Rory Sutherland says cheap strawberries make people suspicious: if they were any good, why is nobody charging full price for them? Sometimes, he says, you have to make a thing more expensive before people will trust it, unless you give them a story for where the saving came from. He is right, and he is describing a shelf while you are quoting a job. Knock two hundred off to win the work and the customer does not hear a discount. They hear a story you did not mean to tell.

CHAPTERS
0:00 A price is a story
1:24 They cannot value what they cannot see
2:42 Let them add the egg
4:01 The sale is not the finish line
5:23 Count what is hard to count
7:03 Work with me

THEY CANNOT VALUE WHAT THEY CANNOT SEE
The IKEA effect: Kamprad believed that building the furniture yourself adds to what you think it is worth, and that the effort takes the shame out of a low price. What he skips is that most small business work is done where the customer cannot see it. You were there at six, the machine was running by eight, and the person paying the invoice was asleep for the part that was hard. Effort nobody sees gets priced like effort nobody made. Show the work once, in a way that costs you nothing: two photos, a checklist left on the counter with the date on it, three lines on the invoice about what you actually found and fixed.

LET THEM ADD THE EGG
The cake mix did not sell when you just added water. A psychologist said there was not enough effort in it to feel like cooking, they changed it so you add an egg, and it sold. Most owners work hard in the other direction: we handle everything, you do not have to lift a finger. It sounds generous and it leaves the customer with no stake in it. Give them one real choice on every job. Three options, not one. The date. The finish. Which room you start in. The customer who picked something is a part owner of the outcome, and they defend it when the price comes up at home.

THE SALE IS NOT THE FINISH LINE
Once the marketing job is done and the person has clicked buy, he says, that customer is handed to people whose metrics are anything but satisfaction: keep them off the phone, make the call shorter, move it cheaper. In a small business you are all of those departments, and by the time the phone rings on Friday the money is already in. Put one thing after the sale that cannot be skipped: a call two days after the job is done. Not a survey, a call. Count it the way you count leads.

COUNT WHAT IS HARD TO COUNT
Loyalty is much slower to measure than conversion, so the money goes to the channels where the effect is easiest to prove, not to the places where it works hardest. An owner does the same thing with their own hours: chasing a new lead feels like progress because you can see it, and ringing the customer from March feels like nothing. Put one slow number on the board and read it once a month. How many customers bought from you again.

Sutherland is right that cheap looks suspicious. What owners forget is that people are not buying what the job costs them. They are buying what the price, and everything after it, tells them about you.

SOURCE AND CREDIT
Reacting to Rory Sutherland on The Diary Of A CEO. Every clip in this episode is his own footage, credited on screen, with his words captioned as he says them. This is a commentary and reaction episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz3RWxJck68

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WORK WITH ME
https://mrjttaylor.com

The Operator Reacts is created, hosted, written and produced by JT Taylor MS, MBA.