That Was Longer Than Three Minutes

Set reasonable expectations for your customers.

You may think that you if you tell your customers it could take up to three weeks to receive their party order they may be upset or may not order.   So perhaps you think that if you tell them “in about a week or so” then they’ll be pleased with that response and order.

This is backwards thinking.   You always want to under-promise and over-deliver. If you tell them 3 weeks and it arrives in eight days, they’ll be thrilled.   Yet if you tell them to expect it in a week and it takes 16 days, they’re going to be upset, may cancel the order or may never want to order again.

I was thinking about this over the weekend at a local pizza establishment. My daughter had some friends over who decided they wanted pizza for lunch. I ran up the street to get a couple Hot and Ready pies for them.   Though when I walked in, there were no pizzas hot and no pizzas ready.   The young man at the counter told me it would be “three minutes”.  Certainly I could wait three minutes for the pepperoni bliss.

Three minutes turned into almost fifteen. How patient do you think I was sitting there waiting? Not very.   However, if young Jacob had told me something along the lines of, “we’re putting more in the oven now; it should be about 15 minutes.”   Then I could have made an informed decision to determine if I wanted to sit there, or perhaps go get some gasoline and then return or perhaps gone to Plan B (what if I was on a tight schedule?) Instead, the longer I sat, the more negative thoughts I had about that particular business.   I live half way between two pizza joints.   I could have easily gone East instead of West. Which one do you think I will patronize next time?

The same is true for your direct sales business.   You are not doing any favors trying to shorten the wait time.   You will do more damage than good. Instead give them the longest possible time it could take. You would be fine following it up with “It usually doesn’t take that long, but it could” (assuming that it usually doesn’t.) Clearly you don’t want to say usually it doesn’t take that long if it usually does.

Give your customers a reason to be loyal to you. There are far too many other consultants; if you don’t take care of them someone else will.

Under-Promise and Over-Deliver.

About the Author: Laurie Ayers is a Michigan work from home mom and a Superstar Director with Scentsy Wickless Candles. She enjoys helping men and women start and maintain a home based business in the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Germany, Ireland, France, Spain and the UK. To download a FREE Start Up Guide which provides more details about how to start a home business as well as to learn about our compensation plan go to www.thrivingcandlebusiness.com/how-to-start-a-candle-business/ or for updates on Facebook LIKE www.facebook.com/ThrivingCandleBusiness and twitter @directsalesblog