611: Does your product match your clients expectations?

Believe it or not, every time a customer does business with you they come in with expectations both spoken and unspoken. So, how do we manage those and shape those to match what we have to offer? Well, let’s talk about that today! Happy Monday friends, Thomas Joyner here with Business on Purpose. Last week, my wife found a deal online. $79 bucks for your first visit. Introductory offer, book here. She ended up calling the office to make an appointment and was so excited to go. She sat down, went through the full experience, and absolutely loved it! About halfway through, the receptionist came over and brought her bill. $240!!! She immediately texted me and was pretty bummed. I told her to just show them the intro web page and ask about it. “Oh, that’s an old promotion. Sorry about that.” And that was it. No one told her as she was running up a bill more than 3 times what she expected. Nope, just added to it and didn’t even flinch. After her having a short conversation with the receptionist, they lowered it to $200 and she left.  But here’s the frustrating part. The service was amazing. Probably worth every bit of the 200 bucks she paid. The place was clean, the service amazing, the staff friendly…and yet because she walked in with an incredibly different expectation for price, she left with a bad taste in her mouth and unable to recommend the place or really want to go back. It felt like a bait and switch.  And to this day, the promotion is still up online… further adding to the belief that it’s a bait and switch. Let me flip over to the other side of the equation. The Savannah Bananas minor league baseball team. The first time I went I was a little shocked at how much tickets cost. I’m used to paying 10 bucks or so for minor league night with the Charleston River dogs. I noticed that the price was a good bit higher, starting around 25 bucks, so I was curious if it would be worth it.  From the moment we stepped foot at the stadium, we were entertained. High-fived, laughed, high energy, all the food and drink you could want all included, not wanting to miss a minute of the action.  We left feeling like we would have paid double the price for what we got and the actual product far exceeded what we knew we were going to pay. See the difference? So, if you were to look at your marketing and sales…where do you fail to live up to the expectations? Maybe you need to start by simply writing down the expectations your customers arrive with. And then one by one walking through them and addressing them. If it’s timely service, how can you meet or exceed that? If it’s value pricing (if that’s your goal), how can you be upfront about that to exceed the customers expectations? Maybe it’s being innovative and providing new solutions… how do you stack up? Maybe it’s having a team that is friendly and joyful? Send some surveys out to customers to find out how you stack up or call up someone you do business with, take them to lunch, and just ask. They will tell you! Because here’s the thing… this goes for relationships, dating, business, everything! Discontentment is a direct result of unmet expectations! But if you learn to manage and understand and exceed expectations, or set them appropriately ahead of time…you will create raving fans in your business with long-term relationships where customers come back time and time again. The opposite, of not knowing what expectations are out there or maybe even manipulating them to get people in the door is shortsighted at best and a horrible business model. There’s a word that one of my mentors walked me through years ago. Congruence…it’s this thought that what’s on the outside matches what’s on the inside. I think we spend too much time trying to hide one or the other instead of matching the two up and being who we say we are and showing who we say we are. Once we learn to set appropriate expectations and deliver or exceed those expectations, we can finally be a business that will get referred by everyone we do business with. So sit down today, create a list of expectations our clients have, and see where we stack up! Do it! Put in the time and see where you land. Thanks!