I have talked a lot about going above and beyond for your customers, gaining and keeping their trust, and more. What about making them feel confident? I recently had an experience where a PR company was trying to gain my business but made me feel completely, and unnecessarily incompetent.
I began writing a press release for the upcoming release of our new product, The IdeaWall. I wanted to find some places to send our release to, and found a PR site. I signed up because there was no cost associated with it (or so I thought). A woman started emailing me and asking me to set up a time to speak with her. I found out for them to just critique your press release was in the triple digits. I’m pretty confident in my writing abilities and don’t want to waste anyone’s money with that.
She continued to email me and I finally tried letting her down easy by telling her “it’s just not in our budget this yearâ€. In reality, I just didn’t want to waste our money. I thought I would get a sympathetic response. Instead, I received “Our prices go from $X – $X… you can’t afford that?†I was, and still am offended. I replied and let her know we actually did have it in our budget but we wanted to focus our efforts elsewhere (you don’t even want to know what I really wanted to say to her).
Besides this being a bit of a rant, you need to take away that no matter how inexpensive you think your products/services are, some people really may not be able to afford it, or may be able to afford it, but don’t want to use their money for the product or service being offered. It’s okay. I may need this PR business’s services in the future, but after that little snippet of unprofessionalism, I think I will take my PR needs elsewhere (when and if we need them).
Be courteous, polite, and don’t make your customers feel bad about themselves.