…you run into something that really shakes up your ideas of how great things could be.
Ever been in a store where you got the idea that they didn’t really care if you bought anything or not? Normally, in a situation like that, you’d expect to hear someone complaining about an apathetic staff, or maybe a manager who was unwilling to bend to a specific customer need.
In this case, I’m giving them a standing ovation.
I’ll introduce the store by name in a future post, but the name is irrelevant to the point.
I walked into a store on Friday where I was served by the owner personally – a gentleman named Marc who could care less whether he made a sale. One of the friendliest people I’ve met in quite a long time, he happily spent an hour with me, quite conscious the whole time that the sale might not happen at all.
But far from a recipe for disaster, it’s Marc’s secret to success. Because Marc has found the one thing that is much more important than the sale.
Marc doesn’t care about getting the sale, but he does care about getting the referral.
It’s a strategy that works well for him, because it was a referral from my one of my most trusted friends that took me to his store in the first place. And from the moment I walked in the door, Marc made it clear that he wasn’t nearly as interested in taking my money as he was in making sure that my experience in his store was so good that I would happily spread his name to anyone who asked.
The most brilliant thing about this approach is that every single one of us can try it. The sad thing that makes it look brilliant is that almost none of us do.
Imagine how different things would be if every person you did business with today wasn’t interested in the transaction itself, but the interaction behind the transaction.
Everyone, from the CEO at one of the world’s biggest corporations, to the person who sells you your next car, to the barista at your coffee hangout, has the potential today to make people walk away raving about how great they were.
The person who pumps my gas today can make my experience so pleasurable that I’ll meet up with friends later and just have to tell them about it. I can get pulled over by a police officer who’s so friendly and genuinely concerned for my safety that their message will actually sink in without them having to write the ticket. I can get my Egg McMuffin from someone who spends the rest of their time behind the counter getting the customers to laugh and sing along to that new Bruno Mars song that everybody’s talking about.
…or, I can get the status quo, and spend my day getting served by people who are just doing their job.
Which one are you going to do today? Are you going to be so great that people can’t help but tell their friends about you? Or are you going to be another completely disposable part of their day?
