customers can be idiots

Show up to look at a high end bathroom remodel.  Customer wants a shower system with a regular shower head, a hand sprayer, a rain fall head, and three body sprayers installed in a new custom built shower.  Doesn't understand why I cant use the old bathtub 1.5" drain.  I tell him code requires two 2" shower drains in a stall with that many heads.  He completely dismisses my explanation.  After i explain just how much water can potentially come out of that system, I move on to hot water supply.  We go down to the basement to look at his water heater.  He doesn't have one.  He has a tankless on the boiler.  I explain best case scenario it can produce 3.5Gal/min at a 70* temp rise, yada yada yada.  That shower system won't work.  His answer was that he needed more heads because with one shower head he wasn't getting enough hot water in the winter time.  He was tired of taking cold showers.  With more heads, he will have more hot water.  I politely told him to have a nice day and to find someone else.

Good move.  He sounds like the type of customer who would have wanted a bathroom remodel done for $400 and be finished in 3 days, "just like on TV..."

He’s not a customer until he pays the invoice.   

Sales is fun.  

Those are the kind of people we walk away from too.  

Rule #1: the customer is always right

Rule #2: not everyone deserves to be your customer

Sometimes you have to fire a customer

That's kinda like "If you want to go faster you just need more gears, because if 5th gear lets you do 120mph just imagine how fast you could go with a ten speed transmission."

People are amazing.

I had a potential client come into my office wanting a floor plan for the new shop she had just rented. “Just rented” being the important part. 

She had a piece of graph paper with the sizes of all the fixtures she wanted in it. She had left about 6” between each piece for clearance.  I mean literally, on all sides.

She couldn’t understand why that wouldn’t work.  They will all fit, what’s the problem?

That bit about adding more shower heads so he doesn't run out of hot water is a little like the guy who was caught speeding and when asked by the nice officer why he was doing 75 mph in a 35 mph zone, he said:  "I'm almost out of gas and I was hurrying to the gas station before I ran out completely."

If you're explaining you're losing.

Minor explanations are typically required but the moment you go further then "code says" it's a lost cause.

I write off something like 50% to 60% of the prospects I talk to. Most don't have any idea what's required for my products and services to work for their organization. I'd rather protect the brand and reputation than take their money and deal with a failed implementation.

I've also had them come back asking for a discount a year later because they blew a quarter million dollars doing exactly what I said wouldn't work... I'll try to help a bit but I don't have much in the way of sympathy.

Spoolpigeon said:

Rule #1: the customer is always right

Wrong.

"The customer should always be satisfied"

The customer is not always right, who knows more about your job / product than you?

I literally had a customer I called regarding an overdraft tell me, "I couldn't be out of money, I'm not out of checks." 

CJ said:

I literally had a customer I called regarding an overdraft tell me, "I couldn't be out of money, I'm not out of checks." 

The0retical said:

Minor explanations are typically required but the moment you go further then "code says" it's a lost cause.

I generally am very happy to defer to experts, but sometimes I need to understand why. And sometimes getting "code says" feels like an evasion.

On the flip side, while it probably is an evasion sometimes, a contractor can also probably tell the difference between "I want to understand this before I blindly write the check" and "I don't like that answer, let's try a different reality."

There are days I would like to make this our company shirt. 

As a side note, don't tell them no. Just make it so expensive that if they accept, their stupidity makes you smile. 

In reply to Ransom :

It's a fine line to walk. As the seller I try to be forthright with the prospect and provide the reference where they can look up the rule set if they ask. I deal with a lot of regulated industries and, while not an expert on all of them, I know where to get the documentation most of the time. If I don't, I tell the prospect I don't know off hand and I figure out who to tap to get that information.

As the buyer, I typically try to avoid that argument but I'll ask for the quote then do some research to confirm. Trust but verify if you will.

It can go a little sideways from time to time though, so I totally understand where tr8todd is coming from.

Example: I straight up told a prospect that a competitor of ours was lying to them when them competitor told the the prospect that their off the shelf ERP solution was FDA validated. You validate procedures not the ERP solution. Medical devices are the only item the FDA potentially requires code to parse. Thus it is impossible to have a "validated system" but the system may have been validated for a particular situation in the past. It is not even remotely the same thing.

Mind you the prospect was in the cosmetics industry, was looking to move into pharmaceuticals, and had hired an outside consultant. Yet no one had figured out, or hadn't sufficiently parsed, the appropriate sections of CRF21 where the FDA clearly defines record management, quality control for manufacturing and inventory control guidelines. 

We hit a point in the conversation where I cut them off and said any further information would be consulting because it was obvious I was volunteering too much information.

I'm not even sure why they hired the consultant except to just pay him for the hell of it if he didn't know something as basic as that.

Pretty sure we're not getting that one. OTOH, I do have their much larger direct competitor as a client as well as the documentation on how we validated our solution for their use. So you never know.

Edit: Typing on my phone next to a sleeping child explaining something technical and attempting to use both good spelling and grammar is difficult. Forgive me if it's a bit off.

Sorry I somehow turned this post into blowing off some steam from this week...

The0retical said:

If you're explaining you're losing.

Minor explanations are typically required but the moment you go further then "code says" it's a lost cause.

But then they grumble about stupid government regulations keeping them from having hot showers, and then they vote.

tr8todd said:

 With more heads, he will have more hot water.  

"This one goes to eleven"

I'm in the IT consulting line these days.  I used to get frustrated with incompetents at customers.  I don't anymore.  It is just an example of their need to outsource in order to find competent people to get their answers.  In other words, their incompetence keeps us employed.  If they were smart enough to hire smart people, they wouldn't need us.

My friend consults.  He makes over a thousand a day doing it, and that's his cut.  The company he works for gets the other half.  I asked him once what advice he was giving that was worth two or three large a day.  He said "I give them common sense advice, but I don't make it sound like their stupid."

Toyman01 said:

There are days I would like to make this our company shirt. 

As a side note, don't tell them no. Just make it so expensive that if they accept, their stupidity makes you smile. 

 

No don’t do this.  Every time my mom/business partner does this, it bites me in the ass because they say yes then i have to deal with morons

Knurled. said:

The0retical said:

If you're explaining you're losing.

Minor explanations are typically required but the moment you go further then "code says" it's a lost cause.

 

But then they grumble about stupid government regulations keeping them from having hot showers, and then they vote.

 

 

We had one woman ask us to take the pressure regulator out of her water system because this plumber in a conspiracy theory book she had said all household fixtures are safe to 120psi and that the government is keeping us down with pressure regulators or some equally absurd bullE36 M3.  I got to inform her that she has a well and her water pressure is whatever her pump/tank is giving her.  The look of dumb on her face was priceless.  

Ransom said:

The0retical said:

Minor explanations are typically required but the moment you go further then "code says" it's a lost cause.

I generally am very happy to defer to experts, but sometimes I need to understand why. And sometimes getting "code says" feels like an evasion.

On the flip side, while it probably is an evasion sometimes, a contractor can also probably tell the difference between "I want to understand this before I blindly write the check" and "I don't like that answer, let's try a different reality."

Exactly.  I sold equipment for decades and expected to explain everything Down to the last but and bolt.  And every aspect of financing. 

Most of the time I didn’t have to because they were referrals but that knowledge served me well.  To the point I was often in the company Lear Jet being flown around. 

Knowing how to educate your customer without offending them is the difference between a profitable sale and “ I’ve got to get some more bids” ( Which is code for I don’t believe you  or you haven’t explained things to me well enough yet) 

Dr. Hess said:

I'm in the IT consulting line these days.  I used to get frustrated with incompetents at customers.  I don't anymore.  It is just an example of their need to outsource in order to find competent people to get their answers.  In other words, their incompetence keeps us employed.  If they were smart enough to hire smart people, they wouldn't need us.

My friend consults.  He makes over a thousand a day doing it, and that's his cut.  The company he works for gets the other half.  I asked him once what advice he was giving that was worth two or three large a day.  He said "I give them common sense advice, but I don't make it sound like their stupid."

 

Exactly! When did being a smart a•• become more important than making a profit?  

SaltyDog said:

tr8todd said:

 With more heads, he will have more hot water.  

"This one goes to eleven"

 

I was going to post this, then decided that surely someone else would have done so already. Good work!

frenchyd said:

Ransom said:

The0retical said:

Minor explanations are typically required but the moment you go further then "code says" it's a lost cause.

I generally am very happy to defer to experts, but sometimes I need to understand why. And sometimes getting "code says" feels like an evasion.

On the flip side, while it probably is an evasion sometimes, a contractor can also probably tell the difference between "I want to understand this before I blindly write the check" and "I don't like that answer, let's try a different reality."

Exactly.  I sold equipment for decades and expected to explain everything Down to the last but and bolt.  

Most of the time I didn’t have to because they were referrals but that knowledge served me well.  To the point I was often in the company Lear Jet being flown around. 

Knowing how to educate your customer without offending them is the difference between a profitable sale and “ I’ve got to get some more bids” 

Sorry but I'm going to disagree. "If the customer just understood x, they would choose us." That's a refrain you hear from highly technical people in sales all the time. I know because I was/am one of them.  

It works fine if you're the only fish or the biggest fish, or you need to slightly educate  if your product/offering has unique design points, but if you need to educate the prospect on the very basics of the offering, it is consulting. 

That sounds pretty dick but when you're competing in a space where competitors often completely co-opt your language to make it sound like their product does what yours does or the prospect is claiming someone is offering them a magic problem solving wand, it doesn't work in your favor. 

I've got plenty of examples of this including one from Thursday where I made the mistake of telling a prospect that pegging inventory for long lead time jobs was a bad idea. I then explained how MRP and DRP systems worked. Since I consulted on his processes, he walked off with free knowledge on how to control inventory and manufacturing jobs that he won't heed. I can assure you he won't choose us as the solution. 

Prospects love to hold their cards close, fish for information, then disappear. They're less likely to do so if you are viewed as the expert and are honest with them. 

It's the same with OPs post. What's the likely hood the prospect will put in a tanked hot water heater instead of an on demand unit? From tr8todd's explanation I assume that would fix the issue (I defer to the contractors of the board on this one.) I'm betting almost zero the prospect will tear out the on demand system. But someone will sure as E36 M3 sell the prospect a $40k+ bathroom remodel and the prospect will go along with it.