One Quick Call Saved Me $463.88
When I opened my long-distance phone bill last month, my mouth literally dropped open. In the past six months or so, my bill had doubled. But I could shrug my shoulders and rationalize the expense, because I knew I had been participating in an extraordinary number of teleseminars lately. Seeing a number over $500 (might not be a lot for your business, but it’s about 4 times my average use), though, caught my attention.
Yet here we are a month later … and my bill is approaching the $300 mark. The pain of paying more money hasn’t yet become less significant than the “pain” I anticipate in having to sit in queue waiting to talk to a potentially unfriendly, unhelpful, unenthusiastic customer service representative.
There are two marketing lessons right there in that last sentence:
(1) As marketers, we have to battle our customers’ sometimes ill-founded prejudices and unsavory past experiences to win their business. Figure out what types of beliefs your customers hold about you/your company/your profession/your industry … and use your marketing materials to prove that you are NOT what they think you are.
(2) As with any type of change, customers will not register for your seminar (which really is a form of committing themselves to making a change by learning whatever it is that you’re going to teach them) until the pain of NOT making the change becomes greater than the pain of making the change. Use this to your advantage by driving home how much they are hurting themselves by choosing to NOT learn the wonderful information you’ll share.
As for my phone bill, a big thanks to my friend Jill Hendrickson of www.WeightLossItalianStyle.com, for the heads up about AT&T’s long-distance plans (oops, make that the “new” AT&T). I’ll now be paying a whopping $36.95 for what cost me $500.83 last month. Since I’ve been an AT&T customer for the past 8 years, I’m a little confused about why I had to sign up with the “new” company … but that’s a topic for some other day.