I’ve spent a great deal of time over the past few weeks focused on marketing: Marketing with a capital M.
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It’s a continuation of the webcasts I’ve been doing, but it’s hard to think or write about marketing without the whole notion of bringing people to your door and getting them to experience the warmth of your care or the quality of your products without it slowly creeping into your office and onto your to-do list at the shop.
It’s insidious. One minute it’s living in the empirical part of your brain: the thoughtful, theoretical, hypothetical part where the subject is interesting, but not necessarily compelling. And the next, it’s taken over your neocortex and it’s all you can think about. One minute I was defining marketing, advertising, sales, public relations, promotions, merchandising, et al, and the next I was calculating lifetime client value and vehicle frequency while segmenting my customer base. It’s hard to imagine anything more exhilarating, or more exhausting.
And even though it takes a lot of energy and effort, it’s fun to re-visit your business plan, redefine your mission and vision statements and then build a brand new marketing plan. It’s fun until the reality of reconciling all the many and different ways you’re going to bring all these new and wonderful people to your door with the practical reality of finding your net filled with at least a few individuals who don’t quite fit your ideal client profile.
We do a lot of Internet marketing. It’s a very effective way to introduce your shop to an almost infinite universe of potential new clients. But it is a very wide net, and there are times where no matter how hard you try to cast that net with surgical precision, you fail. And when you do, it can be epic.
A woman who came to us after finding us on the Internet, brought her vehicle in early one afternoon after it failed to start. She recognized it could a bad starter, a failed alternator and/or a dead battery, and articulated as much at the counter. I listened to Frank explain our process with great care and infinite patience: We check for contamination and corrosion, clean the posts and cables if necessary, check the battery, charge and re-check as required, check the starter and alternator, formulate a diagnosis, prepare an estimate and then share all that information with the client before proceeding. She was impressed, and to tell you the truth, so was I.
His presentation was inspiring, flawless. He explained everything in great detail, building value every step of the way. It was a master’s class in communication.
The client signed the authorization, which included all of the necessary costs including those for inspection and testing, and left. After we finished the necessary tests, we called her with the estimate. The client authorized the work, in this case a new battery, only to call back in 10 minutes questioning the total.
“Why is it so much? I can buy a battery for…” You know what comes next because you’ve heard it all before.
Frank explained the estimate, including the inspection and testing, and that’s when the fun began.
“I called a friend, who is a mechanic…” (Do you realize that if there were as many technicians as there are technicians who are “friends” with our customers there would be no shortage of technicians!) “He said the test only takes 15 minutes and that you had no right to charge for it.”
No right?
Once again, Frank tried to explain our process to her, but the longer the conversation went on the worse things got. The woman wasn’t interested in hearing about overhead, insurance, the cost of the equipment or a lifetime of learning. She just “wasn’t going to be taken advantage of,” and she certainly wasn’t going to pay for inspection and testing.
She started to lose Frank when she said that she wanted us to do the work, but didn’t like our prices.
But, it was when she implied that we “had her,” as in she had no choice, that he pulled the plug. And when he did, I was both proud and relieved.
“I’m sorry. There is apparently nothing I can say or do to help you understand. And since there isn’t, I don’t think I can work on your vehicle.”
“You can’t do that,” she replied. “You have to work on my car.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t have to and I no longer want to. You don’t understand what we do, and because you don’t understand what we do, what we do holds no value for you. And because you can’t see the value we provide, we will never be able to work together.”
In a very famous quote, Peter Drucker, the father of contemporary management theory, said that marketing is all about finding customers. Arthur Levitt, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, said it’s all about finding and keeping customers.
I say, marketing is all about finding and keeping the right customers. And, sometimes, finding and keeping the right customers is all about knowing when to say no, I don’t wanna, or no, I don’t haveta.
I don’t wanna invite you into my world, and I certainly don’t haveta let you ruin my life!
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