Competition or Collaboration?

How are you approaching your customers? More precisely, do you know how your employees are approaching your customers? Are they approaching them with a spirit of competition or collaboration?

Here’s a very accurate way to define the difference. If you and I are gonna compete, I’m gonna win. If we’re gonna collaborate, we’re BOTH gonna win.

You’ve gotta make an accurate assessment of how your customer is approaching you as well. Sometimes when we simply wanna take care of him, he’s trying to beat the snot out of us. Not exactly collaboration there either.

One place to illustrate my point is how we approach price: Are we trying to beat the customer at the negotiating game or are we trying to help the customer make sense of the financial aspects of his purchase decision?

It's such a habit that sometimes we push our customer into trying to beat us up when he showed up in the spirit of collaboration. He often walks in to make some choices and we leave him only one by arguing about or discounting the price before the customer ca pick out or decided on a bike. That’ll push him into defense mode at a minimum, but often we start a big drawn out messy negotiation which ends up with nothing but two pissed off parties and no sale because there was never a commitment to buy. Then we’ve rendered ourselves enemies instead of friends. That is the antithesis of collaboration. Now we’ve only got competition left as a way to communicate.

Not many customers are willing to endure that just to buy a bike from you. Some will but most won’t. I wonder how often that’s what’s actually happening. We end up believing that the customer is a knuckle-head and he's convinced that we are; all just because we didn’t take the time to meet him on his terms. He did his part. He showed up at the place where he believed the professionals were. We didn’t do our part by asking the kinds of questions needed to determine how we could meet his agenda. Nope, we just told him what he couldn’t do when all he wanted to learn from us was what he could do.