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Friday, April 07, 2006
To order common, garden-variety tradeshow logo materials - say, about 1,000 or so? As I've found in the past, hard.
Today I stumbled on a guy that made it easy. When I said can you get it done fast, he said yes. When I said can you do it for a really low price, he said yes. (Actually, I did NOT ask that -- his lower prices were just a bonus.) When I asked for two-color printing, he didn't say "oh man that's a lot extra," or as in the case of yesterday's encounter, fax me back the quote that said "single color only on this product." He did not charge extra for clips. He upgraded me to a finer material for the same price. Best of all, when I asked about the artwork not being in the right format, he said "send it over!" so I sent it over, he converted it, showed me the proofs, and put the $40.00 for that on the ridiculously affordable quote. All inside of ten minutes.
I know, this post is getting overly Seth-like, as is my bad habit. (Yes, Seth, when I think about what blogging is, I think of your style.) I suppose this is vaguely relevant to the current blog because I found him through his AdWords ad... almost called him the first time because of his focused product offering, but I misguidedly called a local company thinking it made any difference. (He's in Vancouver, the company I called, near Toronto.) The second time I saw his ad, I called him, a full day had elapsed and my rush was greater than ever. Unlike the local firm, he said yes to everything, quickly, and charged me a lot less. I guess his pricing was just the icing on the cake. The "cake" was the fact that minor requests and questions were taken as just that -- minor and easy. When you need 1,000 of something fast, who cares if it will cost $40.00 to convert the art. But the other guys I've talked to in the past (unfortunately, salespeople who hadn't quite understood what movitates their customers) seemed to believe that delaying and hemming and hawing for an entire day about the difficult art conversion process was somehow helpful... when doing it in 5 minutes and charging the $40.00, as I found, is entirely feasible.
Yeesh. So if your ads show up on the page against larger companies, etc., despair not. Many of them are probably saying "no", so the customer will be grateful when they find you. (Is that persuasive momentum? Or just common sense? Whatever you call it.... don't lose it.)
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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