Category: Customer Service

Don’t Shop Us, It’s Stupid

Here’s a predicament and a story. First the predicament:

We get calls from satisfied customers who’ve done business with us for years. They know our quality, they know they will be treated with respect, and receive fair pricing. They know how we work. BUT, they shop us anyway. Hey that’s fine, go get pricing from our competitors. I’ll be the first to tell you that I may not always have the cheapest price. But don’t say I didn’t warn you…a cheaper price means a cheaper product! You’ve also got to deal with someone who likely doesn’t give a crap if your product looks good or if it’s done on time.

So in an effort to save a buck, they take an inadvertent risk and go with the “other guy.” A word of caution: If it appears to be a company larger than us, they have less of an incentive to care about you. If they print t-shirts in their garage, chances are their quality is going to be poor. If the price is cheaper, it’s too good to be true.

This kind of predicament happens way too frequently.

So now the story:

I get a call from a customer who orders from us consistently. He needs a favor. He needs us to RUSH an order for him, the item is something we priced out for him weeks ago. He comes clean, {I’ve included my commentary}:

“I know I priced this out with you guys a while back, but I went into this other place and they gave me a cheaper price {they also schmoozed you and gave you the ‘ol song and dance about how we suck}. I should have known it was too good to be true {so the lower price over powered your common sense}. But we were reselling these items so we needed the cheapest price {because you wanted to make the highest margin possible}. When I picked up the product it looked like $#!+ and there’s no way I can sell it now {hate to say it, but I knew this would happen}. Can you help me out?”

Are we going to help this guy out? Sure, but we only do this kind of thing once. Learn a lesson from this guy. Now he’s just looking to break-even! His margin just went to the idiot who screwed him over. Don’t cheap out, don’t trust a salesman. We don’t sell here at Hillsports, we’re merely facilitators.

No Big Deal

Just the other day I was giving a potential customer pricing over the phone. This customer was really nice and I was excited for the opportunity to do some work for her organization. Plus it was a really good order that any screen printing company would drool over.

I gave her pricing and here’s what she said:

“Oh great! This pricing is perfect. It’s a few cents more than than company X’s and they’re friends of mine so I really wanted to go with them, I just needed to make sure they were the cheapest. But you guys came highly recommended, several people told me you do great work and you’re fun to work with.”

My response was:

“Sounds great. We’re not the cheapest but we are the best. Good luck with your event Hope we can work together on a future project.”

So we didn’t get the order. NO BIG DEAL! It’s not the end of the world, there’s always next time. Maybe if I got fifty calls like that, then I would be really disappointed and need to eat some cookie dough to console my sadness – but then if I really got fifty calls like that, there would obviously be a reason why!

I was just happy to get some positive feedback. I’m really glad to hear people are recommending our organization, that means we’re doing right by people – that’s what matters most to me. We’re not in business to be the cheapest. Once you’re the cheapest, where do you go from there? Who wants to be known for being the cheapest? Last I checked, the only way to be the cheapest is to cut corners…or be SUPER efficient! In our industry, a business can’t afford the high costs of superior efficiency by having the cheapest prices. Therefore, if you take the cheapest price on t-shirts, expect to receive junky tees with a cheesy clip-art design, and don’t expect to ever see folks wearing them again.

I have to thank our competition, they do an excellent job at increasing our revenues. Because they are all so short-sighted and focused on only the transaction and not the relationship, they often burn some really great people. So we’re Ok not being the cheapest, we’d prefer to price high enough to cover our costs and make a little profit so we can afford to sponsor some little league teams. And besides, we prefer to do business with people who value service and quality.

When You Work With Us

The other day I was bidding on a non-profit organization’s apparel. They had never ordered from us before but heard many good things about working with us from our satisfied customers (thank you guys!).

What they wanted required a lot of work on our end and their budget was very limited so we gave them the best pricing we could in order to get them into exactly what they wanted. Turns out our price was about the same as another company’s prices. The new customer had to make a decision, so she asked, “This other company is closer to our office, so what’s the benefit of going through Hillsports?” What she was really asking me was, “What is your competitive advantage? Or, what do you do better than everyone else?”

My answer was simple, “You get to work with me!”

Purchasing decisions would be so easy if cost was the only factor involved in decision making. Have you ever gotten a really good deal, then received a horrible product? That’s the worst way to learn that you get what you pay for. In our industry if you’ve got a printer that’s offering a better deal it’s probably because he’s cutting corners. We all buy from the same vendors, and they’re sticklers so none of us will get a special deal without the other having access to it as well.

When you work with us, here are some perks we like to offer because we’ve learned that they are super important to our customers:

• Free Artwork – Yes, we actually provide this labor free of charge. We figure if you’re going to buy shirts from us the least we can do is design you up something nice as a courtesy. Plus, the image on your shirt is a reflection of us too!
• Proofs – We won’t print or embroider your stuff without sending you a proof to approve before we print. It just makes sense. Surprises are for Christmas, no one likes a surprise on 100 custom t-shirts.
• Pleasant People – You deserve to deal with people who are happy to serve you because you’re the one keeping us in business.
• No Salesman – We don’t like pushy and intimidating salesman, so why would you? Sure we may lose sales over not being pushy enough, but that’s Ok with us, we’re “Facilitators” not “Salesman.”
• On-Time – If we can’t meet your deadline, we will tell you upfront. We won’t take a payment unless we plan on delivering the order exactly to spec and on time. We never leave our teams hanging.
• Top-Notch Products – We won’t cut corners, doing so makes us all look bad and cheap. Our goal is to have you say WOW! We’re not here to make a buck on the job and then run you off. We want your business forever and we want you to be happy.

Follow the Non-money

While I’ve been blogging on the subject of motivation, I realized that it is critical to understand motivation in order to more fully comprehend a person or a company’s story.

Whenever you read about someone (or some business) doing something, often your first move is to figure out what their motivation was – or, what’s in it for them?

As people we’re curious and therefore want to know why someone is acting the way they are acting. Your friends, family, customers, investors, vendors and boss all want to know what makes you tick. Usually the instinctive explanation is: money.

“She works 50+ hours a week, but that’s because she gets paid so much.”

“He only wants me to buy that t-shirt because he works on commission.”

Sure, in some cases these explanations are right on. Except they almost always are not.

People don’t volunteer all those hours coaching a little league team for the money. Because there isn’t any!

People don’t work at their jobs from sun-up to sun-down and on weekends because they have to…they have coworkers that get paid just as much who work less.

I have to laugh when I call a customer to follow-up on their uniforms before the season starts. Sometimes I get treated like a ‘salesman’ because they think I’m trying to prod them along…I’m really trying to take care of them so the kids have uniforms by the time the season starts. I’m really saving the coach from the kid’s parents.

No, most people don’t do things only for money. There’s usually a minimum salary that gets someone to choose a job and stick with it, but after that the things we do are expressions of who we are and what we love and the impact we wish to make, not selfish acts designed to earn a few extra bucks (I bet no one is paying you to read this blog).

People don’t always pick the job that pays the best. People don’t always buy the cheapest t-shirt. I believe most of the meaning and activity in our lives comes from the things we do for free, or the choices we make about where we work, not the financial exchanges we do to support ourselves.

Before you choose to follow the money, follow the non-money first.

Due Diligence

Have you ever screwed something up royally? How about a little? Of course it was your fault, “the customer is always right,” right?

After reflecting upon a screw-up, many people replay what happened in their minds and think, “Well if _____(insert circumstance here) didn’t happen, then it would have all worked out.” Usually, the circumstance had little to do with you, because who can really keep a promise at work without having to rely on the customer, or a teammate, to fulfill their responsibility?

If something gets messed up, 99% of the time it’s because there was not enough time for the whole team to be involved so all the checks and balances could be made. Wouldn’t the customer and the business be better off if they each had a little more time? But sometimes something has got to give, the customer has an event, do you really have a choice? You don’t if you want to make them happy.

Here at Hillsports, our favorite question is, “How fast can you print me some shirts?” The truth is…it just depends – there are too many variables involved to answer with a specific timeframe (Our normal turnaround time is 2 weeks, anything done sooner than that is nothing short of a miracle). I would say a weakness of ours is that we forget we’re a small business with limited resources and that we can’t make everyone happy, even though we really really want to.

In dealing with our vendors, and working as a supplier, we’ve learned that if you want something done right, don’t rush it. Do your due diligence because planning in advance always pays off, in the end you’ll be more grateful because you got exactly what you wanted and not something half-arsed.

Much of our work comes at the last minute, we love rush orders! By accepting rush orders, we’re volunteering to wear targets on our backs every time we go out in public. Living in a small community we’re use to comments like, “Hey those shirts you did for so and so didn’t fit my kid the right way!” Never mind the fact that we rushed the order in 2 days, donated the artwork, provided a discount AND figured sizes since no one really knew what they needed.

We just might be suckers, or we just might like making people happy. It’s really a cool feeling to finish a custom project and see that excited look in our customers eyes when they get their stuff (whether they waited 2 weeks, or 2 days). It even gets better when we hear the words, “Thank You.”