What Do Your Customers Really Buy From You?
I just got the final bill from a contractor who was rebuilding a retaining wall from the side of my house. Imagine my surprise when the bill was $1K over and above the contract price. We had a nice argument about it. He said two things that I found out of place. One was he said he did a good job. The second was that I was buying his time as part of the project, and certain things took longer due to problems.
I’ll address these one by one. First, I have no way to judge whether he did a good job or not. In fact, I probably never will know. I’ll know if he did a bad job because the wall will start to fall / shift / move in a few years. But, unless I have some other skilled person come out and evaluate the work, I’ll never really know if he did a good job. I don’t have the skills to judge construction quality. It looks nice, sure, but if the web has taught us anything; just because it looks nice doesn’t mean it works.
Second, and the real meat of this post is what I was buying from him. Was it his time? No! Was it a bunch of bricks? No! I was buying a wider driveway. I was buying a wall that would not bend and drift to the wills of nature. I was also buying the ability to more easily shovel snow off my driveway. I was also buying the ability to not scratch my car as I backed out of the driveway. These were the primary motivators in my having the retaining wall rebuilt.
What does your business sell to customers? What do your customers buy from you? They may not be the same thing. If you were going to get in touch with only one of these things, I strongly suggest that it is the latter. With Flextras, I sell Interface Components for Flex Developers. However customers are buying free time. It may take 2-4 weeks for them to build a component comparable to the one they can buy from me for less than a day’s pay. What will they do with the extra time? Maybe work on other important pieces of the application, thus creating a happy customer. Maybe they’ll step away from the computer and listen to their newborn child say “dada” for the first time. Maybe they’ll go out on a long hike through the woods near the local park, stopping by the stream to have lunch with their latest love interest. I’m not sure what they’ll do, but I want to give them the time to make it happen.
Why do your customers buy from you? How does that differ from what you sell them?
