One of the first lessons I got in the world of sales, from a great mentor, was: “The customer isn’t right, but sometimes you have to humor them, the way you’d humor a fool.” And yes, it may sound offensive and even contradict the belief that “the customer is always right.”
We mustn’t forget that a company’s most important asset is its customers: no customers, no business. But since we’re talking about assets, we’re not interested in toxic assets. In other words, as a company we have neither the obligation nor the need to serve every customer. In fact, companies should also choose their customers, and there are some customers you’re better off sending to the competition.
Personally, I didn’t understand my sales mentor’s words until years later, when I made a big mistake that ended up costing our company money and could even have ended in tragedy.
Customers often know very well what they want, but have no idea what they need. It’s true that there are customers with a great deal of knowledge about the product we sell, and having the chance to serve this kind of customer is a real pleasure. Then there’s another kind of customer who admits they don’t understand much about the product they want to buy, and comes to our company so that we, as experts, can advise them. This kind of customer is also a pleasure to deal with.
Of course, there’s yet another kind of customer: those who think they understand the product but are actually light years away from knowing it. And in some industries, this kind of customer is even a danger to themselves.
Sometimes we’re forced to agree with a customer because confronting them could give us a bad reputation. In fact, Amazon itself doesn’t hesitate to exchange products that it sometimes knows weren’t damaged in shipping; it prefers to take the loss rather than have that customer complain publicly on social media, at a time when Amazon only wants to expand online shopping without anyone questioning its efficiency and quality.
See also: 6 myths about great salespeople
The mistake of giving the customer what they wanted
A few years ago, one of our partner companies placed a special order with us for one of their customers.
It was a tilt-and-slide door with a panel that had to carry 900 kg of armored glass. I asked our experts whether it would be feasible to make. They immediately said no, and I passed that on to our partner.
But the partner company’s manager told us that company X could make it without any trouble. He also told me that, as a company that bought around €100,000 a year from us, they wanted a supplier that didn’t just sell them the easy stuff but could also handle special jobs.
In other words, they were basically telling me that if I didn’t make the tilt-and-slide door for them, they’d look for another supplier.
I went back down to talk to the factory manager and tell him. He was a professional with more than 20 years of experience, and he told me again that you can make anything, but that it would certainly cause problems when it came to installing it, and we’d be lucky if it didn’t break within two weeks.
Even so, we talked to our hardware supplier, the number one in all of Europe. He was also very clear, saying that even with their special fittings rated for up to 900 kg, that type of door would probably cause problems.
But our customer kept saying he had another company that wasn’t raising any objections, while our factory expert kept telling me to forget it: “If we make it, we’ll definitely have problems.”
So I got our partner and their customer together to talk to them and explain the situation, but neither would listen to reason: if there was a company that said it could be made, he wanted that type of door to close off the whole living room.
And I didn’t want to lose a customer worth €100,000 in sales, so in the end I agreed to make that door, more than 4 meters wide with a 900 kg panel, at a cost of about €6,000. If we didn’t do it, another company would do it just the same; that’s what I thought, without realizing the mistake I was making.
To cut a long story short, once it was made and installed in the customer’s house, less than 48 hours went by before we got a call from our partner, who had received a call from their customer: the door “had died.”
I went back to the customer’s house and saw two children of about 4 and 7 walking past the door, whose panel was sticking out and couldn’t go back into place. 900 kilograms that could have fallen on two children. At that moment I understood the madness of what I had done by agreeing, by not listening to our company’s experts and by ignoring our hardware supplier’s recommendations.
It could have ended in tragedy, when the easiest thing would have been to let that customer go. He would have had the same problem with any other company and would have come back to us with his tail between his legs.
We lost a customer worth €100,000 in sales and the €6,000 for that door, and I tarnished our company’s image to some extent by deciding to make something that should never have been made. Fortunately, there was no human tragedy, but there could have been.
They say we can learn from our mistakes, and since that day I’ve been very clear that I won’t get into trouble by giving a customer what they want.
I am the expert, and I work with experts, and as a company of experts we will tell you, the customer, what is good for you and what isn’t, which won’t always be what you want. That’s what we’re here for: to advise you.
The day I discovered that customers don’t like good coffee
If I surveyed regular café customers asking whether they prefer good coffee or bad coffee, 100% would say they want good coffee. But the truth is that 90% actually prefer bad coffee.
See also: What business to start: an entrepreneur doesn’t have to understand everything
A kilo of coffee can cost from 5 or 6 euros. Coffee usually contains a blend of natural roast and torrefacto (beans roasted with added sugar, common in Spain). The most common and acceptable blend is 80% natural coffee and 20% torrefacto, although in some cafés you can even find 60/40, which is the ideal coffee for upsetting your stomach.
Consumers may not know that torrefacto is what gives coffee its color, body and crema. In other words, torrefacto is rubbish, but it gives coffee “presence.”
“Let’s give them good coffee,” I said one day.
As a true coffee lover, I turned to a 100% natural coffee with no torrefacto at all. And customers said, “What rubbish coffee”: very light, no crema, watery…
Even though we were paying up to €25/kg to give customers one of the best coffees you could find in the province, they preferred an €8/kg coffee. And this is a case where you have to humor the customer like a fool and keep serving them rubbish instead of quality.
In short, customers aren’t experts, even though some think they are. You, as a company, are the expert, and sometimes your mission, if you don’t want problems, is to advise the customer and convince them that they don’t need what they actually want.
In some industries there’s no harm in humoring customers and offering them what they want rather than what they need, but in other industries, the best thing to do with certain customers is to let them go before they tarnish your image as a company. Not every customer is right for your company.
As Henry Ford is said to have put it: if he had asked his customers what they wanted, they would have told him a faster horse.
Further reading
- The 3 pillars that make customers trust your business
- 18 business lessons you’ll learn sooner or later
Featured image: MarkSweep, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
