Читать книгу Never Say Sell - Tom McMakin - Страница 11

In How Clients Buy, we learned that expert services are bought differently than, say, a laptop. Tom and his wife, Mary, just bought a new family computer and landed on a Lenovo X1 (on sale at Costco with 16 GB of RAM!). They did the research, comparing processor speed, reliability tests, weight, size, color, storage capacity, and price. They relied on PC Magazine's side-by-side descriptions, building out a matrix that laid out various laptops' key qualities. Then they compared the qualities that were most important to each of them. Mary wanted something light and fast; Tom wanted something that would last for years. Both agreed they would mostly use it for email and the Internet.

Tom and Mary ranked several machines they identified against their priorities, narrowing the choices and easily making the final decision. This approach to buying, call it the “Excel-driven comparative shopping method,” is the way we buy cars, phones, and air travel as we seek to balance features and attributes in the search for a good fit with our needs and budget.

That's not how we buy expert services, however. Expert services are bought on reputation, referral, and relationships, not features and attributes or even price.

As Michael McLaughlin has written, “What sets service providers apart from other sellers is that (we) are first and foremost idea merchants.”

For example, imagine your parents have retired to the coral beaches of Naples, Florida. They are of an age where it doesn't make sense for them to do their taxes (they can't remember where they put their car keys, much less whether their K-1 income qualifies for a 20% deduction this year). They call you one day and say, “Can you help us find someone down here who can do our taxes?”

You don't have any idea whom you should use. There's no PC Magazine that ranks Floridian tax accountants and no online grid that balances services against price and quality. You fly down to see them at Thanksgiving, take a Lyft to the graduated assisted living facility, and spot a billboard on the side of the road that says, “McMakin and Parks: Collier County's Smartest CPAs.” You chuckle because that is a bold and somewhat ridiculous claim.

You pick up a brochure in the lobby of their living facility. It proclaims, “Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe: Paradise Coast's Cheapest CPAs.” You chuckle again. That's not what you are looking for. You want a good tax accountant, not to take the last penny off the table. Indeed, you find yourself wondering if there might be an inverse relationship between the price an expert services provider charges and perceived quality. After all, a $1,500-per-hour San Francisco attorney is thought to be better than one that charges $150 per hour.

In the end, you call a friend from college who works at Ernst & Young out of the Miami office and ask if they could recommend a CPA in Naples?

They say something like, “I do cross-border work, so I'm not your guy, but I have a partner here whose little sister graduated a couple of years ago from the University of Texas in Austin at the top of her class. She's got a small firm in Fort Myers, and it has a great reputation. In fact, she is doing taxes for some of the partners who have retired. I'll introduce you.”

Bam. You're done. No spreadsheet. No ranking of features or processor speed. Just reputation, referral, and relationship. That's how clients buy expertise.