I recently spent $526 on winter tires at my favourite tire place. These guys take very good care of my wife's car, and so when I went shopping for winter tires for my old beater, I called them first for a price.
Buy three, get one free was the deal. $526 out the door. I checked around, and on the same tires they were not the lowest priced, but within a reasonable margin that it warranted continuing what has so far been a great relationship. It still is. I ordered the tires and they put them on this weekend.
I paid my bill and they told me all the other great stuff that went with the deal. Four free oil changes. 120 days complimentary roadside assistance. $250 in a coupon booklet, and reasonably speaking I may use about $100 of it. Free alignment annually. Replacement value pro rated on road hazard damage to the tires. I was blown away and very glad I had paid a few extra bucks and come back to this place.
But none of that was mentioned when I was still in the shopping stage. They were order takers. Customer asks a question, guy at the desk gives an answer. Your move, Mr. Customer. Without a pre-existing relationship they might not have got the sale at all, and I would have ended up with four tires from someone else, never the wiser or worse, retroactively wiser if I found out what could have been.
We're all in sales, folks. A smarter man than me once said, "You can have the greatest product in the world but if you can't sell it, you've still got it." Sell, sell, sell!
No comments:
Post a Comment