There were times in the past when I was able to listen to a caller on the phone, understand what he wanted, and recommend something else. One that I used to get a lot in the early days of Palo Alto Software was where the customer wanted accounting, not planning.
“No, Business Plan Pro doesn’t do that. You probably want QuickBooks, by Intuit, but you might prefer Microsoft Money or something by Sage or Peachtree. I suggest you call your bank, and get whichever one the bank will interact with.”
I was reminded of this just this morning by Seth Godin’s post How to Lose:
It seems to me that this is the perfect opportunity to be a statesman. This is when you earn the right to be seen as a trusted advisor, not a self-interested shill. Two months or two years from now, when you interact with that person or organization again, they’ll remember that you were the one who spoke up on behalf of the competition, the one who helped them find a better fit, the clearly disinterested advisor who helped them choose between the two remaining good choices.
I think that says it very well. You tell a caller on the phone that you don’t have what she wants exactly, but you know who does, and you give her that phone number. Does that sound crazy? Not really. At that moment, three things have happened:
- You’ve listened to the person on the phone, understanding her needs. That’s really important in selling.
- You’ve reinforced your strategic focus.
- You’ve sent that core message to a person who now likes you and, when her needs match your offering, might be back.
And that, like knowing your competition, and knowing your ideal customer, is good business.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Tim: Your advice seems a bit dated. QuickBoooks recently had 94.2% of small business accounting software sales at retail. Quicken had 83% before Microsoft Money dropped retail sales. Now the Quicken percentage of home checkbook software sales at retail is probably higher than the QuickBooks percentage. The 2009 Intuit offerings have Live Community support and can scale to much larger companies, especially with the thousands of QuickBooks add-ons. Live Community is winning social networking awards and saving Intuit a fortune. It will quickly spread to many companies. There also is the far better Accountant Copy, which makes us far more effective in much less time, so you better not refer calls like this to anyone else. See the QuickBooks-blog for more on this.
Mike: thanks for the addition, and of course you’re completely right: my advice was from years ago, something like late 1990s, early this century, which was when I was still taking the phone calls occasionally.
And for readers: yes, Mike’s right, I was using that example because it’s real, it actually happened. I’m assuming you’re not looking for my advice on accounting … or at least not in this post.
And for that, by the way, I do have a previous post, Starting Your Accounting from last April, also on this blog.
Tim