Educate Your Customer: The Sales Advantage

A recent interaction with a tree removal professional reinforced the importance of educating your customer during the sales process.

I love our home in Griswold, Connecticut! One of my favorite things about where we live is that even though we are nestled in a neighborhood our backyard feels very private because it is surrounded by trees. You would never know we had neighbors so close by!

Sadly, we have a few trees surrounding our home that are dying. And even while we are enjoying our backyard, my husband and I will be relaxing in the hot tub and looking up at the night sky, for example… I look across the yard and consider the possibility that a tree could possibly come down in a storm and fall on our house. So, I knew that I had to call a tree guy to come out. And I was really concerned about what it was going to cost because there are six or seven trees in all that would likely have to come down to keep our home safe.

To calm my anxiety, I sat down to make a few phone calls to a few different tree guys that I found on the Internet. The first one to arrive truly impressed me. He’s also an arborist and he pointed out the areas of disease on the tree and he explained the dying process, showing us which ones would have to come down and why. The next guy that came out to give us a quote allowed me to point out which trees needed to come down and he wrote notes on the clipboard while I was speaking. And then, he sent me a quote via e-mail.

When we compared the numbers, The second tree guy came in roughly $1300 less than the first. However, I liked the first guy so much better because he educated us through the customer acquisition process. 

So, I ended up calling the first guy back and telling him that we really wanted to choose him, but that there was such a price difference. Ultimately, he offered to match the other guy’s pricing. And what was surprising to me was that he was so grateful that we had called him back to let him know. I suppose a lot of people just decide to go with the lowest price with all things otherwise being equal. They both had a lot of experience and adequate insurance. 

Educate your customer to increase sales.

My point is that communication holds a lot of value in any transaction and in doing business in general. It’s one thing just to do a job, but it’s another to educate the customer during the process.

That’s an important difference that we strive for when serving clients of Innovast Digital Marketing. From the initial discovery call to defining your brand; content development to outlining the website structure and finally the buildout and QA testing, there are valid reasons behind the recommendations we make. It goes beyond personal preferences. We take the time to explain the basis behind why steps should be taken in a certain order or elements of design should be presented in a specific way.

Ultimately, if we are working on a project for you and you insist on doing things differently than how we recommend, we will build it according to your wishes – but we will surely share our expertise, so at least you will understand the reasons behind recommended practices.