August 26, 2022

Final Sale Feedback

Fellow list member Jing Johnson replied to my recent message about the power of offering guarantees (shared with permission, bold mine, edited lightly for clarity):

Jonathan,

My jaw almost dropped when I read this email. I want to share this because I thought you would get a chuckle out of it. Right before I read your email last Tuesday, I was in Target purchasing a lamp for our living room!!! What an odd coincidence!!! 🙂

Now back to your questions.

1) What promise are you willing to make?

We offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee, although no one has ever taken us up on it during our 16 years in business.

2) If you break your promise, how will you make it right?

We take our work seriously and will do whatever we can to make our clients happy. If our client is not 100% satisfied, we will redo it at our own cost until they are.

Our client’s journey includes post-project meetings to gather clients’ feedback. We are used to get glowing reviews. So, when a couple of clients were not 100% happy, we took it very seriously.

We’d listen tentatively and document all the key points, discuss them internally after the meeting, and arrange a follow-up client meeting to review client’s comments/concerns/suggestions and present our plan/solutions for future improvements.

This practice has enabled us to restore clients’ trust and helped us grow as a team.

Thanks,

Jing

I love it! Thanks for sharing your experience, Jing :-)

KEY COMMENT: “No one has ever taken us up on it during our 16 years in business.”

Here’s the thing...

If you start offering a guarantee of some kind, it will give you a laser-focus on satisfying the client...

vs merely building stuff you think is cool...

or merely adhering to best practices...

or merely putting in a lot of time and expecting to be compensated for your effort.

Yours,

—J