value-driven relationship

Today was a tiring day in our business. One of the customers- who was not the real customer I discovered, and had bought the product and assigned it to someone else to “try” it to see if the product has any use in his class decided to cancel the agreement because the actual user –who had no authority to make a decision if she wanted to use this or not and just was supposed to use it, used the product very poorly. This is the second time that I am realizing we sold the product to someone whom we should have identified at the beginning as not an early adopter of our technology in our start-up.

I now have a much more clear understanding who a real customer is: The real customer is the one, who has a need, and selects a product carefully that does the job he/she wants, and uses it properly and will be often happy (well assuming that the product really does the job it promises it does). If you sign up for a soccer team, for example, and you do not have suitable shoes, you will go to mall, look up available products and buy a pair that helps you play well in the field without sliding and falling. You are a happy costumer for that shoe and the shoe company loves you too.

Sometimes you do not feel you have a need but you buy a product and still are a real customer. Suppose since your childhood, you have been always using knife to chop onions when you cook. You are walking in a mall some day either for fun or just to do regular grocery shopping, and you notice an ad that says if you buy an onion chopper, you will save yourself time and make the job easy. The price tag is there and you know your budget, and decide to try it. You initially did not have a need, but you correctly identified the value of the product and willingly chose to buy.

You may think I am talking obvious, but there is a third group who are poison in the market and you should think twice before selling them your product: If the buyer decided to buy your product because he was afraid of saying “No” to you, he might be ruining the market by badly using the product and spreading negative opinion about your company by giving bad testimonials to others (a bad situation to be for start-ups who have limited number of customers). If he said yes, because he is your friend and is saying “yes” only to do you a favor and probably thinks what you offer “might be” useful somehow in his life at some point, he is in fact ruining your market. And if the buyer did not have a need nor understood the value of your product and yet decided to buy it because she knew that someone else would pay for the cost other than herself, be warned that she can be potentially a dangerous bug for your market.

After the first experience with a bad customer, I knew that I should not approach someone who is willing to setup a meeting with me only because he knows me. That was why I very clearly asked in our meeting that he should feel free to decline if he does not see any value. I knew him personally as someone who never says things unless he believes in it (and in fact I always admired him inside for this side of his characteristic) and I trusted when he told me that he sees value and is not going to waste my time. And he said “yes”. The problem was that the value he saw was not the value we were offering. He just took the technology totally wrong. I was hoping that I could correct him in the next meetings as we normally meet with customers regularly before the actual execution of the project. It turned out that he got too busy to meet me again and my emails in his inbox were his least priority and remained unanswered. After a month and just a few days before the start of the project execution, when I noticed that he is just too busy to meet with me and even not showing any need to get some quick training how to use the product, I saw him in a hallway and told him: Look! I know that we already have spent about 5k for this project and you signed an agreement that you use the system, but I would not mind if you cancel this here. Till this point, I was doing not too bad, but the bad mistake was the email I sent him just one hour after the brief conversation in the hallway. In my email I tried to discourage him to cancel because of the principle we had that a new technology needs some “push” at the beginning, and because we thought we have a sale and have spent resources. Why should one be interested in losing a sale he tried hard to close? Anyways, his final reply was basically that he “makes” someone else to use it. His teaching assistants.

This lesson was probably one of the biggest lessons that I learned since we started this business a year ago. I knew it theoretically before by sitting in marketing seminars and reading books, but now I know what they really mean and how I should talk to customers if I believe I have something that I know has a true value. Remember to build your relationship only upon values and nothing else.