Had a store front we have been doing for a solid 5 years call up yesterday and cancel service because someone came in and beat our price by 50 cents.
We matched the price…
I appreciate faithful customers! It’s good to see service matters to people. If you hadn’t been such a reliable company they may not have given you the opportunity to save the account. Close one…
Oh, I get it. They called as an “April Fool’s” joke. Right?
Except for it’s not April, it’s February. And not the 1st.
- 50 cents… good grief. :rolleyes:
They look at it as a lifetime, saving 50 cents every time they are cleaned, multiplied times once a week cleaning, multiplied time 52 weeks, multiplied times the lifetime of the store, say a 80 years, that is a lifetime of savings. It is the Einstein theory of saving, that is why he did not wear shoelaces and wore the same type of clothes every day, it saved him time and money over his lifetime.
Just because he was a genius does not make him a smart man.
I don’t see them as loyal at all. They called to cancel and they did so over .50.
Sorry, my sarcasm didn’t come thru very well.
Haha well I’m not the sharpest person in the world. When I read the post I literally thought 'Jared is always on point with his posts, but what is he talking about?!"
wow.
Unfortunately this is the game you play with route when building an area up to scale.
I would have raised the price after a phone call like that.
but not trying to build 10 thousand accounts. But with lots of store fronts isn’t the nice thing about it if you lose no one no big deal
are you going to raise your prices on other customers to make up for the pay cut you gave yourself?
Situations like this can be frustrating and i notice that sometimes we tend to get all emotional and snap back.
I believe it was Howard Hughes who said that “a corporation has no soul”. Its business and you have too see it as that. They are a business trying to survive and they are not out to ‘get us’ although our emotions tend to get the best of us.
and .50 after years of service is what will make or break their surviving 
essentially they are saying “we will not allow you to keep up with times, I will, but you won’t.”
Seth Godin nailed it the other day:
“Plenty of people would happily pay extra for what you do… if they only believed that in fact it would turn out to be a bargain, worth more than it costs. One reason we price shop is that we don’t trust that anything that costs more than the cheapest, is worth what it costs.”
By assuming what they are “saying” aren’t you to a degree injecting emotion? They were not satisfied and thats it. Now try to find out why and based on the facts. (Im not knocking All County 
)
Many times the reason people cancel our service is not because of the reasons we think and really, who cares why they switched unless you neglected them in one way or another.
Store front is a numbers game and we all know that. Work on building stronger relationships with current clients. I say this all the time to our guys and its that “people don’t fire friends so make it as uncomfortable as possible for them to fire us”.
the iron cage Dan Kennedy refers to.
ok, not saying, implying.
emotion or not, any “change” of any kind gives people pause and causes a re-evaluation process that carries risk
wouldn’t customers decisions be tainted with emotion too? Most seem to be knee jerk responses to a “change” and with price increases many times it can be taken as a personal offense of some sort, like this .50 cent guy, does that really “make sense”?
I’ve had people cancel over $20 and stick around over $75 on larger jobs
I even had one cancel over a couple bucks years ago (a home)
with increases a whole lot comes down to how it is presented, and no matter which angle is chosen, it will not be the “best angle or approach” for some.
Sometimes businesses do this with all vendors. I have seen it done with businesses I worked for in the past. They go through every single vendor and get a price reduction. Phone, paper, ink, soap, uniforms, cleaning, advertising, professional services, etc… and at the end of the day, 200 vendors have all lowered their price 50 cents a month, shipment or whatever and bingo, the customer is saving a couple of hundred bucks a month. Seems stupid if you’re on the receiving end but at the end of year they saved $2,500, 50 cents at a time.
It’s sad but true because they don’t see the real cost of paying an employee to contact all the vendors to get the discount. Then for the vendors that don’t go for it, the time required to find a replacement vendor.
$0.50 less doesn’t even make sense. You just have to laugh about stuff like that:) What was to total cost of the job?
Yeah, people can be interesting and conflicting at times. These people want to keep you because they know you and know that you do work that they are happy with, but that trust does not mean that they will keep you around if someone a tiny bit cheaper comes along. I had a customer who was rich as heck (I am talking loaded) get me to lower the price of their job $25 because they were trying to feel like they were “bargaining” for the best deal possible. What did I do? Got a waterfed pole and started knocking out their windows in half the time! Damn cheapos.
