purchase you made
and how satisfied you are. Each time you strike the ball well, the ball’s high arc
through the air and soft landing on the distant green reminds you again. Your
Tour 100 ball continually satisfies you—just as the car, a flattering sweater, or
that big-screen TV satisfies you constantly by its presence. Seeing is believing,
and what you see makes you feel satisfied.

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Now, the contrast: You decide you might need a service. Your roof leaks or
your tooth aches, for example. You rarely desire a particular service, and almost
never covet one. In fact, you regard many services as necessary evils—the
lawyer you must hire to resolve a dispute, the accountant you must retain
because you cannot deal with complicated books, the insurance you must own
should disaster strike. In most cases, you are less eager and enthusiastic—and
less satisfied—when you choose a service.
Unlike products that you buy, the services you use come, then go. They do
not stick around to remind you of your satisfaction and to encourage you to
purchase them again. The lawn the neighbor boy mows nicely one day needs
mowing again just days later; the tooth the dentist filled no longer aches, but
nothing about the filled tooth satisfies you or reminds you of the good service
you received. Your much-needed insurance policy is just sitting in a file
somewhere, doing nothing at all. You no longer can see the few visible
reminders of these services that you received. Your satisfaction with them is
primarily a memory.
So the typical service deliverer—like you—is not present to make its clients
conscious of the benefits that the service still is providing: the pipes that are now
draining properly, the insurance coverage that provides much-needed disability
coverage for the sole proprietor, the contract addendum that retains for the
author valuable rights for his book. The homeowner with the fixed pipes was
satisfied for a couple days, then forgot about it. The business proprietor and the
author one day may be very satisfied—but for now, they are not even aware of
the service; the question of satisfaction does not even arise.
Given these significant differences between typical product and service
buyers and their satisfaction, what should the service marketer do to create a
satisfied client?
Stay present.Advertising and publicity reminds clients and former clients of